Brian was browsing London's Borough Market one Saturday in 2023 when his phone buzzed.
One of his clients — an investor — wanted help writing a hot take on Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who’d been ousted by the company's board the day before.
"My private thought was: I'm not sure the world is waiting for a European investor to weigh in on a Saturday," says Brian — not his real name — a ghostwriter who works with VCs and founders.
He went home and did his research ("my partner was not happy I was working, but sometimes these things happen"), and produced a few paragraphs arguing that the ousting was, contrary to the emerging consensus online, the right call by OpenAI's board.
A few days later, Altman was reinstated as CEO. "The investor quietly deleted the post I'd written," Brian says, "which had not exactly made waves anyway."
Such is life in the mirror world of ghostwriting, a solitary, secretive profession, but a demanding one. Investors — alongside journalists, founders, and many others — feel the persistent pressure to have interesting opinions and the words to express them. "There's a handful of tech people who are great posters," says Brian, "and this has put pressure on everyone else."
To swish back the curtain on this industry, I spoke to five ghostwriters, whose identities I've kept confidential so they could speak freely. I learned how founders and investors can be demanding clients, AI is complicating the relationship — and the work pays well.
Mark, London: ‘A client put my writing through an AI chatbot. It was crap.’
Socrates said, "The only thing I know is that I know nothing." Nobody working in tech has ever said this.
Working with an investor or founder requires you to park your ego — theirs is big enough for the both of you. In my experience, they come in three varieties.
First, the ones who hold their hands up and say: I don't know anything about writing, you do it. These are rare. Second are those in the middle ground: people who can write well enough, but will still defer to your judgement.
And then there's the third — and most difficult — category. Their secret weapon is single-minded conviction: they need to be the driving force of everything, in control of the whole process. It can become a battle.
I was working with someone recently who put my copy through an AI chatbot. It was real crap. This piece was for a national newspaper so I had to say, ‘I’m not handing it in like this, they’ll smell the AI a mile off’.
The problem is everybody thinks they're a writer, and AI has amplified that belief. But this isn't sales. Founders and investors are brilliant salespeople, but this is something different. It's a written conversation — a distinct craft.
The job itself involves interviewing the founder or investor, drawing out their ideas and shaping them into something worth reading. It pays better than journalism, for what it’s worth. You can earn £400 to £500 a day if you're good; £80,000 a year is realistic.
Tech people are generally fun to work with, even if you encounter the occasional dickhead. Though in fairness, ghostwriters need to come to this with humility — we writers can be a little precious.
Simon, Paris: ‘I’m not a ghost writer: I’m an interviewer’
I've been writing for founders and CEOs for four or five years and currently have six clients. Each week, I spend 30 minutes with each of them. I tell them to treat it like a podcast appearance, a chance to express their views.
I don't think of myself as a ghostwriter. I'm an interviewer. And that's why AI can't do this job: a chatbot can write, but it can't interview. A CEO won’t open up to an LLM. It takes a human to draw stuff out and articulate it.
My fee is €1k per client per month, for which I write four LinkedIn posts, one per week. I've also started writing a Substack for one CEO, and occasionally draft a few lines when someone needs material for a conference appearance.
Emma, Berlin: ‘I will help you scale cringe mountain’
I write LinkedIn posts for founders. Once a month, I spend 30 minutes with each client — and from that one conversation, I can usually extract around six posts.
Most of my clients come through investor referrals. The typical first reaction I get? "I hate LinkedIn." But they come around.
Here's the reality: when a client hits the Series A stage, they have to take LinkedIn seriously. It's tempting to lean into the "I hate LinkedIn" posts — they get engagement — but it can become a trap. To generate leads and reach the next level, you have to do things that feel cringe. I will help you scale cringe mountain.
When I started out, I assumed I'd need to keep my prices low — worried that AI would undercut what I could charge — and make it up in volume. Instead, I've ended up charging way more. The market has evolved in ways I didn't anticipate.
I'm earning, ballpark, around £400 to £500 a day. The goal is simple: make more than I did in my old job, work fewer hours, and log off at 4pm to spend time with my daughter.
Sarah, London: ‘If I were writing about B2B SaaS, it would suck more from my soul’
I write for a VC firm, which means adapting my style to multiple partners.
Sometimes I can tell a client has run my work through AI after I've sent it. At that point, I can't really be bothered — if that's what they want, that's what they want. But it does make the whole thing feel rather self-defeating.
The pay is roughly double my day rate as a journalist, which is just as well — freelance journalism is an increasingly difficult way to make a living. The ghostwriting work buys me the freedom to invest in longer-term projects that aren't immediately making money.
There’s a cognitive dissonance step I take with the work. I write about AI sometimes and my own view is that the technology has broadly stolen work, is making people less thoughtful, and is an environmental disaster. Let’s hope some good comes out of it too.
I've been lucky, on the whole, to work with people and ideas I feel reasonably aligned with. If you're working with good people, it's easier to share a bit of the optimism that they can be a force for good in the world.
If I were writing for a VC that did nothing but B2B SaaS, then that would suck more from my soul.
