Gergely
Gergely Orosz writes the #1 technology newsletter at Substack, called The Pragmatic Engineer. He started his career as a software developer in the U.K., spent three years at Skype, and followed that role with four years as an engineering manager at Uber before deciding to leave big tech and work for himself. Gergely began pursuing his newsletter full-time in September 2021 and in just one year has amassed 200,000 subscribers. He now makes more money than he did at his salaried tech job, and with freedom and flexibility.
Career (separate track) Skills
Financial security from a major career milestone can be the necessary catalyst and safety net for taking high-stakes entrepreneurial risks.
"I told myself, if four years later Uber exits and I make a bunch of money, I owe it to myself to take a risk, because then I'll have four years of savings in my bank, which... Back then I had maybe si..."
Audience growth often follows a step-function pattern where platform features like cross-publication recommendations create sudden, massive inflection points after initial linear progress.
"In the first about nine months of the newsletter, it got to 50,000 subscribers, and then the next five months, or six or seven months, it went up by another a hundred and something thousand subscriber..."