balaji’s newsletter
Structure
Balaji uses his newsletter as distillation layer for ideas previously shared and sharpened through conversations in forums like X and YouTube. These forums act as a feedback loop wherein he can share half-baked ideas, gather comments, reactions, and feedback, and then use the higher fidelity format of a Substack newsletter to act as a showcase for more refined thinking and insights. In addition to the flywheel effect this workflow creates, the ability to use forums like X to have multiple lines in the water simultaneously (e.g., multiple posts generated comments and engagement from a broad array of people) serves as an always-on catalyst for lateral thinking, in turn generating more interesting and fresher thinking/ideas continuously, reducing the 0-1 effort often required when creating new knowledge products where more generic thinking often occurs.
Examples
Examples of how this appears in his writing:
ex. A: https://balajis.com/p/ai-is-polytheistic-not-monotheistic This post originally appeared on X. See comments here.
ex. B: https://balajis.com/p/all-property-becomes-cryptography _Some of these ideas previously appeared on X and YouTube. See comments here, here, and here. And the talks here, here, and here.
Relevance
Testing content or product ideas early and in public or building ideas through conversation are not novel concepts but the crispness and simplicity of how this manifests in Balaji’s work makes it a useful and salient reference point and example of this for build building knowledge assets in particular.