The story behind the cartoon
Ben Thompson turned product and strategy work at Apple, Microsoft and Automattic into an independent writing career. While in business school he interned at Apple University, an experience he later said heavily influenced his thinking about Apple's strategy and helped turn a longtime interest in technology into the analytical lens that became Stratechery.
He launched Stratechery in March 2013 as an independent site about the strategy and business of technology, working with little more than a text editor and a Chromebook. In April 2014 he launched the paid Daily Update membership, and Stratechery has been his full-time job ever since — a one-person media company that never sold. In July 2015 he published Aggregation Theory, arguing that internet economics shift power toward services that own the consumer relationship while commoditizing suppliers and distribution.
In May 2020 Thompson and John Gruber launched Dithering, a paid short-form technology podcast that extended the subscription model into audio, and in September 2022 he expanded the subscription into Stratechery Plus with the Sharp Tech podcast, just as he was calling the emergence of AI the biggest technology story since mobile and cloud.
The joke in Zimbo's strip is the theory made literal: a giant magnet labelled consumer relationship pulls the readers toward the platform while suppliers and distribution roll away on conveyor belts below, and the finale sends Thompson to a mountain lookout with Shelf the bookshelf, arriving by helicopter, to gaze at his sincere dream — a valley of tiny houses where every writer sits at a laptop owning their own readers, no aggregator required.
AGGREGATION THEORY
THE TIDE TABLE
ONE MORE BOND
LOOP-ECTOMY