New New Media
Media Matters More Than Ever, It's Just Not the Media of Old
In 1986, a newspaper emerged in the UK, the first in that market for decades.
Called The Independent, it attempted to do something different and create a newspaper that was free of political allegiances, making up its own mind on the issues of the day.
The big idea, captured by the advertising, was that this editorial stance was also an inspirational attitude of independent thought.
Forty years on, the media landscape is unrecognizable, and huge gaps have emerged to create opportunities for new entrants that look nothing like the broadsheet newspapers of old.
These gaps, together with the more democratic means of production and distribution, are leading to the arrival of entities that have grown their way organically into their positions and believe that the existing media landscape does not serve the needs of everyone.
I want to pick two examples that I believe show this media transformation from both sides.
From the perspective of hard graft and the work to generate organic growth, I want to highlight the Stebbings brothers in the UK, who have poured blood, sweat, and tears into building their own entities in important but focused niches, and at the other end, a16z, a company with unlimited funds, which decided a year ago that it needed to build a news organization.
The British Brothers
At 13 years of age, Harry Stebbings had a passion for all things venture and start-up and at 18, he started his own podcast.
He had no network, no MBA and dropped out of university, all he had was a passion and a desire to learn, together with a remarkable level of persistence and gaul. His first interview was with none other Guy Kawasaki, the famed Apple evangelist.
Harry tried to get a job at Excel at 18 and they turned him down, which only served to fuel his fire.
He has used podcasting as his MBA, his apprenticeship in the venture and business space and his opportunity to build a network.
Today, 20VC employs over a dozen people and should be classified as a media-enabled investment platform.
20VC Fund 3 is a $400m institutional seed/Series A that’ backed by MIT and RIT Capital.
In 2023, his brother who came from the world of sports management joined him to create the Business of Sport applying the same model to the sports vertical and offering the movers and shakers in the business a comfortable and safe space to tell their stories.
The venture arm of 20VC has been involved in sports with the $13m Series A backing of ScorePlay.
The brilliance lies in how they’ve constructed the model in multiple dimensions.
Data and Insight
Analyzing the interviews to glean insights on how to present, grow and sell and if you do enough of these you get a lot of data that can be very useful to potential founders and people in the space.
Personal Touch and Persistence
Persistence and hard-work, when Harry started out he sent personal DMs on X to every single one of his first 40k subscribers.
Not taking no for an answer- Harry has sent Microsoft’s CEO 50 emails asking him to appear on the podcast.
Repurposing Content
The podcasts get cut up into clips, they get linked to posts on X and short clips are made for YouTube etc..
Media Makes Money
The fact the operation generates revenue from media makes it a little different from other VCs who make money from fees. This means 20VC can be more involved and focused on getting the right deals vs. deal volume.
Net
The brothers have created a media flywheel that gets them close to the movers and shakers and positioned as a key access point for those shaping ventures in general and ventures in sport.
All of this stems from not going the traditional route and not wanting to be constrained by conventional structures. It’s about hard-work, it’s about building relationships with key people and understanding what you can bring to the table once you have this knowledge.
However, none of this would have been possible without the brothers lack of confidence in traditional media as providers of the right space for detailed insights on what it takes to start and finance new companies and for those engaged with the real business of sport.
Journalists often start by looking for what’s wrong and hunting for agendas which is not a place founders and investors like to play in.
The idea that there has to be a new media space is also the motivation for a company that exists at the other end of the food chain from 20VC, A16z.
A16z has $100 billion under management and generates $500m annually in fees.
For the past year, this giant firm has been engaged in a bold media experiment.
It has been forced to find ways to tell interesting stories that traditional media outlets have no capacity and interest in covering.
“New Media is about being interesting and saying what you really mean, versus Old Media where you were mostly trying to stay on message and keep out of trouble. That’s because, in the old world, you were entirely dependent on other people’s channels to get your word out. There were a select set of newspapers or TV shows that could legitimize you, and if you ever made them mad, you were in serious trouble.”
Simply put, A16z has to build media that can help get its founders and their companies out into the world with their stories.
It’s almost like one of the world’s biggest and most iconic VCs has built its own in-house advertising and communication agency.
Get this right and this becomes a point of differentiation over your VC competitors.
This how competitive the space is for the best founders and the lengths they are prepared to go to, in order to get chosen.
“If you’re ever pitching a16z, at some point we turn it around and do “the Bear Hug”, as our competitors call it: we pitch you on all of the resources and power and networks the firm will put behind you; maybe you’ll have dinner with Marc until 2 am, and close out the restaurant while he regales you with detailed knowledge of your domain. And then we’ll follow up the next morning with 20 tangible things we’ll help you with in our first week of working together.”
A16z
A big part of this work is spending time putting founders together with category experts to distill the core essence of what they do and the why and how behind it.
Most people call this type of work brand strategy, but it’s unlikely that phrase is ever used in the walls of A16z.
They understand how critical brand and story are to new companies, but they do not want to use those Madison Avenue words to define and describe that work.
In fact, they declare their people are BETTER than those working in ad agencies!
Add to this, A16z isn’t exactly a media minnow when you are talking about reaching an audience of influence; it has 1 million followers on X, 250k daily newsletter subscribers, 1 million podcast downloads a month and 160k followers on Instagram.
This is the audience heft that helps to get the founder’s word out there and done right and done with consistency this creates a flywheel of goodwill.
Packaging founder ideas>Drives better goodwill and startup outcomes>Attracts a larger audience and better data>Strengthens the firm’s platform.
All this is to say that the media landscape has changed beyond all recognition from the days of launch in the 80s of the “Independent Newspaper”.
Armed with the tools and the means of production, provided you have the passion and the ability to produce something interesting, you will gain an audience.
What you do with that audience is the intriguing part.
In the case of the Stebbings brothers, the audience is the outcome of finding gaps in the media landscape that if you understand the gaps and can provide something valuable, you can build both a network of connections and an audience based on your energy, POV, curiosity and ability to ask the right questions.
For A16z, they already have billions, and because of that recognize the battle in the future is that while there will be more interesting opportunities to build, there is no guarantee those founder/builders will want to be backed by a legacy VC giant.
Adding the new media arm is a defense mechanism to provide important value add that can make a critical difference to start-up success.
Lots of lessons here for those thinking of building their own personal brands and for ad agencies who have hundreds of employees creating their own content, but lack a single-minded approach and methodology that’s aligned with an agency’s brand and POV.
In short, a content machine that’s designed strategically to build network and audience.