New Media is Insider Media
Working Theory #100
A theory of TBPN, Mafia, Feed Me, prestige, and why a small audience of the right people can be more valuable than a massive audience of the wrong ones. This is a theory of the media world rooted in Silicon Valley, but it’s really a meditation on the moment.
In Silicon Valley, “new media” has become shorthand for the post-pandemic revival of a certain kind of tech media. This new media has grown up alongside a distribution strategy: bypass gatekeepers, go direct, and own your audience. Anyone can build an audience, and those who build one can become powerful intermediaries in their own right. So disintermediation can’t be the whole story.
As platforms mature, power laws steepen. Everyone can publish, but most of it has no impact. Attention is scarce. High-value attention is scarcer.—It turns out a small audience of the right people beats a massive audience of the wrong ones. In Silicon Valley, the most valuable audience is inside.
NEW MEDIA IS INSIDER MEDIA.
Insider Media is media for insiders, by insiders. Both creator and audience belong to the same in-group. The public gets to be in the room but is never the audience being catered to. The topic is less important than the audience whose opinion matters. It’s a closed-room broadcast where principals talk to principals while fans, aspirants, and adjacents watch, learn, and report out.
Insider Media is the opposite of journalistic media—outsider media—made for outsiders by outsiders. Outsiders will call Insider Media an echo chamber or bubble, but the proximity is very much the product. This tension is inevitable in any world where status compounds and access is currency.
INSIDER AUDIENCES ARE MORE VALUABLE THAN THEIR SIZE. A show with 50,000 highly valued viewers can matter more than one with five million random ones; ROI is less important than the audience roster, and your mutuals. Audience Market Cap is the metric that matters.
The average person who starts a podcast wants to take a shot at building an audience of mostly strangers, making some money, and maybe becoming famous. The tech insider who starts a podcast for tech insiders wants something distinct: a respectable way to meet people they respect, deeper participation in their social and intellectual circles, and leverage for future opportunities in their field (and if fame, money, and status happen to arrive along the way and push them to go all-in, great).
Every media property has a combination of status, entertainment, and utility. These axes are scalable—more of each is mostly better. Prestige is different because it depends on restraint and rewards selection …
PRESTIGE IS PERCEIVED TASTE LEGITIMACY. Prestige is earned through taste discipline and operates on a curve: past the taste optimum, more is bad. It becomes tryhard, tacky, or tasteslop. Prestige emerges when a group believes someone consistently demonstrates superior judgment.
Prestige earns in-group status, but it is not reducible to status. Status comes from the position and influence of cast, collaborators, consumers, and tastemakers.
Stripe Press is an expression of taste discipline. Each book is produced as a timeless artifact and arrives slowly and quietly. Thrive Capital is the model of restraint: almost no media output and all prestige calibrated. The All-In podcast is the inverse: the cast is high status, but the personas and production aren’t strictly taste-disciplined.
IN THE INSIDER MEDIA GAME, PRESTIGE IS THE COVETED LANE.
Founders Fund@foundersfundMAFIA EP 0015:14 PM · Jun 4, 2026 · 3.21M Views469 Replies · 348 Reposts · 6.34K LikesFounders Fund just launched a show where tech-famous founders and investors play Mafia, with parallels to Celebrity Traitors. It’s the most Prestige Insider Media entry since TBPN (whose arc has forced people to take tech shows seriously). Tech Twitter has certified Mafia as good. It is.
Still, I have notes. The more the players have real-world reputation, the more careful they are in victory and defeat. The show works if it still creates opportunities for character revelation and weakens if the premise is too focal or the cast becomes too self-conscious. It needs more parlor talk (intro bar scene), lounge clips, confessionals, and parasocial continuity even while the cast rotates. Else there’s a good chance insider audiences get bored and just want the cast’s thoughts on the current things.
Insider prestige punches above its weight. TBPN's Hollywood embrace is this unfolding. A show translating tech for everyone would have been too generic; leaning into the inside is the prestige track to crossing over. Make the thing the insiders can’t dismiss, and there’s a good chance outsiders follow. “The most personal is the most creative”—Martin Scorsese via Bong Joon Ho.
INSIDER MEDIA ALWAYS HAS A STORY AND A META-STORY.
The content is one story. It comes with parasocial intimacy with the characters. The people making it are another story. The meta-game they’re playing and game-state visibility into the room is the second draw. Insider Media is so addictive because of these dual stories—a dynamic we’ve seen with TBPN and with the Substack Feed Me among the NYC business-media-creative class (and in a case study I know too well: Clubhouse’s early rise).
Much of the energy around the Mafia launch is about the meta-story. With high-powered real-world figures as the cast, the fun becomes personality profiling, sentiment analysis, and corporate recon. It’s off-script access to people you might invest in, work for, or compete against. Discussing VC branding, power rankings, and the whole meta-game that Founders Fund and Mike Solana are playing is at least half the insider fun.
anu@anuatluruMake something people want to watch you make.
anu @anuatluruMake something people want to watch.8:39 PM · May 10, 2026 · 7.74K Views4 Replies · 5 Reposts · 128 LikesTHE POST BECAME THE PODCAST, AND THE PODCAST WILL CEDE GROUND TO THE SHOW.
“Building in public” was once the insider play. But there’s a tradeoff between perma-dripping raw updates and saving it all for big moments. And with all the noise, you now need slick narrative and polish on top of the raw footage.
The demand for character revelation impacts the format. The podcast and interview talk show has a built-in problem: the guest knows they’re being interviewed. They tell flattering stories they’ve told a hundred times. Hosts lob softballs to protect access. Insider’s subjects become their relationships. No shock Insider Media skews sycophantic. Many overcompensate by chasing and performing profundity: lowered voice, engineered pause, mmms and mmmhmms of poignancy, “say more.” But insiders want real. They can tell.
Premise-driven shows are up next. Aspirationally, they give you character revelation through the freeing nature of constraints. The insider profile is rising too, in the style of prestige magazines. Colossus is the new standard. SF Alexandria, New Ontologies, Early Days are upstarts. These skew sycophantic too, but with license to narrate more character complexity.
NOVELTY CAN’T BE COPIED BECAUSE IT EMERGES FROM FIT. There are calls across Tech Twitter to clone popular formats for tech (Hot Ones, Shark Tank, MTV Cribs, etc). My strong opinion: Format-recasts fall flat, and rarely win. TBPN gets called ESPN for tech, but that’s just aesthetic. Mafia resembles Traitors, but there’s more to why that fits tech.
I see many technically competent Insider Media projects with expensive sets, high production value, and popular formats that are still culturally dead. There is no substitute for being top 0.01% great at something highly visible. It’s best if it’s a quality of the people, not the production.
The easiest thing to copy is “format.” Subway Takes is a good example: the format is memorable, but the novelty comes from the fit between Kareem, New York, the guests, the quirks, and the show’s constraints. Status and celebrity can draw audiences at first. But a true hit requires the creator, cast, format, premise, and moment to reinforce each other. Novelty emerges from fit.
CAPITAL IS INCREASINGLY TABLE STAKES, BUT CULTURAL POSITION ISN’T. Every venture capital firm wants to punch above its weight as talent, capital, and attention concentrate into fewer hands. We’re in the era of venture capital as war between media teams, each with their own ideology and aesthetic, and house style of newly minted creative roles. Every conversation I’ve had with VCs of late has found its way to narrative position. (Credit where due: A16Z reclaimed “new media” and made the coinage stick).
Insider Media helps firms that are smaller than their rivals become culturally larger than them. Prestige Insider Media is powerful because it converts judgment into influence—and judgment is independent of scale.
FEW INSTITUTIONS HAVE TO PLAY THE INSIDER AND OUTSIDER GAME SIMULTANEOUSLY AND AT SCALE AS VISIBLY AS AI LABS DO. AI labs are competing for belief as much as customers. AI itself is an inherently hard protagonist to root for. It’s abstract, threatening, fast-moving, and ultimately inhuman. The frontier AI labs’ products and people have to be inside-the-room coveted and outside-the-room trusted. The jobs-narrative whiplash—AI will take all the jobs, then it won’t—is the insider/outsider narrative tension showing its seams.
The TBPN/OpenAI deal made sense because TBPN has become a rare Insider Media property with perfectly cast human hosts and intense cultural gravity. Very few individuals or institutions have such standing in both worlds. I expect more poaching of cultural unicorns with insider-outsider leverage.
SILICON VALLEY’S MOST VALUABLE AUDIENCE IS SILICON VALLEY—AND WHOEVER IT ADMIRES. No world is more tailor-made for Insider Media. It has an unusually high concentration of money and power, and runs on the belief that anyone could be the next to be right and early.
TECHNOLOGY USED TO BE A NICHE, BUT INCREASINGLY, TECHNOLOGY IS CULTURE. “Tech” is now the intersection of tech and business and media and entertainment and politics and government and international affairs and science and religion and.—The world is getting nerdier too. More and more outsiders curious about Silicon Valley or Formula 1 or the art of making sushi don’t want it watered down. They want to watch the people inside it, guard down, playing for real stakes. The Ambitious from every industry are eyeing tech. As tech becomes more culturally relevant, more want in, and everyone else wants to watch. There’s room for translators and explainers, but earnestly performing for each other is the real show.
Every Silicon Valley blog, podcast, video, and show now competes in the Insider Media game. Trying to win New Media is trying to win Insider Media. Prestige Insider Media is the highest-status game within the game.
The prize for winning the game is being cool, and cool becomes brand, and brand earns you a seat at every insider table. And a seat at every insider table is power. So the games will continue until there are no narratives to sell and nothing new left to make, which is to say, they’ll continue forever (the game is healthiest when the outsider voices are just as good).
SILICON VALLEY HAS FINALLY INVENTED REALITY TELEVISION FOR ITSELF. THE PEOPLE MAKING THE SHOW ARE PART OF THE CAST. WE HAVE MADE THE GAME WE PLAY WATCHABLE. THERE’S NO GAME WE’D RATHER WATCH THAN THE ONE WE PLAY.
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