Welcome to One Thing Better. Each week, the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine (that’s me) shares one way to achieve a breakthrough at work — and build a career or company you love.
This edition is brought to you by the Solo Summit — made for solopreneurs who want to grow! I’ll be giving a free virtual keynote. Details below.
I’ve become obsessed with a certain pattern.
I now see it everywhere. In business, in culture, in life.
After reading today’s newsletter, you’ll see it too — and big changes will start making more sense. Opportunities will reveal themselves. Dare I say, you might even be able to predict the future.
The pattern is this: Everything bundles, un-bundles, and re-bundles.
Today, I’ll show you how it works, why it matters, and how to use it to your advantage.
But first, I’ll tell you where I first noticed it — on a rooftop, with the founder of a $10 billion company.
The $10 billion re-bundler
About a year ago, I interviewed Ivan Zhao, the co-founder and CEO of Notion.
For those who don’t know: Notion is a workplace productivity tool where you can create anything — to-do lists, sales trackers, collaborative docs, presentations, etc. It’s like Google Docs, Excel, PowerPoint, a calendar, and more, all rolled into one.
This company is on fire. It has 100 million users and a $10 billion valuation.
But Zhao told me that, despite its complexity, his business is very simple: “Notion is in the bundling business.”
He says he often thinks about the opening line of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, a historical novel about the rise and fall of Chinese empires. It starts with this line:
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.”
In other words: Everything un-bundles and re-bundles forever. Opportunity comes by spotting when that shift is taking place.
That’s what Zhao did with Notion, he says. He started by thinking about the history of workplace productivity tools:
- First bundle: Everyone used Microsoft in the 1990s. It offered Word, Excel, and so on.
- Un-bundle: When cloud computing began, people left Microsoft’s bundle. Businesses started cobbling together more customized apps for their own workflows. (Trello, Google Docs, etc)
- Re-bundle: Now people are overwhelmed by options. Zhao recognized this and built Notion, to put everything back in one place. Simplicity is the selling point.
In other words: Thus it has ever been.
Now let’s see another re-bundling
A few months after meeting Zhao, I was listening to a podcast episode called “How Do We Survive the Media Apocalypse?”
In it, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein diagnosed why the newspaper industry fell apart. And he said it all had to do with bundles.
Before the internet, he said, newspapers were bundles — containing news, sports, recipes, movie listings, and more. Consumers might have only wanted one part of that, but they had to buy (and therefore fund) the whole thing.
Then the internet un-bundled those topics. People went elsewhere for their sports and recipes. That left newspapers to primarily sell the news — which is expensive to produce, hard to sell ads against, and not what most of its prior readers wanted anyway.
The New York Times is a financially healthy company. How? In part, it’s because they’ve rebuilt the bundle — with games, food, sports, podcasts, and events.
This chart shows you how effective that’s been. It tracks how much time people spent in various NYT-owned apps between 2020 and 2023. Purple is news, and green is games.
As you can see: The growth is all in games.
The Times was a bundle. It was unbundled, then re-bundled.
Now let’s go a step further
I’m the editor in chief of Entrepreneur magazine. A brand like Entrepreneur used to have traditional competitors like Inc, Fortune, Forbes, and so on.
But today, these traditional brands are losing audience to creators — individual people who have huge audiences and influence. As a result, marketing dollars are also shifting toward creators. Every brand must now have an influencer strategy.
People often ask me: Where does this go next? And once I saw this through the lens of bundling/unbundling, I realized — oooh, this is just version of the same thing.
Here’s how it works:
Bundle: People used to trust a media brand. That brand bundled many individual voices. (Ie: You subscribe to Time, and Time has the writers you know.)
Un-bundle: Now creators can reach audiences directly, so they don’t need established brands. Audiences love it, because they can feel a direct personal connection to that creator.
Re-bundle: My prediction for what’s next: As creators seek scale, they’ll start media companies — and launch other creators’ work. Eventually, the main creator will get tired and step back, leaving a brand name with its new bundle of creators. In other words: The creator economy will literally become the traditional media it is currently challenging.
You can see this playing out right now with Steven Bartlett, who became famous for his Diary of a CEO podcast. He started a company that, in part, now launches other creators’ podcasts — and it just closed a funding round at a $425 million valuation.
If he does this right, the name “Bartlett” could become the same as “Forbes” or “Bloomberg” — a name that represents a bundle. I just shared that thought on LinkedIn, and guess who replied:
Yeah. He’s thinking the same thing.
Why this cycle never stops
In the earliest days of internet browsers, Netscape co-founder Jim Barksdale was asked a question: Was he afraid that Microsoft would bundle a browser into Windows?
His response became legendary: “Gentlemen, there are only two ways I know of to make money: bundling and unbundling.”
There’s a reason this pattern repeats endlessly. Both bundling and unbundling solve real problems, but they also create new problems.
Bundles are convenient and efficient, but they force you to pay for things you don’t want. Unbundling gives you choice and specialization, but it creates complexity and decision fatigue.
So we swing back and forth. When bundles become too bloated or expensive, we unbundle. When unbundled options become too fragmented or overwhelming, we re-bundle.
And I’d argue that this isn’t just contained to business.
We bundle our lives. We bring groups of friends together, then realize we’d rather see them alone (until another group opportunity comes along). Or our partners become our everything — our social life, our thought partner, our whatever — and then we realize it’s also healthy to find some of these things in others.
We bundle our identities. Our identity gets tied up in our job title, our achievements, and our social circle. (“I am my career.”) As we grow older, growth often means picking these things apart, until we create a new bundle of identity.
We bundle our careers. We start by taking on everything. (“Sure, I’ll do marketing, ops, and sales.”) Then we focus deeply on one thing, and become a specialist. Then we become leaders who must bring together multiple disciplines.
It’ll always change. Always unbundling and rebundling.
Here’s what I love the most about this:
Once you see the pattern, you can appreciate that nothing is permanent — and that all changes follow the same logic.
No direction is set forever. No path is straight and linear. “New things” are just new versions of old things.
Are things changing? Go with it.
Do you want to make a change? Go for it.
Feeling left behind by a change? Watch close, because opportunity will loop back around.
We live in a cycle. And it’s ours to shape and ride.
That’s how to do one thing better.
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