The Wisdom Wall

11 quotable lessons, heuristics and mental models. Every one is playable at the moment it was said. No fortune cookies allowed.

Everyone Bret Taylor (20)Tobi Lütke (18)Marc Andreessen (14)John Collison (14)Satya Nadella (13)Dan Sundheim (13)Casey Handmer (13)Ben Thompson (11)Kyle Vogt (10)Scott Wu (7)Tony Xu (6)RJ Scaringe (6)Garrett Langley (6)Tarek Mansour (5) Best Newest Oldest

“If you're using the easiest possible way to target ads, which is based on the context of the conversation, we're going to show you a roughly relevant ad. Number one, your market's way smaller because you have to hope someone starts a conversation that matches the inventory you have. Number two, you're getting into a My…”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“And the problem is that I think being an advertising based model is generally incompatible with being a platform. The whole point of a platform is you're letting something else shine, something else bring to the surface. You're just on your, you're the support structure. For something to take over.”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“Like your traditional classic investigative journalism, six month sort of piece. It's not well supported by this. What did support that was the bundle. Having lots of different writers in one publication altogether.”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“Yeah, the problem is the merchants who will drive, make that bundle valuable, have no incentive to join the bundle because they could make more just monetizing users directly.”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“what you're paying for when you, when you pay for me is you're paying for my ongoing production. I'm making a promise to you. I'm going to write something every day. And you're paying for that promise. You're not paying for the actual content. The content is a byproduct of that.”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“the reality is when it comes to platforms, you have to build, the price of becoming a platform is making a great product. So Apple gets platforms so they make great products, and they're terrible stewards of the platforms. Microsoft is a great platform steward, but they can't make good products, so they never get the…”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, and what matters is absolute numbers. So it is better to have .one percent of your content is good if your content is like in the billions or trillions, as opposed to, oh, 10% of our content is good, but you only have a hundred…”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

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

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

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

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

“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.”

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026

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

Ben Thompson, Feb 12, 2026
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