Information Processed is back
Why I paused, and what's coming.
It’s been a year. Information Processed is back.
If you’ve been subscribed through the silence, thanks for sticking around. If you’re new here, welcome. I’m Ethan, and this is a free Substack for anyone curious about trying to use AI well.
First, today
We opened early access to Enzo today - the company I left Asana to build.
When I was a rep, this stuff was really bad. The context of my customer relationships didn’t live in any shared system. It lived in my head or in private Slack messages to teammates. The CRM was where I went to update the forecast to the bare minimum to not get in trouble, not to actually track the relationships I was managing.
Almost none of this has gotten better. I’ve talked to reps at dozens of companies over the last few months, and in 99% of them the situation is basically what it was five years ago.
The teams that have tried to solve it themselves - usually with a scrappy internal AI project - are hitting exactly the hard problems you’d expect: maintenance is brutal, and security is genuinely tough to get right on your own.
But the payoff is worth it. Even a 10% better picture of your customer relationships, shared across the team and compounding year over year, is the kind of competitive edge that reaccelerates a business.
That’s what we’re building at Enzo. I feel so lucky to be doing it with Ben Graney Green (who led Technical Solutions Architecture for Asana’s biggest customers for 4.5 years and was behind GTM AI workflows/agents used millions of times at Asana) and Dr. Mark Hoffman (PhD in computational social science who led AI Insights at the Asana Work Innovation Lab after teaching social network analysis at Stanford).
If you’re a rep, the waitlist is at getenzo.io. The first 100 signups get 5x the free plan’s usage in their first month.
If you lead a GTM org with a big book transfer or territory change coming up later this year, reach out - we’re taking on three design partners to embed with each team and help accelerate the rest of your year.
I’ll write more about what we’re building in the coming weeks - but only to share what we’ve learned and how it might help with your own work. Information Processed is a separate entity from Enzo, and for it to matter over the long term, it has to stay sponsor-free. That’s how the voice stays honest.
The rest of this post, though, is about Information Processed.
Why I paused
For the past year I was at Asana, leading adoption for the AI Studio product line. I loved the work, but I couldn’t write honestly about AI tooling while I was responsible for taking one of the tools to market.
Everything I posted here had to pass through “is this okay given my role?”, which is appropriate when you work somewhere, but the opposite of what an independent publication is for.
Now I’ve left, and the constraint is gone. I can speak more freely about what’s actually working and what isn’t.
What this is for
Information Processed exists to be the highest-quality free, tool-agnostic AI education we can make. A few principles shape what goes in here:
1. Free and sponsor-free. No paywall. No sponsorships or affiliate links.
The point is to tell you the truth of what we’re seeing from the work - which gets harder the moment there’s money on the other side of the page. Over the next five to ten years, we think the writing that earns real trust is the writing that doesn’t have a commercial angle bending it. A lot of people in this space are taking the money right now. We’d rather build something slower that’s actually worth reading over the long term.
2. Practitioner-first. We’re building with this stuff every day - shipping Enzo and hitting the same walls you’re probably hitting. The people we want to interview are in the same position. Over the next five to ten years, we think the AI writing that actually holds up is going to come from operators in the middle of the work, not from pundits describing it from the outside or insiders at a single company. A lot of what’s being published right now is polished commentary from people who haven’t actually shipped anything real or have a sales angle, and we don’t think that ages well.
3. Specific about what’s actually useful. Most AI content sits at one of two extremes - breathless (”this changes everything”) or dismissive (”it’s just autocomplete”). Both are easier to write than the truth, which is almost always more specific and more conditional - closer to “it depends on what you’re actually trying to do.” Over the next five to ten years, we think the writing that earns trust is the writing that helps people make real decisions, not the writing that performs best in a feed.
What’s coming
Here’s the plan:
Substack. One essay every two weeks to start. We’ll pick up the pace as the team onboards and we get our rhythm.
YouTube. One video a week, in a few different formats.
Interviews. We want to talk to two ends of the spectrum: senior leaders who are builders doing genuinely creative things with AI, and early-career people who are taking this era by the reins. These two groups fascinate us, and we think both have a lot to teach.
Tool reviews. A lot of AI content right now is narrative-pushing. We’ll do the opposite: actually use the tool, and break down what we love and what we don’t. We review the product a normal user gets on day one. No demo environments or special builds.
Build logs. We’ll show how we’re actually building tools like Enzo, and what we’ve learned pushing Claude Code and Codex as far as they go. Not the marketing narrative that most people - even the influencers we all follow - are reporting on. True technical first-principles breakdowns.
How we hope this helps
AI is moving faster than most of us can keep up with, and so much of the content out there right now is marketing pretending to be education. I want to do the opposite. If you’re actually trying to build something of your own or get meaningfully better at what you do, I’m glad you’re here.
If there’s something specific you want me to write about, hit reply and let me know. I read every message.
First new piece goes up next week. More to come soon :)
Ethan