AI isn’t the next mobile or PC revolution. It’s the Industrial Revolution 2.0—and that means incumbents are positioned to win big against startups.

Here's how I see the impact of AI on startups as a venture-backed Founder and former history teacher 👇 1/ During the Industrial Revolution, steam power transformed industries by making existing operations vastly more efficient.

Who won? Incumbents.

- They had the factories.
- They had the supply chains.
- They had the scale.

Startups of the era couldn’t compete.

Great products outlive their origin stories.

My favorite example? Flintstones Vitamins.

Here's the story of one of the most successful pharmaceutical products of all time 👇💊🦕 The Flintstones hasn't been on TV for decades. The original run ended almost 60 years ago.

But their gummy vitamins are still in the top-selling kids vitamins, year after year. Adults love them too.

In 2020, the sales of Flintstones vitamins hit $100M for the first time.

Why?

The Barstool deal is the talk of Twitter.

The company was sold for $500M to Penn in 2020.

Three years later, Portnoy acquired 100% of the brand back for $0.

But that's not the whole truth. Here's what really happened 👇 Penn announced today they became the official sports book of ESPN.
ESPN gets 117M unique visitors/month vs BarstoolSports get 8M.

In terms of search traffic, it's no where close (see pic below).

ESPN is goliath and Barstool is David.

This is a huge win for Penn.

Vice was supposed to be the next CNN.

At their peak, they had a $5.7B valuation and turned down an acquisition play from Disney.

Now, Vice is the latest new media group prepping for bankruptcy.

What happened to this media giant? A few thoughts. The original vision for Vice was something a lot of people believed in.

I admired their content studio and their focus on untold, overlooked news stories.

But what went wrong to destroy billions in value?

In 2016, Formula One was a struggling racing organization in desperate need of a cash infusion.

Now, with the Miami Grand Prix just days away, the group has reached a valuation of over $17 billion.

Here's how one great story turned a brand in crisis into a media juggernaut 🧵 By 2016, Formula One viewership had already been in steady decline for years.

A company called Liberty Media saw a huge opportunity outside the European market and they decided to acquire the F1 brand at a generous $8B valuation.

Liberty then set their sights on the U.S.

🚨Announcement 🚨

Kylie and beauty products. Mr. Beast and burgers. Bloomberg and the terminal.

What would you launch if you had 1M+ executives and founders in your audience?

This was a question we asked ourselves from Day 1 at Workweek.

Today, we announce our newest venture. Our mission at Workweek is to create a new blueprint for how creators and media companies operate.

Media companies' business models are designed to make executives and sales leaders the highest-paid employees, not the content creators.

We're changing that.

One of the oldest media businesses that's still killing it: Hallmark

How have they thrived for 113 years?

The answer is Cultural Liquidity “Cultural liquidity" is a term coined by one of the smartest people I know, Henry Ault @JHCA1, to represent the amount of currency you’ve built by being able to be at the forefront of culture.

Hallmark has been building their cultural liquidity since its earliest days.

In the late 80s, an up-and-coming comedian named Jerry Seinfeld pitched a "show about nothing" to NBC.

30 years later, Netflix paid over $500 million to stream the show for 5 years.

Here's the story of Seinfeld: Seinfeld was originally supposed to be a sitcom about how a comedian comes up with material.

But the "show about nothing" concept surprisingly took off - though not right away.

NBC initially ordered 4 episodes and aired them in July 1989.

Season 2 was picked up and did just ok

Is the Creator Economy cratering?

Creator economy platforms that raised millions are pivoting and struggling to raise more money.

A few thoughts: The elephant in the room:

Almost every creator economy platform is struggling to scale.

They almost all built their business model around lowering the barrier to help more people become creators.

more creators = more subscribers = more revenue.

Red Bull is an energy drink company that sold 9.8 billion drinks last year

So why does an energy drink company spend $30 million on a space launch?

To understand why, let's take a closer look at Red Bull: Red Bull is marketing company that happens to sell an energy drink, not the other way around. Here’s what their marketing consists of:

1. Targeting

2. Publicity stunts

3. Sports teams

4. Events

5. Sponsors

Season 1 of the Office had pretty bad ratings

It ranked #102 out of all TV series in the 2004-05 television season and was nearly cancelled.

Here's why it wasn't: The Office starred Michael Scott, played by Steve Carell.

When NBC signed Carell to the series, he was relatively unknown.

He had achieved some success as a correspondent on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but was far from a household name.

This 19-yr old dev is making millions on Roblox.

And he’s not the only teen making bank.

Here are a couple of success stories from the Roblox ecosystem: Alex Balfanz started playing Roblox as a kid.

And within a few years of playing, he started developing games. His first couple of games had some success, and he made a few thousand dollars.

Mr Beast revolutionized YouTube.

He first went viral when he gave $10k to a homeless person.

Now, he’s on his way to being the first YouTube billionaire: Jimmy Donaldson (Mr Beast) became obsessed with YouTube at the age of 13.

He knew he wasn’t like the other kids.

YouTube was all he cared about.

7 billion dollars, 6 actors, and millions of raving fans.

The Batman franchise is one of the greatest franchises of all time.

Here’s the story on why it has succeeded and a prediction on where it’s going: Batman was popularized in the late 80's and 90's with Michael Keaton playing Batman.

He was followed by Val Kilmer, George Clooney, Christian Bale, Ben Affleck, and finally Robert Pattinson.

We’re at the 30 year anniversary since Power Rangers graced the US. Here’s the story of how their 800+ episodes galvanized America: Haim Saban was in Japan watching the Super Sentai series in the 80’s.

A group of teenagers with superpowers would fight villains and save the world. Saban dreamed of bringing this to America.

Elon Musk is buying Twitter (maybe) for $40B+

And Bezos bought the Washington Post for $300M+.

What you didn't know: 8 other billionaires have bought giant media companies.

Here're the 10 billionaires who’ve bought media companies (in order of net worth): Elon Musk

Net worth: $268B

Purchase price: $44B for Twitter in 2022. If the deal closes, that is.

During the first season of Friends, the 6 cast members each made $22,500 per episode

Here’s how they used a rare negotiating technique to start earning $20 million per year EACH - decades after the show stopped production Friends started in 1994 with a 24 episode season.

The 6 main cast members each earned $22,500/episode, or $540,000 total for the season.

But Jennifer Aniston and David Schwimmer emerged as the 2 main stars after season 1, and each were given $40,000 per episode for season 2.

This week, Workweek creators total newsletter subscribers crossed 100,000 and then quickly 110,000.

It's a huge moment for our team.

But not because of the subscribers.

Here's why this is special for us and how we're comparing to other newsletter co's👇 First, you have to know how newsletter businesses work.

Newsletter subscribers are a signal. But that signal can be misleading.

There are a few reasons why...

Not many can say they’ve bootstrapped a media business to $100 million in annual revenue.

But if anyone was going to do it, it was Sean Griffey, CEO & co-founder of Industry Dive.

Never heard of Industry Dive? You're in for a treat.

Here’s how he did it (1/x): Instead of targeting one market, Industry Drive did it differently: They created publications specific to one industry, dozens of times over.

Instead of building one mass-appeal publication, Griffey built several publications that were valuable to a smaller subset of the market.

Out of the top 100 publishers in the world by revenue, none of them were created in THIS CENTURY

This is emblematic of the media industry's creativity problem.

Here’s how media companies can get creative: Out of the top 10 media companies, only 1 of the top 10 was created this century (shout out to Netflix)

Now, I know computers are a more recent invention, but in comparison, 3 of the top 10 software companies by revenue were launched within the last decade.

Newsletters are the highway of a business.

They enable you to direct your audience in a controlled way.

Secondary products are off ramps.

Each off ramp is a new franchise of revenue opportunity, but relys on the hwy to scale.

No one does this better than @APompliano

🧵👇🏼 Pomp has been growing his free newsletter quickly.

From December to March he has added ~500 subscribers a day.

Growing the newsletter can be his primary focus because it is the heart of the Pomp ecosystem.

How big is the ecosystem? Bigger than you think.