The Ledger, every show

“So this is, I think, a very underrated bear case for tech in terms of AI, at least for this time period, is they've lost that That murky bargaining power over employees that they enjoyed for decades. And currently you're seeing what happens when you don't have…”

“Subscription pricing does make much more sense for content production, because in this case, you're actually getting the money upfront. The money is funding the work as opposed to the work Being a speculative bid for the money.”

“If you produce super highly differentiated content, that is something that. Is not going to appeal to the whole world, but to the people who like it, they'll really like it, and if you have that sort of audience, you should maximize your revenue per user, and …”

“Nothing visually about Substack is memorable. Every single site looks the same. And also they'll be reading a post and I'll have to like bring down the address bar number. Who am I reading again?”

“I actually thought about building a sub stack a few years before they launched. I actually had a team together and it ended up falling apart, but my big hesitation was always, I just wasn't sure if it would be venture scale.”

“And actually one of the reasons I actually am in general favorable towards meta is I think they're an essential component in the broader ecosystem of niche businesses, because if the entire world is your audience, how does the world find out about you? I'm luc…”

“What the internet does do in industry after industry, I think this applies to creative talent as much as anything else is number one, there's always a barbell effect. You're either very large or very small, you're very large, you get scale, you get aggregation…”

“This is actually an example of the power of branding. I wrote articles that were basically aggregation theory well before I wrote aggregation theory, but giving it a term and coining it is what made it stick.”

“EUV has another five, six years, and then it's not super clear what's after that.”

“The structural changes that Facebook has imposed on the media, which is inextricably linked to the power of political parties, is what enabled the lives of Trump, for example, right?”

“I'm going to deliver this product consistently for free. It's going to always be there for free. And then if you want more, you can pay to get more. So I wanted the feeling of pain to be a positive feeling where you're getting, this is such great stuff. I want…”

“Once someone has given you 10 dollars, like they're going to carve out the time because they feel like they already paid for it. They better do it. And what's great about that is it, it's a forcing function for habit building where people get in the habit of r…”

“What a company like Airbnb, for example, did was it took that trust, which is very hard to build and develop and companies would spend, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars and lots of time on building brands. They basically digitized trust to being this …”

“Like if you don't have to bear huge fixed costs of being on shelf space and running TV ads, you can spend that money on building a better product that appeals to a narrower segment and charge more.”

“I think the internet has a barbell effect, where there are returns to the biggest and returns to the smallest. And if you're stuck in the middle, it's just a very dangerous sort of place to be.”

“Microsoft didn't miss mobile. Microsoft started building mobile phones in the late nineties. Like they didn't miss it. They just were fundamentally inequipped to compete in it.”

“Like the first era of technology made existing companies and processes better and more efficient. So it was the big companies that would buy big, you know, accounting systems and back end, you know, mainframes. There's a role sort of stuff and it made what the…”

“If you find a point of differentiation, a way to integrate in a value chain, you can Build a new value chain, such as the rest, you build a new bundle, and everyone around you unbundles and aligns themselves to you.”

“No one is investing at Uber at a seventy-five billion dollar valuation hoping to get a Tenex return. It is much more akin to, I think, traditional sort of equity investing, but obviously with a higher risk profile, a chance, which is Implies a chance for a hig…”

“And I think those are where the jobs of the future are going to come from. They're not going to come from A Facebook”

“The messy, high investment, relatively low electronic capital stuff, they would rather gain leverage over other people and force them to do it, to get access to Apple's customers.”

“The social media is viewed as such a bad thing for publications, but that's because they don't have the right business model. For me, social media is absolutely incredible. I mean, it's the most amazing channel that, that could ever be invented. I get to use i…”

“Saying Microsoft failed because of the actions of Steve Ballmer. It's such a presumptuous and it's human nature to ascribe things to people, but it's wrong. Like, what matters far more is the context and environment around Microsoft”

“But even that is a good example because Apple is not moving, truly moving out of China. Like they're diversifying to an extent, but the problem, it would just cost so much.”

“You still have to run inference like GLM or Kimi. Kimi is very expensive to serve. The cost per answer is significantly higher.”

“AWS, contrary to sort of popular thought, was not spare Amazon capacity. Actually, it took a long time to get Amazon.com onto AWS, but the, what it drove was the understanding that we need to have a scalable, we can't be having so many meetings. Like, we need …”

“Apple's never had an iPhone recall.”

“The other problem is they've spent Cumulative hundred some billion dollars on Oculus”

“Google built its business by buying up dark fiber. They had the killer search engine, but they, so much of the power, what they do is because they bought up all this dark fiber. That was basically free after the.com era.”

“It was basically that console was designed around, we're gonna realize our vision and own the living room. And gamers hated it, so they rejected it, so their vision, which they didn't achieve, also killed their console.”

“Asset creation at HD was way more difficult, way more expensive than it was for standard-deficit TVs. And so the economic imperative for developers came, we can't just be on PlayStation. We need to be on everything, and so that was the ultimate generation, and…”

“Text isn't the best interface for ads. Obviously visuals are generally better.”

“Technology often makes old business models even more powerful before it kills them.”

“Spotify is arguably the best bundle on the internet, but the reason why they were able to assemble the bundle is because they only needed to negotiate with like four, For entities.”

“So I do not use it to actually Generate any exact content, but targeted research and then critique. Those would be the two biggest use cases.”

“We're going to believe it or not. We are going to have too much memory capacity in a few years because we have such a shortage right now.”

“The problem is they don't share. Audio content is not shared.”

“From Facebook's perspective, AI's all upside, so of course they're gonna invest what they need to do to win, but it's costing him a lot of money, and by extension, it's costing everyone else in the ecosystem a lot of money.”

“I think my audience at this point is like 70% annual subscriptions.”

“I think about journalists as sort of writing about what is happening at best, uncovering facts. Analysis is explaining why it happened, and opinion is some aspect of saying what you think should happen.”

“Substack's seed deck says Shackery in a box. That was their pitch.”

“For a long time, my percentage of subscribers actually followed was a fixed percentage of my Twitter followers.”

“The problem with a word of mouth business and exponential growth is people run out of people to talk to. And so that's the limiting factor.”

“What I was wrong about is that the vast majority of people thought I would fail and go out of business. They didn't want to lose their money. And so they didn't subscribe, but once it was clear, I would be an ongoing entity. Then like, oh, okay, I guess my mon…”

“In fact, if someone comes back and if they are just over the top rude or disrespectful or insinuating things about me, I will not just cancel their subscription. I will refund them their entire purchase and say, please just never come back.”

“The problem is people don't share podcasts, right? You listen to a podcast, you go to the next podcast, you do X, Y, Z. Whereas if you're reading something, it's super easy to tweet it or to forward the email.”

“The key to success on the internet is you want to be the biggest fish in the pond, but the success metric is not competing with other fish. It's finding your own pond. The opportunity is broad. It's not deep. Like in each pond, there's probably gonna be one or…”

“The edge you can provide is usually measured in sort of months or years or a very low number of years.”