ABOUT THE PUBLICATION · LISBON · ESTABLISHED MARCH 2018
Yeu Tre Tho is a research-grade publication and decision journal for operators who treat how they work as seriously as what they ship. One long-form essay. One 30-minute audio breakdown. No filler.
EDITOR'S NOTE · VOL. VIII
We started Yeu Tre Tho in March 2018 because we were tired of watching good operators lose their week to bad information. Between the two of us — Mae out of Stripe's Risk Ops org, Diego out of Asana's Work Graph team — we had spent the better part of a decade sitting inside the same meetings: the all-hands where a roadmap got approved by generalities, the weekly business review where a number moved and nobody could say why, the offsite where three PowerPoints competed for the same hour.
The people doing that work were not stupid. They were starved. Starved of the kind of writing that actually took their job seriously — writing that admitted the trade-off, named the second-order effect, and linked the source. So we did what most frustrated operators do: we started a newsletter.
The first issue went out on a Tuesday in March 2018. It was 1,400 words long, had one chart, and was read by 312 people, almost all of whom we knew personally. We charged nothing. We charged nothing for a long time.
Eight years later, we are still here, still in Lisbon, still publishing every Tuesday. The newsroom is 14 people full-time and 22 contributors across nine countries. We have never taken outside capital. We have never missed a Tuesday, including through two recessions and one global supply chain collapse. We turn down 92% of the sponsored content that lands in our inbox, and we publish a corrections log the same week an error is flagged. We are not the biggest publication in our category. We are, by a margin we can measure, the most-read per dollar of editorial spend.
This page is the long version of why.
— M.K. & D.F., Editors
COLOPHON · NO. 04
What it actually takes to publish one essay and one audio breakdown, every Tuesday, without an off-week.
CORE TEAM · LISBON
Two editors, a three-person research desk, three writers, two audio producers, a designer, a community lead, an ops generalist, and a finance & partnerships person. We do not subcontract the writing. Every word that ships under the Yeu Tre Tho name is owned by a person on this payroll.
CONTRIBUTOR NETWORK
Former operators who file one essay a quarter. They average 11.3 years of in-house operator experience before writing a single issue; 71% have held a P&L, and 38% have co-founded a company. Every byline carries their real title and last role, not a flattering pseudonym.
RESEARCH DESK
Every claim in every essay links to a primary source. The research desk runs those checks before publication and runs them again whenever a reader flags a footnote. When something is wrong, the corrections log goes out the same week — not the same quarter, not the same year.
AUDIO STUDIO
The 30-minute audio breakdown is produced in-house, in a six-room studio two floors above the editorial floor. Forensic-grade transcription is verified by an independent QA audit every quarter; the most recent figure (Q1 2024) was 98.4%. The same script reads identically on the page and in the ear.
COLOPHON · AS OF FEBRUARY 2026
HOW WE WORK · MANIFESTO
The publication runs on a small number of operational rules. They are simple to state and difficult to keep. We have kept them for 364 consecutive issues.
Rule 01
Sponsorship has to fund the work without distorting it. We reject nine out of ten pitches that come in, and the one in ten we accept is labelled at the top of the issue, not buried in a footer a thousand words later. If you can find a paid partnership we have not disclosed, we will publish the correction the same week and credit your reader account a year of paid membership.
Rule 02
Our three-person research desk checks every footnote before publication. When a reader writes in with a correction, the corrections log goes out the same week — by email to the full subscriber list, with the original sentence and the corrected one side by side. We do not wait for a quiet Friday afternoon to fix things that should have been right in the first place.
Rule 03
Our writers average 11.3 years of in-house operator experience before they write a single issue; 71% have held a P&L and 38% have co-founded a company. Every byline carries their last role and where they held it. If a contributor cannot point to the meeting where the advice in their essay actually got used, we do not run the essay.
SUBSCRIBE · WEEKLY DROP
Built to replace the 47 browser tabs, three podcasts, and four Substack subscriptions that clutter your reading queue. Free in your inbox, or paid with the research desk on call.
Free forever. Paid from $14 / month or $128 / year. Cancel from any issue.
