What's up, everybody? This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to
the IndieHackers podcast. More people than ever are building cool stuff online and making
a lot of money in the process. And on this show, I sit down with these IndieHackers to
discuss the ideas, the opportunities, and the strategies they're taking advantage of
so the rest of us can do the same. Alright, I'm here with Sonal Chokshi. She is one of
the biggest experts in building a media business that I know. She's the editor-in-chief at
A16Z, also known as Andreessen Horowitz, a VC firm in Silicon Valley. She was formerly
a senior editor at Wired magazine and the head of content and community at Xerox PARC.
Sonal, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Cortland. I'm super excited to be here. I'm a huge fan of IndieHackers and
especially of you. I think we were talking about this. We met a few years ago when I
think Mike Solana had brought together like a group of podcasters. That was so much fun.
Yeah, it was great. And it was like the perfect size group too. I think it was just six or
seven of us, which is small enough that you can just be completely frank and honest and
not have to worry about anything, and everybody gets a chance to talk. But it's enough people
where there will always be something interesting that somebody is saying. So I wish there were
more groups of this size that got together and just shared info.
I agree. And there was a special energy in the room, which I can't quite pinpoint what
it was. It was definitely the group that was there. First of all, everyone had such a diverse
set of podcasts. There was that gentleman who had a podcast that was Stories from Prison.
But the other thing that I loved is that there's just not enough trading of tips among experts
in the community. And to be able to share that was so fun. I just loved it so much.
Yeah. And it feels like media today just moves so fast that by the time people have written
books on how to do things and blog posts and guides, it's all old school. It's all old
news. People are on to the next big thing. They're on Clubhouse or whatever it is. And
so having these smaller, more agile groups is just better for exchanging information
faster. And so it's cool that we were able to come together and do that. But then the
pandemic happened. We never met again. But it was great. We should do it more often.
And by the way, to your point about there not being those gatherings, I actually think
it's fascinating because there's been such an explosion of people doing podcasting and
written content and tweets and newsletters. And there are like these big conferences for
organizing things. Or there's like these tiny, tiny little niche groups of people who are
very like minded and get together. But there's nothing in between. And I do think there needs
to be more of that. And the other thing I would say is that I think part of the problem
and opportunity here is that there's so much diversity in the ecosystem in terms of types
of content, formats, styles, needs, who you're trying to reach, what you're trying to do.
There are some principles that underlie all of it. But honestly, for each and every group,
it's very custom to what they're doing. And I find this because I get so many calls weekly
from people trying to do media outlets or how do I do a podcast or my podcast isn't
growing what's going on. And I just feel like I'm having the same conversations over and
over and over again.
Yeah, it's weird because you have these conversations, you say the same things over and over again
to people because they're kind of missing the basics. But then when you get into the
nitty gritty, like everybody does need different advice, like people with podcasts and newsletters
should be doing different things. Even two people with podcasts should probably have
very different strategies depending on what their goals are. So there isn't that much
one size fits all advice. But annoyingly, that's exactly what I'm gonna ask you to do
on the show. Give one size fits all advice for everybody.
It's not annoying. So for the record, yes, it is bespoke advice. Absolutely. You can't
give great advice without it being personalized to that person's strategy goals, audience,
etc. But there still isn't like general principles that people are sharing, because I find myself
still having a lot of the same conversations over and over again. And I think that's part
of the thing is like there are a lot of general things that we can definitely address. So
I don't find it annoying at all.
Yeah, let's let's talk about that. Because you obviously have a ton of experience across
a range of media organizations. You've worked at Wired, you know, the editor in chief at
a large successful VC firm. I think traditionally, venture bath companies have had a relatively
easy time getting press, you know, if they raise a new round, TechCrunch is happy to
write about it. Whereas nd founders and the hackers are a little bit hard pressed to get
the word out about what they're doing. It's either nobody seems to care, or it's just
they don't have the resources to sort of reach the same audiences as venture back companies
do. What's your advice for how nd founders can go about cutting through the noise and
getting some eyeballs and some readers on the things that they're working on?
To your point, like if you are someone who's starting out sort of smaller, you're solving
your own problems, which, frankly, a lot of the best products do. The question you're
asking is really, how do you punch above your weight? And let me start with the basics,
which is what is the thing that you're talking about? And so one of the common things I find
is that a lot of these sort of indie hackers, indie founders, indie technical builders,
they will have a great idea or a great product or an itch they're trying to scratch. But
they don't actually have a clear sense of what the differentiator, what the thing they're
doing is. And this is like one of the number one failure modes I've seen for how to punch
above your weight. What is the thing that you're doing that only you can do and that
no one else can do? Like that's actually a pretty good proxy for figuring out your kind
of unique content moat. And this matters because as you pointed out at the very beginning,
it's pretty crowded. There's a lot of people on podcasts and written pieces and Twitter,
there's like a million threads a day with like thumbs down, like, here's my thread,
look point or thumb below emoji, like read all my tweets below, right? And that's like
a thing that's really exploded on Twitter and it grabs me up. It's great, but it's also
like not enough. So the first thing I would say is to actually spend time thinking about
what is unique to you, like what's your identity? How do you come up with like your signature
two words for who you are and what your identity is as a content outlet, as a product, as an
identity essentially. And when I went to Xerox PARC, the two words that we sort of came up
with through like series of conversations for what's like our uniqueness, what's our
differentiator was this phrase, entrepreneurial scientists. And those two words together mean
something very specific. When I went to Wired, those two words were informed optimism. And
that was something that Chris Anderson had shared, like we were optimistic, pro future,
but it had to be informed by some facts of reality. And then when I came to Anderson
Horowitz, the mandate that I had been given was to help build the innovation brand. Those
are the two words. And then from there, everything else flowed. So that's how the whole two word
thing came about.
I love it because that makes things just super clear. Like if you were a two word constraint
is innovation brand, you know exactly what you can and you can't publish. And that runs
through everything at A16Z. Like I saw you guys just launched a new media publication
called Future. And like I don't have to guess what future is going to be about. I know that
it's going to be about innovation. And this is kind of where you come in because you're
responsible for editing pretty much all the content at A16Z. I mean, you are, you're infusing
this vision of being an innovation brand and to literally everything, not just the podcast,
but also this new effort Future.
So it's funny because even though I'm known for doing the podcast, I've been actually
editing written pieces at A6Z from the very beginning and the podcast came later, in fact.
And so I also rebooted our newsletters and started all of those as well. I used to have
a weekly newsletter that I ran for us, a monthly newsletter, and then I hired our managing
editor and we expanded into vertical newsletters. So anyway, we've had a lot of different media
properties for a long time. And even before I joined, I would say there were some of them.
They just weren't under one cohesive brand. So after joining, I think everyone started
noticing like, hey, the podcast is working. Let's try to do more of that, like bringing
these outside voices, which is a signature of the podcast. Because when I joined, it
was only A6Z voices. And I brought in a lot of people from my book network and all these
other people that wired my former entities, all different combos. And then it was sort
of like, well, what's the next thing we do? And so Future, which the team came up with,
is actually an extension of what we've already been doing with our podcast for the past seven
years, which is bringing outside voices to talk about ideas onto our platform. And the
reason it has its own separate site is because we don't want it to be just about us. But
of course it also is connected into our worldview.
I love this idea of bringing in outside voices and telling that sort of like stories in the
first person, like having these outside voices actually provide the content and the advice
and the strategy and the viewpoints and the opinions. It's like, it's good in so many
ways. Number one, it's authentic. Like you're actually getting to hear from the people who
are doing the innovation, what they're up to. Number two, I don't want to say that it's
easier because it's hard, right? It's like lots of different things that are difficult
about it. But at the same time, like one group of people can only have so many ideas. Like
for any hackers, if I tried to sit down on the podcast and just like monologue, you know,
a hundred episodes in a row, like I would be repeating myself by episode number two.
Oh, totally.
But the fact that I can bring on like guests like you or the fact that I've done the same
thing on the website means that there's like sort of endless diversity of ideas and experiences
and stories. And it's the same thing at a 16 Z. And it's something I don't see a lot
of founders doing the vast majority of Andy hackers who start, you know, sort of a media
arm for their business, whether it's just them tweeting, or them starting a podcast
or a newsletter, try to take on this burden of producing all of the content on the ideas
themselves, which is just so hard to do.
Oh my God. I have so many thoughts on that. Well, first of all, when you say you think
it can be hard, tell me why you think it can be hard. I mean, it's, it's, it's very gratifying,
but I'm curious for, you know, you run indie hackers. I'm curious for your perspective
on that too. Yeah. I mean, I think at the end of the day, if you're going to basically
bring an outside voices, you now have an entire job, which is to sort of find and curate the
voices that you want to bring on because not every single person is like ideal for you
to work with. And so like, that's just a lot like you have to work with other people's
schedules. You have to send a lot of outreach emails. You have to sort of pitch why people
should come and contribute to what you're doing rather than promoting themselves or
writing their ideas on their own platforms, which is like something that I think takes
a while to do. Like with indie hackers, when I first started it, what, five years ago,
I didn't have the cloud or the brand or the reputation to get a lot of people on. And
so like, I think I sent like 150 emails asking any hackers to come on the website and share
their stories. And like eight people said yes. Oh man. They're like, who, who are you
and why would I share my story and my revenue numbers with your audience? Like, you know,
I don't even know what you are. Right. Whereas nowadays it's much easier. And so I think
that part's hard. And then there's also, you know, like the other sort of idiosyncrasies
of like, what happens if somebody comes on and you discover like they're actually not
the right person, right? I end up not publishing a lot of podcast episodes or articles or that
doesn't feel good. You know, if you don't publish your own thing, you're letting yourself
down. But if somebody else came and worked with you and wrote something or did an interview
and you don't publish their thing, like that's emotionally tough to deal with.
It is. I think it's really important to underscore what you said that it's actually not just
the logistics of what you described of like the booking and bringing people on and everything
that it takes. It's not just the logistics that you mentioned curation. Curation is hard
to do well, like finding the right experts at the right time and the right topics. So
that itself is hard. And, you know, I'll also say like, you know, even though A6 and Z had
a strong brand when I joined, it didn't actually have a strong editorial brand. And I had to
sell and pitch people on the idea of coming on the A6 and Z podcast and even know what
A6 and Z was. A lot of the East Coast like publisher types that I would try to pitch
from my Wired network to come and bring their authors on. Like I had to really bank on a
lot of relationships to get people to come. But to your point, you're right. It takes
a lot of people to get good content because you never know what you're going to get. And
it takes a lot of work. But to answer your question about what founders can do if they're
thinking about their own media outlet, whether it's a one person brand or, you know, their
company, the first thing that I would say, and this is the first question I ask people
is whether they need a editor or a writer. And the first thing I'll do is I'll have them,
I'll walk them through like sort of an asset exercise, like an inventory of assets. Like,
okay, what are all the assets that you have in house? So let's say you have a community,
like you're an open source founder, and you have like a really active community and a
lot of like super community members who are willing to like produce content or be on things.
Great. Well, that's one of your assets. Let's say you have a lot of smart people inside
who are building things and who want to articulate and share their ideas. Those are assets. Let's
say you produce data reports and you have like, or you have a lot of data exhaust and
things that are not just exhaust, but they're actually useful, and you might want to turn
them into something interesting. Those are assets. And the reason I ask people to sort
of walk me through their assets and their inventory, what they have in house is that
from there, you can then decide whether you need to hire an editor, which is someone who
can edit many things or a writer who, you know, they can have like a consistent point
of view and a voice, but they're going to be rate limited to your point. Like you asked
me, you know, why don't more people do this? And I think it's because they only know writing
and writing is great, but that's like n equals one. You're rate limited by the time of how
many things you can do. Whereas an editor is like n times 100. You have like 100 contributors
and you can edit all of them by having balls in the air, and then you can land them. And
so that's the difference between an editor and a writer. And so that's one of the first
things I'll do when I walk people through the exercise of how to think about like their
media operation. I don't think so much better, especially if you're like strapped for time
because you're an early stage founder trying to build your product, et cetera. You're just
so much more efficient. Like in the early days of any hackers, I was doing like five,
six interviews a week. In addition to building any hack, any hackers, there's no way I could
have done that if my entire job was writing from scratch would have been impossible. Exactly.
But then you pointed out earlier, and this is the dark side of editing, is it takes a
lot of work and a lot of balls in the air to have like a hundred things to have 10 good
things land. And so there's a lot of work you have to do to readjust your assumptions
when you're doing more editing than writing, because when you're working with people who
are not naturally writers, but who have great ideas, a lot of the work, as you know, more
than anybody, because you do this on your show, it's about drawing out like the best
parts, trying to figure out like what to focus on, what to downplay, what to have them back
up. And there's so much work that goes into editing. It's not just like, you know, making
copy pretty, which is like a big misconception about what editing is. Yeah. And I love this
process that you went through about sort of identifying your assets, because not only
can that help you identify, do we need a writer? Do we need an editor? But it can also help
you identify like, what is it that you uniquely can offer to the world? Exactly. You know,
if you just sit down and say, I want to write and put up content, like vaguely, okay, well,
like that, like, who cares? A lot of people are putting out content, like, why does your
content matter? It has to be unique, which is something that you've preached about a
lot. And it's hard, I think, especially for early stage founders to figure out what they
have that's unique. So if you kind of do this inventory, and you say, okay, well, I've got
this application, you know, I have this data, I talked to these people, I, you know, develop
this expertise, it's easier for you to sort of identify, okay, here's what I can actually
produce, here's what I have to work with that other people don't. And maybe it's a combination
of resources that you have that other people don't. That's exactly half the time it is
a combination. In fact, I often describe that the best way to think about your assets is
not only in isolation, but how you can kind of recombine them in interesting ways to make
it even more fresh, because packaging plays a big role. And I can go into that more later.
But to go even further, I would say, Cortland, something to think about and your audience
should think about is, I find a lot of technical founders overrooted in the opposite direction.
Which is that they almost wear it as a badge of honor that, oh, I'm just going to do it
because that's what I do. That's how I'm successful. I'm a hacker. I just like build and I do,
I build in public and I just do it. And for the record, I'm a huge fan of that. I definitely
believe that's great. But the big thing that a lot of people have missed is that the world
has shifted under their feet. And if they're paying attention, there are more people on
Twitter than ever, there are more people on doing newsletters, there are more people doing
podcasts than ever. And sure, that would have worked great five years ago. You know, I'll
often hear founders tell me a lot of technical founders in particular say, I just want a
conversation that me and my friends can enjoy when they're starting a podcast. That's great.
That's actually really good to do. That's a good way to find your differentiator. But
you know what? Almost all these people after about three months, it's almost like the three
month rule hit kind of like an invisible asymptote where they just level off and they don't grow
any further. And then they get stuck and then they come to me and they ask me like, how
do I reboot my show or how do I do this? And I'm just kind of like, it's because you didn't
start off having a clear identity or concept or differentiator for what you're putting
out into the world. Oh, and by the way, it also solves a lot of time problems because
when you're strapped for time and resources, like when you describe how in the early days
of indie hackers, you know, you would have to have like 135 emails and maybe eight would
respond. And you had a lot of episodes that you couldn't run early on. I'm entirely sure
that as you've gotten better at this, you've probably gotten much better at the hit rate
on which episodes run, right? Totally. Yeah. Why do you think that is, by the way? Just
experience, right? Cause sort of, okay, well now I curate better. Who's going to come on
the show? Cause I know basically which episodes are going to come out well or not. I better
planning better questions. Same. And it's the same thing. We got better
as we did more programming up front. And what I often tell people is that more of the episode
or in fact, for any good content, most of the programming and work, and you know, this
firsthand, you just said it, it's in the upfront work you do. It's actually less than the conversation
itself. It's more in the upfront and the after work, like the production and post-production
and editing and what happens in between is important, but actually less, the least important
for getting a successful hit rate actually. So experience helps you with that. But for
founder, this matters because time you waste on a miss is time wasted on something else.
And so you have greater costs when you don't get that right. And so the more founders actually
ask themselves, what is the goal? And it sounds so obvious. I feel like that cheesy person
who's like, what's your goal? But the reality is like, you have to know that. And it's okay
if your goal is to figure it out, have a hypothesis at least, don't just be like, Oh, I'm just
going to start a show and hang out my friends. And that's interesting to me. So it'll be
interesting to everyone. And look, again, I value the indiness of that and the hackery-ness
of that, but you're not actually hacking your way into something. If you don't have a working
hypothesis of what's working or what you're trying to do, and then a way to kind of close
a feedback loop for is it even working and how do we grow it further?
So let's apply this to what you were doing at A16Z because I agree wholeheartedly. And
I think even if it's like the most obvious advice, people sometimes need to hear the
most obvious advice because it's really easy to take it for granted and not to not have
a goal. So I have a hypothesis to not know what it is you're trying to achieve. At A16Z,
you have this new sort of media publication called future, future.com. It's awesome. It's
got a ton of articles, a ton of content, and they're very high quality pieces. What's your
goal? Like, what's like, how did, what are you trying to accomplish by launching this?
Because like, you don't have to have future. You could just go on with your podcasts and
your newsletters and the blog you already have. Like why create a new media arm of A16Z?
So the goal of future is to help make sense of the future and to have like one go-to place
for being able to do that. Now, to be clear, there are plenty of places, wonderful places
in the ecosystem out there for people to find things out. There's incredible sub-stack newsletters.
I read so many. There's media outlets that do a great job with like reported storytelling
or investigative journalism. There's a lot of people blogging and writing about company
building. There's how to, there's no shortage of good content out there. But there isn't
like one go-to place to kind of make sense of it all. Like, okay, if I want to understand
like this new Trek trend I hear about, well, people come to us to say like, hey, I want
to hear this podcast on GPT-3 they just did because someone just announced this thing.
Everyone's excited about it. I see all these other like scary articles about it. Like what
is it? What's hype? What's real? Where are we on the long arc of innovation? And how
can I understand it? And so we really aim to be the go-to place to understand that.
And a lot of that involves, as we were talking about earlier, a lot of curation for like,
what are the different voices and expertise out there? A lot of thinking about the tech
trends and topics that need to be covered. And then the approach you take, like, is it
a first person op-ed? Is it a podcast? Would it be better served by a listicle or, you
know, whatever things there are. And then we have two pillars of content. There's tech
trends like, you know, whether it's quantum computing or infrastructure or crypto or gaming
or company building. Because the thing that you know from indie hackers is there's a lot
of advice out there for company building for a lot of established companies that have kind
of a known managerial playbook for building things. But a lot of the people that we talk
to are building things in a very uncertain environment under conditions of high uncertainty.
And so the art of what that kind of company building is very different. Like what do you
do when you have your Series A check and actually want to build a company to scale? There's
not a lot of expertise out there. People are trying to still hack like the HBS stuff, the
Harvard Business School stuff and trying to make sense of that. But it's actually not
really native to startups. And so that's essentially what we're building.
And then what are your like internal goals for something like this? Because like you're
putting out this content and that's how it can help readers and you know, they can essentially
understand the future, which is awesome. But like as a VC firm or as an editor in chief
at a VC firm, like what do you hope to accomplish for yourselves? Do you want to make this into
like some sort of huge media company like the New York Times or something? Are you hoping
to generate deal flow and increase the sort of brand and reputation of A16Z? Like why
even go through the effort of doing something like this?
Yeah, it's funny. The joke that people have always made about us that we're a media outlet
that monetizes through VC, which I kind of love. And now it's actually kind of true in
many ways. You know, there's always like business goals at play, but we're very discerning.
Like the whole reason the podcast is so popular is people know when they're being sold something.
And if they don't want to like be bullshitted, they're not going to listen. And of course,
there's going to be like, you know, goals for the business. But the reality is like,
we don't have a shortage of deal flow. And certainly it can maybe help founders to know
that they can publish on future and have a place that they can share their views, that
there isn't out there. The goal is a much deeper underlying job to be done. The way
I think about it is if you think about the early days of Wired, and I don't know how
many of your listeners are even old enough to remember the early Wired or you even get
the magazine in their inbox or their mailbox, but there was this sort of excitement that
people would have when it would come to their doors, because it was this idea, even if you
don't agree with everything in there, which you shouldn't, I mean, there's all these different
worldviews in there. But there was this idea that there was one place you could go to understand
technology. And right now, because tech has become so powerful in so many ways, I think
a lot of media is focusing on sort of calling quote, truth to power versus actually like
friends and the company building. So there is nothing out there that actually does this.
So to me, the ambition is to fill that need in a big, big, big way. It doesn't exist.
And I believe the reason the podcast took off is that there is a large, large silent
majority that craze nuance and depth. And I want us to serve that.
Yeah, I've strong thoughts about this, because like, I think most intelligent people want
to hear both sides of it. So I can say want to understand what's going on under the hood.
And I think certain channels, as you're pointing out, aren't very good at that. Like, you don't
go on Twitter to have nuanced discussions about controversial topics, because like,
essentially, whichever side and that argument has the most people who are the angriest is
going to win, because that's just kind of how Twitter works. But on like a podcast,
or in a newsletter, or in something where like, I guess maybe the sort of common denominators,
the comments aren't that public, you know, everybody kind of reads on their own, and
there isn't this like sort of common public ground for every reader to kind of react and
see how everybody else is reacting, you can kind of express these more nuanced opinions.
And so on future, for example, when I look at like the content that a 16 z is putting
out, you have a lot of stuff that I would consider techno optimism, you know, obviously,
Mark Andreessen is like very adamant about the feature. And to even be a VC firm, like
you have to be sort of optimistic about the future. I wonder how you fall there, like
very personally, like, what are your thoughts on? Basically, techno optimism, how do you
feel because as a as an editor, and sort of a content creator, like, you are not necessarily
creating all the content yourself, you're more so like interviewing and talking to other
people, but like, someone like what are what are your opinions? You know, what do you think
about the future? And like the kind of content that you're putting out?
Oh, my God, I love that you're asking this question, because it gets at the heart of
one of these things that often as a false religious dogma and debate that plays out,
which is this idea that optimism has to be positive, and that criticism has to be negative.
And it's like a false conflation. I think people are actually complaining very different
things. And so I love what you're saying, because I yes, like, first of all, for future,
we are unapologetically pro technology pro future, that's clear, it's in the name, which
for the record, I didn't come up with the team did. But that is like a defining worldview.
I am also to answer your question, Portland, personally, yes, I am very pro future and
progress and change, because I'm the daughter of immigrants, I would visit India growing
up a lot, soft firsthand, you know, how technology and markets and things could change things.
That doesn't mean it's all good or bad. Like, I'm not putting a moral judgment on it one
way or the other. It's more about I saw the benefits in many ways, and certainly a lot
of the backlash and fallouts too. But there's no doubt in my mind that even the solutions
will involve technology in some form. And when I think of like the story of human evolution,
it's all about technology, whether it's a pencil in your hand, you know, cave paintings
or voice like you and I are talking right now on a podcast, but people have been talking
around fires for centuries. So that is a technology fire is a technology. So in that sense, I'm
incredibly positive about the power of technology. Now, we as a position, will not do takedowns,
like there's plenty of other people in the ecosystem that can do that. We're concentrating
on a builder focus point of view. And to be clear, it doesn't mean it has to be cheerleading,
because again, nobody's going to read something that's a puff piece or cheerleading. When
I was at Wired, Chris Anderson used to have like a no kickstarters rule, because the idea
was a kickstarter is great, but we don't know it's real yet. It hasn't even been built.
And so one of the op-eds I edited at Wired was from Astro Teller at Google X. And I don't
really know, you know, my opinion on Google X itself, but he did a piece for me about
how it's easier to think big. So like the framework he used was if you have a big problem,
like if you identify a big problem, and then you also identify a big solution, the third
part of that formula is to have some concrete evidence, some breakthrough in science or
technology or engineering that could actually make that solution possible within the next
decade or so. And that was sort of the formula he used for defining what was a moonshot,
like you can actually reach the moon. And so similarly, that's exactly the kind of principles
when we say informed optimism, that's the same kind of principle, like it's something
that could be real if we brought enough human ingenuity to it. But there has to be some
proof, for example, semiconductor manufacturing in the case of Moore's law to make that trajectory
possible. So that's how I would think about grounding it in reality. So it's not just
like freewheeling futurism.
Well, I think it's interesting in that, like the fact that we've gotten to a place where
saying positive things about startups or technology is in and of itself controversial, kind of
helps from a media standpoint, right? Because like, for example, if you want to take a point
of view, because people tend to spread things that are opinionated, and that either agree
or disagree with them, you can basically write a piece like what Mark Andreessen wrote last
year, like it's time to build, or the kinds of things you write at A16Z in general, which
are like sort of techno optimistic, and people will share them because I'll have very strong
opinions about them. This is something I think about at Indie Hackers, where it's like, by
default, Indie Hackers is very sort of pro innovation. And yet I don't really take that
strong of a public stand about it very specifically, like I'll say things like, I'll share stories
about entrepreneurs who are succeeding, but I won't say that like, this is a good thing
for the world, you know, as explicitly as you guys do. And I wonder how much that helps
you sort of get the message out and how other people who are trying to basically spread
their message or even just do like, you know, sort of generic content marketing could benefit
by having a stronger point of view that aligns with something that's kind of controversial
that people are opinionated about.
Yeah, well, first of all, I'm very similar to you, Cortland, like I won't go on public
and say things. And the only reason is because I mean, I'll say things like share, you know,
stories of things, and I'll try to do more show versus tell. But for me, it's because
there's a lot of ranting and commentary on Twitter. And it's not that I don't enjoy that,
like I like reading it, but I am at heart at builder, I think you are too, which is
probably why we don't want to wade into a lot of that, because it's actually a distraction
from the building. And first is that I actually don't think it's just about being positive
or negative. And I'm not a big fan of the opinions where people only follow like minded
things like we're not successful, if only people who agree with us, or people who hate
us share our stuff. I want to reach that silent majority in the middle that I mentioned again,
like the people that are figuring things out. So I always look for what I call crossover
people. So if in any debate or discussion, do you quote, convert the crossovers? So for
instance, if someone is not understanding quantum computing, they find it very scary.
Oh my God, quantum computing means that all of our algorithms are going to die, and we're
not able to have any private information anymore. And then after they read something really
thoughtful and informed, do they actually understand the thing and then say, Oh, this
is interesting. Well, let me not think about all the different ways I might attract this
problem in a different way. That is what I call a win. And for me, those kinds of crossover
people who are in the middle, who are trying to understand technology are the most powerful
target audience in the world. And that is a group that I believe we need to all serve
as a community, including your listeners, because you will always win if you're selling
to your own, that's great. But if you want to go beyond the core, you have to expand
into that. And by the way, there's a way to do this without quote, dumbing things down,
because the other debate that I hear, which drives me insane is when technical founders
will, and I've heard this for years. I heard this at park. I heard this at Wired. I've
heard this here. They'll say to me like, Oh, I don't want to dumb it down. And it's like,
you know what? You don't have to dumb anything down. The art of it is in the execution. Like,
can you quickly define the term that you're talking about? Because I guarantee you that
even your insiders probably don't define the term the same way that you think they do.
And so there's a lot of things you can do to bring people along is what I would add
to that. And then finally, the other thing I would say is that a real signature of future,
it's not so much that it's like you have to be like, you know, pro something, it's that
you have to argue for something. And I don't just want people who are commentary at or
analyzing, but who are builders. So they're not just reacting, but they're actually proactively
proposing a point of view. That's what we're looking for. And I think there needs to be
more of that because right now, a lot of people are just derivatively analyzing each other's
takes. But it's not really advancing the narrative.
What do you think about the sort of idea of filter bubbles, though, where people kind
of on their own pick the voices they want to listen to, like the people who like read
content from a 16z or the people who listen to Andy hackers, for example, or people who
already sort of agree with what it is that we're pushing up putting out there, in order
to reach these people who are in the middle, who are kind of on the fence, who can be persuaded,
you need it to sort of spread beyond your sort of default audience. How do you how do
you create content that people who already trust you will share with those who don't
necessarily trust or believe what you typically put out?
Oh, God, I love that question, too. And that is all about quality, hands down. Because
if something is good, and well done, and defensible, even if you disagree with it, or it just opens
your eyes a little bit, or it makes you think differently, it makes you feel smarter, people
will share that. And yes, you're absolutely right that there is a phenomenon playing out.
And that's the filter, a couple of things on the filter bubble thing. First of all, I think
there's been a lot of research that's shown that if you think about time, relative elistically,
like right now, versus, say, you know, 200 years ago, or even 2030 years ago, we're actually
exposed to more ideas outside our filter bubbles than ever before. It's actually unprecedented
to have this many humans online, which is why I think we experience a lot of friction,
like we haven't experienced this in our human society at any point, I don't think we've
been ready for that. So we're kind of learning. And that's part of it. Second of all, yes,
you're right that there's a lot of sorting and self sorting that happens. I don't know,
I think there's like a phrase, what is it, Tybo sorting or Tebow sorting, I forgot what
it's called, where people sort of self select into these groups and communities. That certainly
happens too. And that's actually kind of one of the beauty of beautiful things about the
internet is that you no longer are tied to your local neighborhood to find your community,
like you can find your community, your niche interests, but it's not broken across only
demographic variables like, you know, geography, where you live, gender, age, it's often broken
across a combination of interests, it's more of an interest graph, like, I'm interested
in, I'm not interested in these things. But let's say I'm interested in knitting, and
quantum computing, and art, well, guess what, I want to find a like minded community people
who also have those exact three interests. That's not actually homogenizing because that's
actually creating a group of people with like minded interests who are actually quite diverse.
And so that's one thing I would just say about the filter bubbles point. And then the last
thing I would say is that a lot of what you're describing is about the algorithmic nature
of content in terms of what's being surfaced, like how discovery is happening, how recommendations
work. And for me, and I think this is one of the reasons that you know, we're big believers
in sub stack is a lot of companies and content and creators are actually able to directly
share their content in other mediums that don't have those problems. And so that's one
of the values of all the things. I mean, podcasting is a form of that, don't you think?
Yeah, well, I think you're exactly right. Like we are exposed to many more ideas than
we ever were. Like if you were consuming media like 50, 60 years ago, like how many big media
companies were there like four or five, that were all sort of similar. And now there's
this like millions of different little niches you can consume content for, which allows
you to sort of pick out and find the people who are almost exactly like you. But in order
to do that, you sort of have to filter through lots of different other content that you normally
wouldn't be exposed to. So I think it's not all gloom and doom, as people say. But then
there are challenges for building a sort of media company at scale. Like if everybody
can niche down into like the one specific newsletter that they really like are the one
specific group that they really like, then how do you build a gigantic media company
that can appeal to lots and lots of people? How does something like Future reach scale
where millions of people can read it? Even with the Indie Hackers podcast, like when
I started doing this in 2017, there weren't that many people interviewing founders and
podcasts for about their journeys, especially not like any founders. Whereas today there's
like a hundred podcasts and totally, you know, depending on like what your style is and what
kind of interviewer you're like, you can choose the exact thing that you want, which makes
it harder for me to make this show bigger and more influential.
Right. No, there's a lot of interesting points in what you said. So yes, I agree that there's
an end of big in many ways. There are a lot of new breakout hits. Like if you look at
the leaderboard on sub stack and a lot of these really big, you know, they're like one
person media brands that are bigger than most other media brands in some ways. So that's
kind of an interesting phenomenon. And certainly in podcasting, there's been a lot of discussion
about how there's an end of big, like there hasn't been a big breakout hit since serial.
I think the New York Times daily is like one of the biggest like breakout shows in terms
of audience and listenership, but there's a very, very, very long tail of podcasters,
as you know. And that's a good thing in many ways, because you're right. There's like a
niche and the niches find each other and that's a powerful thing. I don't know the answer
of how everyone's going to reach scale in that sense. And I know for future, the way
I think about it is that you can start with the core and then expand into these sort of
adjacent niches and sort of aggregate them in a way to create that larger audience. And
the thing is that I think what's happening is this other phenomenon, which is not only
about content, but it's about cult building, which is there's a lot of people on Twitter
and social and their own, like one person media brands, essentially creating cults.
And I think a lot of those are not just subscribers and listeners and audience, but they're followers.
And a lot of the people I see who are doing that right now are focused on viral hits or
like trying to just get popular. They're not actually thinking about a body of work, like
a portfolio of work. And I think a lot of companies and startups and individuals and
even one person media brands should be thinking more strategically about a portfolio and body
of work.
It's kind of interesting because there's this sort of polarity between like, okay, viral
hits that are sort of trending and that are riding a wave. And these things are pretty
good because they can spread far and wide and capture a lot of people who ordinarily
wouldn't have been exposed to your ideas. Then like there was like this alternative
sort of like evergreen backlog of content you can produce that people will go back and
read for years to come. Like first round capital is really good at this. They put together
like several websites where like I can go and search for like great startup advice from
years ago. It's just evergreen. And that's also like a valid way I think to reach people
if you go through the right channels, for example, like surgeons and optimization being
found on Google is huge. There's perhaps almost no bigger way to reach people than that. And
so when you are putting together something like future, like as an outsider looking in
like my knee jerk reaction is like, this is, these are viral hits. These are things that
will cause an uproar when they're written and they're very timely. But like two years
from now, you know, they might not be as relevant or there might be something that people reference,
but that people aren't sharing to such a large degree. And the downside to that is like,
how do you build over time? Right? How do you grow an audience over time? Will people
get basically bored if it's the same thing or will people, you know, keep coming back
if you don't continue producing new viral hits? Yeah. Well, this is an essential question
of any media operation. And I don't know how you do your editorial calendar, Cortland,
but I think about everything in terms of stock and flow. I think, was it Robin Sloan or someone
coined this as an economics term, but he coined it in the context of content, but I think
of stock and flow. So like the flow is the stuff that you run for volume and cadence
and to kind of build an audience. To be clear, you should not be running a bunch of junk.
So people ask me like number one advice by editorial strategy. And my advice is sometimes
it's more about what you don't run and what you killed and what you do run. And so I think
about it in terms of stock and flow. And then the stock is sort of the big ideas that you
might put out there. So they're not just things that are timely. And when you're talking
about stuff that might get outdated, some of our best content is very Lindy. Like it
keeps coming up over and over and over again. It's evergreen. And that is really critical
for creating a media outlet. You have to have both. I'm reading a quote from Robin Sloan
and he says, flow is the feed. It's the posts and the tweets. It's the stream of daily and
sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. And stock is the durable stuff.
It's the content you produce that's as interesting in two months or two years as it is today.
It's what people discover via search. It's what spreads slowly but surely building fans
over time. And so there are these pieces that I have come out of A16Z and other media properties
that are like definitely stock. Like Mark Andreessen writing It's Time to Build or his
idea of sort of product market fit that he wrote about over a decade ago or writing about
Software Eats the World. Like these are things people talk about forever. Legion writing
about the passion economy and the creating a greater economy. The idea of like a hundred
true fans. Like there are these ideas that just last forever that are certainly stock.
Yes. Except I will say it was interesting because in the examples you cited two of them
Mark's post on It's Time to Build and Lee's post on the passion economy which also grew
from the conversations with the consumer team here. Both of those are also very much in
the zeitgeist and about the timing that they ran in. And so Lindy posts like evergreen posts
will do really well regardless of the time they're in. Like the product market fit post
is a great example of that because that is an evergreen essential idea that keeps coming
back over and over and over again. Ben's example on this front is his famous like good product
manager bad product manager post. Whereas It's Time to Build as viral as that essay
was and oh my God it was really viral. It also is of the time and in that zeitgeist
of the pandemic and his frustration which he writes about in that piece that are you
kidding me? Like we don't have enough surgical masks, eye shields and medical gowns. As I
write this New York City has put out a desperate call for rain ponchos to be used as medical
gowns. Rain ponchos in 2020 in America. Those are all his estimation points. But that was
very much a call to arms and in that zeitgeist like it was very motivated by the time of
the pandemic. The other variable in what you just discussed is it's not just the evergreenness
or not and the stock versus flowness of it or not. It's also the timing and the zeitgeist
and timing plays a really critical role in content and viral hits as well. So what are
your thoughts on like contributing to both of these categories? Because I think there's
probably different strategies for producing a viral sort of flow hit let's call it versus
an evergreen stock hit and like no one's good enough to reliably sit down and just say I
want a viral hit today just get it whatever they want to. But at the end of the day like
if you're trying to produce a publication that like is going to be successful in these
two areas you probably have some principles some thoughts about what will make something
viral and what will make something stock and also you're working with like outside writers
and contributors so it's like you don't even have full control over this. I know this is
what makes it so hard and also fun. Yeah and I actually have to say it's gonna sound so
braggy but I don't mean it to sound braggy. One of the things I pride myself on as an
editor from both my work at Park to Wired to here is sort of like a track record of
viral hits and there are certain variables that go into all of them and timing is a big
part of that. But it actually goes back to where we started this conversation which is
differentiation and so one of the things that I'll tell people is because a lot of times
I think people play this content game that they're trying to compete for who has the
first take and this is the exact problem that a lot of media outlets have when they're
covering news. It became extremely commoditized very fast and so the real strategy here is
to figure out what your unique mode is. So when I was at you know when I first started
at a6nz one of the partners came to me and was like oh my god so-and-so wrote that post
I wanted to write so-and-all like we should have gotten it out last week and I'm like
dude if someone else wrote the post you could write you're writing the wrong thing and so
you shouldn't be writing that post. You have to write something that only you can do like
when Connie and I wrote the WeChat piece that was something that only she could do in a
unique way from her vantage point that nobody else could do and so it's okay that we spent
a couple months working on that because nobody else could beat us to that game and so when
you're playing the commodified game it's a race at the bottom it's diminishing returns
it's all those phrases you're always playing the wrong game.
So does this compete with the idea that when I look at like pieces that go viral they're
often part of a bigger conversation that is very popular you know like during election
season the viral hits are about the election and so in some ways they're not that unique
because they're about a topic that everybody's discussing but within that constraint they
have to be unique. Yeah and to be clear I think there are cases
where sometimes you're right like in the zeitgeist like the creator economy is a great example
like right now everybody is talking about the creator economy as it applies to crypto
and the intersection there and I feel like every day on Twitter I see 20 of the exact
same piece in different forms from different people. Now that's exciting to me because
that shows a lot of energy and excitement it's also quite honestly a little boring to
me because everybody is saying the same thing and so to me that's three things one is there's
a timing factor and yes you're right like in a time when there's a hot topic or something
in the zeitgeist everyone will sort of be circling around the same ideas and when you're
playing that game you have to be first to the conversation. The other way to play this
game is to go later in the conversation and my former colleague at Wired, Mark McCluskey,
he was a editor in chief of the Sports Illustrated online after this and he wrote a book on sports
performance. He coined this thing which I call the McCluskey curve which is the timing
of this so if you go first you want to either be first in the cycle or you want to go later
and add a very differentiated deeper in-depth take that nobody else has where you're adding
value to the conversation but if you go anywhere in the middle you're just in the noise and
frankly I think a lot of people are doing that and look I'll tell them it's a great
strategy because you get a lot of followers you get a lot of attention in the moment but
I guarantee you and I would put good money on this like I would take a bet on this with
anybody who wants to bet me on this those people are going to ask them tote out they're
not going to grow past a certain point because they're not thinking about it in terms of
a body of work they're not thinking about their moat their competitive differentiation
and where they're adding value and they're not playing a long game and so you had to
play the trade-off there to that extent it makes a ton of sense and I've noticed this
with any hackers too like if like some media event happens and we push out like you know
quote unquote news to our audience about it because it's very valuable to inform people
like hey this just happened you should take advantage of it we could write something that's
extremely sparse and it makes it mostly just the headline like hey this happened and it'll
generate a ton of discussion a ton of discussion if it's super new but after that like the
McCluskey curve kicks in and it's much more about providing a ton of detail a ton of analysis
a ton of educating people how to think about certain things or providing a point of view
that it's not necessarily required upfront but definitely is required to stand out from
the noise later on well the media has a phrase for this too which is like first day story
second day take third day story but I'm actually talking about something even bigger and in
your case you building indie hackers as a brand there's also besides the individual
pieces and how they do and don't do in the timing that we just talked about that you
just shared there's also kind of a meta level to this which is the phasing of the brand
so what you did a few years ago in the early days of indie hackers is very different than
what you do today because you're at a different base and that's also important to consider
when you're trying to build your content operation is that true for you as a VC firm I mean like
you've been there for seven years is a 16z at a different phase than it was when you
joined
in many ways absolutely because we're doing you know the separate media site future and
we're really doubling down on what we've been doing for years but now doing it in a much
bigger more open to other voices way but in a lot of ways no it's not that different because
it's very tied to the core of who we are where it is different though and this kind of ties
to the whole idea of the evolution of a brand is from a phasing perspective if you think
about you know like say 10 years ago this is before I even joined their job and markets
job in this case who's the head of marketing at a six and Z was to just put the firm's
name on the map and you know you had things like the P mark a blog and Ben's book and
that sort of established their identities but then the next phase when they brought
on more partners that doesn't work because you can't rely on just like the charismatic
to co-founders to run like create something at scale and so then you have to think about
other things that's the phase that I joined and that was like you know eight years ago
and then after that as you know we started promoting partners that like Connie like one
of the reasons she got promoted was that we chat post we worked on because she has so
much expertise but no one knew and now you know people know that she's like this go-to
person for that kind of expertise but then we kind of went into different verticals like
you know FinTech and crypto and consumer and different domain areas and that's another
example of a next phase and so similarly then within that each of those verticals so for
instance with bio we have a bio fund you know the early days of the phasing of that it was
about creating an identity that this entity exists and that we have investments in bio
and software and engineering based technologies for bio not just classic biotech and that
was the first phase and that involved putting out a lot of content so to bring this all
full circle in order to get noticed to punch above your weight to pay attention I worked
with Vijay along with one of my other colleagues on an op-ed for the New York Times on why
we shouldn't fear the black box of AI and that was really important because we we syndicated
that in order to get even more audience and that led to other great effects but then in
the next phase it became more about well how do we really find our core audience and grow
the audience even more and then we don't do as much content but then we do more quality
over quantity so when you guys launched future there was a lot of I guess media attention
about it a 16z the current phase it's in it's very well known it's a force to be reckoned
with and if you guys make moves people essentially take notice and write about it and when you
launched future I'm sure you read his post Matt Matt Iglesias I love his sub stack slow
boring he wrote sort of a critique and a response of the fact that you want future
and he has a very incisive point and he says if I have a critique of future it's that in
a very non VC way they're not thinking big enough the purpose of the publication is to
foster a tech positive media niche but that purpose is much too obvious if you disagree
with their tech positivity worldview you'll immediately find it off-putting and if you
sympathize then you'll find yourself on guard sort of to make sure you're not a dupe so
you'll be kind of defensive about it and he says this is not the way what they ought to
be doing is thinking like Rupert Murdoch especially in his newspaper guys and I guess this is sort
of his sort of prescription for how do you reach scale how do you reach people who don't
already agree with you and appeal to the mainstream in this in this world where everybody is sort
of niche down and they're only reading the exact things they want to read what are your
thoughts on that you know what is the path forward for future to become this huge ambitious
thing and do you think that he's right in saying that it's not thinking big enough I
don't disagree with a lot of what he said actually and it's funny because the way I
think about this is this is all about the phasing like the initial phase is about hitting
the core and really establishing this range of perspectives like we didn't have one style
of op-ed in both domain and authorship and style they were very different and making
sure that we have the credibility showing the depth because yes part of it is that there's
a lot of attention on what we're building but the goal is always to make sense of the
future and so starting with this initial launch set was one way to start there over time I
absolutely agree we're gonna have to move into not just sort of this core but into more
of the adjacent audiences I mentioned kind of the aggregating of things what you're saying
I think and tell me if I'm wrong and in quoting Maddie is the idea that you have to sort of
have this like culty way of writing and I think that's actually true for a lot of making
big pieces the fundamental question for me is whether really really good nuanced in-depth
things can also survive and actually grow successfully in that world because of that
silent majority the question is how that's gonna play out and I think that time will
tell so we'll have to see how that goes but to be clear this is phase one you know if
we launch the MVP we're resuming publishing in September the next phase will definitely
grow and in future phases you know I'm sure that there'll be many more mainstream things
but we'll be trying a lot of things and showing a range of things to as we kind of iterate
our way to what what's gonna be next I think that's probably the right criticism to hear
early on though that like you're not ambitious enough because I think I talked to a lot of
any hackers about this like okay I'm one person I have this company and they start to really
like all these like really big company things I'm like why are you doing this if you don't
have enough people you got it you got to be like you know much more MVP ish that's
because they're looking at these stories of these like they're looking at Amazon they're
looking at Google and they're trying to copy what they see like big established companies
doing like you can't get there immediately you have to sort of work your way there and
I think that's the same with pretty much everything if you want to build a big media brand you
can't start out of the gate by just copying the biggest media brands are doing like you
work your way there one step at a time and so it probably should look really unambitious
at first it should look really simple at first so you can focus on things and figure out
what works and I think that's really hard to do when you already have an established
name because everybody expects you to come out of the gate amazing and huge well that's
what I loved about the feedback like so many people commented how much they love the pieces
which is exactly the feedback I wanted and at the same time you get comments like the
one you shared you have the haters sort of like oh my god and I feel like they're caught
up in the meta narrative than the actual pieces themselves and so I actually don't care so
much about the meta narrative because I'm focused on the pieces and the content quality
overall like I wasn't too fussed by most of the feedback along those lines so I love the
feedback like Maddie's and others you know in terms of that but that's exactly the point
is that you can absolutely have big ambitions but you do have to create like stepways on
the way there we're also actively taking pitches and so if you have ideas for how to pitch
us you can actually go to future.com at the very bottom there's like a section pitch us
I outlined the pitch guidelines they were actually borrowed from my time at Wired and
I built them for the podcast and expanded them for a future and you can your listeners
can pitch us because if they have a good idea that they can back up and they're the expert
for that idea we would love more of those pieces so how much does it matter who is submitting
an idea to you because I think about this for the podcast as well like when somebody
comes on there is like the quality of their thought and like the arguments they can make
and the point of view they're expressing but there's also like the person themselves what
sort of audience do they have how do their audience their audience and like view them
what expertise and background do they have and like unfortunately we do live in a world
where even if you say the most logical well-argued thing people might not take you seriously
if you don't have the credentials or the background to sort of do that like how how do you think
about that when people are pitching you to come on to future and write a piece oh I think
about this all the time and so you know we talked about earlier how the whole media approach
like my bias in general is for first person this is you know I'm an opinion argument person
I edited people at Xerox parks so I didn't have a lot of patience for so-called quote
derivative experts I have a real bias for first principles people I also by the way
call these people you'll appreciate this term Portland I call them the people that have
bare metal insights because they're closest to the metal of the thing like the building
of the thing so I have a very strong bias for makers and the hacker type and I brought
that to the podcast when I pivoted us from and the media operation from reported to more
first person voices but to answer more specifically what that means so a first person expert doesn't
only have to be the inventor of X like that would be insane that would be like only the
person who came up with the idea can write about the thing so the other way I think about
this is depth like do they have earned expertise and to be very very very clear this is not
credentials or credential list it could be data that they have it could be unique observations
they have because they've earned some secret or some insight because they're working a
certain way it could be the moat that we talked about earlier the thing that differentiates
their view that nobody else has that adds value to the conversation especially given
how crowded a particular topic might be it could be even a derivative thing as long as
they're offering some useful framework or mindset they don't have to have answers and
so the people that we look for and on the podcast for instance like I look for the bare
metal experts it doesn't have to be the CEO or the spokesperson for the product but it
should be the person who's working on the the metal of the thing the closest to it and
I'll give you two examples from when I was at wired that really showed me this so one
was I had the engineer the lead engineer for Raspberry Pi which a lot of people at the
time had been playing with as hobbyists but they didn't have enough and so when they decided
to really scale it and produce way more Raspberry Pies I had the engineer not the spokesperson
the co-founder of Raspberry Pi but the engineer who was responsible for scaling the product
and manufacturing it write a piece for me about the process behind the outcomes of how
they got there like that's super interesting to me but then I had this woman who was an
ethnographer so not the inventor but a person who had shadowed Stephen Hawking for 10 years
and she basically talked about how he was like a collective like a board collective
with all these different people helping him think and interpret information because of
his physical limitations and that is an example of a commenter someone who's not an inventor
but she like shadowed him for 10 years like nobody else can tell the narrative that she
can so that's kind of one way to think about it the bias for the first person and what
is or isn't an expert okay so let's do some like like how-to questions because this is
all like it's it's all very easier said than done you're bringing on you know the engineer
the engineer she said it's not the spokesperson they might know a lot about how things are
are made but they're not necessarily experts in like what kind of content is going to spread
and what's going to be interesting and how to share that story what's one tip that you
would have for working with somebody who knows a lot but might not be the best writer yeah
the one of my number one tips is don't look at what they write actually ask them to answer
questions for you or a lot of time when people pitch us their pitch will have this fancy
language describe the thing but their email version when they just tell you what they're
trying to do is way more clear so I'll use more casual conversation as a way to get that
information the other is to record them talking about it transcribe that and then let them
write up the piece from that or help them write it up using your own transcription of
what they said out loud yes yes and oftentimes in brainstorm calls when we'll call people
because I also am a believer in trying to shape things up front because you know how
you and I talked about that problem where you can get a piece and it's not good and
you have to kill it at the end an experienced content person editor knows that you can actually
prevent that by by shaping something up front and so one of the things we'll do is we'll
do like a brainstorm call and then I'll send the transcription notes and delete out like
the crap from it and let them use that to write the piece because we literally like
their words are right there their argument is right there they're telling it to you people
get in their own way that's like the number one thing when it comes to trying to write
for the first time not getting their own way how much effort do you spend going out to
find people to be part of your sort of network so I do believe like I've always had a kind
of a 30 30 30 rule of thumb where you try to do 30% established voices like academics
existing experts 30% kind of indie or emerging voices and then 30% like ideas like what you
don't know that you don't know and there's a lot of different ways to go about that and
I did this at Wired too and in fact one of the people who just today the day we're recording
this like Zeynep Tofaki announced that she's going back to the New York Times as an opinion
columnist when I was at Wired like nine years ago ten years ago she was a blogger at Princeton
and I was one of the people one of the early people who put her pieces on Wired at the
time and to be clear she didn't actually do them for us because she'd already written
and she was very smart and at the time we didn't have budget for paying people so one
of the things that I would do is reach out to people who had written pieces and ask them
if we could syndicate it and that was also a good thing because she wouldn't get the
audience that she would have gotten on her Princeton blog that she would on Wired the
opposite side is believe it or not it's not that hard so we have no shortage of pitches
to me it's equality and how do you pull it off and that is a combination of how do you
know that this person is not just a expert but the expert and there's a lot of different
indicators of that like this goes back to that builder maker bare metal kind of insight
then the other thing that comes up is when you're focusing with the builder focus like
they can't just be reacting to something they have to be proposing something oftentimes
they're the person selling the very thing that they're talking about that's probably
the biggest challenge I would say and in op-eds I used to call this the problem solution
op-ed where oh my god I'd get pitched this op-ed that's about this great problem and
a great trend but it just so happens that so-and-so person's product and the thing they're working
on which is why they know so much about this topic is the solution and honestly readers
know they know they're being sold and so that is actually the much much harder part and
that's where the editing and the credibility and really making points defensible and thoughtful
and not salesy really comes in that's like literally every piece under the hackers is
talking to a founder who has a business who has a product that they would like to promote
and like to sell and there's a sort of a dual purpose there where they're promoting themselves
but they're also providing something of value to the audience ideally it's almost like a
trade at its best it doesn't feel like a trade doesn't feel like okay let me do this thing
that I want that doesn't help you and return for this thing that you want at best it feels
like the sort of seamless experience where as a reader you're not even thinking about
the fact that this person might you know benefit from what they're writing that's exactly right
and that's where the execution is everything well listen so I could talk to you about media
and content for probably like 10 hours straight and never run out of questions and topics
but to sort of end here you know most of the people listening to this are any hackers they
care about media and so far as obviously they consume a lot of stuff if they're listening
to this listen to podcasts but also they are trying to promote their own businesses and
their own sort of efforts to get the word out about what they're doing what's one tip
that you've learned sort of over the years that you think people might underrate or people
might not be aware of that might help them sort of get the word out about what they're
doing think about what payoff you're giving to your reader or listener for whatever you're
selling whether it's an idea a product or however you convey it one of the number one
things that I've seen is people get caught up in religious debates about length or this
whole thing of I don't want to dumb it down right I don't want to do x y or z and it's
actually less about those two things than it is about the payoff is the payoff proportional
to how much time that person spent listening or reading and did they get enough out of
it because if you nail payoff then people will keep coming back to you kind of like
a repeat sale like sass whereas if you don't nail payoff you've lost something it's really
hard to get them back so I would say pay attention to pay off perfect I love it because it's
sort of like working backwards you know it's very easy as a creator or writer just think
about what you're doing but if you can as early as possible put yourself in the reader's
mind or the user's mind or the customer's mind to think about what they're going to
get out of it that can shape the entire process of what you're creating and lead to that great
payoff I would love it if you could share with listeners where they can go to find out
more about what you're up to personally and also how they can subscribe to future and
catch the a 16 z podcast and other things that you're working on so I do want people
I hope people really check out future calm and then go to the pitch section at the bottom
of the page you'll find the pitch guidelines as well as forms to pitch us for both podcasts
and written content and as I mentioned we're hiring so we'll also take any intros if people
know of any talented people and you don't have to necessarily be a seasoned you know
ex-journalist or anything in fact some of the best talent comes from other places and
then to answer your last question about where people can follow my work personally I'm on
Twitter at SMC 90 and I have some newsletters and one of them is on world building and world
builders where I'll be calling a lot of insights around you know how to build worlds which
is how I think of content and then another one is about editorial content marketing I'm
actually working on a book been trying to work on a book because I get all these questions
so many times and I'm starting to share the insights there in newsletter form so people
can follow all that under my name you can find me under my sub stack and I have many
sub stacks under my Twitter handle at SMC 90 very cool I'm looking forward to your book
I'm so glad to finally get to talk to you in this way it's so fun thank you for having
me.