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.
Hello everyone, and welcome to our March newsletter. Let us start by saying - what. a. month. Between a $32 billion acquisition (s/o Wiz!) and over 15 company launches and funding announcements in the weeks leading up to the RSA cybersecurity conference, things have been pretty wild. I’m sure some of you are still recovering your inboxes after RSA - we’ll keep this opening short, as there’s quite a lot to cover. So, let’s dive right in!
Every year around this time, as the Oscar winners are announced and everyone suddenly becomes a film critic for 48 hours, I’m reminded of something we don’t talk about enough (or talk about all the time, depending on what your job is): campaigns.