Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)
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In my best year at Uber, I made about like 320 or $330,000 in total compensation. And when I quit my job, I was actually thinking like, am I crazy? Because I'm leaving, especially in Europe, this is a lot of money to say, "Well, this will be similar to something." Someone in a similar position would have made like five or 600 K in total in the US. But now I am making more in compensation that I made at Uber. And the difference is that now my compensation, while my burnings are keep going up as long as the newsletter is growing. So there's no theoretical cap on this. Of course, there's an actual cap, there's churn, growth is slowing over time. But it's very, very strange because I felt that I was in a really privileged position. I just honestly made tons of money doing an odd job that I loved. And this was at Uber or as a software engineer. And I'm now doing something that I love. And in some strange way, I guess it even pays better. Welcome to Lenny's podcast. I'm Lenny, and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard one experiences, building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Gergé Oroz. In a sense, Gergé is the me of engineering. He's got the top engineering newsletter on Substack. It's growing really fast. And like me, he does this full-time. In this episode, we talk about the life of newslettering full-time like we both do. We get into Gergé's decision to leave his cushy tech job at Uber to go into this life full-time, what the day-to-day life of a newsletter person is, the pros and cons of this life, what it takes to be successful, and a bunch of advice for how to get started if you're curious about going down this route. This is a pretty unique episode, and it was really fun to do. If you've ever thought about writing or going down this kind of creator route, you'll love this episode.
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