The Cartographer of Things That Haven't Happened Yet
He is not an epidemiologist. He is not a virologist. He holds no public health credentials. And yet in March 2020, Tomas Pueyo sat down at his keyboard after his day job and wrote the article that arguably changed the world's response to a pandemic. "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" - published on Medium on March 10, 2020 - was read 40 million times in nine days. It was translated into 30+ languages. Governments distributed it. Anderson Cooper cited it on CNN. The New York Times' Donald McNeil referenced it. And Pueyo, a Franco-Spanish Stanford MBA working as Vice President of Growth at an online education company, had not slept properly in weeks.
Nine days later, he published "Coronavirus: The Hammer and the Dance" - coining a phrase that entered the vocabulary of policymakers, journalists, and epidemiologists worldwide. The Hammer: aggressive early action to crush the curve. The Dance: sustained, intelligent management until a vaccine arrives. Sixty million readers across both articles. The most-read Medium pieces of 2020. Written by someone who studied engineering in Madrid and Paris, got an MBA from Stanford, managed Facebook games, and ran growth strategy for a fintech company.
That is the story Pueyo is known for. But it is not the whole story - or even the most interesting part of it.
The more interesting story is what he did next. He did not parlay his sudden fame into a consulting empire or a speaking circuit. He launched a Substack newsletter called Uncharted Territories in April 2021 - and slowly, methodically, without a single dollar of advertising, built it to 123,000+ subscribers. He left his CPO role at Ankorstore - a European B2B wholesale marketplace he helped raise $300 million for at a $2 billion valuation - to write full-time. He cut his own income by 80%. He runs the entire operation alone.
The newsletter is part geopolitics, part tech analysis, part geohistory - the study of how geography shapes civilizations over centuries. Pueyo writes about maps that distort our perception of the world, about the coming dominance of renewable energy, about what AI really means for the next decade, about the Israel-Palestine conflict through the lens of history, about why Poland might be the most important country in Europe right now. One article, "Maps Distort How We See the World," was read 227,000 times. "OpenAI and the Biggest Threat in the History of Humanity" hit 160,000. He is not a journalist. He is something harder to categorize: a rigorous thinker who has found an audience hungry for long-form, data-driven sense-making in a world full of noise.
He grew up across France, Spain, and Italy in a family of filmmakers. That cross-cultural childhood explains something about his range. It also explains the 2017 Amazon best-seller he wrote before anyone knew his name: The Star Wars Rings, an analysis of the ring-structure narrative pattern hidden inside the Star Wars saga - and also found in Harry Potter, Beowulf, and the Bible. Pueyo has always been obsessed with structure: the hidden architecture beneath the surface of things. Whether that thing is a Star Wars movie, a pandemic curve, a geopolitical map, or a civilization.
His philosophy is not complicated. "The future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed." His goal is to help people see where it is - and what it means for the world the rest of us will have to live in.
The Metrics of a Mind
for "Act Now" (2020)
article readers
zero paid ads
reads in 2023
Most-Read Articles (Selected)
Bar widths are proportional. Chart is illustrative.
One Spreadsheet, Sixty Million Readers
It was March 2020. COVID-19 was spreading. Governments were hesitating. And Tomas Pueyo - working a full-time job at Course Hero by day - was spending his nights obsessively analyzing publicly available epidemiological data.
He did not have a medical degree. He had something arguably more useful: the ability to turn a complex dataset into a clear, urgent narrative that a non-scientist could act on. "Coronavirus: Why You Must Act Now" landed on March 10, 2020. Forty million reads in nine days. The most-read Medium article of 2020.
Nine days later came "The Hammer and the Dance." It gave the world two words for a strategy - and those words stuck. Journalists used them. Politicians used them. Scientists used them. A Stanford MBA with no public health credentials had coined the pandemic's defining metaphor.
The criticism came too: that Pueyo had no credentials, that he stood to gain commercially from lockdowns (Course Hero, online education). He responded simply: credentialism is not as strong as it used to be. The data spoke. Sixty million people listened.
Aggressive, swift, short-term action to crush the curve - lockdowns, testing, contact tracing. Move fast before exponential growth makes control impossible.
Sustained, intelligent management - targeted measures, rigorous testing, contact tracing - maintained until a vaccine or treatment arrives. Not an endpoint, but a rhythm.
Uncharted Territories
In April 2021, Pueyo launched a Substack newsletter. He called it Uncharted Territories. By the time he went full-time in 2022 - voluntarily cutting his income by 80%, leaving a CPO role he could have kept for many years - it had become the center of everything he does.
The newsletter defies easy categorization. It is not a geopolitics blog. It is not a tech newsletter. It is not a history magazine. It is all of these and none of them. Pueyo writes about how maps literally distort our understanding of geography and power. About why renewable energy will redraw geopolitical alliances. About the real history behind the Israel-Palestine conflict. About what AI means for the labor market, not in abstract terms, but with data, charts, and specific predictions.
What makes it work is Pueyo's refusal to stay in a lane. He has led product teams and raised $100M in funding. He has built apps with 20 million installs. He has studied how stories work at a structural level. When he writes about civilization-scale forces, he is not speculating from an armchair - he is applying a rigorous analytical framework that he developed across two decades of building things.
The result: 123,000+ subscribers. No advertising. No staff. One person, one newsletter, ranked #16 in Technology on Substack globally. Five million reads in 2023 alone.
The Long Road to Going Viral
Before the pandemic made him briefly famous, Pueyo spent fifteen years building things - products, teams, companies. The range is unusual: management consulting in Paris, Facebook gaming in San Francisco, fintech in Silicon Valley, European e-commerce in Paris again, and finally a newsletter from wherever he happens to be.
After engineering degrees from Ecole Centrale Paris and ICAI Madrid, Pueyo worked in management consulting - first at Arthur D. Little, then at PricewaterhouseCoopers Transaction Services. He also did a stint with FINCA International on microfinance in Africa. Standard high-achiever trajectory. He wanted something more.
Stanford GSB, MBA Class of 2010. Studied behavioral psychology, design, storytelling, and scriptwriting alongside the business curriculum. The cross-disciplinary obsession started here. He spent the summers working in Myanmar and Uganda on development finance. Then Silicon Valley called.
Product Manager at RockYou (Facebook games), then Lead Product Manager at Zynga. This is where Pueyo learned about viral growth, user psychology, and what actually makes people click. He built apps that reached 20 million installs. The lessons never left.
Head of Product, Marketing, Design, and Sales at SigFig - a fintech wealth management platform. Under his watch: 100x revenue growth, $100 million in funding raised (Series C to E), headcount grew 10x. This is the career story that gets overshadowed by the pandemic fame. It shouldn't.
Vice President of Growth at Course Hero, one of the largest online learning platforms. He was building growth strategy by day and writing about pandemics by night. March 2020 changed everything - but he stayed at Course Hero through 2021.
Chief Product Officer at Ankorstore - a European B2B wholesale marketplace that raised ~$300M at a $2B valuation. Simultaneously building Uncharted Territories. By 2022, the newsletter won. He went full-time as a writer, cutting his income by 80%. No regrets apparently.
Career at a Glance
What He Has Actually Done
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1
60 Million COVID Readers
Two articles. March 2020. "Why You Must Act Now" (40M reads in 9 days) and "The Hammer and the Dance" (20M reads). The most-read Medium articles of 2020. Translated into 30+ languages and distributed by governments worldwide.
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2
Coined "Hammer and the Dance"
Two words that became the global shorthand for pandemic strategy. Used by journalists, epidemiologists, and politicians worldwide. Coined by a product executive with no medical credentials.
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3
123,000+ Substack Subscribers, Zero Ads
Uncharted Territories is ranked #16 in Technology on Substack globally. Built through content quality alone - no paid advertising, no growth hacks, no sponsorships in the early stages. Five million reads in 2023.
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4
100x Revenue Growth at SigFig
As Head of Product, Marketing, Design and Sales at SigFig, led the company through 100x revenue growth, $100M in funding (Series C to E), and a 10x increase in headcount. The business achievement that preceded the writing fame.
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5
Amazon Best Seller on Star Wars and Narrative Structure
"The Star Wars Rings: The Hidden Structure Behind the Star Wars Story" (2017) - published three years before anyone knew his name, analyzing the ring-narrative pattern in Star Wars, Harry Potter, Beowulf, and the Bible.
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6
TEDx Talk: 300,000+ Views
"Why Stories Captivate" at TEDxHumboldtBay (December 2017). A direct expression of his obsession with narrative structure - the same obsession that made the COVID articles so readable and the Substack so sticky.
Things Worth Quoting
Credentialism is not as strong as it used to be.
- On being an engineer who wrote about epidemiologyUnderstand the biggest problems and how to solve them.
- Mission statement for Uncharted TerritoriesThe Future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed.
- William Gibson, adopted as Pueyo's guiding philosophyUnderstand the world of today to prepare for the world of tomorrow.
- Tagline, Uncharted TerritoriesHow He Thinks
Pueyo is not a journalist and does not write like one. He is not an academic and does not write like one either. He writes like a product manager who learned to tell stories: obsessed with data, allergic to vague handwaving, committed to the specific claim over the hedged generality.
The COVID articles worked because Pueyo did something most people with access to the same data did not do: he spent nights in a spreadsheet, worked out the exponential math, and then translated it into language that made action feel urgent and possible. Not "this could be bad." Specifically: here is what exponential growth looks like in your country's data right now, and here is what happens if governments wait another week.
At Uncharted Territories, the same method applies to longer time horizons. What does the geography of the Middle East tell us about who will control what in fifty years? What does the adoption curve of solar and wind actually look like when you chart it against fossil fuel production? What does the history of the Silk Road tell us about the current U.S.-China technology competition?
He grew up in a family of filmmakers. He studied narrative structure obsessively enough to write an Amazon best-seller about Star Wars. He learned growth and product at Silicon Valley's most intense companies. The combination is unusual. So is the output.
Things You Probably Didn't Know
He grew up in a family of filmmakers across France, Spain, and Italy. That childhood explains the lifelong obsession with narrative structure - and the Star Wars book.
He wrote "Why You Must Act Now" at night while holding a full-time VP role at Course Hero. The article that reached 40 million people in 9 days was a side project.
He voluntarily cut his income by 80% to write Uncharted Territories full-time. He runs the entire operation alone - no staff, no editors, no assistants.
He married his wife Patricia in Covadonga, Spain - a historically significant site in northern Spain where the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula began in 722 AD.
His Instagram handle @pbulises is a nod to Penelope and Ulysses from Greek mythology - his wife Patricia (P) and himself (Ulises/Ulysses) on a modern odyssey.
His 2017 Star Wars book was published under his full name "Tomas Pueyo Brochard" three years before COVID made him famous. It is an Amazon Best Seller about narrative ring structure.
What He's Doing Now
One of his most-discussed recent pieces: a rigorous analysis of where AI actually is right now, the proximity of AGI, and what the next wave of job displacement looks like - with specific predictions rather than vague concerns.
A deep analysis of how renewable electricity is replacing fossil fuels - and what that means for geopolitical alliances built on oil dependency. Classic Pueyo: data-heavy, specific, covers the civilizational implications most analysts skip.
A quarterly digest format covering trade wars, space economics, Syria, and the Poland-Russia dynamic. Reflects Pueyo's evolution from pandemic commentator to serious long-form geopolitical analyst.