Most people who graduate Duke with an economics degree and spend four years in investment banking at Bank of America Merrill Lynch settle comfortably into a career that nobody outside of LinkedIn would ever read about. Packy McCormick is not most people.
In 2019, enrolled in David Perell's Write of Passage course as a 32-year-old startup operator, McCormick submitted his homework: a newsletter to 20 subscribers via a Twitter DM blast. He called it "Per My Last Email" - the passive-aggressive phrase every office worker knows. It was, by all accounts, a homework assignment. It was also the beginning of something unusual.
Today, Not Boring lands in the inboxes of 250,000+ readers every week. These are not casual skimmers. McCormick writes essays that routinely crack 5,000 words, and people actually finish them. In an era of shrinking attention spans, that is either a miracle or evidence that the writing is good enough to earn the time it demands.
The formula is specific: equal parts rigorous business strategy, pop culture references, memes that land, and a voice that sounds like your smartest friend finally got excited about something. McCormick is an optimist - not the performative kind, but the kind who thinks that if you have to pick a lane, optimism tends to be more accurate than pessimism. He bets on that view in writing, and increasingly, in dollars.