JaredGoeller.
Strategy. History. First Principles.
Welcome to my digital garden. A place where I untangle complex ideas at the intersection of technological shifts, timeless wisdom, and business strategy. Read the latest essays below or explore the archives.
Essays, frameworks, and annotated book notes · Delivered weekly.
Trusted by & Worked With
Seven years, four companies worth talking about.
Anonymized case studies from my consulting practice — where I came in, what we actually changed, and what happened after.
Park Restaurant Group
A successful single-location restaurant — Lucco Cucina and Bar in Florham Park — was ready to grow into a multi-location restaurant group. But the operational back office was not built for scale. Toast and Shopify were not connected, there was no consolidated reporting, and the owner was tied to the building for everything to run.
GEOM Golf
A premium forged-iron golf company with a loyal following and rave reviews was making a major move — transitioning manufacturing from China to Japan. They needed a brand identity that matched the ambition, a digital presence that showcased the product properly, and funding to support the production shift.
Hourglass Golf
A club refurbishment and curation business with a strong eye for quality — but a barely functional Squarespace site that required manual intake for every component, could not showcase past project archives, and had no organized system for tracking orders or customer relationships.
PTY Custom Lighting
A custom lighting manufacturer was growing through relationships and great work — but had no brand that communicated what they actually did. Were they an inventory lighting company, or a custom manufacturer building bespoke fixtures for four-and-five-star hotels and high-end designers? The marketplace could not tell.
Toll Brothers
A Fortune 500 luxury homebuilder with fragmented systems across divisions — designers selling plumbing fixtures as individual parts instead of packages, countertop pricing that varied by fabricator with no standardization, and a national purchasing organization that could not produce consolidated reporting because each division ran its own data extraction.
Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication
On the discipline of removing what doesn't matter — and the compounding returns of what remains.
A curator of wisdom, not just a practitioner.
For seven years, I've straddled the line between tactical execution and strategic oversight. The most important lesson I've learned is that the latest tool or framework matters far less than the foundational thinking that drives its use.
Read more about me→Writing is thinking. If you can't write it clearly, you don't understand it yet.
First principles survive platform shifts. Tactics perish.
Read old books. The lindyesque ideas are buried in the past.
Optimize for leverage, then optimize for time, finally optimize for meaning.
Curation is the new creation in an era of infinite generated content.
Annotations
Detailed notes, highlights, and syntheses from the books I read.
History Rhymes
Looking at historical patterns to understand modern technological shifts.
Discourses
Long-form essays on philosophy, culture, and the state of the web.
Strategy in Practice
Tactical frameworks and case studies from my consulting work.
Marginalia
Shorter thoughts, interesting links, and half-baked ideas.
All Writing
View the complete chronological archive of everything published.