Techno-Optimistic Media
A Not Boring x First Principles Guide to Modern Startup Storytelling
Welcome to the 578 newly Not Boring people who have joined us since our last essay! If you haven’t subscribed, join 222,023 smart, curious folks by subscribing here:
Hi friends 👋 ,
Happy Tuesday!
Almost two years ago, I wrote a piece called Optimism. I was confused by the gap between the positive progress I saw happening around me, and the general negative sentiment that had taken hold despite that. Part of the problem, I thought, was that very few people were hearing about the amazing things happening.
Since then, there’s been a major vibe shift, at least in our corner of the internet. Startups are building mind-blowing things, often physical things, and those stories are getting out.
So when Christian Keil suggested that we co-write a piece on the rise of Techno-Optimistic Media and what it means for startups, I jumped at it.
Christian is emblematic of the kind of person telling tech’s stories today. By day, he’s the Chief of Staff at Astranis, which makes communications satellites, and by night, he hosts First Principles, an interview series that dives deep into the technical side of deep-tech startups. Christian is also a venture partner for Not Boring Capital, where he focuses on aerospace, defense, and energy investments.
We’re just two of the many people who are part of the amorphous thing we’re calling Techno-Optimistic Media. We don’t speak for the whole group, which comes in many flavors. But we’ve gotten to see the value founders get from telling their story more directly firsthand and wanted to share what we’ve learned.
Let’s get to it.
Techno-Optimistic Media
Can you feel the acceleration?
Last Monday, Extropic released its whitepaper, Ushering in the Thermodynamic Future. On Tuesday, Cognition AI released its AI Software Engineer, Devin. On Wednesday, Figure shared a video of its humanoid robot, Figure 01, having a full conversation while completing tasks on-command. On Thursday, SpaceX successfully launched its Starship rocket into orbit.
Last week was a historically uncommon week of the sort that is becoming increasingly common.
Technology is accelerating, and we’re witnessing it in real-time, thanks to the emergence of new channels for founders to share what they’re building, unfiltered. The stories above weren't published through mass media channels. Instead, they were broadcast directly from the source, straight to the people most eager to hear about them – and they were amplified by Techno-Optimistic Media.
Extropic went deep answering Christian’s technical questions on First Principles, sat down for a conversation with Garry Tan, and handed the twitter mic to Andrew Côté to put the technology in context.
Cognition partnered with startup comms savant Lulu Cheng Meservey on Devin’s launch, which included an Ashlee Vance writeup and a tweet that broke the internet to the tune of 24.2 million views.
Figure let its robot do the talking.
And SpaceX live streamed its launch on the social media platform its founder owns. There are levels to this.
The Techno-Optimistic Media is a loose collection of newsletters, podcasts, YouTube channels, X accounts, and founders themselves that are less journalist and more storyteller. It’s a decentralized, internet-native response to gap left by the way the traditional press talks about tech. And it spreads stories at the speed of memes.
Hard-hitting journalism is critically important, but there’s often a mismatch between the work that journalists do gathering, verifying, and contextualizing facts and the simple truth that most startups operate more as dream than reality.
The Techno-Optimistic Media fills the gap for startups that want to communicate their stories to a wider audience while they’re still more outline than output. It treats early ideas seriously, analyzes ambitions, and has built relatively small, but extremely targeted, “local” communities of investors, builders, and techno-optimists who are unabashed fans of tech startups.
We’re both a part of the Techno-Optimistic Media – Packy with Not Boring and Age of Miracles and Christian with First Principles – but only a small part: it’s a constellation of niche publications that amplify each other instead of one organization with New York Times scale ambition.
If we eventually reach a larger audience and make the world more optimistic, as is our not-so-secret plan, it won’t be by trying to build The Times, But Tech, but instead by growing concentrically outward alongside the companies we highlight. As their dreams turn into realities and actually improve peoples’ lives, the audience for positive stories about technology companies will grow, too.
In the meantime, Techno-Optimistic Media serves an underserved niche with a new product designed explicitly to help founders reach potential employees, investors, customers, and fans in order to nudge their odds of success from low to slightly-higher.
We would both love to live in a world in which we could open up the newspaper every morning to positive stories of technology companies doing incredible things. To get there, media organizations need to see the market potential of optimistic takes, and entrepreneurs need to avoid the pitfalls of ignoring “media-message fit.”
So this piece will cover both:
Why now is the right time for Techno-Optimistic Media.
How founders can think about their media strategy as they grow.
Let’s start with one of the most jarring aspects of Techno-Optimistic Media: it’s explicitly, unabashedly biased. Sounds bad. But every other modern media organization is biased, too, whether they admit it or not.
Niches, Big and Small
The platonic ideal of reporting – most closely approximated by newspapers and TV channels in the Dan Rather era – saw these mass media companies idealistically delivering fair and unbiased reporting.
The people who ran those media organizations were no more noble than the people who run news organizations today. Their incentive was to reach as many people as possible, whatever those people’s beliefs, and the best way to do that was to deliver the facts. They were truly mass media.
But, unfortunately, Americans today trust such mass media less than they ever have.
When people look at that chart, they overemphasize the media, believing that news writers are failing to live up to their old promise of journalistic integrity. The real challenge is mass.
The confusing thing is that while many of the same organizations – from The New York Times to NBC – are still in business, their incentives have changed, and their products have changed alongside their incentives. They’ve gone from serving the masses, to serving a very large niche.
It’s disconcerting for someone in tech to open up The New York Times and read technology coverage that doesn’t reflect the facts that they see on the ground. The fact is, it’s not The New York Times’ job to get people to love technology. Their job is to serve their niche.
As Ben Thompson wrote in the excellent Never-Ending Niches, “While quality is relatively binary, the number of ways to be focused — that is, the number of niches in the world — are effectively infinite; success, in other words, is about delivering superior quality in your niche — the former is defined by the latter.”
The Times’s niche, he says, includes the “Everything tech does is bad” niche. In that context, even anti-tech stories that are “deeply flawed at best, and willfully mendacious at worst” are “very high quality for much of The New York Times’s audience.”
This might be a bit controversial to say in tech circles, but that’s totally fine! The New York Times is a business, and their readers expect something specific from them: dispassionate, measured, “realistic” analysis. And, realistically, most founders won’t change the world like they all claim they will.
Said differently, the idealistic goal of a publication like The New York Times is to verify and contextualize facts about the world. And the truth is that in a startup’s earliest days, the facts are sparse and the dream is still, well, a dream.
Mass media journalism and early-stage startups simply don’t have “media-message fit.” There’s not enough there there to do real journalism on. So either journalists treat startups with the same tenacity as they’d treat a more mature company and find them lacking, or the startup contorts itself into something they think a journalist wants to hear. It’s a mismatch.
But that’s also an opportunity. You don’t win by getting mad, but by competing.
If you view media organizations as businesses with customers, and believe that the largest underserve important and growing groups of customers, then the setup is ripe for disruption.
Disrupting Media
The term disruption is used far too often to mean anything new that competes with anything old, but there’s a specific definition that the late Harvard professor Clayton Chrisensen used. In What is Disruptive Innovation?, he wrote (emphasis ours):
First, a quick recap of the idea: “Disruption” describes a process whereby a smaller company with fewer resources is able to successfully challenge established incumbent businesses. Specifically, as incumbents focus on improving their products and services for their most demanding (and usually most profitable) customers, they exceed the needs of some segments and ignore the needs of others. Entrants that prove disruptive begin by successfully targeting those overlooked segments, gaining a foothold by delivering more-suitable functionality—frequently at a lower price. Incumbents, chasing higher profitability in more-demanding segments, tend not to respond vigorously. Entrants then move upmarket, delivering the performance that incumbents’ mainstream customers require, while preserving the advantages that drove their early success. When mainstream customers start adopting the entrants’ offerings in volume, disruption has occurred.
Techno-Optimistic Media serves two overlooked segments: pro-tech audiences and founders.
Pro-tech audiences might include people in tech, people who want to work in tech, investors, generally curious people who want to understand where the world is heading, and people who are sick of reading bad news every time they open the paper. These customers are overlooked by mass media organizations who are appealing to the broadest common denominator – who, unfortunately, don’t (yet) love tech.
Techno-Optimistic Media might not do the level of journalism that legacy media does, and they certainly don’t employ armies of editors and fact-checkers. The product is not as polished. But in exchange, the Techno-Optimistic product is free and, well, optimistic, which means that it is both accessible and appealing to pro-tech audiences.
Founders, or more generally subjects of articles, aren’t typically thought of as customers of media organizations, but they are, even if they don’t pay. When a CEO or politician sits down with a journalist and hands over their message to a third-party, they’re paying with information that would otherwise stay private in exchange for reach and credibility.
Techno-Optimistic Media doesn’t offer founders the reach or general population credibility that an organization like The New York Times does, but it does offer founders a way to reach a smaller, more targeted audience with a more direct – and more predictably favorable – version of their story. In exchange, Techno-Optimistic Media gets access to stories and insights their pro-tech audiences demand… and have a lot of fun producing content about the industries and technologies that they think have the greatest chances of changing the world for the better.
If Techno-Optimistic Media displaces any part of legacy media over time, it won’t be by trying to build the same product in a techno-optimistic flavor. It will be by starting at the low-end, and growing alongside the founders they partner with.
The Techno-Optimistic Media is explicitly biased and incentive-aligned because we want tech companies to succeed. We want cheaper energy and abundant goods and robot assistants and financial freedom and human flourishing, and our reach will grow as technologists deliver on those promises. And we have skin in the game, whether as technologists or investors.
Our bias is that technological progress is good, actually.
Creating small spaces for people who share that bias is a surprisingly big shift.
Aside: Small Spaces and Scenius
As we transition from “Why Techno-Optimistic Media?” to “How founders should think about their media strategies,” a quick aside on the importance of small spaces and scenes.
Despite everything we’ve written, we understand the temptation to go big. But there’s real value in starting small. It’s true in the real world, and we think it’s true online.
In Small Spaces, Simon Sarris argues that “culture is not created in cities so much as assembled and discovered there. It is created in smaller spaces.”
“Given the typical assumptions about the multiplicative effects of human capital,” he asks, why has one of these places created four trillion-dollar companies and the other zero?
There are a number of well-studied hypotheses for Palo Alto’s success, but Sarris thinks that its smallness is underappreciated.
Why? Sarris has thoughts – rent prices, remoteness, authenticity, and the “ferment that we have relied on in the less-connected world.” Another answer might be purely statistical – aggregate enough people together, and you’re more likely to end up with an average group.
But we like Kevin Kelly’s answer best.
In Scenius, or Communal Genius, Kelly examines the factors that contribute to scenius: “the intelligence and the intuition of a whole cultural scene. It is the communal form of the concept of the genius.”
Individuals immersed in a productive scenius will blossom and produce their best work. When buoyed by scenius, you act like genius. Your like-minded peers, and the entire environment inspire you.
If you’ve spent time on tech Twitter or in SF or El Segundo recently, maybe you’ve felt this. It’s a magical, self-reinforcing, self-sustaining loop of attention and motivation.
Kelly believes that four factors are at play:
Mutual appreciation — Risky moves are applauded by the group, subtlety is appreciated, and friendly competition goads the shy. Scenius can be thought of as the best of peer pressure.
Rapid exchange of tools and techniques — As soon as something is invented, it is flaunted and then shared. Ideas flow quickly because they are flowing inside a common language and sensibility.
Network effects of success — When a record is broken, a hit happens, or breakthrough erupts, the success is claimed by the entire scene. This empowers the scene to further success.
Local tolerance for the novelties — The local “outside” does not push back too hard against the transgressions of the scene. The renegades and mavericks are protected by this buffer zone.
Consider these in the context of what we’ve been discussing. All four sound more like Techno-Optimistic Media than mass media. Done right, Techno-Optimistic Media helps cultivate scenius at internet scale: celebration of risky moves, sharing technical ideas in-depth, feeding off of each other’s success, protecting renegades and mavericks from the outside.
That doesn’t mean ideas are protected from the inside. To the contrary, by creating small spaces and scenes with people who are generally pro-technology but have very strong opinions on which technologies get built and how, we can create what Tim Urban calls an Idea Lab.
People in the scene can beat the shit out of each other’s ideas, not each other, in the comfy confines of a friendly but opinionated community before they emerge into a broader media landscape that leans Anti-Tech Echo Chamber. As Urban writes,
Ideas in an Idea Lab are treated like hypotheses, which means people are always looking for opportunities to test what they’ve been thinking about. Idea Labs are the perfect boxing ring for that testing.
The fact that Techno-Optimistic Media is small, that it doesn’t appeal to a mass audience, is a feature, not a bug. Going big – and diluting the audience – would kill that vibe, and when you strike upon scenius, Kelly says: The best you can do is NOT KILL IT.
You’ll have to go big eventually, if you want to be big, but there’s real value in beating up your ideas in small Idea Labs and competitively friendly scenes.
Our advice is not as blunt as “don’t work with the mass media.” It’s not that simple – because the mass media can actually be extremely good at what they do.
The trick is trying to speak to the right audiences at the right times on the right channels.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
The Early Days: Go Direct
Startups are an exercise in getting people to believe in a crazy idea, starting with yourself and growing out in concentric circles.
Before there’s even a company, there’s an idea. You can workshop it, write about it, build prototypes, do market research, and think until your brain hurts. The first person your idea needs to survive is you.
Once you’ve convinced yourself, you can start to annoy your smartest friends.
Sam D’Amico, founder of Impulse, said in an interview with Jason Carman:
I think a good checkpoint [for whether you’re ready to start a company] is: ‘Have you annoyed your friends about this idea enough?’ And I definitely did… Because if it sticks in your head, and you’re not being dissuaded. San Francisco is an amazing place for people who are positive about startup ideas. But if you talk to highly technical people about stuff like this, they will poke holes in everything. And if you can survive the thunderdome of that, and keep annoying your friends about it, maybe you should consider doing that idea.
Surviving the thunderdome is a perfect encapsulation of our idea. Your storytelling journey should be like surviving a series of increasingly thunderous thunderdomes, starting with friends, then branching outwards. At some point, you’ll want to go public, both to attract people and battletest your ideas.
Nobody can change the world in a vacuum. You have to convince people to work with you; investors to give you money; customers to buy your product; and so on, at every scale.
This is, ultimately, the most fundamental job of a founder — to share a compelling story that convinces people to hitch their wagons to yours.
And there is no possible way to outsource that task.
As former Anduril comms lead Lulu Cheng Meservey wrote in her must-read Inside Anduril’s Comms Strategy: 10 Rules for Mission-Driven Founders, “Going direct means retaining control over your message by speaking directly to your audience instead of depending on middlemen. This is mandatory for mission-driven founders.”
(Side note: seriously, you should really read Lulu’s piece for hands-on practical tips.)
Ben Nowack did this last week. He dropped a video showing off his company, Reflect Orbital, which used a hot air balloon and a mirror to reflect sunlight onto solar panels. And it got 2 million views.
Having seen a bunch of these successful unveils firsthand – and as we can verify from our conversations with Ben before, during, and after the launch (#reporting!) – Ben’s DMs have been flooded with inbound messages from investors and potential employees. But he’s getting valuable friendly pushback from inside the Idea Lab, too.
Andrew Côté replied to Ben’s tweet with concerns about the model, thought about it a bunch, and then changed his mind, tweeting the next day that “orbital mirrors could unlock solar as a solution for the whole planet.”
At best, Ben got a list of things to improve with his model, and at worst, he got a little preparation for questions that investors, employees, customers, and press might ask down the line.
Ian Brooke’s story is similar. Ian is the founder of Astro Mechanica, which has invented a new kind of jet engine that’s efficient at every speed.
Ian operated inside of the local SF deep tech scene for a while – it seems like every smart person we know there knows Ian – but kept a low profile online. In late February, he spoke about the company publicly for the first time on Christian’s First Principles:
That same day, Ian tweeted a video of an early model of Astro Mechanica’s adaptive jet engine, and blew up our little corner of X to the tune of 7.7 million views.
With literally one video interview and one tweet, Ian grew his following from 500 people to nearly 20,000 overnight. That’s an audience that he can now speak to directly as he builds the company.
But not all founders are deeply immersed in the San Francisco tech scene. For every announcement that works as well as those of Ben and Ian, there are dozens more that fall in the forest without making a sound.
Launch Providers: the Techno-Optimistic Media
This is where Techno-Optimistic Media comes in.
You must hone your story by yourself, going direct as a founder. But when it comes time to share your story with the world, you might find value from leveraging the folks who have already built audiences that include the people you most want to reach.
People like Jason Carman, who works at Astranis on weekdays, where he helps launch communications satellites into orbit. But every Saturday — for the last 34 Saturdays in a row — he has produced a mini-documentary on a deep tech startup with his show, S3.
People like John Coogan, who was a co-founder of Soylent, and currently runs Lucy.co, a tobacco-free nicotine product, as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at Founders Fund. He also happens to have over 400,000 YouTube subscribers, who watch his documentary-style treatments of companies like Hadrian, Rippling, Comma AI, and Anduril.
People like Contrary Capital’s Anna-Sofia Lesiv, who writes Foundations & Frontiers, covers emerging technologies with a potent combination of rigor and wonder, and highlights the companies trying to make the impossible possible at the frontiers.
People like Elliot Hershberg, who writes Century of Biology from the unique perspective of a scientist pursuing his PhD in genomics at Stanford (and who invests in early stage biotech companies at Not Boring Capital). Elliot explains complex techbio companies like Dyno Therapeutics, Vial, and Enveda Biosciences in a way that only someone with the his unique combination of skills as a trained biologist, coder, student of business, and investor could.
And – this is Christian talking now – Packy somehow neglected to add to this draft that he has helped companies introduce themselves to the world for years in this very newsletter. I love reading his “Deep Dives” on companies like Replit, Hadrian, Varda, or the one he wrote about Ramp back in 2020 (when both Ramp and his newsletter were 10x smaller than they are today).
Since then, Ben Thompson has interviewed Replit founder Amjad Masad. Jason Carman did S3’s on Hadrian and Varda. And yesterday, John Coogan released a teaser of the documentary he made to celebrate Ramp’s five-year anniversary. The best stories are best told by many people, through many mediums, over a long time.
The list goes on, and it’s growing and reaching into new niches: Not Boring, First Principles, Pirate Wires, Newcomer, Acquired and ACQ2, Invest Like the Best, The Generalist, Sourcery, The Logan Bartlett Show. Ben Thompson is now interviewing founders on Stratechery, Garry Tan’s YouTube channel and social accounts are bridging into startup announcements, and Ashlee Vance does great pro-tech work within Bloomberg at Hello World. Legacy Media can be Techno-Optimisitc Media, too. The water is warm.
Each of these is different. Pirate Wires, Newcomer, and Hello World are closer to journalism. Stratechery, Invest Like the Best, ACQ2, Garry, Logan, and First Principles host interviews. Not Boring, The Generalist, Foundations & Frontiers, and Century of Biology analyze businesses and categories. Coogan and Carman make documentaries.
There are still more folks who are directionally Techno-Optimistic Media, even if they don’t identify as such. The YouTube channel Real Engineering just released a video helping supersonic jet startup Hermeus introduce their new engines to the world:
And Stoke Space, a new rocket-building startup, invited the legendary Tim Dodd from Everyday Astronaut to get a tour of their factory and watch their unique engine perform a hot fire test:
No matter the platform or the audience, however, what these Techno-Optimists have in common is reach within the targeted audiences that matter to startups: investors, engineers, and potentially customers (obviously depending on your product). Many also bring credibility by being real-world builders in their own rights, and they have all spent years learning how to be compelling storytellers.
They give startups a small space to tell their full story, with all of the detail and respect required to help people see the future the way they do, and they add their own insights, experimenting with new angles to reach new audiences.
This, in Kelly’s parlance, is the “buffer zone” that protects the renegades and mavericks, providing narrative air cover for their ambitious and risky ideas. They can help block the little embers (some of which will grow to be fires) from the wind, and pour gasoline on when the time is right.
If it seems self-serving for two people who identify as part of this world to write about it, well… that’s kinda the point.
The principal benefit of the Techno-Optimist Media is that they are unapologetically pro-tech. They aren’t impartial, and don’t have to pretend that they are.
There’s a clear risk that Techno-Optimistic Media can be too optimistic, that the hype can overtake the substance. But just as venture capitalists are driven by returns to invest in the highest-upside companies they can, we’re bound by serving multiple constituencies to get that selection right over time.
If Not Boring consistently covered companies that fizzled into meaninglessness or blew up, readers would stop reading and great founders wouldn’t trust me with their stories. Techno-Optimist Media operators lose credibility if they attempt to pump bad or uninteresting companies for short-term gain. They won’t get every one right – it’s like venture capital – but they’re incentivized to identify the most promising companies early and share the most compelling stories with their audiences.
That audience and business model alignment is key to Techno-Optimist Media. Our audiences expect us to write about high-risk companies that might fail but also might change the world for the better if they succeed.
And if those companies continue to thrive, they might someday be ready for the mass media.
Crossing the Chasm: Mass Media on Your Terms
Congratulations! You crushed it. You have a loyal following, a network of supportive Techno-Optimistic Media contacts, and a product you’re ready to take for a spin outside of the comforts of your local confines.
Getting here sequentially means that you’re coming in from a position of strength, which can be useful whether your first brush with Legacy Media goes great, or doesn’t. Because it doesn’t always go well, and it only rarely goes exactly as you planned.
Working with the Legacy Media goes something like this:
Your company does something cool.
You call up your favorite reporters and attempt to convince them that it is, indeed, cool.
If they agree, you send them your version of events (a “press release”) and any “assets” (videos, photos, etc.) that can accompany it.
[Massive Black Box]
The reporter publishes their story on their own channels.
There are some clear challenges with this model.
First, reporters can, and often do, say no. It’s not their job to report everything you tell them.
Second, although you can do your best to make your version of events compelling to a reporter, they ultimately decide how to tell your story. They might uncover parts of the story that you would like to obscure, or not “frame” the story as you would prefer.
Third, you can’t control the timing of a press-driven announcement. The [Massive Black Box] step takes an indeterminate amount of time to clear.
Fourth, the fact that news stories are published on press-owned sites (and promoted on press-owned channels) means that you only have intermediate access to the folks your news reaches. Viewers on a news site are disproportionately likely to be one-time viewers for you.
If you’ve built up your direct communications and partnered with Techno-Optimistic Media, however, a lot of these challenges disappear.
If the story is great, you can share it with thousands of people who have been there throughout the journey and will be pumped to see your name in lights. They’ll feel proud and validated in their early belief, and share the story with their own audiences.
If it goes poorly, you’ve bought insurance.
Of course, at some point, if a startup becomes big and important enough, scrutiny is healthy. Whichever company makes the millions of robots that work in our factories, and eventually our homes, should be accountable to the free press. Even Techno-Optimistic Media can, should, and does hold companies accountable.
But sometimes, you’ll get hit with a hit piece that ignores the facts to sell a story. Sometimes, you’ll get doxxed before your company is ready to go public.
If you’ve built your own channels, like Beff Jezos did with e/acc, and work with Techno-Optimistic Media, like he did with Pirate Wires and Moment of Zen, you’ll be prepared.
You’ll have an army of fact-checkers armed with what they already know to be true about your company and willing to call out inaccuracies in the story. You’ll have your own channels through which you can correct the record. You’ll have built relationships with Techno-Optimistic Media operators with their own megaphones to correct it alongside you, and a back-catalog of material you can direct your newfound attention towards.
Attacks can even bolster how much your fans love you, particularly if such attacks are unfounded. There’s no such thing as bad press if you’re prepared to leverage it.
Write Your Own Story
So that’s it. Go direct, partner with Techno-Optimistic Media, and maybe, when your Idea has survived a sufficiently thunderous ThunderDome and your dream has become a little closer to reality, take your message to the mass media on your own terms.
Of course, every startup and every media outlet is different. We don’t speak for everyone, this isn’t one-size-fits-all advice, and we are clearly biased. But we’re honest and realistic, too.
Techno-Optimistic Media isn’t a replacement for legacy media, nor is it a panacea for founders.
It’s a niche alternative to the doom and gloom that dominates the headlines for people who want to learn about the promising technologies coming down the pike, and a way for the founders building those technologies to tell their story to a receptive audience in an approachable way.
One of the fun things about this moment is the sheer ambition of so many startups. The things they’re building are necessarily insanely complex, and sometimes it helps to have someone from the outside take all of that complexity seriously and explain it simply.
We’re lucky enough to be living in a time where fact is more interesting than science fiction. Pick a field – biotech, space, robotics, AI, crypto, energy, you name it – and startups in it are building things that people would not have believed possible even a decade ago. Many of these companies will fail. But some will succeed beyond our wildest imaginations.
These are the most compelling stories being written today, and hopefully, as we pick up steam alongside the companies we cover, it will show bigger media outlets that good news sells, too. The disrupted often come around, eventually.
We also know that storytelling is only one piece of the puzzle. Even the best storytelling can’t make an uninspiring product compelling, and even the worst press in the world can’t kill a product whose time has come.
On October 9, 1903, a writer for the New York Times predicted that it would take the combined, continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians “from one million to ten million years” to evolve “a flying machine which will really fly.”
The Wright Brothers made a flying machine fly just two months and eight days later.
The stories we tell about technology matter. They shape how we think about the future and our place in it. Too often, those stories are dominated by a sense that technology is something to be feared rather than embraced.
The Techno-Optimistic Media offers a different narrative. One that recognizes the potential of technology and the courage of the entrepreneurs bringing it to life. One that doesn't shy away from the challenges and pitfalls, but never loses sight of the dream.
As a founder, you have the power to shape your narrative. By going direct, partnering with Techno-Optimistic Media, and eventually engaging with mass media on your own terms, you can ensure that your story is told in a way that reflects your vision and values.
But never forget that what matters most is what you build. The Wright Brothers flew in spite of the Times’ predictions. The commentariat wrote NVIDIA off many times on the road to this…
There’s no more compelling story than a small group of people turning an outlandish, ambitious, against-all-odds dream into a reality. It’s up to you to write yours.
Thanks to Christian for teaming up!
That’s all for today! We’ll be back in your inbox on Friday with a Weekly Dose.
Thanks for reading,
Packy
I love when people point out a single week where enormous positive tech stories came out day after day.
And I love reminders like the wildly wrong expectations before the Wright Flyer.
Plus anything Wait But Why. ❤
Proud to say my publication, Agora, is unabashedly techno-optimistic. There’s a huge gap that needs filling as we tell the real stories of the companies and technologies making the world just a little bit better everyday
The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewharris?r=298d1j&utm_medium=ios