Stratechery

Just to be clear, you're neither giving Subscriber Only nor the authors your payment details. All of that is handled by Stripe. Their core service is handling this kind of sensitive data. I can certainly understand not liking recurring payments but it's a pretty standard business model. On Subscriber Only, you can choose between monthly and yearly subscriptions and you can cancel them at any time. You can look at it a sort-of automation of what you're already doing with one-time donations. Don't quote me on this -- I have no data -- but I think monetizing a personal blog is pretty tough. Unless you'd consider Strachery <https://stratechery.com/> a personal blog. If you want to get paid writing, I suggest specializing in a niche of a niche. E.g. Don't write about the tech industry, write about semiconductor manufacturing in Germany. But hey, you won't know until you try!

I consider these cop-out answers, but Stratechery [0] and Money Stuff [1] are excellent. I'm bewildered daily by Matt Levines ability to write. Mobile Dev Memo is pretty good and follows mainly the mobile ad industry [2]. Apologies for the self-promotion, but in case any tech minded finns are reading this, I write a daily news letter about tech in finnish called Transistori [3]. [0]: https://stratechery.com/ [1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine [2]: https://mobiledevmemo.com/ [3]: https://www.transistori.com/

Lazy so-called journalist, I'd like to present to you... drums rolling... Ben Thompson of Stratechery[1]! Followed by.... rolling drums... John Gruber of Daring Fireball[2]! And quite frankly, these two are just the ones I thought of, from the top of my head. And, I couldn't say why, I think nowadays the Financial Times could write pieces on the matter more interesting than nearly anyone at Wired could. [1]: https://stratechery.com/ [2]: https://daringfireball.net/

Here are some other analysts you may like if you’re not already familiar with them. http://www.asymco.com/ https://stratechery.com/ https://www.aboveavalon.com/ I haven’t been actively following any of them for a few years now, but collectively they plus Ben Evans really impress me.

This is a direct corollary of the existence of the internet and the effect that had on the scarcity of information that supported the local newspaper model. Ben Thompson has written a number of great articles diving into this topic at Stratechery[1]. I understand why blaming CL seems like it should be a thing, but it's absolutely the wrong target: the very existence of the internet made newspapers utterly unsustainable because the scarcity they depended on vanished. [1] https://stratechery.com/

https://stratechery.com/ Ben writes about technology companies from a business model perspective. He also has a good podcast where he weekly summarizes his blog posts about company specific platform and aggregator data/revenue models. Very insightful.

Some follow-on mentions: https://www.stratechery.com https://www.vox.com https://www.vox.com/recode-decode-podcast-kara-swisher

maybe i was harsh but how do we know the seller is informative? He just said the things that made swizec purchase items. Perhaps he was, but he has an ulterior motive. I will still gladly ask for recommendations, and still refuse them. This salesperson ignored the customers original request, Swizec seems not to care, to me, that means the saleserson is making it obvious he/she is putting himself and his/her sales infront of making the customer happy, Also, was this worth it for the salesman? If he could've sold $100 pair of gloves in 5 minutes, instead of $1500 over 2 hours. a 15x multiplier on sales but also a 40x multiplier on time... > Once upon a time, it was articles on business fundamentals like this that drew me to HN. I think https://stratechery.com/ is now closer to what you are looking for.

FYI: For those of you who enjoy articles like these, https://stratechery.com/ might be worth your while ;)

Benedict Evans’ newsletter on mobile and related tech (everything in tech is related) is quite good as a weekly round up of important stories, plus his own long form writing which is top notch. [1] Ben Thompson’s Stratechery is good too. More hit and miss because it’s mostly his original hot takes, but frequently insightful. [2] [1] Subscribe at bottom https://www.ben-evans.com [2] Also a blog I guess, hit menu and subscribe by email. https://stratechery.com

Ben Thompson of Stratechery (https://www.stratechery.com) - in addition to just talking about tech, would be good to hear about how he's grown his blog into such a great business.

I keep mine pretty minimal, as I often don't have time to read a lot, but the 3 main ones: - The Sizzle, great for quick summaries of the days tech news - https://thesizzle.com.au - Stratechery - https://stratechery.com - MacStories Weekly - https://club.macstories.net

https://stratechery.com/ - best tech blog on the Internet. Nothing related to coding but thorough and thoughtful take on every-day-happenings in the tech industry.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery: https://stratechery.com/ And my most recommended read of all, Slate Star Codex: http://slatestarcodex.com/ (Skip all the link posts and open threads; just read his essays. Superb.)

There are cases of individuals who make money charging for content (Ben Thompson comes to mind: https://stratechery.com/) and others who give away their content but have managed to put together revenue streams that don't annoy their users (http://daringfireball.net/). If someone has unique content that other people want, especially as an individual rather than a multi-person business, there are ways to make money. It's not "baked into the web", so it may require being creative about how the offering is put together... but, it's still doable. What makes Ben Thompson an interesting example is that there is no shortage of people writing about trends in tech. But he has a focus and style that are unique enough that people pay to subscribe to his updates.

I look forward to this one every day, easily the best return on $100/year you'll ever get. Stratechery: https://stratechery.com

Excellent: https://stratechery.com/

Honestly, if she’s ready to graduate High school and enter college, she’s old enough to be researching those questions on her own (not that you can’t too). She should be, too. Learning how to learn in your industry is an actual skill to learn. Learning what the “pulse” of the industry is will also be valuable for her during studies and beyond, and she’ll also meet peers who can have those discussions with her. That said, I think for many this forum is actually the place to learn about the industry. It’s too broad an industry to find more specifics without knowing her interests. Does she like startups? Does she care more about the business side? Financial tech? AI? App development? Does she not know? This site is honestly a great mixed aggregator of other sites. Find interesting ones and see the other posts. She’s in HS so the bar is low on deep technical knowledge and expectations. She should probably focus less on intense research topics unless she has an actual interest in a more academic side (simply because academic research is less approachable to someone without much academic experience). If she doesn’t have an answer to those questions, I would say she just start googling things that pique curiosity. “How does X work” is how I started. That’s how I learned which buzzwords and jargon mattered to me. Probably more approachable for a younger person earlier on the journey. Here are some newsletters I follow. My interests skew towards business. Bits About…

Over the last few years I've made a habit of trying to understand others as much as possible. Historically I only read left-leaning sources but after exposing myself to more, it became clear that I was blind to the other side's perspective. I've found that there was typically validity to multiple views on most topics, and that selection bias (what news sources choose to cover) was a big problem. So these days I visit a number of sources, which is easier today because there are sites that try to represent views from different parts of the spectrum. Staying informed does take time (at least an hour a day), money (supporting news via subscriptions), and effort (takes away mental energy from other things). Apart from the list below I also read and subscribe to a few different local news sources. Over the last several years, local news has been dying (financial issues) and I think that's a bad thing because it means you miss things happening around you that affect your life more so than national news, and because you only get a homogeneous national perspective (often reduced to a left versus right axis) instead of the more diverse issue-to-issue variation that is possible locally. I recommend identifying a few local sources near you if you have the time to read! UNCATEGORIZED 1. Hacker News (I check the first couple pages several times a day) 2. Matt Taibbi (https://taibbi.substack.com - investigative reporting by a former Rolling Stone journalist) 3. Glenn Greenwald…

“This is a point that bears repeating: because U.S. open weight model makers must follow the frontier labs’ terms of service, they (1) are worse than Chinese alternatives and (2) end up distilling the distillation, just with a detour through Chinese labs. Wouldn’t it be better if western open weight model makers could go to the source? … The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum. Stopping distillation — which is literally just querying the API — is nearly impossible; the U.S. should go the other way and lean into a new copyright policy that both indemnifies the labs and also guarantees that what they learned fuels further innovation for everyone else” [1]. [1] https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/

By the harness I believe he means the entire end-user product experience, not specifically the harness code. I’ve mostly stuck with codex because their Mac app is better and I’ve gotten used to running automations through it. The more workflows they can build around this (design tools, collaboration, etc), the better chance of lock-in. He talks about this in another recent essay https://stratechery.com/2026/anthropics-safety-superpower/ > If you own the user touchpoint, then you have meaningful lock-in, and the best way to own the user touchpoint is to be the canvas for everything they need to do. This, by extension, means that the frontier labs are on a collision course with software companies: it’s software that owns the user touchpoint, and it’s in the frontier labs’ long-term interest to not simply be a commodity input into software but to simply replace software outright.

It's not the codebase they're purchasing, it's the customer list, R&D talent, and most importantly, data corpus. X AI is weak on coding and most of their founding researchers have departed for greener pastures. Musk has a great datacenter, but no researchers or data to use it with. This acquisition makes sense in that context. See also ($, Stratechery) https://stratechery.com/2026/john-ternus-and-apples-hardware-defined-f…

Excellent example of a strategy credit. From Stratechery[0]: > Strategy Credit: An uncomplicated decision that makes a company look good relative to other companies who face much more significant trade-offs. For example, Android being open source [0]: https://stratechery.com/2013/strategy-credit/

Ben Thompson interviewed UA's CEO on Starlink a few months ago. Scott said: "It took time to negotiate, because we wanted to own the consumer data, and at the beginning, Starlink did, so that was hard, and then, the other thing was I wanted to let my big competitors in the United States finish their deals with other providers and get locked in so that we would — eventually, everyone’s going to have Starlink." Brilliant. Just brilliant. Ensured that UA would be first (of the 3 major US carriers) to Starlink and that everyone else had to wait until their existing agreements multi-year expired before switching. UA's best CEO in decades! https://stratechery.com/2026/an-interview-with-united-ceo-scott-kirby-…

Steve Yegge is hella smart, and I've spent many hours digging into his recent work on GasTown and Beads, but he needs to read up on business strategy. I'd recommend starting with Stratechery's articles on on Platforms and Aggregators[0], and a semester long course on Porter's Five Forces[1]. [0]https://stratechery.com/2019/shopify-and-the-power-of-platforms/ [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porter%27s_five_forces_analysis

> Does anyone else like to change the font on news articles using Inspect Element? Yes, for sites that use unreadably thin fonts, such as https://stratechery.com

I recommend this Ben Thompson piece on why resiliency has declined: https://stratechery.com/2025/resiliency-and-scale/

Stratechery does an OUTSTANDING job covering Intel, TSMC, and chips. https://stratechery.com/?s=intel They were talking about this in 2013 https://stratechery.com/2013/the-intel-opportunity/

I think you are missing it: https://stratechery.com/2025/deepseek-faq/ That has a great overview - this is a new model, but also a distillation. They used new techniques to make it really cheap (comparatively).

Cloudflare generally seems to have a really smart strategy team. There's a really excellent Stratechery article about Cloudflare's strategy team more generally: (Stratechery is down now, but the web archive is up.) https://web.archive.org/web/20250108182845/https://stratechery.com/202… https://stratechery.com/2021/cloudflares-disruption/