See you further on up the road
If there's a light up ahead, well brother I don't know
But I got this fever burning in my soul
So let's take the good times as they go
And I'll meet you further on up the road
~Bruce Springsteen, Further on up the road
It’s the time of year when I would normally be writing year-end wrap-ups and 2026 predictions, but instead I’ve got some big news to share with you. After 16 months building FastForward at boldstart, we’ve decided the time is right to take the publication independent. This will be my last issue under the boldstart umbrella.
Anyone who has tried to create something meaningful in today’s media landscape knows it’s a challenge. But from the start, we treated this like a true startup experiment, and together we proved what was possible in terms of a stand-alone, enterprise-focused publication.
Ed, Eliot and Ellen incubated this audacious idea to run a publication inside a venture capital firm. It has been exhilarating building this from the ground up, and it’s going to be exciting to take this out on my own. I have put together a collection of 50 newsletters and 50 executive profiles. I got to speak to tech execs from some of the biggest companies out there from JPMorgan to Capital One to Dell to Salesforce and so many more. It has honestly been thrilling.
With boldstart’s support, I created something pretty great, and I’m extremely proud of what came out of it. I genuinely might not have done this without their backing. It empowered me to try new things, learn in public, and extend the audience I built in my decade at TechCrunch into something that stands firmly on its own.
Now it’s time to take this thing I’ve developed in directions that weren’t practical before, or that I simply hadn’t considered. I’m taking a five-week hiatus to rethink the concept behind the publication.
Next up: I plan to return at the end of January and relaunch on a different platform. I hope you’ll take that step with me, but for now, I want to thank everyone who subscribed to this publication, everyone I talked to and everyone who supported me throughout this journey.
I’m grateful for the opportunity, grateful for the people and grateful to the entire boldstart team, whom I will miss so much. But this isn’t good-bye, it’s just so long for now, and I’ll meet you all further on up the road. You can count on it.
~Ron
Featured image by William Warby on Unsplash.
