Usually, the last thing we’d see a still-in-stealth startup do is speak with reporters. Not because they don’t want to (getting traction before launch can be extremely powerful) but because they don’t have anything to say that won’t hurt the launch story.
Hello, and welcome to the April edition of the Tell NY Dispatch! This time, we’re diving into what might just be the article of the year (although we remind ourselves it is still just April), how to break into the news cycle and what everyone pretends to like - conferences. Buckle up.
I hate jumping into debates late, but as Zhou Enlai supposedly once said (when asked about the impact of the French Revolution over 200 years later), sometimes it’s "too early to say". So here we are, after one of the most intense funding cycles in years. Over the past few months alone, we've worked on dozens of funding announcements and every one of those announcements ran into a media environment that looks very different from one or two years ago. And somewhere in that stretch, a familiar debate resurfaced: are funding rounds still newsworthy?
OpenAI acquiring TBPN is not a small or routine move, and there’s no clean precedent for it. They didn’t partner with the show or sponsor it or “explore content together”;They bought it outright. TBPN is one of the fastest-growing shows in tech media - a daily live talk show built around fast, informal conversations with founders, operators, and investors. It’s not trying to be traditional journalism, which is exactly why it works. It feels like being in the room while people who actually shape the industry talk to each other without overproduction or heavy filtering. It already has a real audience, real momentum, and a real business behind it - so OpenAI made a deliberate decision to acquire a platform that already has attention and access to the exact ecosystem they operate in.