Writer-Builders

Theory #39 | The archetype of a new kind of renaissance man

“You can make anything by writing.” — C.S. Lewis

The first time I remember really enjoying writing something (and finishing it) was for my high school English class. Our teacher, Mr. Page, was a British cool music connoisseur who happened to also teach AP English. One of our assignments was simply to choose a song we liked and write an essay analyzing it. I picked a song and started listening to it on repeat, unlocking a small new insight each time. I got a 97 or 98 on the paper, but I hadn’t been worried because I liked what I wrote.

I’ve had a few careers since then, and somehow, I’ve found myself writing in some capacity in each of them. When I dabbled in acting, I wanted to write scripts and lyrics for original scores. In medicine, it was academic papers and irreverent op-eds. Now in this tech-ish world, I find myself writing this blog.

I didn’t see the pattern until recently, but once I did, examples kept appearing. So I’ve started calling this archetype the writer-builder — someone who both writes and builds in a given domain (or perhaps whichever domain they’re in for now). The writer-builder hyphenate is perhaps a sub-archetype of the aspiring renaissance man.¹

Writing increases your rate of revelation. This is true irrespective of the subject because writing is a process of reflection, assertion, and iteration.

Writing clarifies your own ideas. Writing begets new ideas too. Writing lets you explore ideas in depth even if you won’t have time to act on them all. Writing shows people how you think and lets them decide if they agree, if they respect you, and if maybe you’re the kind of person they’d want to ask out for coffee or spend years working with.

You don’t write something in one shot and hit publish. And you don’t build one version of something and call it done. Doing either well calls for copious amounts of reflection and revision too. So while not everyone has the interest or aptitude to embody the writer-builder archetype, those who do have a distinctive advantage — they can unlock a virtuous cycle of revelation that levels up both.

It’s not that writing has to be the medium of reflection, but that there must be some medium that is rooted primarily in reflection rather than craft. And writing has a distinct quality of being rooted in simplicity, clarity, and a core message.

“Galileo Galilei, Johannes Kepler, and Isaac Newton may be known primarily as scientists, but they were also writers, musicians, and philosophers; Leonardo da Vinci, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Claudio Monteverdi may have earned their reputations as artists, writers, and musicians but they were also inventors, political thinkers, and acousticians. The men and women of the Renaissance were polymaths: imaginative and versatile thinkers who crossed the boundaries between humanistic and scientific knowledge.”²

The classic renaissance men we speak of were combination artist-inventor-scientist types. Why did the time period or their environment encourage such breadth of exploration? And why is it that it’s discouraged now? Perhaps it’s discouraged implicitly because we’ve calculated all the ways that doing just one thing compounds value. But we don’t seem to analyze the counterfactual enough.

You can’t talk about writer-builders and tech and not mention Paul Graham. He might be known for having been a founder, then starting Y Combinator, and more recently as a writer, but his affinity for the latter precedes the rest.³ And I find this to be true for many writer-builders — that they dabbled as writers long before they became known in any builder domain.

Paul Graham’s writing is notable in a few ways. First, it’s stylistically simple — a word he monopolizes to describe good writing. Second, his writing increasingly covers universal themes, e.g. how to do good work. And third, it has arguably transcended mainstream tech to reach other creative circles (perhaps in the way that Rick Rubin’s messages have transcended music, albeit more niche).

There are a half-dozen more writer-founders that could be deemed popular. Marc Andreessen. Naval Ravikant. Patrick Collison. The more impressive the company they’ve built, the more it feeds back into the substance and the aura around their writing.⁴ The notable writer-founder (or ex-founder) is rare because it’s hard enough to be known for one thing, let alone be notable for two.⁵

We’re going to see more crossovers between different kinds of writing and building.

‘Writing’ has historically been gatekept and unstable, but there are more ways to share and succeed independently now. These crossovers and oscillations between mostly-writing and mostly-building also reflect an increasing openness to career fluidity and the waning of the stability and status of staying in one “lane.”

This fluidity also embodies the extended wave of creatorization — of everything and everyone. With writing specifically, I suspect Substack’s mainstream emergence and the normalization of para-professional blogs are contributing factors.⁶ And almost irrespective of your goal, the concept of putting work out into the public is normal, if not universally encouraged now. Building any kind of audience is building distribution — and you always want distribution.⁷⁸

Yet another reason we’re seeing (and will see) more writer-builders is that writing is still a niche and underappreciated yet powerful medium.

We’ve seen people rushing to build audiences on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc., and this won’t stop. But people are slowly realizing that all the successful creators in these mediums want to funnel their audiences to more private and owned spaces (and often to collect their e-mail addresses and phone numbers in service of this). A good chunk of these successful creators are starting to write and curate in text-form (and try their hand at building products too).⁹

Not only that, but each medium requires a unique style of effort and creator-fit. There are enough people who don’t want to be in front of a camera or get into video production and editing yet have thoughts and ideas to share. And the more you see notable writer-builders like Paul Graham, the more you think it’s possible for there to be more of them.

The aspiration to be a prolific writer-builder, in any domain, is on the rise.¹⁰

So which comes first — the writer or builder?

You can never escape the chicken-or-egg question. But it’s not so much a question of which one has to come first, but which is best when first. Building first and then writing is like lighting a match from a lit candle. Writing before you’ve built much can be like trying to start a fire by rubbing two sticks together. Building doesn’t have to come first, but it’s easier if it does.¹¹

Write about what you build. Build what you write about. But the quality bar is high. Each needs to stand on its own. Because in this increasingly noisy world, only the best will break through.

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P.S. Which writer-builders do you admire? Which emerging writer-builders should be on everyone’s radar? If this resonates, leave a ♡ at the altar of the Substack algorithm gods.

1. The artistic archetype I respect the most — also a kind of renaissance man — is the prolific writer-director. Christopher Nolan, Sofia Coppola, Quentin Tarantino, Hayao Miyazaki, Richard Linklater. A writer-director is a kind of writer-builder, and the most prolific writer-directors are the visionary founders of the cinematic world.

2. Academia studies renaissance men a lot more than practitioners do, and I think that’s a shame. This course description is one of the best dual classifications of the type.

3. “When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting … What hackers and painters have in common is that they're both makers. Along with composers, architects, and writers, what hackers and painters are trying to do is make good things. They're not doing research per se, though if in the course of trying to make good things they discover some new technique, so much the better.” (link to essay, Hackers & Painters)

4. Even when the companies aren’t as massive (yet), founders building and writing in public creates a flywheel. Ryan Hoover blogged a lot before building ProductHunt and swears by its benefits. Sahil Lavingia’s viral essays captured lessons from building Gumroad.

5. There are a host of writer-builders adjacent to writer-founders too. Writer-operators are functional specialists who often open source playbooks. Some become analysts of careers, companies, and people in niche categories of tech. For the writer-investor (perhaps less of a traditional builder), the job is being active in the right conversations, so it helps to publish thoughts into the public domain.

6. There are near-daily business newsletter writers — After School covers gen Z trends, FeedMe covers culture from a business lens. Some people start out building and move into writing. Ava, who writes the popular largely-personal Substack Bookbear, is a tech builder turned mostly-writer. Others start out strictly writing and move into building.

7. The other thing is that writers don’t like talking about distribution. Whether you’re a writer or builder or both, how do people find your work? There are no shortcuts here. No matter which one you start with, you have to organically build your own distribution. It’s just that the thing you do second gets to take advantage of the first.

8. We’re seeing the opposite too: writer James Clear just entered the builder world, releasing Atoms, a paid mobile app, an extension of his Atomic Habits brand.

9. This isn’t to say that writers won’t crossover into the other mediums, because many of them will. The relative strengths of video, especially video podcasting and vlogging, are a big draw.

10. This doesn’t mean every builder should rush to write and every writer should rush to build. You need affinity, aptitude, and energy for it. Though as with anything that can look shiny in the right light, this archetype will also attract people who may not be a fit.

11. The caveat: “building” can of course have a range of meanings, from uniquely substantive life experience to great products and companies.