Public evidence record
Published podcast speaker
Claim ledger
19 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 / 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.”
03 / 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.”
04 / evaluation
“I think burnout's not a function of how much work you're doing, it's doing work you don't enjoy.”
05 / evaluation
“What actually matters, and this is a key thing, people get hung up on relative numbers, what matters is absolute numbers.”
06 / 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.”
07 / 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.”
08 / 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.”
09 / 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.”
10 / evaluation
“It is a bit humbling to be a writer because I think people would understand all those things had I not written it.”
11 / 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.”
12 / 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.”
13 / evaluation
“I think I'm lucky because I was so early, because I was the only person in this space doing this stuff.”
14 / evaluation
“Blockchain is inherently interesting because the thing about the internet is its reduction in — basically driving distribution cost to zero.”
15 / 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.”
16 / 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.”
17 / 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.”
18 / 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.”
19 / evaluation
“I think Apple struggled originally because they had the same supposition that this is inherently interesting, so let’s build it.”