4 ms·
Yup. When I was deep in the VC-fueled startup game, tech press did not want to write about us at all, unless there was also some kind of funding news included,
by hugs 3y ago
Yup. When I was deep in the VC-fueled startup game, tech press did not want to write about us at all, unless there was also some kind of funding news included, too.. (I interpreted this as the writers knowing their readers... and only stories with funding announcements got the clicks...) So guess what happened? We would raise money, then not talk about it for up to 6 months until we also had some new feature or product to launch.
If people started clicking more on tech stories that didn't have funding announcements, maybe the cycle would change... But it feels like we're in some kind of Prisoner's Dilemma game now. Those stories don't written, so they don't get the clicks, so they don't get written...
- fishtoaster 3y agoYeah, "hold off funding announcements until we've got something else we want to push into the news" was a pretty common thing in my experience as well. I'm somewhat sympathetic to both the press and the readers here - they want to report/read news. Events. "Company X continues to exist" isn't really news. And "Company X adds new feature Y" is rarely noteworthy news, no matter how big a deal it is in Company X. Sometimes new features are news if either the company is huge ("Amazon adds support for Foo to AWSBar") or it's strategically significant ("Company X adds feature Y, now putting it in direct competition with Company Z"), but I think those are the exceptions.
- snowwrestler 3y agoTo reporters, funding is 3rd-party validation that a business is actually worth writing about. Just like press coverage is 3rd-party validation to potential customers that a company is actually worth considering.