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3 weeks ago
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The winding path that Dan Ni took on his way to creating the TLDR suite of tech-focused newsletters is littered with career detours: a job out of college as a quant trader, a rare and painful medical condition, the founding and sale of a SaaS business, and even a stint at culinary school.
Today, the media company that he runs publishes a dozen newsletters that all together reach more than seven million subscribers. Ni, 35, employs 22 people full-time, all of them remote, and last year for the first time the company raked in revenue over eight figures—and is profitable.
“I think it’s an inspiring story for a lot of people trying to grow their own media companies,” says Adam Ryan, co-founder and CEO of Workweek, a platform for professional networks.
The main TLDR tech newsletter—a reference to online slang for “too long; didn’t read”—arrives in the inbox of some of its 1.6 million subscribers, with a subject line populated by brief headlines and corresponding emoji. (News about Tesla might have a little red car next to it, for example.) Subscribing is free, and the company generates revenue by selling sponsored links in the newsletter from prominent companies such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Anthropic. An ad can cost as much as $30,000 per day to run.
“TLDR was such a side project at the time,” Ni recalls, of the newsletter’s early days in 2018. “I really didn’t even think of it as anything other than my own newsletter for a really long time.”
Ni started in finance. After graduating from Yale University in 2012, where he studied economics and math, he scored a job at Jane Street Capital in New York City as a quant trader. “Back then I was really in the grind,” he recalls. “I just wanted to make a lot of money, like a lot of people right out of college.” But then the pain started.
