The TRUTH about VC Media

0:00Welcome back to Dead Cat this week. Oh, wait, no, it's the Newcomer podcast. You know, when you say dead cat, it's very triggering for me because that's peak pandemic. This was our only socializing. Basically, if people remember a lot of I'm assuming newcomer subscribers are too young to remember the pandemic. But this was the only way that people knew how to socialize was via podcasts. These were the clubhouse days. We had a beautiful, you know, dead cat or, you know, it's a cartoon cat. You got a guy from Fiverr to draw that for us. Exactly. The on-demand economy was thriving of people making podcast logos.

0:34And it was a reference to private text messages between Mark Andreessen and Mark Zuckerberg using some spycraft, not to dead cat bounce, as many people believe. You're a startup founder. Finding product market fit is probably your number one priority. But to land bigger customers, you also need security compliance. And obtaining your SOC 2 or ISO 27001 certification can open those big doors. But they take time and energy, pulling you away from building and shipping. That's where Vanta comes in. Vanta is the all-in-one compliance solution, helping startups like yours get audit ready and build a strong security foundation quickly and painlessly.

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2:04In some ways, I don't know, Tom, how would you describe our position? We were less pro-media than media, but also still reporter dismissive of some of the tech complaints. Or what was our posture back then? I think we had a mission statement that we read out on the first episode, which was that we believe in media in this house. We believe in media. We also believe that the media is fallible at times and by and large probably has more of an anti-tech bias than a lot of people in the media are willing to accept. That was the strong stance that we took. You know, you got to remember, basically all people were doing on Twitter, at least our version of Twitter was just bitching about the media.

2:43Right. It was just every VC saying, you know, Balaji was like, never talk to these people. These people are your enemy. They have no they're barely worth your time, like in the real world, let alone, you know, as a business person. And there were all these fights, right? Like they were just constant back and forth. Well, that's also always like so rich just because like Mark Andreessen famously is Kara Swisher's source back in the day. So like it was such a flip. But of course, that was the posture back then. So anyway, yeah, this is exactly what we agonize with. We beat the cat dead. We were like we talked about it exhaustively and then we moved on with our life.

3:16Newcomer became sort of for a while more of an interview show. Now we're on the news, though we have the freedom to have interviews. And now Tom's here. And so we're about to opine on media. But it's in the news. The main story, of course, we're referring to Andreessen Horowitz is hiring Eric Torenberg's Turpentine. Yeah. So Eric Torenberg, you know, early employee at Product Hunt, co-founder of Village Global, on deck. And then he had this company, Turpentine. There was in some ways running, you know, Lenny Rogiski has this product newsletter. And I think Eric in some ways was like, man, we should do a category newsletter for everything.

3:53And All In is pretty successful. I should have an All In style podcast. And like, in some ways, just like, okay, let's see if we can be mercenaries about building a tech media company. I think it was, he hasn't disclosed the financials on like this company here. So I don't know exactly how it did it. And, you know, I think, sure, they're bringing in the turpentine stuff. And I think that gives them a running start. But I think the key here is that Eric's becoming a general partner at the firm and is going to sort of help them continue to have sort of their media ambitions. That's happening in the context of the sons of Founders Fund have just completely blown up with our competitor podcast, TBPN Technology Brothers.

4:33We're talking about TBPN, the three hour daily show. Co-hosted by Jordi Hayes and John Coogan. John Coogan was Founders Fund entrepreneur in residence for a really long time. So they're, you know, connected to Founders Fund. I mean, but they're not like officially run out of Founders Fund, but they have all these ties. Right. So it's kind of like illustrative of how Founders Fund approaches media, right? I know. I guess my first, just to sort of take one step away from the facts before we give our hot, hot takes. I think Founders Fund knows that it's a little cooler not to be so corpo. You know, it's like Pirate Wires and TBPN.

5:13They're not really Founders Fund things. Obviously, having Founders Fund people out and about, you know, Mike Solana, who runs PirateWires is the chief marketing officer of Founders Fund. So obviously, there is marketing, but he's not going to do something that's so terrible here to Founders Fund. Founders Fund's an investor. But these shows sort of stand on their own. And I think they're also sort of spicier than the Andreessen Horowitz portfolio outside of Marc Andreessen, the man, who of course is spicy. But I am not convinced that the rest of Andreessen Horowitz has been able to be spicy. So you've got sort of Founders Fund succeeding without plastering their brand on it.

5:56Andreessen Horowitz, you know, Mark Andreessen was on Joe Rogan. Like you can't argue with that. And certainly they have top podcasts. I'm sure they have way, way, way more distribution than us on their podcasts. And like they have, you know, what, hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. So they definitely have a media presence, but they failed to build Future, their media company, and it seems like they've never really satisfied the ambitions of being a true media company. Why do you think that is that you can have a successful podcast or whatever, get a decent audience for it that justifies its existence, but every time you try to build some sort of media vertical, like future or whatever, that never takes off?

6:37Why is a podcast something that gets people, but text tends to just be very limited. I don't have an answer for that. I just think it's funny. I think it's more that Andreessen is flowing from the ambition to influence. They're seeing, oh man, powerful people influenced through the media and we should build our own. Hire people, go figure it out. Whereas I think Mike Solana at Pyrowires, who strenuously disagree with on some things. He's like got a writer's spirit. He has things to say. He's too angry and he needs to get it out in print somewhere. You know, he, I feel like he has things to say.

7:15And I think the TBPN guys, they're funny and like, they have a sort of point of view. And so I do think it's the, it's a humanities person in all of us. It's like, you got to start with like the desire to really have something to say in a new format and a style. And so I think they've found people for the podcast and some of their partners are great communicators. But then I think future and some of these other ambitions start with we need to be a media company without like the sort of fire behind it. Yeah, I guess you don't really have an audience built into it. It's just sort of an expectation that if you start writing the articles with the bent that you think people want, they'll just show up, which is anyone who's run a media company would know it's not really the way it happens.

7:55I always talk about newcomers like, I don't know, we chase the stories that are fun to us. Like, you know, I don't know. Some of the you can be too intentional with media in my point of view. Part of what makes the TVBN part fun is that it is it feels a little bit disconnected and it has cool vibes. They're reclaiming tech bro. Right. And they're like fun, interesting guys to watch and engage with. So in your conception of all of this, like, is like the narrative control and the ability to like, talk about things in a fun, cool way without it seeming like VC media, like, the business reporter in me is like, does that actually help your fund?

8:30I assume it doesn't like a soft power way. But like, where's the play here other than just being like, you know, getting the attention out being interesting, like, seems like does it really, you know, come back to help founders fund? It seems like Andreessen, it's kind of not really doing anything other than, you know, Mark's Twitter presence. I think just being out there in people's minds is like good for founders because they have to find the next founder and being legitimately sort of cool, as reluctant as I am to say it, helps them sort of get deal flow and like is useful. I do think the TBPN guys are smart in that like they're trying to build a show.

9:08You know, I think it's sort of like they could get bought by CNBC. They know I talked to John Coogan this week and it's not like he's like, oh, yeah, we're building a platform. It's like, no, we're building a good media show. He jokes, but it's sincere that it's corporate media. You know, it's like they have a bunch of ads plastered all over the thing. They're like for them. I think one of the strengths and maybe what could be lasting for like a TVBN is they're not explicitly political. Like all of this story you're talking, we're talking about like posturing and that kind of thing. They don't really do that.

9:35They have their sort of like bro-y outward aesthetic, but much less so than pirate wires. Are they like jumping into the political parade? They're talking about business. Yeah. The only political thing is just that it's sort of this like the bro that you couldn't be anymore. But besides that, besides the stylings, I agree. It's very like down to business talking about companies. Well, of course, like a big theme of the whole Dead Cat era of your of your fame was that like tech could go direct and cut out the media and and address their audience in a way that like. Right. I was terrified. I went on a clubhouse.

10:06I was like, Mark Andreessen needs to answer questions about his Trump support in front of The New York Times. Yeah, it was it was an interesting moment. Tom, you take it first. Where are we on go direct? It's not happening. It's not. Your take is that they have not failed to. Yeah, they clearly failed. And I know this because when I announced that I was working for Newcomer Now and I had an email address, my in blocks got flooded with PR people that are reaching out to me, which in a world of going direct, I understand you're not legacy. So maybe that was partly the reason why they were that excited.

10:41Yeah, exactly. Read the market. It's like they want the media to do the work and people who know how to write to produce it, but they just want a new brand to just start again, like new brands. I never understood the go direct thing. Like it always confused me because ultimately what did it mean? Did it mean you don't want to announce your, your, your next fund raise in tech crunch or, or the New York times or it's wall street journal or Bloomberg. Okay. Three of those publications wouldn't write about it anyway. Now. Did it, did it mean like if your company had a controversy and reporters were writing about it, that you shouldn't ever deal with the media, you shouldn't ever answer questions to them.

11:18Okay, fine. You don't have to do it. But that also assumes that like, Like if you don't talk to people, they won't – if you don't talk to the media, the article won't exist, which obviously it will. Like you need to have like fucking object permanence to recognize that like people exist outside of your wanting to talk to them. And so I never understood what the end state of it was. Was it about killing the New York Times altogether? All right. Here's my view, which I think touches on what you're saying. Go Direct was framed as a binary. Either you're talking to the media or you're talking to tech.

11:50Obviously, in the real world, that's not how it plays out. Things are a spectrum of, and we could imagine a spectrum of unfriendly to tech to friendly to tech. And part of what happened within the media is the friendly to tech sort of disappeared, right? The, I don't know, fast company, Inc. style. Oh my God, you're an amazing company. Those people all suddenly became the like Facebook's the devil. And so the friendliest people became the most hostile. And so the media was out of whack. I think we acknowledged that back in the dead cat days. And so tech started creating these go direct things, many of them far, far too positive ever to build or sustain an audience.

12:30Because at the end of the day, media is dependent on what consumers want. And so now what was the go direct period have become much more sophisticated and are delivering a range of content. You've got Pyrowires, who has its enemies, right? Which the traditional like PR Go Direct set couldn't deliver, right? You needed some sort of foil and antagonist, which Pyrowires has. You have TBPN, which is like literally sort of embracing the aesthetics of like CNBC and TV news. And so I think that spectrum is going to totally re-merge and the distinction will soon be meaningless. I think on the Go Direct side, you have all these people who are still, you know, I think John said it to me this week.

13:12They're like, I'm not a journalist. And I'm like, I don't know what that means. Obviously, journalists themselves have a range of expectations for what you have to do. And I think the go direct crowd still wants none of the ethical burden of journalism while delivering it. And I think what's really going to happen is we're going to go back to a period where we're all judged against the expectations and brand that we build for ourselves. there isn't going to be this like binary switch of like journalists, people can shit on me for not doing enough diligence. And like, I'm just an influencer and I can be as like lazy as I want to.

13:48I don't know, Joe Rogan, you have a huge audience and you're driving the culture. You interviewed the president, like what you say matters. And we're seeing that emerge. And so I think on the media side, you're not going to get this special treatment anymore. And then on the go direct side, you're not going to be able to be like, who me? I'm just like an idiot. Like, you're like, you have an audience. And that's what makes you morally culpable for what you say. Also, the bigger you get, the more people are going to view you in the same sphere as the bigger media companies. I had a source of mine the other day was telling me that he was trying to get me to help him on an editorial that he had.

14:25And he was like, I was going to run it in pirate wires, but I guess they had some sort of executive leave or someone. And they're not able to publish as much as they were able to. He's like, oh, can you help me get this into the Wall Street Journal? the Washington Post. And it's like, and like one, no, like I can't, it's really hard to, you know, I never dealt with the editorial side, but it's like the fact that you consider it like one or the other means that like the lines are already blurred. So like the, in its success, supposedly of Go Direct, you've basically become to a degree, the thing that you hated and were rebelling against.

14:56Exactly. And they're learning all the problems. You talk to them, you're like, oh yeah, like media is really hard. These tech people don't get it. You have to like, you're only as good as your last story. Like that's something we've been yelling out for years. There's like techs all about solutionism. It's like, do the thing, realize what the trade-offs are, why people are doing what they're doing. And like, stop, stop whining, you know, do it. So I'm happy that. Why do you think we're such like negative pieces of shit? It's because our jobs are bad and we have to deal with all this stuff. Like you think you're happy now because you're going direct.

15:27You're just going to become like us. There's going to be no distinction. And journalists are part of the problem in that they hold on to the distinction, right? In some ways, they're enabling the GoDirect crowd to act differently by saying, journalists, we behave this way and you behave that way. And I think I've been early on the like, collapse the distinction quickly so that there's equal sort of responsibility on both ends or at least relative to audience and relative to brand. I mean, the only other thing I would say on this is that what people often overlook is like, is your shit good? Is it an entertaining product?

16:02Like, that's all it comes down to. I know, and I'm happy to always shit on the all-in guys. They have a good show. It's an entertaining show. They have a dynamic that appeals to people that makes for compelling listening or consumption or video or whatever. And it's like, if you don't have a fundamentally good product, it doesn't matter how much philosophy behind the changing tides of media you're basing this on. If it's not interesting, no one's going to care. That's it. It's like a fairly... I mean, the nice thing about media, aside from the fact that the business model is broken, is that the audience is often pretty dependent on whether you day in, day out put out a compelling product.

16:40And a lot of these things just weren't good. All In is a good show. I'm sorry to say it. It is a good show. Journalists arguing for capitalism. I mean, part of what happened with media is that the reporters got very disconnected from the customer, right? I think one thing that Newcomer is a response to is that, yeah, we are responsive to our segment of readers. Now, we found the segment of readers we like, right? If you're going to unsubscribe because I shit on Trump or whatever, you're a lost cause. So we still have a segment. But I think when I was at Bloomberg and certainly many other Bloomberg reporters are very disconnected from which stories are driving the bottom line.

17:16And so building media businesses that are more responsive to customers reflect the culture and are more responsive to the mood for good and bad. Speaking of grifts from one to another, you know, we talked about the VC media grifts, but I think there's a there's a broader I would say grifts are in vogue right now. Grifts are in, you know, from the top down. I think we're seeing a lot of a lot of discussion over how we can take advantage of the moment and, you know, fill our own bag while the gettings are good. There's a point we've been hitting over and over again in this newsletter when we do talk about politics, which is that ultimately the Trump presidency and attitude towards grift and deal making in corrupt ways is bad for business.

18:01And all of the Silicon Valley people who support him and have viewed it, you know, oh, this will be favorable in regulation to me. It's not favorable if he makes a mockery of what your business is doing. The Trump meme coin dinner that was announced this week just kind of encapsulated this, right? Because basically the top 220 Trump coin holders will get like a private dinner with the president. Like that is just such an example of how crypto for all the VCs I talked to who pitched me on the legitimate crypto industries that they are building is just totally thrown out the window by their supposed biggest booster.

18:37And just like what is clearly a like influence scheme. You were talking to a lot of crypto people, ones who I assume are happy that Trump is in office and being one of the biggest boosters of this, you know, of cryptocurrency and the blockchain in history. Are they on board and described as legitimate the meme coin? I mean, do they view that as like part of the same positive uplift in the economy and transformation? Or this is like they're trying to push that off to the side? I would say, well, within the coin holder people, I'm sure people who are just separate from the founders are excited about this in the crypto ecosystem because they can make a buck off of it.

19:16But the crypto investors I've talked to and founders that I've talked to who are happy about cutting regulations, but not so happy about the optics of everything going down, they recognize that the grifty stuff hurts their business. So they've actually expressed to me like, no, this is like a bad call. We don't think that this like helps the crypto industry at all. It just seems like it's a pipeline to pay off Trump and get close to him. And so even the crypto investors I've talked to know that this seems like it will not help them in the end. And yet people like the end, you know, we talked about, you know, all of the close to Trump people, the Andreessen's of the world, like are still sticking with it for now.

19:55And I just don't see why this is seeming like. Crypto, and in some ways, the Silicon Valley view of business has always been, unfortunately, a story of better angels, you know, build, grow, you know, do new things, create. And on the other hand, sort of grift and make sort of momentum trades, right? I mean, you look at Andreessen Horowitz, right? Mark Andreessen is now one of his many famous sayings is, it's time to build an essay about just America. We need to do a lot of things, build a lot of things. Because that's supposed to be the message underpinning the firm. You know, they've got a very successful crypto fund.

20:31But my sense is a lot of those investments, you know, were sort of flips. You know, you make a bunch of money on Filecoin. Obviously, Coinbase, you know, is a key investment. And that is a real company, though a company largely built on speculation of crypto assets. But like a lot of the building for crypto is still to come. And a lot of the money made has been on sort of speculation and flipping and getting out at the right time. I mean, you see a lot of VCs making money on Solana. But anyway, yeah, the ideal of Silicon Valley is this sort of building and creation. And the more that front and center in the American psychology is, thanks to our president, that the way to make money is grifting into selling tokens, that's going to every entrepreneur is going to be like, well, I guess the mood at the moment is get rich quick, not build for the long term.

21:20But that's always one of the greatest gifts about Trump is that he has no subtext. And so when you present him with something like a meme coin, you can construct whatever architecture of like transformation of currency and the blockchain and the value it has. But in his eyes, and maybe the truth behind it all is like, oh, this is a flip, right? This is like, oh, you basically just want me to like pump this shit up. At least we're not getting bullshitted anymore, is your point. He's like, crypto, I get it. I get what you guys are into here. Sure. I'm totally down to just pump this thing up and flip it and see if a couple of people can make money, myself included, on it.

21:54This is Trump stakes. This is Trump University. He just manages to cut through everything to make it at its most basic fundamental level that I'm assuming is very frustrating to the crypto people because they're like, no, no, dude, this is about a revolution. This is not a flip. This is not about just lining my pockets. this is about a whole new, you know, wholesale change. He just kind of is like, don't fucking say that out loud, dude. Like, we all know what's going on here. You don't have to just make it that apparent. Don't make this a QVC, you know, commercial. Just thinking back even to the tariffs, right?

22:23Like he, all of his advisors were trying to say like, no, this is some genius strategy of negotiation. And the first reason he backed off at all was that he was like, well, the markets got a little out of whack. So we're toning it back. Like he's always been very direct about what motivates him and where things are going. But I just don't think that all of this is in any way good for the business community that has attached themselves to him. And the fact that it's still hanging on, like, is a little absurd to me. And we'll see how long they stay. I don't know. At the end of the day, American culture needs to be and can be more than the culture set by the president.

22:59I mean, this is supposed to be the view of the Republicans, you know, know, the small government party. And so I think at this time, more than ever, we have the obligation not to let Trump corrupt business in America and sort of to continue to build real meaningful businesses, even as we're seeing this messaging that you could try to get rich quick and the people at the top are doing it. But certainly Trump isn't making it easier to keep great entrepreneurs focused on real sustainable businesses like they should be. And it seems like every time he backs off most of his most insane policies, it's because some senior person in the traditional business world has a meeting with him in which he's like, yeah, you got to cut this shit out.

23:44So it's like Jamie Dimon goes to the White House. Yeah, exactly. Where's Jamie Dimon being like, yeah, we all grift a little bit. Like, OK, you do some short trades or whatever, but you can't do it like this, man. Right, right. Yeah. So it's Jamie Dimon coming in there and be like, yeah, cut this shit out. Like you were destroying the S &P. And then now with the China tariffs probably backing down, it's because like Walmart and Target CEOs basically came into the Oval Office and were just like, yeah, that's where we get all of our stuff, man. You're not going to be able to charge 145 % tariffs on the place that makes all these things.

24:17Like, yeah. Yeah. All right. All right. We'll see you guys next week.