Brian Lam
Founder, Wirecutter. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderjournalistauthor@blam ↗nytimes.com/wirecutter ↗Wikipedia ↗
Lam served as the editorial director of Gizmodo before leaving to launch the product recommendation site Wirecutter in 2011. He popularized a reader-first, affiliate-commission testing model, leading to Wirecutter's acquisition by The New York Times Company for over $30 million in 2016.
1shows
1appearances
23statements
2resolved
0supported
1contradicted
0%fully supported
Everything Brian Lam said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Brian Lam calls digital advertising one of the world's great evils
“I think advertising is one of the great evils of the world, because it gets in your brain no matter what, and the metrics they use are basically what has made media what it is today, like really shallow, fast cadence”
Gawker ended traffic bonuses after Brian Lam rapidly earned 1% equity
“Within a couple months, certainly less than four or five months, they shut the program down because I had exceeded the traffic so much. That I ended up owning in two months, like over one percent of the company.”
Gizmodo pre-planned its legal defense before publishing the iPhone 4 leak
“Yeah, we went to our lawyer in-house and said, can you look this up? What would happen? How we can do this safely, legally? And we discovered these laws about returning stolen property. You can't get in trouble for it, basically, and the person who claims the …”
Wired and Engadget hesitated and passed on the iPhone 4 scoop
“I know he contacted Wired, and he contacted another publication, maybe Engadget, and they all started just kind of like, not sure what to do. They didn't have a plan, and they were slow.”
The New York Times acquired Wirecutter for more than the reported $30M
“Is that number is actually wrong. It was a leak that was incorrect, but the times published it. It was more, but it wasn't an extraordinary amount.”
Brian Lam argues the highest quality creative work cannot scale capitalistically
“The best podcast, the best books, the best everything is not capitalistic at scale. It still needs to be capitalistic. People need to afford their way of life and their tools, but that scale is something I'm really allergic to now.”
Brian Lam: Perfect objects represent how you wish the world was
“It always pushed me to like this perfect object, which is like a little, it's like perfect objects are like examples of how you wish the world was and how wish you were in a way.”
Brian Lam describes Wired editors as inexperienced and hostile managers
“I would say that I learned how I don't want to manage people there, to be honest. People were not experienced managers. I remember asking one editor a question about, like, how the magazine was made, and I got thrown out of the office for asking that question.”
Brian Lam claims Gizmodo generated the majority of Gawker Media's revenue
“Gizmodo probably made most of the revenue of that company.”
Pre-Wirecutter media models incentivized fragmented, clickbait tech product reviews
“The information is out there. On the tip of the tongues of the editors covering those beats. But the formats that were common in the business models attached to them encourage you to click on, like, 40 different articles about, say, TVs, for example. And then …”
Brian Lam warns against 50/50 founder equity splits to avoid paralysis
“Which is not advised, because then no one can make a decision. Someone should be a majority owner.”
Brian Lam traded Wirecutter's launch sponsorships for 65% equity and buyout rights
“So I negotiated to give up all the launch sponsorship for 65% of the site, but I also had a clause in there saying that if I didn't feel like things were going well, I could basically leave and take the entire company with me.”
Wirecutter scaled product reviews by testing newcomers only against incumbent winners
“Now that you've got the top two or three, the next time you can introduce another 40, and you don't have to compare the new 50 to the previous 50, you just have to compare it to the current kings of the hill and see if they get dethroned. You now have tested a…”
As Wirecutter CEO, Brian Lam ignored web traffic to focus on quality
“And as a CEO, I never checked anything, like traffic, or I knew the size of the checks coming, but I didn't pay attention to anything except the quality of the work.”
Wirecutter generated seven figures in annual profit by its fourth year
“By the fourth year, or the third year, it was making seven figures of profit.”
Wirecutter had 60 employees at acquisition, but cultural alignment peaks under 30
“When we sold about 60, and I think the sweet spot was under 30 in terms of everyone being on the same page culturally.”
Brian Lam: Advancing at Wired required fitting a specific corporate mold
“I kind of feel like it's just like most of America, where you have to look and be from a certain background or way to advance. So for me, like, I didn't smell like an editor there. And you know, like, frankly, I'm not that smart. I'm not that intellectual. I'm…”
Gawker Media was built into a $300M company on AOL Instant Messenger
“We built a three hundred million dollar media company on AIM.”
Wired and multiple other media companies rejected the Wirecutter concept
“I pitched it for Wired, I pitched it to a lot of places, and nobody wanted to do it. And like so many good ideas, you can't get people to take it for free.”
Wirecutter paid reviewers thousands per review instead of standard flat rates
“Say instead of a front of the book, a couple hundred dollars for review, we were offering several thousand dollars to do the same work.”
Retail affiliate programs were originally designed for small mom-and-pop blogs
“The affiliate program was, like, super cheap marketing for them, and it was designed to live on mom-and-pop Blogs. So they would have all these, like, cheesy widgets. If I'm, if like, some blogger wrote about something they like, and they could link on Amazon …”
Surfing ocean waves directly inspired Wirecutter's slow and deliberate publishing cadence
“The cadence of surfing too and like waves is really what informed Wirecutter's cadence, which is slow and clean and like impactful, as opposed to a bunch of like tiny little waves knocking all over the place in a messy way.”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Brian's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder, Wirecutter | 1 | 23 | 0% 0/2 | full record on How I Built This → |