The Distribution Trap
Find leverage.
POD 163: Code Red
This week, Sam Altman shutters side quests to chase speed, reliability, and personalization, and we ask whether he’s a deals guy or a wartime leader in a world where Gemini 3 and Anthropic are catching up. From there we get into the Olivia Nuzzi saga, the New York Times vs David Sachs accountability drama, and another round of Silicon Valley vs East Coast media grievance airing. We close on Bending Spoons’ island of misfit apps, DealBook’s new CEO archetypes in a media world running out of leverage, and Good Product featuring Waymos and Japanese toilets as the most dependable robots in everyday life.
Out FRIDAY AM Apple | Spotify | Substack
Troy: Brian, you said something this week that stuck with me.
Your email list doesn’t matter anymore.
On its face it’s absurd. Email was supposed to be the last defensible outpost of distribution. But it forced an uncomfortable admission: media companies haven’t truly “owned” distribution for a long time.
The web felt reliable until AI and Google pulled the rug. Social followers felt durable until the algorithms found more lucrative signal. Even the inbox—our “direct line”—is overcrowded and overfiltered.
I have a very distribution-centric view on media sustainability. I need a better way to think about this. In a frictionless, networked environment, distribution is not the asset. Distribution is a rental. It’s useful but fleeting.
What seems to matters now, particularly when looking at media from an investment POV is Leverage. And Continuity. Naturallly the Monetization mechanism follows closely. Let’s try this.
Leverage
Leverage is anything that gives you durable power with audiences or advertisers. Not all leverage is created equal:
Low leverage: Email lists, followers, SEO, web traffic. Bonus: Good sales orgs.
The stuff that evaporates the moment someone else changes their mind. Necessary, but flimsy and unreliable.
Large sales orgs supproted by complex operational and technical systems are useful leverage. Probably a medium multiplier.
Medium leverage: Brands and Talent.
Media brands give you leverage. Brands are a type of mental distribution... a useful short cut. But they are not as valuable as before they are less important navigation in a world of networked people. Useful but lower multiple than before.
Talent is leverage. Spotting and nurturing and managing talent is leverage cause duh... see above. But talent us unreliable and talent gets old and dies. Medium multiple.
High leverage: IP, products, and franchise events.
IP is leverage. IP compounds. IP value is like a media brand’s value but different becuase it is more intimately connected to human emotion: narratives and characters and culture and nostalgia. IP is more important than ever. This is high value leverage and high multiple. The people chasing Warner appreciate this obviously.
Products are like IP. Good products emesh themselves in buying behaviors and represent good leverage provided you can compete and make at margin and people keep wanting them. Mr Beast thinks his chocolate bars on the shelves of 7 Elevens and Target are more valuable that his YouTube followers. Potentially high value but hard for media companies to manage.
Events are like products and IP. The good “franchise” ones that people work their schedules around and pay for are high leverage, high multiple. They usually take years to develop.
Super-high leverage: Rights and low-churn subscriptions.
Rights are like repeatable, real time IP, ususally connected to fandoms. Sports are the most obvious example. They get harder and harder to underwrite without rock solid distribution, tangental cash fountains and deep pockets. In a world of fleeting distribution advantage they are increasingly valuable and expensive. Super high leverage and multiples.
Low churn paid direct relationships with audinces are super high leverage and really hard to earn into. These will increasingly demand high multiples.
Continuity
We over-index on creators and forget the thing media brands actually do well: they create continuity.
Continuity derisks talent.
Continuity carries reputation across generations.
Continuity supports institutional relationships that don’t disappear the moment your star host gets bored.
A creator can burn bright and vanish. A media brand can absorb the shock. Continuity deserves a premium in modern media.
Monetization
Leverage without predictable monetization is just a philosophical exercise.
Most modern revenue—programmatic, affiliates, branded content—is fragile. You’re effectively subcontracting your livelihood to platform decisions.
The antidote is boring: take less capital, get to profit sooner, and stay small enough to survive platform volatility. Earn resiliance through reputation.
Slow growth feels unglamorous until you wake up richer, calmer, and in control—while everyone else is still chasing the next trick.
BRIAN: I should clarify. I said it has no value as an enterprise asset.
Lots of people have email lists. If I lost mine in a fire, I’d build a new one. The list itself therefore has little value on its own.
I can’t see how distribution of all kinds lose value. All these AI agents are clunky. I will bet you $100 you will not book a trip with an AI agent next year. But eventually, raw distribution of all kinds loses its defensibility.
What matters more is reputation, either brand or personal. The data coming out from the predictable gold rush to cash in on trying to influence AI answer engines is showing that traditional and niche media are referenced most frequently.
I don’t think of reputation like brand. Brand is more often manicured. Reputation is earned over time, good or bad.
Reputation is high leverage. Trust will plummet. We’ll go back to our original instincts and turn to reputation more often.
Nice gift idea. Chernobyl nuclear power plant with smoke effect, humidifier and lighting. 80 bucks. Etsy.
Alex: Code Red!
Speaking of leverage. OpenAI has reportedly declared a “Code Red”. It’s an inversion of 2022. Back then, ChatGPT launched and Google scrambled to save its search business.
The issue isn’t that Google’s Gemini or Anthropic’s Claude are moderately better than ChatGPT. the issue is that while LLMs aren’t exactly commodities, they are reaching enough parity that no single company is running away with it.
This is a massive problem for OpenAI. Their fundraising narrative relied on the idea that they were lapping the field. Without that gap, asking investors for the billions of dollars they need to burn becomes a much harder sell.
This is technology settling into ubiquity. We aren’t likely going to see one company own super-intelligence, cure cancer, and invent rockets. We’re going to see a lot of very cool infrastructure from a lot of different vendors that is used in a lot of different ways by many different companies.
And in that world, there are a lot of companies who have many advantages over OpenAI. Google/Apple own the customer access points. Amazon/Google own the cloud infrastructure. Facebook/Google own the advertising platforms.
It will be interesting to see if Sam Altman can morph from a fundraising hype man into a crisis CEO.
Best insights I’ve read so far from Troy.