#40 Ben Thompson: Thriving in a Digital World

It is. It is. Strategy and tech. I like to say that naming things is clearly not my forte. It's weird though. It's kind of a running joke with me and my subscribers about the name, but there is a good reason I chose it. It's very prosaic: I was poor and in debt, starting a website, and it was available. It returned zero Google search results, there was a Twitter handle available. It was broadly in line with where I was going. I was inspired by Horace Dediu with Asymco, which is such a great name. The mistake I made is a name that is unclear how to pronounce and unclear how to spell. That's a bad idea. If I could do it over, I would probably do something different. But the challenge of building the brand is more pressing given the hurdles I put in my own way. Yes, it is strategy.

That's a good question. I think the way I describe it is the strategy and business of technology, and I've appended its impact on society. One of the great things about writing about technology is it gives you a license to write about almost everything because technology is impacting everything. Clearly we've seen that in the context of politics. I wrote about Zuckerberg being in Washington DC this week, but I've also written about how the structural changes Facebook has imposed on the media, which is inextricably linked to the power of political parties, enabled the rise of Trump. That was very much in my wheelhouse, but it was also a deeply political piece, not partisan, more political science. So that's a cool thing. Broadly, I view Stratechery as my personal intellectual journal of trying to understand the world and how it works. I start with a technology lens, but the nature of the industry aligns well with my personal interest to understand a whole bunch of things, not just Google or Apple or Facebook.

I've always been interested in technology. I remember being in middle school, getting a computer, and being very into it. Discovering the web when it came out. But also, I lived in a small town in Wisconsin. My family was blue collar, and no one around me had any interest in this stuff. It was just me. I didn't gravitate to the traditional computer science or programming angle. I picked up some programming skills, but it never gripped me. I was more interested in the broader picture and implications. That started in junior high. My parents grew up extremely poor, broken households, and no one pushed me into business. The most obvious outcome was academia. I went to the University of Wisconsin. I didn't even apply to Ivy League schools. That world wasn't even a possibility. So this juxtaposition of a small world environment with innate curiosity and the internet's access to a bigger world is where it all started. From there, I always followed technology as a hobby. It never occurred to me to make it a career. I went to Taiwan after college, thought I'd take a year to travel, and ended up loving it. I met my wife. All along, my hobby was technology. I was obsessed. I read everything. My wife said, 'Why don't you go work in technology?' I was 27 or 28, so I went back to the States and attended business school. It was the shortest route to legitimacy in the US job market. I got a tremendous benefit from it. I got an opportunity at Apple University, which was fantastic. Then I went to Microsoft. That got me a foot in. But tech first showed up in my head back in middle school.

I had a happy childhood. I wasn't trying to get out. I was just genuinely interested. I found this stuff fascinating. In high school, the web came out, and in college, the dot com bubble took off. I had a little business in the dorms putting computers together and selling them. I bought Intel processors for a quarter of the price because of the bubble. There's an article I've linked to called the Oregon Trail generation. It's a distinct group of people around five or six years older than me who grew up with no internet and then switched to having it completely. Everyone before us had the internet come later, and the ones after us grew up immersed. Our generation has a clear delineation between before and after. We can remember pay phones and not being able to find a friend at a party, but we also became fully immersed and digitally native.

When I started Stratechery, I felt pretty confident about the prospects. I had a five-year plan. I wanted it to be my job from the beginning. I thought it would take longer, but I felt there was an opportunity. There were tons of sites writing about technology, but they were all writing from a product perspective. I thought there was a real opportunity to write from the business side, the strategic side. To the extent I wrote about products, it was how a company's business model influences the products it creates. I felt there was a significant void I could fill. I think that's turned out to be the case. My viewpoint is unique because the starting point is different. I start from business models and a company's culture, which goes back to its founding and early lessons, and then look at what they do and the products they create. Most sites start with the products and go backwards.

Business school gave me a lot of the language, but I realized I was actually really good at this stuff. It came naturally. I'm a systematic thinker. I see things in systems and how they interconnect. I'm not a detail person, so working in corporate America was challenging. I could see where to go but couldn't communicate it well. I'm a strong believer that strengths are weaknesses. My talent is the ability to view things systematically and see how a business model flows through to product decisions. I'm fortunate to have found a career that rewards that. You have a model where you release one free article a week and four articles for paying subscribers. How did you arrive at that? Was it business model driven? When I started, I had a goal of making money. I quickly decided to do only one or two articles a week. The reason I didn't want to write every day was that in the long run, I wanted a subscription offering that was 'get more' rather than a paywall. The only person who had done a one-person blog paywall was Andrew Sullivan. He went from publishing like crazy with advertising to throwing up a paywall. It worked because he had a large audience, but he never adjusted his editorial strategy and burned out. I had the luxury of starting with the knowledge of the business model I wanted. I wanted to deliver a product consistently for free, and then if you want more, you can pay. I wanted paying to be a positive feeling. I don't push the paywall hard. A lot of people say they didn't even know I had a product for months or years. That's okay because I want people who are exploring the site to find it. Those are the people I want to attract. The metric I used when figuring out when to launch was the number of visitors to the homepage on days I didn't post. Those were people searching for new content, checking if I posted. Those were my initial customers. Today, I do one free article, three additional articles a week, and a podcast. I started out much more aggressive, doing two free articles and five daily updates plus a podcast. That was insane. I cut it down to one free and five daily updates, then one and four, and settled on one and three plus a podcast a couple years ago. It's a sustainable level.

I honestly don't look at metrics at all. Every day when I send the email, I see how many people are receiving the update. As long as that number is larger than the day before, I figure everything's going fine. The brilliant thing about the subscription model is you just have to keep your existing subscribers happy. Everything else takes care of itself. I don't need to worry about the free articles. I want them to be great, but they're harder because they're spread more widely. The daily update is more familiar. At the end of the day, what matters is that my subscribers are happy. If they're happy, they won't cancel, and they'll tell people to sign up. I've never done any marketing. The friction for subscribers to tell others is zero. They can post on social media or email. I don't have trials. I'm already giving away 25% of my content. If that's not enough, a couple extra articles won't make a difference. Also, I write around 2,000 words every day. If I did a trial, people would sign up, get this huge email daily, and then decide it's not worth it. The sunk cost fallacy works in my favor. Once someone pays $10, they'll carve out the time to read it. That builds a habit. Once they're in the habit, they can't imagine not reading it. My business model, editorial content, and all pieces of my business interact and interconnect. Publishers have to align editorial strategy with business strategy, customer acquisition, and go-to-market. They all have to work in concert because the internet makes competition so much greater.

Absolutely. All the time. You have to get over it and accept that it's going to happen. You'll see it show up in other columns or opinion pieces a day or two later. It was frustrating at first, but I realized my goal is not to make money or get rich. I wanted to make a living and provide for my family, but this is stuff I'm passionate about. The opportunity to spend every day thinking and writing about what fascinates me is a tremendous privilege. To the extent that I'm influencing other people to write similar things, that's a tremendous outcome. It shows that the way to truly scale is not just to influence direct readers, but to influence the influencers. If my goal is to have positive change and not to feed my ego, then it's actually a great thing.

I don't offer a trial. I think monthly gives you an accessible way in. It's $10, on the edge of 'I'll give it a try' territory. People will try for a month and many will immediately cancel auto-renew because they're just trying it out. That's fine. When I look at churn, I exclude the one-month folks. But a lot of times, people start with a month and then switch to a year because they realize it's great. A year is $20 cheaper, $100 a year. So it's an easier entry point. Over time, I see more people go from monthly to annual than churn out. At this point, my annual membership is actually larger than my monthly membership, and I think that's great.

I wake up and deal with this super annoying puppy, then make breakfast for my daughter, walk her to school. My son grabs a bus. Then I sit down and have a meeting with someone who assists me with administrative stuff. That's usually the first hour or two because he's based in the US and the time zone means it has to be first. It's a pain to dive right into it, but that's what happens. After that, I theoretically dive into research and planning for the daily update. Usually it's a winding road of reading, Twitter, flipping around, thinking. One thing I do early right when I wake up is look at all the headlines from the day before. So ongoing through my head is an outline of what I'll probably write about that day. For weekly updates, I usually have an idea quite a while in advance. I knew this week I would write about Zuckerberg in Congress. I wrote about Microsoft's reorganization last week, and I knew I would write about it the following week. I'm thinking about those for several days ahead. I usually already know which day I'll write them. The daily update is more responsive to what happened the day before. I always have a list of stuff going on. The middle of the day is spent fleshing out the angle. Then in the early to mid-afternoon, I receive the necessary dose of sheer panic and terror that I have a deadline coming up in three or four hours, and I better buckle down and start writing. I spend the afternoon and early evening writing. My goal is to publish by 7:00, usually ends up closer to 7:00. Then I have dinner, hang out with the kids, play with the dog, and go to bed and do it again the next day.

The most common misconception people have is that it's like starting from nothing every day. I have a view of the world, a mental model. Things happen, and I pass them through that model. Most of the time they fit, and it's easy to write about. Some don't, and usually that means there's something else going on, or sometimes I'm wrong. When I'm wrong, that's the most interesting and the spur of a lot of weekly articles where I'm modifying the model. So it's less coming up with opinions that's difficult, and more the discipline of avoiding confirmation bias. Things happen that fit my view, and I think they must be true, but I need to double check. It would be easy to fall into saying something is wrong when maybe it's right and I'm wrong. So the bigger challenge is the discipline of avoiding confirmation bias.

All the time. I did it a couple weeks ago. It turned out I think I was probably right, but no, I do it all the time. I think a strong commitment to that is critical. It's key in a few areas. One, it's very freeing. A friend of mine once said, 'I love to be right, which is why I always say I'm wrong because that's the fastest and shortest way to be right.' So if you want to be right, admit you're wrong. Number two, I write with a fairly authoritative tone because that's better writing, but I abide by strong opinions weakly held. I pursue what I believe to be true and always test the assumptions. Having a systematic view of the world helps because it's my nature to challenge assumptions. Also, it aligns with my business model. People pay me because they think what I write is worth reading. For me to come out and say I got this wrong, and every time I get something wrong, I try to recount what I was thinking. Probably 60% of the time it's confirmation bias. I'll say I got this wrong because of confirmation bias. I presumed it would be this and didn't consider that. You could search for confirmation bias in my writing and get several examples. Other times, circumstances change, or my opinion changed. A lot of times I get things wrong due to timing. I can see structurally why a company is facing a particular issue, but I don't appreciate the extent to which their current route has legs. So what I say is correct, but it's not going to be correct until 2020. That's no excuse because to be wrong in timing is to be wrong. I am wrong all the time, and I relish the opportunity to say when I'm wrong. Is it painful? Sometimes it's painful. Probably one of the more painful ones was the Snapchat Spectacles thing. There were a few people who rubbed it in my face constantly, which is irritating. But it was also painful because I knew better. I should have known better. Those are the most irritating ones where it wasn't even confirmation bias, it was I kind of fell in love.

With my own sort of theory, and the theory wasn't wrong. It was just misapplied, I think, in that particular case. And those are the irritating ones. But at the same time, you know, if I don't come out and say that, say, 'This is why I got it wrong, I did this, I made this mistake,' then why should people trust me or pay me money to read what I have to say?

Yeah. So I very much start at sort of first principles, by which I, in the case of content, by which I mean like just news. So I wake up, I open up Techmeme, just like, where are the headlines of the day? And when I'm reading something, I try to get into original sources as much as possible. Um, sometimes if something comes up, I will try to find like more opinion someone has written about it more, just because I find it a useful way. It's like a knife sharpener where it prompts me to think through my own sort of view. But usually, by and large, I form my opinions directly from the core content. And so people like, 'Oh, who are the writers you read?' or whatever. Usually if I read other writers, it's more as a happenstance of researching a particular topic. What I actually read on a day-to-day basis is just news, like what is actually happening. And then in the context of writing a daily update, I will do extensive amounts of research. I mean, my typical day I end with like 150 browser tabs open. I have an iMac with 40 gigabytes of RAM because I have so many browser tabs for handling browser tabs.

Oh, hundreds. Hundred every day. Like when I write about stuff, I want to... It's really important for me to get everything right down to the details because I see things like, for example, Mark Zuckerberg was in Congress this week and he was let off the hook on at least three occasions in the Senate, and I didn't count times in the House, because people talked about Facebook selling data. Well, Facebook doesn't sell data. Now, is Facebook's handling of data a-ok? Of course not. But if you're not precise and understand exactly how the business works, then your analysis may be right in spirit, but it's not right because the details are wrong. And more importantly, the people that matter are not going to hear what you have to say because they're going to get caught up on the details. And so for me, getting the details right is critical, not just to make sure my analysis is right, but to make sure that people will hear the analysis, because people won't hear what you have to say if you get details wrong, even if those details don't matter. So to me, getting stuff right is really important just from a rhetorical standpoint. But then also, I want to know, I don't want to say stuff that I don't think I understand. And sometimes it's things like, I wrote an article about GPUs like a year ago. I remember this one, I was really proud of, in part because I knew how they worked at a sort of high level, but to me that was a great example where I really got down into the weeds on understanding a very granular level how they work. And to my mind, that was an example of a daily article where it read like any other daily update, but there were hours of research that went into that to make it feel like just another daily update. And you know, I think my absolute favorite compliments that I get from people is when people in other fields are like, 'This is the first time someone's actually written something about this field that understands how it works.' You know, and those are gratifying because it shows that the time I put in to make sure I got the details right were worth it. And I think that's the flip part to the saying when you're wrong. Like if you say when you're wrong and you put in the time to get the details right the rest of the time, that's the best way to build trust and reputation in the long run. You know, there's always a challenge about a broad-based publication where it's like, 'Oh, this publication is really great, they always know what they're talking about,' and then they write about the field that you're in and if they get the details wrong, it's like, 'Wait, I know about this one, they're getting it wrong.' And you start to question everything else. And so to me, it's so important to take the time to get the details right.

I mean, I... Facebook is an entire morass there. I think the part of the challenge with Facebook currently is I think there's an aspect where Facebook is a bit of a scapegoat for the last election, but I think Facebook is very attuned to that and feels resentful about that. But that doesn't change the fact that Facebook did a lot of bad things. And you know, I actually think Facebook is responsible for the last election, not because of Russian ads or fake news, but because of the way they fundamentally changed the structure of politics and media in America. But that's a very different sort of cause. And so, it's hard to pull apart what are the causes here. And I think it's such a challenge just in general. Now, Facebook is probably the most prominent example, particularly currently, but by and large, to sort of break out of your bubble. And it feels like the bubble has gotten so much stronger and more pervasive, particularly since the last election. And you know, I think to this point, I'm grateful for one having grown up in the sort of environment that I did because I feel at least more aware of the... I mean, imagine growing up and not even knowing that you should apply to Harvard or something like that. That was me. And I think that's a mindset and a view of the world that most people that I deal with on a daily basis can't even fathom. To grow up in that sort of... but that's the experience of a lot of... That's one. But then two, on a day-to-day basis, to not be in San Francisco, to not be immersed in tech in a sort of environmental basis, but to be living abroad, living in a different country, talking to people who mostly aren't really interested or don't really care that much, I think is tremendously... there are certainly downsides, many of which are ameliorated by the internet, which, you know, things like Twitter and messaging that let you stay in touch with people. But there are tremendous upsides, which is being on the outside looking in brings, I think, a lot of clarity and skepticism. I think probably more than anything.

Yeah. I mean, and like I said, everything is a strength and a weakness, you know? So I'm less in touch with the details and the day-to-day by definition because I'm not immersed in it. But the payoff is being on the outside looking in, and that happens to align with again my sort of natural way to view the world. So again, I think it's another area where my life and sort of business model is in alignment, I think, to my benefit.

Well, I mean, my theory with Facebook is... There's that famous book, 'The Party Decides,' and that was sort of the theory that drove Nate Silver, for example, to ignore his own polling data and to say that Trump wasn't going anywhere. And the thesis of that book, 'The Party Decides,' is that after the democratic reforms of the presidential nomination process in the '60s and '70s—I mean, it used to be like a smoky room, they would go choose the presidential nominee, but then there was this push to be more democratic, I think particularly in the Democratic side after Herbert Hoover was sort of just picked out of nowhere—and the thesis of the book is that yes, it became more democratic, we had the primaries and caucuses and all those sort of things, but it actually was still the parties deciding who is the presidential nominee. And their point was the party is not like politicians. The party is all the broad sort of interest groups and donors and activists who care about outcomes, and their collective preferences drive the decision-making because they're the ones that actually do stuff. They actually do the work, they actually pay the money, they actually do all this sort of stuff, and they will make the selection by virtue of there only being a possible selection, which means only some candidates would get money, only some candidates would get the sort of necessary support, only some candidates get the sort of media coverage that is necessary to even make a presidential run. And I think what was implicit in that and what was missed and underappreciated is all that sort of implicit power—no longer explicit power, but implicit power—was inextricably tied up to the gatekeepers in media. In order to get your name out, you needed money for advertising or you needed earned media, where the newspapers would write about you and television stations would cover you, and all those sorts of things. And that only happened if you were in a position that was enabled by sort of the party—again, the party speaking broadly, not just the politicians. And so people would vote in primaries, but they were always voting for broadly acceptable candidates to the party as a whole. And so that's kind of part one. Part two is what has happened to the media over the last 20 years. The media has completely lost its gatekeeper status. The media was predicated on controlling... the media was not predicated on writing content that people wanted to read. They were predicated on owning printing presses and owning delivery trucks.

Exactly. And so what the internet did is completely made all that obsolete. The internet made distribution cost zero, made transaction cost zero, made it possible for anyone to go anywhere to read anything, and basically destroyed the power on which those gatekeeper functions rested. And so what happened was the media completely switched from being a gatekeeper to being a subservient supplier to platforms like Google and Facebook, where they had to go on the platforms according to the platform's dictates and could compete for readers according to the way they were allowed, which is by clicks or getting attention or whatever it might be, as opposed to being, 'We own the printing press, you will read what we have to say.' And so the implication of that is once the media lost its power and its gatekeeper status, the parties at the same time—because they were inextricably tied to the media—lost their power and gatekeeping status, and no one sort of realized this happened until really Obama came along and came out of nowhere and totally overwhelmed the party's choice, which was Clinton. And he did it through grassroots, through being someone that broke through and people were attracted to. And then Trump took it up to 11. No one in the party establishment wanted him or supported him, but he had celebrity, he had attraction. And why did the news cover Trump? The news didn't make Trump. The news covered Trump because people wanted to see more Trump. They wanted it. And so the news media organizations were responding to the incentives that they had in a world where they were no longer gatekeepers. They were sort of serfs in Google and Facebook's kingdoms. And what else would they do? If they didn't cover Trump, someone else would, and that's where the audience would go. And so this is the effect that Facebook had in Trump being elected, by virtue of being the mechanism by which media entities lost their gatekeeper status on what was acceptable or not acceptable. They were by extension the mechanism by which political parties lost their controlling function, such that no one could control it. And once no one could control it, it laid the groundwork for Trump to come along and be nominated and be elected, which is what the actual voters wanted, you know, whether you agree or not, even though the party didn't want that. And so it just flipped it around on its head.

Unquestionably. I mean, we are switching from a world where it used to be a world where market power and economic power and social power was gained by controlling supply, to a new world where power is gained by controlling demand. The fundamental difference between, let's say, a newspaper previously that controlled the printing presses and Facebook is that Facebook has the users, such that suppliers—and this being content organizations, news organizations—have no choice but to go to users on Facebook's terms. A great example is Google. Google is kind of the king of what I call these sort of aggregators. What does any website do? What do I do? What do you do? What does the New York Times do? What does anyone do? They put up a map of their website that, according to Google's terms, makes their site easier for Google to understand and to put in a search index, right? Like we are all doing work on Google's behalf to make Google's service better. That is because Google controls demand. They control the customer in where they enter the internet. And that's a perfect example of how controlling demand is the true locus of power going forward, not controlling supply.

Because there are multiple virtuous cycles going on. So in the case of Google, you have a data network advantage, which is the more people search, the more data and results they get on what searches work, what searches don't, people's preferences, it makes your search results better. So there's one network effect there where the more people that use Google, the better Google gets. And if you had two search engines and they started out with identical technology and one had 51% share, one 49% share, over time the 51% share would grow and would improve just because they have a data advantage. So that's number one. Number two is you get a two-sided network effect where the more users... users come to a platform initially because it has a great user experience or it fits their specific need, and those users give that aggregator power over suppliers. Suppliers will come onto their platform on the aggregator's terms. You can see this with Google, Facebook, you see with Netflix, for example, where they go there to get access to the customers, and that makes the offering more attractive to end users, so they get more users, and you get more users, now you have more power over suppliers, you get more suppliers.

And so the sort of... and you're seeing this play out where the endgame of controlling demand, and because again the two key things are there being zero distribution costs, which means you can pull all suppliers of all types on your platform and reach all customers at effectively zero marginal costs. Whereas it used to be, you know, to print a newspaper and deliver it to a doorstep, that cost money, such that a newspaper couldn't scale infinitely. Google can scale infinitely, and there's no transaction costs. Google can legitimately serve every person in the world. Facebook can legitimately serve two billion people. There's no way any business with any sort of marginal cost could ever serve two billion people. And so it's the fact that there are no marginal costs is a consequence of the internet. And you know, the thing with business school is always very critical. I remember going to business school and strategy class, and there were no classes about the internet that involved internet companies. And I went to the professor, I'm like, 'How can you have a strategy class without anything about the internet?' Like, 'Well, the thing about strategy and doing case studies is you learn these broad principles that can be applied.' And it's because it's true, but what the internet has effectively done is, if you think there's like a big complex math equation, if you put a zero into that equation, the whole thing kind of blows up, right? You can still use the equation with zeros in it, but most people don't think that way. They can't think through all the implications. And so again, my sort of systematic view of the world let me sort of figure out what happens if you put a zero in this equation. What are the implications of that? But a lot of what I write about with aggregation theory is, okay, this equation, let's lose the equation, let's go through to the simplified equation, which looks completely different than the equation that came before because after the zeros are there, it looks totally different. And now how does this actually apply to the real world? How can this actually apply to your business and your industry and things along those lines?

I think the most important takeaway would be... I'm sure I could do case studies about different industries and companies. But I think the more important thing is examining the implications of changing assumptions. Like what happens when you start with zero marginal costs? And I would probably want to go through different industries and show how when you change the assumptions, the implication for that business and what is attractive completely changes. Like take CPG companies, consumer packaged goods, which is a huge focus at Kellogg where I went to school. These sort of companies were predicated... the single most important thing to understand about a CPG company is that their most important strategic tool was shelf space. If you control shelf space, then what you do is you do R&D to get marginally better products, and then they would run a bunch of TV advertising reaching the lowest common denominator, and they'd go in the store and it would be a brand extension where they'd be next to the Tide detergent because, oh, if a grocery store owner, if you want Tide detergent, you better carry this brand extension next to it, and then it would be there and you'd buy it, and that's how they would drive growth. And if you think about it, if you have a strategy that is quite literally predicated on physical space, that probably is not going to be a very... if you do the thing with the internet, what happens if there are no shelves?

It turns out that brand already mattered, but brand matters more in a different way on the internet. Where it used to be brand mattered from a recognition perspective. Like you're in the grocery store, 'Oh, I need some deodorant.' And you're looking at a shelf with like 20 kinds of deodorant. How do you pick the one that you pick? Most people don't know, but a lot of it has to do with advertising and implied preference and things that they've picked up over time. Whereas on the internet, if you go to Amazon for deodorant, you search for deodorant. You search for Old Spice or you search for Right Guard, which means the recollection of a specific brand name is much more important than sort of recognition of a brand, if that makes sense. Which means your advertising strategy needs to be different. All those things, everything you do about your business needs to be different. You probably want fewer brand extensions and more investment in a sort of standout thing. And you have to deal with competitors that are super niche focused because the internet enables niche in an unbelievable sort of way. I mean, our businesses are examples of that. And so my point would be, if I were to guest lecture in an MBA program, I would maybe use CPG as a case study, but my goal would be: you need to learn to consistently and repeatedly start with new assumptions. Like what is the controlling assumption in this industry? What happens if that controlling assumption goes to completely changes? Here's another example: hotels. If you're trying to figure out what is the most important thing for a hotel, traditionally it's the name on the sign. Why? You are going to go and close your eyes in a strange place and you need to feel safe. And so if you don't feel safe, if you don't feel like it's a place that is trustworthy, it doesn't matter. Location doesn't matter, amenities don't matter, the quality of the sheets don't matter. Nothing matters unless that one priority is taken care of. And so what a company like Airbnb did was it took that trust, which was very hard to build and develop—companies would spend hundreds of millions of dollars and lots of time on building brands—they basically digitized trust to being this sort of reputation system and ratings and things like that. Again, eBay is a huge pioneer in lots of this stuff. But they digitized trust, and what that did was it didn't make trust not matter. What it did was it lowered trust from being the only thing that matters to being one of many things that matter, along with maybe I want a kitchen, maybe I want to live in a particular neighborhood, maybe I want to do all these sorts of things. And you can see this in industry after industry where the assumptions fundamentally change. And so again, the lesson I would want to impart is: how can you train yourself to question and look at assumptions? Because most people don't. They stay on the surface.

Yeah. I think that's a mistake by the brands. They have too many versions, too many variations, and that's a holdover from the world that came before. And I think all these brands and so much of the modern economy was built on this mass market, lowest common denominator sort of model where you're going to watch the big sports game that everybody watches, and you're going to see the commercial for the big beer or the big deodorant or the big whatever it might be that everyone sees, and you're going to drive your big car to a big box retailer, and you're going to bump into it on the shelf, you're going to grab it, you're going to go home. And every single piece of that story that I just told is being fundamentally disrupted by the internet. You know, sports, the shared experience of watching a football game, certainly still strong, and there's a reason why it's still valuable and it still drives a lot of, particularly the bundle and things on those lines, but there's so many more things to watch. There's esports, there's Reddit, there's listening to podcasts. There's so many more outlets for free time that that is inevitably going to weaken over time. The driving a car, well, maybe you're going to take an Uber, or maybe you're going to ride a bus, or maybe the fundamental nature of our cities is going to slowly transform as new forms of transportation become viable. Big box retailers, well, what about just going to Amazon? What about searching for it? A lowest common denominator brand that sort of applies. What about the micro brand that can target me on Facebook or Instagram because it understands who I am and what is right about it, and like, 'Oh, that's actually really interesting,' and they can reach me spending a fraction of the price that these companies spend to do these mass market advertisements. But the implication of being very niche is they can be much more specialized. If you don't have to bear huge fixed costs of being on shelf space and running TV ads, you can spend that money on building a better product that appeals to a narrower segment and charge more. And now I'm buying my custom deodorant that's meant for men in the Oregon Trail generation, and I'm lost as a customer for P&G completely, and there's no real way to get me back.

Well, I say you're owned by Warren Buffett, so you should probably do what he says.

I think you just said it. I think that the internet has a barbell effect where there are returns to the biggest and returns to the smallest. And if you're stuck in the middle, it's a very dangerous place to be. And so, if I were Heinz, I would double down on the Heinz brand and I would seek to dominate even further all the traditional distribution channels that I do, whether that be restaurants, schools, or the B2B selling space, because that's going to be a space where being big and having barrier assets is going to be much more impactful than the consumer space where it's getting more challenging. So that would be another aspect of what I would do. And I think that's probably relatively consistent advice. But certainly, I think Heinz is probably in better shape than a lot of folks, to be honest, because, you know, did you read that New York article about trying to invent new kinds of ketchup?

Oh, it's a classic. It's one of those Gladwell pieces from a few years ago, but it turns out it's really hard to improve on Heinz. Which is a good place to be. But yeah, I think that the thinking about your go-to-market, your target customers, what your brand is, is it worth doubling down on, can you do extensions, what makes sense, all those are going to be key questions.

Well, I think they're in pretty distinct categories. I think going forward, Amazon is clearly focused on, from a consumer perspective anyway, they want to be where you buy everything. They want to be the one-stop shop, and if you want something to buy, you should just go to Amazon, don't even bother going anywhere else. And they've been very effective in that regard. Google: if you want to know something, you go to Google. And Facebook is where you waste time. And that is a surprisingly valuable thing to be where you waste time, because in part, one, people have a lot of time to waste, more than they think, and mobile has really unlocked huge amounts of new places for people to waste time, whether it be waiting for the bus, going to the bathroom, whatever it might be. There's lots of places to waste time. And the other thing, the good thing about wasting time, is that it is one of the most attractive and compelling places to advertise. Because when you are focused, like Google is about focus—'I want this thing and Google's going to help me find it'—to that extent, Google search ads are very compelling because they are helping you find the thing that you want, and it's really a win-win sort of thing. Whereas what about the things that you don't know that you want, that you don't know about, that you're not aware of that even exist? And if you're in a focus state where your attention is thinking about one thing, you're not open to new things, to new ideas, to new things coming in. You're much more open when your mind is kind of shut off, when you're just absently scrolling through your Facebook feed or through Instagram. And so Facebook is actually an incredibly powerful advertising platform for precisely that reason, because the mental state that people are in when they're on Facebook is different than the one they're in when they're on Google, for example, or even on Amazon. The other thing to think about in this case, and why those are the big companies, is you have to think about from an advertiser perspective as well. Advertisers think about it from an ROI. Everyone thinks about the R: what's the return? Like how many purchases do I get from this ad? But the I matters as well: how much work do I have to do to get this ad out there? Do I have to learn the platform? Do I have to invest? Do I have to make special creative for it? And this is where Instagram is such a powerful tool for Facebook, in that if you want to reach say teenagers, maybe Snapchat is a better way to reach teenagers, and Instagram is only 80% as good, but you're already buying Facebook ads, you're already on the platform, and the background tools are so much better. That the I overwhelms whatever advantage Snapchat might have. And so the real problematic angle to Google and Facebook is less the consumer front end and more the advertiser backend, such that it's not really viable to build a mass market advertising business in the current day because Facebook and Google are so dominant.

Uh, I don't know. I mean, I think probably Google. I mean, Google has one of the most perfect models of all time, in part because they're such a perfect aggregator. Google's goal is to know everything, and the nature of their model is that everyone voluntarily gives them everything. Like users go and literally tell Google...

Now they're not saying 'advertise shoes.' They're saying they're searching for shoes, but like it couldn't be clearer what they're going for, right? Like Google certainly has a ton of data on you and they do targeting and all those sorts of things. But at the end of the day, the most powerful piece of targeting Google has is what you tell them in their search box. And if all targeting and data collection went away tomorrow, Google would still be in fantastic shape. And on the back side, all the suppliers, the websites and all those things, they give Google all their data. Google's like, 'Oh, we have a new format for recipes. Put your recipes in our format.' And everyone's like, 'Okay, we'll do your format.' Because it's a win-win-win sort of situation. In the long run, when we move to voice, is their business model going to make sense? They have challenges certainly going forward. Google's less attractive for the sort of brand advertising, although YouTube is obviously a massive advantage in this case. Amazon, it's pretty straightforward: you buy from Amazon and they'll take a skim off it, and they're shifting more and more to being a platform model where third parties sell on Amazon, and the third parties pay Amazon to put their stuff in Amazon's warehouses, and then they give Amazon a percentage of the sale, and Amazon is just facilitating it, all because they own the storefront, they own the customer relationship. So Facebook is probably the least attractive, just because all those things that I talked about—the ability to reach people when they're bored and the downtime, to understand what those people want—implies the sort of data collection and stuff that Facebook is getting grief about currently. And also people are more likely to be critical of just a leisure activity in general. It's less clear what societal value Facebook contributes that gives them a defense against their actions, whereas Google, it's like, 'We use Google, everyone uses Google and finds it very valuable.' I think that's a little unfair to Facebook. I think, like when you're raising kids, it's very easy to say, 'Oh, my kids should be studying more and taking more classes and doing stuff,' but kids need to play, right? They need downtime. I think there's an aspect of it's okay to be a leisure-focused company. It's okay to be something that people do when they're bored. But it's also a much easier way to attack. Does Facebook have addictive qualities? Are there issues about it? I don't know. I'm glad they're opening up to more research. I think that there is a personal responsibility aspect that goes into this. But it's a much bigger danger zone for Facebook where they get branded as being like the new smoking or something like that. And given that these companies gain their power through owning the customer relationship, the greatest danger is always a turn in customer sentiment.

Well, it was impossible for someone in their garage to compete with Microsoft. I mean, and I think that's what people don't appreciate about these sort of dominant players in these sort of epochs. They are tied to the paradigm of the moment, and their upheaval and downfall will come not from someone being in a garage alone. It will come from someone being in a garage who latches on to the next paradigm shift that makes it impossible for the powers that be to compete. I mean, the issue with Microsoft was you...

Know mobile two issues: one, the internet sort of changed the layer of lock-in, if that makes sense. It didn't matter if you were on the Windows API or not because everything was within a browser window. It actually mattered what was the first site people went to in the browser window, which was Google. The layer of the chokehold kind of moved up. In the case of mobile, Microsoft didn't have the right business model. The business model was either you own the device and sell the device like Apple did, or you give the software for free, building this massive network effect, and then you have another means of monetizing it, which Google and Android did. Microsoft was stuck with a licensing business model that just didn't make sense, that didn't work. They also had the wrong mindset. All of Microsoft's mobile phones before the iPhone came along presumed the presence of a PC. They all assumed the PC would be central to people's lives and the phone was an adjunct to that. It turned out actually no, the phone is the center of your life and the PC is an adjunct to that. Microsoft could never get over that culturally and from a mindset perspective. So that's what took Microsoft down was not someone in a garage. It was that the world changed. I think this is underappreciated. No one would have recognized it. I think that Microsoft gets a lot of unfair grief for a fate that would have befallen any manager and any company in the same position because it was a matter of culture and broad changes in the competitive space. It had nothing to do with Microsoft itself. Microsoft didn't miss mobile. Microsoft started building mobile phones in the late 90s. They didn't miss it. They just were fundamentally unequipped to compete in it. That's what happens. That's how disruption happens. Stories of companies moving seamlessly from one paradigm to another are basically non-existent because all the things that make you strong and competitive in one paradigm make you fundamentally ill-equipped to be in the next one. It's what I said at the beginning: strengths are weaknesses. What makes you strong and what? I mean, so I'm competing right now with systematic analysis of technology and society. If it turned out tomorrow that the only newsletters that matter are ones that got into the nitty-gritty details, I'd be screwed. I'm not going to fundamentally change who I am. That's a very obviously isolated narrow example, but it absolutely applies broadly to companies as big as Microsoft.

It's for the reason that story I told before about watching the big sports game and then going to the store and buying deodorant. There was a way of organizing the world that held true for 60-odd years after the post-World War II order, and that order is ending. When orders and eras come to an end, the inevitable outcome is consolidation. There's an aspect where technology enables this. There are almost two eras of technology. The first era of technology made existing companies and processes better and more efficient, so the big companies would buy big accounting systems and mainframes to run this stuff, and it made what they did better. The internet fundamentally changed the assumptions undergirding their business, and to some extent it made it more possible to run large companies efficiently, so doing a merger became a more viable process. The broader trend is that the world in which these companies grew up, in which they're built to operate, is shrinking. The obvious way to deal with that is to merge and see if we can figure it out together, because we don't have time to compete with each other, we have to deal with fundamental secular impacts on our companies and businesses.

What happens with these paradigm shifts is that the point of integration changes in the value chain. Where it used to be you integrate at a particular point, and everyone around the point of integration modularizes and fits into that framework. There used to be a point of integration around putting all the TV channels together. On one side you would have customers that would sign up, the other side you would have show creators that would make a show and sell it to the highest bidder, then sell it elsewhere for international rights and rerun rights, all those sorts of things. You had very modular pieces in this integration in the middle. Then Netflix came along and digitized time; the linear TV schedule that was the key constraint on TV was now completely gone. A great example: Netflix's initial foray into streaming was made possible by a deal with Starz for 11,000 movies. The day Netflix launched streaming, the effective catalog size for Starz was one — whatever movie they were showing on their channel at that time. Whereas for Netflix, the moment they launched, the effective catalog size was 11,000 because you could choose any one of the movies to watch. Netflix combined that with a fantastic user experience that let them gain customers. They gain customers, they gain more economic power over suppliers, they can start signing up new suppliers. Eventually they get to the point where they can start creating their own shows. What happened is the entire value chain has been broken up and reformed around this new integration that Netflix has between their service and owning the customer relationship. Now it's broken out into individual shows selling to Netflix. It's no longer the studio system, all that has been broken up into pieces. There's a famous quote from Jim Barksdale, the co-founder of Netscape: 'There are two ways to make money in business. One is to bundle and the other is to unbundle.' If you find a point of differentiation, a way to integrate in a value chain, you can build a new value chain such that the rest — you build a new bundle and everyone around you unbundles and aligns themselves to you. It's like when you have a bunch of magnets and you move, you build a connection where they all kind of scurry around and line up. That's what happens in business on paradigm shifts with the internet, where new areas become possible, new points of integration, and then everything else in the value chain reorganizes itself around that.

No. I think we're in the middle of a huge transition and probably will have more stability going forward. In the long run for TV, the long run is likely that the traditional bundle becomes basically all about sports, because sports is better live and advertising-driven. The business model on that side is going to be different and very expensive. You're going to pay a lot of money to get not that many channels that are mostly all sports. It's going to become an accidental sports bundle for people that only want sports. You have Netflix, and you're probably going to have Disney Fox, for example, and maybe one or two other services like Amazon Prime. But Amazon's goal is not to be entertainment in itself. What's going to happen is people are going to end up paying about the same amount of money every month they do for content today, they're just going to be paying different people. This idea that you're going to suddenly be paying $15 a month for all the entertainment you want is a fantasy. That's not going to happen. You're going to be paying different people than you paid before. You'll see that in lots of industries. There will be new giants that emerge in the new area. When I started Stratechery with the business model in place, that gave me lots of advantages relative to other folks. You're going to see the same thing at a much larger scale: companies that are started with internet assumptions, with a view of how the world works today, with the assumption of zero distribution cost for information and the ability to scale, are going to be the new giants. We're kind of in the middle of this multi-year, probably multi-decade shift.

I would say there are two points. One, I think VC is inextricably tied to technology. The nature of technology is massive upfront investment followed by basically zero marginal costs and huge amounts of scale. If you write a piece of software, it takes a lot of time and money, but once that software is written, it can be reproduced infinitely. The same thing with chips, which is where VC really started: in chip production. Chips are made out of sand, the marginal cost is nothing, but astronomical amounts of fixed costs up front. VC is the financial equivalent of software; it's the mechanism by which to put a lot of money in upfront so you can earn uncapped returns on the back end. That said, VC has been fundamentally shifted. AWS has been a huge factor where it used to be you needed funding to build something to get it off the ground. You would have to get funding with a PowerPoint just to do anything. Now you can walk up to Amazon and basically have as many servers as you could possibly want on a pay-as-you-go basis, build something, get off the ground, prove a concept, and walk into a pitch meeting demonstrating a working app instead of a PowerPoint. The entire ecosystem of funding has shifted. What used to be a Series A today is a pre-seed, then a seed, then a Series A, which is basically the old Series C. Part of that structural shift is everything sort of shifted up the chain. The huge amounts of private capital being available at the highest ends is almost a separate category from VC in many respects. It's called growth investing. When you're funding an Uber at billions of dollars, it's a completely different animal. In VC you're hoping for a 10x return; you do a bunch of bets and want a couple to maybe hit big. Growth investing is not like that. No one is investing at Uber at a $75 billion valuation hoping to get a 10x return. It is much more akin to traditional equity investing but with a higher risk profile and a chance for higher return, but the fundamental mechanics and thinking are completely different.

It's interesting you mentioned Shopify. I don't think Shopify generally has much to do with VC startup funding. I think startups in my world are generally VC-funded, and the goal is to build at least a hundred million dollar company, ideally a billion dollar company. But I think there is a massive opportunity for a completely new type of business — derogatorily referred to as lifestyle businesses — that are uniquely enabled by the internet and the ability to access the entire world as your market. You and I are examples. I sit in Taiwan and have customers in literally hundreds of countries around the world because of the internet. The fact that I can build that business is reliant on Stripe making it trivial for me to accept payments, or WordPress as a platform. Shopify is a classic example. These are the companies I'm most excited about because I think we need to dramatically reduce the barriers for people to build new kinds of businesses uniquely enabled by the internet. Those are where the jobs of the future are going to come from. They're not going to come from Facebook or, I guess, a lot are coming from Amazon. People talk about the long-run trend in lower business formation in the US. I'm not surprised by that because the consolidation and reduction in friction that the internet allows bigger companies to be bigger and reach out into small towns more. I suspect that rate of decline would be even faster if it weren't for these new types of businesses. My hope and belief in the long run is that, like the music industry, revenue declined for many years and everyone said the music industry is screwed. It turns out the music industry is actually in fantastic shape, revenue has been increasing, and they're on pace to have their best year ever in the next couple of years, even more than the CD era. Why? Because streaming came along and is a much more cohesive model. It took time, you had to weather the decline of the old model, but the new model came through. I believe that a lot of the policy prescriptions I have are about enabling this new model for the world where people are uniquely enabled to build new kinds of businesses that were not possible before the internet. By definition, if the internet is screwing up all these other businesses, then the businesses that take the place almost by definition have to be predicated on the internet. Strength has to be weakness in that regard. I don't write about partisan politics much, but things I endorse are things like universal healthcare. I'm well aware of all the arguments against it, but people need to not worry about their family getting sick and be able to invent these new jobs of the future.

The thing that people forget about Visa and Mastercard is they're incredibly convenient. The reason credit cards are everywhere is because they solved a real pain problem. Anything that wants to replace them has to be not just a little bit better, but massively better in multiple ways. I am well aware of how expensive credit cards are; it's my largest expense by a lot. But I'm not going to ever not support credit cards because the payoff in convenience for customers to be able to sign up from anywhere in the world is well worth it. I think we'll probably have the credit card with us for a lot longer than some proponents of alternative payment methods might think.

You could sketch out a scenario where in the long run, if enough people use Apple Pay, Apple could do something to switch out the back end. But why would Apple want to do that? Apple wants to control the user experience and then get other people to do the very expensive infrastructure buildout. Think about the iPhone. They leveraged the iPhone to control customers and made customers switch carriers to get the iPhone, which gave them power over the carriers. The carriers had to spend billions to build out new infrastructure to support all the data these iPhone people were using, and Apple didn't have to pay a dime. That's what Apple wants to do in industry: the messy, high-investment, relatively low-capital stuff they would rather gain leverage over other people and force them to do it to get access to Apple's customers.

I would say probably not, but it doesn't really matter. I read something a long time ago, can't remember where: the issue goes beyond social media. It used to be that the world that mattered to us day-to-day was our local world, and occasionally the outside world would intrude. We've shifted to a world where we're all obsessed with the outside world and occasionally the inside world breaks in. I think that's challenging for humans. I think it's not healthy to be obsessed with the tosses and turns of what happens in Washington and let that affect your emotional mood on an ongoing basis. Social media exacerbates that and exaggerates it greatly. It perpetuates filter bubbles and bubbles in general where you think lots of people agree with you. In your small town, you are geographically constrained with people who don't agree with you. Online, you can surround yourself with people who think the same thing as you. I think all those are probably problematic. The reason it doesn't matter is that the genie is not going back in the bottle. This applies to lots of things: social media, the economy, advertising, privacy. The temptation will be strong to fight battles that have already been decided, when we'd be much better off pushing forward and figuring out what we're going to do going forward. How are we going to build structures that are healthy? How are we going to train people to handle 24/7 news, to handle social media? How are we going to create the conditions for the companies of the future? To bemoan that the post-World War II order is falling apart is completely counterproductive and is an opportunity cost to actually figure out what's next.

This is the real paradox of what's going on right now. Facebook's response — and they are being cheered on as they do it — is to lock down their data, which basically entrenches them. There's lots of regulation. People talk about the GDPR. What's the GDPR for people who don't know? The European General Data Privacy Regulation imposes all these rules around data retention. You have to get permission from customers. Everyone says 'Facebook are in big trouble.' They are, but if you realize that there is still going to be digital advertising, the alternatives to Google and Facebook are going to be hurt way more. Is every site with advertising going to get permission from users for each of the individual ad networks that runs on the site? The barriers for a Google or Facebook, which have so much internal data, are much lower. Facebook has lots of data. You already told them. If they were cut off from all third-party data, they'd still be fine. If Google's cut off from all third-party data, they're still fine. If a publication is cut off from all third-party data, they're going to be in much more trouble. This is going to be a challenge with government action going forward: the most obvious solutions are going to lock in the biggest players, lock in the incumbents. Something that is important to me is continuing to raise a voice and remember the future little guy whose business hasn't started yet. Let's make sure we maintain the conditions for him or her to get off the ground because we need new jobs, jobs that don't exist, new industries uniquely enabled by the internet. It's going to be awfully easy to shut that off before it even gets started.

There are two ways to argue this. One is that these companies need to be broken up, like maybe Google or Facebook need to be separated to create more competition in the ad market. Another argument is that maybe they actually should be heavily regulated so we have stable platforms and foundations on which the future can be built. Think about AT&T: phone service was costly and didn't evolve very much, but it was a stable sort of base that other stuff could be built on. I'm not totally sure, to be honest. It's something I've been wrestling with a lot: what should the regulatory response be to these platforms? The implication of aggregation theory is that to be large and dominant is the natural state of affairs because of these feedback loops. The end state for an aggregator is to win it all. If the future is, as I used on the Exponent podcast with a jungle analogy, huge trees that tower over everything, huge amounts of undergrowth and massive amounts of life on the floor, and nothing in the middle, then maybe seeking out stability and a fair playing field on top of the platforms is more important than ensuring platform competition. I'm not sure I've fully articulated that on Stratechery yet, but it's certainly something I'm trying to come to terms with in my own head. This barbell effect: big and small. How do we deal with the one while maintaining room for the other? That's the critical policy question going forward.

I started Stratechery five years ago, and then it became a business four years ago.

First and foremost, one is the speed with which you can grow. Word of mouth can spread; it was mind-blowing. My goal when I started Stratechery was that in five years it could become my job. It actually became my job in a year. I am now five years in and far more successful than I would have ever imagined. A lot of that success was really seated in the first few months, going from a few readers to thousands in a remarkably short amount of time. Social media is viewed as such a bad thing for publications, but that's because they don't have the right business model. For me, social media is absolutely incredible. It's the most amazing channel that could ever be invented, and I get to use it for free. That's probably the biggest surprise. The second one is that it's a big market out there. There are so many people. I constantly on Twitter encounter people who don't follow me. I think this person would actually really enjoy my work. It reminds me that there is still upside, still room to grow. People make the mistake of saying, 'Oh, how many subscription sites can there be? Not everyone can have 50 subscriptions.' That's not the outcome. The outcome is breadth. There are going to be so many niches and so many people out there that there will be enough for everyone. We both have subscription models, but we're not competitors. It's not like there are a thousand people who will pay for content and we have to fight over them. There are hundreds of thousands, millions, hundreds of millions that will. The issue is not that I need to convince them to pay, it's that they just don't know who I am yet. That's a pretty great place to be. Another thing we touched on earlier is the value you create and the value you capture. There needs to be a means for people to capture a percentage of the value they create. If you overcapture, you go out of business, and if you undercapture, you go out of business. There has to be a mechanism in the middle where you can earn a living and still provide high-quality meaningful content. I'm cognizant that I am inherently biased because my personal life and business have benefited so greatly from the internet. But I also strongly push back against the running joke 'that's fine for Ben' or 'that's great for Ben.' This idea that my success rests on things that are unique to me is wrong. Do I bring things to the table that are valuable? I'm not saying anyone can write an internet publication, you have to deliver something of value that is differentiated. But I strongly reject that I am the only person in the world that can deliver differentiated content. There are lots of people who can about lots of areas I know nothing about. Saying Microsoft failed because of the actions of Steve Ballmer is presumptuous. It's human nature to ascribe things to people, but it's wrong. What matters far more is the context and environment around Microsoft. It's the same with me. Am I successful because of my hard work? I am. But I reject the idea that I am solely responsible. I could have come along ten years earlier or five years earlier and would have had a completely different outcome. I'd be writing for some magazine, probably scratching out a living. I was in the right place at the right time. If I came along ten years later, I probably wouldn't be successful either because someone would be in my niche. I'm very cognizant I was just in the right place at the right time. It can be both. To the extent I succeed in writing about companies and strategy, it's acknowledging and describing all those contextual factors beyond the great man theory of history. It's easy to write one, it's more difficult to write the other, but it's very important.

Absolutely. I'd be writing for some magazine, probably scratching out a living. I was the right place at the right time. Frankly, if I came along ten years later, I probably wouldn't be successful because someone would be in my space. I'm very cognizant of that. It can be both.

All that said, I have three unique skills that definitely benefit what I do. One is I read extremely fast. Two is I write extremely fast. Three is I have a very good memory. I will remember stuff. Google is my best friend. One of the reasons I upgraded search on Stratechery is I use search more than anyone. I know I've written about something and I need to find it. That said, I'm definitely getting old. I can feel I could retain stuff like nobody's business when I was younger, and it's getting harder. So I'm trying to be better about that. I keep an outline using Workflowy, constantly filling it with links to stories of interest and notes. It does have a search function, and I don't always rely on it exclusively, but I'm always trying to capture stuff as I go along. I put a few notes about what the article is about and then a link. Then I rely on search. I remember when I was at Microsoft, the email team did a study about the different ways people use email: the filer versus the searcher, the hoarder. I am definitely in the camp where if there was no search, I would be screwed. I vaguely recall that I saw something about this one time, and let me exercise my Google-fu or my email inbox search capabilities to find what I was searching for.

Sounds good. I'm happy to be here. Thanks again for the multiple delays and getting it out, but we've done it. So there you go.