I've been sourcing TJ Rodgers content lately for some likely nostalgic reason. My dad spent most of his career repairing and maintaining machines at Cypress Semiconductor. Later I encountered Rodgers' writing when I went down the libertarian rabbit hole in early adulthood (possibly through Reason). Then, in a stranger encounter, Rodgers' work showed up again while touring my college campus' winemaking facilities. He built and donated a wireless wine fermentation tank system that allows for one-off student-sized experiments.

When asked for shareholder letters, I thought I might find one of his that was particularly good. I mostly failed, only finding this one from 2002 (hosted with an expired cert). Save for the context, shortly after the dotcom crash, the content of the shareholder letter is banal. Still it brought back faint, awkward memories of the year or two where my parents felt middle class, racked up debt, bankrupted themselves, and divorced.

In my search for shareholder letters, I found the OP link of his reply to a Sister Gormley of a social responsibility group that wrote him protesting the board's lack of diversity. We're all probably fatigued from the current DEI/wokeness sniping. It should at least be reassuring then that this exchange was in 1996 - none of this is new and we survived it well enough to forget about it until it ramped up or simply reappeared recently. The letter Rodgers wrote reminds me of Armstrong's resistance to politicization of Coinbase, seen at the time as bold, cold, and daring before almost over night becoming common sense again. (Even Bitcoin's most venerated disagreed with Armstrong at the time.)

Anyway, I mostly wanted to tell the tale of my discoveries. Isn't the internet grand?