Hi there,

Soundarya here, aka thecuriousmaverick :)

Welcome to the seventh edition of the Curious Mavericks newsletter! (Each newsletter will begin with the tag "tcm")

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Let's start!
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This week's maverick: Anne-Laure Le Cunff

TL;DR: Read the story of a curious maverick who walked away from a stable career at Google to embrace uncertainty, rediscover her love for neuroscience, and build a thriving community through curiosity and experimentation.

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What constitutes the recipe for success?

It’s fair to say it includes a decent education, a well-paying job where you get to do impactful work and a healthy support system of people.

Anne had all of that when she was 27, working at Google, enjoying her work, and living in France (her home country).

And yet… she chose to quit.

She shares,

She left Google in 2017. She knew it was the right decision. But what next?

The natural response was, “Build a startup.”

So she spent a year enrolling in accelerator programs and trying to tie the knot with a co-founder, which eventually ended in a breakup.

Lost, unemployed, and clueless, she finally asked herself something she hadn’t asked before: What do I love?

The answer was surprisingly easy. It was still the same thing she loved as a kid: asking questions about the brain.

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She decided to go back to school to pursue a master’s in neuroscience at King’s College London, at the age of 28, when her friends were getting married and buying houses.

But after a few months into the course, she didn’t care. She was in love.

To ease the overwhelm, she decided to write what she was learning about.

I feel like using jargon is a way to hide your lack of understanding of a topic. So for me, writing in terms that anyone could understand about what I was studying at school was a way to check that I was not fooling myself and that I actually understood what I was studying.

Instead of a website, she decided to start a weekly newsletter. It required less setup, and it would keep her accountable every week.

She started the newsletter in the summer of 2019:

• June 2019: 0 subscribers
• Aug 2019: 3000 subscribers
• Dec 2019: 8000 subscribers
• Dec 2020: 40,000 subscribers
• Today: 100,000+ subscribers

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How did she grow it so fast, especially in the first year?

She experimented, a lot.

• She shared the first few editions with her close friends and family, who gave helpful feedback & told her how much they loved it
• That made her begin posting her newsletter as blog articles online
• She began sharing these articles on Hacker News and Twitter/X, always adding a “subscribe” link at the bottom
• She launched her newsletter as a product on ProductHunt, which got her 2000 new subscribers
• And, when the pandemic hit, she decided to start an online community where people paid $49/year to get access to a discussion forum, virtual meetups, coaching, group challenges, and one-on-one matching with fellow members.

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Today, Anne runs a community of 2500+ paying members, is pursuing her PhD in neuroscience, and has written a book called “Tiny Experiments”, encouraging people to try more experiments and embrace ambiguity.

Now I have this deep belief that I have the agency to decide wherever I take my life and wherever I go next. There’s no prerecorded track or journey that I need to follow. I get to choose, basically, what’s next.

Quote of the week: “Wisdom without compassion is ruthlessness, and compassion without wisdom is folly.”

~ Fred Kofman