Michael Burry launched a paid newsletter in late 2025, and within months, it was the #8 most-subscribed publication across all Brex customers, racing ahead of writers who spent a decade building their base.

A two-decade-old reputation for contrarian calls became a line item on startup corporate cards in a matter of months. That's what this Brex Benchmark measures: the reading that survives an expense report.

A decade ago, a founder's market intelligence was free: TechCrunch for funding news, Hacker News for technical arguments, Twitter for everything else. You could read all of it and still not know what to do on Monday. Free media is paid by the size of its audience, which makes it very good at telling you what happened and useless at telling you what to do.

Today the operating knowledge lives behind paywalls, attached to specific names. Product-market fit questions go to Lenny's. Engineering org problems go to The Pragmatic Engineer. A platform shift sends you to Stratechery.

The newsletter stack has become part of company formation, as standard as the SaaS stack. While a personal subscription means you like something, a company subscription that gets expensed, approved, and renewed means it helps run your business. And because Brex's card data identifies the publication behind each charge, not just the billing platform, these rankings follow the writer, whether they publish on Substack, Ghost, beehiiv, or their own site. Across Brex customers, those renewals add up to the startup economy's required reading list.

Trend 1: The winners stopped selling newsletters and started selling memberships.

The complaint about the newsletter boom is fatigue: too many sends, a few names absorbing everyone else's growth. But fatigue is an inbox problem, and the winners left the inbox. Lenny's comes with a 30,000-person Slack and software credits. Stratechery is a daily column plus four podcasts. Unsubscribing from an email costs nothing; leaving a room with 30,000 people in it costs something.

The same three names have led this list since a year ago, and they cover the three functions every company staffs first: Lenny Rachitsky on product, Gergely Orosz on engineering, Ben Thompson on strategy. Among Brex customers, these are the subscriptions a company expenses without a second thought, the way an earlier generation expensed trade magazines.

Thompson predicted why value would flow to individual writers back in 2014, in Publishers and the Smiling Curve: value in internet media flows to the two ends of the chain, aggregators on one side and 'focused, responsive, and differentiated' writers on the other. The middle is missing from this newsletter list. Nearly every entry is one writer or a small team who owns a subject. The leaders are still growing. Lenny's has more paid subscribers on Brex than #2 and #3 combined, and all three grew double digits, led by The Pragmatic Engineer at +36%. Engineering was where the money went in 2025; the reading budget followed.

The Free Press is the one entry that isn't a single writer’s judgment business. It climbed to #4, up 93% on Brex cards, and it scaled by selling: Paramount bought it for $150 million and put Bari Weiss in charge of CBS News. One writer's judgment scales on a laptop; a newsroom needs a payroll. That may be why the only newsroom on this list is also the only entry that got acquired. One rung below, Emily Sundberg's Feed Me is up 38%. Feed Me is a read about taste and consumer culture, and it sits four spots below Stratechery on the same corporate cards.

Trend 2: Startups will pay to be told they might be wrong.

Burry made his name being right about the 2008 crash after years of being told he was wrong, then spent two decades communicating in fragments. The newsletter reverses that: for the first time, his research is available to anyone with a subscription.

Startups buy it for the same reason anyone buys research. Every company needs a view on AI, rates, and capital right now, and Burry offers a track record of being early and a habit of not caring who disagrees. Most subscribers probably don't think he's right, but they want to know early if he is. Two decades of credibility, and the market found it within months of launch. Startups pay for writers who can make them re-examine the default story.

Trend 3: A healthcare-interoperability newsletter cracked the top 15.

Brendan Keeler's Health API Guy, a newsletter about healthcare interoperability, debuted at #13 — and Christina Farr's Second Opinion jumped to #10, up 56%. An interoperability newsletter cracking a top-15 business reading list means a vertical is producing real companies. Once enough startups build in a category, general tech media is too broad and industry trade news is too shallow, and the person who knows the info becomes valuable. The economics reward this: a niche audience that needs the information pays more reliably than a broad one that merely enjoys it. The pattern repeats across the list: Thesis Driven for real estate, Bankless for crypto, This Week in Fintech for financial services.

A vertical read climbing this list is an early signal that companies in that vertical are forming and spending. Just below the top 15, Fintech Business Weekly gives financial services a second dedicated read, and Chipstrat sits right behind it. Founders are now budgeting to understand semiconductor supply.

Why startups pay to read

A business prices a purchase against the money it makes or saves, and in Brex data newsletter subscriptions behave accordingly. In Brex data, they get bought the way software gets bought: approved, renewed, carried from one budget cycle to the next. A few hundred dollars a year competes with the cost of a bad hire, a mispriced round, or a product bet made blind. If it improves a single decision, one hire, one pricing call, one product bet, it has covered a decade of renewals.

Fifteen writers, most of them working alone, are now a standing line item at tens of thousands of companies. What startups buy tells you what they think they don't know.

For the companion piece on what startups are reading in book form, see Brex Benchmark: The 25 books founders are reading in 2026

Methodology and privacy

Sumeet Marwaha is the Head of Data at Brex, supporting Brex in understanding how customers spend, adopt tools, and grow their businesses.

We pulled paid newsletter subscriptions across all Brex customers, anonymized and aggregated, and compared October 2025 through June 2026 against the same nine months a year earlier. Brex's L2/L3 card data identifies the publication behind a charge rather than just the billing platform, so we can see past "Substack spend went up" to the individual writers getting paid. Descriptor detail varies by platform; the rankings are a floor, not a census. We publish rankings, rank movement, and percentage changes, never absolute counts. Two publications with strong prior-period counts showed no transactions in the current window, consistent with a change in billing platform rather than subscriber loss; they were excluded from rankings rather than reported as declines. We never share customer-identifiable information. For questions about how we use data in anonymized or aggregated form for trend reporting, email privacy@brex.com.