Congrats. Give us the update. What is Upstarts Media, and what's the vision?

This week we launched Upstarts Media. It's my new tech media publication, and it's focused on the startup ecosystem from inception all the way through IPO.

What does that mean in practice? Given your background at Forbes, I imagine a good chunk of it will be written, but how are you thinking about what you want to build over time? Will it be a multi-product media arm? When we think out two, three, four, five years, what's the Upstarts vision?

The shortest answer is that after 12 years at Forbes, having a blast, running a bunch of lists like Midas and Cloud 100, and writing a bunch of cover stories, I wanted to try new things and be really close to the startup community. So at a nutshell, I want to try everything. I want to experiment. I want to build in public. We're going to screw up a lot, but we're going to ship a lot of fun things.

So we'll have it all. We'll have a newsletter that I plan to publish twice a week. We're launching a live video series through the Substack app and in the newsletter that starts next week. I'm really excited with the first speaker there. Then we're going to try a bunch of other stuff, like a weekly podcast down the road and our own events. But I really just wanted to be able to say yes to things and be close to the startup community. Even just as one day as a founder, I feel closer than ever, and it's going to be a lot of fun.

This is a good opportunity for me to click into something I've been thinking about. One of the things you and I have talked about is that out of everything you've done and worked on, startup stories were the things that inspired you the most. And like you said, maybe it was so contagious that it made you want to become a founder. Working on your own startup story right now, how has it been relative to expectations going in? Better? Worse? Crazy? Not crazy?

Suddenly I understand why VCs back startups that do a lot of basic workflow stuff, because they just solve their own annoyances. I've already found 10 of them. But it's been a lot of fun. It's great to have the buy-in of the community. A lot of folks are calling for this kind of journalism.

For the audience to appreciate, I feel like we're just in a moment in media right now where, I love my team that were at Forbes, and I think there is a lot of good coverage out there. But big publications are being pushed to cover big tech policy, folks in the White House. I think it's a very difficult environment to get a lot of that startup storytelling out there: those founder journeys, those stories that are not huge dollar amounts yet, or new technology that is just kind of weird. Those stories have always really resonated with me, and I'm so excited to be sharing those stories. In the first 24 hours, I've heard from hundreds of people who are rooting for me to do that, which is both exciting and a lot of pressure.

It's a big task. You mentioned a lot of these traditional outlets being pushed to cover big tech. Is that because of the monetization structure that's in place, or do they simply get more clicks at the end of the day because they're familiar, known companies?

It was interesting, because we've had this meta narrative of media versus tech in some sort of adversarial situation in recent years. I don't think there's anything that cynical or nefarious happening. I think it goes back to the Charlie Munger quote, or apocryphal quote: show me the incentives, I'll show you the outcomes. In this case, audiences care about big tech at the real macro standpoint. When we talk about the average American, or the hundreds of thousands of people, they want to know how tech is working in policy. They want to know what is AI at the most basic level. Then you have this audience in the technology world who care more about what startups are doing, who's ahead on a model race in LLMs, which is not something that I need to go too deep into, thankfully, with Upstarts. But there's a very different audience in the tech community.

One thing that I've always tried to do in my career is bridge those communities. A Forbes cover story, in my mind, had the amazing storytelling and inspiration of someone like Melanie Perkins at Canva, but it also could talk about how Canva was able to do well against its competitors and create a design software category. It had a lot of insights for practitioners in the startup world too. That's really my hope with Upstarts: that this is close to the community and it's reaching people who are both students and early-career folks, and then all the way to the other end of the spectrum, those VC partners and those CEOs, with a mix of different insights about the ecosystem.

You said it yourself, you were at Forbes for well over a decade. Why was now the right moment in time for you to branch out and start your own media company?

Well, if you just look at the tech ecosystem right now, we're in this crazy moment where we're seeing a flurry of new startup activity, a lot of exciting new technology, so many companies being unlocked by AI and new capabilities there, vibe coding and all that good stuff. So we're seeing a great platform moment in tech. It reminds me of those seismic moments like the iPhone getting advanced enough for the App Store, or I read about the cloud wars 10 years ago, and obviously cheap cloud computing was huge for startups. Broadly speaking, a lot of us feel we're in one of those moments right now.

And at the same time, as I noted, that really wide audience for a national publication might be skeptical of tech. It might want very different stories about technology. So I think my job is to bring some of those people in to care about technology again, think that startups can be good for the world. It's not just a startup becomes an evil creator of a doomsday AI machine. And at the same time, be chronicling this moment for the builders right alongside them too.

If you had to distill your role in this ecosystem compared to the big media outlets, is what you just mentioned at the crux of it? People like you, Eric Newcomer, and others, people I'll call independent journalists, though I don't know if you'd agree with that assessment. How do you see yourself fitting into that ecosystem, and how will you define success here?

I like independent journalists. I also think of myself as new media versus trad media. I don't know what my former colleagues would say about that, but I definitely think that's a nice way to frame it too. Eric Newcomer, Alex Kantrowitz, a lot of these independent folks, a lot of them on Substack with me, which is great. I think we are closer to our audiences. We have much more of a direct relationship with our community. I think that's very important for storytelling today because, given short attention spans, the huge amount of information available to us, and AI summaries for everything we do, that relationship is what will stay human and important.

There's a future where maybe my newsletter is just aggregated by an AI that tells you the top takeaway from 10 different newsletters. That could be devastating for my business unless you thought, "Hey, Upstarts has trusted information. It won't have every startup story, but every startup story it writes about will matter." I think that's the relationship and the resonance, and the idea that you're coming to me for curation, craftsmanship, the deep storytelling. I think that will stand the test of time. And that's why you see a lot of us going independent and trying to be that trusted person against that bigger backdrop.

I think you hit the nail on the head. We spent a lot of time talking about this at Contrary, both for our own portfolio companies and for us as a firm. One of the core things we've talked about, to your point around the advent of AI, is the increasing importance of what I'll call proprietary work: proprietary research, proprietary stories. If an AI can come in and create a pretty quick RSS feed of everything that's gone on in the news that day, the daily, easily distilled kind of news loses signal. And it makes the high-quality, bespoke written word, for the kind of work that you do or will do, all that much more valuable in a post-AI world.

I do think that is a big challenge for the Forbes, Fortune, even New York Times of the world. These places do have some really good reporters, but they also get caught in a scale and eyeballs game. That's where they got pushed by the internet economy and Google search ad revenue. And as AI is, pretty well documented at this point, messing with Google's AI search business, or at least their SEO search business, those dollar signs are going away.

It's sort of like: are you playing a scale game, or are you playing that craftsmanship game? I think we're seeing a bifurcation there, just as we're seeing in some other industries disrupted by AI too. And so I'd much rather be on the craftsmanship side than on the racing ahead of the wave, getting less value per person side of things.

You mentioned this earlier too. There's been this antagonism over the past three, four, five years between various parts of the tech industry and tech journalists. Hopefully with Upstarts, your goal is to be much more the techno-optimist, positive piece of that equation. But if we take a step back from you, Alex Konrad, what's your take on the antagonism to begin with? What do you attribute as the main cause?

I think on one level, things are naturally cyclical. When I started my career in 2010, I think tech coverage was very optimistic. TechCrunch, VentureBeat, a lot of the bloggers out there were really excited to write about underdogs and challengers, a lot like I want to do today. But then as these companies like Meta and Amazon and Google got huge and extremely influential, I think it's natural that society said, "Wait a second, what are the checks and balances in place? Who are these people who run these companies, who are arguably more powerful than most politicians in the world?" And I think it's natural that you veer toward the skepticism of, these folks are no longer the underdogs that they hope to be, or at least that they identified as.

I do think tech still has a reckoning with its own responsibilities and power. But you can do that, and you can also remember that technology is good for the world. You can also remember that startups, when executed well, can really improve our lives and our planet. I just don't think they need to be mutually exclusive. So I won't be just an unabashed cheerleader saying that tech is good all the time or hyping up some book. I'm not a VC who has investments to hype. But at the same time, I do like technology. I find it interesting. If I didn't, I wouldn't still be writing about it after 15 years.

So for me, it's about being empathetic and fair, understanding that things could go wrong or that startups are really hard. I'm going to be living that firsthand, and I'm going to be writing for the good of the ecosystem. I think that's the key for me. I will skew optimistic in the sense that I like technology. But if I think that a story that could be more uncomfortable is good for the ecosystem, I'm not going to pull my punches and shy away from it. But I may be doing it for the good of others, not just because I want to get notoriety or go viral.

Last question. Are you able to share who's up first with Upstarts? Who's the first piece about, or what do we have first on the docket? Or is that still an unannounced piece of news?

I can give a good clue. In working on Upstarts, I did audience calls with 25 early signups across CEOs, founders, and VCs to understand what they wanted from me, to try to get a sense of product-market fit here, just like any startup should. And I used a really cool new note-taking tool to transcribe those chats, organize them really well, and give me insights about what people really wanted from my work. That got me thinking, "Hey, this tool is pretty popular right now. It could be a fun first interview to talk about." So you can expect that next week. And then you can also expect a video with a really cool New York-based creative AI company CEO. I'll leave it at that.