I Am Early, and I Am Building a Media Company

When people call you crazy, there are two possibilities. You may be ahead of the curve and working on a need the market has not recognized yet, or you may actually be crazy. Larry Ellison has made that point in interviews, and I keep coming back to it because it is a useful test.

The test is evidence. If the numbers keep moving, "crazy" may just mean early. If the numbers do not move, you are only loud.

At this point, I know I am early. I took my channel from zero to 30,000 subscribers since the beginning of the year. Thirty thousand is small next to the entire internet. It is meaningful for deep-tech journalism, where the audience is narrow and the subject matter is difficult.

Yesterday, I sold about $50,000 of my digital product. I have never bought an ad, so the sales were organic. Eight months ago, that level of interest seemed impossible. These numbers validate demand. The company still has to be built.

Followers are not a show

One of the most useful critiques in my bookmarks came from Riley Brown, who warned me not to confuse a large follower count with having the best AI news show. You can collect attention by posting updates. A show has to make people return.

That distinction matters. The viewer has to care about how technology becomes power, how people use that power, and how they hide what they are doing. There are not millions of people waiting for that conversation. Thirty thousand people still showed up.

The channel has done well enough to validate the idea. It has raised the next questions. I do not know exactly which viewer segment will become the core audience, and I have pieces of a few different markets. That uncertainty is part of the work.

The Ed Zitron video made it visible. I had to turn off comments after receiving violent threats, including people talking about my family. I can take criticism aimed at me. My family is not making YouTube videos, and I do not feature them in the work. Dragging them into it crosses a line.

The audience wants a person

As Greg Isenberg put it, the more AI floods everything, the more people will want real human connection. I think that is right, with one adjustment: the audience needs somebody identifiable, somebody whose judgment it can evaluate.

The thing that makes a media company interesting is the person inside it. People connect with flaws, contradictions, bad judgment, apologies, and the occasional public mistake. A polished avatar may look safer, but it gives the audience nothing to recognize.

Lyndon B. Johnson is one of my favorite examples. He used racist language in private and still became one of the most consequential presidents for civil rights in American history. That racism does not disappear because he passed major civil rights laws. The contradiction is the point. Pretending otherwise makes history less honest.

I am contradictory too. I am imperfect, and I am probably a special type of crazy. Most people have some of that in them, then sand it off and call the polished result journalism.

Hunter S. Thompson understood the alternative. The core of Gonzo journalism is putting yourself into the story and into the scene. You do not pretend to be a passive observer floating above the people and events you describe.

That is what I see in a lot of tech media. The host cracks a few jokes, performs a mild opinion, and keeps enough distance to remain acceptable to every guest and sponsor. The result may be clean, but it is hard to care about.

I had a public exchange on X with Rahul Sidhu of Flock Safety, whose company makes the surveillance systems I was criticizing. I got heated and called him a retarded cunt. I apologized because I should have kept my temper.

That moment was more revealing than a polished interview. A person with a large audience can lose his temper, recognize the mistake, and own it. The audience can decide what to do with that information. That is entertainment, but it is also a form of trust.

Conflict created only for shock value gets boring. Conflict that comes from a real disagreement, a real mistake, or a real human reaction has a different texture.

The work has to survive me

I am building a media company. I have said that in multiple places, and I do not make a big show of it because the work matters more than the announcement.

The company will need other hosts. I will keep my own show, but I have to think in broader lanes: AI tools that ordinary people can use, labor arbitrage that displaces workers through H-1B, CPT, and OPT, and the larger question of who gets to make decisions about technology. Some lanes will stay with me. Others should belong to the right person when I meet them.

I want to cover the person whose AI project moved to India while his visa clock ran down. I want to cover the employee who gets told the system is efficient while he absorbs the cost. The audience is made of people who have to keep showing up after somebody else's strategy changes.

That is why the channel has been broad from day one. I built it as a platform that can hold several shows and several ways of looking at the world.

I have the background to do that work. I have been a manager, a software and community director, a teacher, and an academic. I am better at mentoring than teaching, and those are different skills even though I could not always articulate the difference.

What I know how to do is push people without browbeating them. I can help somebody find capability they did not know they had, then get them moving. I have done that in classrooms, on Zoom calls, and during customer deployments, and it remains some of the most satisfying work I have ever done.

I want the opportunity without surrendering the point

The email from a16z New Media may become a call. It may go nowhere. It is still worth thinking through because a16z will not be the first media outfit or financier to notice what I am doing, and it will not be the last.

Funding, publicity, or an expansion deal might accelerate the company. Today, I can build without any of them. I have optionality, and optionality is valuable when you are still building the thing.

If somebody says, "Here are our terms. This is your one shot. Come work this way," I can say no. I want to do this full time, but I do not want to return to a regular day job inside somebody else's idea of what my journalism should be.

There will be setbacks. I will have weak moments, second-guess the plan, and think about the thing that did not work. That is noise. The work is still there the next morning.

I am going to succeed at this. The shape may change, the timeline may change, and the people around it may change. The central decision is already made.

The audience is looking for a person who will stay on the record.

Find the rest of the work at drjoshcsimmons.com/links.