The Obsessor

Hey there. It’s Panzer. I’m a writer, editor, founder and photographer based in California’s Central Valley. After a long stint as a retail worker I wrote my way into a career covering startups and early stage technology and reviewing products like Apple’s iPhone.

For more about my career there and how I got started, check out these recent podcast chats with Nilay Patel at Decoder and Ben Thompson at Stratechery.

Though I built a great audience for sites like The Next Web and TechCrunch doing that, I’ve never had a place to collect my thoughts on the broader spectrum of my interests. I’ll be dropping anything I find interesting on the site here as it occurs to me and then once a week shipping a newsletter on a bigger idea or theme. And we might even have some contributors dropping by to share thoughts on something that they have working experience of, rather than it being translated through a lens, darkly.

Given that I just spent about 10 years running TechCrunch in some form or another, managing a team of up to 50 people, I didn’t get a lot of time to write about a lot of the things that I love so much. And I love a lot. Fashion, movies, music, food, theme parks, robots, product development and design, business and company building, collecting and art. You name it, I’ve probably obsessed over it.

This is a place for me to exercise some of those obsessions. I write to understand, so the topics here will be wide ranging. It might be a clever interaction design from a killer product team, or a well made sneaker. A favorite new restaurant or fascinating new robot from Walt Disney Imagineering.

I’m keeping it simple for now but might drop some new projects in the very near future. I’m also joining a new, incredible team in 2024 so I’ll write about that here too. And yeah, you probably can’t stop me from reviewing new Apple hardware.

More than anything over the years, I’ve enjoyed covering the various things that I love learning about for an audience of intensely interested and engaged people.

The more people care about something the deeper you can go – and I love getting all the way to the atoms of a topic. I live in the rabbit hole and I love people that want to be here with me.

In this age of parametric oblivion, the only real moat is taste. I hope you enjoy mine. Please subscribe to the newsletter using any of the links you find on the site and I can’t wait to share these obsessions with you. Ciao!

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