About Bill Voss

Deep dives on the companies shaping the future

The Short Version

I write 7,000-word deep dives on the companies reshaping technology, energy, defense, and finance. I start with the human story behind the ticker and end with the financial tension that makes the investment interesting. I always give you the bull case and the bear case with equal conviction, because if I only tell you one side, I'm doing marketing, not journalism.

I never tell you what to buy. That's your job. My job is to make sure you understand the company well enough to disagree with everyone, including me.

The Longer Version

I studied mechanical engineering at the University of Michigan because my father — a man who spent 31 years designing HVAC systems for commercial buildings — told me that engineering was "the only degree that teaches you how the world actually works." He was right about that. He was wrong about me wanting to design HVAC systems.

After graduating, I did what every engineer who secretly wanted to be a writer does: I got a job at an engineering firm, lasted fourteen months, and quit to take an unpaid internship at a financial publication in New York that no longer exists. My father didn't speak to me for three weeks. Then he called and asked if I'd read the latest Micron earnings report, because he had opinions about memory pricing. We've been having that conversation ever since.

I spent the next decade in financial media — first as a staff writer at a mid-tier financial news site where I learned to produce 800-word articles about quarterly earnings in 45 minutes, then as a senior analyst at a research shop where I learned that the people who move markets are usually less informed than they are confident, and finally as a freelancer contributing to outlets whose names you'd recognize but whose pay rates would make you wince.

Somewhere along the way, I developed two professional obsessions. The first is origin stories. Not the sanitized "founded in a garage" versions that show up in press releases, but the genuinely weird ones — a semiconductor company funded by frozen potato money, a nuclear startup backed by the guy who built ChatGPT, a defense contractor named after a sword from Lord of the Rings. I've found that the stranger the origin story, the more it reveals about how the company actually thinks.

The second obsession is analogies. I believe that if you can't explain a forward P/E ratio using a metaphor that would land at a bar at 2 AM, you don't understand it well enough to write about it. "DRAM is the desk, NAND is the library, HBM is the desk with steroids welded to your brain" is not me dumbing things down. It's me making sure the concept actually sticks in your memory, which — given the subject matter — feels appropriate.

I started this site because I got tired of the two dominant modes of financial writing: the 300-word hot take that tells you nothing, and the 40-page institutional report that tells you everything in a font specifically designed to induce sleep. I wanted something in between. Something that respects your intelligence without punishing your attention span. Something that reads like the conversation you'd have with the smartest person at a dinner party — the one who actually read the 10-K and has a sense of humor about it.

Coverage

How I Work

For each deep dive, I spend roughly two weeks reading everything I can find: SEC filings, earnings transcripts, analyst reports, patent applications, old interviews, obscure industry journals, and the occasional Reddit thread that turns out to be written by a former employee with an axe to grind and surprisingly accurate information.

I build the bull case until it's genuinely compelling — until I almost convince myself. Then I build the bear case until it's genuinely terrifying — until I almost convince myself of the opposite. Then I put both on the page and let you sit with the discomfort. Because investing is discomfort, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either selling you something or hasn't been doing it long enough.

I do not hold positions in any securities I write about. Not because I'm above making money — I'm an engineer's son from Michigan, I'm not above anything — but because it's hard to give you the honest bear case on a stock when your retirement account is hoping the bull case wins.