In a personal retrospective marking eight years at Sifted, the author recalls first speaking with John Thornhill, cofounder of Sifted, in autumn 2018. At that point, the author had been writing about Swedish tech for over three years and had already watched another new tech site grow rapidly. The last thing on their mind, they write, was joining another new site and going through the same kind of growth journey again.
The essay describes how Sifted expanded from producing a few articles a week to 10 a day, a trajectory the author connects to the broader tech boom. The piece is framed as a reflection on what that experience taught them about the tech bubble, though much of the detail is conveyed through the author's own retrospective lens.
Because the source is a single first-person essay, there are no contrasting accounts to compare. The observations are the author's own, drawn from eight years inside a tech publication. The value of the piece is less as a data-driven analysis and more as a personal account of being inside a fast-growing corner of the tech industry.