Ben Thompson (analyst)
Ben Thompson | |
|---|---|
| Thompson in 2016 Thompson in 2016 | |
| Occupation | Business, technology, and media analyst |
| Alma mater | |
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Ben Thompson is an American business, technology, and media analyst who lived in Taipei, where he founded Stratechery, a subscription-based newsletter/podcast featuring commentary on tech and media news,[1] and cohosts tech podcasts Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp,[2] Dithering with John Gruber and Exponent with James Allworth, respectively.[3]
Education
[edit | edit source]Thompson's undergraduate education was at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and his graduate education at Northwestern University, where he received a Master of Business Administration from the Kellogg School as well as a Master of Engineering Management from the McCormick School of Engineering.[4]
Career
[edit | edit source]Thompson's career includes stints at Apple, where he interned at Apple University;[5] Microsoft, where he worked on its Windows Apps team;[6] and at WordPress developer Automattic as a growth engineer.[7]
Thompson launched Stratechery as a blog while still a Microsoft employee, and in April 2014 devoted himself to the site full-time, operating on a "freemium" subscription model.[8] He has stated his primary inspiration was John Gruber, author of the site Daring Fireball.[9]
As of April 2015, Thompson had more than 2,000 paying subscribers.[10] By 2017, Recode described Stratechery as having pioneered the paid newsletter business model.[11] The founders of Substack, a newsletter platform launched in 2018, called Thompson a major inspiration for their project.[11]
Aggregation theory
[edit | edit source]Thompson is a proponent of aggregation theory, which describes how platforms (i.e. aggregators such as Google and Facebook) come to dominate the industries in which they compete in a systematic and predictable way. Aggregators have all three of the following characteristics:
- direct relationship with users;
- zero marginal costs for serving users;
- and demand-driven multi-sided networks with decreasing acquisition costs.[12]
Personal life
[edit | edit source]In August 2025, Ben relocated from Taiwan back to the United States.[13]
References
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