Yury Molodtsov

We Need a New Product Hunt

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 16:52:00 +0000

This is Product Hunt’s main page today. 4 out of 5 places are taken by extremely large companies that need little promotion: Anthropic, Google, Cloudflare and Vercel.

Product Hunt used to be a website I opened daily looking for cool new products. Some of them were just nice personal tools and some eventually grew into billion-dollar companies (I found Truebill there during their launch). But since then, it has turned into a marketing platform for big tech startups. Sometimes it’s genuine products, but more often than not, it’s mundane updates grouped under a “Pied Piper 2.0” or just the most basic features.

The only thing that matters is how much attention you can manufacture around the vote. There’s an entire industry around ProductHunt. Infinite guides, professional “hunters”, workflows to ensure you will get hundreds of upvotes right away just so bystanders could organically see you and start voting. Founders and marketing teams plan it for weeks and blast across all of their channels on the day.

So I stopped opening Product Hunt years ago because I rarely saw anything interesting anymore. A true indy project has little hope. Which is why we need a new Product Hunt.

Product Hunt started in November 2013 as a scrappy side project by Ryan Hoover. He liked browsing App Store charts in other countries and exploring AngelList to see what people were building (I get that feeling) but there was no single destination for discovering the new product launches. Product Hunt initially launched as an email list and later turned into one of the main niche tech websites and grew until AngelList acquired it in 2016 for $20 million. It is still the default launchpad for new tech products, which are accelerating even more with agentic engineering.

What changed the most is the ecosystem. Back then, the information was scarce and products were rare. ProductHunt could legitimately serve as the hub for all the day’s key product launches. It was never the only choice even then. Hacker News: Show was an early inspiration, and there were true alternatives like Betalist and many others. But none of the alternatives have been able to elevate the launch into a separate event.

Right now, we’re drowning in new companies and products. Not a day goes by that people aren’t hyping up yet another thing that is bound to replace the previous thing. Aggregating all of them is a futile exercise because what matters is not the discovery but curation. Any catalog built around voting will inevitably attract the same marketers that Product Hunt suffers from. As long as it’s about the headcount and attention, large companies with social media presence will always win. Which leads us to the question: can we even have a new Product Hunt?

One particular change that could fix this problem is tying the product to the company. Imagine that you could submit your company only once. Have another product? Feel free to post about it, but it won’t take a slot. Then neither Google nor Vercel would compete with indie developers. Makers could break through, and marketing teams won’t be able to repackage their existing products countless times. You could also go authoritarian and limit who can vote, though Product Hunt already prioritizes old, verified users over new signups, especially on launch days.

The more I think about it, the more it seems that we will never have a true replacement. But what we can have is individuals and communities curating their app collections. This removes the promotion issue altogether. It adds other issues, most importantly about access — as a founder, you can’t post your project on someone’s blog. You need to make the authors interested in some way.

We’re shifting from a centralized directory to a fragmented ecosystem of tastemakers. And the biggest problem for consumers is finding the people to follow.

I watch A Better Computer, an awesome channel by Matt Birchler, who figured out there was an almost unoccupied niche in talking about software and not gadgets on YouTube. I discovered and subscribed to MacStories because they took a very different route compared to most Apple-centric websites and focused on unique apps. I also subcribe to Internet is Beatiful, which shares hidden internet gems along with useful tools and products. There are niche subreddits on all sorts of topics related to computers.

Maybe one day, one of these platforms or another will become a new Product Hunt. But I’m doubtful for the same reasons I outlined earlier. Most likely we will just have no tech monoculture anymore apart from the Twitter timeline. The algorithm will decide whose launch everyone will see tomorrow.

Why I've Built Syndicator

Wed, 08 Apr 2026 21:20:00 +0000

Over the last two months, I’ve done all my news reading through Syndicator. It’s an app I built, and I’m releasing it to the public now.

Syndicator is a ranked, personalized reading app. It pulls news sites, blogs, YouTube videos and Substacks into one place, then learns from what you actually read, skip, save, and share.

Algorithms have a bad rep, but I 100% believe they can be fantastic when they’re optimized to help you. I don’t want the app to be “engaging”. I want you to open it, scan everything that happened, and close it for the day. Follow everything, miss nothing.

No folders, no tedious manual organization. Just read and save what you’re interested in, and Syndicator will adjust on the fly. It also groups overlapping coverage so you can compare framing across outlets.

Syndicator is designed to provide a great reading experience. It can distill pages and show you just their text. Supports keyboard shortcuts for all key actions. And it can be installed on desktop or mobile as a Progressive Web App.

You can make your profile public and follow other people. The articles and posts they share end up right in your feed. And your profile even has its own RSS — it’s basically a linklog. Here’s my profile.

Syndicator is free in beta. Sign up here!

The State of Media 2026

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 15:00:00 +0000

In 2026, first-time founders don’t want to get on TechCrunch. They want TBPN.

The Decline in Numbers

News publications are down on traffic and laying off people because readers’ habits are changing and there’s harsh competition. This might sound new, but people were saying this in 2009. What’s different now?

Most media publications are fighting to stay relevant while struggling to contain costs, which directly shapes their editorial policies. Practically all of them have put up paywalls to compensate for falling ad revenue, which means most people just can’t read what they publish easily. Just recently, both X and Threads were filled with stories from people who were saying they no longer read The Verge because of its paywall.

Growtika reviewed the traffic to the largest news media websites. Most major tech publications like Wired, CNET and Tom’s Guide lost 58% of their monthly visits since their peaks. This is only organic search traffic — nobody else has other figures. It might be a long-standing industry trend that publications started compensating long ago through apps, email newsletters and other methods. But it’s undeniable they’re losing relevance to new visitors. And social media has been dead as a traffic source for many years, even before Elon bought Twitter.

The numbers are even more dramatic at the individual level: Digital Trends lost 97%, The Verge lost 85%, ZDNet lost 90%. I want to stress that this is an external estimate of the search traffic alone and news publications could be adjusting their strategy and focusing on managed channels like newsletters (more on that later). We have data from the Reuters Institute that says Google’s organic search traffic to 2,500+ publisher sites went down by 33% between Nov 2024 and Nov 2025 and publishers expect an additional 43% decline over the next three years. Only 38% of media leaders say they’re confident about journalism’s prospects in 2026, down from 60% in 2022.

Josh Constine, formerly of TechCrunch, diagnosed the industry: tech blogs collapsed by under-rewarding star writers, chasing social over owned audiences, paywalling bland content, and adopting a relentlessly pessimistic tone. Meanwhile, digital ad revenue concentration among the top 10 tech companies reached 80.8%. Infinite personalized feeds are a far better ad medium than a news website, so this is where the money goes.

What’s Different This Time

The main problem for the media is that there are exactly two scenarios for information consumption in 2026.

First: specific requests. You go to a chatbot like ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini and get your answer there. In 2020, I wrote that the product that will dethrone Google Search won’t be a search engine — instead of links, it will simply provide you with answers. LLMs are exactly that. Even when they show sources, few people go in there. Several of our clients are now getting up to 50% of their leads from ChatGPT while their search visits are falling — but what they care about is sales. This doesn’t work for the media, which are getting far fewer visits from people they can monetize.

Even when you Google things today, what you see at the top of the page is an AI Overview. They’re known to be laughably wrong sometimes because the LLM they use is small and cheap to run, but they will only improve — just look at AI Mode as a reference, which is built by the same people. The steepest traffic decline in H2 2025 correlates directly with AI Overviews expanding to more queries. The media isn’t just losing to new competitors but also to its biggest existing traffic source. The fact that they’re this bad and still killing traffic is even scarier.

Second: curiosity. You have hobbies and interests, and you’re a professional in some specific area. Then you go directly to the sources. You have YouTube and TikTok, which are extremely engaging, and most professional media organizations struggle to get views there. If you’re in growth or product management, you subscribe to Lenny Rachitsky because the interviews he produces are much deeper and more interesting for you than anything the legacy media can produce. There are people like him for most industries. And most importantly, he and his fellow creators have a vastly different cost structure and either operate alone or with extremely lean teams while earning comparable advertising and subscription revenue.

There’s a third mode of passive consumption we have to acknowledge: scrolling through short-form videos, but for our purposes, it’s the extension of the second one. The best bits from interviews and product videos get clipped and shared as short-form videos on Instagram, TikTok, and X.

Social, along with search and aggregators, is now the primary online source of news. And although we still ultimately consume content from news outlets, we do not do so directly. Which is understandable, since reading their websites directly is often an atrocious experience, especially without an ad blocker.

The Rise of the Alternative Media Ecosystem

A giant alternative media ecosystem emerged, comprising newsletters, Substacks, and podcasts. This isn’t new per se but we’re at the point where many of them have larger audiences and more clout than most online news media outlets.

This is why founders want to go on TBPN. It’s the clout and recognition that were previously only accessible through the media. Plus, it’s a unique opportunity to control the message, which is why Travis Kalanick’s Atoms gave an exclusive to TBPN even though they could have gone anywhere. This enabled a great interview that became a single source of truth for other publications that reported on the quotes. And this is a complete inversion of how it worked five years ago. Then you’d pitch the WSJ exclusive, and podcasters would discuss it afterward.

There’s a range of top-tier individual authors like Lenny Rachinsky, Gergely Orosz, Eric Newcomer, Alex Konrad, all of whom started as one-person blogs and many have grown into mini-media companies with multiple writers and other staff members. But unlike the publications they left, these have radically lower cost structures yet deeper audience loyalty. And this is a very profitable combination. The IAB says U.S. creator ad spend hit $37B in 2025, growing 4x faster than total media, and WPP’s mid-2025 analysis found that creator-generated content ad revenue surpassed professional media for the first time.

Nothing exemplifies that better than The Free Press, which started in 2021 as Bari Weiss’s Substack newsletter “Common Sense,” launched after her resignation from the New York Times. It quickly grew into one of Substack’s top paid publications, raised outside capital, and was ultimately acquired by CBS News for $150 million.

In total, Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platform. They boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

Another new format that went mainstream in the past year is live video. TBPN, a daily live show on technology hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, reaches 50k unique live viewers across platforms. Their podcast version is #2 in the US Technology chart. They were profiled by NYT/Vanity Fair/New Yorker/The Information, sold out ad inventory for the year and signed with CAA. They basically invented the format that is now being adopted by alternatives from both traditional media like The Information’s TITV and creators in other regions and verticals such as ETN. The best part of the live TV format for comms is that it expands the medium for brands and companies: there’s a place to get both in the traditional press and on the same day’s live show.

Podcasts are valuable since 56% of weekly podcast listeners say podcast hosts are the type of influencer who matters most to them, nearly triple the share who say the same about social media influencers, and 67% of global podcast listeners have made a purchase because of a podcaster. This is what brings these authors power.

But here’s the kicker. Getting on these newsletters and podcasts is often far harder than TechCrunch. The creators are naturally more selective because their audience trust is their entire business model (and apart from TBPN, they produce much less content than a news reporter). A bad guest damages them more than a bad article damages TechCrunch.

How Legacy Media Is Adapting

To compensate for losing star talent and to rebuild their direct connection with the audience, media publications are now growing writers internally and launching their own newsletters. The Verge with Notepad, Optimizer, Installer and others. Business Insider, in addition to being the owner of Morning Brew, recently launched their own lists Vibe Mode, Work Shift, Side Hustles, etc. 76% of media leaders plan to encourage staff to behave more like creators in 2026; half want to partner with creators to distribute content.

Publications always had star writers who attracted the most readers, but it wasn’t as transparent then. Now, authors can get a good benchmark on their actual star power and potential income if they break away. I’ve been told that Substack’s guaranteed offers and examples of authors are being widely used in media salary negotiations. Single writers now get so much power that they can partner with entire news organizations on their own — like Joanna Stern launching her newsletter in partnership with NBC News.

And by launching newsletters, media outlets also partially get around the atrocious website experience problem: reading their emails is a much better experience.

One potential direction the media is looking at is partnering with AI labs to license their ongoing content. Meta secured a multi‑year licensing agreement paying News Corp up to about $50 million annually to train its models and power Meta AI responses, and also partnering with CNN, Fox News, People Inc., and USA Today Co . OpenAI has expanded its network to nearly 160 news outlets, including News Corp, The Atlantic, Vox Media, Condé Nast, Hearst, Prisa Media, and Axios, typically combining content licensing with access to OpenAI tools for newsroom product development. Google has a pilot program with the Associated Press. Perplexity signed revenue‑sharing or licensing deals with TIME, Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, and a long tail of digital outlets. But it’s unclear if these payments would be sufficient, and while ChatGPT leads are growing, it’s not enough to offset the search declines.

Squeezing the Middle

Each wave of disruption squeezes the middle. The top survives on institutional authority — the NYT, the FT, the WSJ aren’t going anywhere, they can charge premium subscription prices and amortize their fixed costs most effectively. The bottom has radical cost efficiency: most of their costs are their own salaries (or profits).

The middle has neither advantage, as they have large editorial teams, office space, and infrastructure, but they don’t have the brand gravity and are stuck paying legacy costs while competing for an audience that’s leaving in both directions.

Yet the middle is where most tech media lives, specifically the kind of outlets that used to cover products and launches by startups from Seed to Series B. TechCrunch, The Verge, Wired, Business Insider — these are the publications the tech industry grew up reading, and they’re the ones most exposed right now.

We’ve seen this pattern before. Before the Internet, every city had a few major news publications. They were excited about serving not just their city but everyone on the internet. But this also meant competing with everyone on the Internet and turns out most people would rather read The New York Times, which turned them into a juggernaut with $800 million in digital subscription revenue alone.

Local media have also been reimagined through newsletters and influencer accounts with radically smaller cost structures. People still care about places where they live, but the supply side has changed. 6AM City, The Mill, and Inbox Scoop are good examples of modern, newsletter-first local media companies. 6AM City reaches millions across 30+ US markets with hyper-local daily emails and has over $10M in annual revenue.

With AI, we will see this supply-side transformation on a far larger scale.

Internet killed local papers → survivors consolidated → social media killed mid-tier blogs → survivors consolidated → AI is now killing the mid-tier publications that survived social.

The Trust Economy

There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust and personal trust. The only publications that will hold attention will be those that can build trusted relationships with their audience.

But here’s the thing — it’s far easier to build a parasocial relationship with a personality rather than a faceless news organization. And by promoting a specific face, the media always risks those people leaving to launch their own Substack or a YouTube channel.

It’s not like the media publications lost all relevance. Of course, they didn’t. There’s a reason some of the largest startups like Cursor announce their funding rounds on Forbes and The New York Times, and not just post on X. There’s brand value in there, recognition among enterprise buyers, and another source of truth you leave for your next campaigns.

What changes is the composition of the media space. There are now two kinds of credible media: institutional trust (NYT, Forbes, FT) that you tap for the stamp of legitimacy, especially for enterprise and investor audiences, and personal trust (Lenny Rachitsky, Eric Newcomer, TBPN) for depth, audience access, and authenticity. Brands and companies need both, but for different things.

Let’s get back to the Atoms launch we discussed earlier. If TBPN is good enough for an exclusive launch for Travis Kalanick, are you sure traditional media would deliver the best results for your brand? As a founder or a comms professional, you need to be open to a wider spectrum of possibilities.

Trust is the only durable currency. Especially right now, when AI-generated slop content is flooding every channel and raising the noise floor. This environment is making both creators and the media even more powerful.

What This Means for Comms

The era where comms meant “news media relations” is over. Most comms agencies still primarily do media pitching. The ones that survive will be the ones that can produce content, manage creator relationships, run a founder’s LinkedIn, and also pitch journalists when that makes sense.

The goal is the same as it ever was — tell your story to the world, and “we got a TechCrunch article” is no longer sufficient. What did that article drive? We live in a world where a top-tier podcast appearance might generate a more qualified pipeline than a Bloomberg feature. When one of our clients went on Joe Rogan’s Experience a few years ago, people started recognizing him in airports.

When we work on a major funding announcement these days, we still care about where it lands, of course. We plan for an extensive, exclusive profile in a top-tier outlet and pitch secondary targets afterward. But we dedicate as much attention to building out the messaging, preparing graphics and content, blogs, X and LinkedIn posts, securing a live show for the same day, as well as various newsletters and podcasts we can tap into in the next few weeks to build a strong, sustaining presence.

The question is: what should you do when you’re an early-stage company with little to show? Maybe you raised $1-2M in Seed funding, but you don’t come from the team that was building Claude Code, you don’t have many customers yet, and you have no celebrity investors or some other crazy story to share. What then? You could try local publications, such as Built in SF or Tech.eu, but honestly, the answer might be to focus on your own channels. Launch a newsletter, keep sharing the exciting updates on the company and your product, and interact with key experts and influencers in the space. I have a guide for this.

Comms people now need to think like content strategists, not just media relations specialists. You need to produce, not just pitch. You need to understand distribution and communities, not just publications. You need to be a master of everything.

Shiori, A Novel Bookmarking App

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 21:14:00 +0000

Bookmarking apps are a cursed category. So many attempts, so many failures. Remember Pocket? Omnivore? All buried under the sands of indifference.

And I can see why. It’s a hard category to break through and an even harder one to make sustainable. Users want the service, but hardly anybody wants to pay for it. Readwise Reader, which I’ve used for the last 3 years, has achieved a lot, but it also costs a lot and still feels like opening an airplane control panel sometimes. Safari technically has a Reading List, but I never figured out how to actually archive items in it.

Which is why I was really enamoured by Shiori, a new app from Brian Lovin. On the surface, it seems extremely simplistic, but as Steve Jobs said, “design is how it works”, and Shiori operates very uniquely.

On the surface, it’s just a list of links that you saved. There’s no text extraction other than a minimum distilled description. Click a link and read it in the browser. Which might already be a good environment for this. You can turn on Safari’s Reading Mode or if you use Chrome, feel free to install Readr, my reader mode extension that simulates it. But Shiori does know what’s inside those links. You can use its AI to chat with any link or all of them, ask questions, or summarize.

If a website from which you saved the link has an RSS feed, you can subscribe to all updates right within Shiori and get new articles. Found a Substack post that you liked? You can follow the author right from there. It’s a beautiful reimagination of the feed. Very few people use RSS these days, and even fewer know what it is. Shiori makes it simple. This is what I mean by a truly beautiful, unique design. Not just the way this app looks, but how it actually works, its features, their logic, the interactions.

And if you prefer email newsletters, Shiori provides you with a personal address that you can forward anything to, either separate emails or set up a filter for entire categories, and read them inside the app. You can also just upload files, like a PDF.

Bookmarking tweets on X is like stuffing factoids into a file cabinet. You will never open it again. Shiori auto-saves new X bookmarks and summarizes them so you can easily remember the context. And there’s a global search on top of this.

Shiori doesn’t necessarily have apps, but it’s a Progressive Web App that you can install in Chrome and Safari and on iOS and Android. And there’s a Chrome Extension and an iOS shortcut that make saving new links seamless.

You can import links to Shiori and you can export data from it if needed; there’s also a Notion connector. And, as a truly modern app, it has an MCP server that you can connect to your agent (like Claude Code) and do whatever you want with those links.

Shiori offers a generous free tier with unlimited links, along with two paid tiers. Here’s what’s locked behind each of them:

$3: richer content extraction, such as YouTube transcripts, file upload, audio transcription, and color themes
$10: AI chat, X bookmarks auto-sync, Notion sync, email forwarding

I still use Readwise Reader, since my entire history is saved there, along with specific quotes and highlights, which are then resurfaced through Readwise — this is probably the most important part that ensures I actually learn something from this hoarding. But now I mostly use it for long-form texts I wanted to read sometime and prefer Shiori for everything else, such as the links I find for Five Finds.

AI Won’t Kill SaaS But It Might Kill The Messy Middle

Mon, 16 Mar 2026 16:50:00 +0000

AI won’t kill the SaaS models. OpenAI itself famously runs on Slack and uses countless off-the-shelf tools. There’s simply no point in rebuilding key apps your entire workflow depends on with vibe coding. You will be just wasting resources.

Especially considering how difficult it is to build production apps. After a few experiments, I’m now primarily working on two specific applications. And like all software, they’re never finished. I’m making daily commits to both.

But not all apps are essential or that demanding. I believe two sides of the spectrum are safe:

Simple tools that solve a specific problem and don’t cost much
Expensive tools that act as your system of record (chats, CRM, ERP, etc)

It’s the messy middle that has to be worried.

I used to manage a WordPress website at a previous job. Cheap to run. Countless plug-ins and vendors. Easy to add the content you planned to add. But as soon as you want to change anything else you have to spend hours or hire that agency again (great business model for them, honestly).

So when an agency built our new website in Webflow, I loved it. Not only was it easy to add content, but I could also easily create a blog, add a sign-up form, and update multiple pages as we grew.

But over the past year, I had grown increasingly annoyed with it. Webflow is not cheap, especially at the CMS layer which is the entire point of their app if you ask me. It has also gotten much slower, specifically that CMS editor, while their “Designer” is somehow still quick enough (one would think it’s the more complicated part).

So I fired up Codex, asked it to download our entire website and rebuild it on a modern and portable tech stack. I chatted about options and chose Astro and Vercel. After an hour of polishing, our new website was running. That might sound like a long time, but instead of keeping the old visuals, I asked it to rebuild it completely from scratch.

Then I spent about 4 hours updating the content, since I was now able to do so via the agent, which is just wonderful. Instead of being stuck in the CMS, I can just ask it to do things for me, like updating all the listed publications with the current metadata.

Webflow has become that messy middle. If you want a quick website, there are fully managed platforms: Substack, Beehiiv, Ghost, Shopify, etc. And if you want your own thing, you can build it with AI.

The question is, who’s going to be technical enough to use Webflow and build entire pages from scratch, but not technical enough to use Claude Code or Codex?

That market will shrink into nothing.

Building Personal Software

Wed, 04 Feb 2026 18:30:00 +0000

My feeds are filled with posts praising Claude Code. People claim they feel bad if they don’t have an agent running 24/7. Developers are asking for ways to manage more and more agents at once through apps like Conductor.

The comments are always the same: “What have you actually shipped?”

Fair question. I built several apps that I use practically every day and put the source code on my GitHub. I’ll share more on them later but first I wanted to give a bit of background.

I started programming as a teenager. Pascal, Delphi, eventually moved on PHP and spent a year building my own CMS (who didn’t back then). I loved coding. That magical feeling when the words you write make the machine do something. But I had other interests and my career moved me elsewhere so I mostly skipped the switch to modern web development with node.js and React.

AI Engineering got me back big time. Claude Code with Opus 4.5 was specifically wonderful. It’s the same magical feeling once again, except now I can code in English. Still useful to have the basic idea of how things worked and what specific technologies and frameworks can enable. I only have a glimpse of those and I can already build things I couldn’t do just a few years ago.

The barriers to programming have never been lower. That doesn’t necessarily mean you would land a Software Engineer position at a tech company tomorrow. I don’t think you will. But I can certainly see product people and designers jumping straight to code without waiting for engineers.

What you can do instead is build the software for yourself. The apps you always wanted the market wasn’t able to produce. Nobody can stop you. This is exactly what I did.

I like Safari’s Reading Mode. It’s the best one out there. Chrome never had a good one. So I built 📖 Readr, a Safari-like Reading mode for Google Chrome and Chromium-based browsers. There are several extensions that try to solve this but all look like they were built by a developer inspired by a 2004 Linux distro. A million settings and none can make them look good. Readr has zero settings and simply uses your system font and light/dark mode.

For many years I wanted to have a minimal photo blog to document my trips and projects. Flickr and 500px are very old and push you to their subscriptions. I knew it was possible to build with Hugo but I never had time to build what I actually wanted and deal with photo processing and visibility scopes. With Claude Code, I built it in one evening. It’s 🌁 Photowall, a clean and minimal Hugo theme for photographers with a unified masonry feed. Here’s my photo blog running it.

I spend most of my day in the browser. All the apps are there. But it’s a distracting environment. Sometimes I just want to have a full-screen note where I can scribble. So I built 📝 Flow, a minimal one-page Markdown-enabled notes app. It’s completely private because the data is stored directly in your browser. Don’t store anything valuable in there but it’s great for temporary things.

I like Readwise and Readwise Reader is my read-later app of choice. But I very much dislike Readwise’s web interface. It’s clunky and outdated and I can never figured out where each particular highlight came from in the first place. Thankfully, it has an API so I built my own frontend 📔 ClipSavvy. You can even use this deployment by bringing your API key from here (or just deploy it yourself).

These apps aren’t groundbreaking. Any developer would be able to build any of them with minimal time. But it’d have taken me a lot longer. And even developers confirm the barrier to engage has lowered so much they’re starting side projects and experiments they didn’t previously have time for.

***

If you’re thinking of building something for yourself, here’s the framework I came up with.

Easy to vibe code: anything without persistent data storage or authentication. Local-first tools, apps relying on third-party APIs, static sites. Something you ship but don’t have to manage.

Hard to vibe code: anything multi-user with background jobs and synced data. Yes, Supabase exists and you can put a task manager on it quite easily but a multi-user RSS reader would be difficult. You have to manage job queues, deal with bandwidth issues, manage costs, etc.

OpenClaw is a perfect example. It’s an incredible complex piece of software but it doesn’t matter since users have to run and manage it themselves.

Considering this, there are several interesting directions to explore:

Chrome extensions. Most people use Chrome. You don’t need the cloud. You can actually get organic users. There are entire businesses built on top of Chrome Web Store.
Native macOS/iOS apps. Claude Code can build them as well. You get multi-device sync with CloudKit for free. There are apps for everything but many of them feel scammy and users are annoyed with subscriptions.

The real unlock is building the specific tool nobody bothered to make because the market was too small. Now the market of one is viable.

Founders’ Guide to Comms

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 21:00:00 +0000

If you’re a founder, neglecting public communications is a drag on your business. It’s not something you should focus on primarily (that’s what rage baiters do), but you should use this channel just like any other, because it will help you find customers, win candidates, secure partnerships and raise funding.

Now, what are comms? We used to call this public relations when it was mostly about print and TV media, even when they’ve moved online. New categories have emerged with the rise of social media and influencers, and now individual authors are building full-scale media outlets on platforms like Substack and YouTube. To me, comms is all of this. WSJ reported that the industry is trying to rebrand this combined approach as “storytelling” but I don’t agree much; it’s still just comms.

I get many requests from founders who make the same mistake: “we launched our product a while ago, how can we get it on TechCrunch or Bloomberg? Unfortunately, “here’s my great company” isn’t a story. You need to share something new, either a fact or a piece of knowledge, something that wasn’t known yesterday. This mostly applies to the news media but they’re just the most gated and demanding. You’d be wise to apply the same criteria to what you post on X or LinkedIn.

If you have already launched your startup publicly, you can’t just come to the media and ask them to tell the same story. And while you can technically post it on X or LinkedIn, it’s unlikely to go viral.

Let’s go over this exact scenario: you launched a while ago, didn’t have much publicity, and want to switch it up now. What do you do? First, we will figure out how to give it another shot. Then, what you should do afterward.

Restart

First, you must come up with a newsworthy event. It could be a major feature launch, a unique partnership with a larger brand, a unique report on the industry you prepared, or something else. That’s why launch and funding announcements work so well; there’s a clear before and after. Look at your roadmap, think about what kind of data you have access to or can gather.

But this is a hook. Now you need the arc. What is actually your story? What are you building and why is it important? Why is it objectively good for humanity? With some products, this comes naturally. The best case is when you have the “enemy”, the Goliath that you, the David, want to kill, because it’s archaic, expensive, or harmful. Arc/Dia wants to replace Chrome. Perplexity wants to replace Google. Linear wants to replace Jira. Sometimes, it can be the faceless industry you’re fightning, slow and inefficient.

Ultimately, you need people to root for you. Lulu Cheng Meservey said that people root for you when they think you deserve more than you’ve got. For this to happen, they must find what you’re building to be objectively good and important. However, while people like rooting for the underdog, nobody wants to root for the loser. You can’t be the loser. You must have something to show for. Not just a radically better product, because this is often subjective — all founders say their product is the best one.

There are exactly two ways to “prove” this. First is hard data, like “our AI coding agent makes 30% fewer mistakes than Claude Code”. Second is anecdotes, like “this guy on Twitter used our product to create a viral app with 2M users”. The best is if you can combine all of this.

We are building a SaaS that makes customer data instantly queryable for non-technical teams. Our product is 10x faster than traditional BI tools and is already used by teams at Notion, Figma, and Linear.

What if you have none of this? Look deeper into the product, talk to you team, figure out what you can actually gather if you start tracking: improvements, time spent, PMF scores, etc. Still nothing? Then you don’t have a story and probably don’t have a good product yet. Focus on the fundamentals before you proceed with comms.

Tactics for Pitching

You’ve identified an upcoming interesting feature in your roadmap that you want to announce. How?

First, draft a one-page document about the announcement. Combine your overall story with this feature and show how they’re connected. Add all the validation you currently have, including traction figures, growth rates, and customer names. If you want an example, I believe Stripe has the best corporate communications: no buzzwords, straight to the point, validated by numbers where necessary. Find a similar announcement from them and write one for your company. We can call this document a “press release”. If you have any stakeholders for this announcement, such as co-founders, partners, or investors, this is the ideal moment to get their approval.

It’s time for pitching! In 2026 and beyond, you have a rich array of options, including news media, newsletters and podcasts. The first option is the classic one, with publications like TechCrunch, Axios, Forbes, Bloomberg, Business Insider, Sifted, and many others. Use search, find articles similar to the story you have, and study their authors. For instance, TechCrunch has around four people covering AI now. If you’re building in this space, these are the people to target.

When you see someone relevant, pitch them and offer your story as an exclusive. You pitch authors similarly to how you pitch investors. Here’s an example of a pitch that landed our client on TechCrunch.

But don’t disregard the alternatives. TBPN, Alex Konrad’s Upstarts or Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer are probably more influential than most of the classic outlets for select audiences. In fact, more people would likely read about you there. Few outlets disclose the readers of individual stories, but Forbes still does, and it can be as low as a few thousand (see here). Meanwhile, most other founders and executives I talk to listen religiously to Lenny’s Podcast. New media are extremely powerful, even if brands haven’t reached mainstream awareness yet.

Chances are, you might be a bit too small for them as well. New media authors are picky: they have to be, as they tend to produce fewer stories than a TechCrunch authors would do per week. I recommend you trying them anyway, because the profiles they produce are often longer and have more details, like Konrad’s story on Granola. Even big orgs that could have gotten a top-tier media now go to newsletters instead, like this $190M fund announcement from Root Ventures.

But there are many more options out there. Look beyond top-3, find the authors who are also rising and grow with them. I’ve gathered almost 100 relevant and often underrated new media platforms that I will share in the next email blast, so subscribe if you want to get access.

Whether to go with a traditinal media outlet or a new one depends on your goals. With the former you get a logo you can put on your website and a link you can share with a wide array of customers and less sophisticated investors. Meanwhile, new media can often provide you with a much larger and detailed profile and people in this business often value them just as much or even more.

When an author takes an interest in your pitch, share the full release and offer to jump on a call or have a meeting. Continue selling until the very end and ask them to confirm if they’re planning to cover you.

Now, it’s time to take that press release and create a blog post and social media posts. A blog post is a more reader-facing version of the same document. Again, Stripe has both press releases and blog posts for each announcement; use them as a reference.

As for social media, for most projects, it’s just LinkedIn and X (many live just fine without the latter). Repurpose the ideas from the press release to write native posts for them. Even more human, conversational, a longer post for LinkedIn, and a thread for X. Don’t use the native article formats; few people bother to read them. Here’s a great example of such a thread.

Social media is valuable because you will be able to capture and onboard any incoming interested people while also sharing your ideas in your own voice.

Continuing Activities

You probably don’t have an announcement every two weeks. Maybe not even every month. So what’s important is to spend the rest building up your presence.

Write down 15-20 reporters, newsletter authors and podcasters covering the same area you’re in and follow them everywhere. Respond if you have interesting context to add to their thoughts and stories. The best option is not to pitch yourself into a podcast, but be invited instead because you look like someone who has interesting things to day.

If you’re in the same city, you can ask them for a coffee and offer to share anything about the tech industry without pushing your own startup too much. This is how you build relationships that can be converted into coverage later.

Your best long-term option is to “go direct” and “build in public”. It doesn’t mean you should ignore the media, on the contrary, your goal is to build up a profile that makes you unavoidable for them. Because when lightning strucks, they can be extremely valuable.

Lovable built their entire social media strategy on posting photos from the office and bragging about the speed at which they delivered features. But doing this from a corporate account is much harder. People want to follow people, and the current X’s algorithm discourages underperformance by a lot.

Your best bet is running comms for the company from your personal account. I often recommend early-stage founders to avoid using a corporate account at all initially, just create it to take the name.

At the end of each day, look at what you and your team built and find something to post. You can post this every day on X and 2-3 times a week on LinkedIn (I wouldn’t recommend more there). Here are some examples of founders who do this best (by no means an exhaustive list):

What unites them is they are always running founder-led comms. They speak as operators, not as brand accounts, and teach and share knowledge while selling their product in the meantime. They feel like fighers in the ring and not random white-collar workers, so bystanders root and cheer as if it was their own company. These founders pre-announce features, educate about their product and the industry, share screenshots or vides and charts with metrics, post exciting user stories, hype up employees, and are always running customer support (here’s a great guide for this).

Great founders aren’t posting solely about their company. They also show their personal interests and their human side, because this is what helps other content resonate. That’s why people want to follow them. Tobi Lutke posted about vibe-coding a viewer app for his MRI and got 7 million views. Now we know a bit more about him and he only looks cooler. But when Shopify has an actually big announcement, he posts relentlessly about it.

Founders have a lot on their plate. Many are working days, nights and weekends. Comms are rarely a priority — you have lots of stuff to do, so you can always postpone and post it tomorrow, right? Or maybe you feel it’s pure vanity irrelevant to the business. But the founders above didn’t suddenly get more free time than you. They just realized that 15 minutes dedicated to posting daily is marketing, so they look for ideas and get all the benefits in the end.

Why Growth Matters

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 11:20:00 +0000

A lot of left-leaning people refuse to value the economic growth on its own. To many of them, growth is something negative. A poisoned concept used by capitalists to justify their terrible capitalist things.

“Why do we need more growth and isn’t it impossible a finite planet?” they ask. “Why can’t we just stay where we are and focus on helping people?”

Because living in an economy that doesn’t grow is a terrible fate. Growth and GDP aren’t some imaginary concepts that have no bearing on our lives. In fact, GDP correlates pretty well with happiness until around $70,000, where it plateaus (pretty late as you can see). GDP isn’t some fake number, it’s a metric of the economy which is produced by a multitude of value-creation processes where people produce and trade goods or services.

An economy that doesn’t grow means your employer’s company likely doesn’t grow (it’s very hard to do in a stagnant world). So your employer can’t promote you (unless somebody else leaves or retires). They can’t justify raising your salary. If the entire economy is like this, then people don’t have much money to spend, which prevents the growth in the first place.

In a stagnant economy it’s much harder to create new businesses. There’s no reason to innovate. Everything is in the perfect competition, which means minimal profits, which means, again, companies can’t spend those profits on better products or to lure better candidates. So everybody holds on to their job, as there are no incentives for employers to compete for the best people and pay higher salaries or provide better benefits.

This is why recessions are such a terrible thing. They are caused by cascading decreases of demand. Simplistically, let’s say a car factory sees weaker demand. It cuts orders to their own suppliers accordingly. If it gets too bad, they cut personnel too. Now a bunch of businesses have less work (so they cut orders to their own suppliers and lay off their own personnel). Thousands of people are without income. All of them try to save money, so they don’t buy new things, and the cascade goes on, creating a flywheel.

But a recession is about a contracting economy. What if it just stays stable?

Even if your income is nominally the same, you will get hit by inflation. The inflation is primarily caused by governments running deficit and expanding the monetary supply. But the absolute majority of budget deficits in Western economies are caused by entitlement spending, primarily pensions and social benefits. With time, every society accumulates more obligations like this. Living standards rise, so pensioners demand higher pensions. People want better infrastructure built in safer ways, so the costs to create and support it go ballistic.

Nobody is ready to cut these obligations, so we’re stuck with this. These are promises made in the past that must be paid in the future.

Growth is how you make those promises affordable without fighting over redistribution. When growth stops, politics turns into a zero-sum game. Someone has to lose for someone else to win. Remind you of anything? This is the politics of 2020s.

The case against growth usually starts with a confusion between levels and rates. A rich country, the argument goes, is already rich. Why push for more? But growth is not about becoming rich once. It is about staying functional over time. A country with zero growth is not standing still. It is slowly losing the ability to deal with new problems. This is why the very term of “developed countries” doesn’t make sense. It’s not a club you have to only enter once. It’s the Red Queen paradox, where you have to run as fast as you can just to stay in place.

Ultimately, no country exists in isolation. Even if you’re satisfied with staying at the level (hypothetically), other countries will pull forward. And then your citizens will actually become poorer, because many things have the same price across the world, whether it’s cars or iPhones. Your best people will emigrate for the better opportunities abroad. Instead, rich foreigners will come to your country and buy up property inflating the asset prices, simply because they can easily afford it (unlike the locals).

And then, one day, British fans are outraged when they see the prices for the World Cup 2026 held in the US. FIFA is, of course, a very corrupt and money-hungry organization, but everything is more expensive in the US. They’re a big and wealthy country. This is why so many Americans go on a vacation in Europe. It’s much cheaper for them to fly to Chamonix for two weeks instead of going to Aspen. But this doesn’t work in reverse: American winter resorts would feel prohibitively expensive to an average European.

This is the story of the United Kingdom. It tracked other advanced economies, then fell into a long productivity slump after the global financial crisis and never fully recovered. Brexit slowed down trade and talent flows, compounding already weak productivity. Measured against the US, the median British household now earns significantly less in real terms than it would have if pre-2008 trends had held. You can see this in surveys: people feel they are working hard yet falling behind, public services is crumbling, and opportunities appear narrower than a generation ago:

When asked about the important issues facing the UK today, the most commonly reported issues were the cost of living (85%), the NHS (81%), and the economy (67%). Source

Did you hear how cheap Japan is right now from your friends? Or maybe read travel blogs saying just so? Well, it’s because Japan is kind of poor.

Their real GDP growth there averaged around 1% or less for three decades. Businesses avoided price increases, which leads to no wage growth, weak demand and creates a negative feedback loop. Japan feels cheap to people from other developed countries, but these countries are now expensive for the Japanese, along with the goods produced in there.

Economic growth is the best way to raise the quality of life for everyone. Sure, the outcome will not be evenly distributed: some people’s wealth will grow more than the others. People who only care about the inequality miss the forest for the trees. Ask yourself what’s actually important: the gini coefficient or the median quality of life? In my world, what’s important is that everybody’s wealth goes up.

The most dangerous idea is that stagnation is stable. But zero growth with constant change means eventual decline. Because technology does not pause. Other countries do not pause. Demographics do not pause. A country that decides it is fine to stop growing is making an implicit bet that nothing unexpected will happen. This rarely holds true.

***

But is infinite growth even possible on a finite planet? In all practical ways, it is. Even if the volume of resources is limited in theory, the amount of resources available to us is constantly growing. We’re constantly finding new deposits and new ways of accessing them.

Go read an old magazine and you might see scary forecasts that we’d be left with no oil by 2025. Similar forecasts are made about 2050 now. Turns out, oil companies are discovering just as much oil as we use each year.

When it was first discovered, aluminium was extraordinarily expensive and seen as a luxury metal. Napoleon III’s court prized aluminium tableware because it was rarer than silver. But in 1886 the Hall–Héroult process was developed. This breakthrough collapsed aluminum’s price, transforming it from a luxury metal into a mass-market industrial staple. Now we use it to make everything from planes to disposable Coca-Cola cans.

Some of the most valued objects on our planet are chips, CPUs and GPUs, which are made out of literal sand. Nvidia is a $4 trillion company because of how good they are at making chips (and they don’t even manufacture them, TSMC does).

We have gone past resources. Countries that sell nothing but commodities are usually considered poor, except a few lucky ones that have enormous oil reserves per capita. What matters is how much value can you add at each specific step.

The growth happens when businesses figure out new ways of building things that are more efficient and create new products. Human ingenuity can create value out of sand. And we have a lot of sand.

The AI Price Hike

Sun, 07 Dec 2025 11:20:00 +0000

We should be in a recession. Interest rates jumped after COVID, the war and tariffs ruin global trade, while western countries are struggling with expensive energy, social spending, and competition from China. But the economy is growing and markets are breaking records. This is happening because of AI: it explains roughly 85% of US equity gains this year, and about half of the S&P 500 stocks are associated with AI.

Everyone comparing it to the dotcom bubble either doesn’t know about what happened in 2000 or misunderstands it. Even though the internet was early, for some reason people believed it’d change everything in a year or two. Investors poured millions into any companies with the world “internet” in their boilerplate despite little to revenue, relying on users alone. And by users I literally mean “signups” because nobody tracked Daily or Monthly Active Users back then.

Most of Mark Cuban’s fortune came from his dotcom project Audionet, a streaming platform for audio and video that he sold to Yahoo! for $5.7Bn in 1999, just in time before the party ended. You know what revenue they had? $13.5 million in the last quarter before the sale.

This is a typical S-curve of expectations: investors overestimated short-term effects but underestimated long-term ones. Because the internet did change the world and the tech companies dethroned oil corporations as world’s most expensive businesses. Pets.com launched in 1998 to delivery pet food and toys and shut down two years later— but the model is reasonable and you can easily order those things online today. They simply were too early and tried to induce the demand that wasn’t there yet.

And unlike the dotcom companies, AI labs are printing money. OpenAI and Anthropic collectively generate $25 billion in revenue. These are the fastest-growing companies in the history of the world.

Source: Deedy Das

People argue whether Nvidia is going to bust, but its $4.4T market cap is far more reasonable when you look at their revenue — the just earn a lot of money. Nvidia trades around 45 P/E, which is within benchmarks for their industry and growth rates.

These companies are benefitting from AI directly by selling inference (directly or not). If we trust Altman, he said that OpenAI is profitable on inference and only loses money on training. But what about others, the ones who have to pay for these APIs and the included margins?

If you look around, AI seems to become the biggest differentiator for tech products and yet all of them have it. Task managers and notetakers that existed for years before have suddenly become AI-first if you look at the landing pages. Many apps and platforms have pivoted their entire businesses because the new opportunities are far bigger.

Replit started in 2016 as a web-first IDE available in the cloud, primarily targeting students. Last year they had slightly over $2M in ARR. This year, Replit shifted from a coding IDE to an AI-first agentic platform for creating app and suddenly grew to $150M in ARR. It is now projecting $1 billion in revenue by the end of 2026. The demand for AI coding is so massive even minor players get a lot of interest.

Cursor, an agentic IDE based on VS Code, was launched in 2023. This November they raised a funding round valuing them at $30Bn. That’s probably three times more than the entire company of JetBrains on the back of Cursor’s enormous revenue growth. Developers just love Cursor and can’t get enough of it.

But these are apps for developers. Software development is the most obvious use case for LLMs beside general knowledge retrieval and far more lucrative. Developers cost a lot already so anything that makes them more efficient is a good leverage and businesses are more willing to spend on it. Besides, programming languages have something that natural ones like English don’t — formal verification. The code is code, either it works or doesn’t, which makes it easier to iterate and improve LLMs’ capacity to produce code.

What about others? We’re not shy of examples, since every app is integrating AI now. Google pushes Gemini in Gmail and Docs. Notion has Notion AI everywhere in the app. I’ve recently gotten AI in Slack and it tries to do minor things there and summarises the threads that took place while I was away. Grammarly acquired Superhuman and relaunched as an AI productivity suite under its brand.

For many companies, AI has been a great excuse to raise pricing. Our Notion pricing has grown by +25% per user. Google Workplace raised the price by ~$2 for everyone because we bundled Gemini. Do we use Notion AI? No, but we can’t avoid paying for it, the same for Google Workplace. I suppose the silver lining is that if you actually use Gemini a lot, all other business users basically subsidise you at the moment. That’s how it works: prices are higher across the board to cover the inference costs but if most users barely touch AI the company’s margins are also higher.

But we need to distinguish solving clear pains with AI and bolting it on top of an existing solution with the hope it will take off. Adding AI just because you can is a cargo cult. Raycast an indispensable Mac app, tried adding this to their subscription in the hope to justify it. Eventually, they gave up and let anyone add their own API keys.

People don’t want to pay ten times just to chat with a slightly different LLM in every app. For this, they can just use ChatGPT, which is OpenAI’s ultimate moat and the reason to exist. Apart from this, the real advantages of LLMs come not from chatbots but specific little features enabled by them.

That’s how you get a market where software got expensive across the board not because AI created value, but because companies used AI as cover to raise prices while their competitors were doing the same thing.

I talked to several operators across some of the largest tech scale-ups. All of them are frightened. The common belief is that you have to integrate AI if only because all of your competitors are doing so. It’s the Red Queen hypothesis where “it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place”. And they are not crazy, just look at Cursor again and all the competitors they were able to overtake solely because of AI.

Companies that were building products for years expect them to have a moat at least in terms of features and capabilities. Turns out, AI can replace the need for most of this functionality altogether and even if it’s not great yet, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are burning billions on the next training run of the next SOTA model anyway. The models will only get better.

How Startups Get Viral

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 17:20:00 +0000

Tech people adore Stripe. Linear’s old branding infected GenAI so much all its landing pages look purple. Arc Browser received glowing coverages from top-tier outlets even for basic features.

Some companies get viral while their competitors struggle to break through the ice. Why?

This is a question that bothers many founders and marketers wishing to promote their companies or clients. What’s curious is it often have little to no connection to the financial success. Adyen is as big as Stripe, but only the latter is the Silicon Valley darling. There are immensely successful tech companies out there, entire unicorns whose founders have only a few hundred followers.

Arc is the perfect example of a viral product. The reason I know is because I’ve become a user and a fan, but before this, me and my team were leading communications for one of their competitors, Sidekick, which was acquired by Perplexity.

We were against not the wind, but a storm. Had to spend weeks coming up with dozens of ideas and pitching hundreds of reporters just to get something meaningful (and we had some great stories in the end). Meanwhile, Arc was getting covered by The Verge even for minor updates. There are many stories written about their brand and what made it work. It’s a combination of the top-down strategy, dedicated pros thinking about storytelling, which funnily enough was all about centering people to create a relatable brand. But also flawless execution, with every simple feature made with a degree of care few others would go to. All of this led to news stories like titled “Arc is the best web browser to come out in the last decade”.

At the time, Arc didn’t generate any revenue. The viral tech companies stand out not just for their financial success (many more companies are financially successful than viral), but for deeply resonant brand strategies and product philosophies coupled with excellent execution that their competitors often lack.

But Arc had a lot of users! First early adopters started talking, then influencers, then I saw it slowly spreading outside the US. All this demand served as a validation for reporters, who felt they were reporting on the phenomenon, not merely covering a feature launch. There are many companies whose products people find OK and few that they truly love. With Sidekick, we had 15,000 of them, and even though a significant share were already paying, it only constricted the number of people who could rave about us. Meanwhile, Arc’s fans were everywhere.

This is the first requirement for virality and the most obvious: users. But you need more than users, you need hardcore fans and you need them to be publicly vocal. I’d say that you need to have a concentrated set of users: better to capture a single tribe but completely, then expand afterward. Startup founders and VCs are one example of a good audience, because they can pay and have a lot of clout. That’s why apps like Superhuman and or Granola were so successful in capturing them. And suddenly everyone uses the “thing” and you’re behind, which creates FOMO for others. Raving users are the first pillar of virality.

Arc was built by the company with a highly unusual name: The Browser Company. Far from the usual nouns (sometimes with skipped or added letter), that’s how people name their businesses in late 1800s, not 2020s. It was truly unique and burnable, because anybody trying to follow them would instantly become a copycat (Jordi Hays had a great post on this). It’s quirky, it’s fun and it hints at their main goal: building a new redefined browser, the first company launched to do so since Mozilla.

Each viral company clearly communicates its purpose and values, which makes their brands memorable and engendered loyalty among users, investors, and even talent. And the brand is one thing competitors can’t copy. This is the second pillar: great storytelling. Stripe isn’t a card acquiring platform, they’re growing the GDP of the Internet. Lovable’s tagline is “building the last piece of software”. You don’t necessarily have to have grand views. Linear calls itself a purpose-built tool for planning and building products. Straight and to the point, just like everything is about them. Every startup is unique.

And most of these companies need the enemy. It can be a single product, a company, or an entire faceless industry. For Linear it was Jira. For Stripe it was the the very challenge of accepting payments on the web. With Arc, Josh Miller gave talks on why you need a better browser than Chrome.

Along with brands like Stripe and Linear, Arc proves that viral startups are obsessed with product taste, a rigorous attention to form and function that goes far beyond what’s common in traditional enterprise software. Early adopters and powers users definitely care for delightful software, which is why they share praises and screenshots publicly, which fuels the growth further.

If your product solves the pain but hard to use, you will not get public praises, and then you won’t be able to launch a flywheel of generating new users and referrals. Superhuman famously built a major part of their brand around the need to get all interactions down to 100ms or less, which is supposedly the border where people notice delays. That extreme love to the product among its small but powerful subset of users picked everyone’s curiosity, acquired tastemakers, and later converted into the demand from truly profitable market of enterprise customers.

Superhuman also came up with the PMF metric that perfectly defines delightful and useful products: asking how disappointed would the users be if they could no longer use the app (good if over 40% of them are very disappointed). Although, it can be slightly misleading in case of unique monopolistic products you can’t replace (don’t like using it but don’t want it gone anyway). So now we have the third pillar: delightful product.

Don’t all companies care about their user experience and try to bring delight? Everyone wishes they’d do this, few have the capacity. The hardest thing, of course, is that you can’t copy this by hiring an agency. It’s something the company must have internally and the direction should come from the founders themselves. Any friction ruins the experience. You might even have a good product, but if it’s considered “heavy” or “laggy” you will never get the laurels.

The best viral companies hire and empower people with a natural sense of what makes software elegant, intuitive, and delightful. It’s hard to find such people and even harder to hire them in the first place, because they have many opportunities open. Usually they were involved in building similarly great products before, even if those didn’t work out. Cursor, a $30Bn AI coding IDE, specifically hires great people over great candidates:

At Cursor, the recruiting process looks like this: post the name of someone really, really good in the #hiring-ideas channel in Slack, swarm that person with attention, conduct team interviews (wide range of “process” here), and if the desire is mutual, they start on Monday.

A product that end-users can easily touch helps a lot. Indeed, Adyen has grown its processing volume and revenue in lock step with Stripe, but focuses on larger merchants, meanwhile any developers can sign up for Stripe and connect it to their personal blog if they wished to do so.

The real truth is none of these metrics can be faked. Either you have raving users or you don’t. You technically could care a lot about the story you tell, but your ability to execute this is what’ll be the blocker. The same goes for the delightful product: a desire to make one doesn’t necessarily translate in your ability.

What else?

There’s a fourth quality at the intersection of the first three: built-in shareability. Viral startups play status games and embed virality loops directly into their product in various ways. Sometimes it’s very obvious, like with Superhuman, which had two specific things. First, it literally added “Sent via Superhuman” to people’s signature by default. Anyone could do this, but what matters is who were the people sending emails with such a signature: founders of sought-after startups, powerful executives, popular venture capitalists. Second, it allowed all of their users to refer their contacts to Superhuman directly, one by one, which fueled both FOMO and their feeling of importance.

Sometimes it’s just the opposite. The first AI notetakers, like Otter and Fireflies, used the same model of sending a bot to join your calls. Instant virality, since they join all your calls and other see them. Granola differentiated itself specifically by not doing this. At the same time, many of its users (ideally all of them but that wouldn’t be truthful) disclosed they were recording the calls to their contacts, which made those curious and interested. Alex Konrad covered Granola and said:

Granola is the first AI note-taking app that I’ve actually enjoyed using – and didn’t feel like a gimmick or more work. It’s still small, but gaining super fans in VC and founder circles.

Shareability might come in a myriad ways. A YouTuber producing endless content about their Notion dashboard is sharing and promoting the product itself. But the most straightforward way is when you can either share some content with others via a link or ideally collaborate with them — Figma built their entire product on top of this idea.

So, here are the must-have pillars for viral products:

Raving users
Great storytelling
Delightful product
Built-in shareability

These seem to be necessary, but aren’t sufficient. Companies that are already hugely successful have their advantages baked-in. But the real question is at what point do they receive it? How do you actually start from scratch if you want to build a viral startup?

I don’t think anybody can have a clear answer of this. Most of these companies weren’t too obvious shortly after inception as well. Lovable now has $200M in ARR and looking to raise funding at a $6Bn valuation, but this very idea is the team’s third pivot. And Stripe famously had only 50 users two years after launch.

Patrick Collison: “If you’re working on a startup that’s a bad idea, it’s going to feel like slow-going. But if you’re working on a startup that’s a good idea, it may feel like slow-going too”.

And the end of the day, it was a lot of work done by very smart people willing to go through this mud of early stage.

All viral companies are united by the fifth quality: they are unreasonable about something. One or a few very particular things at least. You need cornerstones, the ideas you uniquely believe in and ready to commit fully. Cornerstones help to define everything you do and bring unique taste to it. They bring believers and fans, candidates and users. This is the magic that people see in products and the reason why they love them. Because of this, viral companies tend to go the extra mile and do things that surprise people.

Stripe realized that their actual users were developers and committed to being a developer-first company. All other payment processing services focused on the business; when a deal was made, developers would be required to integrate regardless. But Stripe decided they’d have the best API and the best docs, so that developers on the ground might either make a decision themselves or support Stripe in front of the stakeholders.

This is also why Stripe launched Stripe Atlas, their company registration tool, and Stripe Press, their own publishing. Both support their mission of growing the GDP for the Internet (and generate more clients for them along the way), and are generally quite unusual for any tech company and specifically for their area of work. But they did it anyway, because this is what makes them a magnet and a mission worth associating with.

A good method for understanding whether something is unreasonable is trying to imagine this happening at a regular corporation. Most corporations are like cakes: they are built from countless levels of hierarchy and approvals. Can you spend an unreasonable amount of time on polishing a feature to perfection? Or can you approve and put up a billboard in 8 hours like Ramp can? As a startup, you main advantage is speed and the quality of execution, along with the hope that you won’t lose it as you grow. The most successful viral companies are the ones that preserve it for many years.

Superhuman’s first deck looked very different from all other startup presentations. It was basically a collection of screenshots, a vision board of their taste, with no charts or forecasts at all, all supported by their core belief that all interactions should take 100ms or less. The founders repeated this talking point so often others started believing it too — and associated their product with taste and speed.

Lovable itself decided to focus on transparency and speed of iteration for their community engagement. They shared casual behind-the-scenes updates and stories of both successes and failures. They turned their day-to-day work into social media content. When a user reported a bug, they’d rush to fix it and report about this publicly and mention the time that it took for everyone to see. Lovable wanted its users to cheer the process.

An early stage startup often doesn’t have too many things to be proud of. But you can always take pride in being unreasonable about something. About your customers, your developers, your design, your speed or something else. Figure out that cornerstone and turn it into artifacts you can share through product features, emails and social media posts. Show how much you’re doing for your customers or how much money you’re saving for them. Show your best designs and explain what unreasonable process you took to end up with them. Show how fast you’re willing to move.

Be unreasonable about something and people will remember this.

Retro Tech Became the New Luxury

Thu, 13 Nov 2025 23:20:00 +0000

YouTube is full of videos with people trying to replace their iPhone with half a dozen devices. They carry an iPod for music, a dedicated camera to take photos, a Kindle for reading, a notebook for thoughts, sometimes even a flip phone for calls.

Companies are selling minimal phones, like the $599 Light Phone that can do only a few things and won’t let you get you an Uber. The market for old point-and-shoot film cameras is so hot that Pentax and Lomo are now making brand-new film cameras and some people are buying up old digital ones. Kylie Jenner and Zendaya made Contax T2 so popular it costs $1000 now.

A used iPod Classic in good condition can sell for $200 on eBay and there are now dedicated companies that repair and retrofit them on-demand, like Elite Obsolete and Retrospekt. Batteries, screens, buttons, cases: all third-party parts are easy to find. The only limiting factor is the motherboards, so they depend on how many iPods Apple originally made.

There’s an old line: “There are only two ways to make money — bundling and unbundling.” The iPhone was the ultimate bundle, merging half-a-dozen devices into a single one and became so ubiquitous there’s now a counter-culture reaction to it. This return to separate, single-purpose devices is part retro nostalgia, part rebellion against being constantly online.

There’s an entire industry emerging around digital minimalism, complete with manufacturers, celebrities, influencers and cults. Some of them hardcore cultists and you instantly believe them when you see them. Some are geeks who like using a particular gadget.

Why do people seem to want it so much? There’s an article describing and naming a particular phenomenon anemoia:

Anemoia is the feeling of nostalgia for a time or place that one has never experienced

Most Gen Z never owned a digital point-and-shoot. Younger millennials didn’t grow up with vinyl. They’re experiencing nostalgia for a world they never inhabited. It makes them perfect customers. Because anemoia doesn’t just make you want the experience, it makes you want the object that represents it. The influencers aren’t lying when they say their iPod reignited something. It probably did. But they’re selling the object as the solution to a feeling that actually predates the object.

But I did own a point-and-shoot and only had a primitive cellphone for most of my childhood. What I didn’t have is an iPod, so I bought one myself a month ago to try it out.

And you know? It’s an awesome device and very fun to play with. The interface is fast enough, but also beautifully skeuomorphic and amazingly logical. It has all the features and functions you need to keeping and listening to your music library. Its design looks like it belongs in a digital museum (in a good way).

I already had a small MP3 library and bought more through iTunes (still the easiest way, and the files are DRM-free). People often recommend Bandcamp, but nobody except indie artists use it.

I get the sentiment. iPod is almost like vinyl, which is another trend of the last decade (sales started growing again after 2020). You have a limited library, so you end up listening more carefully and rediscovering the albums you already had. And you stop skipping every 15 seconds, because it’s not too convenient. Unlike vinyl though, the iPod gives you much better sound quality and much cheaper to run. But here’s the thing: it still spends most of its time on the shelf.

The truth is, Spotify can offer something similar if you just use it more deliberately. You can get all these benefits without the performance, the price, or the dependency on influencer trends.

Create one playlist for your absolute favorites and don’t treat “Liked Songs” as a library; it’s just a collection bin. Then, create playlists for favorite artists and specific moods, like training or reading. There are buttons at the top allowing you to filter between Playlists, Artists and Albums in your Library persistently. Just use this.

And if you want ownership, you can actually keep a library of MP3 files and listen to them on your phone. You don’t need an iPod for this! You can either upload your files to Spotify or Apple Music, or listen locally through apps like Evermusic, Flacbox, or Plexamp.

The entire market of digital minimalism exists because people feel powerless. But selling someone control is just repackaging the same problem, whether it’s a $599 Light Phone or an influencer’s perfectly curated iPod moment. You’re still buying your way to peace through things.

How Big is TBPN?

Thu, 30 Oct 2025 12:35:00 +0000

Zuckerbeg. Nadella. Benioff. An exclusive announcement from Microsoft.

TBPN has been blasting from all corners of tech Twitter lately. It’s a technology daily show hosted by John Coogan and Jordi Hays, streaming live every weekday for about three hours. Sometimes I wonder who has that much free time to listen to it.

Both hosts take it immensely seriously and first got the accolades of tech Twitter and now gathering Magnificient 7 CEOs one by one. They also secured top-tier sponsors like Figma, Brex, Linear, and Public. It all started just over a year ago and has grown tremendously since.

I have no doubt their imagery and atmosphere, lifted from sports channels but uniquely applied to the tech space, plays its role, but you probably need quite an audience to warrant the time of a Big Tech CEO, right? So, how big they actually are?

What I find fascinating is that despite being video-first, TBPN is fairly small on YouTube, with only 35k followers; most of their videos gather a couple thousand views, with one exception at 360k.

Twitter is surely a big driver for TBPN, especially because it can handle both long-form videos with chapters and short clips. In fact, I remember Coogan as one of the first people I noticed were using those a lot to post videos on Twitter some time ago (on his personal handle). TBPN has over 120k followers on Twitter now, with average views around 5000-50000 per tweet that contains a video.

So, if it’s not YouTube, where are their views, if anywhere? I imagine there are two possible avenues. One is it’s mostly in clips, short-form pieces of their longer videos. Also, TBPN is released as a podcast, so many of their listeneres might be there, on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, along with all third-party clients like Overcast, Pocket Casts and Castro, which rely on Apple Podcasts’s library.

While they do post clips on X, I doubt other social media platform carry a lot of weight with clips. TBPN has 13k followers on Instagram and only 1772 on TikTok. Many of their own clips on the latter get thousands of likes but none seem to breakthrough beyond this. Searches for their clips from third-party accounts don’t show a drastically different picture. So it’s not the clips.

Unfortunately, there’s simply no way to get reliable listeners stats for podcasts — that’s how this ecosystem works. Spotify doesn’t share its figures, Apple can’t even collect it beyond their own app, so only the hosts know their downloads figures (but not neccesarily the subscribers). But we can get estimates and their position in the top charts. Listen Notes, a podcast monitoring tool, estimates that TBPN is in the top 1.5% most popular shows out of 3,659,109 podcasts globally. Here are some well-known benchmarks:

Joe Rogan: top 0.01%
Dwarkesh: top 0.5%
All-in Podcast: top 0.05%
Acquired: top 0.05%

To give you a reference, another podcast at around 1.5% is Sam Harris.

And if we check the Tech category in Top Shows on Apple Podcasts in the US, TBPN is #32rd. Which is quite impressive for a show that only exists for a year, even though the benchmarks podcasts are in top 10. Especially if we remember the quality of guests TBPN is able to attract.

This is why most podcasters I talked to recommend ignoring YouTube unless you get really big. It’s almost better not to have it at all than disclosing your numbers. A podcast with 20,000 listeners is impressive, while a YouTube channel with 20,000 views and 5000 subsribers looks subpar, simply because there are so many big creators there, even though their real audience might be the same. But TBPN was started as a TV program, so they didn’t have this luxury. Instead, they committed and produced content that was barely seen for a long time.

And the reasons they could is because it’s like both hosts were created for this. John Coogan co-founded Soylent, where he was the CTO, and then Lucy, where he served as CMO. He also had a pretty successful YouTube channel of his own with 459k subscribers and popular videos on multiple tech companies and startups, as well as tech, like this one about the origins of DARPA. His co-host Jordi Hays created built and led a performance-focused YouTube ad network and invested in multiple startups. Together, they seem to have a perfect combination of knowledge and network to pull this off (which is what they’re doing at the moment).

Now the format. The New York Times described TBPN as “SportsCenter meets LinkedIn”. One related trait is the enthusiams both John and Jordi show to the technology industry as a whole, similar to how sports pundits enjoy the very sport they’re covering.

F1 pundits critisize the drivers and the FIA. But they love the sport. The same goes for football, basketball, etc. This doesn’t mean it’s all rainbows and stuff. In addition to bashing the gong for major funding rounds and product launches, TBPN doesn’t shy away from discussing the impact of AI generated music on artists or overhiring in tech. But you can feel they love this industry.

And this is why tech CEOs are probably happy to go on the show, even if it might not be truly big yet. It’s big enough in a certain tech afficioado circles who help drive the conversations.

The lack of such love for the industry has become one of the key critisisms of the media and reporting ecosystem in the last 5-6 years or so. As Seth Godin used to say: “The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down)". Matt Yglesias publicly commented that The New York Times made a “weird editorial decision” regarding its tech industry coverage, suggesting there was a top-down directive for reporters to approach tech stories with a more critical, investigative tone.

The industry felt this and many people adopted the “going direct” strategy, while others poured millions into building out their own media operations to fix this. Like Future, the outlet launched (and closed) by Andreessen Horowitz. But all of them were trying to come at this with a wrong atittude. Either by hiring people editorial experience and giving them unviable directions or trying to expand a usual corporate podcast into something big.

Instead, the hosts of TBPN started with a good and unique media product.

Apple Watch is Better than Whoop and Oura

Wed, 17 Sep 2025 12:00:00 +0000

Last week, Apple relented and introduced the Sleep Score for the first time since adding sleep monitoring to the Apple Watch. This is huge, since they were always extremely careful about giving out assessments like this.

Apple dominates the concept of personal fitness trackers, but other options have been getting a lot more attention, right to the point where you can pick up an Oura at Walmart and a half of the F1 paddock wear a Whoop through the race.

Unfortunately, both of these devices come with a hefty subscription and are basically unusuable without it; Oura provides just a bit of data but that’s the least they could do to avoid saying it doesn’t work.

Oura Gen4 costs $349 and then you have to shell out $69.99 each year to get access to most of its functions. Whoop is technically free but requires a subscription for anything and the cheapest options is $199 a year.

Here’s the total cost of ownership by year for all three devices.

As you can see, owning a Whoop get really expensive.

Three years ago I switched to mechanical watches but I still use Apple Watch for training and they came in handy when I picked up running. More recently, I started having troubles with my sleep, so now I put it on every night.

Here’s what I noticed: Apple Watch is actually a great health tracker. And you can just use it, especially if you already have one, instead of buying Whoop or Oura.

Tim Cook once said:

One day Apple would be remembered for their improvements to the global health, not the iPhone.

200 million people already have an Apple Watch and that’s exactly why it might be the best fitness tracker for them (and for you). Even if you don’t actually own an Apple Watch, it still will be the cheapest option. And unlike both of its alternatives, it’s an actual fitness tracker you can use for running, cycling or any other activities that require as screen. It also tells time (HUGE!).

There are two primary reasons many choose alternative trackers which come down to wearing it 24/7 and the data it provides. Some people just don’t like wearing a watch to sleep. Personally, I’m perfectly comfortable even with my Ultra. What moves the needle is choosing the right strap: get one a nylon one, it’s way less obtrusive than silicon or steel.

Now the second point, which is all about the app experience and the data it provides. For some, Apple Watch just doesn’t track what they want to see. Here’s where Whoop and Oura come in. You get sleep scores. Metabolical age. How much do you need to train to properly exhaust yourself. An exact mathematical representation of your sleep, exertion and recovery: “your sleep score is 74% and you are recovered by 69%”.

Do these numbers actually mean anything? Nobody knows. I mean, there is some science behind this and you can assign an arbitrary score to a combination of various body metrics, but there’s a reason Apple is cautious about this. In iOS 26, they’ve finally introduced Sleep Score. Today, Apple gave the score of 98, while an alternative app Bevel calculated 68 based on the same data. Have to say, I feel more like 68.

What Apple does well is highlighting the outliers. If you have a regular night of sleep, all Vital signs stay nice and purple. Had too much to drink? You will see HRV going down, RHR and body temp rising, oxygenation falling, and the app will warn you abut this. But Apple really doesn’t want you to fret about the numbers daily and I think that’s the right approach.

One time on a vacation the Watch showed me I had an elevated temperature during the night. The very next day it flagged I had increased respirations. And on the third day I woke up with a cold. The Watch detected something two days in advance.

This is why I love Apple’s no-nonsense approach. Flag important things, but don’t create more anxiety and metrics to monitor each day. What I don’t like is how Apple Health app set up by default. If you do want those metrics, you have to adjust it yourself.

Here’s how it looks for me:

Apart from anything collected by Vitals, here’s what I look at:

HRV is Heart Rate Variability, a metric that shows whether your heart is controlled by sympathetic or parasympathetic nervous system. The line might be more or less flat, but if you train 2-3 times a week you’d see ups and downs. There were a few times when I felt great in the morning but struggled at the evening run when my nightly HRV was low. After some training, a higher HRV is good.
Resting Heart Rate shows how powerful your heart is. The stronger it is, the rarer it needs to beat to deliver enough oxygen. The more you can get it down through training, the better (until you start triggering hospital equipment). Apple Watch can warn you if your RHR falls below 40 during the night but I had to disable this feature because it would just wake me up, which as I understand is quite common among runners.
Cardio Fitness (VO2Max) is your body’s capacity to deliver and process oxygen. Generally, the higher is better, but everyone has a different baseline and what you should hope for goes down with age. VO2Max is defined by your heart’s power, lung function, the volume of hemoglobin, the amount of capillaries in your muscles, and many others things. If your cells don’t have enough oxygen, they will produce energy through a different metabolic cycle that produces lactic acid (not a good feeling).
Blood oxygen and wrist temperature are good predictors of your physical condition. If they divert from the baseline, there’s a good chance you might be falling down with a virus.

I don’t spend too much time thinking about these, but it’s nice to see how my training and good sleep schedule improve the underlying things.

What if you still want to have the numbers and some proactive coaching on top of this?

Thankfully, Apple Watch is a platform. It can track so many things and pump that data into the Health app, which is then available to third-party apps and services.

The two most popular options are Athlytic and Bevel. If you want to get an analysis of your sleep, strain scores, you can try both. Yes, both carry a subscription, which changes the financial equation. Still, even in this case Apple Watch remains a very competitive and acts as a watch. I think Bevel is better. It seems to be a very close analogue of Whoop and its metrics. The subscription is $5.99 and you get some basics without it.

P.S. My girlfriend read this and said she still wants an Oura (sigh).

The Best Brands for Enthusiasts

Wed, 10 Sep 2025 13:52:00 +0000

Good things are approximately ten times better than the average thing you can buy. In each category. The real challenge is finding them.

Wirecutter was supposed to be exactly about this, but I often find myself baffled by their recommendations for product areas I care about. They don’t focus on user experience as much as they should and often prioritize the price too much.

Reddit is kind of an obvious one (please watch this 47s video on “finding subreddit for a hobby”), but few subreddits bother to collect their findings in a single FAQ post, so you have to go through everything.

Reviewers and youtubers are incentivized to care about the most recent thing and produce more content, so I often find myself overwhelmed — they rarely tell you directly what is the best.

Enthusiasts have the greatest recommendatons, but they’re scattered across the web. Zen of Things is a great nifty website by Arun Venkatesan but only for several categories.

So our only option is to build our own lists. Here’s mine, and I plan to continue updating it as I go. Would be great to start a trend here, so if you read this, please write about your recommendations on your own blog or Twitter.

***

Backpacks: Aer for everyday and travel, Peak Design for photography and travel, Matador just for travel
Wallets: Secrid for delightful minimal wallets that can comfortably hold a bit of cash as well, Leatherology for a classic bifold
Slings: Rework Toshi and Peak Design Outdoor Sling
Multitools: Victorinox
Chargers/Powerbanks/Stands: Ugreen and Anker
Outdoor Wear: Patagonia, Millet
Pens: I’m not into fountain pens, so a Parker Jotter is all I need
Notebooks: Leuchtturm1917

The Broken Promises of Substack

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 16:35:00 +0000

Earlier in July, Substack announced a $100M funding round, bringing its valuation to $1.1 billion.

Substack has built an entirely new media ecosystem by enabling reporters and influencers to monetize their audience longing for long-term writing. People share links and discuss pieces from Eric Newcomer’s Newcomer, Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, Richard Rushfield’s The Ankler, Gergely Orosz’s The Pragmatic Engineer, Lenny Rachitsky’s Lenny’s Newsletter, Matthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring and thousands of other blogs. Many of these projects have grown into mini-media companies with staff, essentially rebuilding the publications their founders once left.

Substack now has more than 50 creators who are making millions of dollars per year on the platforms. In total, they boast 500,000 creators, more than 5 million paid subscribers, and have about $45 million in annual recurring revenue. Their domain got more traffic than than The Wall Street Journal and CBS News in June 2025.

But building this ecosystem at scale has forced Substack to abandon some of its original promises.

Portability of Audience

Substack’s original pitch was independence. Writers owned their mailing lists, controlled their billing via Stripe, and could leave at any time.

Chris Best, Substack’s co-founder, said on the interview with The Verge in Dec 2020:

Another way we do that is we mean it when we say we’re helping writers go independent, and they own their content and they own their contact point with their audience, which means that you can leave. If you’re a writer and you build up your following and your subscriber base on Substack, you can take it away. <…> Start a blog, an email newsletter, have people subscribe directly to somebody you trust. You own your content, you own your audience.

This changed in March 2022, when Substack introduced its app that consolidates subscriptions in one place rather than dispersing them separately via email. Unlike the usual email subscribers, the followers who signed up through the app can’t be exported, creating a powerful lock-in. For many writers, it could be up to a third of their audience. Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery newsletter directly inspired Substack, wrote then that Substack has gone from being a “Faceless Publisher” behind the scenes to trying to put “the Substack brand front-and-center,” building up its app as a destination on the backs of writers.

Just a few days ago, Substack also launched in-app payments for all writers on iOS. It is true, that they can only launch it for everyone or noone, but this creates yet another lock-in. Unlike with Stripe, you can’t export your paid iOS subscribers.

No Algorithms

Substack positioned itself as the anti-platform. No algorithmic feeds, just direct connections between readers and writers.

On the same interview, Chris said:

If you don’t like the stuff that you’re seeing there, you have this really good remedy, which is [to] hit the unsubscribe button. A lot of the worst problems that content moderation addresses on other platforms is the spread of content that is bad, because basically your algorithmic feed is serving as an editor, whether you think of it that way or not.

Back in 2021, Chris wrote on his own substack:

For writers, this means being able to control their relationships with their audience instead of being mediated by fickle corporations whose algorithms decide what gets the most attention.

But in 2023, Substack launched Substack Notes, it Twitter replacement, which uses an engagement-driven algorithm that prioritizes likes, replies, and reposts to boost visibility. More recently, it expanded even more in the social network aspect, launching vertical videos and a $20M “creator accelerator fund” to attract TikTokers.

No Ads

Originally, Substack positioned heavily against ads. Here’s a comment made by one of their employees in 2022:

We aren’t in the attention economy here. No ads. We only make money when writers make money and decide to turn on paid subscriptions.

Then, in 2025 Hamish McKenzie, another co-founder of Substack, told DigiDay:

“For us, advertising is an interesting business. Maybe some way off in the distant future.”

Content Moderation

Substack’s founders long argued that they solved moderation by design. But as soon as Substack built recommendations, it inherited the same problems as every social network.

That interview Chris gave to Nilay Patel is an extremel useful benchmark to track changes in their thinking and approach:

A lot of the worst problems that content moderation addresses on other platforms is the spread of content that is bad, because basically your algorithmic feed is serving as an editor, whether you think of it that way or not. And I’m getting bad crap in my Facebook feed because some uncle of mine liked it or because it’s getting engagement. That problem doesn’t exist on Substack in the same way. I think we can and should do discovery, and it’s just important for us to do it in a way that takes advantage of the model that we have, and of the fundamental promise of Substack. <…> Because the whole value of Substack is the direct relationship between readers and writers. If we did discovery in some cheap way that might be like, what would work best on YouTube, it would be easy for us to blindly violate that and kill the thing that makes Substack good.

In July 2025, Substack sent a push alert to some users promoting a Nazi blog called “NatSocToday”, which featured a swastika logo and content pushing Holocaust denial. This is the direct result of Substack engaging with recommendations in order to help authors grow their newsletters. If you write on Substack, you might get more subscribers, but your brand will be used to promote other authors as well, even if you might disagree with them.

Substack has stumbled into Nazi-related controversy before (not a phrase you’d want to hear about yourself!). In 2024, criticism of its content-moderation policies prompted publications like Platformer to leave. In my view, that case was a bit overblown and I generally agree with the Pirate Wires’s explainer. Ultimately, Substack had to remove a number of authors involved in this.

What is the appropriate layer of the Internet stack for moderation and censorship is an important question, the one Substack’s founders like to discuss a lot, but it’s a different question here. The only reason for this latest accident is Substack giving recommendations in the first place.

In practice, Substack now functions much like any other social network. But unlike Facebook or Twitter, simply hosting an author on Substack carries a kind of implicit endorsement. That aura makes its laissez-faire moderation stance harder to defend: the company insists on First Amendment absolutism, yet its recommendation systems inevitably entangle it in the politics of promotion.

My goal here is not to attack Substack but highlight the compromises they made while implementing their original vision. It’s the endless dilemma for social products and as we see subscriptions alone don’t ultimately solve it.

Carcinization is a process where various crustaceans repeatedly evolve into crabs. There must be a similar “law” that all content platforms evolve into algorithm-driven social networks with powerful recommendation engines — or perish.

Earlier this month, Ghost, an open-source publishing platform, reported that publishers earned over $100M in subscription through their platform. Impressive, but it took them 12 years to get here and their entire model for paid communities was introduced in 2019 directly inspired by the growth of Substack.

So why do authors still go on Substack?

Because they see the value in this. On August 21, 2025, Mika Solana announced Pirate Wires are integrating back with Substack in an email:

I do recommend downloading the Substack app if you don’t already have it. The app will grant you a lot of new Pirate Wires content. All of our writers will be pretty active on Notes (social posts on Substack) moving forward, and I’ll be going live myself (a kind of video chat, sometimes solo, sometimes with my team, sometimes with other popular writers on Substack) on and off all week. I’ll also be posting my little heart out.

I’ve learned a lot about media these past few years. I grew my subscriber base with Substack in the early days as a single writer, and I grew my subscriber base without Substack, on my own, with a full team. The latter was more difficult, as I knew it would be, but I traded the Substack audience for complete creative control of my company.

It was a no brainer decision. Substack tools are incredible. Their CMS alone would be a compelling reason to build with them, but their entire publishing backend is beautiful, and their growth network is unlike anything else in the business. I’ve watched people leave Substack in a huff and immediately die (couldn’t be me). I’ve watched people grow on Substack and somehow not understand the degree to which the Substack growth engine was the reason. And now that I can reenter on precisely my own terms? It’s a new era for the Pirate Nation, tbh.

Alternatives

Substack’s greatest risk has always been writers leaving. A 10% fee (plus Stripe’s usual fee) in exchange for someone handling all the tech, subscription and mailing blasts sounds great at first, but as authors grow big and get to a couple of hundred thousands a year in income, they start looking more and more at this annoying little line in their P/L.

With Pirate Wires, Solana treated Substack as the as a launchpad before spinning out. Some other writers left citing the company’s moderation policy, like Casey Newton with Platformer, or because they couldn’t turn it into a reliable income stream. Every, originally known as The Everything Bundle, evolved into a full-fledged media company that needed its own technology.

For most authors, Substack is still the best bet.

Now, setting up your own blog is easy; I covered the options before. You could even run a free static website, but the two main hurdles are newsletters and paid subscription. As the world largely abandoned RSS (the “pull” model), email newsletters have become the most reliable way to connect to your readers directly, but it’s the “push” model that requires far more work. Sending and delivering mass email reliably is difficult and you will probably have to pay someone else to do so. Subscriptions push the complexity to yet another level.

Substack is still a very good option because you, as an author, don’t have to pay anything (except for your own domain name). What if you want more control though? At the end of it, all Substacks look like Substack, which has been another point of critisism.

Substack’s brand has become an asset for writers. They practically turned substack in a new noun (which heavily annoys many people). And it helps conversions, because readers already know what Substack it, how to subscribe and why they might want to pay for it. The funnel is also highly optimized for moving visitors to free subscribers and then paid subscribers flow. The trade-off is uniformity: every substack looks like every other substack, which can make individual blogs feel less distinct.

Substack has two very direct alternatives in the form of Beehiiv and Ghost. Beehiiv was built by the technical people from Morning Brew and provides vast customization capabilities with custom websites, custom newsletters, analytics, and API access. In return, you have to pay subscription for access to advanced features, but it provides a lot even at the free tier so you can pay $0 until you hit 2,500 subscribers.

The beauty of Ghost is that it’s a free open-source software that you can deploy yourself. But there’s the catch with actually sending newsletters, which is still challenging. If you care about it, the best option is to go for their platform offering, which immediately starts at $18 a month. But the starter tier doesn’t even support custom themes or over 1000 subscribers, so it’s more like $35 for the “Publisher” tier. Good for publishers, a bit pricey for regular bloggers.

Another less known is Buttondown, which I’m using to send out fresh posts from my blog. It’s a bit more geeky and basic, but has some nice features, including paid subscriptions, and until you get to 1000 subscribers it costs $9 a month.

If you are an aspiring writer aiming to build a large audience and sell content online, all of these might work, but Substack might be the easiest option to start because of its zero price and awareness. Still, even a couple of paid subscribers will nullify the costs of any other platform for you. That’s why Substack remains sticky: the entry cost is zero, the growth engine is real, the aura of legitimacy is powerful. But they will lock you in. If you build a large thriving newsletter on Substack, it’s a great thing in itself, but it will be quite hard for you leave. Both Beehiiv and Ghost are much more independent alternatives.

That doesn’t necessarily mean you will be successful. Most blogs on Substack earn nothing. Most blogs on the entire web earn nothing. But if you aren’t sure or don’t want to commit for all eternity, Substack and Beehiiv are probably the easiest place to start for non-technical people. Because email is how most people consume text content these days.

Substack promised independence, but has evolved into another platform playing the same game as everyone else. The crab always becomes a crab.

How Much Spotify Pays Artists

Sat, 16 Aug 2025 12:20:00 +0000

Few things get people so worked up as Spotify’s payouts to artists. Every time this topic comes up on Twitter or Threads, you can be sure there will be hundreds of angry replies from people you can’t argue with.

So I wrote this post.

On Spotify, a single stream generates on average between $0.003 and $0.005 in royalties that get paid to the rights holders. Is that small?

It’s important to note these per-stream figures are not fixed prices set in a contract, but rather averages resulting from a revenue sharing model. Many streaming platforms, including Spotify, operate on a pro-rata pool system: roughly 70% of all streaming revenue gets paid out to music rights holders, divided proportionally by each rights holder’s share of total streams. This topline figure heavily depends on the earnings, which are affected by differen pricing tiers, bundles, regional pricing, etc.

For most of its history, Spotify has been paying out just around 74% of all of its revenue as royalties to right holders. As you can see from the chart, 2025 is the first year to see a sudden drop just to 69%. This didn’t happen because Spotify altered its terms with labels (they wish they could do so). It’s because the platform has been investing in other types of content, specifically podcasts and audiobooks, where they operate on different terms. The Q1 2024 has been widely recognized as the turning point for consistent profitability for the company. Before this, Spotify did show profitable quarters here and there, but never in a sustainable way.

For comparison, Apple Music’s stated headline rate (what they’re paying to right holders) is 52%. As you can see, Apple actually keeps more of their music revenue to itself compared to Spotify (who actually do some shadier things we’ll get in later). In 2021, they publicly stated Apple paid $0.01 per stream to rights holders, although independent analysts in 2023 put Apple’s average around $0.008 per stream, roughly double Spotify’s rate. How does this happen?

It’s because the actual revenue per user is different. Streaming services have different plans for individuals and families. They enact regional pricing across different countries. For instance, a month of Spotify costs just ₹139/month in India (~$1.6). This isn’t unique to Spotify, but what is unique though is the ad-supported plan, which enables the company to have 696 million users, who, on average monetize worse than the users of Apple Music or Tidal. Finally, there are discounts. Recently, Apple Music offered me three months at the price of one in an attempt to reengage me as a user. Apple will not pay out of its pocket fo any streams I do during this.

The price per stream for Spotify has actually declined from earlier years as well. For example, an analysis of an indie label’s data showed Spotify’s effective per-stream rate dropped from ~$0.0052 in 2014 to ~$0.00397 by 2017. By 2019 it had stabilized around $0.0033–$0.0035 per play, and it remains in the ~$0.003–0.005 range as of the early 2020s.

Other Streaming Services

VIRPP has gathered the data for other streaming services. Tidal offers one of the highest rates (around $0.012–$0.013 per stream as of 2023), while Amazon Music is around $0.004 and YouTube Music is very low – roughly $0.002 or less per stream. In fact, YouTube (including Content ID streams) accounted for over 50% of music streams in 2019 but only about 6% of streaming revenue – an enormous “value gap.” This implies YouTube’s effective per-stream payout is just a tiny fraction of a cent (on the order of $0.0002–$0.0007 in many cases).

In practical terms, 1 million streams on Spotify gives you around $3,000–$5,000 in royalties, whereas 1 million streams on Apple Music might pay around $8,000–$10,000. What is important is that because of Spotify’s larger audience, artists are more likely to have a larger number of streams there. And also, the royalties are paid out to right holders, which can be the label, and then it comes down to the relationship that the artist has with the label.

What is very important here is to understand that all parties, including streaming services, labels, and artists have the same incentive. The more money Spotify makes on music, the more it has to pay back, while spending the remainder on its operations. Therefore, Spotify is incentivized to maximize its total revenue. This is why they have regional pricing and the ad-enabled tier — because the company believes they’re making more money this way.

Can’t they just charge more? Streaming services constantly check the elasticity of the demand, but any time Spotify raises its subscription by $1 you get a myriad of news stories and a public outcry. Revealed preferences: people “want” artists to make more right until it’s out of their pockets. And as we saw earlier, Spotify is barely profitable and can’t pay out more.

Streaming Is Good

Streaming has massively grown the overall recorded music market by solving the piracy problem. Labels have won the most. Their previous business model was failing, but Spotify saved them by providing and establishing an alternative. As the result, in 2024 the global recorded music revenue finally surpassed the peak of the CD era in 1999, reaching $29.6 billion globally. And streaming contributes 84% of recorded music revenue in the US and about 67% globally. Since its inception, Spotify paid out over $60Bn to right holders, including the artists.

So how much do bands and artists actually get from Spotify and other streaming services? Spotify’s own data shows that in 2024, 110,000 artists earned more than $5,000 in a year, about 71,000 artists globally earned over $10,000 USD. And of those, just around 1,500 artists generated over $1 million in Spotify payouts.

It’d be correct to say that only a very small percentage of artists see substantial revenue from Spotify and other streaming services. And if the artist is signed to a label, they might only see 15–20% of that amount as their take-home. So tours and merchandise are the primary revenue source for many musicians. But… it has always been this way.

Artists Before Streaming

Let’s compare how a band might have earned money solely from record sales in the pre-streaming era (say, the CD heyday of the 1990s).

If an artist was signed to a record label, their contract would specify a royalty rate for album sales. A typical album royalty was around 10%–20% of the album’s price. Mind you, that was the wholesale price, not retail. For a $10 album sold, the band would get $1. If that album sold 100,000 copies, which would make it a gold record in countries like the UK, the band would theoretically earn around $150,000. Most bands never sold anywhere near that kind of volume! And crucially, they wouldn’t see a dime until the label “recouped” all the money it spent on recording, marketing, and tour support. Many bands never recouped and thus made $0 from their record deals.

The Internet enables artists to grow independently and distribute their music without labels. You still need a distributor to upload your albums to most streaming providers, but many offer a flat fee and let you keep all the royalties. Now an artist with a laptop can produce, publish and promote their music without leaving their apartment. The barriers to releasing music have essentially disappeared. The final boss is the Internet’s greatest villain — attention.

According to Spotify, as of early 2025, there are nearly 12 million artists who have at least one song on Spotify. A huge chunk of these are likely hobbyists or very early in their careers. Spotify itself notes about 8 million of those artists have fewer than 10 tracks released and identifies roughly ~200–250k artists as the actively “professional” musicians. It’s hard to find a truly comparable number, but considering the challenges of recording music and putting it into stores, there surely were far fewer of them. The National Endowment for the Arts in the US reported 167,000 of musicians and composers in 1990.

There’s a headline I used to see too often, which derides YouTube for how few creators actually earn a full-time income from the platform. Titles like “Most YouTubers earn little to nothing” are written to invoke anger and despair. Well, YouTube reportedly has over 65 million YouTube creators, which potentially might even include myself, since I had an uploaded video (I deleted it). Well, I’d love my blog to have as many readers as The New York Times, but I’m definitely not entitled to this. And yet, between 300,000 and 500,000 people worldwide earn a full-time income from YouTube.

Now, there are more bands getting something than in the “good old days” when, if you didn’t land a record deal, you essentially got nothing from record sales. But it does create a long tail of artists who only get a little. One 2020 study found that the top 1% of artists get the lion’s share of streams (over 60% of all streams). This is because most people listen to Taylor Swifts and Drakes of the world and not your garage band.

Today, instead of a fan paying $10 for an album once, the fan’s listening contributes to many small payments for each stream. To match the revenue of one album sale, a song typically needs hundreds of streams. RIAA has a rule for counting album sales along streaming: it’s 1,500 streams for 1 album unit.

Let’s figure this thing out. 1,500 streams multiplied by $0.004 is $6. This is more than what you’d get from a CD, but unless you go directly, the label would get 50% to 80%, and you as an artist would get ~$1.2. One advantage of the streaming model is superfans continue generating revenue for artists even if they don’t release any albums, simply by playing music on repeat.

Labels Are Kings

Spotify can’t change the terms between labels and musicians. The reason why the music and film industries are so different is in music we have an oligopoly of major labels with an extremely useful back catalog. Now, a major company can start a new movie streaming platform filled exclusively with its own content, just like Apple TV+ did, and people might pay for it. But very few people want a music streaming app that doesn’t have Taylor Swift, or Drake, or Beatles, or somebody else they like.

And Spotify does some shadier things occasionally. Apple specifically attacked them for offering different payout terms to major and indie labels. And Spotify has a system that promotes artists’ music in exchange for cutting their royalty rates. No business is simple.

But Spotify likely provides more money overall to any artist than other streaming services purely based on its scale and you shouldn’t feel bad for using it.

***

Updated on December 31, 2025.

Many artists gripe about streaming payouts but few are ready to spill the beans on how much they actually make. I tried hard to find any metrics from the musicians’ side when I was writing this article, but couldn’t.

Now, a band called Los Campesinos shared their exact payouts (thank you!). Here are their figures from July 2024 to June 2025.

As you can see, the vast majority of both their streams and revenue come from Spotify. Alone, it brought them 3 times as much as Apple Music.

Unfortunately, of the major streaming platforms, Spotify pays significantly less per stream than anywhere else. If everyone who streamed All Hell on Spotify had done so using Tidal instead, we would have received an extra £31,847.38

This is why the per stream payout is a meaningless metric. The reason why Spotify dominates among their listeners is both their cultural prevalence and their ad-enabled plan. Just like Spotify can’t convert all of these users to a subscription, Tidal or another service wouldn’t be able to do also.

This November, Bloomberg published an entire story on how Apple Music is losing new listeners because it doesn’t have a free tier.

What Spotify does is maximizing its total revenue, from which the payouts to artists are made in the first place. So, the incentives are aligned.

The Limits of the Network State

Sun, 10 Aug 2025 14:25:50 +0000

The Network State is a concept popularized by the entrepreneur and investor Balaji Srinivasan. These network states begin as highly-aligned online communities and graduate to diplomatic recognition by existing countries, rather than seizing territory by force.

You can read in his own words:

A key concept is to go cloud first, land last — but not land never — by starting with an online community and then materializing it into the physical world.

I can understand the idea behind these words. The countries and states we have aren’t always great. They are often silly, short-sighted and outright dangerous. They hold their population hostage as politicians ride the memes to gain more power and execute things without understanding the unintented consequences. Unfortunately, I doubt we can go beyond them, even though I’d love to share the view.

Balaji’s ideas are very similar to the cyberpunk visions of the late 20th century, specifically the concepts explored in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash and Diamond Age. Both show post–nation-state governance models where corporations, cultural groups, or clans function as sovereign entities with their own laws, police, and territories. Phyles in Diamond Age are large, voluntary, and culturally aligned networks of people spread across the globe.

I can’t see a path for Balaji’s network states to become something more than a club or an online forum and gain sovereignty. Fukuyama’s End of History is an extremely misunderstood book: it doesn’t say the world won’t change; it implies that we will never see novel state concepts beyond liberal democracies (although countries can break down to authoritarianism again).

Sovereign states have three key monopolies they will never give up or share: identity, taxation, and the use of force. We will dive into each aspect separately, but let’s start with sovereignty itself.

There are 193 member states in the United Nations. The bar to be recognized as a sovereign state is exceptionally high. The advantages are numerous and there are few things worse than being born in an unrecognized state.

According to Balaji, a startup society with sufficient scale should eventually be able to negotiate for diplomatic recognition from at least one pre-existing government, and from there, gradually increase sovereignty, slowly becoming a true network state.

A few countries are recognized by only a small group of UN members: Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Northern Cyprus, and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic. And these are some of the most chaotic, dangerous and poor societies in the world. Their recognition is primarily a political act, usually conducted by one or a few major countries in the region who have their own interest at heart (Russia for the first two, Turkey for Northern Cyprus, etc). Getting recognition by any state is extremely hard, but being accepted by a failed state or a poor Pacific Island nation wouldn’t help.

Truly sovereign states simply don’t want to lose the exclusivity of their status and unique capabilities.

Identity

Srinivasan envisions one’s citizenship for the network states will be established through cryptographic identifiers (for example, Ethereum Name Service or World Chain) rather than birth certificates or passports. But this is nothing more than relying on a library card.

If you can’t use the document to enter another state, it’s not an identity. Going through the border control requires a passport, and not just a piece of paper with a biometric chip, but a passport recognized by other countries.

The only non-governments that have the capability to issue internationally recognized passports are the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and the Vatican. As you can imagine, they do this very sparingly. The Vatican is a micro-state whose passports are issued to clergy, officials, and diplomats of the Holy See. The Maltese Order is actually recognized as a sovereign subject of international law for historical reasons. It has diplomatic relations with over 100 countries, making its passports valid for official travel in many places. However, these passports are not available to the general public and are strictly limited to official use. ⁠No other non-governmental organizations or entities have internationally recognized passports.

You can get things like Palau Digital Residency, which a blockchain-based digital identity program offered by the Republic of Palau, but you can enter zero countries with this. That’s why it’s just a “library card”.

Certain countries issue so-called alien passports to refugees. A Belarusian citizen who escaped persecution can obtain one if they live in the Netherlands. However, according to the law, they will still be Belarusian citizens and will not get any additional rights (e.g., visa-free travel to the US).

Governments have a monopoly on identity.

Taxation

Balaji believes that since the crypto-based economy is inherently borderless and can operate outside legacy banking systems, traditional tax authorities will have less visibility and control over network state commerce.

In Stephenson’s books, the invention of crypto currencies led to the collapse of centralized states, which could no longer collect taxes. We have crypto currency, and the most capable tax entities know what to do with it. The US treats crypto as property, taxing gains and enforcing strict reporting rules. IRS enforcement is increasing, with mandatory reporting and penalties for non-compliance: from 2025, brokers must report digital asset sales to the IRS.

Balaji even foresees that network states will effectively arbitrate between jurisdictions to minimize burdens and maximize freedom for their citizens. Since a network state’s people are distributed across many countries, the community can choose to establish physical hubs in places with favorable laws and low taxes. Moreover, the network state is supposed to be funded by the members, who might pool funds to buy land or build communal infrastructure.

Since the governments have sovereignty, they are not going to relieve the network state of taxes. Anything you want to collect or raise has to come on top of the government taxes. The only countries willing to accommodate such daring requests are likely failed states.

And this is where we meet the final issue.

Use of force

Max Weber, a German sociologist, was the first to define the state as the only human community that claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory.

In the early stages, network states are supposed to lean on existing states for physical security. Srinivasan is candid that a startup society won’t be handling violent crime or defense immediately:

If governance is limited to the digital realm… how does a startup society deal with physical criminals? The short answer is that for a long time, it doesn’t – it leaves that to the surrounding legacy society.

An early network state has no physical coercive power, including an army or police force. Which is why being co-located with a potentially poor failed state is quite dangerous. Either you will suffer from organized crime, or sooner or later, they will try to take over the network state. At the same time, capable countries, whether it’s the United States or Singapore, won’t tolerate shedding sovereignty.

Of course, you might want to go beyond existing states and their land simply. Create new land.

Land becomes elastic. As Will Rogers once said, “buy land, they ain’t making any more of it.” Or are they? Seasteaders and the artificial islands built in Dubai show that land supply is perhaps more elastic than we think. We also know you can build cruise ships. So it’s possible that we could start reopening the frontier physically as well, not just digitally.

Dubai isn’t a great example. Palm Jumeirah and The World Islands are famous artificial land projects that are only possible with infinite oil money and for astonishment. Many countries dredge sand to raise their shores and protect them against erosion. And some (like China) indeed create artificial islands with the sole purpose of using them to claim sovereignty over a larger sea territory.

Countries can claim up to 12 nautical miles of territorial sea and 200 nautical miles of Exclusive Economic Zone from their land, including islands. China has built and expanded artificial islands to assert its “nine-dash line” claim, which covers most of the South China Sea.

If you want to create an island nobody can claim, you will probably have to do this in the Pacific Ocean.

I Can't Stop Using Dia Browser

Sun, 03 Aug 2025 13:57:39 +0000

I was a heavy user of Arc and abandoned it only after it was “sunset”. The app still works, of course, but I used to experience a few glitches and understood they would never be solved anymore. Still, I get their decision — Arc just wasn’t mainstream enough.

I understand it even better after using Dia. It has become my primary browser and I’d be extremely dissapointed if it went away, which is a very good PMF score.

The early reviews weren’t great. Arc has become popular because of its unique and polished UI, and then the Browser Company threw it all away and started from scratch. I get the frustration. But a niche browser never had the chance, while Dia might.

Unlike Arc, Dia simply feels like a more polished Chrome. A much better Chrome. Frankly, that just shows how little Google cares about its products and their UX. A team of 120 employees has managed to build an alternative UI that is a joy to use. Dia doesn’t have many advanced features yet, such as Tab Groups or PWA support, but everything included already feels better. And Chrome’s tab groups have always been quite rough and inferior to Safari’s anyway. Plus, with the recent update, Dia again possesses my favorite Arc’s feature in vertical tabs.

What really separates Dia is the AI. The browser is built around it. And I can definitely see why the team went this way. Once you start using it, it’s really difficult to go back. And I imagine the overall familiarity makes it easy for most people to switch from Chrome.

For some reason, none of the major AI chatbots really interact with your browser. And if you send a link to ChatGPT to summarize the webpage, there’s a good chance it’d just hallucinate the content instead. With Dia, you can always use any particular set of open webpages as context for the LLM. And this is wonderful. You can summarize, ask questions, or get additional context from the LLM itself or ask it to search the web for you. Just click Cmd-E and you have Chat on the side.

You can instantly ask whether the thing you’re planning to buy is actually good and find promo codes to get it cheaper. And it works! Don’t trust the reviews on the website, just ask and the AI will give a summary from top-tier review websites and meticulous fans on Reddit. You can extract data from complex HTML layouts and get a simple list of bullet points if you need it.

You can do more complex things and turn this into a make-shift Google NotebookLM. I opened a dozen of articles and blog posts about the state of AI coding, then asked it to summarize them into a quick single industry report. The result was quite close to what I’d mention, yet it only took me a few seconds (the rest is actually knowing what context to provide).

Finally, I notice that I really enjoy using these models, whether it’s from OpenAI or Gemini, via the API and with Dia’s prompt instead of their first-party chatbots. After I “personalized” Dia by giving it several people whose writing I enjoy and mentioned I prefer outlines and bullet points, it gave me very well-written straightforward answers. It’s not hilariously sycophantic like ChatGPT that you can’t really wean from this behavior. And kindly offers “links” to ask about adjacent topics if you want to dig deeper.

When you type something in the omnibox, Dia chooses whether to send the request to Google or its AI implementation, mostly based on the length and the syntax of the request. And this is great, because some things are just easier to check with Google. You can always override and choose yourself.

The thing that surprised me the most is how often I end going to Dia to ask question in Chat. It makes sense, because I spent most of my days in the browser. But what I really like is how ephemeral these chats are. I realized I don’t like that ChatGPT keeps all of your requests in history unless you manually enable a Temporary chat each time. Most of the things I search aren’t that interesting or important, but ChatGPT is hoarding them all regardless. Sometimes I research a medical condition, but sometimes I just need a quick lentils stew recipe or a fitting English metaphor.

Dia keeps a few recent chats in history, but ultimately they’re ephemeral and very low-friction things, and that’s why I end up using its AI so much. I also can’t imagine a browser without it.

Of course, Dia isn’t the only option. Google Chrome added Gemini, but only in the US, and according to the reviews it’s pretty basic.

There’s also Comet from Perplexity, which has a more agentic AI that can actually interact with the web pages, go through links and perform actions. But it’s not entirely reliable yet and there’s a chance people will get discouraged if they hit a brick wall too often and stop trusting it altogether. Comet also pushes all searches to Perplexity, which is good for some things, but not all of them. No surprise Google is scared and pushes AI so hard.

Finally, OpenAI’s agent can also open links and interact with webpages now. There are persistent rumors about them building their own browser as well.

We are in the new era of browser competition, and most importantly, it’s finally not about coming up with yet-another-engine — Chrome has officially won. Instead, all these companies are tuning the browser’s user interface and experience, the area that stayed under the radar and stagnated in the past decade. And I couldn’t be more excited about this.

Highlights from Apple in China

Thu, 31 Jul 2025 19:45:07 +0000

I have finished Apple in China by Patrick McGee, a fantastic book dissecting the history of manufacturing and breaking up some common myths around it.

There’s an uncanny quality about adversarial books and media stories like this. Patrick has talked to dozens of people who worked at Apple or their partners. But there’s always a bias in terms of who is willing to talk — mostly the people who didn’t leave the company on good terms. Jeff Williams, Apple’s former COO, isn’t joining that meeting invite. But the people who had issues with the management, disagreed with their “ignorant” strategies or believed they were wronged would. They might also use this as an opportunity to remake their story, so we have to trust the writer to build a complete picture from multiple sources. Throughout the book I was getting just a touch of that feeling, but I believe Patrick McGee did a very good job overall.

We know our devices are made in China. We saw the label on the back and maybe have heard about companies like Foxconn and workers operating these human “conveyor belts”. And while, admittedly, it is a part of the picture, Patrick argues that we’re missing the forest for the trees.

Apple hasn’t moved to China because the workforce there is cheap. In fact, it was one of the last companies to offshore it manufacturing. Following the return of Steve Jobs, Apple continued using US-based manufacturers but struggled so much with the iMac it had to look outward. First to Japan and Taiwan, and later to China, as local companies propped up by local governments and lax regulations enabled to stimulate growth fiercely competed for their business. And as a result, China built an ecosystem of manufacturers and suppliers where you can do and build practically anything you can dream of.

As Patrick says:

The prevailing Western narrative about Apple in China is remarkably narrow. The go-to story of the past two decades has been about the tedium of assembling Apple products—a tale of low wages, underage employees, sixteen-hour workdays, suicides at Foxconn, and accusations of forced Uighur labor. This narrative isn’t wrong, but it misses the biggest piece of the puzzle: It’s not merely that Apple has exploited Chinese workers, it’s that Beijing has allowed Apple to exploit its workers, so that China can in turn exploit Apple.

You see, China was trying to catch up in the technology and manufacturing and after their acceptance into the WTO looked for semi-legal ways to import the technological know-how. And according to the book, Apple became the perfect partner.

Apple had essentially cracked the code on how to manufacture the world’s best products without doing any of the manufacturing itself. It wasn’t really “outsourcing” in the normal sense—that would imply it was sending blueprints to companies capable of taking the orders and executing. Instead, Apple was routinely sending its top engineers, designers, procurement specialists, and lawyers from the United States into hundreds of factories across the country, where they’d import machinery, train armies of workers, coordinate the delivery of intermediate goods, and scrutinize suppliers to ensure compliance.

And the most ambitious claim this book makes is that Apple uplifted the entire China’s manufacturing by bringing its talented engineers, educating manufacturers and pushing suppliers to their limit to raise quality.

China wouldn’t be China today without Apple. Its investments in the country have been spectacular, rivaling nation-building efforts in cost, man-hours, and impact. Apple itself estimates that since 2008 it has trained at least 28 million workers—more people than the entire labor force of California. China brilliantly played its long-term interests against Apple’s short-term needs. In 1999, none of Apple’s products were made in mainland China; by 2009, virtually all were.

In fact, the book devotes a lot of space telling the story of Apple’s struggles in China because their approach was too unusual. China had come up with a simple system of requiring foreign companies to set up joint ventures with the idea that local partners would master the necessary skills to start building the tech themselves.

The party’s whole reform program was meant to lure in capital and Western businesses as a way of learning, so China could reverse-engineer the technology, replicate it, and then replace it.

But unlike Samsung and all other corporations, Apple didn’t have a joint venture nor did it own any factories itself. Instead, it was sending engineers that would train workers and bought billions of dollars of equipment that was used by them.

Years before Uber would become the largest taxi provider without owning a single vehicle or Airbnb would grow into the largest accommodation provider without owning any real estate, Apple was discovering how to be the world’s largest manufacturer without owning any factories. <…> It was working so intimately with suppliers that it had come up with a new offshoring model altogether. It married the best of both worlds, imposing a zealous level of control over its manufacturing processes, but with the lower costs and added flexibility of not actually running a factory.

And Apple is brutal in their demands to both quality and costs. The company is known to extract all the margins out of its suppliers for itself. Analysts report Apple earns ~80% of all smartphone profits, even though its shipment share is in the teens (~19%). Some suppliers were so eager to work with Apple they offered to do order at cost. Why?

Suppliers would put up with this seemingly inequitable deal because they got something less tangible but more valuable than profits. They got engineering help from Apple’s best—tuition-free, on-the-ground training—for multiple hours a day, day after day, for weeks and months leading up to a product launch. “So the reason Apple gets Chinese suppliers to work for them, for zero profits, is because the Apple ops engineer, following Tim Cook’s orders, is sleeping on a mat in their factory and helping them make that line efficient,” Guthrie says.

Apple wasn’t just coming to factories to place an order. Most of these were much smaller organizations that had to be expanded drastically. And managers who knew how to work the provinces’ leadership and get manpower and land would go all-in.

When Foxconn wanted to expand from cables to building the iPod, they reversed-engineer the device from available components and demonstrated it to Apple to prove they can do this. Apple’s employees were astonished as the device was almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

There was no way Apple could send the specs to some factory and wait for the parts to be built; instead, it sent teams of engineers to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and China to find hungry vendors it could work with to co-create the processes. “There were a few truly groundbreaking mass production processes we were involved with, where we really had to go around to find the best people in the entire world—the peak of what humans have developed for some of these technologies,” says a product manager.

Apple seemingly understood that anything they build in China would be copied, just like it happened with all other companies. So their strategy became to always stay at the bleeding edge of what was possible. And then, their inventions become the industry norm. The book retells the famous anecdote about the invention of scratch-resistant glass for the iPhone.

Jobs reached out to Wendell Weeks, CEO of Corning, a glassmaker in upstate New York, saying he needed the hardest glass they could make. Weeks told Jobs about Gorilla Glass, something Corning had developed for fighter-jet cockpits back in the 1960s. They’d never found a market for it and abandoned the project. Now, this glass is practically in every flagship phone.

The volume of devices shipped by Apple is so big and grows so quickly, the suppliers who were able to scale along ended up selling to them almost exclusively.

Overdependence on Apple could create trouble, because Cupertino had a propensity to shift directions. So if, say, a company providing a key component was 80 percent dependent on iPhone revenue, and Apple made a design change obviating the need for that component, that company might collapse. In fact, many did; this happened repeatedly, and it caused Apple problems, including negative headlines in the media and bad will from suppliers. So Apple learned to find a sweet spot: to be the most important client for its suppliers, so it had leverage, but not so much that the supplier was overly reliant. The upshot of this policy, as a senior executive put it, was that “whatever rate we’re growing at, they have to grow that fast with someone else.” So as iPhone shipments soared, Apple encouraged its China-based suppliers to feed the Android market. As a result, Apple gave birth to the Chinese smartphone industry.

At first, China looked Apple with suspicion and frustration, simply because of how secretive and unusual their approach was. There was no joint venture! So Apple gathered a team and flew Tim Cook to give CCP a presentation where he explained what they were doing and commited to spending over $260Bn until 2021. Not even as some grand gesture, merely multiplying what Apple was spending annually already.

The suppliers and manufacturers of Apple devices leveraged the same know-how to help create Huawei, Xiaomi, Oppo, and Vivo, who collectively dominate the Chinese market and are actively expanding outward.

The ascent of China’s smartphone sector spoke volumes about Apple’s dependence on the very capabilities it had orchestrated, underscoring how China had gone from a land of cheap labor to one of sophisticated automation.

This statement might sound ambitious, but without having a single first-party factory in China, it was still one of the most frequent destination for the company’s engineers and managers.

Apple had been sending so many engineers to China on temporary trips that Cupertino convinced United Airlines to begin direct flights from San Francisco to Chengdu, three times a week, arguing that Apple would regularly buy enough of the thirty-six first-class seats to make it profitable. The 6,857-mile flight became United’s longest nonstop flight.

And when COVID-19 shut down airlines, Apple sent their engineers by jet.

United halted nonstop flights from San Francisco to Shanghai from March to October 2020. So Apple scrambled the jets. In the spring, Cupertino began sending engineers to Shanghai on private planes departing from San Jose, with a pit stop in Alaska. “Each jet could hold thirteen people, but we only sat six,” says a person familiar with the flights. “We wanted room and, you know, we’re Apple.”

The dramatic shift of high-tech manufacturing capabilities happened in just about three decades. And the result were so drastic, so when Apple tried to build Mac Pro in the US to placate Trump, it had to fly engineers from Foxconn to set it up

…the project made it only because Apple leveraged relationships with suppliers in the one country where it knew the talent existed. “We flew people from China to get it fixed,” one of the engineers says. “People working for Foxconn.” The irony is hard to overstate.

The last part of the book is about the peculiar position Apple now finds itself, stuck between the geopolitical ambitions of Xi’s China and the new reversal of domestic policies in the US, along with added risks around Taiwan and TSMC.

The company that once positioned itself as a rebel now forced to give up control over iCloud in China to local “partners” along with the encryption keys, remove VPNs and The New York Times from the AppStore and avoid critisizing China in any Apple TV+ content.

In 2017, explaining why corporate executives should be more up-front about their values and “lead accordingly,” Cook had told journalist Megan Murphy that “silence is the ultimate consent.” He went on: If you see something going on that’s not right, the most powerful form of consent is to say nothing.

Tim Cook has been an extremely succesful and ruthless CEO who made Apple one of the world’s richest companies. But he also made it hightly dependent on China during the worst deterioration of local political freedoms and their relationships with the United States. We will see what comes out of it.

IMAX is a Superbrand

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 15:30:00 +0000

How many companies building cinema projectors do you know?

I bet you know at least one, and it’s called IMAX. You’ve heard the name when you watched “Dune“, “Avatar“, or something from Christopher Nolan. If you paid more to get an IMAX experience, they weren’t too shy to add a dedicated intro promoting themselves — quite obnoxious if you ask me.

Do you get how weird it is? I mean, do you know any other projectors? Yet IMAX has become entangled with the film industry and a sign of prestige. There are 1,772 IMAX theaters across 90 countries. A huge scandal played out when Tom Cruise couldn’t secure extended IMAX viewings for his previous Mission Impossible film.

Lately, I’ve become exceedingly interested in companies with brands so powerful that they break common laws. This is my first post in this new series, and I have a few others in the pipeline.

Companies are egoists by nature. They don’t want to share the spotlight, and they don’t want any other brand alongside their own. So when they do, it’s a beautiful exception worth exploring.

Like other Superbrands, IMAX has conquered its dominant place by inventing and controlling a unique technology that enabled the industry to go beyond what was possible. It became a symbol of quality, which meant partners benefited by advertising their films as IMAX.

In this story, I want to answer several questions:

What is IMAX
How did it emerge
And what enabled it to secure this supreme position

What is IMAX

IMAX is a cinema format that combines specialized cameras, a specific post-production pipeline and purpose-built cinemas to deliver a superior viewing experience.

The standard film format was 35mm. In addition to doubling it and using 70mm, IMAX also changed the orientation. Instead of feeding the film vertically like in standard projectors, IMAX runs the film sideways (horizontally) and makes each frame much taller.

In regular 70mm film, a frame is usually 5 perforations tall and runs vertically through the projector. But with IMAX’s 70mm, each frame is 15 perforations wide (the official name is 15/70). This lets each frame stretch across more of the film’s width, making it about 10 times bigger in area than standard 35mm film. While top digital cameras can reach the 8K resolution, IMAX film achieves roughly 16K.

(And while I’m already scared of confusing you, it’s important to remember that 70mm is the projection film, while IMAX is actually shot on 65mm film, as 5mm is used for the soundtrack)

This is what gives IMAX its square-ish 1.43:1 ratio — when you get to a cinema, you see a much taller screen that can occupy your entire area of vision.

You can find many comparisons of shots in famous movies at IMAX and other carriers. Every other format is cut and pales in comparison. You simply cannot experience the original IMAX cut at home. Even if the movie was shot with IMAX 15/70 cameras (like Dunkirk or Oppenheimer), you’re most likely seeing 1.78:1 or 2.20:1 (closer, still cropped) or even just 2.39:1 (Cinemascope ratio), with IMAX framing lost entirely.

Great, so it’s just a larger film? Not so easy.

The movie industry has been trying to switch from the traditional 35mm to a larger format for decades. Fox introduced Fox Grandeur in 1929, and Walt Disney came up with the Fantasound system for the original “Fantasia” film in 1940. In 1953, CinemaScope was introduced, which brought the now commonly ratio of 2.35:1 (later expanded 2.39:1), much wider than the previously used 1.37:1. It used special anamorphic lenses that compress a wide image onto standard 35mm film, then expand it during projection. All these technologies were targeting the 35mm, and they still tried to keep it. The Techniscope film format was invented and became popular precisely because it used half as much 35mm film for the same number of shots, even at loss of quality.

The Origin Story

In 1967, the International and Universal Exposition was held in Montreal. Two people came there with the same dream of making movies bigger. Making the picture bigger, to be exact.

There, Graeme Ferguson presented his film “Man and the Polar Regions” while Roman Kroitor showcased his production “In the Labyrinth”. Both utilized complex multi-projector and multi-screen systems, which were impressive but challenging. Recognizing each other’s experience, they later decided to pool their expertise and were joined by Robert Kerr, a businessman, and William C. Shaw, an engineer, to form Multiscreen Corporation, Ltd. That company would later change its name to IMAX (Image MAXimum).

Soon, they realized that using multiple film reels and projectors was a dead end and instead decided to focus on one big screen and one big film. In three years, they filed a patent for the “Rolling Loop” film transport system, which allowed for the smooth, high-speed movement of large-format film through a projector.

The Rolling Loop is what enabled the use of 70mm film running horizontally, creating much larger and sharper images than conventional vertical 70mm or 35mm film projectors. The first movie IMAX Corporation produced using this new technology was Tiger Child. To do this, IMAX had to create basically every piece of equipment from scratch, including cameras, lenses, lighting, and sound devices to support their 6-story high screen and giant film frames required for it. The first permanent IMAX theater was established in 1971 in Toronto, Canada.

However, IMAX didn’t become a part of Hollywood for decades after. Throughout the 1980s, IMAX was primarily used for science and nature documentaries as the company expanded across science centers, museums, and planetariums. In 1984, NASA even brought IMAX cameras to space aboard the Space Shuttle Challenger. The audiences were amazed by the picture, but it wasn’t going to conquer cinemas just yet.

IMAX had a chicken-and-egg problem. The 70mm film was expensive, heavy and difficult to operate; the same applied to cameras, which were so loud that you would have to re-record all the actors’ dialogues. And since nobody was shooting movies in IMAX, cinemas weren’t interested in investing in it.

The Fateful Acquisition

In 1994, investment bankers Richard Gelfond and Bradley Wechsler acquired IMAX Corporation, and the same year, they took IMAX public by listing it on the NASDAQ stock exchange. They were fascinated by the technology and believed it could have been used for Hollywood. But first, they had to make it better and figure out how to “sell” it.

One of my best sources for this was the interview that Richard Gelfond, who took the role of the CEO, gave to Harvard Business Review and I will be quoting it extensively. The funniest part is that he and his partner merely wanted to flip the company but he ended up making it his life’s work.

Their first challenge was going around the chicken-and-egg problem.

Studios didn’t want to film a movie in our format (which required bulky, expensive cameras and lots of film) unless thousands of theaters were equipped to show IMAX films. Theater owners wouldn’t convert to IMAX until many more IMAX films were available.

Building IMAX was indeed very expensive. For starters, IMAX used to charge cinema multiplexes $1.2 million for the privilege of using their technology. Meanwhile, studios back then had to send individual prints of the movie to each cinema. While a regular set of 35mm would cost about $1,000, each IMAX print would take $30,000 and require a forklift just to get it over to the projection room.

IMAX had to change basically everything about how it operated and the technology itself to make it work. But in the process, they stumbled upon an extremely profitable model that the company continues to use to this day.

First, they started covering the IMAX installations at cinemas themselves at no up-front charge. But in exchange, they took 20% of the box office on that screen, which proved very wise in the long run, albeit a risky endeavor.

But also, as Richard said:

The huge up-front cost was an obstacle, but not the only one. Very few movies were being offered in the IMAX format.

So, in 2001 they figured out how existing movies could be converted to IMAX, which removed the risks for movie studios. IMAX would even cover the costs of the conversion in return for 12.5% of the box office of the IMAX rerun.

Finally, the shift to digital removed the price barriers of both film and film projection systems: $30,000 in film prints were replaced with $150 reusable hard drives. In 2008, IMAX introduced its first digital projection system, which used dual 2K or 4K projectors, making it easier to install IMAX systems in cinemas. This led to a radical expansion of IMAX theaters globally.

They found a win-win-win scenario that incentivized all the parties to participate:

If it costs $10.50 or $11 to see a new release in a theater, a ticket to the IMAX version will cost about $15 or $16. That means that even if the studio pays us 12.5% and the theater owner pays us 20%, they still wind up with more revenue than if the moviegoer had bought a regular ticket.

The main challenge that they had to work around was that:

The Hollywood movie industry is an interconnected system of studios, directors, and theaters that has evolved over 100 years, and it has a traditional way of doing things.

IMAX had to become a part of that system.

The Industry

In 1998, “Everest”, a documentary film about the struggles involved in climbing the mountain, became the first IMAX film to make it to the box-office top ten. But it was still a documentary and IMAX was trying to enter fiction films.

The turning point was when Disney decided to make “Fantasia 2000”, a sequel to the 1940 movie “Fantasia” and play it exclusively at IMAX theaters. It became the first feature-length animated film to be released in the format across 75 theaters.

Christopher Nolan became the first major director to use IMAX in narrative cinema, shooting parts of “The Dark Knight“ (2008) with IMAX cameras. Although the film only had 28 minutes of IMAX footage, that was enough to turn the tide. Then Brad Bird followed with “Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol”, which legitimized IMAX as a format for blockbusters.

Visionary directors like Christopher Nolan, James Cameron, and Denis Villeneuve started integrating IMAX technology into their process. IMAX co-opted the best minds of the industry to become their promoters and ambassadors.

Richard Gelfond:

We used to have to beg studios to make films in the IMAX format, but now a lot of Hollywood people say you can’t really make a blockbuster except in IMAX. As a result, we’ve become much more profitable.

And it’s not surprising. When James Cameron’s “Avatar” was released in IMAX theaters in 2009, it became a sensation. The film heavily relied on 3D and IMAX’s immersive format, which provided a unique cinematic experience. “Avatar” grossed over $2.7 billion, and a lot of it came from IMAX.

Christopher Nolan has become explicitly associated with IMAX. He started with “The Dark Knight”, and continued using it more and more for his future movies, so over 70% of ‘Dunkirk’ was shot in it. For “Oppenheimer”, Nolan even ordered a brand-new film stock to be made because IMAX wasn’t available in black-and-white before (but he really wanted it).

There are still some mountains left unconquered. No feature movie to date has been shot entirely on IMAX film (only digitally) due to technical and logistical challenges. Nolan’s “Odyssey“ will be the first.

Lessons

So, what enabled IMAX to become so dominant? Quality, both real and perceived.

Richard says:

Our commitment to quality and providing a cutting-edge entertainment experience, combined with the differentiation we’re able to create by working closely with these key partners, has enabled us to build IMAX into a globally recognized and sought-after brand.

Imagine the giant screen covering your entire field of view and throbbing sound. IMAX has become synonymous with premium cinema. Directors and studios boast how much of their movie is shot in IMAX because this seems to attract the viewers. But all this time, they’re promoting the company that built the cameras and the projectors.

IMAX enabled higher ticket prices, so even with their cut, studios and theaters make more money. But even more importantly, it helps turn movie releases into events, something that every studio wants to achieve.

Combined with effective marketing, IMAX’s technical features have established it as the go-to brand for high-quality, immersive movie experiences. You can expect a certain quality when going to IMAX (I don’t go to any other theaters anymore).

IMAX’s success is due to its execution. The company took an enormous risk by absorbing all of the primary costs from the cinemas and studios to kickstart this network. They have been rewarded handsomely for this, receiving about 20% of the box office from every IMAX film. IMAX became indispensable to the industry and an integral part of it.

That was a very risky strategy that forced them to incur practically all of the costs. The company was on the verge of bankruptcy and delisting multiple times:

At one point in 2001, our stock traded for 55 cents a share, and some of our bondholders began buying equity and trying to force us into bankruptcy. In 2006, we actively tried to sell the company, but our future was so uncertain that no one was willing to pay a reasonable price.

But they managed to succeed, and the payoff was dramatic.

This is the first post in the series. My next article will be about GORE-TEX, which pushed Nike and Arcteryx to put its brand alongside their own, and the company behind it.

Sources

If you would love to learn more about IMAX, here are the best sources I found while researching materials for this article.

Extras

Editors usually force you to cut stories, and this makes sense. The shorter they are, the better, as long as you deliver your core idea. But I still wanted to clarify a few more complex things and add asterisks to give you a complete picture.

First of all, it’s important to understand the definitions, as it can be a bit murky. There are different flavors of IMAX, namely “Filmed for IMAX” and “Shot with IMAX”, which often used interchangeably in marketing, but they mean different things technically and artistically.

“Filmed for IMAX” means the movie was shot with an expanded aspect ratio (1.90:1) that fills more of the IMAX screen. The “F1” 2025 movie, directed by Joseph Kosinski, is a good example. This means the filmmakers used traditional digital cameras and worked closely with the company to optimize the movie visually and sonically for IMAX theaters. Examples include “Dune: Part One”, “The Batman” (2022), “Fast X” (2023).

“Shot with IMAX” means a movie or scene was filmed using special large, high-resolution film or digital cameras built by IMAX itself. Scenes shot this way use a taller aspect ratio (1.43:1 ratio), which fills the entire IMAX screen. Examples would include “Interstellar“, “Dunkirk“, “Oppenheimer“, and many others.