The Last Dispatch

There's a version of this post where I explain that I've been thinking about the future of Local Legends and decided to evolve.

That's not what happened.

What happened is that the writing got harder to start, harder to finish, and easier to skip. I told myself it was a busy stretch. Then that it was the format. Then I stopped telling myself anything and just…stopped writing.

Operators will recognize this pattern. The product nobody's excited to sell. The service line that stays on the roadmap but never gets resourced. The thing that technically works but nobody fights for.

The honest diagnosis is not that Local Legends stopped working. 

It's that I stopped wanting to write it. Those are different problems with different solutions.

The newsletter format was turning writing into a performance. And that’s a different exercise than writing.

This past January I took three weeks for a CEO retreat. I summitted Cotopaxi. Finished Decada Group’s 2025 annual letter. Settled into a surf town and wrote more than I had in years.

The writing that came out was longer, slower, more interested in questions than answers. It felt like it wanted to exist.

That was the real signal. Not that Local Legends was broken — but that I'd found where the energy was.

So today’s post is the last one.

A few thousand of you subscribed to this newsletter and kept showing up. 

That wasn't a small thing. You came for writing from inside the work, not above it, and I've tried to honor that. You deserve the same candor about why this is ending, and a real invitation to follow along to where the writing is going.

Patina Essays

The primary home for my writing is now Patina Essays — leadership, capital, stewardship, decision-making. The questions operators eventually start asking when the tactical playbook stops being enough.

I publish on no schedule, just pieces I believe will hold up. A few to start:

• On Judgment — Most leaders spend their careers trying to make better decisions. Few ask whether they've set themselves up to make them.

• The Wrong Advice — Most AI advice is written by people who build software for people who buy it. Most business owners are neither.

• Ruthless Prioritization — Clarity is rarely created by addition. It is created by removal.

Patina Essays live on the website of my personal investment and advisory firm, Patina Capital. You can also subscribe on Substack. 

margins

I also launched margins on Substack. It’s slower writing, on things that resist conclusion: spirituality, fatherhood, craft, travel, and other creative explorations.

• Sailor Jerry — On craft, obsession, and American Traditional tattooing.

• Rothko Room — A small room in a museum, and what presence looks like when it doesn't perform for your approval.

Annual Letter & Dispatch

I am also continuing to write in two other areas.

Decada Group’s Annual Letters: Every year for five years, I’ve published a longform annual letter as CEO of Decada Group. The 2025 letter is now out, and I’m especially proud of it. 

The Durable Dispatch: For those of you who want to stay close to practical operator content, the Dispatch is where that lives, alongside other operators and contributors doing the same work.

Durable is Decada Group’s newest company and is building Utah’s Business Commons: a community for founders and business owners.

The Archive

Everything here stays up for a few months. The pieces worth keeping will eventually be rewritten and republished under Patina. 

Most of us sit too long on things we've outgrown. The pivot is obvious in retrospect and overdue in real time. I've learned to trust the signal when the energy moves.

Thank you for being part of Local Legends. I hope you'll follow along to what's next.

— Chase