The Heyday of the Writing-first Practitioner

AI makes it trivially easy to generate content—so does the advantage of being a prolific public writer disappear when everyone can write? Eleanor Warnock, Every’s new managing editor, argues the opposite: In a world flooded with AI-generated text, “writing-first practitioners” like Fred Wilson, Julie Zhuo, and Warren Buffett have an edge that only sharpens. These are professionals who write to think, not just to market—and their cultivated voice and hard-won networks can’t be prompted into existence. Her piece maps where this archetype thrives, why companies should hire them (and let them keep writing), and the tech stack she uses herself.—Kate Lee

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Ten minutes into a professional meet-cute at a Parisian café, the venture capitalist who had reached out on LinkedIn laid her cards on the table: “I want you to help our firm with marketing.”

“Why me?” I asked. She hadn’t asked for references, and the few minutes we spent together could hardly count as an interview.

“Because I like your writing,” she said. “It’s no-bullshit.”

This wasn’t the first time writing had opened a door for me. And I’m not the only one. Across knowledge work fields, I see what I call writing-first practitioners: professionals who use consistent public writing—on blogs, in newsletters, through op-eds, on social media—to sharpen their thinking, build networks, and attract opportunity.

Fred Wilson, the legendary venture capitalist who started his blog in 2003, fits this archetype. He credits his writing with helping him win deals and hone his investment judgment. So does Julie Zhuo, former vice president of product design at Facebook, who turned her insights on management into a bestselling book and now writes regularly on Substack. Similarly, longtime blogger Alex Danco was hired last year by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz as an editor at large from his role as director of product at Shopify. And of course, we can’t forget the OG: legendary investor Warren Buffet… more on him later.

Though the glow of brand building and content marketing are usually the things that make people jealous of these individuals, that’s not why they write and, indeed, not the greatest benefit of their urge to scribble. These individuals write first and foremost for themselves. Through the personal and often intimate act of putting words down, taking an intellectual stance and sharing that with the world, they end up making better decisions about where to invest their money or time.

Writing-first practitioners have always competed on distribution; anyone can start a blog or post on LinkedIn. Now, with AI, they’re competing on production, too. As tools like Claude and ChatGPT make it trivially easy to generate content, does the writing-first edge disappear when everyone can write?

After years of sharing my own perspectives publicly as a business and tech journalist, newsletter writer, and coaching investors and early-stage founders on how to share theirs, I believe that if anything, AI will sharpen the advantage that these practitioners have. That’s also why I joined Every late last year as managing editor. Drawing on these experiences, I’ll demonstrate where writing-first practitioners shine and why companies should want to hire them in 2026.

Where writing creates disproportionate leverage

The writing-first archetype exists in any profession built on expertise and trust, from roles like marketing to professions that require formal credentials, such as medicine. Writing creates disproportionate advantages under these conditions:

1. Results and track record lag or stay hidden. It takes a decade to know if a venture capitalist is a good company picker. An executive coach’s impact on a client’s career after years of counseling may never be shared publicly. In fields where results and track record lag or stay hidden, writing is an interim signal of competence. AI can generate content, but it can’t demonstrate judgment accumulated over years of experience.
2. Profit opportunities flow through networks. In venture capital, access to the best deals directly impacts returns, something that communications professional Lulu Cheng Meservey (and her LPs) keenly understood when she raised a $40 million fund last month. For executive recruiters, access to talent can determine success or failure. Writing makes investors, collaborators, and candidates aware of you even before you need them. AI-generated content might fill a feed, but it doesn’t build the trust that makes someone open your cold email.
3. Fast-moving or emerging industries. In fast-moving or emerging industries like tech, the window to act is short. Writing forces real-time synthesis; you process what’s happening, form a view, and spot openings while others are still waiting for clarity. AI tools can summarize what’s already known, but they can’t give you a point of view on what you don’t yet know.
4. Output is subjective, and clients aren’t experts. In fields like design, branding, consulting, and coaching, clients often lack the expertise to judge quality directly. When a Fortune 500 company hires a branding agency, the decision-makers usually aren’t designers. Instead, these clients rely on proxies such as referrals and reputation. Writing positions you as someone worth trusting.

One could argue that podcasts and, in particular, video podcasts, can serve a similar purpose as a medium that allows professionals to publicly share and gain recognition for a point of view. There is a larger umbrella of “content-first practitioners” that includes podcasters like investor Harry Stebbings, who parlayed his 20VC podcast into founding a venture firm.

While podcasting can be a way to process and shape ideas in real time—particularly if the podcast involves conversations with other smart practitioners—writing imposes a discipline on thought that podcasts do not. Writing publicly requires one to commit to an angle and a view, distilled into something clear and concise. You are forced to take a decisive step in one direction or another, a process that, done over and over again, becomes progress. Compared to this, hours-long podcasts feel more like a first draft of thinking.

Why AI sharpens the edge

When that venture capitalist in Paris glommed onto my writing, what she liked wasn’t any particular thing I said but how I said it, my “no-bullshit” voice. Just as writing hones your thinking, over time it hones your style of thinking, expressed outwardly as your writing voice.

Even the best writers don’t start out with a fully formed voice. The essays and fiction I wrote 10 years ago are totally different from what they are now, and that reflects the writing I’ve done, the writing I’ve read, and what I’ve learned from both. When the whole world is working with AI tools that tend to normalize writing to an unobjectionable range, the cultivation of a uniquely personal voice becomes even more valuable. This observation isn’t new, but it bears repeating: The practitioners who have developed a unique and recognizable voice have a head start that cannot be prompted into existence.

There’s a less obvious way AI sharpens this edge: networks. As AI tools make data analysis and information synthesis easier, proprietary human relationships become more valuable. Writing has always been a way to attract those relationships—people reaching out because they’ve read your work and want to connect. In a world where everyone can synthesize information, the network you’ve built by thinking in public becomes your true moat.

The catch: You can’t fake it

I often get asked by founders and investors how I can create this magic for them. They want the inbound leads, the reputation and the network effects…the glow. The bad news: If you’re asking how to become this archetype, chances are you won’t.

In my experience, people who are writing-first practitioners start not because they are eager to build their network or get ahead in their career. They write because they can’t stop themselves. They have a natural aptitude for processing ideas on page or screen. They would be writing whether they had 10 followers or 100,000—and very often they build the 100,000 from those first 10. This can’t be forced. And it can’t be outsourced.

What usually happens is that someone tries for a while, then runs out of steam. Or they hire me to ghostwrite, and I end up generating not just the words but the ideas—because they don’t actually have much to say, or because they don’t understand that forcing yourself to do the writing is how you get more ideas.

It takes courage, too. Writing-first practitioners dare to put things out there that they know might be wrong in a few years. They aren’t afraid for their writing to get feedback and criticism, or push on even when they are afraid. They understand that the writing is a means to an end, not a performance.

That is not to discourage people who have been writing diligently in private. Everyone who became a writing-first practitioner had to put themselves out there for the first time at some point. When I’ve been nervous about going public with something, I’ve asked professional contacts to give me feedback (“I’ll give you credit at the bottom of the piece”) and friends to keep me accountable for publishing (“WhatsApp me on Friday to check if I’ve published this”).

Why you should hire writing-first practitioners

If you are an employer, you should want to hire writing-first practitioners—and let them do their thing.

By bringing attention to themselves, they automatically bring attention to your company. For example, many people who are prolific writers have told me their writing has given them the opportunity to speak at industry conferences with more frequency than non-writers, giving their employers some free publicity. Don’t forget that other magic of writing, either; these individuals are sharpening their perspectives through words and bringing that to your customers.

Yet many companies get this wrong. I’ve interviewed at places that were visibly nervous about me writing on LinkedIn or contributing journalistic pieces to external media, which was odd, because my writing and personal brand were often the reason why they wanted to interview me in the first place.

An angel investor I know went to work for a big tech company and was told he’d need to shut down his long-running podcast about startups. He pushed back and eventually negotiated the communications team’s sign-off only for episodes in which he spoke about his employer…which was never. He has long since left that employer, but his podcast continues.

A writing-first practitioner with a platform is free marketing for your business. The risk of them writing something reputationally damaging to your business is near zero; why would they want to jeopardize the company that pays their bills? That tiny risk is far outweighed by having smart people associated with your company.

Finally, writers are good communicators full stop, so they are an internal asset when we consider how much money poor communications costs companies—Grammarly puts it at an estimated $9,284 per worker annually.

The tech stack for writing-first practitioners

Even if AI won’t turn anyone into a writing-first practitioner, those who do put writing first can get a lot out of AI. Here’s my tech stack:

1. Otter: I use Otter for recording conversations and capturing quotes from those conversations. While I think Granola’s summary feature is better, the journalist in me always wants to have the raw transcript and recording.
2. Claude projects: I keep separate projects for each of my writing worlds, including the writing I do after living in Japan for many years and speaking the language fluently. For example, I have one project for my Japanese-language writing with instructions that include context about the specific topics I cover in Japanese. The project documents include samples of my Japanese writing.
3. Substack/LinkedIn: These are my primary distribution channels, though X is also fertile ground for writing-first practitioners.
4. Spiral: The writing I do for articles and newsletters is always 100 percent me, no AI, but for things like quick updates on LinkedIn, I use Every’s AI writing tool Spiral for the draft. I love that it gives you three drafts to play around with and compare, and I find that when I use the Writing Style trained on my LinkedIn posts, I get better output than on Claude.

The archetype endures

Years before my coffee interview with the venture capitalist, on the first week of my MBA program in France, a thick FedEx envelope arrived from my dad. Inside: a stack of decades of Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters.

I learned as much from those letters as I did from my finance coursework. Buffett wasn’t trying to teach me directly—he was writing to his shareholders, processing his own thinking, building a public record of his judgment. But I benefited all the same.

This is the other side of the writing-first practice: Readers benefit, too. Fred Wilson’s blog has taught a generation of founders how to think about venture capital. Julie Zhuo’s writing has shaped how thousands of managers approach their work. These practitioners have created—and are still creating—a body of knowledge that others can learn from long after they’re gone.

AI might be able to simulate the no-nonsense style of a Warren Buffett letter, but it can’t replicate his self-criticism and generosity with lessons, hard-won from real-life experience and honed through his very act of writing.

That’s why this archetype endures. And if you’re not a writing-first practitioner, the next best thing is to find them—and start reading.

Eleanor Warnock is the managing editor at Every. She has been a business journalist and editor at the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times-backed Sifted, and is an advisor to Bek Ventures. Follow her on LinkedIn and Substack.

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