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After I published my “velocity is the new authority” essay, a reader and dear friend emailed and asked if my framework explained the fraught relationship between media and the technology ecosystem it covers. My one-word reply was “Absolutely.” And here’s why.
In “comms” across tech, startups, and the larger ecosystem, little seems to matter anymore. It’s hard to pin down anythingconcrete or meaningful. Everything is noise and nothing can be heard.
Most founders (and technology companies) treat comms like a checklist: have something new, draft a story, chase press,issue a release, share it on LinkedIn and X, maybe do a podcast tour. Others skip intermediaries and go straight to their audience. That worked when media was the gatekeeper and friction was high. Building your audience and owning your channels made sense. Today, anyone can go direct, and the noise has exploded. Rising above it gets harder every day.
Velocity is replacing authority as the organizing principle for information. You see it in the broken relationship between media and the technology ecosystem. The YouTube tech review I wrote about earlier highlights the core issue: access.
Access journalism is as old as media itself. These days though, it is table stakes. Not just in tech, but across all media. I didn’t play the access game, so I was not a preferred “leaker” for many technology companies. I got my stories the old-fashioned way. By being an annoying scoop hunter. It didn’t pan out often, but occasionally I got the big one. Like Microsoft buying Skype. It was a hard game to play. It’s even harder now.
A few months ago, I naively asked the founder of a purportedly disruptive company for an interview. I thought it would be a great interview, as he was doing something new and interesting and worth digging into. Obviously, he didn’t respond. He didn’t have to. Maybe he was worried that an old-school reporter like me would do my homework and ask basic, but tough questions. The kind of questions that used to be standard fare, but now they get you ignored.
A hundred years ago, tabloids printed whatever they were told, just to sell rags. Today it’s videos and podcasts. Don’t get me started on the “technology” ones, especially those creaming over “AI.”
Podcasters need guests. To build an audience they chase boldface names. Access depends on avoiding tough questions. Press them with unflattering ones and you get a reputation. No surprise we now have podcasters acting as mouthpieces for tech companies. The “interview” becomes a promotional vehicle. The host lobs softballs and nods along with whatever narrative the guest is spinning. Both lapse into MBA-speak. It’s an Oscar-worthy performance. The line between journalism and marketing blurs.
I don’t think this is an ethical failure; it’s structural. When your business model depends on downloads and views, you do what you must: keep cozy relationships with a small circle of founders, venture capitalists, and executives you’re supposed to cover critically.
AI podcasts are a perfect example. You hear the same talking heads saying the same things. They’re half-bullish, half-skeptical. One side sees transformation, the other disaster. As with any technology, the truth sits somewhere in the middle. What you need is contextual skepticism, technical scrutiny, and analytic rigor. That mix doesn’t exist because the system won’t support it.
There are fewer than a dozen journalists I can name-check those who don’t disappoint. Nilay Patel of The Verge for example. There are some veterans, but only a handful are newcomers. Good technology coverage needs more.
While building GigaOm, I knew we’d drown in pitch meetings without standards. I wrote a one-page guide for my writers covering startups. Beyond taking the time to understand their subject, I asked them to answer four questions before writing about a founder or a startup.
Begin with the founders. Look past LinkedIn summaries to their actual histories. Have they built and shipped real products? Do they understand the market they claim to disrupt? Are they domain experts or opportunists chasing the latest trend? And lastly, as a form of validation, who are their financial backers?
Founders were interesting only if you had enough context about the technology landscape to distinguish the novel from the incremental. You had to know whether their insight was real or just a repackaging of existing ideas with better marketing.
Investors mattered. With every deal, a firm put its reputation on the line. Their involvement signaled intent. If Sequoia or Kleiner Perkins backed a company, it meant their partners had done due diligence. The amount of capital and the stage said a lot about conviction and risk tolerance.
Assessing the market opportunity amid technology trends was the hardest part and required the most expertise. You needed to understand what was technically possible,, what the market was ready for, how the cost curves looked, andwhere the ecosystem dependencies were.
All this took time. I spent years watching markets evolve, covering hundreds of companies, and seeing patterns emerge. My understanding of technology grew through conversations with people who built it. Tony Li and Pradeep Sindhu walked me through the secrets of internet routing. From Andy Bechtolsheim and Desh Deshpande, I learned the ins and outs of switching. David Huber, the man behind Ciena, introduced me to optical networks. I learned the technology and, in turn, how to ask the right questions.
I was lucky. Back then, the internet didn’t move at neck-snapping speed.
In my VC role, I told founders to step back and think about why their stories mattered to anyone but themselves. I encouraged them to build real rather than transactional relationships with journalists, and to wait until they had something genuinely interesting to say instead of treating PR as a checklist.
It was good advice then, and it still is, in part, as a subset of a new approach. The system I described, where thoughtful storytelling and relationship-building mattered, required time on both sides.
Much like the rest of media, tech journalism, today relies on writers who lack the deep context to do the work well. They are young, overworked, pushed to churn, and don’t have time to spend weeks learning a market before covering it. You can’t learn on the job while filing three stories a day or recording several podcast episodes a month.
As I argued in my velocity piece, we now operate on vibes. When a firm like Andreessen Horowitz invests in everything at every stage, what does that signal? A16z’s backing no longer means what Sequoia’s meant in 2005, and a TechCrunch launch no longer means what it did in 2008. The technology ecosystem is noise. Its media outlets are just the outward expression of that noise.
I just read a Bloomberg piece about a startup called Upscale, which claimed it would take on Cisco and Broadcom with AI networking gear. It has raised a truckload of money and is valued in the billions, yet the story never told me the mostbasic thing: what it actually does.
The Wall Street Journal, the bastion of good financial journalism, recently spent many inches on the peccadillos of one of the founders of Thinking Machines. Thinking Machines is an AI company founded by former OpenAI employees and is now valued at $12 billion. The WSJ and a handful of other major publications covered this drama as if it were a story for the Daily Mail or Vanity Fair, yet none of them explained to readers what Thinking Machines does or why it is worth $12 billion. What is its technological edge? You know, the basic financial and technological questions most readers need forcontext.
This isn’t the first time I’ve seen empty stories dominate. In the late 1990s, the dot-com boom launched a wave of new publications, staffed by new writers. They reported fluff: financings, concepts, hires, and parties. The hard part was covering the technology and the financial realities.
We built systems that reward acceleration, and we act surprised when everything feels rushed, shallow, a little manic. The algorithm doesn’t care if something is true. It cares if it moves. Nothing moves like titillation, gossip, and startup psychodrama.
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To see what works in this environment, look at Sam Altman and OpenAI.
Sam is everywhere. Always in the media, always talking. What matters is that he’s in the conversation. People are talking about OpenAI, about him, about their vision for the future of AI. The objective is to make OpenAI synonymous with AI. Tighten the equation until, in people’s minds, OpenAI equals AI. That constant presence, that relentless visibility, lets him raise money at ungodly valuations. Everything else is tactics.
What he says doesn’t have to mean anything; it’s no surprise he’s often self-contradictory.
Take advertising as an example. In a talk at Harvard in October 2024, Sam said, “The idea of intermingling ads and AI is uniquely unsettling to me. I think ads were important to give the early internet a business model, but they do sort of somewhat fundamentally misalign a user’s incentives with the company providing the service. I view ads as a last-resortbusiness model.”
By October 2025 his tune had changed. In January 2026, ChatGPT rolled out ads. “It is clear to us that a lot of people want to use a lot of AI and don’t want to pay, so we are hopeful a business model like this can work.”
In fifteen months, he went from “uniquely unsettling” to “hopeful that a business model like this can work,” from “I hate ads” to ads running in ChatGPT. Anyone can connect the dots, but nobody does because the system doesn’t reward it.
The system rewards the next Sam interview. It seeks the sound bite that gets attention, gets views, picks up speed.Everyone covers Sam’s latest thoughts on AI, the future, and whatever else he wants to talk about that day.
You hardly see anybody connecting the dots and writing, “Here’s what Sam Altman said about advertising six months ago, here’s what he’s saying now, and here’s what that tells us about OpenAI’s actual business model versus its stated principles.” That story doesn’t get written because it requires someone to remember what was said six months ago, compare it to what is being said today, analyze the gap between rhetoric and reality, and ask why the gap exists and what it means for the company’s actual strategy.
Don’t hate the player, play the game. Like I said, velocity trumps everything.
February 1, 2026, San Francisco
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