Hello. Welcome.

It's baffling that there was a time, not that long ago really, when people tied a little message to A GODDAMN BIRD and sent it on its way.

Come here, pigeon, I must leave a bequeath to my remaining sons. They live in, uh... that direction? One of them looks like me, but shorter. Eh, it's probably fine. You got this, bird. Now go. Deliver forth my message.

Of course, today everything is hyper-targeted, delivered to your wearable device, and every once in a while they even get the %%FIRST_NAME%% tag right and really hit home how bespoke this content they sent to 50k people is. 

We also happen to live in a time when the contents of the messages we're barraged with leave something to be desired. Political spin. Tech bro spin. AI-generated word salad. And usually some combination of all three at once.

And so, The Carrion Pigeon exists to pick through the onslaught.

Business and tech news are the starting point. The interesting part is what it tells us about the people making it, the people selling it, and the people expected to live with it. 

We're surrounded by breathless announcements, carefully workshopped LinkedIn posts, and insufferably empty corporate jargon. Meanwhile, the people actually doing the work are trying to figure out what any of it means, whether any of it matters, and if they can get through the week without an existential crisis.

We thought it might be useful to have a place to talk about it.

Not another place to build your personal brand. Not another place where every opinion is a carefully calculated investment in your professional future. And not another corner of the internet where being an asshole is mistaken for having a personality.

Just a place for regular business professionals to speak candidly. 

Maybe you have some firsthand knowledge of a company making headlines. Maybe a founder said something so spectacularly stupid that you need to know you're not the only person who noticed. Maybe you're tired of being told that record profits, mass layoffs, and an increasingly expensive existence are all signs of a healthy economy.

Or maybe work just sucks this week. That's worth talking about, too.

The idea is to bring together people who know this world from the inside, but don't feel obligated to defend everything happening in it. People with interesting perspectives, useful experience, strong opinions, or just the sort of weirdness that makes a conversation worth having.

We'll start with an invite-only group and a vouching system. The goal is to get some interesting people in the room, let them establish the tone, and give them a say in who else joins. Five people vouching for you doesn't mean you're the second coming of David Ogilvy, or that you're incapable of being an asshole. But it's a start.

The news is just the starting point. The interesting part is what people have to say about it: what they've seen firsthand, what they disagree with, what it reminds them of, and what they've been wanting to say about their own jobs but haven't quite found the right place to say.

Sometimes that'll be a discussion about an acquisition. Sometimes a tech founder says something indefensible. And sometimes it's just work. You read to your kid's class at 10 a.m., present to the VCs at noon, and need an Ativan by 2 p.m. Just in time for the bus to roll in. Great. 

Anyway, that's the general idea. Bring a point of view, a sense of humor, and a reasonable expectation of basic human decency.

We'll see what happens.