Hello world, again

Welcome to Hypertext, a brand new site and newsletter written by me, Romain Dillet. While this is a new home for my thoughts, writing isn’t a new thing for me. Over the past decade, I have written thousands of articles for a little known tech news publication called TechCrunch.

Tech news has changed so much that people working in the tech industry aren’t looking for the same thing as they were 10 years ago. We are constantly being bombarded with small and big news items — in our feeds, inboxes, and private chats.

But when is the last time you took some time to think about what you just read and tried to make sense of it all?

With Hypertext, I want to bring analysis and opinion on the tech industry, for people working in the tech industry. Think about it as a smart briefing for busy people. I won’t try to cover everything. Instead, I plan to focus on some important tidbits of information and answer a simple question, over and over again: why does it matter?

I’m not the first person to launch a newsletter. And people like Ben Thompson, Om Malik, M.G. Siegler, Eric Newcomer and Alex Konrad have shown me that it was possible to break out of the traditional newsroom setup.

And yet, I don’t think there’s enough coverage of what’s happening in Europe — especially in English, and especially with the right context. Sifted, The French Tech Journal and business news publications are doing a fine job. But I believe I can cover the news through a different angle and by bringing new context to the table.

More importantly, when I browse my LinkedIn newsfeed, some hot takes are simply extremely bad. I’m sure I don’t have a perfect track record over my 3,500 articles at TechCrunch. But I hope I can do better than the average ChatGPT-fuelled misinformed BS that you can read in your newsfeeds.

So there you have it. Thank you so much for reading this post. Obviously, I have many ideas of what I could do next but one thing at a time… For now, please subscribe to the newsletter before closing this tab.

Have a good day ☀️
Romain