Byrne Hobart On Finance And Culture

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2021-10-27 18:30:07

Byrne Hobart is the author of The Diff, a newsletter about inflections in tech and finance. ADS is the author of Applied Divinity Studies.

Applied Divinity Studies: Is there a Hotelling’s law for newsletters? It doesn’t seem absurd, at face value, to imagine that there’s a Byrne Hobart Prime writing approximately the same newsletter but say, covering a slightly different subset of events.

Or if talent plays a role, maybe a Discount Byrne Hobart who writes a worse version of the same newsletter but offers it for half the cost.

You might argue that the pressure towards homogeneity is eradicated by zero marginal costs to replication, but ultimately, we should still expect to see a lot of imitators, some of which might by slightly better at filling some demand niche, and with enough of these you would expect to lose your lunch.

That said, the business is quite competitive. There are some very smart people out there writing on topics I cover, and when there’s a big story I often assume it’s going to be covered, and covered well, by someone who I like to read.