As an entrepreneur who owned an ad agency for 20 years and had clients in 21 countries, developed real estate in an early post-Soviet emerging market and taught behavioral investing and entrepreneurship in business schools all over Europe, I believe I’m qualified to write about how capitalism works on any platform I choose. As an angel investor who’s earned his right to be beachfront lazy in Latvia, I have no need or desire to operate a business on Patreon for $3 coffees or manage $5 monthly subs on Substack, and all the work that would entail. With Medium, I write, put it out there and readers supply a ruthlessly objective verdict that tells me what I need to know about my writing. Since Medium has chosen to distribute every history, investments and economics article I’ve written the last few months, I have reason to believe I’ve carved out an outlier blue ocean niche: readable journalistic narrative combined with high level scholarly heft.

Having helped nurture one early stage investment to near pre-IPO status, I’m indifferent to the financial health of the platform I write on. A couple of years is more than enough time to discover whether readers believe I’m worth reading. As far as Medium’s left wing bias goes, reality and evidence have a well-known liberal bias nowadays, unless you believe drinking bleach and downing hydroxichloroquine will protect you from COVID19 and satanic child-trafficking cults. Love of intellectual novelty and deep-dive research do as well. I suspect we’ve both read the neurological and cognitive research about the conservative mind being wired to perceive novelty as threat. I also suspect that’s why you’re resistant to hearing about dysfunctional neo-feudal monopolistic capitalism from an capitalist like me who understands it from the inside.