E503 | Cathy White, CEW Communications & Dan Taylor: The Fall of TechCrunch Europe & The Future of European Tech Media

0:00Europe's tech media landscape just suffered a seismic shock that no one saw coming. One place where there's not a lot of cookies these days is TechCrunch Europe. What happened there? When private equity moves in, entire newsrooms vanish overnight. It did mean that all of the journalists on the European team have been let go. And it just leaves a great big gaping hole in terms of telling the stories of European startups. But this isn't just about layoffs. The entire game is changing. The rules of the game have changed. We are no longer in the age of SEO. We are in the age of LEO and GEO. And the stakes?

0:37Control over who gets to tell Europe's story. This is a monopoly play as well. This is a let's buy all the companies and then we can control the narrative. In a world where AI decides what stories surface, quality matters more than ever. If you feed the machine garbage, garbage is what you will get. But from crisis comes opportunity. I'm going to optimistically say that yes, a new publication will fill the gap because I think there's a big opportunity. Join me and my expert guests as we dissect the collapse of European tech journalism and discover who will write Europe's next chapter. This is EUVC podcast where European venture meets reality.

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1:51Tear down this wall. It's more than just an alliance. This is a union of values. Let's start acting. This show is not investment advice and the hosts of this episode may be invested in the funds and companies featured. Welcome back everyone to another episode of the UVC podcast. Today, we are back with a bit of a special emergency episode because sometimes European mentor demands that we drop everything and hit record. Today's episode is sparked by the shock news of TechCrunch is axing their European tech team, which is a bit of a seismic shift to many in the media landscape. And it's too important to ignore, of course.

2:31So to unpack this and what it means and what's next, we're joined by two of the most respected voices in European tech and comms world. Of course, our good friends, Cathy White and Dan Taylor from CEW Communications. And Dan, of course, has a long background as a journalist and editor at TechEU, which, of course, means that there's a bit of an inside angle there, hopefully. Before we get to the axing of the TechCrunch team, let's just hear a bit about CEW, who you are and why it is that PR is actually more important now than ever. Oh, well, the short version for why it's more important than ever is LLMs and everything that we're seeing happening on the AI side.

3:10And I'm sure we're going to dig into that even more so on the podcast today. But for us, CEW, we're specialists in working with scale ups and VCs. We've been telling European stories for almost a decade. kind of born from my background working with startups and the London tech scene as it was kicking off 15 years ago. And today we work with a range of companies across deep tech, VC, health tech, fintech, huge range, everything from kind of pre-seed all the way up to exited and IPO. And we don't just do PR, but that's the main part that we're going to talk about today. Dan, you shifted from the journalist side to the PR side.

3:47If one says that's shifting from founder side to VC side is the dark side. I guess that is exactly the same move for journalists. It's just seeing things from the other side of the table. You know, as the joke goes, the dark side, they have cookies and cookies are good. The cookies are good. One place where there's not a lot of cookies these days is TechCrunch Europe. What happened there? Well, there's a lot of cookies in TechCrunch US. It's just on the European side that there's a lack of cookies. So the short story is that TechCrunch got bought out in a private equity deal not too long ago now.

4:23It's not the first time that we've seen TechCrunch exchange hands. It's had quite a few owners at this point. But with PE coming in, what we're seeing now is that they're trimming the fat. And I hate saying that because the team in Europe are fantastic. But they're cutting back where they need to, right? They're queuing it up for whatever the next part of the deal might look like. It could be, for instance, making more out of TechCrunch Disrupt, which is their big conference out in the US. But sadly for Europe, with what's been going on, it did mean that all of the journalists on the European team have been let go.

4:55And it just leaves a great big gaping hole in terms of telling the stories of European startups. Regent is the PE firm that acquired TechCrunch from Yahoo. Well, if you go and you look at Regent's portfolio, it includes TechCrunch, InfoWorld, ComputerWorld, NetworkWorld, PC World, Tech Hive, Tech Advisor, Strictly VC, remember that name, Cheddar News, Sunset. So this is a monopoly play as well. This is a let's buy all the companies and then we can control the narrative. Do you think so? I absolutely think so. Yes. The Trump administration has been phenomenal at controlling the narrative by controlling the media.

5:36Same thing's happening in tech. And now we've got, you know, the European part is the bit that's gone bye-bye at that end to it. it's a u.s story because no one wants to control the narrative here uh because the stories aren't big enough is that what you're saying i don't think the stories aren't big enough i think it's just more about less you're i think it's less about europe and it's more about the u.s it's controlling the narrative on that side but i'm also not the american on the call hey i've lived i've lived on this continent for 18 years i don't consider myself american anymore No, no, no.

6:11You are adopted. You are European, but there's a lens to it that you'll have that I won't. Andreas, Cathy, we can get into this one. I mean, Andreas, this is a whole other episode, I'm sure. But like, where is Europe's Y Combinator? Like, you know, I mean, Y Combinator has been around for how long? And it's still the benchmark. And every European founder, well, I say every blanket license here, you know, the business model includes, right, we build here, we proof of concept here. and then we get to America as fast as we can. Hopefully, some of the nonsense that Mr. Trump is pulling right now will dissuade that.

6:47But traditionally, historically, America has been the biggest consumer market. And so you want to go there to make the most amount of money. Let's get back to tech journalism because I think I could definitely push back. Let me away from politics, please. I could definitely also push back on some of the things you said about the path of European startups. Yes, we go to the US, but we don't do that purely to just get out of POC land. We also do that just because it is a big market, but you definitely still are building a lot in Europe. And as an example, we had just recently our summit where we had William McQuillian from Frontline showing exactly how much of the revenue of an IPO company from the States has in Europe, which was everyone thought it would be 5 % or so, but it turned out that it was actually 35 % or something like that.

7:3635 % of a US IPO and company, that revenue comes from Europe. So I don't think Europe in any way is not worthwhile and important to think about for any company that's building anywhere. But let's leave that. Also the tinfoil stuff about Mr. Trump and so on, because I think that's also a bigger conversation. I think we should talk about the future of media more specifically here in Europe, because TechCrunch Europe was not the first team to be cut. We've seen the same thing with TNW that was acquired basically just because they had a good conference and then the tech journalist team was laid off, at least the majority of it.

8:15And we've seen similar moves across the ecosystem. Is this a trend already? Is this a couple of companies where it's happened and then we make a lot of noise about it? What do you see as PR people looking into the tech landscape in Europe? First of all, in media, it's not uncommon to see layoffs. When the market takes a dip, we tend to see a lot more of them. And I've been working in PR now for 15 years. This isn't the first round of cutbacks that we've witnessed. What makes this one different is an entire team for a very well-established media outlet being waved off. the other one that we're waiting it's kind of the writings on the wall sadly but business insider also came out and they said they were going to cut their staff back by 21 percent globally one of the factors within the long email sent by the ceo was ai it puts the entire business insider team within the uk which is about 21 members of staff at the moment at risk they're kind of unionizing right now and there'll be others across the continent as well so ai is another factor and ultimately media and its business model right there's a variety of different ways within media where you can make money but it you need most of them to be working pretty well for you to be okay so subscriptions is one area sponsored content is another and then of course there's advertising and so we were also talking about changing media habits from people that are reading watching listening to the news.

9:44So there's a lot of different things going on here. And 2025, we're seeing, particularly with the companies that we talk to more frequently at the moment, that they want to cut spend right now. And usually when people are cutting spend, media is one of the areas that gets trimmed back. So there's numerous different factors at play. I'd love to ask the both of you, are we seeing anyone in the European ecosystem truly stepping up and coming into the arena and trying to make it a big difference here and be a big dent? The obvious one kind of at the top now of TechCrunch going and Business Insider being at risk is Sifted, which has been going for six, seven years, backed by the Financial Times and had investors as well.

10:30So they are filling that gap. But even with Sifted being there and also a range of other titles, right? You've got TechEU, TechFundingU, Silicon Canals, EU startups. they're not top top tier but they still do a fantastic job of trying to get those stories out there there's still not enough firepower i think to kind of do european startup european venture this ecosystem the service that it needs you know right now it's turbulent it's going to be really interesting to watch and see what happens over the next few months into the next year Will we see a brand spanking new publication be created to fill this gap?

11:10Will we see another existing publication go, ah, interesting. There's a hole there in that startup ecosystem. We could add that into what we already do and plug it. And it's kind of, you know, we're waiting to see what happens. Mike Butcher has been very quiet for Mike Butcher. I mean, my thinking about all this, you know, the journalists that were let go from TechCrunch, I don't understand why there's not a 404 media model happening here. Band together, start your own platform. You know, 404 is a newsletter and now a platform. And quite frankly, it's one of the first places I go to in the morning for news.

11:50Let's go to that because in the States, of course, you also saw a lot of people leaving Fox News as an example to create incredibly massive platforms. So this whole media persona turned creator, turned entrepreneur. Do you see that happening in Europe? Have you heard voices moving in that direction? For a journalist today, and Dan will know this more than me, but just from kind of witnessing what's happened with others, like when we've seen people in the past be let go from TNW or somewhere else. I think if you want to survive in a very difficult market, and journalism is a difficult career as well, if you want to survive, I think you do have to think entrepreneurially.

12:33Like, what else can I create? What other things can I have in my arsenal that make me not just employable and someone that, you know, a great publication wants to bring in, but you've got to think about your influence, like the readers that you also carry with you when you move to the next place. it's like andre um delia for instance is very good with podcasts and creating content and newsletters martin bryant does a range of different things at the moment but he started pre-seed now this newsletter that you know will cover just like one specific pre-seed company typically within the uk and give them a profile and he's built this whole platform from that as well alex comrade leading forbes and creating upstart media and you know so i think there's people that can shift and they can think entrepreneurially and they can come up with new ways of growing their audience and their influence as a journalist as well.

13:22But that doesn't always come naturally to everyone. I think that also raises the question of like, what is a journalist? Because there's this guy, Andreas, with a podcast that has a pretty big reach. And does that make him a journalist? I don't know. You know, this guy named Harry started talking to people and now he's got his own funds. So, I mean, the classical definition of journalist, that disappeared, like, along with the Olivetti. Who is a journalist and what is a news outlet? I honestly think that's undefinable at the moment. I can say I have spoken to two guys in Paris, two different teams in the UK, and one team in Spain that's all setting up their own newsletters and trying to figure out.

14:13And some of them are further along than others. And they're all trying to basically figure out what is the path here as a creator standalone. We have two things in the works, I would say, at ABC. One is we want to do a creator conference. We haven't gotten around to it yet. You've got to create it. Yeah, purely for that, we've got to create it, right? We've been a bit busy, unfortunately, but we do want to bring, you know, 30, 40 people together and probably in the wilderness, really. Do some cool content from there, but just make it a big conversation about where we're headed. And that's the one thing which is basically just about bringing people together.

14:50And then I have a larger thought around, I think there's something that should be done in terms of bringing the creators under one platform. Because I think that the standalone newsletters, if they charge you 20 bucks or something because they have a low subscriber base, it's not sustainable because then we'll have to pick between them because no one is going to have$300 worth of newsletter subscriptions. So we've got to figure out some way where you can get a mass subscription to all of them. And then if you're truly dedicated, you support a couple specifically. I'm looking into that, trying to figure out how it can be done.

15:28I don't know if we are the people to do it, but I definitely think someone should. I think there is a play to be made. So anyone interested in talking about that or working on that, I'd love to talk. So just a shout out to anyone working on that. If I can shift then to the situation for VCs and founders. We used to all, like I've seen enough people wanting to pitch to journalists and it was always, first I want TechCrunch and then I want, and then no one blah, blah, blah. And then we're kind of, with TechCrunch falling out now, what are the media outlets that VCs and founders should be thinking about?

16:06Is there a new roadmap? Has the story changed or have the rules in any ways changed or has TechCrunch just fallen out? the rules really haven't changed it just says there's a hole with tech crunch not being there so if i think about it from the the pr perspective and dan will have a different take because i saw his eyebrows go from aha um but you know whenever we're telling a story on behalf of a startup or a vc if they want tech crunch what we historically did dependent on the ultimately the value of that story or the monetary value connected with that story so fundraising fund for for instance if you really want a tech crunch you maybe go to them in advance you try and secure an exclusive because it was very competitive it was still very competitive to get tech crunch to cover you and then once tech crunch would break a story we would share that widely right now you're just talking about really sharing it widely from the beginning unless the piece of news is substantial and there's loosely some rules when it comes to the media that we talk to so if you're a startup or a VC and the numbers that you're talking about are in the hundred millions, then, you know, you've got the potential to talk to Forbes, you could potentially talk to Bloomberg, the FT, Royce's, that kind of that lofty level of media.

17:28For smaller figures and below, then we're kind of looking at Sifted as well, tech EU, EU startups, all of this. And that's just the tech and business side of things like dependent on what your company actually does or the areas in which your fund is focused there's a whole range of trade media at your disposal as well and there are fantastic source to stories because they're used by other journalists and that slightly loftier publication level to pull from and then on top of that you've got what we're just talking about right like among in this creator economy where people have newsletters and podcasts and youtubes and stuff There's a whole other area that you can pitch your story to, including these newsletters.

18:10The newsletters in particular and a niche audience are really powerful. So the game's not massively shifted. It's just that that tech crunch hole is kind of substantial. But we're going to watch it and see what happens. Yeah. I mean, Andreas, forgive me, I might be getting ahead of the conversation here. But the rules of the game have changed. we are no longer in the age of seo we are in the age of leo and geo and what i mean by that is language engine optimization and generative engine optimization yes of the tone that one in particular yeah exactly so i would argue i mean cassie's gonna fire me for saying this but i mean The death of the press release, we've heard that for a decade now.

19:04About a year ago, I would say, right around the same time, Lulu Cheng, former VP of communications at Substack, she published her Go Direct manifesto. I think about a week or two later, Andrew Chang, a 17-year partner at Andreessen Horowitz, did a tweet about the death of the press release and GoDirect. Personally, I strongly agree with that. Both of those messages, they weren't quite leveraging what we're seeing in search right now. Because what we've been talking about, right, is media. Well, how do you hear about media? Okay, how do you search? If you want to find out about a company, if you wanted information, traditionally, you'd go to a search engine and da-da-da-da-da.

19:52And then, of course, TechCrunch would rank top in Financial Times, et cetera, et cetera. Increasingly, more and more, like I don't know about either of you, but Google, I can't tell. Well, no, I did open Google this morning. But nine times out of 10, I'm talking to ChatGTP or Claude or Perplexity, any one of them. And so brands and companies really need to start thinking about, okay, not where am I showing up in Google results, but where am I showing up in LLM results? I could get into how it's like I've been doing research and experimenting with all this for quite a while now. But the way that AI and LLMs index and retrieve information is fundamentally different from SEO, if placed in the right areas at the right time, it could shift the game dramatically for a brand startup.

20:49it. It's interesting because when I go on KGBT and I type something about a UVC, tell me something about Andreas Moncombe or tell me, I'm surprised at how much it just echoes whatever I have put out myself, quite indiscriminatorily. So it's interesting when we talk about LEO or whatever you want to call it, there's definitely something to be grab there in terms of solidifying who you are and what you are and making it just echo what you're seeing. So, and obviously that's pretty powerful for UBC, given that we have as much content as we do. But what would you say are the tool, what's the toolbox here when it comes to actually leveraging AI?

21:33The simplest answer, optimizing content that is easily readable and indexable by AI. This is why, for example, when you talk to GPT, you will get a lot of bullet points. And in summary, that is the way that AI large language models, they love to read information like that. Another format, for example, like companies that aren't optimizing for schema, which is a massive chunk of metadata that appears before every like the human readable context you will just not get indexed by ai because it is difficult for ai ai has to use tokens and processing power to understand what it's looking at right the easier you make it for the machine to understand what it's looking at the more weight and credibility it will give to it and therefore rank it higher when it returns a search result.

22:35What's the reading age of AI? That's a good question. I don't know. I know. And I'm just thinking that because when we talk about taking something complex that a client has, whether, you know, a deep tech startup, whatever it might be, we naturally try to make what we're starting from much more easily to adjustable so that we could approach any journalist. Or if we're trying to put something together on behalf of a client for social media, then we're lowering the barrier to entry and normally you judge these things sort of based on like a reading age right like what level do we go for and different publications have different reading ages so you know we joke in the UK that something like the sun is easily accessible to a 10 year old so I'm I'm curious it's just something I'm thinking if we're talking about making things easily accessible to AI what is that in terms of language or reading age and it's probably also based on the user because as an example, for some prompts, I use a GPT that's tailored to simplicity.

23:39And then I have others that's tailored to nuance and complexity, and I don't want to lose a thing. And I imagine that it'll also, when it goes out to search information, will also go for those with a higher reading age. I just imagine that that might also be one of its tools in in Zinbox, but I honestly have no idea, so I don't want to dive too much into this. Don't forget that we're defining reading age in human terms, right? LLMs are not humans. No. LLMs don't actually read anything. They identify, match, and correlate patterns. So I don't even think you could define a reading age for AI. it would be more defined by how deeply and complex the patterns of recognition are yeah but then we still have to you know have an understanding of how that works right like i know you're doing loads of research into this and you're powering through a bit so you know what you're doing right but for me i need to put more time in now i don't i don't oh you're making it up i don't know what i'm doing i make it up every day no i i have a rough idea i'm scratching the surface but see But right, so if we change the way we communicate in order to make this all work, we've still got to keep the current way we communicate rolling because we're in this transition period, right?

25:02So for some of us, maybe we are using, you know, Claude or something to do search, but then different generations are probably still going to be using Google or asking someone. And it depends on your audience and ultimately who you're trying to reach. And so the job then becomes for that VC or that startup to really understand the audience that you're trying to get in front of and start to know what exactly their habits are looking like when it comes to how they're getting their information or accessing media. Right. And then you tailor it to fit. I still think there's space for the press release and there probably is for now, but it's going to shift.

25:42Yeah, I agree with that. I would just only add that traditional PR, you know, one of the metrics, for example, that we would use is how many places was this article or how many publications wrote about this company that we're representing? What's the readership there? Cool. Good. Yes. Readership has always been a bullshit figure, but yes. You know, cool. Yes. But in my opinion, the thinking needs to shift from how many places was it published to how many times did AI use this as a citation? Because this is where people are going to search. And there are tools out there that will measure that. I'd love to pivot the conversation actually in a way a bit back because I'd love to ask you the role of PR firms in this age of AI.

26:40we all used to struggle to tell our stories in an engaging way. Now I almost feel with AI that we've gone through a period where it was easy to now tell our story, but it was hard to not make it sound what I call chatty-bitty-ish because it would always start with imagine if, and it would make extremely elaborate small stories and allegories and I don't know what. that I also feel we've kind of gotten quite well beyond. If you use instead of a ChatGPT, but you use ChatGPT 4.0, you use ChatGPT 4.5, I think it is, the one that actually sticks quite close to your own tone of voice, but just improves, which is the one that they advise that we use for writing copy.

27:31I feel like you're at a place where you get some really good writing. it's just what you put in made a lot better so this whole step where we all felt that we need help writing our story I feel that many have now been able to get beyond am I right or am I wrong in saying that I mean if I talk from personal experience when it comes to use of AI so I am using it more and more a hell of a lot more than I was even like a year ago right and I still see it for myself as the first draft there's just things that still don't stick well for me but I also am not investing huge amounts of time in it compared to Dan and Dan has been tinkering in a really fun way and is seeing a hell of a lot better results.

28:25Dan I'd love to hear your take someone writing every day. I know that AI is part of your process. The question is for VC that wants their story out. Do they really need you? Right now? Yes. I'll summarize it as such. If you feed the machine garbage, garbage is what you will get. For me, for example, I am a brilliant coder that never bothered to learn how to code, right? Like conceptually, I have great ideas for what I would like to see and this there and how it sounds and la la la. But Python, PHP, Ruby on Rails, no, just no, I'm not that guy. What AI has done for me has allowed me to become a coder of language without ever having to learn how to code.

29:22Thinking about things analytically and structurally and what do I want the intended outcome to be? Therefore, what do I need to feed the machine to output what I want? That is what I am doing. If I translate what you say, Dan, what I think is that if you're a very good, let's call it prompter, but if you're good at putting together what you want and surfacing that in a way that the machine truly understands it. You have a perfect autocomplete button now. And then the question is, do you have taste? Do you have authoring taste? There it is. Yes. And that's what I wanted to get to was not everyone, a coder is usually not a storyteller, right?

30:10So I can feed all the data in the world and it'll spit back a brilliant piece from somebody who isn't a natural storyteller and writer. However, if you have a natural storyteller and writer feeding the machine... Yeah, or you have that person doing the last 20%, taking it and fixing it, so to say. I think you need the person doing the last 20%, but I also think you need a person doing a hell of a lot before you even start feeding the machine. So if we're talking about why a VC or a startup might need someone like us. It's not just about us being like them literally just giving us some material and us rolling with it.

30:52The whole idea of working with someone like us is that we're able to really drill into what their business is doing or what their backstory is. You know, we're there to ask questions. It's the human part to really unearth what we've got to play with and then think about strategy and then you can feed the machine. Maybe that's the bit I did leave out is that in saying, you know, I can look at a million pitch decks. I can look at all the financial reporting I want. You know, I mean, I don't know, maybe I'm lucky working with TechEU and TNW years and years ago of getting to the heart of the story, realizing it and then saying, oh, okay, which bits of this data do I need to feed the machine to get the output that I want?