Dolores Heights Strategies · San Francisco
I write, edit, and produce the words venture firms and founders put their names on: the essay and the announcement, the report and the newsletter, the talk, the script, the post. Whatever it is, I make it sound like you, and good enough that a stranger reads to the end.
What I do
This used to take a comms team. Now it takes one journalist who learns your voice and keeps the client list short enough to mean it.
Thesis essays, op-eds, funding announcements, the executive post your comms team keeps sanding down. I write them in your voice until the only thing left to do is decide whether you meant it.
The keynote, the conference talk, the all-hands memo. I'll help you find the one idea worth standing up for and the words that make a room believe it.
Executive accounts and brand channels that sound like a person, not a press release. The posts people actually forward, on a cadence you can keep.
Whitepapers, sector deep-dives, market maps. I report them like a journalist and footnote them like one too, so the argument still stands when someone smart pushes back.
I'll run your newsletter from blank page to send button: deciding what's worth saying, writing it, getting it out on time. The hard part was never the writing. It's the every week.
Scripts, show formats, the questions worth asking. I've built series from the idea up, and I can produce the whole thing or just make sure what you're saying is worth pressing record for.
The style guide, the examples, the rules a whole team can write inside, so your fund sounds like one person with good taste instead of twelve freelancers and a chatbot.
Before we make anything, we work out what you're actually claiming and why a skeptic should buy it. Half my job is talking clients out of the boring version of their own idea.
When a piece needs a designer, an illustrator, or a developer, I bring the right ones in and run the process, then fact-check every claim. You get a finished thing, not a Google Doc full of notes.
How it works
Before I write a word, we settle what you're claiming and why it's true. Most writing dies here, not in the prose. Get this right and the sentences come easy.
A point of view, a real lede, claims that survive a fact-check. I spent twenty years cutting the hedging and the inflation out of other people's copy. I'll cut it out of yours.
I take a few clients at a time, by referral. You get me, someone who knows your voice cold, not an account manager and a junior writer working from a brief.
Anyone can generate a thousand competent words now. The scarce thing is judgment — knowing what carries a piece, and cutting everything that doesn't.
// that's the part you're hiring me for
Who's behind it
I've always worked at the seam where technology meets creativity. Before I was a journalist I was a web designer and developer, building and coding sites for a living. Then I spent twenty years as an editor in newsrooms: Fortune, Fast Company, The New York Times, and others, where the job was to take an almost-right draft and find the piece the writer meant to write. I was founding editor of Op-Talk at the Times and of Marker, Medium's business magazine, and I ran editorial inside Elastic and Lightspeed before starting out on my own.
Dolores Heights Strategies takes its name from the San Francisco neighborhood where the firm began. It's a one-person shop on purpose. The work is better when the person who learns your voice is the same one writing in it. And when a piece needs a designer or a developer, I know how to talk to them, because I used to be one.
I studied philosophy, which mostly taught me the job is figuring out what's true and how to say it plainly. I work from San Francisco. You'll also find me on LinkedIn.
I once opened a four-thousand-word feature on hiring with the line “I broke the website.”
It's still the thing I believe most about writing: find the person in the story, and a reader will follow you anywhere. Even into four thousand words about hiring.
Start a conversation
Tell me what you're trying to say and who needs to believe it. If I'm not the right fit, I probably know who is.
p@smalera.com