How Ben Thompson Built a Writing Empire
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The most important article you write is the second article someone reads. And I do think that volume or quantity is underrated. So that's like 50 or 60 books worth of writing over the last decade. That is an insane amount of volume. It would be hard to have the degree of success that I've had.

if it weren't for the just day in, day out sort of grinding. Should we do the day in the life grand reveal now? So I have a framework, an overall view of the world and how I'm a big believer in halfs in life in general. So the most important thing for succeeding on the internet is success.

Ben Thompson is like the OG of subscription newsletters. He makes millions of dollars a year from his writing. If you're thinking about, hey, how often should I write? What is my business model going to be? What is online writing all about and how does the internet work?

Well, this podcast is like a 101 class in that. And I got to say, Ben is a real visionary. His ideas, his way of thinking about the world is frameworks. They're going to give you a sense for not just how the world exists now, but where the world is going. And it's going to help you to think about how to thrive as a creator over the coming decades.

You got to walk me through a day in the life because presumably you're waking up, you're thinking, what am I going to say today? And then by the end of your day, you have an article shipped. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the interesting questions that I will get a lot is how long does it take you to write an article or write an update?

Well, first off, that distinction is important. So I write two kinds of pieces. I write what I call an article, which goes on the front page of Checkery. That's free for everyone to read. And then I write updates, which are behind the paywall. And they generally have different formats. And they're written for different audiences. I think the articles are more challenging for a couple of reasons. Number one, I have no idea who's reading them and what base knowledge they have.

And those, they can go viral, they could be read by a million people, and they might be reading Stratagy for the first time, or they might not know that much about technology. And so my approach that shifted over time as, you know, the relative base of my readers changes, but like, you have to explain more things on one hand. And on the other hand, it needs to have a hook. It needs to be interesting. But when I started, there were

you know, a number of people that sort of like imitated, you know, or wanted to do the same sort of thing. And I thought they were all very smart. They had good insights. There are people who I've been following them on Twitter or I'd been reading their blogs or whatever, and they had good insights about technology. And the vast majority of them kind of flamed out and never really got popular. And I'm like, well, they have good insights. And the key thing that I sort of realized is the difference between my writing and their writing is

you know, let's assume the insights were equal. Number one, I had a lot more volume. We should definitely get to volume because I think that's actually really important. But also my best pieces told a story and people love stories. And they were pieces that were analysis, but they had a beginning. They had a, they had a path and they had sort of a resolution and conclusion of like what it, what it came to. What's an example of that from one of your pieces?

I was talking about the Disney charter thing last year where there's that big sort of standoff. And I opened with the story of the first commercial satellite and the rocket launch and all that sort of thing. To me, that was a great example of what

What is a killer article for Stratechery? Where it's like you're walked in. It's like, this is really interesting. I've never heard this story before. And then suddenly you're like into arcane sort of business details about carriage disputes. And so that was, I think, been a differentiator for Stratechery throughout is to the extent Stratechery is really sort of killing it. I am delivering articles that are not just sort of good analysis, but are good stories and that are interesting and compelling to read.

Now, that takes a lot of work. So the answer of how long do you spend? Well, sometimes articles, it's hours. And a lot of it is literally just figuring out the opening. Like once I can get through the first few paragraphs, I know what I want to say. But like, how do you actually get into it and sort of make it interesting? And some of the less interesting articles, which I think have very good analysis, they have sort of a weak opening. Whatever I see, you know, just because I couldn't get it, but I needed to publish it.

So tell me this, is the opening about you for the writer, like you need to find your flow and it's almost like going down a ski slope. It's like once you find it, you're good. Or is it for the reader that you need to actually hook the reader in? Well, so there's a few aspects to that. So number one, when I'm writing, it is absolutely about flow state for sure.

So, you know, I actually think about the way I write as being very similar to a way a programmer is coding. You have the entire structure of the application, which you're working on in your head. So, you know, all the pieces and how they work together. And the act of programming is substantiating what is in your head. Right. Realizing it. That's right. And so the reason why flow state is really important in sort of getting locked in is

is because you need to be holding that in your head while you're actually typing stuff sort of on, you know, on your computer and looking stuff up and doing whatever. And so, you know, it took a few years of communication and understanding and frankly realizing I needed to work in a different place from my family for it to really internalize my wife, which is like, look, no, when I'm locked in, I like, and she would get annoyed. Like, you

you know, if I'm going to be working late, I come to dinner and I'd just be like catatonic. And I'm just like shoving food in my mouth and then going back. You're like, I need an office. She's like, you need an office. Get out of here. So I do work back at home now in part because my kids are older and they're doing their own thing and stuff like that. But for a while, especially when my kids were young,

uh definitely reached a point where i know i need to actually rent a different place and i need to be somewhere else just because it's at the end of the day it's my job it's not necessarily their responsibility they feel like dad's around they can talk to him and so that was sort of an imposition of of even though technically i can work from anywhere

you know, there is an aspect of, I need to, I am in a different place. I'm in a different place mentally, but it's still sort of a different place. And that needed to be matched with being in a different place, sort of physically getting in that state is for sure hard. And that's for every day. That's hard. So a huge part of once I actually get started with the writing, then it happens pretty quickly, but actually getting started is hard. And it's a million times harder with the articles, because if I don't have that hook up front,

then I feel very challenged to start. And I think, you know, just knowing that for me, there's still a weight that comes with this is on the front page. This is going to be sort of broadly available. It's almost like a psychological barrier of like, I need a good hook.

But the distinction between the articles and the updates is I don't do that for the updates. The updates are I are they're very timely. They're usually about something that's happened very recently. So this now it's earnings season now. So I'm writing about earnings. I know exactly what I'm going to write about. And the opening is I'm going to pull an excerpt from usually the Wall Street Journal or Bloomberg to Twitter.

publications that write in a very predictable way. They have the, you know, it's the traditional journalistic. You have the nut up front and then you have the sort of the additional thing at the bottom. I just want the nut up front. Like, then that's my launching off point to talk about that. And so that just makes it way easier because I know what I'm

I know how to get started. Number two, I know who my audience is. They're people who are interested in what I have to write because they're paying to get it. And so that is just very psychologically freeing in a way. I assume way more knowledge on the audience. I'll just like talk about things without having to feel like I have to introduce it to other folks. That said, the best updates that I write

are the ones that do have a common thread that that there is like i tie with something in part one and then part two and three sort of brings it around and ties some stuff together like you know i had something in mind this just this past week about you know uh

I had already written about Google's earnings, but they had a lot of interesting stuff this quarter. So I didn't get into some of their comments about infrastructure spend, which I want, or a CapEx. So I wanted to get into, but then Microsoft was all about the CapEx stuff. So I was able to bring in the Google piece and then retie together how the Microsoft one started. And that was, you know, both satisfying. And I also, you want to leave the reader with a,

You know, when they finish, they're like, ah, yes. And it's like sort of brings it together. And that finishing moment when they finish reading it, they feel that was a productive use of 10 minutes. Like, and they feel sort of satisfied. I don't think, and I don't think it's a conscious thing that they're saying, but if they're leaving and saying like, well, whatever, and they go to the next thing. But I think you build up sort of a well of,

Not disappointment, but boredom or whatever. Whereas if you get that little bit of aha bit at the end, then it's like, that was great. And then it just sort of leaves a positive, you know, sort of affinity for the product. And so while I don't obsess to the same degree with the updates as I do the articles about having that thread going,

You don't want to not have that thread too frequently. So I did some of the back of the napkin math today. Something like 2,480 articles over the last 10 years for you. Daily updates, public ones. I said, you're probably writing 250 a year.

I think it's not quite that many. I think it's around 170 or 200, but whatever. It's a lot. Yeah, I've written like multiple books at this point. Right. Well, even then, you do five or six books a year worth of content. So that's like 50 or 60 books worth of writing over the last decade. We just need to get that out. That is an insane amount of volume. So people think I'm very productive, and this probably gets to your, you know, to –

Circle back to the day in the life thing. On an objective basis, yes, I am extremely productive. I tend to think on a personal self-reflective basis. I'm a massive procrastinator who wants to just, you know, lay around and not do anything and read Twitter.

And so there's a bit of a hack. I'm a big believer in hacks in life in general. It drives my daughter up the wall. I'm constantly like setting alarms for everything. If there's anything I need to do, I set an alarm. Oh, that sounds so annoying. I know, because my phone is just always going off. But the reality is that, you know, to go back to this flow state idea, I am very much a serial thinker. Like I'm thinking about like I'm locked in. I'm not having side conversations. I'm not doing sort of other things.

And so my hack in terms of productivity is I have a daily deadline every single day. And, you know, I go back to, I remember being in college and writing a college thesis and

And so I'd done a lot of work for it, but the actual thought of like sitting down and writing this was very overwhelming. And it was due, you know, in May when we were sort of set to graduate. And so basically, you know, I'm not, I don't advocate this as far as being a good writer. I basically sat down like 36 hours straight, some sort of combination of tons of caffeine and then,

a few beers, take the buzz off when I was like getting shaky and then back to caffeine. I just wrote the whole thing. And, and then I took the whole thing and then me and some other folks, we were having sort of a graduation party, which we had invited my senior thesis advisor to. And I walked up to him in the middle of the party with like my thesis, gave it to him and then like took like, like slammed a beer, like right there. But, but,

But all this to say is that for me, the hack is deadlines make me very productive. And so I've never written an actual book. And I'm fairly terrified to do so because the idea of it being fairly open-ended as far as time, you just need to do a little bit every day. I actually had questioned whether I could actually do that. Huh. And so...

What I do with Shruthakari, on one hand, I think the blog style, and I still call Shruthakari a blog, is very conducive to my thought process. And also, you know, and the fact I'm covering stuff that's in real time, like the idea of a book being frozen in time is something that

that I'm not sure I would like very much. But there's also a bit where it just sort of suits me personally and helps me get stuff done. You've been doing this for what, 12 years now? 11 years. 11 years. Do you dream and sleep differently in terms of thinking about your articles now? If I feel I wrote something that wasn't very good, I don't sleep very well. And that's the downside of the daily deadline is...

There's days at work where you're just like, I don't have it today. Not feeling good. Might check out early. And that's just not an option. I'm going to publish every day. And the day that I write something that I don't think is great and I sleep well at night is the day I shouldn't be doing this anymore. So anyhow, when it comes to, so the question of how often to say, right, update the actual physical action.

Updates are easier than articles happen more quickly. But the reason it's hard to answer is the reality is, is I'm thinking about what I write about all the time. And the reason I'm able to be so productive to your point is people have a perception. My writing is that I sit down what I'm going to write about. Okay. I'm gonna write about this.

Do a bunch of research. I'm going to think about what I want to say and then I'm going to sort of come up with something and I'm going to write it. And that's not sustainable. You wouldn't be able to write however many thousand pieces it is. The way I think about it is I have a framework, an overall view of the world and how it works.

And it's like, it's almost like a, like a machine. And so when a piece of news happens, I feed it into the machine and out pops sort of like a conclusion, like if A happened, then B, then C, then D, then E. And sometimes it's very straightforward. Like some, some news happens. I understand exactly why it happened. All you need to do is sit down and write down the steps in the machine. That's sort of the framework in my head. Sometimes,

It's a little surprising. That's often where you can make like small scale predictions. Like clearly something else is going to happen because there's a missing piece here. Right. That those are the ones I think we have a pretty good track record on those sorts of things. What's an example of that? There's going to be another announcement about, you know, X support for feature Y or something like that. Like this doesn't make sense in the context of their business model, wherever it might be. So the third one is marketing.

I'm wrong or there's a void in the machine. This doesn't make sense.

That's usually, I think, where articles do come from, where, okay, there's a lot of different pieces here that are being sort of pulled together and sort of make sense. And now I can write a larger, like articles are ideally an articulation, augmentation, or a correction of sort of the machine, sort of what I've gotten wrong. So, you know, everyone's thinking about like,

you know, AI and CapEx. And I just mentioned that. So I wrote that piece about Microsoft and Google last week, and it's in my head. There is some sort of article in the formulation stage about the various risks, the relative risk factors of the hyperscalers. You know, you have meta that AI is all for their own product. You have AWS, which is

by and large for third parties, Microsoft and Google in the middle. How does risk sort of align to that spectrum? And what are you doing there? You're looking at the different pieces and then are you trying to think, is there like a unifying framework that bridges this together? Like, how are you beginning now to piece that article together? Yeah, I mean, I think at this point, I definitely have the outline for an article. So then there's a bit about...

Is there some sort of piece of news that is worth being a trigger to write about this? So one of the things I have found is I will, I've written stuff that's just a pure like theoretical articulation of something. It usually doesn't resonate that much. I think that this ties to the story bit. People are interested, again, and this goes back to being a blog, but they're interested in it being tied to something sort of in real life.

So if I were to write a book about aggregation theory or something along those lines, that would be a

Here, I'm laying out this whole thing. It's meant to be more sort of timeless. Given the format that I work in, a lot of my insights, and this is why it'd almost be hard if I were to publish like an anthology or something like that. They are anchored in the time and place of which they came, even if the insight is relatively timeless. And so I think there is a bit where I think Shostakovich rewards the regular reader because you see the

You see the development of this machine. The evolution. Yeah. And Stratechery is sort of like a journal of my understanding of the world. And so, and this is a case where the format, regular writing every day and being able to go back and say, I got this wrong or change sort of X, Y, Z. And now I think this.

In a way, that sort of writing a book would scare me because it's sort of locked in there. And it's like, well, no, I don't actually think that anymore, but it's in the book. It's something I enjoy. Well, you're talking about developing ideas and you have your doodles. And then also you've mentioned logic three or four times. Are you somebody who is working things out with sketches on a whiteboard? Or does this happen in your head and you kind of get the outline just in the Ben brain? Yeah, it mostly happens in my head. I think the more interesting balance is...

how many essays are sort of in my head fully formed and I'm just writing it out versus the ones where I vaguely have a sense where I'm going. And by virtue of writing, it forces me, it forces it into a final form. Sure. I certainly agree with the sentiment. You know, I think Jeff Bezos is famous for articulating this, but other folks where the value of writing is you have to fill in sort of the gaps between the bullets on the slide. And I,

you have to actually see what you actually think. And sometimes when I'm stuck on an article, cause I don't have an opening or whatever, I know the answer is I just have to start writing. Cause I don't, the issue is I don't actually fully know what I think. And for sure, you know, this is gets back to why I do still write, even though I do a lot of podcasting these days and podcasting is definitely easier. I can see, you know, I can see how like Bill Simmons, you know,

Sort of the granddaddy of, I think, internet writing, even though he was sports, I would view him as a forerunner of even Stratechery to a certain extent. You know, now he just podcasts all the time. It's like, yeah, I could definitely see that. That would be nice. The reason why I do hesitate to ever do that is because

I for sure think that writing makes me a better podcaster because I've been forced to examine, make sure everything that I say is actually correct. I've been forced to actually structure my thoughts in a way that I

Every semicolon is used to its maximum. You know, I'm not repeating myself, but I am sort of building sort of logical things. And I think my goal is the way I always put it is I hope the value to my subscribers is not that I'm always right, but rather that I've forced you to think about the issue. And because I've laid out very clearly the

My thoughts, my assumptions and the implications of that, you are now equipped to come perhaps to a completely different conclusion. Like if I'm writing about a company and you're the CEO of that company, you have way more information about the situation than I do. But I've now given you a structured way to think about the issue in front of you. You can bring to bear the additional information you have, which may lead to a different outcome.

And in that case, just because you disagree with me or didn't follow my advice, I would like to think I've done a large service for you. So I'm going to throw something out there. You tell me if I'm right or wrong.

So when I was scrolling through on your site, you have all the different concepts. And then you can click on one of the concepts, and then there's like three to five articles there. And then you have like a one-line sentence where you've summarized like, MKBHD for everything, this is what it is. Or ESPN bundle, this is what it is. But it sounds like the way that you're talking about your articles is more in outline forms and logic trains rather than one sentence, one liner, that then you're kind of

to see what's inside of that. Yeah, I mean, those sentence one letters honestly get written at the very last second before I publish because something needs to go in that field. So I do sometimes feel I should give more thought into those and making sure they're sort of a good articulation. To the extent they're good and useful is probably an accident, to be totally honest. But you're not starting with those at all. Those happen right at the end. Yeah, those happen at the end. Yeah, I mean, so I have this sort of a broader thought or sense of,

And again, this goes back to the sort of machine idea. I'm very rarely writing an article from scratch. Use like TSMC as an example. So TSMC, one of the values they provide as a fab or as a foundry is that

You go to them because you want to make a custom chip. So they've enabled this entire world of anyone, you know, all these small companies can have their own sort of chips. But you're not going to actually build an entire chip yourself. What they provide, and this is a big challenge for Intel and sort of competing in this space,

is they have like a huge collection of Lego bricks, like all these different pieces of IP where they have all the parts of the chip. And then you as a company, you're adding your special sauce. It's like the last sort of 5% or whatever. But there's a ton of stuff about, you know, registers, pipelines, all these sort of, you know, cache, in and out sort of stuff that's pretty standardized across chips. And so what you're adding in is sort of the little bit that makes that chip particularly unique and useful for you.

And this is perhaps a stretched analogy, but the way I think about my writing is I have a lot of the concepts and overall things in place. Something new has happened. And how does that tie into what I understand? Or how does that explain how my understanding has changed? The other thing people on Twitter like to make fun of me for beyond the semicolons is I love to quote myself. Yes, you do.

And it is worth mocking. I sort of feel silly when I'm mocking myself. But there's a lot of times where sometimes it's very like pragmatic where I remember I was writing something about I think it was like Facebook and their shift to the TikTokization or whatever. And my, you know, my thought was, you know, Facebook, they were constrained by their network. That's actually a fundamental limitation on how interesting their content could be.

And, you know, the more I write, the more I forget stuff I've written. I went back and I'd written exactly that like a couple of years previously. And the problem is that because that was when I had the idea and I worked really hard on that article and I go back and read it. I'm like, I can't say it any better than this. Like, what am I like? What am I going to do? I already I made this point a couple of years ago. So so number one, it's just like, look, I already did a good job writing this. Why am I going to kill myself to write it again?

But number two is, again, I think just the overall concept of what Stratechery is as it being a journal of my attempt to understand technology and understand media and understand the impact of the internet on all these sorts of areas.

is it's not building something new every day. It's evolving. It's touching up the little bits and pieces of this is the way I thought the world worked. That is kind of right, but there is sort of a couple things that I missed here. And so let me remind you of where we're at, and I'm going to sort of add on to that.

And I can get that it probably comes across at times as a little solipsistic. And again, it's just sort of like my signature at this point is that I quote myself. But it is actually pretty integral to the way I think about what Stratechery is and

how that fits into my process and how it is that I write thousands of articles because I'm not writing a thousand new short stories a day. And so there's an aspect of

I've been developing this understanding. There's an aspect of I've just been doing this every day for so long that the sort of process of how to do it ties into that. How in the world do you edit at the end of the day? Because something that happens to me, something that happens to a bunch of writers is you're in it. And the challenge is when you're in the article, you're reading it from scratch.

perspective and you're adding all of these intentions of, hey, this is what I meant to say. And I like to sleep on things because of that. I see it with fresh eyes. You don't have that luxury. Like you're in it, dare I say, almost in a state of panic. And now you got to do the edit. So what does that look like? So I would say two things. Number one, I will grant the caveat that not all, everything I write, but some stuff I write could probably use more editing. And

And there's sometimes I feel this when I'm going like 5,000 words. That's too long. This really could be trimmed. And that's just sort of the tradeoffs of my model is that's not sort of happening. The reason I do generally get away with it is I rarely edit my pieces. So and I think it's and this is a function of it's not just I've been thinking about the article all day. It's I've been thinking about the article in a certain sense for 10 years.

And so the ideally the the tightness that I'm going for where I'm not repeating myself and it's a very logical thing is springing from a tightness in my own thinking and a structured miss in my in my own sort of understanding of the world. And so it comes out in a fairly.

sort of state. And so I do, of course, edit, but it's mostly about typos, mostly about like repeating words, which drives me up the wall. And then the one, actually the one sort of hack that I accidentally developed is now that all my articles also are available sort of as podcasts,

I read it and I always read it out loud before I publish. And that is actually completely killed my typo rate. Like I have like one a month now, whereas I used to have many more than that because it's like just the reading out loud and you can feel that, oh, yeah, that's sort of stumbling. I do think I write by and large how I talk. You can see I'm talking in long extended sort of answers and senses here. But hopefully I'm talking in a way that

I'm not rambling to, or, you know, I'm rambling to a certain extent, but it's not like random rambling and I'm tying stuff together. And ideally I'm linking it back to, it's still in my head. You asked me what my typical day is, which I haven't yet answered, but there's a bit where we're going to come back to that. That's in my head. And that's just generally how I write. And, you know, I think about the human brain in terms of like computers to a certain extent.

Like, I just have a very large amount of sort of like LN cash, like, you know, where the whole thing is sort of in my head and I can retrieve it quickly without having to go to like memory or whatever it might be. Do you want to, should we do the day in the life grand reveal now? Well, I think that the challenge actually in some ways

This sort of gets your editing point is like anyone else, you're going to be more high energy and more capable of doing stuff sort of in the morning. The issue is that because I'm in Taiwan and if I'm doing interviews with people or I'm just talking to like my my assistant that I do all the writing and stuff myself, but like all this like taxes and accounting and all that sort of stuff, that's mostly all people in the U.S.,

And so my mornings are usually occupied with just admin stuff or doing interviews with people or phone calls if I have calls. And also sports. I'm a big sports fan. And sports that are on at night in the U.S. are on in the morning in Taiwan. And so if there's a basketball game, I'm probably going to watch the basketball game. And so I will wake up very excited. Maybe, you know, I don't always know what I'm going to write, but sometimes I know what I'm going to write. I'm like, this is great. I'm going to finish the day early. It's going to be awesome. And then stuff happens during the day.

And then I get lunch and I'm kind of sleepy after lunch and it takes a while. And then I start procrastinating. And then you get to like three o'clock or whatever. Like, oh my God, I have to bring this up today. So I forgot about it. So one thing I have done is I,

I've sort of compressed my entire week into three days. And so because the fourth day that I do now is an interview. And so that's usually happens in the first few days of the week. And basically, I just somewhat physically destroy myself for those three days where there's a lag in the afternoon where I'm being lazy and procrastinating and not wanting to do it. I'm kind of low energy.

And then sort of the panic sets in. And then, you know, the late afternoon, early evening is about sort of getting that written and getting that done. And then I sort of crash out at night and wake up. I didn't quite imagine you with like a quill pen and, you know, some sort of very meditative office writing every single day. But it is striking how much panic and I got to do this. For sure. How big of a part of your writing process that is.

And frankly, it's one of those things that I'm not particularly proud of it. I wish it was better. Like, I wish I was more disciplined. Was it like that when you were at the Daily Herald in college? No, same sort of thing. So, yeah, I mean, in that case, you know, and that goes back to

One of the things that when I took over the editorial or opinion or the editorials when I was a senior was student newspapers would do editorials and they would do it about random national things like once a month or something. No one cared.

Uh, what we, what I wanted to do is like, oh, wait, we're actually in a unique position for a very specific set of issues. And so my idea was that we're never going to write about national issues because no one cares. We're some random sort of student newspaper. We are going to write about these things and we're going to write an editorial every day or Monday through Thursday. And then Friday will be like letters to the editor and stuff like that.

And we did it, which mostly manifested into me doing it every single day and writing like all those editorials.

And of course they were all, you had to do it every day. You had to come up with something, you had to figure something out. And then you, and then you were doing it at the last minute. And I loved it. It was, it was awesome. And it was successful. Like I think of our five objectives, we, at the end, we sort of did an inventory and we felt we had succeeded on four of them. And so there is a bit where that was sort of a foreshadowing of what I did. Streckery was, you know, I now, again, I do an interview now, but it's been four days a week for a very long time. It used to be five days a week. And yeah,

I write about technology. I write about media. I don't, I'm not partisan. I go to the extent I write about politics. Like I wrote a little bit about like some of the, you know, Kamala Harris or JD Vance or whatever, and their views on this stuff and what impact that might have. But I'm presenting it like, this is just sort of my view on it. I'm not saying who I prefer or X, Y, Z. Cause like I, I,

My goal is, of course, I have opinions. My goal, though, is to have an impact on technology in the area that I am focused on. And I think ultimately I can have more impact on the world and more influence by sticking to what I'm good at. Just like the student newspaper. Hey, if you're if you hammer on something like student government related, they care what the student newspaper says. If you write about like technology.

the Iraq war, no one cares. Like it, it sort of doesn't matter. And so gauging your, what you're targeting, what you're focused on to what's your capable and, uh,

granted some degree of authority to talk and write about, I think is something that is useful and important. How do you think about your own reading? I mean, I remember many years ago, you wrote a piece called, I think it was called The Voters Decide, which was inspired by a book called The Party Decides. And so there's a book there, and then there's a lot that you've built on Clayton Christensen, and then you probably wake up in the morning and thinking through headlines. Like, how do you think about your reading input and how intentional are you about that? Well,

My reading is extremely intentional in that I'm not sitting around and reading books, but there are days where literally I know I want to write about. I know there's a specific thing I need to understand better. I think some of the best trajectory pieces are historical. I agree that they pull into like I think a lot of things companies do go back to.

things that happen at their founding. And that, cause that is still a part of the culture and to understand how a company thinks you have to understand their culture, to understand their culture, you have to understand their founding. And so there's days where I will be writing about something and I will in the morning, I'm an extremely fast reader. Fortunately, I will sit down and I'll read through an entire book. Really? And then I, and then I, that book will be a heavy reference for, you know, that, that I'm, that I'm writing and reading about. No, there's certainly foundational books. Like you mentioned sort of the Clayton Christensen and things on those lines, but,

And once I've read a book, it's sort of in the, you know, it's in the repository that I might sort of pull on it and things on those lines. I mean, certainly Clayton Christian is the biggest influence in that regard for sure. But yeah, so I read a decent number of books, but not when I'm just like sitting on the chair relaxing. It's like that's part of my workflow is I'm just going to plow through this and I'm

you know, at this point, you know, I know which sexes I'm going for and which things I'm sort of really seeking to understand. And those are very satisfying ones. I think, or there's other ones where I remember there's an article I wrote ages ago when Apple was changing, you know, as part of that update sort of explained this and what the implications were and sort of X, Y, Z. And the good thing about that is it's directional, but obviously that's in there sort of in the long run. You know, by the time, you know,

the AI stuff came along and video and all that sort of thing. Like I knew at a very pretty deep level, how, how GPUs worked. And that was arguably born of a, you know, an intense day of research. Cause I, you know, I think the, the biggest compliment I can get is when someone will comment on Twitter or their email me and say, you know, I have to say like,

you know, for someone that's not in my field, you really got, got that. And, and, and that's what it, that's great. Cause you want to, we all know like the gentleman amnesia thing or whatever, right? You read something and you're like, Oh, that's really good. And it's about something you write about. Like they don't know what they're talking about. And it's like, I, I don't want to ever do that. And sometimes I do. And then I value greatly readers that will, will, will write in and say, you got that wrong. And then the next day, you know, it's not fun, but,

John Gruber, who writes Staring Fireball, has a saying that I have wholeheartedly adopted, which is, he says, I love to be right. And the best way to always be right is to immediately correct yourself when you're wrong. And I think that is certainly something I try to live by. You know, I'm going to get stuff wrong, especially when you're writing every single day. But to, I try to not just correct.

issue of correction, but also I walk the reader through my thought process. How did I get to the wrong thing? And what was that bit in my chain that was mistaken? And I think that's, it's not just good hygiene in general. I write pretty authoritatively, just that's my style. It's like, it's pretty direct. It's A because of B because of C. I'm not going to dilly dally around it, which I think is an important just general writing tip. You got to go for it. You can't be like,

making excuses or hedging your bets too much in your writing if you say what you think. But that's also risky because when you're wrong, then you kind of look like an idiot. Tell me more about that. Go in for it. I want to hear more about that. I state things. This happened because of this.

As opposed to, well, one could, you know, and again, I'm not saying I'm perfect at this. I do hedge my bets. You know, you can probably tell things where I do leave a sort of an out for myself, so I'm not sure. But by and large, I think you want to, if you think something is the case, your whole value is, as an analyst, is not being a...

you know, not being a stenographer, like you would just say, oh yeah, the company said this, therefore it's this. Your whole point is to find, you know, we talked about the PowerPoint to the essay bit before. There's a bit where what companies say are PowerPoints. And the role that I can bring is to fill in the space between the PowerPoints of what companies say. And you don't,

do that effectively by just listing every possible thing. Or on the other hand, just repeating the PowerPoints. You have to actually, the value you provide has to be something that's, this is what's in the middle. And so you say what's in the middle. Right. And ideally you're right. And sometimes you're wrong. You have to own that. But I think that's the best approach because if you're sort of mealy-mouthed around it,

then it's not interesting writing. Like no one finds it sort of compelling. Yeah. One of the things that you do a lot is you'll look at a keynote and you'll say, this thing happened. They framed it like this. You're gonna say, that's my wedge. And now I'm going to analyze that. And then this is what it means for the cultural grain of Google or Apple. Yeah. I mean, I love keynotes. The, I love the first five minutes of a keynote because to me, it's like they're,

they're trying to set a frame for what's to follow. And to me, the frame they're trying to set is more interesting than the products. Like, why is this the frame that they're sort of looking for? You know, like, Satya Nadella does a lot of, like, he tries to tie stuff back in historically, which obviously I try to do as well. So I find that appealing generally. But,

Does that make sense? Is that actually a relevant sort of historical comparison? And why are they doing this? What does it say about the products they're introducing? I think the risk that I have to be careful of is, first off, there's just a general confirmation bias. My whole bit is I think I already know how the world works and I'm plugging this news into it. So I have to be very, very careful that I'm not looking for stuff that

fits my preexisting worldview. The funny thing is, is that sometimes that makes me get stuff wrong. So I overcompensate. Actually, no, I had it figured out, but I'm like so eager to look, but that's okay. That's that those are mistakes I'll accept because it's a function of my process of making sure I don't give in to confirmation bias too much.

The other thing is, because I do actually think the narratives these companies say are important because they speak to the underlying focus of the company and its culture and things on those lines. At the end of the day, the actual like results do matter and the actual like specifications do matter. And so I need to make sure I'm still digging into does the actual like numbers match this sort of narrative that's being put forward? So I want to talk about

I want to talk about introductions and how you think about them. And you're talking about stories mattering. So I'm going to read this to you and I want to hear your thoughts on it. So this from what Clayton Christensen got wrong.

There's no question, this is the very beginning, there's no question Clayton Christensen, who developed the theory of disruption, is Silicon Valley's favorite business school professor. For me, diving deep into his thinking in a corporate innovation class was a breath of fresh air for management theory that explained all of corporate America, but for its most successful company, Apple. What's going on there? That's probably like the origin article for trajectory, even though it was four to five months after I'd actually started. You know,

The bit was true. You're in sort of business school and they have all these sort of theories about how things work. I mean, I have a few business school students

bits that are, you know, somewhat relevant. I mean, number one is the fact that I was at business school in the first place. I sort of grew up on the internet, you know, interested in technology, interested in the business side of things. And by growing up the internet in the, you know, the 90s, 2000s, MBAs were terrible, right? They were worthless. But I sort of grew up in a

blue collar sort of area. No one really went to work for tech. Never even occurred to me to do that sort of thing, even though I was super into it in sort of the dot-com era. And so I was in sort of the 2000s, I was in Taiwan teaching English. And my wife's like, you know, why don't you, all you do is read about and talk about tech. Why don't you go work in tech? I'm like, that's a good idea. I should work in tech.

And I'm like, I'm like, what, 27 years old with my no career relevant career experience. Like the only option to me was like to get an MBA. That was like the way sort of like get legitimacy in the U.S. job market. And so I did that. Turned out it was a great fit. Right. Just because I had a lot of experience.

implicit understanding of things like leverage and margin and game theory and all this sort of stuff that suddenly I now had was given a language to sort of articulate things like that with. And so the MBA was great in that regard, but still like a lot of technologists, people in technology was fascinated by Apple, very interested in it. And well, there's actually a step up. There's one more thing. So I go back to business school.

First day, first class, you know, management 101 or whatever it's called. And I'm flipping through all the case studies we're going to do for the semester. And there was zero technology companies. And so I go to the professor afterwards. You know, I'm an annoying student like that. I'm like, why are there no technology companies? And the answer is like, well, there's broad principles that you learn from these cases that are applicable to sort of, you know, companies in all industries. And I'm like, I don't think that's true.

And this is actually one of the core things about Stratechery, which is

Technically, it is true. But what I think makes technology unique is the nature of zero marginal costs and zero transactional costs. By zero marginal costs, you know, one more person visiting Google.com doesn't cost them anything. Do they have substantial server costs? Of course. But like one extra person doesn't cost anything. And this applies to basically everything on the Internet. Zero transaction costs is Google can serve anyone.

7 billion people without a sweat because their actual interaction is completely mediated by computers. And the implications of this on business models and strategy, I think are very profound. And it was very, and to me, it was a major hole in the curriculum that this wasn't the case. Yes, you had all these equations that you could use to analyze businesses. But if you're putting a zero into an equation, the equation doesn't,

comes out looking totally different because zeros cancel so many things out. So number one, I got from business school is there's an entire arena of strategic analysis that at, you know, at a top five business school is not even aware that's needing to be addressed. Let me just pause you. One thing that I think is a really good prompt or thing that you find yourself saying when it's like, I should write is when you're in the midst of an expert like you were in business school. And what did you say?

I don't think I agree with that. That, I think for a lot of people, they say, I think I'm missing something. But somehow when you find that, can you start asking yourself, maybe I'm right. Let me go explore that. Because if you find yourself saying that and you are right, you have...

the seeds of a really compelling piece. Well, I mean, there's a certain bit, I think, to be a writer or to be a writer particularly of what I do, which is my own site on the internet that entails some combination of narcissism and delusions of grandeur where I think I'm right and I think I'm right enough and compelling enough that

I can just put something up there and you're going to read it and it's going to be spread around and it's going to be interesting. I'm not sure this is good career advice. I'm fortunate that turned out to, by and large, be the case. You know, I started Streckery with 380 or something followers on Twitter. No one knew who I was. And there was no hand up or favor given or whatever. It was just I went up there and wrote what I hope was compelling stuff. There wasn't –

Social media was different then. There was a lot of currency to be gained from sharing interesting links, you know, and different than today when links are suppressed and there's so much stuff out there and by and large. And so I certainly benefited in that regard, but.

Yeah, there's a bit like that's just my personality and thought process is I'm an English teacher from Taiwan and I'm going to go tell the strategy professor that I think your curriculum on day one is BS because you're completely missing, you know, sort of. That's awesome. Yeah, that's awesome. I love that. So so that was that was sort of the first sort of business school bit. But the other thing was Apple, as I mentioned.

And Apple did everything wrong, right? They didn't have a division. They had a functional organization, a divisional organization, the way they sort of did marketing, the way they did, did product development, all this stuff was supposed to be commoditized. Like why, why were they able? And at that time there was a real fever around the idea that Apple was doom was imminent because just like the Mac and PC, uh,

the iPhone is going to fade away. All developers go to Android because it was open. And then the iPhone would become a fractional part of the marketplace. And that whole argument around that, broadly speaking, really ties a lot of checker threads together. Number one, everyone gets the historical context of Mac versus Windows wrong. It was not Mac was there and then Windows came along and knocked it off. DOS was there before Mac.

And that was downstream from sort of IBM. And the DOS market was massive and large before the Mac ever even shipped. So it's actually the inverse where the iPhone was first and Android sort of came later. And that it's amazing. That is just a basic historical fact that basically everyone in the world does not understand. I greatly respect Professor Christensen. As I mentioned, he's had more influence on me than basically anyone else. He got that fact totally wrong. And it,

meant his entire thesis fell apart. But there's a bit where that's why it's really important to go back and read those books, go back and make sure I get the bits right. Because if you just go along with the popular sort of thing, you actually don't go back and assure that, make sure that what the myth is, is what actually happened. You can actually get huge swaths of analysis wrong because one of your core assumptions is sort of mistaken. Well, let me talk through a few things that I've taken. So

One of the big ones, like I said, is you got to know stuff. Another one is to once you have that background knowledge to just trust your point of view and to not be hesitant. Like there's something that you're doing where you're taking that point of view. You're like, OK, I'm going to go for it. And I think part of that is probably temperamental. We are saying, OK, this is how I am. I mean, like the you know, if you do like personality test or whatever, I'm like you're high and disagree. I disagree. I'm 100 percent sure that's the case.

And I think, by the way, and this does, I think, color Internet discourse generally. Anyone who's successful in the Internet is probably very highly disagreeable. Like, because the amount of abuse and disagreement and people coming at you that you, you know, people weren't meant to see the get the level of feedback that they do. Right.

And most people just sort of want to get along and want to be along. And so, and you can see them wilt and, and it's a very difficult thing to deal with. And it's not, and I'm not saying I'm impervious to it. Like there's, you mentioned not sleeping. There's because I haven't slept because it's like something got like spun up into a completely different arena of people that I wasn't aware with, you know, I wasn't focused on and I'm getting all these sort of attacks and it's, it's very difficult and challenging to sort of, to sort of deal with. But, but,

At the end of the day, I am temperamentally sort of don't care. Well, the other Ben Thompson prompts, so to speak, are what are some places where there's an expert and you understand their theory, but it doesn't explain something? And then where's the time in your worldview where you're saying, OK, something isn't lining up here? And I resonated with what you said earlier. And just think about all

all the daily updates that I've read. Some of the times when you've started and you said yesterday, day before I got something wrong, here's what I got wrong. This was the hole in my thinking. Those are almost more instructive. And I felt that as a reader, those moments are when I feel you as the writer more intimately than when you're talking about aggregation theory or something sort of coming from on high, you're much more professorial.

Right. Well, yes, you're getting inside my thinking, which I think is intrinsically sort of more intimate in that regard. Sure. Sure. You told me earlier, come back to volume. Let's talk about volume. Well, so, you know, this ties into the sort of daily schedule. It ties into the fact that I still think of myself as writing a blog. And it ties into the business model, which is, you know, as a contrast, right?

There's a guy named Dylan Patel, right? The site called Semi-Analysis. And he will get these incredible scoops or details about the next NVIDIA processor or what the production pipelines are or components and things along those lines. Incredibly valuable stuff, like market-changing stuff potentially or...

strategy changing stuff. And, you know, we've talked about sort of business models and what he has, it's a sub stack. I mean, this guy, it's an amazing internet success story. He grew up posting on forums and like, he was like a Reddit moderator at some point. And now he's like, like the authority about stuff like this.

And he charges something like $500 a year and he only sells annual subscriptions. And the reason is he might only write one article a year that actually matters to you, but you really have to read that article. And, and for him to charge what I charge $15 a month, you know, uh,

That would be weaving so much value on the table because you just sign up for a month, read the article and then cancel. And you like, cause it's, you know, that's what he's selling is these occasional super incredible, powerful and useful sort of insights. And so he's doing a good job of maximizing his return on that. What I do is I charge $15 a month. It used to be 10. It's sort of made its way. I've done two price raises. I just did another one. Part of what I am selling, frankly, is,

the ongoing production of content. And it's almost like, it's like monetizing my hack, which is my hack is I have a daily deadline set to publish every day. What I'm delivering to you is any one piece I write is hopefully insightful. Oftentimes my most insightful things are in the free articles, which you could just read sort of anyway. But what you get when you sign up for Stratechery is you're going to get

three, a piece on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and hopefully a very compelling interview on Thursday. I would say I have a podcast. You get all this, you know, it's a big bundle. Hopefully something's going to be interesting to you, but it's that regularity of delivery and you're paying not for the archives. You're paying for the confidence and, and even if you don't realize what you're paying for, just knowing that you're going to get this in sort of your inbox every day. And one thing that I think is, is, is kind of interesting is the,

The reason I can do this for so long is I'm writing about stuff that I'm interested in. If I'm trying to cater to my customers, I think that's a recipe for burnout. The one time I did almost burnout is like 2019, 2020. I was writing about regulation and antitrust and congressional hearings. And I'm like, oh, this is actually horrible. Like it's burning me out. I work a lot. That's not what's burning me out. It's writing about stuff that I don't, that is kind of soul sucking from my perspective.

But the – And you also over-index on sports because that's what you love talking about. I do read a lot of media. I mean, number one, I'm in the media, so that's interesting. Number two, I do think the media is – it is indicative of everything that's going to happen – what's going to happen to everyone. The canary in the coal mine. Right, because it is digital inherently. And the media – the reason why there's like on Wall Street, TMT –

tech, media, telecom, or maybe it's telecom, media, tech, whatever, is those are all zero marginal cost industries. That is the connective sort of tissue. And so it's interesting. I do get the media. I would say my analysis of the media is wrong more often than it is about tech. I think a lot of that is

I don't fully understand all the incentives. Like I think a lot of my stuff about Hollywood has been directly correct, but I've gotten details wrong in part because Hollywood's a city of big personalities and like people do dumb stuff because there's prestige in it or sort of X, Y, Z. Whereas tech you're, you have people doing dumb stuff for those reasons, but much less so it's like tech is pretty huge, pretty closely to its broader, broader incentive incentives. But like,

Yeah, it's also fun to write about. All of which is to say, I mean, so some of it is self-serving. It ties into my hack, all this sort of bit. But I do think that volume or quantity is underrated. And this is a massive revealed versus stated preference thing. Everyone will say, oh, I just want you to write good stuff. Like, don't worry. When you write it, I'll read it. And again, maybe I'm just telling myself this, but my sense is that

It would be hard to have the degree of success that I've had if it weren't for the just day in, day out sort of grinding. And you know you're going to get something from me. And yes, that occasionally leads to stuff that is maybe not as high quality as it should be. Maybe you could use another round of editing. But I suspect that the actual process leads to far more interesting and compelling stuff because –

There's no choice. You're going to have to write regardless. And I do think it's something people find valuable and it sort of ties into their, their, their daily life. I haven't done a lot of like deep analytics about my readers. I think it's important to focus on what, just focus on what you're interested in. That's the key thing to doing this for a long time. But yeah,

I have monthly subscriptions and I have annual subscriptions. And at this point, the vast majority of my subscribers are annual subscribers, which is great because that means they're committed. They know they want to get this. And for me, it's freeing. Like if I have one bad update, okay, fine. I have a year to make it up to them before they have to sort of renew.

But one thing I did notice that was interesting when I was trying to understand like the lifetime value of the different groups is I had to cut out people who would subscribe in the first month and immediately turn off auto renew. And those are people, it makes sense that they want to try it or sort of they want to get one article. And so I had to separate those from people that suck through. But when I did deeper analysis, it turned out my best cohort was people who subscribed and subscribed

turn off auto renew. And then sometime in that first month, they subscribed annually. And they were people that like, they wanted to try it out and they,

I was delivering them every day and they're in the habit. And at some point they're like, yeah, I want to keep getting this. And then like, why don't we, why didn't bother with monthly discount to go sort of annually and sort of walk in. And I think, you know, I have a lot of subscribers that have, you know, they've been, they've been there for years and years and they're awesome. You know, I still have my initial set of subscribers that, you know,

They got me off the ground and I'm incredibly grateful to them. And I've had a lot of people that have churned and, you know, my churn rate is very low, but it's still obviously sort of exists. I, you know, I bounce them to the, they still get the free articles sort of bit and,

And it's funny. A lot of companies should understand their business. I don't want to understand my business too much to a certain extent because as long as the number is not going down, then things are good. We don't need to name names, but I got to ask, what is it like when you're seeing someone come in that's like Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg? You're like, that's a big name. Yeah, I've never sort of tried to read them.

and know who's coming in. Actually, there is a funny story about this, which is, you know, currently Stryker runs on my own sort of system that will be available broadly sort of hopefully soon. But for now, it's sort of like a custom sort of thing. But before that, I was working with a service called Memberful, and I was like one of their first customers. They actually watched my first version of Stryker because this business model didn't really exist. So it was sort of all glued together by myself. And then they started this, and they did a great job.

But they emailed me one time saying, hey, just to let you know, you have three subscribers that we accidentally double charged. We've already refunded them. And then they gave me the names. It was random person A, random person B, random.

top five Fortune 5 CEO who was number three. And I'm like, wow, I didn't know he was a subscriber. He was like totally random. But I don't like knowing. It's weird. Actually, it's a real paradox. On one hand, I don't like knowing. And I usually forget pretty quickly because I don't ever, I want to write what I think. I don't want to ever write because I know someone else is sort of reading or write B. And frankly, they don't want that either. Like I do personally,

you know, most relevant, well-known sort of executives do research techery. And I've had the chance to talk to several of them. The reason they find it valuable is when you're a CEO, everyone you talk to inherently has an incentive

to tell you what you want to hear, right? Because it's inescapable. Even if you have the most disagreeable straight talking person ever, there's always going to be some sort of constraint there. And so they like reading me or talking to me because even though I'm lacking a lot of knowledge that they have, because I'm not in charge of the company, I'm just reading their financial reports or watching their presentations or listening to their earnings calls,

I have no incentive to lie to them or no incentive to sort of, I just say what I think they can sort of. And it's interesting the extent I will get pushed back from companies about stuff I write. I never get pushed back from CEOs. It's always people lower down the chain. Like PR people, marketing people. Or even senior VPs or stuff like that, which disagree and say, you don't get this. This is wrong. I've never had a CEO pushed back at that level. What's going on there?

Because they appreciate getting a different point of view. Of course, they want the public record to be in a certain regard. And perhaps they will email their head of PR, say, email Ben and tell him to go after Ben. But I've never gotten pushback from a CEO personally. And my perception, and again, just to the extent I've talked to them sort of in person, is they're so hungry from a distinct point of view that doesn't care about them.

That like, I don't care what they think. Like I'm saying what I think. My business model is not dependent on them. They're paying $15 a month like everybody else. And I don't even know if they're subscribers by and large. And I try not to know. And so the flip side of the paradox is, of course I'm thrilled they're reading, right? Like the, you know, trajectory at the end of the day, I want to have an impact. And, you know, I used to work at Microsoft and, you know, the, you know,

I had opinions and like what the company should do and what it should be. And the great irony is I almost certainly have way more impact on them than I ever would have had I stayed for 10 years and sort of been promoted up the chain and been in the internal sort of political fights. And that's amazing. Like there's a bit where my core audience is a very small collection of like CEOs and everyone else is helping pay the bills, you know, sort of go along with it. Well, one of the things that I want to make really clear is that

This is a compliment that's going to sound like an insult, so bear with me. There is something now sitting here that is very unremarkable about you and Stratechery.

And it's because the business model that you founded and that you pioneered has now become a big part of the world. And I think of that in two ways. First of all, the founders of Substack have explicitly said that you inspired their model. That's the first thing. And then the other thing is one-man media companies have really become a thing, both in writing where, you know, I guess you had before you had bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Ezra Klein and

but now we have people like MKBHD. We have people like Joe Rogan. It is a big thing now that single person media companies can have all this reach, but you go back 10, 15 years ago, that would have been insane. They're going to disrupt ESPN. They're going to disrupt MTV. What are you talking about? Well, I mean the, the, at the end of the day, from the user perspective, time is time. So every minute spent reading strategies, I'm going to not spend reading the New York times or not spent reading. So from that perspective, uh,

I am competing on an equal plane with the largest media companies in the world. And so that's all that matters. And then for it to pay off from my perspective, the advantage you have as a single person media company is your cost structure can be totally different. Like my cost structure for the first four or five years, I was literally one person. I did everything. I did my taxes. I did my accounting. I answered emails. I did sort of all those sorts of pieces.

And while that was busy and stressful, particularly since I wrote more back then than I sort of I do now, and, you know, it was pretty insane the amount of stuff I was doing. That meant my only costs were basic credit card processing fees, right? And then, like, you know, because my time was obviously, you know, valuable, but it wasn't – I wasn't paying a salary. It was just sort of like whatever came out of it. Yeah.

And I'm working in a zero marginal cost business for me to send an email to a hundred people. Yes. Email costs money, but on the order of cents is the exact same as to send it to a thousand people or to send it to 10,000 people or send it to a hundred thousand people. The beauty of media is it is on the internet is it's perfectly scalable on the backend. I can write an article that reaches a million people or reach or theoretically can reach billions of people. Now do billions of people read it? No, but sometimes a million people do, which is amazing.

It's media is not scalable on the front end because you have to keep writing stuff every day, like the and so that turns people off from it. It makes media, I think, maybe often a poor investment in that's a real challenge. But that's that's an opportunity for.

for the people that are capable of, that have that generative function. So it was appropriate for you to start with what's your day-to-day look like, because that is the part that, that is marginal costs. Like I have to literally sit down and write that update every day. Once that update is written, then I get the internet advantages. I get to send that, send that to however many people are subscribers or people are on my mailing list or whatever it might be.

So, that is, and you know, and I wrote a lot about that when I was getting started and like why this is an opportunity and the different frames of reference. And so, I'm very proud of the model. I'm proud of Substack. I'm proud of everyone that is sort of doing this. And I hope to some extent it gives, even though I've never been the CEO of a Microsoft or a Meta or an Apple, hopefully it gives some sort of credence that I'm not

I know to some extent what I'm talking about because like the fact that, yeah, I was the first to sort of really do this. Again, newsletters existed on Wall Street in particular.

Those are more of the, you have like 100 subscribers and you charge $10,000 or $100,000 or sort of whatever it might be. This idea of like, you know, Stripe was really a core piece. They started in 2009 and their product came out in 2011. I launched in 2013. And this ability to just take credit cards easily, do a subscription, not have to muck around with PayPal or whatever, and basically make it up in scale. Like the internet lets everything be made up in scale. And-

That is a challenge. Like, it's funny. People will bemoan the fact I only have a thousand listeners, my podcast, or I only have a 500 people read my blog. It's like, well, let's step back here. Let's go back to the nineties and tell someone you sit down in a thousand people, listen to what you have to say every single week. Like it's, it's pretty remarkable. I think the,

Reason why people don't fully appreciate is number one, it's everywhere. Number two, through social media, you see all the success stories. You're not gauging yourself sort of appropriately. And that's a problem with all sorts of stuff. And then also the monetization is obviously hard because you're dealing with zero marginal cost content.

Advertising operates at scale. And so the key thing with Stratechery is, I mentioned I'm low price compared to Dylan Patel, but I'm very high price compared to most content on the internet. And it's really about maximizing the average revenue per user, which is if you're selling something, you have to

You have to be confident to charge for it. And, you know, if you have, if you charge a hundred dollars a year, you have a thousand subscribers, that's, you know, thousand true fans, you know, the sort of classic sort of essay, you have a hundred thousand dollars a year and that's a pretty good outcome. So when you see people launching a sub stack,

Trying to charge for content and it doesn't work. What went wrong? What is the mistake, the strategy mistake that people repeatedly make? When I started, I was the only one doing this. Sure. So that certainly, I want to be humble about that fact. That makes it, that makes a big difference. One of the real big challenges is, and this is where the volume thing frankly comes in, is

You need a way to acquire customers, but you also need something to sell. I solved that by just writing a massive amount, some of which was free and some of which was paid. If you're only generating one content a week, one article a week, which is frankly is a lot.

How are you going to balance customer acquisition with actually having a product that people feel compelled to pay for because they want to get access to it? I think that's really hard. And it's harder today to just grow. Part of the internet advantage was social media. My best marketing is my customers telling other people. And that was when links were being pushed on social media in the way that now they're just gone.

That's right. That's right. And so that makes it astronomically more difficult today. You know, I'm now able to launch new things. Like I start a new podcast and I can overnight have five-figure sort of listeners. But that's because I'm lending the sort of audience that I gained before sort of into getting that off the ground. So what do I say to someone who's trying to start a new podcast that has no –

audience and know whatever it's, I just want to be humble about that. Sure. But also there's something fundamental to Stratechery that businesses can pay for it. It provides value. Write consistently really good stuff. I mean, the thesis that I have is the most important article you write is the second article someone reads.

So they go on your site and they're like, wow, that was a good article. And then maybe they leave and they come back later because they follow another link or they click somewhere on your site and they read a different article. And they're like, wow, that was a really good article. And suddenly there is a level of consistency and expectation that you've established with that, with that reader. And,

And so some of the things I did with Shachakri is funny. I mean, I joke about it. It's a word of mouth blog with a name no one can pronounce, but it's also memorable. That's why I can't remember the name of that blog. How do you say that again? Shachakri had a custom font when custom fonts were a completely new thing in the internet. Shachakri had the hand drawings. Shachakri was orange. The reason for all that is, is I wanted to capitalize on that second visit because

where people would show up and they'd say, I've been on this site before because they were just following links on Twitter. And then, oh, I see that drawing. Oh, that's the guy that does the hand drawings. And what I want is that user to start to develop an expectation that this site has good stuff. And I did that. I started Shrekery with the goal of monetizing it. But the way I always thought about it is when I monetized it, I wasn't going to drop a paywall

I was going to do more stuff because I wouldn't have to have another job. I could write more. I was probably insanely turned out okay, but probably insane at the time, confident I could generate more stuff. I'm like, I have so many ideas. And so when I add the daily updates, like, yeah, I still have the free stuff. But now if you want more, you can sort of get more stuff. And I wanted to build a desire and linkage in people that like,

This is a place to go to, to get good stuff. When something happens in the world and Ben doesn't write about it, I'm disappointed. Like I wish Ben would comment on this sort of thing. And then I, you know, the day that day comes along, Oh, you want me to comment about news of the day as it happens?

$10 a month and you can get that. So I want to do a little segment here called How the Internet Works. So I'm going to give you framework sentences that you've written and I want you to basically unpack them. And I think what we can do is we can get the Ben Thompson model of how media works online.

First thing is this is Exponent, my favorite episode of Exponent, episode 12. It's called the Internet Rainforest. And the thesis is this, that the Internet enables big winners and small focused niche players. Yeah, well, there's lots of names for this. It's the barbell effect. I've done the thing called the smiling curve. And this is basically the idea that

The internet, the implication of zero marginal cost is your transaction cost. This is sort of aggregation theory is everyone had a vision of the internet of being a million sort of winners. Cause it's a, you can go anywhere and you can do anything. The reality is when you can go anywhere and do anything, you're overwhelmed with abundance. You have too much stuff. And so the, whereas in the analog world,

The controlling factor is scarcity. And so the analog world, it's who can get you stuff. So it's distribution that matters. On the internet, anyone can get you stuff because it's all free. And so you have too much. So what matters is discovery. Who can help you find the stuff that is sort of interesting? What this means is the platforms that control discovery, they get more users. They get more users. They get more supply because that's where the users are, which makes their platform better. So they get more users. You get a virtuous cycle that the implication of the internet is not you have a lot of

winners is that you have very few, very large winners. And so this is the Googles and the Facebooks of the world. This is all very obvious now, but I think, you know, Shetekri in the early days was really explaining why are the expectations around these companies wrong? Like the great shame is I had no money when I started Shetekri. I would have been much better off

Had I had the money I have now and then just investing in my thesis back then of like basically because like the big the big five completely outperform VC, completely outperform anyone over sort of the running strategy. And Jerry was explaining why that was the case. Why are they why are all these companies, despite the fact of the largest companies ever, still completely undervalued?

And that, you know, was obviously sort of turned out to be the case. That's probably why a lot of loyal subscribers is I help them make a lot of money. So good for them. So you have those large players, but at the same time, all these bits about the cheapness

makes all these small creators completely possible. And the key thing is, is traditional media can't shrink down enough. Their cost structures were built for a different world. They're built for a world that's predicated on having white manufacturing operations, which is printing presses and delivery trucks and things on those lines, which entailed a certain sort of lock-in in their market that they had. If you're online,

If you can get just a few subscribers that are really, or a few people that are really loyal to you and really like your stuff, and there's a gazillion niches in the world, and now you can address the entire internet. So you can pull, I have subscribers from over a hundred countries. Like you can find the people that like what you want, and then you can charge them again, a high average revenue per user, and you can have a, have a very good life. And so that is the case in industry after industry, like, like, like cost internet cost structures, right?

and niche and find your tribe versus zero marginal costs, serve everyone, sort of get these aggregation effects. Everyone in the middle is screwed. And that started with print.

And then it happened with, it was happening with the rest of media. And you're seeing it happen in all sorts of industries. Right. Let's do a string of sentences now that truly changed my life. I remember reading these in my college dorm room and I was like, oh, I think that might actually influence what I do for a career. Here we go. People underestimate the scale of the internet. It's not going to appeal your content. It's not going to appeal to the whole world. But if you're going to like it, you're really going to like it.

This gets in the bit about the whole world is your addressable market.

People, you know, you real, like every trajectory post, the addressable market is literally on the order of billions of people. Now there's the, there's the classic phrase everyone makes fun of. If we can only capture X percent of the market, that's actually true in this case. Like, and you know, it was funny. There's a lot of like well-known VCs and folks in that area. When I watched the, the, the pay version of checkers, like,

You know, love your stuff. Come on, man. No shot. That's not going to work. And it's interesting. People whose job is to understand the scale of the Internet do not understand the scale of the Internet in that particular case. Like, it turns out there is a good number of people that are willing to pay for

Because they really like the content and, and we see it. It's not just me. There's all the success stories of the sub stack. There's all the YouTube success stories to your point, these individual creators. And there's no, there's no cap on that. People have like subscription fatigue and they're like, they, I think they underestimate the number of niches and they're, they're overly focused on themselves. There's a lot of stuff. And actually their problem is they're too interested. There's too many stuff they want to subscribe to. And so they're frustrated how much they're spending on subscriptions and

Without, and they forget about the fact that most people, everyone is different. Everyone is not like them. And people will subscribe to, you know, the most arcane sort of niche-focused sort of things. And it pays off. Let's do one more. Most of what I read is the best there is to read on any given subject. The trash is few and far between, and the average equally rare. Well, I mean, I think this is just an internet effect, which is,

And this is a function, this is why discovery matters. What bubbles up, what gets traction, the links that get shared are shared because they're good. And, you know, this is a reason why you talk about this like misinformation or whatever. One of the worst things that exists in terms of intelligent conversation with the internet is search. Because you can go on and search and you can find absolute garbage because this is like the whole TikTokization of things. The vast majority of videos created on TikTok are trashed.

What the magic is, is that if you say point zero zero zero one percent are great, if you can ramp up the volume, then the the absolute on the Internet, the absolute number matters most. And so you just like if you have a huge amount of volume, even if a tiny percentage of that is good, the number of good things is quite large.

And it can be so large that it starts to overwhelm sort of other sorts of things. One of my favorite lines on this is from a little book by Aubrey Maraschenko called Human as Media. And it says that before the internet, curation happened before the publication of something. And now curation happens after something gets publicized. And that's what you're saying. You just let everything go. Everything can be shared. And then you have search or algorithms that then say, shh, shh, shh.

this is the best stuff. Now that's what we're going to show. That's right. So the curation is on the word for discovery, which is, which is these platforms that help you discover the best stuff. And they are heavily motivated to engender massive amounts of creation. And actually it is a positive thing.

for these large platforms if there is gargantuan levels of junk out there. Because the implication is there's lots of stuff being created, which means, you know, there's going to be lots of good stuff too. I want to talk about writing conclusions. So let's go back to what Clayton Christensen got wrong. Here's how you ended it.

Apple is, and for the last 15 years, has been focused exactly on the blind spot in the theory of low-end disruption. Differentiation based on design, which, while it can't be measured, can certainly be felt by consumers who are both buyers and users. It's time for the theory to change. So as you're thinking about ending a piece, what is really important to you? Well, I think that was a good example of how I can be very wordy and use a lot of punctuation. So thank you for that. Number two.

You are calling back to an article I wrote in 2013, which feeds my worst fears that I peaked early and it's been downhill ever since. Um, what is this staple Ben Thompson piece? Uh, but number three conclusions are hard for sure. I think the best conclusions they taught, this is kind of cliche writing device, but they tie back into the introduction and they, they, they, they not the thread as it were. And so I started that piece, as you quoted before saying, everyone admires Clay Christensen. Um,

He's very smart, but he's got something wrong. And so at the end, I say, what do you got wrong? So that was it was fairly. And I do think when you talk about you ask about editing before to the extent I do edit again, I think I write with a pretty high degree of clarity.

But what if I do rework something sometimes because it's too long, I just got to take something out. But the other big thing is I'm not pulling the thread tight on the conclusion. And so I want to I want to.

You know, I'll go back and sometimes when I'm writing the conclusion, I will, I'll copy the introduction at the top and I'll paste it down at the bottom. So it's right there in my line of sight. And so I'm thinking about like, how am I tying this together? Sometimes like, I can't really tie this together. And I need to go back into the essay and put in a couple of guide posts so that I'm like driving sort of to pull it back in. How does that work? Usually when I came up with the introduction, I had a sense of where I was going. Sometimes the piece goes in a different direction.

And I have to like sometimes scrap the introduction, which is very sad. But sometimes it's like, oh, wait, no, it's there. I just – there were a couple of guideposts I needed to add so that when I get to the end, I can sort of link it back to where I started. So I think those are the best conclusions. Conclusions are hard though. Like the – but I do think they're important. Like –

You know, you want to, and they can be risky because sometimes you, to get a good conclusion, you have to like maybe go a little bit more on a branch than you want to say sort of whatever it might be. But I would say the challenges of the conclusion are tied to the challenges of the introduction. And again, I think that's sort of writing 101 in a certain regard. When you're editing and you're in a story, how do you think about the pacing of that story and what the right kind of tempo is for a reader? Yeah.

It's definitely a challenge between saying anything I want to say and having it be short enough and compelling. You know, again, I think that's where when I could use more editing, that's often the case, or it's late at night, or I'm just like, you know, like I wrote a piece about, it was getting related to European regulators or whatever, and I had a whole section in there about, you know, using the European internet and this annoyance that everyone wants. Like, I kind of can understand why people

They're so obsessed with data because everyone's trying to collect data. That's totally unnecessary. And I thought it was actually like, like you go, you sign up for like to go visit a museum and they're like, you know, what was your income last year or something like that? I mean, I'm overstating it slightly, but that's where your passport information, like all that sort of stuff. It's like,

Like, I just want to buy tickets, right? And the U.S. is so much better at this. You go in, like, they're like, look, we're just going to do a transaction. We don't care who you are. We don't want to know who you are. I was in Barcelona a few weeks ago, and I was trying to rent a bike, and they started asking me for my passport information. Yeah, it's out of control, and everyone has their own bespoke system. And the U.S., like, everyone just uses, like, a standardized platform, right? Yeah.

And actually, so my take there was this is actually an area where we've actually ended up with a much better system. Like the European internet feels frozen in time in the 2000s when every site was trying to collect data because it's valuable or whatever. And I think it was a good aside and a good anecdote. It was also like a 6,000 word article that it wasn't directly pertinent to it. And so I was going through, I'm like, I really should cut this. This is not necessary anymore.

But I was really in love with it, and it was also like 3 in the morning. And I'm like, whatever, it's going in there. And so I got a bunch of tweets about it. I need to keep it in. I need to keep it in. They're like, Ben must have had a good vacation because his first post back is like a 6,500-word bromade against the European Union. But so, yeah, there's probably a bit, to be totally honest, where I've gotten worse about this over time because, like –

People are going to read it. And so like, you're going to, you're going to hear everything that I have to say. I should be, I should be more disciplined about like, there's a bit also the classic saying, if I would have had more time, I would have made it shorter. Sure. Where if I'm going through, like summers are super hard because, uh,

Actually, being in Taiwan is a big benefit because I work during the day and I publish in the evening. It's morning here. Here I wake up at 3 a.m. usually and I write. And there's a bit where – Here you wake up at 3 a.m.? Yeah, on days that I'm writing. So did you get your writing done today? I didn't publish today. So, yeah, in July, in the first part of August, I don't do interviews. So that's sort of like my break for the year. I only publish three days a week.

But, and so there's a bit where I still finish later than I want to, and I'm under the gun. And I feel like my summer updates get a little long. And part of that is honestly just a function of, and I almost hesitate to talk about it. It's not my reader's problem, like that I'm busy or I'm waking up early. I think it's important for writers to adopt the sense of, at least from my perspective,

I'm selling a product. It's if you want access to this, you have to pay for it. I think I'm very this happens less. But early in the days, people, there's a lot of personal appeals like, oh, please support me. And a lot of writers, you wrote something. You want everyone to read it. So they want stuff to be free. And I'm to a lot of writers like, no, you're running a business.

You need to make like you have to give someone a reason to pay. And a reason to pay is not charity. And a reason to pay is not that they want you to be popular. The reason to pay is because they want to read what you wrote and you're not letting them read it. And there's a bit where a lot of writers are too hesitant and they're not disagreeable enough to basically tell their potential customers, no, you're not going to get to read what I write unless you pay for it.

And you need to have a clearly articulated, you know, what are you selling? And so to that end, I don't like talking about myself. I don't like talking about I'm super busy or I'm dealing with X, Y, Z. And so this is, you know, late or whatever. That's why I don't say personal days. Like if I'm busy or stuff's going on, that is not my reader's problem. My reader signed up to get an email every day. And my job is to give them that email every day. And my problems are my problems.

That said, my updates get a little long in the summer because I'm busy and waiting up early. So if I'm the chancellor at Northwestern at the business school and I were to invite you back and I'd say, hey, Ben, you're going to teach a semester and we're going to train people how to do what you do, what would be on that curriculum? How would you structure it? I mean, I think the most important thing is what you're going to write about. Like the –

Everyone thinks I have the best job in the world because I get to, you know, quote unquote, sit in my pajamas and write about the big five tech companies. But if you wanted to do that, you are literally competing directly with me and directly with Twitter. Everyone has comments about like I'm getting paid to do what millions of people do for free on Twitter every day, which is provide their opinions on the big five tech companies. Yeah.

So you're jumping into a very big pond in a world where you have no inherent advantages of like geography. Like you could have a bunch of sports columnists in the U.S. before because they were limited to their geographic area of where they're published. Once you're online, you're competing with every sports columnist in the world. Now we're just going to read Bill Simmons. They're not going to read your local columnist or whatever it might be. The dynamics of competition completely change. What you can do, and this goes back to the niche bit, is you can find your own pond.

What you need to do, so the most important thing for succeeding on the internet is defining who your target audience is. So, for example, there's a guy, Neil Seibert, he writes about Apple. Right. He writes about Apple every single day.

And I write about Apple, so we're nominally competitive. But if you really care about Apple, like he's the guy you should sign up for, he's going to write about Apple every single day. And that is a, he's choosing in some extent a smaller pond because he's only writing about one company. I'm writing about a bunch of companies and media and stuff along those lines. But he is owning that pond.

And, and I think there should be someone that writes about Amazon every day. There should be someone that writes about Google every day. Casey Newton writes about like social media networks generally, and he's been very successful sort of doing that. I think what it, again, it's a cliche, but I think it applies very much is if you want to be the successful fish in the pond, the key is making your own pond, not trying to sort of defeat the other fish. Have you ever heard of a publication called,

Somebody failed because they chose a niche that was just too small? Probably. There's a lot of failures out there. I mean, it's the old plane on the internet, right, with bullet holes in it. It's like you see what succeeds and what doesn't. I do think that grind is underrated. Like, it's very...

It's very easy to get started. You've probably been thinking about it for a long time. You're like a band putting out its first album with songs you've been curating for years and years. The great bands are the ones with a great second album and where there's an ability to generate consistently new and interesting sort of insights and points of view. And it's interesting because I do think there's a bit where doing something like

Because I do it daily, I think about it all the time. And so my process of coming up with ideas is always running to a certain extent. There's a bit where...

the way to not run out of stuff is to make more stuff, which is sort of counterintuitive. Like creativity isn't a well that you just borrow from. It's kind of constantly replenishing. That's right. I do think there is something to that. Certainly that gets back to the concepts we talked about earlier about having a view of the world and the system and you're sort of augmenting and building on that as opposed to trying to build a perfect edifice of like, this is my castle of technology. No, this is my sort of much more organic,

always changing, always evolving, always being different sort of views of how things work.

Lovely stuff. Well, I got to thank you because I don't think this podcast would exist without your work and some of the things we were talking about with the laws of the internet. And it's because of your writing and your ideas that this exists. And thank you very much. Well, thank you for having me. Yeah. Winston Churchill wasn't just the prime minister of the United Kingdom. That's what people know him for, but he was also a prolific writer. He wrote a novel, two biographies, memoirs, and of course, as prime minister, speeches.

He'd spend roughly an hour working on them for every minute that he spoke. So if he spoke for eight minutes, he'd spend eight hours in prep. And yes, I know he's controversial, but man, there's a lot to learn from his writing. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to play you a short clip from a speech that he gave in 1940. And then we're going to break it down together. We shall fight on beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.

So let's break this down. Like a good battle plan, the structure of Churchill's writing here is simple and strategic. A commander-in-chief can get their squadron, their unit, on the same page with repetition, and that's what Churchill's doing here. There's no mistaking the core themes here. What is he doing? He's using the word fight four different times.

And then he talks about how the British military will fight in five different places. They're going to fight on the beaches. They're going to fight on the landing grounds, in the fields, in the streets, in the hills. So you see all the buildup there. But the entire paragraph is building up to these words right here. We shall never surrender.

That is the main point at the end. That's the climax that everything builds up to. Churchill also uses style to get his point across to writers these days. You sit in your fifth grade English class and you'll be told to only keep what's necessary. Cut the fluff, get rid of the excess. But Churchill does the opposite here.

You'll notice that rhetorically, the volume and the diversity of places mentioned, it's actually more important for him than the literal meaning of each place. And Churchill, he could have just added emphasis by ad-libbing a bunch more places with the word fight. So you'll see here, he's got fight, fight, fight, fight. He's got all this fight. But you know what he could do? He could just add a

a whole row worth of stuff. We shall fight in the cities. We shall fight in the skies. We shall fight in the forest. We shall fight in the little Italian sandwich shops. I'm just kidding, right? But he could have just added stuff.

And look at this. The order of the locations is immaterial. So he could take fight the skies and he could make beaches down here, streets. We'll move it up here. Then we'll take this. So we'll go over here. We're sort of like shuffling things around. And this all works. Here's what matters. All you need is right at the end. You just need we shall never surrender. This just needs to come at the end. And if it does, the whole thing works.

Now, why is this? It's because speech writing is different from the kind of writing that you usually get on paper. It's this series of phrases, these little phrases that are serving up to the punchline at the end, right? They're just building, building, building into we shall never surrender. And you could arrange any of those little phrases. You could take the first one, make it the seventh, you know, rearrange them however you want it. In the paragraph, it would still accomplish its purpose. A sense of timing is important, though. Adding all

adding all these little buildup phrases right here, what are they doing? They're increasing suspense right up until the point that you start losing people's interest. And the more engaged your audience is, like when you're speech writing, the more engaged your audience is, the more of these little buildup phrases you can add. So yeah, you could say the majority of what Churchill is saying here is fluff. He could have taken all this and compressed it into one thing. It looked like this. We shall fight everywhere.

and we shall never surrender.

Eight words could have had the same meaning, but that wouldn't have been memorable. We wouldn't be talking about it almost a century later. Instead, Churchill took 31 words and all of these words right here, they raise the stakes of what he's saying. They're giving his speech an element of suspense right when he wants it the most. And this drumbeat of repetition, we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight, we shall fight. It's paving the way for his eventual climax. All of this is paving a way for what comes at the end.

We shall never surrender. Well, that was fun. Who knew that arts and crafts class would come in so clutch, huh? Well, look, I publish one of these writing examples every single week on writingexamples.com. And if you go to the site, you enter your email right at the top of the page. I'll email you the latest one whenever it goes live.