Today I walk with Adam Delehanty, founder and CEO of Ghost, a leading ghostwriting agency for founders, VCs, and brands. Adam has written culture books for Hinge, Duolingo, and e.l.f. Beauty, advises many prominent founders and VCs on their content, and has hosted a popular writing group in his sunroom for 175 Wednesdays in a row. These days, he's been spending more time stepping out from behind the “ghost” and building his own voice online.
We get into:
- Why ghostwriting = journalism × therapy
- Growing up the product of Irish writers and anxious Jewish therapists → "This was the only job that made sense”
- Why culture starts to dissipate somewhere between 200 and 1,000 employees, and the role of culture artifacts and lore in preserving aura
- His method for using AI: the human + Claude + human sandwich, and how to train Claude to edit its own work
- Why founders who only post about their product are that person at that bar everyone runs from
- Why he spent four days in the woods recently with his phone locked in the car, and what on earth happened
- Why words like "partner" move us further from the truth
so much more!
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
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01:17) Adam Delehanty, Founder & CEO, Ghost
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03:07) Why culture breaks between 200 and 1,000 people
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04:28) What it means to become an “internal journalist” for his clients
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07:06) Hiring a ghostwriter is nothing to be ashamed of!
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08:38) Cutting 12 company values down to the 4 that are real
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09:59) The right reasons to start a company
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13:43) The founder who only talks about his product at a bar
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15:02) Why my LinkedIn posts get three likes
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16:59) Human, Claude, human: how Ghost writes
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19:36) Training Claude to edit its own writing
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20:59) Why AI won't replace the hardest part of his job
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22:13) Writing as a way to figure out who you are, and what your company is
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25:51) Four days in the woods with his phone locked in the car
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29:20) How Williamsburg lost all its aura
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31:22) Reading Ted Sorensen instead of TikToks about him
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34:00) The subtle hints of particular words: why women call some men “dude”
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35:51) Notes on trendy lingo in tech right now (e.g., “GTM engineer”)
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39:33) The Ghost mantra: “find the language your ideas deserve”
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40:51) What he's still becoming
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