Ben Thompson: belief

Transcript context

…Okay. WordPress is an open-source project. One of the greatest things working there was, that’s when I went back to Taiwan because they’re fully distributed. You live and work anywhere in the world. Teams are totally remote and virtual. That was just a really cool and neat experience generally. You would have team get-togethers all over the world where people would fly together for a week. Almost from a social experiment, it’s a very interesting and fascinating company to work for. I would say the other thing though, when I was working there, is the scale of the internet is astronomical. Automattic and WordPress.com — the number of sign-ups they have every day and the number of new blogs being created. Even people who blog — who writes blogs anymore? There are a massive number of new blogs created every single day. Do a lot of them fail? Sure they do. But this idea of the internet being huge — it’s something that drives Stratechery. I can write a paid newsletter, and because my market is the entire world, I can have plenty of subscribers all over the place. It makes it viable. Not just me, but you can write a newsletter about China — I just talked to my friend Bill Bishop here in DC. You write a newsletter about basketball. I can write a newsletter about Apple specifically. That’s just one niche, one area is newsletters because the internet — it’s bigger than anyone thinks. Even people in Silicon Valley, I think, underestimate at times just what it really means to be able to access billions of people. As you mentioned, you live in Taiwan. Your wife also is Taiwanese, I believe. What’s your favorite thing to eat in Taiwan?…

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