Dot biz is for doctors in Cleveland
Why dot biz exists and who it's for
Doctors in Cleveland are being ignored, and it’s a problem.
We’re in the middle of an ongoing takeover—tech is eating business, and it tastes like MANGOS.
This is the juicy new way to refer to Meta, Anthropic, Nvidia, Google, OpenAI, and SpaceX (we say Google rather than its parent company, Alphabet, for the fruitiness). These are the AI-centered companies that might define the next decade in tech, and they’re climbing close to a combined $15 trillion market cap.
Imagine you’re a doctor in Cleveland.
You’re smart, you’re curious, and you’re interested in what’s happening to your investments. But you’re also not listening to 4-hour podcasts with luminaries in artificial intelligence, and you’re not subscribing to paywalled newsletters about software-as-a-service. You also aren’t part of a San Francisco and Silicon Valley bubble, where chatter about tech is constantly in the air. You might not hear about tech news in casual conversation at all.
Where are the publications serving you? Business news is swiftly becoming just tech news, and yet it’s surprisingly hard to find explanations. This is the lens for dot biz, and it’s a necessary one.
This is a retread of the About page, but there’s a big problem here. Publications are highly polarized: they either hate technology companies and their social consequences, or they’re extreme boosters funded and/or owned by the very companies they cover. Both often come with insufficient disclosures (we’ll always have a disclosures page you can look at). If you’re a doctor in Cleveland, you’re able to formulate your own opinions about how these companies affect your work, life, and communities for good or for ill—you need a publication that provides basic explanation of the business decisions, not a sermon.
The other major problem? The information is polarized in a couple ways. It’s either super niche and technical focused, usually behind a paywall. Or it’s overly broad and hypey, playing a volume game that means there’s not a lot of editorial oversight. It’s often incredibly granular (which artificial intelligence model launched on which particular day, without any context to understand it) or incredibly broad (how humanity might be saved and/or doomed by some new breakthrough). Dot biz will sit in the middle, providing you carefully curated news and, crucially, the context to understand it.
Finally, our focus is going to be on the business. We’ll always let you know the business context behind decisions. Sometimes, that will necessarily get into technical details or history, but the focus is always the business dynamics at play. Who’s winning? Who’s losing? What might happen next? Many other angles on tech are fascinating, from the gadgets to the AI, but we’ll stick to the implications for business.
Right now, dot biz is a laptop sticker on Phil Edwards, a journalist who’s covered just about everything over the past decade. I’ll shift from the completely fictitious “we” for the rest of this paragraph. I’ll be finding my footing when it comes to publication cadence, formats, and more. But that doctor in Cleveland is going to remain my reader through all the short videos, long-form videos, newsletters, and any other ways I try to do the work and explain the businesses that haven’t been explained yet. I’ll also be writing this myself. I’ll use lots of AI in the production process, but the words and insights will be human-generated (and damn it I’ll use em dashes if I want to).
Of course, this publication is for all people who want to understand tech. But we’re thinking of that doctor in Cleveland with every story. Your feet are tired from standing. You can’t plug in the podcast. But you’re smart, you’re curious, and you deserve news about the mangos taking over the world.