View from the Office.

I met up with Matt Robinson at the Pain Quotidien at Columbus Circle. I had the small cappuccino because the large ones are ridiculously huge. Matt had coffee and cream. 

Matt recently started an AI focused newsletter called AI Street after moving to Milan with his wife and daughter. Previously, he spent more than a decade as a reporter at Bloomberg. 

I know from first-hand experience that Matt knows a lot about newsletters because in 2011 he was hired by Bloomberg to write about structured products for a publication I created. 

His new title takes a different tack than many of the others I subscribe to which are focused on the large language model companies, such as OpenAI, or prompt engineering. 

Matt writes about how companies are — or are not — integrating AI into their day-to-day operations. He interviews founders and academics working on practical solutions. 

For example, for a recent edition he interviewed Alex Kim, a Ph.D. candidate in accounting at the University of Chicago, who has pioneered ways to measure vocal tones using AI. 

For another article, he spoke with Peter Hafez, chief data scientist at the textual analysis platform RavenPack. He has also written about Sid Jayakumar, CEO and founder of Finster AI and a former engineer at Google DeepMind, who is building AI agents. 

Matt’s goal is to bridge the gap between experts and a wider audience. 

He said that running his own newsletter company was both familiar and pretty different than running one for Bloomberg. 

The big change is that now he has to think about distribution and making money through subscriptions or advertising. 

As we were talking I realized there was a weird symmetry in our lives: 

–We both started at Bloomberg at 25

–We both switched jobs about 15 years later

–We both had our first child at age 37 

–We both started newsletter businesses at 40

–We are now both focused on AI and tech 

Life is amazing!

It was great to re-connect and talk about the state of media and tech. 

Next time, I’m going to insist on meeting in Milan. 

I’ll drop a link to Matt’s newsletter in the comments. 

Matt can be reached via LinkedIn or DM me for a warm intro.