Tell NY Dispatch: Start Thinking About EOW before EOD

If You Watch One Thing

If you watch one thing, make it You Can See Everything, A24’s new Elizabeth Holmes documentary coming out soon. But almost as interesting as the film itself is how it all came together.

A24 managed to keep the project remarkably quiet while Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim spent years filming Holmes and the people around her. After a surprise premiere at Telluride, the trailer dropped with almost no warning, revealing not only that Holmes had let cameras into her life just 34 days before going to prison, but that Amanda Seyfried was returning to play her in reenactments after winning an Emmy for The Dropout.

It also taps into something much bigger: our seemingly endless fascination with founders, and particularly with what happens when things go wrong. Think The Dropout and Elizabeth Holmes, WeCrashed and Adam Neumann, and now two of the most anticipated upcoming films: Artificial, centered on Sam Altman, and The Social Reckoning, focused on whistleblower Frances Haugen and the reporting that became the Facebook Files. We wrote about a version of this recently on our blog: tech founders are increasingly becoming public personalities in their own right, and being interesting, relatable, and sometimes even entertaining is becoming part of the job. Maybe that also explains why we’re so interested in what happens behind the company. The founder story can be just as compelling as the company itself. We want to know what these people were like before the billion-dollar valuation, what they believed, how they convinced everyone around them, what happened behind closed doors, and, especially, what they did when everything started falling apart.

There’s a useful PR lesson in all of this too. When we’re pitching founder profiles, we see a real difference between pitching the business and pitching the person behind it. When we worked on the Fortune profile of Yevgeny Dibrov, for example, even with an $8 billion company like Armis behind him, some of the most interesting details had little to do with cybersecurity or company metrics: where he grew up, how he closed a deal while his wife was giving birth, and how his childhood dream of becoming a basketball player led to an interview with the reporter on a basketball court.

That’s something worth remembering when we’re looking for opportunities. The business might be what makes someone relevant enough to profile, but the personal details, the unusual career path, the experiences that shaped them, or the stories you wouldn’t find in a company bio are often what give a reporter an actual character to write about.

Start Thinking About EOW before EOD

Summer somehow just ended, and we’re already talking about the end of the year. It feels early, but the projects that make December interesting take more than a few weeks to put together.

That could mean a social post, a video, a customer event, or something interactive. It might look back at what your company accomplished, or capture a bigger shift in your industry. Either way, the question to ask now is: what happened this year that people would actually want to watch, explore, or be part of?

The big companies have shown how far that idea can go. Spotify Wrapped turns personal data into something people look forward to sharing, and has even brought that experience into the real world (one of Tell NY’s most successful LinkedIn posts borrowed the Wrapped format to share our own wins from the year!). Google’s Year in Search turns the year’s searches into a film about the moments we all lived through.

But you don’t need a Spotify-sized audience or budget. Clay’s Clayback gave users a personalized look at what they built over the year. Mercury and Puzzle hosted a conversation for their community about what changed in 2025 and what might come next. One made the year personal; the other made room for people to reflect together.

There’s room to go bigger, too: a short video featuring the customers and partners who shaped your year, an interactive look at what your community built, or a gathering around the questions everyone in your industry is taking into next year.

Our best take here would be to think about the value you can give people, whether that’s a useful insight, a chance to connect, or a new perspective on their own year. And leave room for something that’s simply fun. The end of the year is crowded with content, and the projects people remember are often the ones they just thought were really cool! Show us what you got.