Ben Thompson

Ben Thompson is an American business and technology analyst best known as the founder of Stratechery, the subscription newsletter and podcast network that is widely credited with proving the paid newsletter model. He writes and runs Stratechery largely on his own, and is known for coining and popularising Aggregation Theory, his framework for how internet platforms such as Google and Facebook come to dominate their markets.

Thompson studied at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and then at Northwestern University, where he earned both an MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and a Master of Engineering Management from the McCormick School of Engineering. Before writing full-time he interned at Apple University, worked on the Windows apps team at Microsoft and was a growth engineer at Automattic, the company behind WordPress.

He started Stratechery as a blog while still employed at Microsoft and went full-time on it in April 2014, using a freemium model: free weekly articles plus a paid Daily Update. By April 2015 he had more than 2,000 paying subscribers, and in 2017 Recode described Stratechery as the site that pioneered the paid newsletter business. The founders of Substack have named him as a major inspiration for their platform. Thompson in turn has said he was inspired by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, with whom he later launched the paid podcast Dithering.

Today Stratechery Plus bundles the Stratechery Update and Stratechery Interviews with a family of podcasts: Sharp Tech with Andrew Sharp, Sharp China, Dithering, Greatest of All Talk and Asianometry. Thompson has never published revenue figures. He also built Passport, a subscription and membership platform he announced in 2021; in April 2026 the Hollywood newsletter The Ankler moved to Passport, which is being developed with Automattic. After years based in Taipei, he moved back to the United States in August 2025.

Thompson matters to indie makers because he showed that one writer with a clear point of view can run a durable, high-margin media business without advertising or a newsroom, and his model shaped the whole creator-newsletter wave that followed.