Blog - Ben Guttmann

Where does the internet happen?

We’ve long talked about the internet as a single thing — something that can be “broken” by photos of Kim Kardashian for instance — despite it being this complex billion-starred cosmos of niches small and large. Where does this idea of “the internet” live?

January 22, 2022

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Bloated to death

Facebook is borderline unusable. Instagram is heading that way with each passing month. The market demands growth, the news cycle demands change, and an office full of workers need something to do. But remember that things don’t always have to change to improve.

January 20, 2022

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The most revolutionary piece of tech I’ve used since the iPhone

The metaverse is nice and all, but we still exist IRL. The single most revolutionary piece of technology that I have used in the past five years is one that looks a whole lot like something invented over two hundred years ago.

January 16, 2022

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22 Ways To See The City

Words have the power to change how we see things and how we think. Over these past couple turbulent and transformative years, I’ve been among many who have been seeing the world anew, and I’ve been collecting these ideas, these lenses, that allow for a new way of seeing our city.

January 13, 2022

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Client School: Have the respect to say no

If you get a proposal, respond. Even if it’s a no. Nothing is more universal when I speak to other agency executives than one frustration: their absolute rage when they pour time and resources into a proposal or a pitch, just to send it off into a black hole and receive deafening, endless radio silence.

January 10, 2022

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If you ran it again

But there are plenty of great performers that don’t achieve this level of success. Wild success takes both ability and fortune. Luck is an inextricable component of the recipe.

January 6, 2022

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A Few Things I’m Curious About In 2022

One of my favorite self-descriptions is a “polymath” — basically somebody who is interested in a lot of different things. Maybe it’s a byproduct of flipping through encyclopedia volumes as a bored kid just before the internet swallowed time and information as a whole, or maybe it’s some deep desire to be more like the similarly-named, and arguably most famous, renaissance man of Benjamin Franklin.

January 3, 2022

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At least do the little things right

There’s an old saying popularized by former President John F Kennedy, “victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan.” While he was referring to the phenomenon of countless big and small contributors coming out of the woodwork taking credit for good things and saying “never knew ‘em” to failures, this phrase also carries meaning in the actual creation of those victories.

December 15, 2021

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Have a favorite

I have a somewhat useful, somewhat annoying habit. Nearly every time I find myself at a new restaurant, brewery, ice cream shop, or other venue with a new and unfamiliar menu, I ask “what’s the move here?”

November 30, 2021

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Don’t just read business books

Every now and then the same exhausting content pops up on tech/VC/hustle Twitter: some collage of the “best” business books, an implied MBA on a bookshelf that includes the likes of the The Lean Startup, Good to Great, and maybe Sun Tzu if the poster wants to feel more worldly.

November 4, 2021

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