Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
69 transcript-backed records
01 / evaluation
“com is a particularly interesting one because they aggregate all the hotels, but they are also aggregated by Google.”
02 / belief
“Not having access to that is definitely one of them. But the problem is that it's such a huge market now that I think there are fewer and fewer restaurants, in that a lot of these places actually just straight up close their storefronts are just ghost kitchens basically.”
03 / belief
“I think you're with Stripe, you're on the skepticism side. I think ads are amazing.”
04 / belief
“I mean, I think that that's a bridge that every tech company would be happy to cross if they came to it.”
05 / observation
“The problem is the merchants who will make that bundle valuable have no incentive to join the bundle because they could make more just monetizing users directly.”
06 / belief
“I think there's a lot of …There's a real stated versus revealed preference about a lot of this stuff.”
07 / belief
“I think there's massive economic reasons to do so, which is all the revenue you're going to be foregoing in 2029 if you don't do it now, and then we'll happily get geopolitical insurance for free.”
08 / belief
“I think OpenAI might be a bigger threat to Facebook than Google, something worth considering, but Facebook is obviously clearly spending to meet it.”
09 / belief
“Not just a six billion humans typing away, but agents generating stuff sort of constantly. And in that world, I think crypto as an identifier of authenticity is going to be more and more important.”
10 / belief
“I think no one's going to really solve community around content, like a message board or comments or not.”
11 / prediction
“I think one of the brilliance of American business is… Actually, this is one of my theories about why the Europeans are so gung-ho about data privacy and regulation is because they so often interact with European companies.”
12 / evaluation
“And if you're just an app on a phone, you can't build a platform. And the problem is that I think being an advertising-based model is generally incompatible with being a platform.”
13 / evaluation
“I've made this disagreement before and they get mad about it, but they characterize themselves as being totally writer-friendly. And I think that was a mistake because it's impossible for them to be ultimately writer-friendly because the most writer-friendly setup is running an open source software on your own server.”
14 / preference
“It's still great. But there's a number of restaurants that I used to always take people to, like holes in the wall that I knew had super good beef noodles or something.”
15 / preference
“Just because it just shows up, I'm moving back to Wisconsin, so I'm buying stuff for the house and I get all those ski hangers and think those would be great.”
16 / commitment
“There was a thumb on the scale here. And I started talking about it then, and I did support the ban of TikTok or the forced divesture from China because it seems fairly insane to have a primary information source controlled by your chief geopolitical adversary.”
17 / evaluation
“I think burnout's not a function of how much work you're doing, it's doing work you don't enjoy.”
18 / evaluation
“What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, what matters is absolute numbers.”
19 / evaluation
“You get exactly what you asked for. And I think the extent to how powerful this already works, they're just stuck on “50% of my ads work, I don't know which ones.”
20 / preference
“Yeah, I mean it's silly to try to crush it out. I'm very opposed to these AI detectors because they don't work.”
21 / evaluation
“The sooner you can demonstrate that to someone, the sooner they are going to take advantage of whatever means you have to follow, to subscribe, or whatever it might be, because it's not just a promise of consistency, but it's evidence of that.”
22 / belief
“I think that's the other company I've mostly been pretty right about over the years along with Microsoft or probably my two long standing best calls, but I'm not like waking up in the morning killing myself.”
23 / uncertainty
“I don't know if I ever will. I agree that I should have by now written a book, but alas.”
24 / belief
“I think you're both right. There should be a set-in-stone treaties. Honestly, there's just a matter of priority.”
25 / belief
“Build a couple in Japan, because Japan is a future ally, but I think you do have to double down on Taiwan and roll the dice that nothing happens.”
26 / belief
“All we want them to do is write content. I think that's so foolish because everyone wants feedback.”
27 / belief
“Aggregation Theory is the obvious one. I think the time to have written that book would probably be 2017.”
28 / belief
“I think that of my work experience, the Microsoft bit was certainly the most impactful, not just because of what I learned about Microsoft, but just what you learn about big companies (I think) in general.”
29 / commitment
“I usually have a very good memory of everything that I've written. But every now and then, I will encounter a piece where there's someone linked to it or come up when I'm searching for it.”
30 / belief
“To go to the back of the Hawaii trip, there was an aspect about going to Microsoft. It's like, well, I should go to a place that is directly oppositional to everything I believe in.”
31 / belief
“I think, actually, often the better interviews are with other analysts or people in different spaces. This also solved the how do I cover startups, because part of not being a reporter and being independent is that public companies have to disclose a lot of data.”
32 / belief
“I think Gruber was at the right place, the right time for Apple, for sure, not just in terms of Apple's growth, but also the explosion of the App Store.”
33 / belief
“One thing I think is great, sort of I went back to Substack and making it easy to pay, I think the real great thing for Substack and Substack writers today, it's not that it's easy to pay, but people aren't scared to give their money to some random writer on the Internet.”
34 / belief
“I think from Amazon, building up the support capabilities and rationalizing their offerings, it's weird because Amazon benefits, because they have so many features.”
35 / belief
“I haven't done a good job marketing my paid podcasts, I would say, other than leveraging Stratechery, but that's something we want to work on.”
36 / belief
“I think that's where subscription pricing does make much more sense for content production, because in this case, you're actually getting the money up front.”
37 / belief
“I would consolidate Meta, acquire Shopify, and spend three years fighting out in court, because I think the payoff would be worth it.”
38 / belief
“I'm not going to work at Meta. I think that's pretty safe. If Meta wants to buy me for $100 million, I guess I'll earn out.”
39 / belief
“I think he actually invented native advertising, because you read every piece of content that he writes, and one of them just happens to basically be an ad.”
40 / evaluation
“Then I think the first month, when I tore all that out, I screwed up the subscription, so I double charged a whole bunch of people to process all these refunds as well as customer support.”
41 / evaluation
“Honestly, the biggest change that happened when I did raise prices was it didn't affect growth at all, except that I had a lot more people switch to annual subscriptions, because I like pre-announces like, hey, if you want to get a year at the old price, which is great, because I want people with annual subscriptions as we discussed at the beginning.”
42 / commitment
“I was totally right, and I was so mad that I walked back a little bit. But I'm glad it happened because when I started out, no one cared.”
43 / evaluation
“It is a bit humbling to be a writer because I think people would understand all those things had I not written it.”
44 / evaluation
“The metric I was paying attention to was people who visited the homepage on days I didn't post, because to me, those were people that were hoping I had written, and they wanted more from me.”
45 / evaluation
“Automattic worked out. It actually worked out even better because I was hired as a growth engineer or whatever, which I didn't really know anything about, but then the team I was on pivoted shortly after I was there, to building a new back end of WordPress.”
46 / commitment
“Once I realized I definitely want to do the subscription model, I started becoming super disciplined about never writing more than twice a week.”
47 / preference
“For example, now you can consume the daily update via a podcast or my articles via podcast, I think that's actually very much in line with my vision and view of Stratechery, which is, this is a publication that I write and I will make it as easy for you to consume in the way you want to consume as possible.”
48 / evaluation
“I think I'm lucky because I was so early, because I was the only person in this space doing this stuff.”
49 / prediction
“In general, I think writers tend to succeed with podcasts because writing is a good marketing medium.”
50 / belief
“I think that’d make the end of the games remarkably faster, make the whole game faster and more exciting.”
51 / belief
“I think a lot of MBAs get a bad rap, deservedly so, for thinking they know everything when they’ve just read a few case studies.”
52 / belief
“I think there’s going to be a mind shift, where we need to be willing to go into those areas with massive regulatory overhead, with massive red tape, because that’s the real growth opportunity.”
53 / belief
“Even people in Silicon Valley, I think, underestimate at times just what it really means to be able to access billions of people.”
54 / disagreement
“Sometimes it’s, oh, I disagree with you and it’s an opinion sort of thing, which is fine.”
55 / uncertainty
“I don’t know. I’m not that familiar with it, to be honest. People ask me why I don’t cover Chinese companies more.”
56 / belief
“I think there’s a bigger challenge, in general, for a company like Facebook where, if you think about public relations, it’s very tied up into the media and that sort of area, where there’s a certain tension already in that sort of relationship, particularly when it comes to the health of their underlying businesses.”
57 / belief
“I think that’s actually been more the last couple years, they’ve actually fleshed it out to being more accessible.”
58 / belief
“I think people will have them in their homes, and they’ll become more popular because it’s convenient.”
59 / belief
“I think the attributing causation to these companies when, if you think about how they work and how they have power in the market, it is by giving people what they want, which it follows — people want to be polarized, they’re going to get polarized things.”
60 / evaluation
“Blockchain is inherently interesting because the thing about the internet is its reduction in — basically driving distribution cost to zero.”
61 / evaluation
“Google in particular is notorious for this, for launching products all the time that never succeed. But it doesn’t matter because they have that core product with the huge network effects that lets them do that end fail.”
62 / prediction
“I think there’s still tremendous amounts of transformation that is going to happen from here on out, particularly things like the cloud and ever-present computing.”
63 / recommendation
“I think I mentioned that: that venture capitalists need to change their mindset, generally, to be willing to go into spaces where upfront capital investment is not sufficient — there needs to be sufficient ongoing expenditure on a marginal basis for a product — and be willing to accept that.”
64 / prediction
“New teachers would come, and you could tell right away which ones would not make it because that sort of stuff would just drive them crazy, and they’d be gone in a month or two.”
65 / evaluation
“They’re very different than the dominant companies of old that were like monopolies based on controlling distribution. They had no need to service their customers well because their customers couldn’t go nowhere else.”
66 / evaluation
“And why? Because Facebook is the digitization of your friends and family. Where I’m from, friends and family is very central in a way that in Silicon Valley — where a lot of people are running away from their friends and family to pursue this dream or to get away — is less cognizant of.”
67 / evaluation
“I just mentioned the context of Facebook. They’re so convinced that they are a force for good and changing the world that they can’t even fathom that they’re not, which leaves them unprepared to answer very legitimate questions about their effects on the world because they don’t have the — I don’t know if empathy’s the right word — but they don’t have the empathy for the possibility that they might not be, which doesn’t allow them to even create the right response.”
68 / preference
“The reason I like that book and go back to it, even though I think he’s taken the concept a little too far, and one of the first articles I got traction on was saying why he got Apple so wrong, but what I like about that book specifically is the fundamental premise is managers can do the “right thing” and fail.”
69 / evaluation
“I think Apple struggled originally because they had the same supposition that this is inherently interesting, so let’s build it.”