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BUSINESS STORY 🗞️

TBPN, Vibemogging & The Future Of Trust

Today, my friends, tech media is changing. I had planned to write a story centered on the idea of founder brand and owned media, two of the pillars of our subsequent piece, but I couldn’t move forward without addressing the TBPN-sized elephant in the room.

For anyone who hasn’t seen tech Twitter in the last 72 hours, Sam Altman, with the help of the two men pictured below, absolutely vibemogged Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and the market at large. They stole the beating heart of technology storytelling. And for a rumored sum in the low nine figures (low and nine figures are at odds in that sentence).

Why would a company as large and powerful as OpenAI want to buy a YouTube channel with fewer than 70 thousand subscribers? Two words: distribution and trust. Today, we will look at the TBPN deal, along with a handful of other examples of companies making a big push into the founder-brand and owned-media space. Let's dive in.

What’s happening today?

A penny has begun to drop inside of comms departments around the world. Today, more than ever, there is a voracious appetite for storytellers. Companies like Vanta, Ramp, Notion, and even Morgan Stanley are getting in on the action. Hiring a head of storytelling is certainly one way to go about winning trust in the marketplace.

It might sound crazy to some, but it makes sense. Humans trust humans. We want to buy from people we feel would be reasonably comfortable having a beer with. It’s who we are, and it’s how we’ve always been. Taking a look at this example below from Airbnb’s 2023 Winter Release, with Brian Chesky’s personal post of the release doing roughly 100x more eyeballs from the branded account.

_{Note: This is a screenshot from a presentation I recently gave to the Startmate W26 cohort at Canva HQ in Melbourne. For the sake of time and energy, I didn’t bother to clean them up. And there are more, forgive me!}

It’s no coincidence that Stripe’s John Collison and Vanta’s Christina Cacioppo now host Cheeky Pint and Frameworks for Growth, respectively. Yes, it’s content, yes, it’s distribution, but it’s so much more than that. This is the evolution of founder brand → founder media. The ultimate parasocial relationship.

Take a typical sales funnel, for example. Most companies are out there running countless channels to get in front of their audience. This starts with generating traffic and building awareness. Think Meta Ads, Google, too, trade shows, events, podcast sponsorship, and creator partners. Every brand needs people to know they exist. Next is the middle of the funnel: email nurture campaigns, case studies, and social proof marketing, blah, blah, blah. The final stage of a good sales funnel is the hardest. Trust.

But what if we were to flip that on its head? What if we led with trust? ‘John Collison, he seems like a good guy, I could definitely grab a pint with him,’ or ‘Geez, I love Frameworks for Growth, this Christina seems really, really smart.’ This totally hijacks the funnel, putting trust up front, and opening the door to a much smoother sales process.

The data backs this up. 63% of consumers in the U.S. are more likely to buy from someone they follow, and 57% more likely to recommend them. Find any dataset online, and it will tell you the same. Your ape ancestors were not going to be swapping bananas on the savannas with an untrustworthy primate. Our little monkey brains were evolved to partner with and do business with people we trust.

Who is doing this well today?

There are a handful of scale-up founders leading the way, building trust and, in the case of our next example, goodwill, across the ecosystem. Take James Hawkins of PostHog, who has grown his brand by becoming the ultimate techno-shit-poster. His style of building trust is through comedy and not taking himself too seriously. This works because it aligns super well with PostHog, which is one of the most unhinged brands in tech.

PostHog is also playing in the owned media space, similar to our examples of Stripe and Vanta, but in this case, with their newsletter, Product for Engineers. The newsletter focuses on how PostHog builds product, but also covers general technical concepts and is written by a handful of team members, one of whom is James himself.

I spoke to Ian from PostHog recently about this strategy, and he told me, “We’ve spent countless dollars on Meta and Google, along with newsletter ads; the only thing that converts is our own newsletter.” Again, trust over time builds the relationship with the reader until they are ready to buy.

Another founder I like following is Tyler Denk. Tyler leads beehiiv, and also has a strong presence online, although if James’ brand archetype is The Joker, then Tyler’s is definitely The Rebel. He enjoys starting a fight with competitors online, and one of the better things you’ll see is the community—present company included—going in to bat for him.

Again, as in the previous examples, Tyler is building trust in the most impactful way possible through his newsletter, Big Desk Energy, which is a weekly build-in-public-style essay on his experience building beehiiv, now read by north of 100,000 people.

Another example is this very newsletter, Open Source CEO. My team and I at my startup, Athyna, made the bet a while ago that if we could build my brand through socials and, more importantly, this newsletter, it would go a long way in opening doors in the future. Take this reply from my Neumannomics piece from Phillip Moyer.

At the time of the reply, Phillip was the CEO of Vimeo. Not a bad ally to have, really. Especially, knowing that the base level of trust is likely to be there if I ever need it.

Are you a trusted voice? Or are you a slop cannon?

Here's something nobody likes to admit. The same tools that make it possible to build a genuine founder brand are also the ones companies use to fire an absolute tsunami of content-shaped garbage at the internet.

Before the internet, content was scarce. There was a floor on quality because there was a cost that came with publishing. After the internet arrived, that floor dropped out, and volume went through the roof. We got a lot more great stuff. We also got a lot more garbage. In 2026, the curve doesn't just grow, it explodes. And it explodes mostly to the left. We have officially entered the slop cannon era.

We have entered a world where anyone can produce more content in a day than most companies used to publish in a month. A world where the volume of ‘thought leadership’ being fired at LinkedIn on any given Tuesday would have filled a library in 2005. Most of it has no soul. No opinion. No personality. No trust.

Here's the thing, though: The more slop that gets fired into the world, the more valuable a genuine voice becomes. This is the counterintuitive upside of the AI content explosion. Real trust is getting rarer and more powerful at exactly the same time it's getting harder to fake.

James Hawkins doesn't have 5.2M views on a Microsoft Teams meme because he has a great content strategy. He has it because he sounds like James. Unmistakably, irreducibly James. That's what cuts through. That's what you're actually competing for. Not attention. Trust.

Your options: Build, buy, partner

Now that we know the lay of the land, it’s important for you to know your options. As with all good opportunities, you should look at it through the very simple framework of build, buy, or partner. Let’s look at each of the options in reverse order.

Partner

This is the lowest-friction entry point. You're not building from scratch, and you're not writing a cheque with nine figures on it. You're borrowing someone else's trust. This is what our sponsors in Open Source CEO are actually doing. When Vanta, Granola, or Framer shows up in this newsletter, it's not just an ad placement. It's a trust transfer. 345,000 people who trust me now have a reason to at least look at your product. You didn't necessarily earn that trust. You borrowed it.

In the example of this newsletter, I also work as an outsourced storytelling lead to trusted partners. Vanta has run multiple campaigns in a row now, and keeps coming back to have my document the company. I have done the same with Attio, Paddle, and more.

This works because my partners know that my audience trusts me and believes me when I write about a company. Partnering is a great place to start, and most brands stop here. But there are two more levels to explore.

Audiences follow people, not brands. If the talent walks out a year after the acquisition, the trust walks with them. But if you have the capital and the patience to integrate without destroying what made it valuable in the first place, this can be a huge win. The most successful example of this working out in recent memory is Hubspot, and how they have managed to keep Sam and Shaan engaged on the My First Million podcast (part of their acquisition of The Hustle).

Build

This is the true long game. A newsletter. A podcast. A YouTube channel. Starting from zero, and compounding over time. There is no cheque required here, just consistency and the willingness to keep showing up before anyone is watching, and everything feels shit.

The key here is putting a genuine human voice at the front of your company and giving them room to actually speak. Vanta didn't build Frameworks for Growth because they needed more content. They built it because Christina Cacioppo is interesting, and people in the compliance and startup world will pay attention to her in a way they will never pay attention to a Vanta product page.

Same with Stripe and Cheeky Pint. John Collison having an honest conversation with Satya Nadella is worth more to Stripe's brand than a hundred press releases. It's the trust-first funnel, built from the inside out.

Case Study: The TBPN deal

Now, we finish with the aforementioned TBPN deal. On April 2nd—less than 18 hours post the April Fool’s safety window of noon on April 1st—the team announced that they had been acquired by OpenAI. This took the business and media space by storm, sending Twitter into a fury of takes about how this affects the future of media, and how budding creators can snap up TBPN’s pre-exit sponsors.

As recently as October of last year, the Ellison family (David, with his father Larry’s money) snapped up the center-right business and politics brand, The Free Press, for an eye-popping $150M. A large sum for a brand with a relatively small audience.

And while TBPN’s advertising arm reportedly generated $5M in revenue in 2025 and had a run rate of ~$30M this year, OpenAI plans to wind down the advertising side of the business entirely. If rumors are true, they purchased a media brand at 10x year-end revenue projections, only to shutter the ad sales. So, why buy it? Well, similar to the acquisition of The Free Press, it comes down to one bone-smashing inspired word: Vibemogging.

For OpenAI, it’s been a horrible year. They are hemorrhaging cash, they shut down Sora, and the deal with the Pentagon made them look like the shit-eating bad guys. More importantly, for many months now, the only real word on the street is how much better Claude is for most things: coding, writing, automations. Claude Cowork’s release was the nail in the coffin. Every man, woman, and child has moved from OpenAI to Anthropic if they weren’t already there.

Now, OpenAI, through their new media-mogul employees, John Coogan and Jordi Hays, gets to trustmaxx by association. People think this is just about distribution, but it’s not. It’s about repairing and building upon their deteriorating brand.

Summary / Future

The smart money has stopped betting purely on products. A seismic shift is underway in how companies build credibility, and the TBPN deal is the moment it went mainstream. Owned media, founder brand, and earned trust have quietly become the most defensible moats in tech, and the companies moving now are locking in an advantage that money alone can't replicate later.

For founders who can't write a nine-figure cheque, the path forward is the same as it's always been: start building your voice, consistently and authentically, before you feel ready. Partner with trusted voices in your space. Document the journey. The person who plants that flag today and keeps showing up before anyone is watching will be nearly impossible to catch in three years. The future belongs to the storyteller.

Extra reading

• The Perfect Onboarding In 7 Simple Steps - May, 2024

• How (This & Other) Newsletters Make Money - November, 2024

• A Guide To Crafting Your Brand Voice - December, 2025

• How Athyna Makes Remote, Work - March, 2026

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

TWEETS OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE RECOMMEND 🛠️

Every week, we highlight tools we like and those we actually use inside our business and give them an honest review. Today, we are highlighting Lightfield*—an AI-native CRM that assembles itself from your email, calendar, and meetings.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

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