Substacks recommended by Courtney Kaplan

Recommended by Courtney Kaplan

Beautiful Thinkers

Elizabeth Laraki

How to design for people: Stories and insights.

Reconsidering

By The Team

Reconsidering, a podcast about life and how to live it better co-hosted by Bob Baxley, Meredith Black, and Aarron Walter.

Everything is Liminal

By Jenna Park

Essays on transitions, culture, modern life, and the creative self through the liminal lens of a post-career, Gen X empty nester. With curated links, delivered weekly.

Nedra Nuggets

By Nedra Glover Tawwab

Nedra Nuggets is a heart-to-heart with a therapist—short, practical, and packed with wisdom! Each week, I break down boundaries, relationships, and mental health into bite-sized, relatable advice you can actually use. No fluff, no jargon—just real talk.

Recipe as Feeling

By Sarah Epps

a newsletter about what I'm hungry for.

Recipe as Feeling is my soulful reminder of the joy, beauty and sorrow we experience through all our senses but especially through food and meals. Always inspiring and beautiful.

- Courtney Kaplan

Lessons

By Molly G.

Things I've learned from years inside startups and scaling companies.

Lessons is written in my love language. It's fresh, real, and let's me geek out on operational challenges and approaches. If you identify as "glue people" you might find your next best friends here.

- Courtney Kaplan

The Hard Parts of Growth

By Ami Vora

Hard-won lessons on scaling tech products, teams, and cultures – so you get a head start.

Ami's leadership and wisdom is delivered without fuss. Her honestly about the challenges of leadership is super refreshing. The Hard Parts of Growth helps me remember this isn't supposed to be easy.

- Courtney Kaplan

AI First Designer

By ADPList's Newsletter

A weekly 5-minute playbook that transforms designers into confident builders of AI-powered products—faster than their teams, peers, and the market.

Perspectives

By Deb Liu

Your personal guide on how you can achieve more and live more through lessons from tech, leadership, and parenthood.

Practical, real, useful advice based on Deb's own amazing experience feels like having coffee with a mentor who's going to bring the goods and openly share the ups and downs of leadership. I'm a longtime fan of Deb's work.

- Courtney Kaplan

Gibson Biddle's "Ask Gib" Product Newsletter

By Gibson Biddle's "Ask Gib" product newsletter

I answer questions about product, management, strategy, leadership, culture & careers. (It's free, and I'm the former VP/CPO of Netflix/Chegg.)

All questions about all product things answered here. I appreciate the direct style built on a ton of experience.

- Courtney Kaplan

The Looking Glass

By Julie Zhuo

Essays on the endless journey of building products, teams, and ourselves.

Julie's writing breaks things into easy to understand tidbits and step-by-step practicalities.

- Courtney Kaplan

The Jungle Gym

By Nick DeWilde

Join 12,000+ readers for monthly ideas about career strategy, learning, and work-life integration.

Nick writes honestly about how to build, grow, direct, invent your career - and integrate work and life. (Ah! singing my song!)

- Courtney Kaplan

TBD: To Be Determined

Recommended by Courtney Kaplan