Danielle Strachman 💗 🐈 💃 🪴 🎸 🎨 🐕

I love getting a solid cold email or DM from founders! No need for an intro to 1517. Some things will make your message standout and get a response (faster than others)🧵:

But what about sexy pro rata rights?

Sudbury Valley is the OG of education based in agency.

We've been hosting sci fi field trips for the last 4 years and they are a blast. Cam is hosting one with Marathon Fusion, also a 1517 portco, next week! Invites like this rarely come along. Get in there and see what the future holds!

The dream team. We had and built something very special together!

Really impressed and looking forward to watching!

There is one, and only one, newsletter that's allowed in my inbox every day and it's Arnold's. Gems like this abound: "The Empathy Test: Why You Tune Out When Someone Needs You Someone you care about starts telling you about their rough day. Two minutes in, you’re nodding along while your brain drafts tomorrow’s to-do list. They notice before you do. “Anyway,” they say, and the moment is gone. The Old Question: Am I an empathetic person? The Better Question: When do I check out, and how do I come back? It’s tempting to treat empathy like eye color. You either got it or you didn’t, and every time you drift feels like proof you got shortchanged. That’s not what the research shows. People differ in how naturally empathy comes. But when researchers reviewed 18 randomized trials of empathy training, the training produced a moderate, reliable improvement. Empathy works more like a skill than a fixed setting. It also works like a choice you make over and over, and each one costs effort. In one set of 11 experiments, researchers showed 1,204 online participants photos of strangers. People picked between two tasks: try to feel what the person was feeling, or simply describe how they looked. People chose empathy only about one in three times. They avoided it even when the faces were happy. The more draining it felt, the more they steered away. Nobody was asked for money or time. Mental effort was the only price, and it was enough. So if you tune out sometimes, you’re normal, not broken. Here’s the interesting part. When researchers told people they’d scored in the top 5% at empathy (the feedback was made up), the avoidance disappeared. People chose empathy about as often as the easier task. The barrier wasn’t ability. It was a forecast: this will be hard, and I’ll be bad at it. You can’t just talk yourself into a better forecast, though. A large 2025 project ran five preregistered studies. It tested short messages saying empathy is unlimited, can grow, or is what good people do. None reliably raised empathy toward the strangers in the stories. One message sometimes backfired: hearing that empathy is a limited resource made people feel less of it. That doesn’t mean empathy can’t grow. It means a few sentences on a screen don’t train it. Real confidence comes from reps you actually complete, like in the gym. (Also worth knowing: these studies used strangers in photos and stories. Your partner after a long day is a different test.) So the goal is to make each rep cost less. Care without carrying everything. In a small brain-imaging study of women, training to feel others’ pain while watching footage of suffering increased negative emotions. Compassion training came next: warmth and wanting the person to be okay, without taking on all their distress. It reversed the negative emotions and boosted positive ones. It’s a small study, so treat it as a clue rather than proof. But it matches what most of us know. Absorbing someone’s pain is exhausting, and exhaustion is when you check out. Give your attention a job. In one study, strangers chatted online for 15 minutes. People randomly told to ask at least nine questions were liked more than people told to ask four or fewer. Follow-up questions did the most work, because they prove you heard what came before. Partners saw the question-askers as more responsive. Most people don’t expect questions to matter this much. The next time you notice yourself drifting while someone talks, ask one follow-up question about something they just said. Then listen to the whole answer. If even that feels like too much, start smaller. Repeat back the last thing they said before you respond. You don’t need to be born empathetic. You need to notice the moment you leave and come back with one question. Every time you do, that’s a rep, and reps are how this skill grows."