Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)

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, Am I crazy because I'm- I'm leaving..." Especially in Europe, this is a lot of money to say, well, this will be similar to something, you know, someone in a similar position would have made like 5 or 600K in- in total in the US. But now, I am making more in- in compensation that I made at Uber, and the difference is that now my compensation, well, my earnings 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 just honestly making tons of money doing a job that I love, and this was at Uber or- or as a software engineer. And I'm now doing stuff that I love and, um, in some strange way, I guess, it even pays better.

(instrumental music) 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-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Gergely Orosz. In a sense, Gergely is the meat 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 Gergely'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 ever thought about writing or going down this kind of creator route, you'll love this episode. With that, I bring you Gergely Orosz. This episode is brought to you by Lemon.io. You've achieved product-market fit, you're able to activate, engage, and retain your customers, but you don't have the engineers that you need to move as fast as you want to because it's hard to find great engineers quickly, especially if you're trying to protect your burn rate. Meet Lemon.io. Lemon.io will quickly match you with skilled senior developers who are all vetted, results-oriented, and ready to help you grow, and all that at competitive rates. Startups choose Lemon.io because they offer only handpicked developers with three or more years of experience and strong, proven portfolios. Only 1% of candidates who apply get in, so you can be sure that they offer you only high-quality talent. And if something ever goes wrong, Lemon.io offers you a swift replacement so that you're kind of hiring with a warranty. Learn more, just go to lemon.io/lenny and find your perfect developer or tech team in 48 hours or less. And if you start the process now, you can claim a special discount exclusively for Lenny's Podcast listeners, 15% off your first four weeks of working with your new software developer. Grow faster with an extra pair of hands. Visit lemon.io/lenny. This episode is brought to you by Eppo. Eppo is a next-generation A/B testing platform built by Airbnb alums for modern growth teams. Companies like Netlify, Contentful, and Cameo rely on Eppo to power their experiments. Wherever you work, running experiments is increasingly essential, but there are no commercial tools that integrate with a modern growth team stack. This leads to wasted time building internal tools or trying to run your experiments through a clunky marketing tool. When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytic cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic click-through metrics and instead use your North Star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions, and payments. And Eppo supports tests on the front end, the back end, email marketing, and even machine learning clients. Check out Eppo at GetEppo.com, GetE-P-P-O.com, and 10X your experiment velocity. Gergely, welcome to the podcast.