I had a great experience at a DMV yesterday. The entire visit took 15 minutes to get a new license. This was a government service that actually took a customer-centric approach and applied basic technology like iPads for check-in and centralized production and photography. I’ve become radicalized that a well-functioning DMV is a litmus test for state capacity.
Today, a conversation with Caper co-founder and CEO Max Tcheyan about why food is a hot new lifestyle category for the well-off, and lessons from vibe coding that apply to the future of companies.
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We have a busy Q2 planned:
On April 9, we are kicking off the TRB Morning Salon, a private, curated breakfast conversation for top executives. Our first Morning Salon focuses on audience-first strategies and is sponsored by Omeda and ViaFoura.
From April 27-29, we are collaborating with EX.CO to bring our TRB Conversations video series to Possible in Miami Beach.
On May 13, the TRB Media x AI Morning Salon will gather the top executives from media companies focused on AI strategies. Beehiiv is our presenting partner – get in touch for other opportunities.
On May 15, we are collaborating with WordPress VIP on our third annual Media Product Forum, where we will gather over 100 top media product executives in NYC for a day of programming and networking.
In June, TRB is setting off for the Cannes Lions. We will have activations throughout the week, including on the Civic Science yacht and at the People Inc villa.
Get in touch to discuss partnership opportunities: [email protected].
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If you want to know what kind of media property a founder will build, look to their past. Most everyone has a playbook that they write over the years and tweak as they go. With Caper, Max Tcheyan is drawing on his experiences launching both The Athletic and Puck with a new publication focused on “what fuels the restaurant world.”
Max believes that food media looks a lot like sports media in 2016-2017: lots of lists and rankings, less emphasis on the power narratives – people, power, money – that underpin all cultural industries. The Athletic proved that people would pay for sports coverage that was in depth.
Restaurants, or more broadly food culture, has become a cultural industry, particularly for rich people. Unlike the NBA, people actually participate by battling each other on Resy two months in advance to eat a bucket of fried chicken at Coqodaq.
Dining out has become “a way to express taste and have status and be in culture," Max told me on The Rebooting Show.
Max founded Caper with fellow former Puck exec Dan Tsinis and former Vanity Fair deputy editor Dana Brown.
The Puck influence is clear from not just how Caper describes itself and its design choices, but also how it seeks to occupy a “prosumer” lane that will attract both a professional audience and those who orbit sexy industries. Max compares restaurant hospitality groups to Hollywood production companies, chefs to actors and comms people to agents. A brand like Caper for, say, waste management would not be as attractive of a proposition.
Caper’s early coverage skews in a different direction from most food media. It doesn’t review restaurants, for one. Instead, it treats restaurants – mostly in New York City – as pop cultural objects. A typical recent piece details how Upper West Side stalwart purveyor of smoked salmon Barney Greengrass is expanding into merch. (There truly is a market for everything.) Other pieces have examined the rise and economics of private dining, the fancy restaurants of art museums, and scenes from the farewell party for En Brasserie, a Japanese fusion restaurant in New York’s West Village that insisted on having American servers shout "Irasshaimase!" when you entered.
Media geared to the affluent – a quarter of restaurant spending comes from households making over $200,000 a year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics – will continue to be produced. Caper launched with a sponsorship from luxury brand Loewe, betting on luxury’s interest in the category as seen by forays into hospitality by luxury brands.
Max is a believer in subscription models. Like Puck, Caper will lean on a combination of subscriptions, ads and events. Caper had a brief preview period and is now mostly behind a paywall, offering subscriptions for $100 a year for consumer and $299 for professional. There are plans for an activations business, with pop-up events like an "underground rap battle meets Top Chef" competitive cooking competition.
It will be a smaller affair, however. Caper raised a modest $2.5 million and has launched with a small editorial team.
Is there a large enough group of people who are interested in what goes on behind the scenes at their favorite restaurants? Max points to The Bear, Chef’s Table and the Noma documentary as evidence there is demand for behind-the-scenes stories. The counter: dining fanatics are obsessed with going out to dinner, not necessarily reading about the business dynamics of hospitality groups.
Rally Rd. is a marketplace where investors buy shares in rare collectible assets. Inside the app, compliance rules limit what they can say. So the real selling happens in their newsletter, Shiny Things, a weekly long-form essay that runs on beehiiv and never actually asks readers to open the app.
The strategy, when paired with beehiiv’s all-in-one growth platform, is clearly working: newsletter subscribers convert at 3X the rate of standard users, with a 20%+ lift in investment behavior and stronger portfolio retention.
And between Q4 2025 and Q1 2026, two major institutional partnerships opened tens of millions of dollars in tier-one supply, both attributed directly to the newsletter.
Owned audience, built right, doesn't just drive engagement. It drives businesses to new levels of success.
My PvA collaborator Troy Young has made impressive progress in building what is a robust piece of software: a personal media aggregation tool that pulls in all of his information sources into, what else, an executive dashboard. (Anyone in the Boss Class has a fetish for dashboards.)
Troy updated us on his progress in vibe coding a more than serviceable piece of software without any coding experience. The application works and is useful. In another time, as Troy notes, it’s something Yahoo would buy.
The experience highlights how software development is becoming a lot more like other writing: Anyone can publish. We are at the start of a flood of new software that will be created to solve specific problems or tasks. Some will be personal, some will be professional. It will become the norm within organizations to expect needs to be addressed with software first, then human labor if necessary.
Companies don’t truly want to hire humans and pay for their health care. They want certain tasks accomplished inside an economic process. Those tasks will sometimes be solved through software, costing tokens, and sometimes through humans, costing salary and benefits, and often through a combination of the two.
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