Leaving big tech to build the #1 technology newsletter | Gergely Orosz (The Pragmatic Engineer)

**Gergely Orosz** (0:00)
In my best year at Uber, I made about $320,000 or $330,000 in total compensation. And when I quit my job, I was actually thinking, am I crazy because I'm leaving, especially in Europe, this is a lot of money to say, well, this will be similar to something. Someone in a similar position would have made like 500 or 600K in total in the US. But now I am making more in compensation that I made at Uber.
And the difference is that now my compensation, well, my earnings are keep going up as long as the news that it was growing. So there's no theoretical cap on this. Of course, there is an actual cap. There's churn growth is slowing over time, but it's very, very strange because I felt that I was in a really privileged position. I just honestly making tons of money, doing an odd job that I loved. And this was at Uber or as a software engineer.
And I'm now doing something that I love. And in some strange way, I guess it even pays better.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:59)
Welcome to Lenny's Podcast. I'm Lenny and my goal here is to help you get better at the craft of building and growing products. I interview world-class product leaders and growth experts to learn from their hard-won experiences building and scaling today's most successful companies. Today, my guest is Gergely Orosz. In a sense, Gergely is the me of engineering. He's got the top engineering newsletter on Substack. It's growing really fast. And like me, he does this full time.
In this episode, we talk about the life of newslettering full time, like we both do. We get into Gergely's decision to leave his cushy tech job at Uber to go into this life full time. What the day-to-day life of a newsletter person is, the pros and cons of this life, what it takes to be successful, and a bunch of advice for how to get started if you're curious about going down this route. This is a pretty unique episode, and it was really fun to do. If you ever thought about writing, or going down this kind of creative route, you'll love this episode. With that, I bring you Gergely Orosz.
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Gergy, welcome to the podcast.

**Gergely Orosz** (4:34)
It's awesome. Great to be here Lenny.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:36)
So I think this is going to be a pretty special and unique podcast. Your newsletter is the number one technology newsletter on Substack called The Pragmatic Engineer by the way. My newsletter is the number one business newsletter on Substack. And so we're connected in this really special weird way. And I thought it would be pretty fun to just explore this weird path that we're on doing this newsletter thing. And in that help listeners understand kind of the pros and cons of this life, how to go down this route, what it takes to be successful, all that kind of stuff.