YouSaid · the spoken record

Matthew Panzarino

lines on the record: 67
first: 2023-09-19
most recent: 2023-09-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Probably not I need a break for media. Media probably needs a break from me. It's not like I would object, but I think maybe I want to try something a little different for a while.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I do not know. As of currently, the public stance is that I'm doing some consulting for Yahoo, which obviously includes landing some disrupt for them next week. So I'll be doing that. That's what's next for me immediately. And then long term, I don't know. I want to build something new. I want to work on something. I'd love to kind of create something or help somebody create something that is fresh and that I think is clever. And that's about as far as I've taken the thought. In Media or not.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can't get Yeah, I mean, we've definitely put some stuff out there, but obviously clearly labeled and really specifically about like, this is what we're writing about, you know? And honestly, I don't know that it's not like I have any sort of theological thing, right? It's just, I think it behooves ourselves to value, as you said, like the human quotient. Why else are we here? And then, you know, if there comes a time to utilize it to amplify things or to use it in a fun or clever, interesting way, cool. That's fun. Do it. You know, who cares? So it's not like some sort of like theological anti-AI, you know, thing. It was just like, no, our job is to write the stuff. So we're going to write the stuff, you know.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Although our policy is slightly different, which is just be honest, like I personally have published AI generated copy onto the Verge. I just put a lot of words around it saying, look at the scarbage. I can't get anybody to be outraged about it. It's driving me crazy. It would go bonkers if people were more outraged about it.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No. Yeah, our internal policy, which I think we published externally at some point, but I can't remember. But just policy is like, hey, mess with these tools as much as possible. You need to understand them, right? You need to understand what they do, what they don't do, how deep they go, what the capabilities are, what the possibilities are, but we don't put any AI generated words on TechCrunch, period, you know, nor do we even use them to generate story ideas or headlines or any of that stuff. It's all meat space all the way down for now anyway.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Telling people something they don't know, and they come to you as a primary source, who cares, you know, whatever AI does with it after that. If you're generating original thought, right, endlessly and fresh information, then the remixing of it is this sort of like non-entity to you. Now, obviously, that does torpedo all of the businesses that were in the business of re-reporting and repackaging and taking that from. And much leaner, and like that's just the way that it works now, right? Is that it's five to ten people that really obsess about a thing that run a several million dollar business about X, right? And that's it, you know, and like that, that's one shape I could see it taking.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They haven't raised any more capital after their initial raise. They cover like Congress via newsletter, right? Like what happened in the halls of Congress today? Very specific, right? Very specific audience. That kind of thing is the thing we're going to be seeing more of. Specific audiences with specific needs being addressed by people that know all of the memes that they know, right? that are up to the moment with a thing that is happening with that you know particular area of obsession and that are willing to take the conversation further from there tell them something they don't know about that thing i think that is the power of that and it is forward looking it is of the moment so inherently at least now it sidesteps the whole gen AI model scraping thing right because all of those models are two years old right now and even if they get to a few months old or even a few minutes old”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I am not going to couch this in terms of what would I do if I ran TechCrunch. Totally unfair to Connie and not my job. However, if I was to say run a media company, XYZ, and I was trying to determine what my path would be forward, I think niche media is going to be the thing that survives this next burst of energy. I think people value focused information from obsessives, people that genuinely go to sleep thinking about something, wake up thinking about it, and are willing to put in the effort to be at the point of inflection with their audience constantly. That is tiresome work. It is exhausting work, but it's also exciting work if it's the thing you're truly obsessed with. So we're seeing publications like, you know, Punchbowl, they're doing really well. I think they're profitable. I don't know exactly what they're, I don't know anything about their revenue, but I think that they're doing well.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's already interest in this thing. They're going to find it because you're going to deliver some more value. That is a distribution channel that feels like it's going to change, right? I think most media companies are existentially dependent on Google in a way that they're only just realizing now because of generative AI. Then generative AI itself, media companies that care less about anything but traffic are already deploying it basically to arbitrage search results and get traffic for their crappy ads. That's two trends that are just Those are freight trains pointed at each other and the resulting explosion is going to wipe out an entire generation of media companies I think. How do you see that? If you were going to be running TechCrunch for the next couple of years, how would you manage those two things?”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Makes money for sure. TechCrunch Plus is making more and more money every day, which is great. You know, all of these things are functioning businesses, right? TechCrunch is a functioning working business that is great, you know, that works well. However, advertising revenue is important to a publication, right? In this current environment. That is balanced that you'll have to strike. And so that's her job going forward is to figure out ways to twiddle those dials to make sure that the traffic keeps growing, but that if you want to emphasize original reporting, you have to by nature understand that original means new and new generally means you got to convince people to be interested, right? Yeah. That's it.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Writing about things nobody's ever heard about. And so traffic has always been tough, right? Like it's hard. And we've done well over the years and we've grown significantly, which is a testament to everybody's ability on the TechRebred staff to get people excited about this thing they've never heard of, right? Or at least help them to understand that they should be interested in it. And that's the balance, right? And that's the balance you'll have to strike all of that. The thing that will be pivotal to this is, and this is her job now, thankfully, is to make sure that she has alignment all the way up to the top of the business stack, you know, to the CEO that if TechCrunch's job is to do original reporting and tell people about things they've never heard about, which is always been a primary part of its job, if not the job, traffic has got to be part of the conversation. We got to talk about this, this like, hey, traffic may grow slower. It may be lower. It may be whatever, but we'll provide value in these other ways, right? And because disrupt makes money, right? Advertising, yes.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's for her to decide and define. And I wouldn't want to walk over her on any of that stuff. I think that I will speak on a trend basis. I think all of us always struggle with this idea that if you want to generate traffic, a large portion of that traffic is going to come from stories that have already broken. Simple, right? Like if your job is to generate attention, then something people already know about that they're searching for more information about is an easy win on the traffic front. I don't know, you know, Instagram launch is a thing or requires a thing or whatever. And we didn't break this story, but we bring, say, original analysis to the story. You know, obviously we would never just pair it somebody else's reporting. We would want to add reporting and kind of write. If you're going to do that kind of work, you're going to generate traffic because people already know what that thing is. But ironically, TechCrench is in the business.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think that's it. There's nothing deeper really behind it. There is good people in place. Like, there's always another crisis, right? There's always another foundation level crisis coming around the bend. And there were so many of those. You only have to look back a couple of years. Okay, COVID, like, oh, crud, you know, we got to do virtual events all of a sudden. How are we going to turn an enormous 10,000-person in-person event into a virtual one? The COVID thing, there's acquisitions. There's been three. It's constant pushes of the reset button, right? Where I'm like, cool, cool, cool, cool. And there's a reset. No, no, hold on. Let me figure this out. Let me help, you know, let me make sure this lands correctly, all of that. And then I finally got to the point where I was like, okay, you know, like this is the moment if I don't do it now. And I used the 10-year anniversary of my joining as a sort of excuse to throw myself out of the nest. It was one of those things.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. So, and that meant continuity, like continuity of understanding what TC was, what it is, what its role is, the balance, as you mentioned before, between like getting snowblown by all these, you know, smart young, brazen people all building technology and also yet saying, but we retain optimism, you know, that some of this stuff is going to be really cool and clever and world-changing in a positive way. And so skepticism, not cynicism, you know, taking that through, you know, pulling that through line all the way through the years, the eight to ten years of service. Like right now, the senior leadership of Tech Orange that I'm leaving behind at the top has like 100 years of TechCrunch experience. It's pretty crazy, right? Like it's a lot of tenure there. And I think that's what maintains the culture.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so I was willing to sort of put in that sweat. But the regrets that I do have are all the things we could have done, you know, that's the regret, you know. But it was only able to do it really, really, really because we have a long, unusually long tenured team. You know, a lot of people had been there eight years, 10 years, 12 years, which is crazy in media, completely unheard of. I mean, not completely, but you know what I mean? It's rare.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like that labor I viewed as part of the job absolutely did limit, I think, the fun bits for me. I would have loved to have done a lot more, launched a lot more. Like there's so many things I wanted to launch and do and create and, you know, help this team do, but I understood that my role, if I didn't do it, nobody was going to do it. Like if I didn't do it, if I said yes, they would have just rolled right over the rest of it, right? And I think that's, and people would have left, whatever. I'm not saying people would have just said, yo, okay, yeah, whatever. But it would have ruined the thing that existed.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Pushed and pulled by these billion dollar flips, you know, these acquisitions by much larger corporations, to which Techranch was essentially like a drop of sweat rolling off the back of an animal. They were like, what is this thing? But at the same time, the brand halo was super strong. And so there was the temptation to be the person who did the big thing with TechCrunch. And by this, I mean the people above us, right? And, you know, I had good partners over the years, thankfully, in our business side. We were able to fend off a lot of that with a lot of very long memos, maybe some threats, maybe some, you know, like very, very polite, very straightforward threats. But it is honestly a miracle that it exists the way it does now. 100% credit that to, well, I will take some small credit in that I was happy to spend the sweat and blood that it took to protect it over time. That was fine by me, right?”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And, you know, though, I think one of the only reasons it didn't happen to us is because we were willing to sort of leverage their fear, I guess, is the word. And I don't mean fear in some sort of weird way. It's like a godly fear. They're like, ah, you know, like, what will they write about us? Like, what will they say about us if we make them do this, right? And I was happy to utilize that, right? It's not like it had any really hateful relationships. And honestly, everybody was, like, I liked him where I'm strong. I think he's a great salesman and a really smart guy. And I liked a lot of the people. But the architectures around those things, remember, we're being like.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Stuff when I worked at AOL, the phrase that we always used was Steve Jobsquid, it was the bozo explosion. It was just a lot of people who had an idea and they could glue it to our thing without any understanding of our thing. And we'd be like, no, just because it's a big audience doesn't mean they're just going to do whatever thing that you think is going to happen here. And that will actually over time dilute the brand and remove the audience, which”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They get it right because there were a lot of previous owners of this, and honestly, nobody was malicious. I have to say this. It was never like any weird cackling villain above us in the corporate architecture of like AOL or Oath or Verizon or whatever that was like finally we get to mess with Tekaj. It was it never felt like that. 100% the malaise of Big Corp.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and you know, It's a funny thing because when you have a bit of leverage and a bit of clout and are able to exercise your leverage to fight off bad ideas and all of that stuff, it's gratifying, but it's also exhausting, right? It becomes like a good portion of the job. And I am just to be really clear, like the current owners of TechCrunch are actually really smart and understand the value of it. The CEO Jim Lanzone not only has led a couple of really big media turnarounds, but also launched his company at Disrupt. So he knows exactly the value of what TC has for the industry. But I'm definitely commenting on previous. First of all, they haven't really been around long enough to screw anything up, but I don't think they are. I think they view this as a growth opportunity for TC. It's one of the reasons why I'm so happy to be in this moment stepping away. Because it's like, okay, finally, like people.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How do you give access to that information to everyone? Our ambitions for that product and for other things that we launched over the years were, just to be frank, like severely curtailed by the fact that the various owners of Tech Crunch over the years didn't really want to invest in it in the ways that we wanted to. They wanted to invest it in weird, trendy ways, which you and I both have seen all of those trends come and go. I would say what you and I talk about the most.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Advice stuff Like we either interview and do our taste thing or bring in experts to write about operational stuff. Because if you want to drill back to the earliest days of us discussing this from the editorial side, you know, the business side, of course, very straightforward. Like we need recurring revenue. How do we generate that, right? And my job was like, okay, how do we do that? But actually make a good product for our readers, right? You know, not just sell them on something that's worthless. The whole original conversation was There are a ton of startups, a ton of founders that are outside of”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is Nell rebranded as TechCrunch Plus? We got to get our brand anchor. No, no, that's totally fine. That branding itself tells a story, right? Because I think initially we view this as extra tech crunch, right? Like that was the thing. Extra crunch. And the extra tech crunch was what job could we do for readers that was essentially self-funded by the reader, right? Like they're subscribing. That is the recurring revenue that drives this product. And eventually we want it to grow, obviously, to be more. TechRench Plus these days is a mixture of analysis of industries that we view as kind of important and compelling and pivotal at the moment. We do have some reporters writing about venture specific stuff there as well because, you know, TechCrunch is sort of like the ultimate navel gazing publication. Our whole job is to go inwards more, right? And so a little bit about the architecture of venture. But then also important industries like climate tech and sustainability and that sort of thing. But the content that does the best on TechRange Plus is still operational.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember talking to you about it at launch at the idea there was there was a need in the market for information for people building startups. I think you told me that the first product that clicked for you was reviews of like office furniture companies because there was just none of this information out in the world. That was Genesis. Where has ExtraCrunch landed now?”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of really. My friend Casey Newton is fond of saying that anybody can get traffic and it is impossible to build an audience. And that's the thing, right? The taste you are describing requires you to have a point of view and stay focused on it instead of doing what people want to hear. There's a lot of wreckage in the ravine over the past decade in media, right? You and I have lived through maybe too much, like maybe too many changes. TechCrunch has, right, you've done a few things that are different. You launched a paid tier with Extra Crunch.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Steve Jobs as editor type thing if you want to go there, right? And that's, I think, is the important bit that I think a lot of these places miss. They viewed the media as the easy part and the money is the hard part when in fact many times it's the other way around. Like, you know, any media company can succeed if you apply money in the appropriate way. Unfortunately, most people don't want to hear that the appropriate way is a lot of people, a lot of really good people, you know, like that's what drives media.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Having a honing edge to pull out the truth. This is you and I both know editing, right? This is the editorial process, right? And like, that's what a lot of these places lacked is like they viewed editing. As a job, as putting things in the right package, but when, in fact, editing is all about taste and curating, like a curatorial force”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thing happens with stories on the pages of Verge, Tekrench, Times, other places like that, that that's what brings the excitement. When you're reading this story, you're like, what's going to happen next? Like, what did they tease out of them? That they didn't want to say or weren't ready to say, but they're like, fuck it, I'm going to say it. I believe it, you know? Like, what truth did you draw out of them? And it's not about a gotcha. It's about like.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The VC apparatus and the whole universe there that has its own momentum and so much money and so much power and all of this, they tried to spin up media. Right, they went through a whole era of spinning up their own publications because they wanted to go direct. They wanted to talk directly. And I didn't begrudge them. I don't care. Would I read it? I don't know, you know. It's weird how much they don't realize that the excitement and energy that comes from reading an article on a place like TechCrunch or The Verge or any place like that is the friction. Like the sparks that are flying between a person whose job is to be healthily oppositional to a person that is trying to tell their narrative right and that honing bit is what's exciting. It's like, you know, you mentioned disrupt, like the battlefield is exciting because it's actually real. Like we pick these companies and then throw them to the wolves and we tell the investors, you can ask anything you want. Like there's no glad handing. There's no like, it's not a pantomime. It's probably one of the last real startup competitions on the planet. A lot of the other ones are just really, really entertainment-based, right? That kind of...”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like, I'll give you the example, the external example would be definitely a big trend towards, hey, we need to own the narrative because the mainstream media is just not getting how transformative tech is, and they just don't get it, right? They don't get us and they don't get our world, whatever. TechCrunch has always dodged that a little bit because we do put in the effort to get to the white paper. We write a lot about APIs to understanding that stuff. And they know that we grok that. But we have not been wholly immune, right? We've kind of been swept into the same bucket many times over the years of like the media that just doesn't get it, right? Like that kind of universe. To counter that, I say.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Storytelling, right? That's the buzzword, right? Storytelling is super important to an early company or any company. However, when it comes time to like fund media or invest in media or understand that the expense of media is almost wholly people, like if you look at the P&L of a media organization, the top line expense is always people, right? Unless you're doing something funky, right?”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Recruiting, additional funding, and early adopters, right? All of those things. And I think that valuable audience is the thing that draws people to us, but it is also like the danger, right? As a publication, you can be very easily seduced by this like, oh, hey, if I feed this audience, like, you know, I can feed them anything, they'll eat it because they believe us. But I think that's why, like, and we mentioned earlier, like ebbs and flows, like there were definitely periods of time where people were like, don't talk to Tech Crunch, don't talk to any media or whatever, you know, and stories got a little bit thinner and harder to tease out because there was a lot of mandates about talking to media and all that stuff. But the fact is people come around. They value of narrative is a weird one because I think almost anybody that you talk to will be willing to ascribe a lot of value to it. Oh, yeah, narrative's super important. Oh, yeah. Storytelling.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody does want attention from TechCrunch because, like, we don't have the largest audience in the world, right? For sure. But our audience is extremely high honey. It's like thick and sticky with all of the stuff that these folks want.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To pull this back, right? And that's like I usually would write an editorial note. It varied one a week was for a long time, and then it was like, okay, one every couple of weeks because we have a lot of people who have been with TechCrunch a long time and they don't need to hear from me that much, you know, it was kind of wild. But you basically put out these memos and these notes and have live discussions with your people that help you to tweak that mix and tweak that balance of like, okay, are we being too access driven on this? Are we not being proactive enough, you know, reaching out and”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's always dials, right? The mix of editorial content from like, oh, this is a funding story to this is just a growth story to this is a story of something going awry. Like those dials are always twiddleable, right? And you have to be. As an EAC, I think a lot of times, depending on the type of personality that you have as a person, right? Because you are just a person embodying a role, right? And the idea that you are able to set an editorial policy around the mixture of like access-driven stories versus non or funding driven stories versus broader text stories or whatever, that you can set some sort of policy and let it ride for any amount of time is like hubris. It's crazy to think that. You have to constantly have your hands on the dial 24-7. You're looking at the mix of stories hitting the site. You're looking at the editorial calendar, and you're kind of balancing that out and saying like, okay, look, we need to.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TyCrunch has a really unique role in this ecosystem. Do you think that that's been in balance? Do you think that you see it differently over time or do you think it ebbs and flows and you have to correct it?”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The Times can do that, right? We don't need your participation. We're going to go and just do a bunch of reporting every now and again, the Verge is pretentious enough to say we can do that. And I think that's often when we do our best work. Like I fundamentally think access is poison. And I think a lot of our editorial ethos stems from that. We have a lot of access. But I think, you know, I tell this is just two editors in chief doing their own sayings all the time. My saying to my staff is the less you need it, the more you get, right? Like, Fundamentally, the less you need the access, the more it will be bestowed upon you because they want their side of the story told, basically.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is fine. I mean, obviously, we'll reach out and we'll talk to you. It's like, hey, you're not going to stop us from writing about you. So the participation part of it is 100% your choice. And we don't, you know, there's never any feeling of like penalizing anybody for making that choice. Who cares? I get it.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who tells your story is a choice, right? And it can be, a valid choice is we're going to tell our own story and not let anybody else ever tell it. But the fact is at some point your narrative will become the property of the public, of other people, right? And so you can choose to say at the earliest stages we're going to write our own narrative and control our own narrative. The conundrum is if you're successful, your company is going to be scalar. That narrative is going to be the property of hundreds, thousands or millions of people, especially if it's a consumer-facing company, right? It's an interesting choice that they go through to figure out why they're choosing not to talk to press or why they're choosing not to have somebody else tell their narrative. You have to be really sure of that. And I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I don't really care. We can talk to you now. We can talk to you later. We can write about you without your participation.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and most of us never really talk about it that much because we're like, whatever, we got other things to do than to crow about this. But that is the fact that the people that are the most ardent about people not needing the media are the people who are in our inbox the most and texting and being like, oh, you got to look at these people. It's so good. It stands out. But the fact is, it's like”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely, there is an ebb and flow to that that can ride on public sentiment. It can ride on trend thinking amongst PR professionals and comms professionals. The people that whose responsibility is to build the narrative of the company from inside the company, it can definitely ride on their kind of whims. And then, of course, the big thinkers in the tech industry are like, oh, you don't need comps, go direct, or you don't need publications, go direct, all that stuff. It can go in waves for sure.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it has. I mean, I think taste comes in to a lot of that. You have to just build your sense of taste over time as the fire hose got larger and larger. I mean, as much attention as was given TechCrunch in the early days now that there are thousands of companies being founded every quarter, all of those want coverage in TechCrunch. And it's not aggrandizement, right? This is not some sort of like patting ourselves on the back. It's like it's literal. Like all of them want it. But I will say It goes in waves.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back talking about the ideas of storytelling, narrative, and importantly, access One of the things I would call out in the past decade, right, is going direct. I hear this from founders all the time. I certainly hear it from VCs all the time. You don't need the media. Go direct. Find the audience. Tell your own story. And then the flip side of that that I see from my vantage point is running a large outlet is you kind of need a story to validate some of what you're saying. Like just putting the logo of a big publication on your website means something to a lot of people. other person wrote about us And it kind of doesn't matter who you can go pay someone to pay Forbes to do it doesn't matter you get the logo did TechCrunch participate in that more or less this time went on because in the beginning the only outlet that was covering any of these companies was TechCrunch right so it was the default and the early TechCrunch was I mean it was a spray and prey of press releases almost and that is just dramatically changed over time”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Without PR teams, you know, that are just coming to chat about this thing that they're doing that they're super hype about. You know, what are the things we can talk about that are too soon so that over the next year people have this reference point looking back and going, oh yeah, they were like, oh, they were on stage of disrupt. Or we can at least remind them through marketing. Oh, yeah, you know, we talked about these folks at disrupt that kind of set the tone for this universe. In some ways, it's always reflective as well, right? Some of the big, bigger names that come to the stage, it's going to be reflective in nature. How did you get here? What's your big learnings from XYZ? People like to hear that stuff. But then the bulk of the programming everywhere else, besides that stage, was about setting the tone for what is going to be happening over the next, you know, 12 to 18 months.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And definitely LLMs, like we were writing about those a decade ago for sure. And I'm sure you folks were too. But then it goes from zero to 100 so, so, so quick now, right? So the job of TechCrunch has always been to find those nascent things, pull them out, tease them out, and talk about them earlier than everyone else. My byword for disrupt as an example has always been when we're doing programming too soon. Like, how do we get people to talk about stuff that they're doing too soon?”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Everybody else would know, right? And be like, oh, yeah, you know, so and so is talking to me about it. I went to hackathon or I was milling about in a bar and we were, I was talking with some engineers and they're like, oh, we heard of this new technology. This new programming language called Ruby. And these guys are putting together a package to make it faster. And then 12 months later, oh, this is the first big company that has, you know, Ruby at its base, whatever. Now it's like, you're lucky if you get a few weeks, right? It's like, oh, chat GPT is a thing. And we start covering them in 20 in 2014 or 15, 16. You know, like you started covering them pretty early.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have to be. As technology has invaded every aspect of our lives, and unless you're a luddite or a homesteader, and even then, all homesteaders are solar-powered now. Like technology's everywhere, right? And so you have this shift where the Spelunking is getting harder and weirder, right? It's really crazy. The speed of the loop between the time that something is nascent or weird or interesting and the time that it's everywhere is so quick. It's just so quick now. It used to be Tech Crunch would know about a thing and 18 months later.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“New technological discoveries or remixes, as we all know, of traditional businesses that were enabled by, you know, you strap a database to a laundromat and you've got a business, right? And like whatever the form that took, we knew that it was going to be happening at the edges and continued to be happening at the edges of things. These days, it is a little bit different. And the new EAC of Tech Rensch and whoever takes it on from here will have their own job, right? Because I think like you, that we are kind of at a watershed moment for media, but also for tech, you know, over the past decade, you and I have both seen tech go from a marginal thing that geeks cared about to everyone being forced to be geeks, right? Like every one of us are, right? Doesn't matter whether it's your grandma or whether it's your brother or cousin or nephew or parents. We're all geeks now because we all have.”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“TechCrunch and a broader publication or a very good, very well staffed, very astute bureau at a larger paper record like the New York Times or journal or whatever. I'm not singling anybody out, but like any one of those great chunks of tech writers that exist within a larger organization. The differential between us and them is that we very, very, very specifically wanted to be as fast and close to this stuff as possible without, of course, abandoning all reason, right? And skating that edge literally is our job, right? Or is the job of TechCrunch, I should say. The idea that you would be able to suss out like nascent trends or new bits of technology that were being productized out of the ether, out of like academic programs or out of”
2023-09-19 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · After 10 years covering startups, former TechCrunch EIC Matthew Panzarino tells us what's next · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT