The Real Reason OpenAI Acquired TBPN for $100M+

“It's not just about the TBBN brand and the audience and that. It's about John and Jordy because they are gonna be reporting to the head of PR essentially at OpenAI, and they want them to do something beyond just the show to somehow help OpenAI with their public relations or communication strategy that's not just doing the podcast.”

“Sam Altman framed this thing as, like, a marketing problem. He said, these guys, John Geordi, are genius marketers. If AI were a political candidate, it would be one of the least popular in history. And given the amazing things AI can do, I think we need to be a lot better at marketing for AI.”

“Generally, in many cases, when you shut down their advertising business and they only run ads for the parent company, OpenAI, for example. They're immediately perceived as less independent. They're perceived as, like, shilling in many ways just for that one company. And it feels like a media business when you have different brand partners, different logos on your website and your podcast, it feels like a real, like, legit operation.”

“He said the main insight is the gap between full time and part time is insane. A ton of creators and almost no one is actually full time. Everybody has a company, a fund, a product, a course, something to pull them away from the main thing, the core thing. If you keep the core thing, the core thing, success will come.”

“I call this the land grab mindset. You want to like, when you're a niche media creator, let's say you own a category, HVAC. You wanna have, like, the HVAC newsletter, but then you also wanna have the HVAC podcast, and then you wanna be doing great clips, and then you wanna have the HVAC course and the HVAC coaching program, the HVAC conference, and they listen. Like, you wanna just land grab everything and just try and get everything in your space and have something to offer everybody, but that's actually is not what's gonna make you successful.”

“Another thing is live streaming. It's the next hot thing in b two b content. And what's so powerful about live streaming is it can be repurposed into literally every other media format, and nothing else can be said of that. So, obviously, you have the live stream, then that becomes a YouTube video in itself. It also becomes a long form podcast.”

“If that company actually ran independently, had their own business model, and only gave 50% of their inventory to the parent company, they could keep going sustainably for a long time without relying on additional funding from the the the ownership company. So I think and that's how you win media too. Like, the best media brands have been around for a hundred years or at least a decade.”

“Now OpenAI buys TBPN. So if you're building an audience and you have a valuable niche, you are a potential acquisition target. So start building towards that and think what would make you valuable to these larger players.”