Key Takeaways

  • Jeremy Stern focuses on prose craft and narrative weight rather than business tactics when profiling leaders like Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu, and Josh Kushner.
  • Technologists and entrepreneurs have become the most culturally central figures in American life, yet the prose covering them often lacks durability.
  • Stern draws on David Foster Wallace's observation that great writers are natural-born watchers and lurkers who witness rather than participate.
  • Long-form magazine profiling is America's single indigenous writing invention, according to Tablet writer David Samuels.

The Flaw in Tactical Business Writing

Most business writing treats founders like optimization problems. It strips away personality, obsession, fear, and oddity to produce a sterile list of five management rules.

Jeremy Stern takes the opposite route at Colossus. When writing long profiles of figures like Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu, and Josh Kushner, he ignores the impulse to extract neat playbooks. Instead, he treats founders as complex characters acting on a historical stage.

As Stern explains: “I've been so focused on the craft of writing prose and storytelling and narrative and bringing some sort of literary or cinematic ambition to bear on the lives of these core figures in business and technology and eventually elsewhere that I've been more focused on the success of the craft rather than on what I'm trying to absorb from these individual people.”

Business media usually optimizes for quick utility. Readers want a hack they can apply to their sales funnel by lunch. But hacks expire. Character study, historical context, and literary prose endure because human psychology does not change across decades.

The Shift in American Culture

For most of the twentieth century, novelists, playwrights, and politicians occupied the center of American public thought. That reality inverted over the past two decades.

Stern points out that “people in business and technology had somewhat recently become a lot of the most interesting, the most interdisciplinary, the most culturally central and salient figures in American life.”

Yet the quality of prose covering these people failed to keep pace. As Stern notes, “the most talented prose stylists, the people who bring real literary ambition to the things they write, tend not to be in this space.” Tech coverage split into two dull extremes: PR fluff or hostile takedowns.

Stern connects his work to an older tradition. He references his former Tablet colleague David Samuels, who argues that the long-form magazine profile is America's only indigenous form of writing. America did not invent the novel or verse poetry, but it did invent the character profile. Reviving that craft for technology founders means capturing the human contradictions that actually build giant companies.

The Writer as Lurker

To write about founders accurately, you cannot be their cheerleader or their customer. You have to stand apart.

Stern references an observation by David Foster Wallace: “There's this great David Foster Wallace essay that I really like where he talks about writers as natural-born watchers and lurkers and starers and what they kind of covet is this image of themselves as witnesses of other things and other people.”

Founders who want to understand their competitors, their markets, and their own blind spots need to adopt that same detached observer mindset. Stop looking for bullet-point playbooks. Study the underlying psychology, upbringing, and obsessions of the people shaping your industry.

What to Do With This

Stop reading bulleted business summaries for one week. Pick one founder you study, buy a full-length biography or unedited long-form profile, and read it for character traits and personal flaws instead of tactical advice. Write one page on what internal drive makes that person endure years of friction that would break a normal operator.