The Wisdom Wall
9 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.
“as soon as I go in-house somewhere, Like I lose half of my value or, you know, X percent of my value as soon as I go in-house somewhere. Um, and that is kind of one, even though, you know, I do do sponsored posts and all of that, there is like this independent voice that I have that obviously goes away. Everything that…”
“if you're not yourself, it's not like a be true to yourself kind of thing. It's like, you're going to have a miserable experience because all of your interactions are going to be other people wanting to interact with this persona, or if I were writing from a different voice, Everyone would expect me to write from that…”
“Lenny's audience is so specific and like, you know exactly who you are and who should be paying for that, which is people who do product or people who do growth. And not only do they know that they should be reading that and that they need to pay for it, their companies are going to be willing to pay for it for them.…”
“I think it's really hard to do that kind of journalism. Independently because you need lawyers who have your back and you need, uh, editors to make sure that you get everything right. And you need like all this stuff to protect you when you're doing this really brave work that I think is tougher to do on the, on the…”
“it does scale a lot better to run a venture fund than to show up every week and get a sponsor and then write, write an essay.”
“The more I do of that stuff, the more dilutes the core thing. Uh, and the more it makes it seem like kind of a shill factory”
“I don't think it's gotten, you know, any easier convincing founders to give me allocation at 50,000 readers or 88,000 readers. Like if they're a reader, then they kind of get it. And if they're not, then You know, they don't on the sponsorship side. It's different. Like there's more of a, an equation there and people…”
“It changes the strategy completely though. You can't deploy a billion dollars in follow checks.”
“if I get hit by a bus, like not boring is just done. And that's like the extreme example and the example that everybody uses when they talk about one person things, but that means that like every week, if I don't show up and write something, the momentum slows a little bit.”