I wanted to take moment to share some thoughts on a project you may have seen Jay Acunzo, NextView’s VP of platform,working on over the past few months — a show and related projects under an umbrella called Unthinkable.

For those who have followed our firm and our team blogs, you know that the idea of craftsmanship is very important to us. It’s part of our original imagery around craft brewing, and the idea that we are most excited by founders who are looking to do a few things insanely well and have an authentic passion for creating great stuff. It’s part of our own raison d’etre at NextView too.

When we brought Jay into NextView three years ago, we were looking for a team member that embodied this idea and more. A big part of his role has been around creating unique, insightful, and helpful content for founders — stuff that stands out above the crowd.

What makes Jay a great contributor to our team is his ability to take his learned techniques and practical abilities as a world-class content marketer and merge it with artistic creativity and intuition to make his projects really sing. This is in contrast to the tips, tricks, and link-baity stuff prevalent in the content marketing world.

This idea of breaking from convention to create things that are both surprisingly unique and also strikingly good is something that Jay has been thinking a lot about over the past few years. He sees it every day in the founders that we work with, but also in other avenues of life and work, like authors, artists,side project
tinkerers, chefs, athletes, etc. He’s been on a personal journey to try to understand this better, and it has led to his side project Unthinkable.

Through Unthinkable, Jay is spending time to build a vibrant community of creative, entrepreneurial individuals who care about the same things we care about at NextView: breaking from conventional thinking and building meaningful things in the world.

I’m biased, but I think what he’s building is truly a world-class show. (Both iTunes and Stitcher featured it on their home pages when it launched — congrats, Jay!)  Two of my favorite episodes…

• The Bias to Act, with stories from the VP of Creative at Dollar Shave Club, and an executive coach who pulls a technique from golf to help business leaders to build momentum.
• The Muse Is An Excuse, with stories from NYC Tech’s own The Muse, plus CreativeLive CEO Chase Jarvis.

We are excited about Jay’s great start with this project and how it has strengthened our own collective thinking on this topic. While Unthinkable is wholly separate from NextView and something that Jay works on apart from his role as our VP Platform, it will be really cool to see where it all goes!

You can read more of an explainer from Jay, and you can subscribe to the show on the Unthinkable home page.