Why subscribe?
The Shift is a newsletter for skilled professionals who can read the room.
You’re good at what you do. You’ve climbed the ladder far enough to see the next few rungs, and somewhere along the way you noticed they don’t lead anywhere you actually want to go. The promotions are smaller. The mergers are bigger. The work feels increasingly performative. The plan that was supposed to last another decade is starting to look like a story your industry tells itself.
You’re not panicking. You’re just paying attention.
This newsletter is for you.
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About me
I'm Francesco. I spent 13 years inside the attention economy.
The last role was Head of EMEA YouTube Strategy at Warner Bros, a job that, on paper, should have kept me there for another decade.
1.5 Billion monthly views managed on the platform, managing over 100 stakeholders, upskilling teams.
I left at the peak. Not because the job failed. Because the data did.
I’d watched too many senior people get hollowed out by mergers, restructures, and the quiet realisation that their leverage had been eroding for years while their salaries hid the trend. Career security wasn’t dissolving in some abstract future. It was already gone for everyone who hadn’t built something portable.
So I built something portable.
The Shift is what I’m learning as I do it, out loud, in public, with the receipts.
Some of it is what the attention economy actually rewards (and what it punishes that nobody warns you about).
Some of it is the operational reality of building a business while still figuring out what business you’re building. Some of it is the parts most people leave out: the financial fear, the identity questions, the days where the data says one thing and your nervous system says another.
No guru framing. No “just quit and follow your passion.” No fake luxury props.
If a piece doesn’t have a specific take and at least one thing you can do with it, I don’t send it.
Feel free to ask what you would like to read next.
One issue per week. No filler. Hit reply if something lands.
- Francesco
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