Patterns
Opening mid-scene: 43 posts, and what the best ones do
43 posts in the library open with a story, reaching a median of 964 likes. Eight that worked, what separates the top quarter from the rest, and how to write one.
Rests on:the post,the post,the post,the post,the post,the post,the post,the post
The post starts inside an event — a moment, a conversation, a decision — rather than with a summary of what it will argue. The reader is placed somewhere before they are told anything.
43 posts in the library open this way — 0% of everything in it. They reach a median of 964 likes, against 632 for the library as a whole: the opening travels.
Eight that worked
10 months ago we shut down Atrium after raising $75m in venture capital. Anyone hearing that knows I made tons of mistakes along the way. Someone asked me today what my biggest lessons learned were. Here they are:
Last month we launched Project Glasswing, our collaborative AI cybersecurity initiative. Since then, we and our partners have found more than ten thousand high- or critical-severity vulnerabilities in essential software.
A year ago, we verified a preview of an unreleased version of @OpenAI o3 (High) that scored 88% on ARC-AGI-1 at est. $4.5k/task
Last week, we released a preview of memories in Codex.
Last week CNN asked me how I explain the downturn in the news industry: big layoffs, scant investment, no recovery in sight.
In 2004 I had an offer to join the new Kindle team at Amzn and I jumped at the oppty. I was on our retail team at the time -> Kindle was new/sexy. But a week before I was scheduled to start my new job, I was told to stay put and I learned an important lesson. Here’s the story:
Last month, Anthropic asked if I wanted to test its Claude-powered vending machine in our offices.
In 2018, Sam Altman simultaneously managed YC(a $30B+ Startup Accelerator) , invested >$400M in startups on the side, and built the world’s best team of frontier AI researchers with Elon for Open AI.
What separates the top from the rest
Comparing the 10 most-liked posts with this opening against the other 33:
- The structure the analysis reads most often in the top group is Hook → Landing — 4 of 10.
How to write one
Start at the moment the situation turned, not at the beginning of the day. Use a concrete detail the reader can picture. Hold the lesson back until the scene has done its work; a story that announces its moral in line one is a lecture with a costume on.
The analysis of the strongest example above puts it this way: Preserve the Hook → Landing structure and the opens mid-story opening. Replace the subject matter entirely with the writer’s own product, story and numbers.
Take the top three into the studio with your own subject; the opening move carries over, the words do not.