Spencer Burleigh

Dancing with Missiles

I wrote this essay back in school after spending months interviewing veterans and poring over declassified mission logs from the squadron my grandfather flew 100+ missions with during the Vietnam War.

The Wild Weasels were the “first in, last out” volunteers who intentionally drew fire from surface-to-air missiles to protect the strike packages behind them. I’m still struck by how much their story says about courage, politics, and the uneasy art of fighting a limited war under the shadow of super-power escalation.

Delta Wings & Supersonic Dreams

I wrote the following essay as a school research project into the Cold-War race for civil supersonic flight. In those times, Concorde’s slender delta wing came to symbolize industrial ambition, national pride, and, ultimately, the crushing economics of the luxury high speed travel against the egalitarian jumbo jet.

The first supersonic age ended in defeat when Concorde retired in 2003, but a few months ago, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator began a new era. Built in a Colorado warehouse rather than a state-owned hangar, Boom built the first privately funded civil supersonic aircraft, and broke the sound barrier in the quietest way ever recorded.

The story that follows captures the drama of that first supersonic age; may it also offer context, and a bit of propulsion, as we watch the second one taxi toward the threshold.

Andrew Jackson’s Ghost at the Fed

As politicians on both side thunder about ending, auditing or increasing the President’s authority over the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to forget we’ve fought this war before. Nearly two centuries ago, Andrew Jackson’s populist crusade against Nicholas Biddle’s Congressionally chartered “Second Bank of the United States” toppled our nation’s monetary backbone and set the stage for the Panic of 1837.

Back in high school, I wrote an essay about Jackson’s crusade and how a victory against imagined financial tyrants can become a long defeat for everyone else:

Bad Startup Names

I generally believe that good startup (and product) names are short, fairly easy to remember / spell, somewhat distinctive, and you can buy the .com / .ai domain name. I’m also a sucker for things that rank first alphabetically. If you meet (most of) these criteria you get a 4/5.

Founder’s Guide to Working with Filipino VAs

We wrote this guide to compliment Spencer’s popular “Founder’s Guide to Hiring an Operations Team in the Philippines.” It draws upon our personal experiences and insights gleaned from working with talented VAs (virtual assistants) over many years (shoutout to Angeli, Karyn, Rio, and Shang!) as well as observations from other founders who have successfully built remote teams in the Philippines.

• Rio & Spencer

For a real-world example of the kinds of tasks you can delegate, see our list of 221 tasks you can give to a VA.