to think #1: gramercy park, substack & pensar
what I thought about this morning
Welcome!
My good friend Conor is an English teacher and a very strong writer. He’s a huge fan of the exercise “brain dump/free write” and says “it’s good for the brain to do that.”
This newsletter is going to be more of a brain dump than anything else. From time to time, I’ll share writings on topics that require a bit more thought, resemble technical writing and include a buzz word or two.
Today I thought about…
Gramercy Park
Every once in a while I’ll go for a walk, call my mom, and talk her ear off for 20 or so. Friday I walked the perimeter of Gramercy Park (if you or someone you know has a key to the park please message me I’d like to borrow it) and she said, “You should record yourself.”
I have lots of thoughts, sometimes many at once, and recording them would be great to recall at a later time. There’s a tool I like for this (of which I’m an early user) called Jelly built by Dan and Iqram. Pretty cool stuff.
But what pushed me to write? My mom said something along the lines of “you’re really good at speaking more so than writing.” I think the mild underlying hint that I’m not good at something coupled with being locked outside of Gramercy Park made me want to write. It was timing. One day I will get inside of the gates of Gramercy Park, but today I will write.
Substack
I’ve been following a few Substack newsletters for a while now. Jeff Becker’s “Monday Morning Meeting” and Darwin Salazar’s “The Cybersecurity Pulse” are my two favorites.
Currently making an effort to be more consistent on LinkedIn and figured Substack is a better home for long-winded posts. Can always post snippets from here on LinkedIn.
Starting fresh on here reminds me of when I was like 12 and made a YouTube channel with my friend Mike (who is subscribed what’s up dude) and fought to get like 100 subscribers. We had a good run Mike.
This is my personal newsletter. I will talk loads about my company, communities I’m involved in, and investors I work with. To be very clear, these thoughts are my own.
For now, I’ve decided to name my newsletter “to think” and I will explain why.
I love a good play on words. Quite simply the word/name “Pensar” (hold the AI) means “to think” in Latin/Spanish.
Pensar
Incase you’re not hip, Pensar is an AI-powered developer tool that finds and fixes unsecure code, in short we're automating security/compliance for devs.
There is so much to write about here. I want to go deep on the Pensar origin story, what Kerem and I are currently working on, and the big vision.
A goal of mine is to grow the Pensar community — this means get more devs using (and loving) the tool. I think this newsletter will help with that.
Wrapping up…
After finishing this I’ve realized my natural writing style is quite erratic. In an effort to keep posts casual, I’m limiting my rereading, no peer editors, no chatGPT. This likely will impact spelling and grammar.
Excited to think, write and publish more.
Kyle Bhiro
🧠