Substack is the new business section of the bookstore

Tech writers deliver real-time insights on how to succeed at your job

The tech industry evolves daily—new software is developed, new companies are founded, new roles are created. Yesterday’s career guides are already collecting dust, and generic business books are useless when it comes to figuring out what being something like a “product manager” means, much less how to do the job well. But there’s a new wave of experts emerging who offer real-time guidance and best practices to navigate today’s professional landscape. 

Lenny Rachitsky is an early example.

A former product manager himself, Lenny left his position at Airbnb and saw an opportunity to share his lessons about the reality of the job—including how to do it well. “Before I started this newsletter,” Lenny wrote, “I’d never written anything publicly, taken writing courses, or studied writing.” But he had an itch to share his expertise, and wanted to provide others with a resource he didn’t have when he was figuring it out. Today, Lenny's Newsletter is a media empire in its own right, including podcast interviews with top tech leaders, data-rich charts to benchmark growth rates and monthly churn, in-depth how-to guides on finding early B2B customers and building PM hiring timelines, and a thriving membership community.

Many others quickly followed in Lenny’s footsteps. Gergely Orosz, who writes The Pragmatic Engineer, set out to create a version of Lenny’s Newsletter for engineers and engineering managers. Gergely’s biweekly newsletter, which offers programming lessons from companies like Uber and software development toolkits, grew to 500,000 subscribers in two years. His advice landed so well with his readers that a book he wrote based on content from his Substack crossed the Amazon bestseller list in just two days. 

I’m beginning to think of Lenny and Gergely as models for a new kind of “tech guru.” These gurus have spent decades in their domains and now want to do more with their experiences than just reap the benefits themselves. Some of these experts have founded companies, been early-stage employees, stuck around through moments of hypergrowth, or been forced to make tough decisions when their companies suffered. Some were individual contributors, some product managers, some team leads, some founders. But all want scaling their expertise to be their next successful venture.

Dave Anderson, the writer of Scarlet Ink, spent 12 years as a senior manager and director of technology at Amazon, did a stint as a technology head at Meta and then a year as the CTO of Bezos Academy, before quitting to focus on writing full-time. One of his best-known articles acts as a step-by-step instruction manual for passing Amazon’s rigorous interview process. These days, he writes about everything from best practices for managing up to succeeding when on-call as an engineer. “Writing down knowledge scales incredibly well,” Dave says. “Now I’m able to reach tens of thousands of people. Being able to have those steady checks from my newsletter opens a lot of doors for my family, in the short and the long run.”

“Writing down knowledge scales incredibly well. Now I’m able to reach tens of thousands of people. Being able to have those steady checks from my newsletter opens a lot of doors for my family, in the short and the long run.”

There is a robust ecosystem of this kind of expertise thriving on Substack, covering a huge variety of domains and skills within those areas. Elena Verna writes about developing B2B growth strategies; Florin Tatulea leans on his decade in sales to provide prospecting hacks; April Dunford writes about building effective storytelling in sales pitches; Leah Tharin talks about how to pursue product-led growth: Kent Beck explores the creative thinking required for programming; Irina Stanescu provides tips for engineers to improve working cultures and avoid burnout; Peter Yang helps creators learn how to build products.

There’s no tip too small or too large. Some writers focus on career-defining practices: Ryan Peterman spotlights the skills ICs need to flourish at FAANG companies. Others go into the weeds with helpful hacks: Wes Kao covers how to succeed without formal onboarding processes in chaotic environments.

And then there’s a library of deep tech knowledge: Zach Wilson explains how to efficiently process large data sets in the nascent field of data engineering; Alex Xu and the ByteByteGo Newsletter team provide crash courses on modern development apps like Docker. Other writers focus on the act of creating a company itself: Deb Liu and Marc Randolph draw on their experiences building iconic companies like PayPal and Netflix to teach subscribers lessons on how to build company cultures of scrappiness and execution. 

All of these Substack writers are carving out a new genre for the tech world. Gone are the days when readers waited years for professional advice to be learned, collected and produced, printed in a book and then sold on a shelf at the store, all while the industry evolved around them.

Information from three months ago is obsolete today. Substack is the new business section of the bookstore; readers now get a direct line to the people in the daily trenches of these jobs. Tech writers are coming to Substack to scale their expertise, build communities around their knowledge, and make career advice more real-time and accessible than ever. Founders, PMs, software engineers, marketers: there’s so much more room on this bookshelf. Come start a Substack.

If you’re inspired by Lenny, or any of the tech writers here, sending your first Substack post is just a few clicks away:

Who are your favorite tech writers on Substack? Tell us about your publication, or a writer we should know about, in the comments.