The Obligation to Your Gift

Jeremy Stern is the editor-in-chief of Colossus, where he writes long-form profiles of founders and investors including Mark Zuckerberg, Palmer Luckey, Scott Wu and Josh Kushner. Until a few years ago he wrote about American and German politics and foreign policy, and before that he served in the US Army. His first profile of any person, on Luckey, came out in 2024. He majored in Russian, is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and brings a novelist's ambitions to business writing. These signals are from Jeremy Stern's interview with David Senra on Senra.

1. Start With the Question. Stern begins with a subject he wants to understand, then finds the person who is the best excuse to explore it. He quotes a Talmudic idea that killing one person destroys a world, because every life contains many worlds. He asks each subject for at least 2 conversations of 90 minutes, spaced apart, to catch them in different settings. For Zuckerberg that grew to 5 or 6 months of reporting and almost 40 other interviews.
2. The Last Man Standing. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates stepped away, and Steve Jobs died. Stern sees Zuckerberg as the last founder of his generation still running his company. He's also the only millennial founder at his scale. By Stern's rough count, the next biggest millennial-founded company, Stripe, is worth about a tenth of Meta.
3. Augustus as Self-Portrait. Zuckerberg's interest in Augustus goes back to high school Latin, and at 42 he can still recite Virgil. He used to end early Facebook meetings by shouting "domination" until Sean Parker warned it could show up in an antitrust suit. His personal AI agent is named Agrippa, after Augustus's key lieutenant. Stern finds his reading of Augustus revealing because it is selective: Zuckerberg credits him with turning a pillage economy into a trade economy and leaves out the standing army and the end of the republic.
4. Ruthless Without Being Cruel. Family, colleagues, critics and rivals told Stern the same 2 things: people still underestimate how competitive Zuckerberg is, and he treats people well. A former Meta AI researcher now at a rival lab told him "Mark is the Terminator." He stays permanently discontent and keeps moving. Stern says most people that competitive are also monstrous to those around them.
5. Unsexy Compounding. Zuckerberg told Stern his edge is sitting down with a team and improving one product methodically over decades, without raising money or asking permission. Stern found him more ideologically coherent than the AI lab leaders, because he treats Meta as a business and doesn't think it is the last thing humans will build. The AI bull case follows from that: Meta's apps reach roughly half of humanity. He has also spent 20 years negotiating data center deals, tax incentives and contracts with local governments, while pure AI labs still rent much of their compute.
6. The Instant No. Around 2006, Yahoo offered $1 billion for Facebook. The management team wanted to sell, and board members Don Graham and Peter Thiel encouraged him to take it. Zuckerberg, about 22 and owning roughly 70%, said no immediately, and much of the management team left over it. Stern reads that as conviction you can't fake, and expects Zuckerberg and Elon Musk to die in the CEO chair.
7. Conviction That Costs. Stern's Luckey profile began with a question after October 7: Israel had arguably the world's most advanced high-tech military, and Hamas breached it with hang gliders, construction equipment and small arms. Ukraine mixed drone swarms with trench warfare. He asked whether defense tech actually works, and a planned interview piece grew into a 15,000-word life story. It ran in August 2024 as Silicon Valley swung toward Trump, and Stern was struck that Luckey had backed Trump earlier, when it cost him his job at Facebook and the company he'd built.
8. Prose Built to Last. Every era has its central figures, Stern says: physicists and national security officials in the 1940s, musicians and filmmakers in the 1960s and 1970s, and technologists and business people for the last 10 to 20 years. Most writing about them won't be worth reading a year later, let alone in 20. His former Tablet colleague David Samuels calls the long-form magazine profile America's only native literary form, running from the New Yorker in the 1940s to Esquire, Vanity Fair and Harper's. Stern and Colossus founder Patrick O'Shaughnessy saw an opening to bring that ambition back.
9. The Unmanaged Founder. Stern went looking for an AI leader who wasn't grating, someone the public might trust with the technology, and Scott Wu's name came up more than any other. Wu wasn't stage-managed, with no layers of PR or media training. Their rapport was good enough that Stern published the piece mostly as a conversation, the first time he felt the reader would get more from the subject directly than from Stern narrating. Of everyone Stern has profiled, Wu seemed most the same person in every setting.
10. Competing at Everything. Even among Olympiad gold medalists, Wu is considered the greatest competitor and coach, and he isn't yet 30. Show a photo of him with 12 colleagues to a stranger and they'll pick him as the leader. Zuckerberg competes hardest at his business; Wu, like Michael Jordan, wants to win at everything, pulling out quarters or dice in a 5-minute wait. Stern reached him just after Cursor's deal with xAI, and Wu explained why he will keep turning down acquisition offers.
11. Fear of Losing the Magic. Stern's Josh Kushner profile is still the most-read on Colossus. It opens with Kushner going to Rick Rubin to ask what to do if he loses the magic behind Thrive Capital's run. Stern links that fear to the family's history: Kushner's grandmother fought with the Bielski partisans, the group behind the film Defiance, and within her lifetime Bill Clinton and Benjamin Netanyahu came to dinner. Stern admires that Kushner knows everything can be taken away overnight and works to make himself invulnerable while he can.
12. The Obligation to a Gift. Stern did so badly in high school Spanish that he picked Russian to get through a college requirement, and it became his major and a year and a half in Russia. His professor, Natalya Shansky, spoke to him every Sunday he was there and told him that someone with a gift has an obligation to it. Wasting it on drinking and drugs, she said, was a sin against his own future. Stern named his daughter after her, still keeps her voicemails backed up after her death from ALS in 2015, and now sees his subjects through that lens.

Watch the full video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvmgnpxr-Lk.