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Post by Balaji on X

A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress. Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

5.1K likes60 repliesPosted Jan 8, 2021

View the original on X Written by Balaji. Captured Sep 4, 2026.

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Based on absolute engagement — the platform doesn’t expose follower counts here, so large accounts score higher.

From likes, comments.

Why it worked

Short enough to read in full without expanding, which removes a step before the point lands.
Short sentences keep the pace up, so the reader never has to re-read a line.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook → Landing
Style: Conversational paragraphs at a steady pace.
Tone: plain, matter-of-fact
Written for: Founders and early-stage teams

Analysis by ViralLoop — not written by the original author.

Topics

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Marques Brownlee

Memory price hikes have finally started hitting Apple. Today, they raised some base prices: Macbook Neo: $599 -> $699 Macbook Air: $1099 -> $1299 Macbook Pro: $1699 -> $1999 Mac Studio: $1999 -> $2499 iPad Air $599 - $749 iPad Pro: $999 -> $1199

Ok, THIS is wild, never expected anything like this: Uber exited Nigeria… no warning, just shut down the app, on the spot. When riders were mid-trip ?!! This is what a startup that just went bankrupt would do, not a $150B corporation. Uber operated in Nigeria since 2014 (!!)

Derek Buitenhuis

Reviving this account to say: Almost everyone at Vimeo was laid off yesterday, including the entire video team. If you're looking for talented engineers, there are a few on the market. Sucks to see something I built killed by private equity in a technology company skin suit.

I am joining @ylecun and an exceptional founding team to lead @amilabs as CEO. We have secured a $1.03 billion USD seed round to fuel our mission to build intelligent systems capable of truly understanding the real world—a long-term scientific endeavor.

Fable one-shotted a Rust rewrite of the TerminalTextEffects Python library in 11M tokens. Startup time went from 87ms to 2ms and rendering speed is up by 9.6x. Now zero dependencies and a 3mb single exec 🤯 t.co

Jathan Sadowski

It's objectively funny to see DeepSeek — an open source, high performing AI model trained by a Chinese startup for less than $6 million — wipe $1 trillion off tech stocks only days after Trump, OpenAI, and SoftBank announce their $500 billion Stargate boondoggle.

More from Balaji

There are counterarguments worth engaging. One point (also by @MarceloLima) is that Block was overstaffed, like Twitter before the acquisition. Possibly true. But it’s also true that the new tools mean many orgs think they can do more with less. Some will run the experiment.

Zuck out Page out Brin out Thiel out Elon out The most successful tech founders of all time have now exited the failed state of California. You shouldn’t move there for tech. And if you are there, you should leave. The future is the decentralized Internet.

This is nuking every single supply chain that passes through the US in any way, under the illusion that 45 years of deindustrialization can be fixed in one day of 45% tariffs. Countless low-margin businesses, including US exporters, will be pushed into unprofitability.

If we do see hundreds of memecoins out there, then the market gets educated and becomes more real. A celeb memecoin is then a bit like a tracking poll. It measures the strength of an influencer’s brand. You aren’t forecasting future revenue, you’re forecasting future pageviews.

In other words: the Chinese Deepseek paper references GPT-4o, which was in fact led by an Indian immigrant to the US. Many valid policy decisions one can make, but be real about the tradeoffs. 96% of the world is non-American and there is real talent out there. Original post:

Funny you mention that! Because Prafulla Dhariwal is an International Math Olympiad and International Physics Olympiad gold medalist with a 5.0 GPA from MIT. And he led the development of GPT-4o.

Balaji on Founder · ViralLoop