About Byrne Hobart
Byrne Hobart is an investor and writer best known for The Diff, a newsletter about inflection points in finance and technology. The Diff covers the largest technology companies, early-stage startups and unproven technologies, and the ways banks, funds and markets respond to change, with an eye on what is likely to matter over the next several years.
Hobart's background spans both of the industries he writes about. On the technology side he worked at digital advertising agencies, Yahoo and 21.co. On the finance side he did equity research at the hedge fund SAC Capital, later Point72, and at alternative-data research firms that sell to hedge funds, including 7Park Data and M Science. He has said he started investing in public companies in middle school and began writing online in high school.
Hobart has said he ran the newsletter intermittently for about a decade, mostly to promote other writing, before he began writing it regularly and charging for it. In a 2021 podcast interview he said he promised subscribers three posts a week but usually sent five, with some free and the rest for paying readers. Alongside the main essays the newsletter runs a weekly Longreads + Open Thread roundup and short news items, and it has added research staff. He is also a partner at Anomaly, an investment firm focused on frontier technology.
With his Anomaly colleague Tobias Huber, Hobart wrote Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, published by Stripe Press. The book looks at the slowdown in technological progress since the mid-twentieth century and studies breakthroughs from the Manhattan Project and Apollo to Moore's law and bitcoin. Its argument is that transformative progress often looks like a financial bubble, with small groups sharing a vision, plenty of money and little accountability, and that such bubbles are not always bad.
What Byrne Hobart is known for
- Writing The Diff newsletter on finance and technology
- Co-authoring Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation
- Partner at the frontier-tech investment firm Anomaly
- Equity research background at SAC Capital and hedge-fund data firms
Works by Byrne Hobart
1 essay to practice
More notable works
Newsletter
His main publication: several essays a week on inflections in finance and technology, plus short items and a weekly reading list.
Written with Tobias Huber for Stripe Press, it argues that bubble-like enthusiasm has driven many of the twentieth century's biggest breakthroughs.
Argues that AI makes it easy to infer secrets from scattered public signals, so companies will reveal less and demand for AI-driven intelligence gathering will grow.
A recurring weekly edition of The Diff that collects and annotates the best long reads Hobart has found.
Byrne Hobart’s writing style
Hobart's writing is characterized by deep financial analysis combined with broad historical knowledge. He frequently draws unexpected connections between different industries and eras, using data and historical examples to support his arguments. His style is technical but accessible to informed readers.
- Dense, compressed analysis
- A single Diff post can move through several industries in a few paragraphs, assuming the reader can keep up with finance terms and company names without much hand-holding.
- Unexpected analogies
- He frames business questions with borrowed ideas, such as the science-fiction 'dark forest' answer to the Fermi paradox, and then tests the analogy against real markets.
- Historical parallels and numbers
- Arguments lean on precedents, such as the collapse of Long-Term Capital Management, and on specific figures, so claims about the present are checked against what happened before.
- Footnotes and side items
- Numbered footnotes carry caveats and asides, and many posts end with a 'Plus!' set of short sections on smaller news, which keeps the main essay focused.
- Mechanism-first sentences
- He likes crisp general statements about how systems behave, for example: "Capex booms propagate through supply chains until they hit bottlenecks." The rest of the paragraph shows where the rule applies.
How to write like Byrne Hobart
Hobart's writing rewards readers who already know the basics, so the first step is to know your subject well enough to skip the basics. Pick one idea, such as a pricing change, a regulatory quirk or a new technology, and ask what it changes downstream: who gains, who loses, and what other markets it touches. Write down the general mechanism in one sentence, then test it against two or three historical cases.
Keep the main line of argument tight and push qualifications and tangents into footnotes. Use real numbers wherever you can. When an analogy from another field (science fiction, biology, military history) explains a market better than the usual jargon, use it, but follow through and show where it breaks. Finally, add a few short, separate items at the end for smaller observations that do not deserve their own essay.
The quickest way to absorb these habits is to retype one of Byrne Hobart’s essays above, word for word, then write a paragraph of your own in the same voice. New to this? Read what copywork is and how to do it.
Frequently asked questions about Byrne Hobart
- Who is Byrne Hobart?
- Byrne Hobart is an investor and writer who publishes The Diff, a newsletter about finance and technology. He previously worked in technology at ad agencies, Yahoo and 21.co, and in finance as an equity researcher at SAC Capital and at data firms that serve hedge funds. He is a partner at the investment firm Anomaly and co-author of Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation.
- What is The Diff?
- The Diff is Byrne Hobart's newsletter on inflection points in finance and technology. It covers big tech companies, startups and new technologies, and how financial institutions react to change. It publishes several times a week, with some posts free and most for paying subscribers, and includes a weekly Longreads + Open Thread roundup of recommended reading.
- What is Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation about?
- Boom, written by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber and published by Stripe Press, asks why technological progress has slowed. It studies projects such as the Manhattan Project, Apollo, Moore's law and bitcoin and argues that great breakthroughs share the features of financial bubbles: a tight group with a shared vision, abundant funding and loose accountability. The authors conclude that some bubbles are worth having.
- What is Byrne Hobart's writing style?
- Hobart writes dense, fast-moving analysis for informed readers. He states general rules about how markets behave, supports them with numbers and historical precedents, and borrows analogies from science fiction and history. Footnotes hold his caveats and asides, and many posts close with short 'Plus!' items on smaller topics, so a single issue covers a lot of ground.