Do You Need a Personal Website?

Let me be honest upfront: I have a personal website, and you’re reading this on it. So yes, I’m biased. But here’s the thing. No, you don’t need a personal website. You can have a successful career, meaningful relationships, and a fulfilling life without ever owning a domain name.

But building one might teach you more about yourself than you expect.

The Attention Economy Reality

We live in a world where attention is the scarcest resource. People don’t read, they scan. They don’t explore, they swipe. The average person decides whether to stay on a page in about two seconds. Video dominates because it requires the least effort from the viewer. Curiosity, as a trait, is declining. People want things handed to them, pre-digested, entertaining.

This sounds bleak, but there’s a silver lining. If you want to stand out, you have to answer a brutally simple question: “Why should anyone spend their two seconds on me?”

A personal website forces you to confront this question. You can’t hide behind a job title or a company logo. It’s just you, a blank page, and the uncomfortable task of making yourself interesting enough to hold someone’s attention.

Most people never answer this question. And that’s exactly why they blend into the noise.

Building a Website Is Building Self-Awareness

Building a personal website is less about the website and more about the process. When you sit down to create one, you’re forced to make decisions: What do I put on the homepage? What do I leave out? What’s the one thing I want someone to remember about me?

These questions sound simple, but they’re surprisingly hard. You realize you don’t actually know what you stand for. You’ve never had to articulate it. The act of building becomes a mirror. You see yourself more clearly because you’re forced to describe yourself to strangers.

It’s also an exercise in storytelling. You learn to be concise, to cut the fluff, to lead with what matters. These skills don’t stay on the website. They transfer to how you introduce yourself at parties, how you pitch ideas at work, how you think about your own life. Storytelling is a meta-skill. It compounds.

And here’s the underrated part: having a blog makes you write. Writing is one of the purest ways to clarify your thinking. When you write, you discover what you actually believe, not what you think you believe. You don’t need to optimize for SEO, or virality, or anyone’s approval. It’s your corner of the internet. You have complete creative freedom. That freedom is rare, and most people never use it.

The “Dress Code” Analogy

Think about why people wear nice clothes. Yes, part of it is for others. First impressions matter. But a bigger part is for yourself. When you dress well, you carry yourself differently. You feel more intentional, more put-together, more like someone who takes themselves seriously.

A personal website works the same way. It’s a signal, not just to others, but to yourself, that you value who you are and how you present. Even if no one visits, the act of creating it changes something internally. You’ve invested time in yourself. You’ve said, “I’m worth a homepage.”

This isn’t vanity. It’s self-respect made tangible.

But What About Berkshire Hathaway’s Website?

Now, let’s address the obvious counter-examples. Because if you’ve ever looked at the Berkshire Hathaway website, you might wonder why anyone bothers with design at all.

Warren Buffett’s company is worth over $800 billion. Their website looks like it was built in a high school computer class in 1997. Plain HTML. Times New Roman. No images. A list of links. That’s it. And yet, it works perfectly fine for its purpose.

Then there’s SSI.inc. The AI company founded by Ilya Sutskever after leaving OpenAI. One page. A few paragraphs. A job application link. Nothing else. For a company tackling one of the most important technical problems of our time, you’d expect something grander. But they don’t need it.

Craigslist is perhaps the most extreme example. The site looks like it hasn’t been updated since 1995, because it largely hasn’t. And yet, it generates hundreds of millions in revenue annually with a team of about 50 people. It’s ugly by every design standard, but it works.

And then there’s the famous image: a tech CEO in a plain t-shirt walking into a room full of suit-wearing executives. Zuckerberg. Jobs. The message is clear: “I don’t play by your rules. My work speaks for itself.”

You Haven’t Earned That Yet

Here’s the thing about those examples: those people earned the right to not care about presentation. Their track record is so undeniable, so public, so proven, that how they present themselves is irrelevant. Buffett’s 60-year investment record is his website. Craigslist’s market dominance is its design. The CEO in the t-shirt can dress however they want because everyone in that room already knows who they are and what they’ve built.

But what about you? What about me?

Here’s one of the most important realizations I had in university: who you are in your head is not who you are to other people. In your mind, you might be brilliant, ambitious, full of potential. You might have a vision for your life that’s genuinely impressive. But other people can’t see inside your head. They only see what you show them. And if you show them nothing, they assume nothing.

It’s like the person who says they’re training for a marathon, but in reality, they can’t stick to a home workout routine for more than a week. In their head, they’re an athlete. In reality, they’re someone who talks about being an athlete. The gap between self-perception and external perception is often enormous, and most people never close it.

This isn’t about lacking self-confidence. You can believe in yourself fully and still understand that belief doesn’t transfer automatically to others. It’s about understanding how reality works. People judge you by what they can see. Before you’ve proven yourself, presentation isn’t superficial. It’s the only data point anyone has.

Minimalism in presentation is a privilege earned through undeniable results. Work so hard that you eventually earn the right to not care. But don’t assume that privilege before it’s there. That’s not confidence. That’s a misunderstanding of how the world perceives you.

And It Can Be Fun

Now let’s talk about the upside, and it’s not just about professionalism or self-improvement. A personal website can be genuinely fun.

Look at Lando Norris’s website. Does an F1 driver need a personal website to compete? Absolutely not. His car doesn’t go faster because he has a nice homepage. But his site is something else entirely. It’s playful, immersive, full of personality. There’s a helmet gallery showcasing his custom designs, from disco balls to glitter to porcelain patterns. The whole thing feels like an extension of who he is, not just a digital business card.

What does this accomplish? It shows people what he values beyond racing. It creates an emotional connection with fans. Something to be inspired by, not just informed by. It makes him more human, more interesting, more memorable.

A personal website is an opportunity to show the world what you like and who you are. It doesn’t need to be fancy. It just needs to be you. And there’s no reason not to take that opportunity.

With AI tools today, the creative ceiling has basically disappeared. You can build almost anything. You don’t need to be a professional developer or designer. If you can describe what you want, you can probably make it happen. For tech people especially, there’s really no excuse anymore. The tools exist. The barrier to entry has never been lower.

I think the world needs more of this. More personal expression. More weird, creative corners of the internet that aren’t optimized for engagement metrics or ad revenue. More websites that exist just because someone thought they’d be cool to make. A personal website is one of the few places left where you can do whatever you want, for no reason other than you wanted to.

That freedom is worth something.

So, Do You Need One?

No. You don’t need a personal website.

But building one might:

• Force you to figure out who you actually are and what you stand for
• Make you a better writer and clearer thinker through blogging
• Help you practice the underrated skill of storytelling
• Signal to yourself (and others) that you take yourself seriously
• Give people a way to understand you beyond a two-second glance
• Become a creative outlet in a world that’s increasingly optimized and templated

And if one day you become so undeniably successful that you don’t need a website anymore, that your work speaks so loudly that presentation becomes irrelevant, you can always take it down.

But until then, you might as well build one.