If you know me, you've received a link from me. Probably today. Probably unprompted. An article about a new restaurant. A product launch from a brand you've never heard of. A thread about sneaker culture or Japanese design or the economics of independent bookshops. No explanation. No preamble. Just a link and maybe two words: "this is good" or "you need to see this" or just "look." That's the most Mike thing I do. I'm a compulsive recommender. I can't stop sending links.
My wife gets them. My friends get them. My former colleagues get them. People I've not spoken to in months get them - out of nowhere, no context, just a link that made me think of them specifically. I have a mental model of about ten people's taste and interests, running in the background at all times, and when I encounter something that fits one of those models, the link gets sent before I have consciously decided to send it. It is reflexive. It is involuntary. It's, if I'm being honest, a bit much.
But I've been thinking about why I do it, and I think it explains more about me than anything on my CV.
Recommending as love language
I don't think recommending things is about the things. It's about the connection. When I send someone a link, what I'm really saying is: I know you. I understand what you care about. I was thinking about you when I found this. The link is a proxy for attention. It says "I see you" in a language that doesn't require me to be emotionally articulate, which - if we're being honest - is convenient for someone who finds direct emotional expression slightly terrifying.
Think about the best recommendation you've ever received. Not from an algorithm. From a person. Someone who handed you a book and said "you'll love this" and they were right. Someone who told you about a restaurant and when you went you understood why they thought of you. Someone who sent you an article and it changed how you thought about something. That feeling - the feeling of being known, of being understood through someone else's curation - is one of the best feelings there is. It's intimacy through taste. It's connection through what you notice.
I chase that feeling constantly. I want to be the person who gives it to others. When someone replies to a link I sent with "this is exactly what I needed" or "how did you know" - that is it. That is the high. That's the thing that makes the compulsive scanning and filtering and sending worth it. Not because I want gratitude. Because the match - the perfect match between a person and a thing - is the most satisfying puzzle I know how to solve.
The person people come to
I've become the person people ask when they want to know "what is good." Not in any official capacity. Not as a job. Just as a role I've drifted into over years of sending links and making recommendations. "What should I read?" "Where should we eat?" "What's happening in X right now?" "Have you seen anything good lately?" These questions come to me because I've built a reputation, link by link, recommendation by recommendation, for having a reliable antenna. For knowing what's good before other people know it is good.
This is flattering and it's also a trap. Because the more people rely on your taste, the more pressure you feel to maintain it. To keep scanning, keep filtering, keep finding. To never send a bad recommendation because your credibility - which is the only currency you have as a curator - depends on your hit rate. One bad restaurant recommendation and the whole edifice wobbles. Three in a row and they stop asking. The recommender lives and dies by accuracy, and accuracy requires constant work.
But here's the thing I have realised: this work - the scanning, the filtering, the matching of things to people - isn't a burden. It's the work I love most. It's the work I would do even if nobody asked me to. It's the work I was doing before I knew it was work. Every project I've built is an extension of this instinct. CultureTerminal is a recommendation engine for culture. Curio is a recommendation engine for links your network is sharing. Trove is a recommendation engine for understanding your own taste. They're all me, sending links, at scale.
The origin story
I think about where this started. Before the internet, before links existed as a concept, the instinct was the same. At school, it was mixtapes. Recording songs off the radio onto cassettes for specific people, choosing the order carefully, writing the tracklist by hand. A mixtape was a recommendation engine. It said "I know what you like and here's what you should listen to next" in a format that required effort and care and taste.
Then it was magazines. Tearing out pages from The Face or i-D and giving them to people. "Look at this editorial." "Look at this designer." "Look at this thing I found on page forty-seven that you would never have found on your own." The physical act of tearing out a page and handing it to someone - that's linking before links. That's sharing before the share button. That's the same compulsion, expressed in paper rather than pixels.
Then the internet arrived and the compulsion went into overdrive. Suddenly you could share anything with anyone instantly. No tearing, no recording, no physical handoff. Just copy, paste, send. The friction dropped to zero and the volume exploded. I went from sharing three things a week to sharing three things an hour. The instinct didn't change. The bandwidth did.
What it means for what I build
I didn't plan a career in advertising. I did a marketing degree because it seemed practical, and I fell into agency life because someone offered me a job and I didn't have a better idea. But looking back, the thing that made me good at strategy - the thing underneath the job title - was always this: I was the person in the room who had already found the reference, already seen the trend, already read the article that nobody else had read. I was the recommender in the meeting. The person who said "have you seen what this brand did" or "there's a thing happening in this subculture that is relevant." The scanning and the sending - it turned out to be a professional skill, even if nobody called it that.
Now I'm building products instead of strategies, and the instinct is identical. I scan the landscape. I find the things that matter. I package them up and send them out into the world. The format changed - from links to products, from messages to websites - but the underlying act is the same. Find something good. Match it to someone who needs it. Deliver it with taste and context and care.
If I'm really honest about my dream role - Head of Culture at a brand with physical products, or some version of that - it's because I want to be the recommender at an organisational level. The person who says "this is what's happening in culture and here's what it means for us." The person who scans and filters and matches at scale, not just for ten friends in my phone but for a brand that wants to stay culturally relevant. That is the job. That's the only job I've ever really wanted. The recommender in chief, but with resources.
Until then, I'll keep sending links. If you're reading this and you've ever received an unprompted message from me with a link and no context - now you know what it meant. It meant I was thinking about you. It meant I found something and I thought you should see it. It meant, in the only language I really speak fluently, that I care. One link at a time.
