Transcript

00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You’re saying come dream with me a little, and if you get too much into the fantasy world, it becomes almost religious, and that’s where you get something like a WeWork happening. But when you can make the argument in a coherent way and are able to earn parts of that argument, then that come dream with me can be extremely compelling and can take outsiders along for the ride with you.

00:00:30 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Mario Gabrieli of the Generalist.

00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Hey, great to be here.

00:00:51 - Speaker 2: And Mario, I understand that before your life in tech, you were working in a Michelin star restaurant. What was that like?

00:00:59 - Speaker 1: It was fascinating.

I should clarify that I was truly the lowest man on the totem pole in the Michelin Star restaurant, so a lot of chopping vegetables and sort of assembling geometric and intricate salads and ceviches and things like that, but it was pretty fascinating to see what a high performance team in that environment looks like, and I don’t think it’s so different than a startup, you know, we had a very Strong sort of charismatic but efficient leader, a really well run team and like extremely high levels of motivation that, you know, I don’t know if I’ve seen even that many startups that have that level of drive from folks that were on their feet 1112, 16 hours a day, and obviously, you know, it’s not the most lucrative industry, so there’s a lot of passion and a lot of art in that that I respected a great deal.

00:01:53 - Speaker 2: I also feel like from what I’ve seen in the restaurant business, you know, chef’s table and other fictional representations that it’s almost has this performance element because of the timing and the real-time nature of it, you know, a startup, things may be fast paced, but ultimately, Maybe you, you know, ship once a day if you’re a very focused, continuous deployment type team, that’s something where you have, OK, it’s show time, you know, from 7 to 10 p.m. or whatever, dinner rush hour, all the food has to come out together and be the right temperature and so on. It feels like, yeah, there’s something almost theatrical to it.

00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Yes, 100%. It always felt very bad if I did a plate that chef was like, no this can’t go out. You’re like, oh gosh, I forget that we are judging it, you know, minute by minute here. Yeah, that’s an interesting thing to adapt to.

00:02:45 - Speaker 2: Now the Generalist is a publication, if that’s the right way to put it, I think so.

00:02:50 - Speaker 2: That covers business and technology. It’s something I’ve been reading basically since you got started, absolutely fascinating, very long form pieces that dive really deeply on a variety of topics, but often profiling specific companies, and I’ll reference some of my favorites there, but maybe you can tell us what the generalist is for you and yeah, the story that brought you there.

00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Amazing. Yeah, I think you did a great job describing it and have always very much appreciated you being a reader, so I’m grateful for that.

The generalist is a what I hope modern media publication. We’ve started out with our deep dives, which are once a week we put out a deep piece of research usually about a company, as you mentioned, could be a crypto project, a venture fund or a trend.

And the goal is to tell the story of that company in a way that both surfaces what makes it interesting and unique and the lessons behind it, but does so in a way that it really does feel like a narrative. And that’s both, you know, I think because of my own interests in storytelling and more sort of fictional styles of writing, but also pragmatic, you know, I think we all remember stories much, much better than we do. drier recitations of a subject and so the position of the generalist has always been If you really want to learn about these companies and the way that they’re impacting the future, the most efficient as well as the most enjoyable way is by packaging it in this sort of grander tale. And so the ultimate goal is, you know, build the most thoughtful publication in tech that has the depth of research of equity analysis, but a style that is closer to the New Yorker than a hedge fund.

00:04:42 - Speaker 2: I think when it comes to business analysis pieces, you might think of, for example, a high profile example would be stray, and you know, his analysis is excellent, but it is pretty dry stuff.

You have to be really interested in the nuts and bolts and the inside baseball.

Of technology companies and the industry and so forth, so yours strike me perhaps differently maybe that you spend time on the personal backgrounds of the founders and in many cases going back to who their parents were and what brought them to this place, but also telling the story in a context that’s I don’t know, it feels more like almost all of your briefings me feel like there’s something that could be adapted to like an HBO fictionalized, you know, TV show, not in like a sensationalist sense, but in the sense of a gripping narrative that you want to like follow through to the end, which is good because they’re also very, very long and detailed.

00:05:39 - Speaker 1: They are very long. Uh, thank you, that’s very kind.

00:05:42 - Speaker 2: To give some examples, we’ll link these in the show notes, but just some ones that struck me.

One is the story of Telegram, which is a messaging app that basically almost everyone I know here in Europe uses it, especially after WhatsApp kind of went the Facebook terms of service route. And the backstory of that fellow and his time in Russia doing social media and then kind of his commitment to privacy because of that experience and just how huge it is. It’s like, hey, it’s a little messaging app all my friends use and it seems to be well executed, but the story there is pretty epic. Another example would be one called Andoril, and this is a defense contractor that uses software, and I think there is a natural, maybe knee jerk to anyone who’s making weapons of war or something adjacent to it, that that’s not a good use of computing or that there’s some moral questions there, but I think you do a good job of making an argument of why defense technology or war technology, which can be used for defense and offense is important. As well as just telling the story of this group that modernized it.

And the third one I’ll mention is more of a blockchain kind of web 3 world company which is Helium, and this one’s also interesting, and maybe we’ll talk about your interest in the cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds, but it’s one that I’m probably a little more skeptical of and you seem to have more interest and enthusiasm for, but perhaps reading some of these deeper dives gives me more of a sense of like, OK, you know, there’s a lot of noise in this space, but there are some interesting call them success stories there.

00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the helium one is a good example of how crypto can sort of divide people and you can look at the same set of facts and come up with, you know, very different conclusions.

That one sparked a rather public debate on Twitter and amongst other media publications of, you know, whether helium is a success story or not, the usage is low, but the scale is broad, and so it’s always interesting to see.

Which parts of the story matter to people? I think, you know, for better or worse, when I see something extremely novel, working at least in some really meaningful way, that to me is like extremely exciting, but you know, I think there’s also plenty of value in people saying yes, but here are all the things that aren’t working about it and, you know, the rooms for improvement.

So that was a fun one and a stressful one.

00:08:09 - Speaker 2: And can you tell us a little about the journey that brought you from, at one point, working in a high intensity kitchen, and ended in creating this tech publication with these in-depth weekly briefings?

00:08:22 - Speaker 1: Yes, well, it might surprise you to hear that it wasn’t particularly linear. It was a lot of exploration and wandering from one place to another. I, despite my very American accent, grew up in London to an American mother and Italian father and sort of always spoken an American accent at home, just a lot of code switching, and came to the US for undergraduate, went to college and was very much of the mind that I was going to.

Be a lawyer and then sort of move into the public sector. That was definitely my sort of mental model of how people made impact in the world and followed that, you know, rather assiduously through undergrad. All of my sort of internships were on the hill. I was extremely into mock trial and going every couple weekends to Iowa or California to compete in these, you know, literally sham trials, which was extremely nerdy and really had a pretty clear path there.

But at some point I decided I wanted to study abroad and You know, like every good sort of truth seeking young undergraduate who has a passing interest in Buddhism, I went to Kathmandu and spent 6 months there, and it was extremely, extremely difficult, but also I think a valuable lesson in dealing with one’s own narratives about oneself.

I know that’s sort of the topic of our conversation today, but You know, I think we are all predisposed to either inherit lessons that others have told us and take them as our own or develop them ourselves. And in the isolation of Kathmandu, you know, it’s very hard to get internet there. Time difference alone makes communication difficult. I think I started to recognize the cracks in my logic, although it would take a few years for me to. Sort of shake it all out.

So, left undergraduate, got a job at a law firm that had a very interesting program in theory, which was, you know, you can do the work a 1 or 2nd year associate at a law school might be able to do. You can draft cross exams, you can write briefs. And so I got to work on some, again, theoretically interesting cases, one of the first Madoff cases, New York’s involvement with sort of reconstruction after Hurricane Sandy, but really quickly realized like, wow, my brain does not work in such a way as it is able to get enjoyment from this work. It is extremely like detail oriented and really much less about storytelling or writing or anything else.

Or even, you know, if you want to get sort of righteous about it, justice or any of these other things, right? Like, once you see how the sausage actually gets made, you’re like, oh, we spent 9 months working on this case and then all of that was just to settle, you know, it was all a sort of game of chicken, like that is infuriating. And so I sort of realized, oh this is not gonna be the thing, and while trying to avoid doing as little work as possible at the law firm, I started to spend a lot of time on TechCrunch. And that was when I started to think like, oh, actually a lot of the interesting things happening in the world aren’t happening through government or nonprofits or anything else. They’re happening through tech. That’s where the impact is occurring, and that’s what is making a real difference. And so there were several other steps from there that, you know, I’m happy to go through, but that was sort of the moment that I started to become interested in this world.

00:11:49 - Speaker 3: And did you jump right to writing about it, or was there be steps between there?

00:11:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I left the law firm. I had started at that point taking night school classes at NYU in fiction writing. Always loved writing growing up. I, you know, was writing a novel for most of my teen years in one way or another, you know, I’d sort of get like 100 pages in and then start on something different. And so that always really appealed to me.

And so I thought, OK, I’m gonna take a year. I’ll apply to grad school because I need to be outwardly doing something. But really I will spend the year finishing a first draft of this novel I’ve started in night school classes. And take it from there.

So I spent a year doing that, got into grad school, and after I had gotten into grad school and finished a draft of this book, I decided then to spend that summer going to culinary school and cooking at this Michelin star restaurant, which was a great like modern French place on 5th Avenue. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a ton of fun. And then again, sort of another few chapters of this exploration without a clear sight of what I was supposed to be doing. I did my masters in international development with a focus on tech and emerging markets. That to me felt sort of like a good interstitial, you know, intermediary phase between this international relations, politics, interest, and this sort of less certain thing about technology.

So I did that. I worked in Bogota for 56 months, one summer working with like an incubator down there, getting to see these different startups. And then once I graduated, I really sort of more formally entered the world of tech for better or worse.

So joined a startup called Eco, which was a fast platform for freelancers. We were acquired by Fiver after a couple of years and then joined a venture firm called Charge Ventures. Which was preceed and seed investing in New York. And it was while I was at charge that I basically had an old boss say, you’re an investor now, it probably would be useful for you to start writing about tech and sharing your thoughts online. And you know, ever since that NYU night school class, I developed this habit of getting up an hour or two before work to work on my novel at the coffee shop, you know, around the corner. And so I sort of was like, all right, like I think I know at least how to write a bit. Let’s see what this could become. And so, yeah, the generalist was born out of that little experiment and sort of quickly absorbed my interests and enthusiasm.

00:14:36 - Speaker 2: Timing wise, I feel like you went all in on this with a sort of paid subscription to your publication around the time that paid newsletters generally were starting to get popular, being in the zeitgeist, something like that.

We talked with Dan Shipper from every, they started their business and were early on Substack.

There’s obviously, yeah, Substack is a platform, but also other ways of kind of subscribing to individual writers or small groups of writers where you like their perspective and their take and you’re willing to just pay them directly versus the mediated stories that we get through, whether it’s something like social media feeds, Facebook. Reddit, Twitter, whatever, or even something like, you know, the classic kind of magazine you mentioned, the New Yorker, The Economist or something like that, that sort of bundles up, writing and reporting from many different sources, puts it all through a copy editing thing and then you purchase that bundle and this kind of direct relationship with a creator seemed like that’s pretty new in the last few years and maybe you. I don’t know what the order was there, whether you saw that that was kind of a growing opportunity and you wanted to be part of that, or if you just happened to start doing this around the same time, that was also an emerging trend.

00:15:49 - Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, it was definitely luck.

I had never read a sub stack before, but I remember seeing, I think, a friend of mine saying they were starting one, and I was like, oh, OK, for this new thing where I’m gonna write.

Every week I’ll just try out this new tool since it seems like it’s interesting and it’ll be fun to use and that was, you know, I think in sort of late 2019, and then I went full time on the generalist by August 2020, and it felt like the landscape had changed a ton during that time. I mean, obviously COVID also massively impacted this world because I think there was just such an appetite for Online content, but also the way that the creator economy as a category in tech and venture capital emerged and the legitimacy of being sort of an online solo writer proliferated, both of those were, or all of those things were real tailwinds for me in a way that I didn’t necessarily recognize at the time. It just sort of felt like, you know, good luck, wish it was.

00:16:59 - Speaker 2: So our topic today is narratives. Now we’ve teased at this already a little bit. You’ve talked about your interest in narratives and certainly taking a class for fiction writing or writing novels, you know, that’s the purest of narrative one that’s pure invention of imagination. But here we’re talking about narratives for real world events. It’s always good to start at the beginning. What does that word narrative mean for you, Mario?

00:17:25 - Speaker 1: To me, a narrative is just a story, and it can be either fiction, nonfiction, the real sort of part of it that I think of is almost just like this unit of meaning that has been built in such a way that our minds really grasp onto it and take meaning from it, that is maybe different than just information or data, right? There’s like this other element feathered or ribboned into it that Makes it extra sticky for us because it follows an arc that our brains are just predisposed to latch onto.

00:18:03 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I find myself mentally referencing storytelling as kind of a closely related thing.

We did a podcast on that sometime back and talked about great storytellers like Steve Jobs, for example, or the TED Talk format, but one of the things I think that makes something a story as opposed to, like you said, just data.

And it is especially relevant to, yeah, the business world where you’re often talking in abstractions, what are the best practices for running your startup, for example, or you do actually want data about a company or you know the market, what’s happening in the market in terms of trends that you as an investor or an employee or a company founder might care about, but it’s much less powerful to present the abstraction or the data like. People who don’t look both ways before crossing the street are 20% more likely to be struck by a car versus telling a story of one day Joe wanted to cross the street, he didn’t look both ways, and he was turned into Broad pizza by an oncoming truck, and his friends were all incredibly sad. And it’s just like, even with something as dumb and simple story like that, that is more likely to stick in your mind or have an emotional impact and therefore stick with you and maybe make you think about looking both ways when you cross the street next time than that first abstraction.

00:19:23 - Speaker 1: Yes, it’s fun actually to sort of brainstorm this live with you guys a little bit, but it’s almost like data plus tension or something. There’s somehow this notion of stakes or drama that you’re adding to it that fundamentally changes that information and you sort of only get that tension by tying it to something that we can relate to or see some of ourselves in.

00:19:49 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly the concept of stakes or tension or conflict is, I think, important in a story.

I remember watching a little bit of uh Master Class by Aaron Sorkin, who I think is one of the great storytellers in the kind of television and movie world, often doing workplace dramas, you know, something that could easily be very boring, things like the West Wing, but instead makes it really exciting and gripping.

And he talks about the fact that yeah, you need some goal and then a thing that makes it really urgent to reach that goal, but then a thing that is standing in your way. And the more you can ratchet up both sides of that, the urgency and the difficulty that has to be overcome to reach the goal, the more interesting and compelling the story is.

Mm. One of your articles I think it would be great to zoom in on, and again I’ll link this in the show notes as you’re writing about soft power and you contrast this with traditional marketing, maybe a little call back here to where we started, which is you give the now very classic example of the Michelin star, Michelin guide, restaurant guide as a form of soft power marketing where essentially they wanted to sell more tires because that’s what they. But that means actually just expanding people’s desire to take road trips, and that means, or led to this concept, which turned out to be a good one and a counterintuitive one, that making a guide of restaurants that you might visit around the country or around the world would be in the long game, a good way to sell more tires.

00:21:23 - Speaker 1: Yes, it’s one of the weirdest business stories in my opinion. Like you could never have pulled a management consulting team together and said, hey, you know, we really want to sell more tires, what’s your plan? There’s no shot they would come up with this idea because it’s so sort of left field.

But even if they did, I think the average company at least would sort of laugh you out of the room because it is just so orthogonal, but that is also I think like what makes it so brilliant.

And I think it is potentially one of those things that is particularly potent today, because I think we’re also all very aware of the advertising we are receiving as consumers. And so the ability to tell one’s story in this slightly more indirect way that appeals to the fundamental parts of one’s business, I think can be extremely powerful and is probably under leveraged a lot in the tech world and beyond.

00:22:22 - Speaker 2: Yeah, well, it is a long game.

You give a lot of other kind of more modern examples in the story, one that I think folks who listen to this podcast will be quite familiar with is Stripe, and they have a lot of sort of initiatives in this realm, but Stripe Press is a good example, and you could wonder how in the world publishing these books about human progress or stories that are obliquely related to things that nerdy technology people are interested in. How does that help them? You know, sell more credit card processing. But at the same time, it has been incredibly powerful for their brand, which you could think of as a recruiting thing, maybe if just, you know, tech nerds like a company, then they’re more likely to go work there, but I think you’re saying there’s more to it than that.

00:23:09 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the way sort of I have thought about breaking soft power down is into these sort of two constituent parts. You have the core message, the real story that you’re wanting to tell, which, you know, in Michelin’s case is something like, you know, the world is smaller than you think.

And then you have to find the vehicle that helps you tell that story in a way that doesn’t feel like marketing that is indirect but still powerful. And so with Michelin, they had the Michelin Guide, which is all about discovering great destinations within a driving distance.

Stripe, I think, has something pretty similar going on, which is, if you really abstract back from Stripe. Almost main thing that they are trying to say it feels like across their different vehicles and initiatives is that progress really matters. It isn’t an accident, it requires intentional work. And when you sort of see it through that lens, things like Stripe Press, even indie hackers or their sort of developer magazine increment.

Actually start to, I think, make a lot of sense for reinforcing that story. And when you have a story like that, I think it Has power in ways that are often hard to define.

Yes, it definitely I think helps with recruiting. It helps because it separates you from every other payments company in the world, right? No one gets cachet from working at PayPal and anything like the same way as they do at Stripe or Adan or whoever else. It also, I think allows them to sort of command a much bigger territory than they might control right now. Because Stripe is always talking about things on this historic civilization scale level. When Stripe then says, hey, we’re gonna do crypto, you never really feel like, ah, they’re not gonna be able to pull that off, or like, are they really dedicating time to that? You always get the sense they have thought about it extremely deeply, they are aware of the big moves of history and are willing to dedicate real resources and time to whatever they put their minds to. It ends up having a broader reach than many other traditional companies, I think.

00:25:27 - Speaker 2: I wonder if this connects also to the startup approach, I guess, which is one often of wanting to change the world and obviously that term has become almost a little bit hackneyed, but it’s true that usually you’re trying to do something disruptive in the sense that there’s some corner of the world, even if it’s some little piece of business software or some big piece of infrastructure software like payments, and you think that the way it’s done now is not as good as it could be.

But the improvement needed is not an incremental one. It’s not the sort of thing that, for example, if you’re working in payments or you’re working in social media or you’re working in thinking tools, say you think that the companies that already exist there aren’t really in a position to kind of incrementally go to this new world that you picture because maybe it includes some sort of contrarian takes or some discontinuous jumps.

And so, in building the startup and trying to make that jump to this new world, there’s like a worldview, and in some cases that can be almost cult-like in some senses, you come to believe that almost, you know, there’s a fine line between vision and delusion that the world can be more the way that our mission describes.

And to believe that is this leap of faith, and we all have to have a almost vaguely cult-like belief in that, but that needs to extend beyond our team, and certainly it’s recruiting and certainly it’s investors, but it’s also customers. And this is something we saw pretty dramatically at Hiroku, which is when I wrote this manifesto, the twelve-factor app, that really made a difference for customers understanding and getting in the headspace of what we were doing, which is making it possible to deploy apps in this true cloud native way that made servers less relevant or even not a part of the equation. And that was a confusing jump for people, but once there was this I don’t know, philosophical piece that described that in a way that was somewhat independent from our product that that could have more weight or you could engage with it on a level that was less of a, here’s some propaganda trying to get me to buy a product and more like Maybe here’s some propaganda getting me to buy into a worldview, but if you buy into that worldview, the product makes sense. Now, once you’re in that worldview, maybe there’s multiple products that you might choose to use or multiple tools or whatever that would work there, and then those tools and products can compete on their relative merits within that. But first you have to buy the worldview or else the product just doesn’t even make sense.

00:27:57 - Speaker 1: Yes, I think that’s a really well articulated way of putting this.

You’re sort of saying come dream with me a little, and if you get too much into the fantasy world, it becomes almost religious, and that’s where you get something like a WeWork happening, but when you can sort of make the argument in a coherent way and are able to earn parts of that argument.

I think then that come dream with me actually can be extremely compelling and can take outsiders along for the ride with you. I think you guys do this, you know, a lot with Muse too, right? Like there are probably many more dry and pragmatic ways of describing what you’re doing or presenting what you’re doing, but the way that you guys obviously seem to think about it is as this. Sort of step forward in the way that we’re able to think with computers. And so, I would submit that you guys are probably doing a lot more in terms of soft power in a very intelligent and thoughtful way than most others.

00:29:02 - Speaker 2: Oh well, thank you.

Yeah, I mean, part of it just comes from our personal motivations to, it is in many ways the world we want to see come true is, I think.

Equally important, perhaps even more important than the business itself.

Now, we have a duty to our team, to our customers, to investors, to, yeah, a fiduciary duty, in fact, to make the business be successful, and you do have to pay attention to those pragmatic needs and try to sell your product and otherwise make the business successful, that’s all important.

But there is this element where I care more about seeing these ideas, whether it’s people being a little more thoughtful in a world of social media and hot takes, or maybe some of these technology pieces like local first sync and the benefits that has over cloud or infinite canvas and why I think that’s a really interesting document type as compared to the classic top to bottom linear documents of text. And I hope each of those ideas has a chance to succeed on its own and part of what we’re doing here is bringing those ideas forward.

And you know, if they all come together well and we put that together with a product that’s well made and the right price and the right go to market strategy and all that sort of thing, it can be a very powerful combination. And some of these examples that you’ve named here like Stripe or some of the others that are listed in your article, they’ve managed to do both of those together, which makes them into these incredible juggernauts. We’re not a juggernaut, at least not yet, but certainly, No matter how things turn out in terms of overall success of the business, if I can look back and say we had some really compelling ideas and a better vision for the way the world could be or some piece of the world could be, and we helped to advance those in some way, and that those goals are just as valuable to me as the kind of more pragmatic success of the business.

00:30:51 - Speaker 1: Yes, I think as a result, you know, if you were to describe or someone was to describe Muse as a whiteboarding app, you’d be like, oh, that doesn’t feel quite right, you know, that feels too simple or not sufficiently thoughtful. And I think a lot of other companies don’t necessarily earn that elevation, or don’t even try for it per se.

00:31:11 - Speaker 2: Yeah, which is always a trade off when it comes to just the pragmatic side of the marketing.

I mean, we do on our website at the moment say include whiteboarding is one of the things you can do with Muse cause at some point, There’s the loftier things of let’s be more thoughtful or let’s use a computer or the capabilities of computers to help us be more thoughtful, but at the same time, then you go, OK, that sounds nice, but what actually is it? And he goes, well, it’s kind of like a whiteboard, right? And then it does feel very reductive and if you have just that, I think it’s too simple and doesn’t make clear what we’re trying to do.

But you need both, you need this simple reductive piece just to understand what actually it is, and then there’s the other pieces that maybe help elevate and help frame and help put into a context that hopefully makes it matter more.

00:31:58 - Speaker 1: Yes, agreed.

00:32:00 - Speaker 2: Well, next, I’d be curious to hear a little bit about the business side. How does the generalists work in terms of how big is the team, how do you work together, how do you make your money? It’s all well and good to have these extremely long and detailed write-ups, but how do you make this work as a not only a full-time gig, but indeed a whole business.

00:32:21 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so the generalist is right now 2 of us full time, and the two of us full time are married to one another, so it’s me and my wife.

00:32:31 - Speaker 2: How does that work out in practice?

00:32:33 - Speaker 1: Honestly, fantastic. I know that there’s a lot of, I think, reasonable apprehension about working with one spouse, but I think if you end up having complementary skills. It can be extremely powerful because hopefully you have a large long track record of solving problems together that is useful in the business realm as well, and also just so many shorthands for things and, you know, depth of understanding that would be quite hard to replicate with someone fresh. So, I started the generalist part time just as a little side thing in 2019. Went full time 2020, and my wife Alessandra joined around this time last year, and we had thought about it for a long time.

She comes from a creative production background and had always been a really important sort of advisor to me and the person I would talk through strategic decisions with and I’d always wanted to see if I could sort of poach her, but as she decided to sort of look for a new chapter, she took some time off and Started to think about it more seriously and yeah, thankfully we gave it a shot. So it’s now, as I said, about a year in and has been definitely a step change improvement for the generalist in terms of what we’re able to take on, the level that I think we’re able to execute at both hopefully on the writing side and beyond, and I think just puts us in a much better position sort of going forward. The business itself has, I think, very fortunately continued to grow really well.

So the main ways that we make money are through sponsorships and then through the subscription to our private community. The big change for us was actually initially that we had a subscription for extra content or you know, roughly 50% of the content wepagated.

And the big lesson of 2021 on that front was that actually that doesn’t really make sense, particularly for a business like the generalist. The content is, as you might expect, quite general, and as a result, you might have one week where the topic is extremely important and, you know, immediately valuable to you. If you’re a crypto investor, the week where we publish 15 sort of snippets about interesting crypto companies is like, yeah, a no brainer, you would definitely have paid for that. But the next week when we’re talking about, you know, the playbook of Stripe or something else might be outside of your wheelhouse. And so I think by having this broader approach, it means that a sponsorship model makes more sense. And so yeah, we made that switch, it was Yeah, clearly the right decision and also ended up being for the benefit of the subscription side, limiting that just to the community, I think increased the perception of how valuable the community was and improved conversion because I think it was just a clearer sell that if you want a community, great, this is what you’re there for, and that made the messaging a lot easier.

00:35:52 - Speaker 2: It’s also always tricky, I think, in the content business to decide where those paywalls go, like you said, which articles are behind them or not, or is it that all articles are readable from the beginning, but then you at some point halfway down where it says, you know, enjoying this article, please become a subscriber and anything like that is going to limit the spread of your content, which sort of limits your top of funnel. So it’s always a difficult trade-off.

00:36:18 - Speaker 1: Yes, I think also. I still have not at all cracked like which pieces will go viral when, which ones are gonna be the ones that drive a ton of new sign ups, and so having sort of more swings at that and not saying, oh, actually, you know, 50% of these are only gonna go to a small audience because their paywalls has been important as well. So yeah, it’s been really interesting and hopefully we’ll continue to get sharper on those different aspects of it.

00:36:50 - Speaker 2: And I’d love to hear about your creative process, how you pick subjects for your stories, what the research looks like, or how you get access to what’s occasionally inside-ish information, and then, yeah, with the writing process of like, especially with such a small team and a relatively demanding schedule of weekly publications.

00:37:10 - Speaker 1: Yes, process may be too generous a word for what is me sort of feeling like my hair is on fire a lot of the time and running to learn as much as I can as possible.

It does sometimes feel like I’m just sort of trying to shove as much information in one ear and then, you know, a bit like final exams. By the time the next weeks happened, you’ve sort of forgotten about 50% of it, but it’s extremely fun, so that’s the part of it that I think makes it addictive.

The process goes sort of something like this, which is, I think hopefully a few weeks ahead of time, what pieces I want to write.

For the first time ever we’ve actually like booked our content calendar out for the rest of the year, which is kind of a miracle, but usually it was much more short term. Then there’s sort of usually a bit of time where I’m thinking it over in the background while I’m working on pieces that are coming up.

Two weeks beforehand I would say I really start seriously doing my own research, reaching out to people from the different companies, their investors, customers, jumping on calls, sending them questions, and then the week of the piece itself is. You know, a little bit of chaos in terms of the writing front.

So Mondays tend to be pretty relaxed where I’m getting to do those things like having calls and doing more passive research. Tuesday’s a little tighter. Wednesday I’m like, OK, I have to get an introduction written, otherwise I’m gonna start feeling terrible tomorrow. Thursday I’m usually like, ah, I’m a little behind, like, let’s go a little faster.

Friday I can’t do anything else but write. I just have to, you know, make sure that is entirely clear.

Saturday the same, you know, you’re very much in sort of the bunker where nothing can disturb you, and then Sunday is unpleasant where I sort of like get up at 4 a.m. usually cause I’m like, oh God, I didn’t finish this, like, there’s something that isn’t quite right or there’s something I’m missing.

And so my poor wife will have the Amazon Alexa chirp 4 a.m. I sort of trudge out into the office and then by the time she gets up, hopefully I have something for her to take a read at. And then it’s just a, yeah, a mad dash to the end.

There are some images to do, there’s some graphs to pull together, and then we publish. And so that is probably not a scalable solution. But it has worked for now, and I will need to find new solutions as we grow.

00:39:42 - Speaker 2: I got a small peek at how you guess research information from sources insofar as you were writing an article about Y Combinator and their whole now pretty long and storied history. I had a very small piece of that insofar as participating pretty early on.

And you sent me just a little, basically Google Doc questionnaire with some questions about what I see and, you know, just prompts for me to reflect on the experience, and I don’t know, there was, forget if you quoted me, or maybe there’s just a paragraph or something that mentioned some of the things there, but assuming that’s reflective of how you do research normally, How do you identify the sources? Yeah, how many people do you try to talk to? Are there some, you know, they’re really canonical source, and if you can, you get a, you know, 3 hour interview with them, what does that process look like?

00:40:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’d say that’s reasonably typical and grateful that you were game to share your thoughts. It depends a lot. So, for example, when you’re writing about a lot of these mega funds, like when I wrote about Tiger. Or I just wrote about SoftBank this past week, you can pretty much never get the people at the company to really be on record at the very least, and so then it’s a little bit more thorny, where you have to find folks that maybe used to work there or have interfaced with them as founders or co-investors.

There is often one person that you end up finding who can kind of give you the scaffolding of the whole story, and that’s when the story like totally transforms in your mind and it’s like such a relief, you know, you get these kind of episodic things and then someone who has been there for enough time can say this happened with Tiger, for example, can say like, hey, here’s actually how it went, and here’s how people were thinking about it at the time, and here’s why we made this decision, and same for several of these others, and that is when it like.

Ah, you’re like, I got it now, but often you don’t find that.

So sometimes there’s stories where I haven’t been able to talk to anyone. That’s increasingly rare now that the generalist has gotten, you know, larger, and then yeah, there’s plenty of times where you actually get to talk to the people behind the scenes or, you know, who are running these organizations, so. Jeff Ralston at YC was generous enough to sit down and do an interview. Lots of the CEOs of the companies I write are now sort of open to have these conversations, which is super helpful. And in the very, very rare cases, you get someone, you know, like a Sambankment Freed who is like, hey, here’s our whole data room and lets you kind of run riot, and so that’s unusual but possible.

00:42:23 - Speaker 2: Yeah, it seems like now that you have a track record of writing these thoughtful pieces that dive deeply and in general, I would say that they’re certainly not puff pieces, but you’re writing about the company because you think they have done something impressive, important because they have this incredible story to tell, and so Given that track record, it seems very desirable indeed to be covered by you and getting to give the information from the company, rather than from perhaps ex-employees who might have their own ax to grind or just a smaller piece of the picture. I could see why that would be valuable to them.

00:43:00 - Speaker 1: Yes, thank you. Hopefully that it continues to be the case. I definitely do probably 95% filter for things that I, a priori, I’m like, this is an amazing company doing something really interesting that we have a lot to learn from. And I always, you know, to your point, want to identify the risks and the parts of it that maybe aren’t working or could fail, but I don’t think I would find it super fun to pick companies that I thought were, you know, poor. And so that does help in terms of allowing for collaboration.

00:43:34 - Speaker 2: Yeah, certainly haven’t fallen into the what I feel like there’s an increasing trend, maybe it’s people outside of tech, but where there’s almost a sort of joy in documenting a mess, whether it’s WeWork or you know, maybe Uber, like I feel like both of those had even TV shows that kind of dramatize. their worst excesses and didn’t put a lot of attention on the hard work or the technology innovations or things like that, which is totally fine. There’s room for things that aren’t necessarily, you know, pro-technology and indeed are questioning maybe some of the worst excesses of the industry.

But yeah, even in, you mentioned the Softbank story. I had read a little of that actually just before our call, and certainly there’s a lot of ups and downs in that story, and the ending is not clear, you know, is this gonna be one that’s looked back on as an epic success or Or one of these like hilarious laughable failures or something in between, we don’t really know when you’re trying to sort of document it midstream with what we know so far and hopefully in a way that is fair to all parties involved.

00:44:44 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I hope so. I think that’s the part that for me is really interesting is this little gray zone where for the most part, you know, none of these companies, well, no company is perfect, right? There’s always some aspect of it that is working or not working, that is maybe poorly thought through versus, you know, brilliantly strategized.

And SoftBank I think is, you know, at both ends of the spectrum at once, perhaps more than many others, where there are some things they do where you just think, oh gosh, why would you have done that? That doesn’t seem to make much sense.

But then when you sort of put it in the context of their whole story and How Masayushisson has made and lost and made fortunes, it all starts to kind of make sense and you can see a little bit of the intelligence behind it, even if it doesn’t work out. And I think that’s always fun because you don’t want to write off an idea entirely, I think a lot of the time. A lot of the time maybe there was some merit to the idea, it was badly executed or the timing was off, or, you know, we were just looking at it from a perspective that wasn’t complete. And SoftBank is a little bit like that, where The Vision fund has, by most accounts, I think, especially VF one, which we have more data on, performed very poorly. But there was something to that idea of like, how do you capitalize a leader so that they can take the long term bets that the market won’t kind of let them do? How do you give them the latitude to make those big swings themselves? How do you create a monopoly through capital? Like those are not obviously dumb ideas. The way they were implemented, you know, left a lot to be desired, I think, but I love at least sort of trying to wade through that.

00:46:35 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I think this topic of what does one write about is actually a really important aspect of narrative that maybe we kind of skipped over in our original discussion because there’s all these things about the narrative once you’ve chosen it, you know, the form and the content, whether it’s oblique or, you know, there’s all these different aspects, but maybe the single most important thing is just what you choose to speak about and therefore bring attention to.

And that actually becomes one of the most powerful things that a narrative teller wields.

Now you tell some good narratives, people realize that they start to listen to you, and then when you get up to deliver your next one, they’re by default going to pay attention to the thing that you start speaking about. It’s very powerful.

00:47:14 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s so true. Every narrative feels like there’s something you’re highlighting and something you’re pushing into the shadow, at least to some extent, and the way that you decide to draw that line between sort of light and dark, you know, bright and shade, whatever that is, obviously entirely changes the story, right, which is, you know, I think why you can get so much disagreement.

00:47:37 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and I would argue that it’s not just light and dark within a given topic like within SoftBank or whatever. It’s SoftBank versus semiconductors versus shipbuilding, right? You know, which of these is more important, the world is so vast and there’s so many things going on. There’s no way you can pay attention to all of it. So a critical aspect of narrative becomes, what am I going to speak about and what am I going to pay attention to?

00:48:01 - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally.

00:48:03 - Speaker 2: I think that touches on something that I like about the creator economy perhaps, which is I’m choosing creators I want to follow partially because I think they have good taste or judgment about what’s interesting.

So yeah, YouTubers who are film critics, your work, Mario, where just by seeing the title of the article and knowing what company you’re covering, it may take a company I’ve heard of that I just don’t have much. Feelings on or knowledge about and it just instantly makes me go, OK, there must be something really interesting there because Mario chose to write about it because I trust that he has a good nose for what’s interesting in tech.

And I think that’s the same thing is true for yeah newsletters I subscribe to, for example, people that do political analysis where just literally they’ve chosen to write about a given topic automatically because I already trust their judgment about what’s important in the world and what’s worth giving our attention. To that already elevates the subject to me. And of course, if I read a lot of their work and I find that I’m not getting the payout from the pieces that I feel like, why did they write a piece about this? This doesn’t seem that important or just relevant to me, then that might make me lose interest and it really is that I guess you could have a version of that for more classic media, which is OK, if the economist wrote about this, it must be interesting or important, but for some reason there’s something about the individual or the judgment of an individual person. And that’s what kind of what you get with the creator economy.

00:49:32 - Speaker 3: Oh man, I got a whole theory, we could talk about some time about the difference between sole proprietors and people in similar positions versus people in larger corporations, but I think it’s a super important point, and I also agree Adam, I tend to listen to individual narrative weavers because They are putting their own reputational capital on the line and they’re making their entire living from that, right? And there’s no ability to, you know, you might say draft behind or parasitize a larger reputational entity, which the short version of my argument is that that temptation becomes overwhelming when there’s a huge reputational draft that you’re sitting behind. It almost doesn’t make sense to invest in your own research and writing when you could just latch on to the behemoth draft behind it, whereas you know with an individual. There’s no choice but to make a valuable product.

00:50:22 - Speaker 1: I think especially in media because the behemoths have so well served true news, like breaking news, and that, you know, doing that requires such massive teams to actually sort of be in the mix.

It’s almost forced the smaller players to say like, OK, let me look a little further afield and make time less of a variable.

And I think that often leads to more important stuff or more interesting stuff, because a lot of the time the things that these bigger publications are telling you are important, they are important only because they just happened, and for these smaller publishers, they’re saying, no, no, no, it’s important for all these actually other interesting reasons that might actually appeal to you in a deeper way.

00:51:11 - Speaker 2: So in the creative process you described, it may be a matter of weeks from when you start researching something or you have a hunch about it to when you’re publishing this finished piece, and certainly the pieces come across as authoritative is quite the right word for it, but it’s not like a, here’s Mario’s blog and here’s my opinion, man. It’s clear you’ve researched this substantially and you’re trying to present. The facts again in that narrative frame you’re telling a story, there’s emotional impact, there’s conflict, there’s tension, but in the end you are also documenting something true and real about the world. How do you find it is this sort of like learning on the fly and then needing to publish something authoritative? What is that experience like? Do you ever feel like you’re wrong or you got it wrong later on, or yeah, what’s that like?

00:52:04 - Speaker 1: Yeah, in many respects it sort of forces you to fall into that phrase often wrong, never in doubt. You’re forced on a weekly basis to create massive conviction and understanding on a topic where in some places you might be starting reasonably close to zero.

Like maybe you understand the moving pieces, you understand what venture capital is or you understand what crypto is, but Looking at an entirely new project that’s doing something different or a fund with a totally different strategic approach takes time and trying to do that in sort of a speed run, I think has some real benefits but also definitely some drawbacks.

I mean, the benefit is that you, I think, have to really sharpen your thinking as quickly as possible, talk to people much more intelligent and knowledgeable than you about this subject, which is a huge gift. And then sort of, you know, commit to something that you want to stand behind and that you know that 60,000+ people hopefully are going to take a look at many of them who might have worked in that industry for several years, some of them who might work at the company, and they will know how much of it is true. And then, you know, there are often moments where sometimes you get that really right and I think for example, SoftBank is one that From what I have heard so far, I think I got it mostly correct. But then there are also cases like Tara, where I wrote a piece about Tara and I touched on the danger of a death spiral and outlined that risk, but by and large, I sort of made the position that I thought it was an interesting venture style bet, like huge upside, definite downside, and you know, that was 100% wrong. And those are the parts where learning in public. can feel painful where you look back on your old self and you think, oh, how did I overlook this or how did I get that so wrong?

00:54:00 - Speaker 3: Yeah, I can definitely see how it’s challenging. One of the interesting results that we keep coming back to on the podcast, this idea of the robustness and power of teaching and learning.

If you look at whether it’s the master apprentice relationship, whether it’s teaching hospitals, whether it’s the academy, it’s traditionally conceived, whether it’s the cities that have the highest concentration of any given industry.

The act of teaching and learning just has some really powerful way of helping people climb the learning curve faster. It always feels messy. It feels like it shouldn’t be the case that teaching hospitals, we have all these students running around, should have good medical results, but just because you’re constantly going through the motion of teaching and learning, it somehow triggers something in your brain where you learn faster. And so I think that’s related to this idea of working in public. You know, it does have a personal element, has a marketing element, but there’s also something to actually get into the truth faster.

00:54:49 - Speaker 1: Mm, that’s super interesting. So I’m actually not familiar with like the data about that. So when these teaching hospitals tend to outperform those that don’t have, you know, a similar structure.

00:55:01 - Speaker 3: You know, I would want to go back to literature before I made a really definitive statement here. I feel like I’m recalling this from a Gande book, who is a doctor who wrote about the practice of medicine, and that’s kind of an interesting self-referential thing there.

Yes. But anyways, I think you. Without looking at the literature, I think we could agree that a lot of the best hospitals in the country are so-called teaching hospitals, where it’s not all doctors at the top of their game.

A lot of it is these medical students, you know, they basically don’t know what they’re doing yet. They’re running around, they’re doing procedures for the first time. They’re getting instructions from doctors on the fly, you know, all this stuff, and there are risks and challenges with that for sure. But It seems to be that it nets out pretty well, at least better than you might intuit given just the raw where these people are at in their career measurement.

00:55:48 - Speaker 1: That’s super interesting. I really like that analogy, and I, I’m gonna try and sniff out where it comes from to learn more, so I’m glad to know it.

00:55:58 - Speaker 3: Yeah, and it’s, that’s completely wrong. Our will tell us and we will do some learning in public.

00:56:02 - Speaker 1: I also want to know what osmotics are.

00:56:05 - Speaker 3: I I don’t know if that’s the thing.

I wrote it down when you mentioned something earlier about you learned or someone was learning from the people that they’re around.

One of my long term theses is that the way people learn and develop values and change behavior is just by osmotically observing and subtly copying the people around them, especially in childhood and early adulthood.

And so, for example, there’s all these theories and practices about how you Teach kids stuff and how people learn, and what the purpose of college is, and I so often see people missing what I think is the main point is just like being physically next to people who have some mores, some values, some ways of being, some habits that are what you basically want to copy.

I just feel like people weigh under index on this.

00:56:56 - Speaker 1: It’s interesting. There was this, I think it was in the Atlantic where they published a piece detailing the results of a fairly extensive research project into the effect postal code has on outcomes later in life, and it was basically something like your child’s earning potential is 25% determined by The zip code in which you live, and they created a massive map where you can search by zip code, like what the outcomes are, and I think the point that, you know, they were making or the sort of conclusions were that being around people who have stable jobs and stable family structures and act in a certain way and value certain things, like all of those actually. There’s a certain amount of uniformity or presence versus absence in these different zip codes, and that like has a huge impact on a child.

00:57:52 - Speaker 2: As the parent of a toddler, I can say they are absolutely imitation machines.

You know, there’s the things that you sort of want to quote unquote teach them, they sort of copy you on, but they copy you on everything, even the things you don’t think you’re teaching them, and I think that extends into adult life as well.

I always like this concept, I don’t know that it’s scientifically supported, it’s more just a folk philosophy, if you like, but that you are The combination of the five people you spend the most time with, and so, choose your friends, colleagues, whatever with care, not just people you like or drawn to, but also that are people you admire and you want to be more like cause you will be more like them whether you like it or not.

00:58:33 - Speaker 1: Yes, that’s so true.

00:58:33 - Speaker 3: And I think this ties back to our narrative topics.

We were talking about narrative as the zero step is you choose to talk about.

And so, if you are what you’re surrounded by, and the narrative environment is what you’re surrounded by, basically people tend to become Whatever the narrative choices are of the people that they look up to.

It’s actually extremely hard to have original thoughts.

At best, most people are just recombining narratives that they’re existing within. So it becomes very important and powerful in terms of what the narrative environment is. And we see this all the time because there are these super important topics in retrospect that just weren’t on people’s narrative map at all. And they get blindsided. And it’s not because at some point they sat down and said, what are the most important things in my world, and they picked wrong is they never did that. They just, one of the top 5 narratives in my environment and, you know, that was quote unquote wrong at some point. On my current example here is the whole energy infrastructure thing, but we could pick a zillion examples.

00:59:33 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it feels like it’s why one of the most generous things I think someone can do for a friend or a child or a colleague is just to sort of recognize and tell them that they can probably do an order of magnitude more than they might be sort of mentally expecting of themselves in a given moment. Like I think we’re very accustomed to sort of Acclimatizing or matching our ambition to the people around us and the things we see, and having someone who can say, no, no, no, don’t worry about that. Like, the thing that you can do is 100 times greater or 100 times more wild is such a crazy gift.

01:00:14 - Speaker 2: And perhaps that is part of the power of Silicon Valley, and the idea that this is a place you can come to do way more than not only that you thought was possible for yourself, but that you thought was possible at all for any person.

01:00:30 - Speaker 1: Absolutely. It feels like there’s sort of an interesting moment for tech from a narrative perspective where I do think Silicon Valley definitely has some of that story still. But it feels like in many respects outside of the tech world, it is perceived a little bit like, you know, banking might have been around 2008 or, you know, something like that where it has sort of become the synecdoche for Excess for fantastic visions without enough meat behind them for sort of the tech bro hubris, yeah, whoever the hubris of mankind, yeah,

01:01:13 - Speaker 1: which I think is a pity, and that is a narrative that I hope we can in the generalist in some small way and through many other things, try and correct to an extent because really tech is such an engine of progress that we should be wanting. To work and absorb more of people’s energies and efforts.

01:01:36 - Speaker 2: Indeed, I feel I see that theme in all your writing, which is, even without it being spelled out, it seems that in telling these epic stories in Choosing the companies that you do choose to talk about, talking about the challenges ahead, but the way that they’ve changed things, there is a kind of optimism or positive outlook on technology and how it is already changing our world, and what more it can do to change the world in the future, and that that is something that should be celebrated, the companies should be celebrated and the founders and the leaders who helped bring that stuff to pass should also be celebrated.

Now that’s not that they get a free pass for bad behavior or mistakes or failures, but rather that overall there’s something good here and perhaps in some contrast to what’s an increasingly a mainstream.

The idea that, yeah, tech is a place for greed or manipulation or as sort of a net negative on society, that indeed reading through the generalist pieces, you come away thinking this is a net positive already, and it’s only just getting started.

01:02:43 - Speaker 1: I hope so, yeah, you never want it to be this, you know, hang glossy and look at tech and everything is so amazing and these people are perfect.

All of the corruption and excess and all those other things make for, I think a good story and make for that tension that we talked about, but, you know, compare it to so many other. Industries and the level of invention and progress it contributes I think is hard to argue with, you know, we want, I think people who are very willing to take big swings to maybe fail and try again with something equally ambitious.

And so, especially I think at a moment where almost every large western democracy feels especially dysfunctional. Technology at least feels like it is still able to run productive experiments and contribute.

01:03:39 - Speaker 2: Well, let’s trap it there. Thanks everyone for listening. If you have feedback, write us on Twitter at museAppHQ or on email hello at museapp.com. And Mario, thanks for documenting and I would say celebrating the works of the technology field to date, and I look forward to continuing to read your briefings.

01:04:00 - Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for reading and for having me on. I really enjoyed it.