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Discuss this episode in the Muse community Follow @MuseAppHQ on Twitter Show notes 00:00:00 - Speaker 1: You’re saying come dream with me a little, and if you get too much into the fantasy world, it becomes almost religious, and that’s where you get something like a WeWork happening. But when you can make the argument in a coherent way and are able to earn parts of that argument, then that come dream with me can be extremely compelling and can take outsiders along for the ride with you. 00:00:30 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with my colleague Mark McGranaghan. Hey, Adam. And joined today by Mario Gabrieli of the Generalist. 00:00:49 - Speaker 1: Hey, great to be here. 00:00:51 - Speaker 2: And Mario, I understand that before your life in tech, you were working in a Michelin star restaurant. What was that like? 00:00:59 - Speaker 1: It was fascinating. I should clarify that I was truly the lowest man on the totem pole in the Michelin Star restaurant, so a lot of chopping vegetables and sort of assembling geometric and intricate salads and ceviches and things like that, but it was pretty fascinating to see what a high performance team in that environment looks like, and I don’t think it’s so different than a startup, you know, we had a very Strong sort of charismatic but efficient leader, a really well run team and like extremely high levels of motivation that, you know, I don’t know if I’ve seen even that many startups that have that level of drive from folks that were on their feet 1112, 16 hours a day, and obviously, you know, it’s not the most lucrative industry, so there’s a lot of passion and a lot of art in that that I respected a great deal. 00:01:53 - Speaker 2: I also feel like from what I’ve seen in the restaurant business, you know, chef’s table and other fictional representations that it’s almost has this performance element because of the timing and the real-time nature of it, you know, a startup, things may be fast paced, but ultimately, Maybe you, you know, ship once a day if you’re a very focused, continuous deployment type team, that’s something where you have, OK, it’s show time, you know, from 7 to 10 p.m. or whatever, dinner rush hour, all the food has to come out together and be the right temperature and so on. It feels like, yeah, there’s something almost theatrical to it. 00:02:30 - Speaker 1: Yes, 100%. It always felt very bad if I did a plate that chef was like, no this can’t go out. You’re like, oh gosh, I forget that we are judging it, you know, minute by minute here. Yeah, that’s an interesting thing to adapt to. 00:02:45 - Speaker 2: Now the Generalist is a publication, if that’s the right way to put it, I think so. 00:02:50 - Speaker 2: That covers business and technology. It’s something I’ve been reading basically since you got started, absolutely fascinating, very long form pieces that dive really deeply on a variety of topics, but often profiling specific companies, and I’ll reference some of my favorites there, but maybe you can tell us what the generalist is for you and yeah, the story that brought you there. 00:03:14 - Speaker 1: Amazing. Yeah, I think you did a great job describing it and have always very much appreciated you being a reader, so I’m grateful for that. The generalist is a what I hope modern media publication. We’ve started out with our deep dives, which are once a week we put out a deep piece of research usually about a company, as you mentioned, could be a crypto project, a venture fund or a trend. And the goal is to tell the story of that company in a way that both surfaces what makes it interesting and unique and the lessons behind it, but does so in a way that it really does feel like a narrative. And that’s both, you know, I think because of my own interests in storytelling and more sort of fictional styles of writing, but also pragmatic, you know, I think we all remember stories much, much better than we do. drier recitations of a subject and so the position of the generalist has always been If you really want to learn about these companies and the way that they’re impacting the future, the most efficient as well as the most enjoyable way is by packaging it in this sort of grander tale. And so the ultimate goal is, you know, build the most thoughtful publication in tech that has the depth of research of equity analysis, but a style that is closer to the New Yorker than a hedge fund. 00:04:42 - Speaker 2: I think when it comes to business analysis pieces, you might think of, for example, a high profile example would be stray, and you know, his analysis is excellent, but it is pretty dry stuff. You have to be really interested in the nuts and bolts and the inside baseball. Of technology companies and the industry and so forth, so yours strike me perhaps differently maybe that you spend time on the personal backgrounds of the founders and in many cases going back to who their parents were and what brought them to this place, but also telling the story in a context that’s I don’t know, it feels more like almost all of your briefings me feel like there’s something that could be adapted to like an HBO fictionalized, you know, TV show, not in like a sensationalist sense, but in the sense of a gripping narrative that you want to like follow through to the end, which is good because they’re also very, very long and detailed. 00:05:39 - Speaker 1: They are very long. Uh, thank you, that’s very kind. 00:05:42 - Speaker 2: To give some examples, we’ll link these in the show notes, but just some ones that struck me. One is the story of Telegram, which is a messaging app that basically almost everyone I know here in Europe uses it, especially after WhatsApp kind of went the Facebook terms of service route. And the backstory of that fellow and his time in Russia doing social media and then kind of his commitment to privacy because of that experience and just how huge it is. It’s like, hey, it’s a little messaging app all my friends use and it seems to be well executed, but the story there is pretty epic. Another example would be one called Andoril, and this is a defense contractor that uses software, and I think there is a natural, maybe knee jerk to anyone who’s making weapons of war or something adjacent to it, that that’s not a good use of computing or that there’s some moral questions there, but I think you do a good job of making an argument of why defense technology or war technology, which can be used for defense and offense is important. As well as just telling the story of this group that modernized it. And the third one I’ll mention is more of a blockchain kind of web 3 world company which is Helium, and this one’s also interesting, and maybe we’ll talk about your interest in the cryptocurrency and blockchain worlds, but it’s one that I’m probably a little more skeptical of and you seem to have more interest and enthusiasm for, but perhaps reading some of these deeper dives gives me more of a sense of like, OK, you know, there’s a lot of noise in this space, but there are some interesting call them success stories there. 00:07:16 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think the helium one is a good example of how crypto can sort of divide people and you can look at the same set of facts and come up with, you know, very different conclusions. That one sparked a rather public debate on Twitter and amongst other media publications of, you know, whether helium is a success story or not, the usage is low, but the scale is broad, and so it’s always interesting to see. Which parts of the story matter to people? I think, you know, for better or worse, when I see something extremely novel, working at least in some really meaningful way, that to me is like extremely exciting, but you know, I think there’s also plenty of value in people saying yes, but here are all the things that aren’t working about it and, you know, the rooms for improvement. So that was a fun one and a stressful one. 00:08:09 - Speaker 2: And can you tell us a little about the journey that brought you from, at one point, working in a high intensity kitchen, and ended in creating this tech publication with these in-depth weekly briefings? 00:08:22 - Speaker 1: Yes, well, it might surprise you to hear that it wasn’t particularly linear. It was a lot of exploration and wandering from one place to another. I, despite my very American accent, grew up in London to an American mother and Italian father and sort of always spoken an American accent at home, just a lot of code switching, and came to the US for undergraduate, went to college and was very much of the mind that I was going to. Be a lawyer and then sort of move into the public sector. That was definitely my sort of mental model of how people made impact in the world and followed that, you know, rather assiduously through undergrad. All of my sort of internships were on the hill. I was extremely into mock trial and going every couple weekends to Iowa or California to compete in these, you know, literally sham trials, which was extremely nerdy and really had a pretty clear path there. But at some point I decided I wanted to study abroad and You know, like every good sort of truth seeking young undergraduate who has a passing interest in Buddhism, I went to Kathmandu and spent 6 months there, and it was extremely, extremely difficult, but also I think a valuable lesson in dealing with one’s own narratives about oneself. I know that’s sort of the topic of our conversation today, but You know, I think we are all predisposed to either inherit lessons that others have told us and take them as our own or develop them ourselves. And in the isolation of Kathmandu, you know, it’s very hard to get internet there. Time difference alone makes communication difficult. I think I started to recognize the cracks in my logic, although it would take a few years for me to. Sort of shake it all out. So, left undergraduate, got a job at a law firm that had a very interesting program in theory, which was, you know, you can do the work a 1 or 2nd year associate at a law school might be able to do. You can draft cross exams, you can write briefs. And so I got to work on some, again, theoretically interesting cases, one of the first Madoff cases, New York’s involvement with sort of reconstruction after Hurricane Sandy, but really quickly realized like, wow, my brain does not work in such a way as it is able to get enjoyment from this work. It is extremely like detail oriented and really much less about storytelling or writing or anything else. Or even, you know, if you want to get sort of righteous about it, justice or any of these other things, right? Like, once you see how the sausage actually gets made, you’re like, oh, we spent 9 months working on this case and then all of that was just to settle, you know, it was all a sort of game of chicken, like that is infuriating. And so I sort of realized, oh this is not gonna be the thing, and while trying to avoid doing as little work as possible at the law firm, I started to spend a lot of time on TechCrunch. And that was when I started to think like, oh, actually a lot of the interesting things happening in the world aren’t happening through government or nonprofits or anything else. They’re happening through tech. That’s where the impact is occurring, and that’s what is making a real difference. And so there were several other steps from there that, you know, I’m happy to go through, but that was sort of the moment that I started to become interested in this world. 00:11:49 - Speaker 3: And did you jump right to writing about it, or was there be steps between there? 00:11:56 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so I left the law firm. I had started at that point taking night school classes at NYU in fiction writing. Always loved writing growing up. I, you know, was writing a novel for most of my teen years in one way or another, you know, I’d sort of get like 100 pages in and then start on something different. And so that always really appealed to me. And so I thought, OK, I’m gonna take a year. I’ll apply to grad school because I need to be outwardly doing something. But really I will spend the year finishing a first draft of this novel I’ve started in night school classes. And take it from there. So I spent a year doing that, got into grad school, and after I had gotten into grad school and finished a draft of this book, I decided then to spend that summer going to culinary school and cooking at this Michelin star restaurant, which was a great like modern French place on 5th Avenue. Unfortunately it doesn’t exist anymore, but it was a ton of fun. And then again, sort of another few chapters of this exploration without a clear sight of what I was supposed to be doing. I did my masters in international development with a focus on tech and emerging markets. That to me felt sort of like a good interstitial, you know, intermediary phase between this international relations, politics, interest, and this sort of less certain thing about technology. So I did that. I worked in Bogota for 56 months, one summer working with like an incubator down there, getting to see these different startups. And then once I graduated, I really sort of more formally entered the world of tech for better or worse. So joined a startup called Eco, which was a fast platform for freelancers. We were acquired by Fiver after a couple of years and then joined a venture firm called Charge Ventures. Which was preceed and seed investing in New York. And it was while I was at charge that I basically had an old boss say, you’re an investor now, it probably would be useful for you to start writing about tech and sharing your thoughts online. And you know, ever since that NYU night school class, I developed this habit of getting up an hour or two before work to work on my novel at the coffee shop, you know, around the corner. And so I sort of was like, all right, like I think I know at least how to write a bit. Let’s see what this could become. And so, yeah, the generalist was born out of that little experiment and sort of quickly absorbed my interests and enthusiasm. 00:14:36 - Speaker 2: Timing wise, I feel like you went all in on this with a sort of paid subscription to your publication around the time that paid newsletters generally were starting to get popular, being in the zeitgeist, something like that. We talked with Dan Shipper from every, they started their business and were early on Substack. There’s obviously, yeah, Substack is a platform, but also other ways of kind of subscribing to individual writers or small groups of writers where you like their perspective and their take and you’re willing to just pay them directly versus the mediated stories that we get through, whether it’s something like social media feeds, Facebook. Reddit, Twitter, whatever, or even something like, you know, the classic kind of magazine you mentioned, the New Yorker, The Economist or something like that, that sort of bundles up, writing and reporting from many different sources, puts it all through a copy editing thing and then you purchase that bundle and this kind of direct relationship with a creator seemed like that’s pretty new in the last few years and maybe you. I don’t know what the order was there, whether you saw that that was kind of a growing opportunity and you wanted to be part of that, or if you just happened to start doing this around the same time, that was also an emerging trend. 00:15:49 - Speaker 1: Oh, absolutely, it was definitely luck. I had never read a sub stack before, but I remember seeing, I think, a friend of mine saying they were starting one, and I was like, oh, OK, for this new thing where I’m gonna write. Every week I’ll just try out this new tool since it seems like it’s inter…
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