Tech's media safe space

Let me know if you’ll be in Miami Beach for Possible next week. We are doing a pair of dinners, and I’ll be hanging out from time to time in the Fontainebleau lobby among the lanyarded masses.

In today’s member essay, I wrote about how the tech industry is creating a parallel media ecosystem that’s aligned with its worldview in a way that journalistic outlets are not. Treating any group as a monolith is impossible, of course. Silicon Valley is vast and diverse. What I’m seeing is the most powerful people there, particularly venture capitalists, recognize that media provides tremendous leverage. Nobody understands that more than Andreessen Horowitz, which in the words of Marc Andreessen is “a media company that monetizes via investing.” The go-direct playbook is evolving – and will challenge B2B institutional media as it spreads to other sectors.

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First up, some highlights from yesterday’s Online Forum about how Metro UK is using personalization to drive both acquisition of direct connections and deeper engagement with the audience.

The Rebooting held an Online Forum yesterday that took a deep dive into how Metro UK is using personalization to power its newsletter strategy. Sophie Laughton, newsletter editor at Metro, Emily Shackleton, product lead at Metro, and Nikki Perry, director of customer success at Marigold, detailed how Metro uses personalization in newsletter onboarding and created personalized vertical newsletters in horoscopes and sports that drove engagement levels of over 25% CTR. Some key takeaways:

You can watch a replay of the hourlong session here.

Thanks to Marigold for its support. Check out the ways Marigold’s messaging and relationships platform helps publishers nurture audience connections.

It looks like CNBC. A running ticker scrolls across the screen. The backdrop is slick, the lighting tight. On screen, affable, TV-ready co-hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays trade commentary on the day’s biggest business and tech stories. Over three hours, guests—from startup founders to industry analysts—rotate through interviews interspersed with commentary. On X, clipped highlights flood the timeline, recognizable by their distinct three-panel format: the guest framed between Coogan and Hays, in the show’s visual signature. Welcome to the Technology Brothers Programming Network, or TBPN. From the outside, it looks like a scrappy but polished journalistic upstart.

TBPN isn’t a newsroom or pretending to be. It’s the product of two tech entrepreneurs—Founders Fund entrepreneur-in-residence John Coogan and Jordi Hays—who’ve built the kind of tech-focused business media they want to see. It also happens to be the kind of tech-focused business media the tech industry’s powerbrokers want to see. It’s friendly, non-confrontational, aligned—and safe. This week, Coogan, who founded meal-replacement company Soylent, announced he was leaving Founders Fund to focus full-time on TBPN. Considering the show produces 15 hours of live programming a week, it’s a testament to how efficient you can be when you cut out the friction of chewing meals.

The tech industry feels burned by journalistic coverage. It believes the institutional press is focused on accountability—and has spent two decades trying to influence coverage. After many missteps in executing its go-direct playbook, an emerging constellation of tech-friendly media has risen, some directly controlled by venture capital firms, others subsidized and supported, and all broadly sympathetic to the Silicon Valley powerbroker consensus view of tech’s essential role in innovation. 

This ecosystem was built after the tech powerbrokers tried the usual channels. Tech titans have worked the refs, calling in complaints and critiques, as Nick Denton described on People vs Algorithms, recounting the pressure he received running Valleywag.

Tech also tried the investment route. A generation ago, Marc Andreessen and other Valley heavyweights backed PandoDaily, pitched as a more sympathetic alternative to TechCrunch. That backfired when Pando turned heel and started skewering the industry. Pando disappeared in 2015 after it failed to make an audience-supported model work. Its tech backers weren’t interested in continuing to fund it. The lesson tech took from that moment wasn’t that the media model needed tweaking—it was that media independence was too risky to trust.

Then came the subsidization phase. Facebook and Google funded journalism-support programs. Meta launched initiatives before walking away. Google’s News Initiative still limps along, but the returns are hazy, especially now that the company is ruled a monopoly and embroiled in antitrust cases. The ROI on goodwill is hard to measure—especially under scrutiny.

Why not build your own media? And this time, do it differently: no journalists, no editorial separation, no accountability. Just platforms, podcasts, and personalities who share your worldview—or won’t challenge it.

That’s the logic behind the rise of operator media and the alternative tech information ecosystem. It’s not a rebellion against the media. It’s an alternative that is more likely to confirm the worldview of its audience than challenge it.

This is the new media model’s jiu-jitsu: borrow journalism’s look, ditch the burden. TBPN clips look like CNBC, but there are no confrontations. It filters the news through the consensus view of the Silicon Valley elite. John Coogan’s X bio says: “I read the Wall Street Journal so you don’t have to.”

It’s working. TBPN, a two-person operation, is “tech’s hot new show.” This isn’t a scale game. It’s a trust, proximity, and influence game. 

The alignment between TBPN’s sponsors and Founders Fund’s investment portfolio is noteworthy. Ramp, a fintech company specializing in corporate cards and expense management, has been backed by Founders Fund in multiple funding rounds. Eight Sleep, known for its smart mattresses and sleep fitness technology, secured Series C funding with Founders Fund. Wander, a platform offering luxury vacation rentals, has also received backing from a Founders Fund affiliate. TBPN has other tech sponsors without Founders Fund affiliation, like watch marketplace Bezel and out-of-home ad platform AdQuick. Sponsors like Bezel receive their own segments on the show, such as Bezel CEO Quad Walker’s recent drop-by to discuss tariffs’ effect on the watch industry. The connection between the show’s audience, sponsors, and the Valley’s capital networks is the product.

TBPN is adjacent to a trend of VCs launching media properties to deepen network effects and extend influence. In addition to Harry Stebbings’ 20VC, there’s Redpoint Partners’ The Logan Bartlett Show, which uses the podcast format to connect with founders, LPs, and a broader startup audience while advancing the firm’s brand and deal flow.

Andreessen has dropped the pretense. He’s long dabbled in media infrastructure directly and indirectly. Notable example: a16z brought on well-known tech analyst Benedict Evans as a partner from 2014 to 2020. Evans, now ‘Independent’ on LinkedIn, still offers sympathetic analysis of the tech industry’s ambitions—if mildly critical of its methods. In announcing the acquihire of Erik Torenberg and his Turpentine podcast network, he said: “We sometimes called ourselves a media company that monetizes via investing.” That mindset is now institutionalized.

Substack, Clubhouse, and Turpentine—all backed or owned by a16z—are part of the same push. Build the stage. Control the message. Make the media the moat.

This isn’t insurgent media. It’s elite media for elites. The irony? It mirrors the soft power state-funded media operations that Elon Musk decries. Except here, it’s VCs—not governments—pulling the strings.

Tech now sets the pace for the economy. We didn’t have office snacks until tech deemed them necessary. The more-with-less ethos in most sectors began in Silicon Valley. So it makes sense tech would reshape media on its terms. The Information Space creates fertile ground for media products. Through one lens, the tech industry is evading accountability by backing an array of media assets that espouse the American dynamism ethos. Any movement needs media (and merch).

In the past, this was called propaganda, but that term feels outdated. This isn’t Pravda or RT. These are competitors in the Information Space’s marketplace of ideas. Their conflicts of interest aren’t hidden—they’re brand features. Talk up an investment? They have skin in the game. This is media made by non-journalists who speak like insiders. And they’re not exposing safety lapses at the sausage factory—they’re buddies with the owners.

This hints at the future of business news media. A version is happening in media and marketing. The Trade Desk has funded its own media operation, The Current. What’s different about The Current—and arguably a mistake—is that it does news. It’s hard to take a story about Google abandoning cookie deprecation seriously when it’s published by an outlet funded by a Google rival. There are numerous friendly outlets that publish uncritical video interviews. But most money in this space is in events. It’s smarter to run an events business—like Brand Innovators—and skip the journalism for “CMO of the Week” content.

Trade publications are losing influence and business to newcomers. The Possible conference in Miami next week will draw a cross-section of the marketing ecosystem to the “Davos of marketing,” where ad tech execs sweat it out poolside at the Fontainebleau next to OnlyFans models. Possible is owned by events firm Hyvve, but it was smart to bring on industry heavyweights as financial backers—motivated to make it work and profit. As Michael Kassan says, “No conflict, no interest.”

Trade publications will still report daily news, but companies will participate in the marketplace directly. Any media model has conflicts. B2B media properties have them because their business models depend on tech companies funding them with event sponsorships and ad buys, and access. There might not be a quid pro quo, but there's a value exchange when a well-known executive speaks at a publication's conference.

Tech didn’t lose faith in journalism. It ran the numbers—and decided it could do better alone.

The risk in all of this is that funding shifts to these insulated safe spaces. U.S. universities are finding out what kind of leverage power centers can exert when they’re also funders. What’s emerging alongside traditional business media, with its messy conflicts, is audience-funded models that can exert true independence. Gergely Orosz recently crossed 1 million subscribers for his Pragmatic Engineering Substack, which doesn’t pull punches in calling out bad practices. This kind of model is only possible with a subscriptions business—otherwise there would be too much risk in stepping on the wrong toes.

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