Build Authority by Finding an Audience With Tony Stubblebine

That's an honor to be here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, for sure. I know there's a little bit of like Willy Wonka to my story, where like he needed someone to replace him running the Chocolate Factory and picked his most enthusiastic customer. But there's a lot more to it beyond that. I'm a programmer originally, came out of school with a computer science degree as startups were a big thing. I'm from California originally, and so I just got sucked into the tech community and the idea that there would be ways to reinvent the future or invent a better future. The first category of things I got pulled into was: how do we make people smarter? I had been working really early in my career as a programmer for a publishing company, O'Reilly Media, which published technical books. But the secret for that company was they didn't go find writers — they went and found professionals and taught those professionals how to be writers, which is I think what we're going to be talking about today. It's easier to teach someone who knows what they're talking about how to communicate than to teach someone who's just a great communicator how to know what they're talking about, especially when you get into really deep technical subjects, which every academic ends up in that space. We were doing this for programmers — we would take a professional programmer who was on the cutting edge of some technology and help them write a book, and that was the business. And this is quaint now — who learns from books anymore? We all learn from the internet. But I was doing that right as that switch was happening, and we saw the potential for what we would call at the time user-generated content, but now blogging is literally one of the first forms of that — what happens if you give everyone a voice? Originally this was really exciting to us because we thought the world's going to get a lot smarter. You see places where that's true — Wikipedia is an upgrade on encyclopedias, and that's all community-driven. But I think now, 15-20 years later, it feels like there's a lot of places where maybe the world didn't get better by giving everyone a voice — it got louder, more divisive, there's more misinformation. So I'm straying from my career arc, but I was a programmer, then a manager, then I started a business, then I started another business, and along the way I just always was writing and happened to be close to Medium when it launched 12 years ago, and just got closer and closer over maybe a 10-year period to the point where I was the top user. I had a publishing group here that was representing maybe close to 2% of the traffic, which for a platform is actually a lot for one user to be representing. So when Medium was looking for another CEO, I threw my hat in the ring and made the case that this lesson I'd learned early in my career — we could do a better job of helping with this core problem of finding readers. The rest of the internet gives readers based on attention-seeking, like people that are really good at grabbing your attention. I thought we could build a place that gave distribution, gave readers to people who know what they're talking about. My two years here have really been based on making a modern take on blogging that could do that.

Exactly. Goldilocks — I use that phrase a lot actually at work. It is tricky to find the just right version of these things. Yeah, absolutely. When I talk to academics, there's often this frustration about how much you've written that didn't get read — especially when you're a student, a lot of what you write just gets read by your TA. And then this other frustration about how oversimplified the mainstream media covers every topic that you happen to know about. So blogging is this great middle ground where there's enough room for you to go in depth, but it really calls for you to explain it in plain language. It's a chance to do both — to show that you can teach and explain, but also get into the subtleties that are important. That's how most academics that I see on Medium approach it. The writing ends up really showing the depth and breadth of their understanding. When you write a paper, that can often be very deep and narrow, but when I read an academic on Medium, I'm realizing how many other papers they've read on that topic along the way. So it's this perfect format for mainstream communication. And then the thing that makes it worthwhile is we're going to bring you readers that really want to hear from you.