Originally published on 01/12/2025
Dear reader,
I spent most of last month speaking to potential RO writers. I initially marketed the role as an “RO correspondent” role. Candidates were expected to commit to 15h per week to write RO articles, organize RO events, and sell RO subscriptions. A mediocre idea, in hindsight.
The logistical fallacy of the RO Correspondent
Do you know anyone with precisely 15h of free time floating around in their week? Either someone is employed full-time, or unemployed and looking for full-time employment. As a result, the only suitable RO correspondent candidates were freelancers who simultaneously had:
Exactly 15h of free time per week.
Excellent writing skills.
Magnetic social skills (to run/attend events on behalf of the RO).
The grit to sell subscriptions, and the corresponding skills to do so.
Unsurprisingly, the talent pool was small.
These multiple demands, packed into a 15h timeframe, also meant RO correspondents would spend a minuscule amount of hours actually writing.
I understand where this mistake came from. I over-indexed the importance of “growth”, failing to realize that “growth” was a result of excellent writing. Mentally, I’d conceptualized our articles as something to streamline while we focused on real, growth stuff.
I was shaken in my torpor by an RO correspondent candidate. When I asked him what his RO growth strategy would be, he answered “well, write fantastic articles”.
Now: I am not mindlessly swinging back the pendulum in the opposite direction. Yours truly has a subtle, nuanced mind. Launching intelligent growth initiatives is, evidently, crucial to our business.
Instead, I’ve “put the church back in the middle of the town” as we French people say by placing the quality, exclusivity, and utility of the RO’s writing on its rightful pedestal.
What does this mean, operationally-speaking?
Instead of hiring quarter-time RO correspondents, we’ll be commissioning fantastic articles from talented writers around the world. This opens up the talent pool, enabling us to try new writers and drop ones who don’t fit without committing to fixed monthly costs (a folly until MRR predictably ramps up).
This is what the RO structure will look like for the foreseeable future:
Aakash and I will continue writing the interview format articles + running growth initiatives.
We’ll commission ambitious, long-form, experimental articles from writers around the world.
I’ve started fielding article pitches from various writers. And let me tell you, RO subscribers: you lot are in for a real treat.
Receiving pitches from writers who know exactly what their ecosystems are informationally-deprived of is exhilarating. The RO’s editorial production is about to step up a notch.
“What are the RO’s editorial guidelines”?
Some writers have asked me this, to which I convincingly retort: “I’m working on it”.
Until now, RO writers have generally been served with an injunction to read previous articles and vague advice to follow Orwell’s “Six Rules of Writing”. Which is ironic because I still have a hard time conceptualizing the passive voice vs the active voice (Rule #4). I have to start the reasoning from scratch every time, just like you recite the entire alphabet song in your head when you want to know whether a word is before or after another.
Dear RO investors: there are some patches of smart in my brain, I promise.
All of that to say: the RO’s editorial guidelines have basically been “whatever Tim finds good”. Hardly worthy of a Financial Times competitor.
This RO letter is a forcing mechanism to extract these editorial guidelines out of myself, so here we go. I won’t write the actual editorial guidelines, because that would make for a dull read in what is otherwise a brilliantly entertaining correspondence. Rather, let me elaborate on what the RO’s editorial “vibe” is.
Imagine a dinner party. A dinner party where you know 20% of the people and are meeting the remaining 80% for the first time. Distinct personalities populate this fictional dinner table. I’ll let your imagination fill them in.
Now, I want you to imagine the RO as one of this dinner party’s participants. They (because the RO is gender-neutral) are one of the people you’ve never met. I will give you this person’s characteristics. Hopefully, you can extrapolate these into the RO’s editorial vibe.
You first hear them speak at the end of the dinner, because they were intently listening to the loudmouths around the table beforehand.
Their interjections lack the wittiness and sophistication of other participants, yet seem to drive the conversation further.
They don’t make any of the facile, cynical comments about world affairs others make.
They are mostly deep in conversation with their neighbor, rather than fighting for a spot at the “macro” group conversation.
Their professed ignorance about certain topics feels like a desire to learn, not self-deprecating.
As the conversation develops, they ask increasingly pointed questions rather than offer their opinion.
When you ask about their interests, they pedagogically explain them, with legible simplicity but without condescension.
This is what the RO is. Editorially, this means:
We listen more than we speak.
We look for solutions, not scapegoats.
We decorticate complexity, rather than reducing it to aphorisms.
If the RO’s dinner party character is you and you want to write for us, DM me.
See you next month,
Tim