Thread by @balajis

A solo media founder like Rogan or Mr Beast can make as much money as a strong tech founder, with significantly less managerial stress.

Tech created this ecosystem but there’s a historical cultural bias in tech towards media as unprofitable. That changed a long time ago.

Many more angels that invest in people will invest in media founders. Many traditional media people will *become* media founders.

But not necessarily big companies. Just solo individuals or small groups doing content, like Notch doing Minecraft. Because media scales like code.

Increasingly feeling like “keeping the team size as small as possible, even to one person” is the unarticulated key to making media profitable.

Substack and all the creator tools are just the start of this ecosystem.

https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1219311955674062848

The process of converting social influencers into media founders (a trend that has been going on for 10+ years at this point) will be increasingly streamlined.

V1 is link-in-bio, Substack, and sponcon.

V2 likely involves more angels & tokenization a la @tryrollhq. What else?

Why lack of awareness? Influencer monetization numbers are not as public as tech numbers.

There isn’t a TechCrunch & CrunchBase for media founders, chronicling the valuations of influencers.

But that’d be quite valuable. If you are interested in doing this, please DM with demo.

Investing in independent media founders is a critical leverage area for decentralization, and where a considerable amount of crypto winnings should go.

Why? Because decentralization isn’t just a technological phenomenon, it’s a cultural one.

The independent is more independent.

Decentralizing media means funding countless diverse influencers both in the US and around the world.

It’s how we remediate the demographic, linguistic, ideological, and intellectual non-representativeness of legacy media.

https://twitter.com/nasdaily/status/1341330491463659520

Crypto needs to go all in on working with influencers.

They distrust tech platforms as much as we distrust governments.

Of course, many people in crypto are also influencers. Crypto Twitter shows this is not a disjoint set.

And people in crypto have of course distrusted tech platforms for a while.

But this is a crucial demographic to target, to cross the chasm. Crypto tools for content creators.

A tech platform’s policy changes can be as economically impactful & arbitrary as any government.

Crypto can give influencers the tools to reach their audiences and monetize them without interference from legacy tech platforms.

The sovereign individual, the sovereign influencer.

If a nocoiner has no coins, a noinfluencer has no influence. Own a media company or be owned by one.

For every billion in valuation, a tech co should spend a few million on original content, with their own editor-in-chief. Not on PR; that’s just an interface to legacy media corporations.

Tell your own story, it’s your defense budget. Bloomberg isn’t Bloomberg without Bloomberg.