There are great insights in this piece into how Sam thinks about AI and the future of YC.
But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.
Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.
A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.
This comes out in small ways:
1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.
2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."
3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ "
Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.
How dare he not humble himself before the god-kings.
The negative passages are an integral part of the story, which is about a wealthy and powerful guy living in a closed-off bubble of wealthy and powerful guys with limited or no outside supervision, and a capacity for self-reflection bounded within an extraordinarily limited scope. It may not be the story you want to be told, but it's a perfectly legitimate take on the situation.
Yeah, I'm not criticizing the reporter much, despite a stray factual inaccuracy. I'm writing for an audience of potential sources to point out the risks of letting an interloper such as Tad Friend into your life. It's a trade off. You get exposure, but you have to be careful, because he won't be careful for you. Sam was pretty careful, but Tad still played a little gotcha.
You're suggesting the reporter is doing something perfidious. Quoting a subject making a fool of himself to you on the record is not "dropping bombs", it's good journalism.
That depends on your goals for the piece. If you want to interview them again, then you're more careful. That's why, from the source's point of view, it's best to work with beat reporters and have long term relationships.
On (1), I think you're misreading. The "college and grad-school dropouts" are new people who could become "Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin." As that era has not yet produced a Facebook or Google, their names are useful stand-ins. The sentence hinges on that "could."
But getting profiled in The New Yorker bears a risk, and the risk is that other media organizations try to tell the "down" story, because the down story is the only new thing to say after a subject is painted with such grandiose brush strokes.
Example: Marc Andreessen gets profiled in The New Yorker and a year later the WSJ publishes a hit piece on Andreessen Horowitz's returns. That's how journalists think: "what can I say that's different?" The whole industry plays a kind of ping pong, with one reporter telling an up story so the next can tell the opposite. It's a strange form of job security in an insecure profession. In a sense, you know you made it when they're publishing hit pieces about you.
A New Yorker profile is as good as it gets, and in a sense represents peak exposure, at least for someone in tech. (The Kardashians have other benchmarks...) It's doubly risky because at peak exposure, you get journalists who a) don't know much about tech because they don't specialize in it and therefore b) don't care if they get little things wrong, or subtly damage their source, in the telling of their story. They will move on to other profiles.
This comes out in small ways:
1) These sentences about Google and Facebook show that the reporter has misunderstood something fundamental about Google's history as it relates to the rest of the industry: "In the nineties, before the accelerator era, startups were usually launched by mid-career engineers or repeat entrepreneurs, who sought millions in venture capital and then labored in secret on something complicated that took years to launch. As the price of Web hosting plummeted and PCs and cell phones proliferated, college and grad-school dropouts like Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page and Sergey Brin could suddenly conjure unicorns on their laptops." Google was building its own racks in the 1990s. And for that matter, Facebook didn't need an accelerator.
2) This passage will alienate most readers, because they simply can't relate to a world where a cushion like this somehow equates with a sacrifice: "Leery of tech’s culture of Golcondan wealth, in which a billion dollars is dismissed as “a buck,” he decided to rid himself of all but a comfortable cushion: his four-bedroom house in San Francisco’s Mission district, his cars, his Big Sur property, and a reserve of ten million dollars, whose annual interest would cover his living expenses. The rest would go to improving humanity."
3) And this will piss off the DOD: "He added, “A friend of mine says, ‘The thing that saves us from the Department of Defense is that, though they have a ton of money, they’re not very competent.’ "
Obviously there are positive passages in the profile, but a reporter like Tad Friend will report the negative passages with a straight face knowing that they will spark controversy, outrage or derision. He will tell a larger story of mad scientists and investors creating technology beyond their ken that spells doom for humanity. He will let his subjects hang themselves, subtly, because he can afford to do that kind of damage and pretend he had no part in it. Drop some little bombs, move on.