Raw Meat is a quoteblog by Aaron Swartz.

“I must congratulate you on doing a fantastic job building PayPal. My 14-year-old son is a very apathetic high school student and very much dislikes writing homework assignments. But he just wrote a beautiful e-mail to his friends about how PayPal was growing quickly, why they should sign up for it, and how they could take advantage of the referral structure that you put in place.”

On some level, this was a literary masterpiece. If nothing else, it was impressive for the many nested levels of conversation that were woven in. Other people were talking to other people about PayPal, possibly at infinite levels on down. The son was talking to other people about those people. Bill Gross was talking to his son. Then Gross was talking to Peter Thiel. And at the most opaque and important level, Gross was talking to the other investors at the table, tacitly playing up how smart he was for having invested in PayPal. The message is that sales is hidden. Advertising is hidden. It works best that way.