I help organizations build AI fluency and governance that actually changes behavior — not the kind that lives as a PDF on a Notion page. 19 years onboarding humans to strange new places (startups, scaling tech, enterprise agencies like GroupM and WPP) gave me a head start when AI showed up as just another strange new place. The TL;DR is my biweekly newsletter for leaders thinking through what AI means for their people.
The TL;DR, From Two Hats To One
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A bi-weekly roundup of how to focus on just one thing September 7 - September 20 Hanging Up My Startup Boston HatFor the past two years, I've been the Everything Else drawer at Startup Boston as Head of Operations and then COO. Many of you that subscribe to this newsletter met me through Startup Boston! As Learn to Scale continues to niche down into the world of marketing agencies, I've stepped away from Startup Boston to better service our current and future Learn to Scale clients. Rest assured, this newsletter will continue to be chock full of business insights for small but growing organizations, employee engagement techniques, and leadership advice for anyone navigating entrepreneurship...and of course, updates from CRO Roman Noodles. If this isn't for you, clean up your inbox and unsubscribe from the TL;DR now: Opt-out from the newsletter If this content tickles your bones, let me know which topic(s) YOU want to hear more of:
Clicking those will tag you for when we're doing a special event or have a niche thing to share, plus it helps me cater this newsletter to what you want. Speaking of which, to celebrate the end of Startup Boston Week, Hubspot Inbound, and the start of Q4, our Small Agency Assessment is 10% off until the end of September. If your agency has dreams but only a faint idea to get there, this assessment will provide the roadmap you need.
A TL;DR from the CROI get groomed every quarter- your email list should too! -Roman Noodles, Chief Ruff Officer Wait, What's This About Marketing Agencies?If you missed it in the last TL;DR, Learn to Scale has been doing quite a bit of market research around small marketing agencies. The verdict: marketing agencies have common and totally solvable problems that I enjoy eating for breakfast. Learn more about the research, the results, and the changes going on at Learn to Scale in our concise blog post below.
I've been at the Hubspot Inbound conference all week hanging out with one of my clients learning about how breathless marketers are about AI. Every session: AI! And now with more AI! Look at how handy it is, it can summarize things! It can make more of what you already make! Things will get hard, because, you know, AI. But fortunately, we put more AI into stuff. The good news is that AI won't be stealing your jobs, unless your job is to do cool stuff that people didn't really ask for. If that's your actual job: watch out. Artificially skeptical, Dan from Learn to Scale Opt-out from the newsletter | Unsubscribe from all emails | Update your Preferences | www.learntoscale.us, Boston, MA 02119 PS. Watch this sales call and customers will be threatening that you take their money. |
Dan Newman
I help organizations build AI fluency and governance that actually changes behavior — not the kind that lives as a PDF on a Notion page. 19 years onboarding humans to strange new places (startups, scaling tech, enterprise agencies like GroupM and WPP) gave me a head start when AI showed up as just another strange new place. The TL;DR is my biweekly newsletter for leaders thinking through what AI means for their people.
A bi-weekly roundup of napkin math and secret ceilings. August 8 - August 21 Anthropic's 39% of flesh I'm midway through an AI transformation engagement with a climate client and one thing I agreed to chase down for them is a reliable way to measure AI's climate impact. After some research and 6K of ElevenLabs tokens, I had hacked together a short 5-minute podcast between three fake people to explain what I found. Wanna listen? Listen: The AI Climate Paradox Let's acknowledge the absurdity...
A bi-weekly roundup of how fighting with an AI makes good business sense July 25 - August 7 How To Invite AI To Punch You Right In The Task List My Sunday Scaries tend to hit me on Monday mornings and they are existential. You know those deep-dark forever-empty thoughts, like “Am I enough?” or “Is my life meaningless?” Yep, I get them too. This Monday’s creeping dread was “Am I making enough money?” and as a business owner, that’s uncomfortably adjacent to “Is my business making enough...
A bi-weekly roundup of money-saving hacks in iambic pentameter July 11 - July 24 A Poem For FinOps For next week’s monthly Show Me Something Cool With AI, I issued an optional challenge to get AI to write a poem that sounds like you in the FEWEST number of words/prompts as possible. This challenge is both a curiosity of mine and my forecast where AI Fluency is headed next. First, the forecast: people are using AI. According to Pew Research, about half of Americans are using chatbots in 2026,...