Signal Tower was the site where I hosted interviews from 2013-2016. The publication is long gone, but I’ve been slowly migrating the interviews over to this site. Today, I finally published the last interview from the series. You can find all of them under Interviews.
One of my favorite pages from the Signal Tower website was always About page. I didn’t want to lose it. So I thought I’d republish it here. Enjoy!
“Honestly, what the hell were you thinking?”
It was a common reaction among friends and former colleagues.
You see, I had been in San Francisco, Chicago and Atlanta. I started a business in college, worked at a Y-Combinator startup, and learned web development at The Starter League, a school taught at 37signals. What the hell was I doing moving to a tiny city on the Gulf Coast?
The truth is that Mobile, Alabama was never on the map for me. I stumbled into that town—one known more for leprechaun sightings than technology. Friends that didn’t live in the South didn’t even understand that there was a city named Mobile. Those friends assumed that I was working on mobile products and applications. They were rightly confused.
I moved to Mobile to take a big boy job at a seventy-person advertising agency. It was the first time I had worked for a company that large. The people were quirky, and entertaining—our clients were not.
There weren’t really any designers or developers in Mobile. The ones that existed worked for the same agency. It didn’t take long to discover that there was no tech community to be found in mobile. The experience was brutally isolating.
From that isolation—and the dull boredom it produced—emerged Signal Tower. It wasn’t long after moving that I started hosting video calls with friends and fellow entrepreneurs. We’d talk about successes, failures and offer each other advice.
One day I had a great idea—I’d start recording those conversations.
I posted those recordings on Signal Tower, an experimental tech blog I had been running. Interviews with my friends Vaibhav Puri and Will Richman became the first published interviews.
The publication
Here you’ll find a collection of conversations with entrepreneurs, designers, writers and people working on remarkable things.
I release a series of interviews at a time. Once a series is released there will be a new interview week-after-week for six weeks. Most interviews have north of 3,000 words and take about 20 minutes to read. For those that like podcasts or are interested in the uncut conversations, I’ve included audio and video versions. Perhaps in the future I’ll include a Kindle version.
A brief summary of the most recent interview is sent out on the day of publication. It is my goal to make Signal Tower that newsletter you can’t wait to get. I hope you’ll give it a shot and subscribe.
I value white space, typography and function. Signal Tower is my interpretation of how publication should exist in the internet age—where design complements content.
To achieve this, the backend of this site has a special layout tool, which allows me to create interview layouts dynamically. This ensures that you’ll never see the same layout twice.
If you’re interested in learning a bit more about me, head over to my website. I write about design, philosophy and my experience running Signal Tower.
Thank you
If this is your first time here, I hope that you’ll come back. I’d encourage you to subscribe, and perhaps even share this site with your friends.
I’ve put a monumental amount of energy into this publication over the years. Signal Tower has no staff. I am the interviewer, editor, producer, publisher, transcriber, designer, developer, marketer—you get it, it’s just me.
Knowing that you get value out of the site is what keeps me going. Please don’t hesitate to contact me with questions, interview ideas, or just to say “hello!” You can reach me at sam@signaltower.co or @SamuelRSolomon on Twitter. If you’re interested in essays or my experience running this site, checkout solomon.io.
Thanks for sticking with me!
—Sam Solomon, Founder
