Announcing The Founders' Tribune

The Startup Archive began as a fun side project to archive the world’s best startup advice for the next generation of founders. In the past year, its reach has grown to millions of impressions per month, and some of the most influential people in the world follow it. Naturally, my primary concern has shifted from “Will anybody care?” to “Am I wasting a rare opportunity treating it as just a side project?”

The idea I’ve been most excited about is using the Startup Archive to bootstrap a new media company that celebrates great founders and shows future generations how they can do it too. For instance, Paul Graham’s essays inspired a generation of founders to build companies like Reddit, Coinbase, Airbnb, Stripe, and OpenAI. Can we grow the reach of ideas like these from a niche community to the 5+ billion people connected to the Internet?

Today we’re launching that media company. It’ll be called The Founders Tribune, and its purpose will be to share ideas from people building the future, in their own words. The value proposition is simple: more high-quality ideas per reading minute than any publication on the planet.

If you think about this formulaically, it means better ideas in fewer words. Most publications do the opposite because advertising-reliant business models force them to prioritize total engagement over value per unit of reading time. That’s why most outlets publish dozens, if not hundreds, of click-bait articles a day. Our strategy will be different. We will prioritize reach over engagement and follow a general principle that people should be able to read everything we publish. We will publish only one essay per week, and it will be the single best essay we can find.

With respect to better ideas, I think Steve Jobs put it best when he said, “The doers are the major thinkers.” Of course conflicts of interest can arise, but I’ve generally found that the people in the room have better ideas than the pontificators. “Experts” mostly extrapolate the past, and in a world that’s changing faster than ever, they are usually overconfident and wrong about the future. One of my favorite examples is electric cars. In 2010, the Department of Energy projected that there would be 2,305 electric cars on the US market by 2035. In 2014, Tesla alone shipped about 80,000 electric cars.

Looking forward, I’d bet Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s predictions about the future of AI in this blog post turn out to be more correct than the ones made by MIT economics professor Daron Acemoglu’s in last week’s New York Times op-ed. It’s very clear when you read each of them that one writer is thinking from first principles and leveraging knowledge that’s been accumulated over a lifetime, while the other is simply extrapolating the past.

The Founders’ Tribune will only publish the best ideas from those who do.

How will we get these incredibly busy people to take the time to write up their ideas for our silly op-ed platform? Reach. A lot of the best founders are already writing op-eds in legacy media publications. Below are just a few examples:

• Peter Thiel in the New York Times

• Marc Andreessen in the Wall Street Journal

• Sam Altman in the Washington Post

• Patrick Collison in The Atlantic

• Palmer Luckey in the Washington Post

We will promise them no paywalls and a better audience.

This is where the Startup Archive comes in. By sharing key excerpts of founder essays across our social accounts that have hundreds of thousands of followers, we’ll soon be able to offer founders reach for their ideas that’s competitive with the largest media publications in the world. It’ll take some time to earn their trust, so we’ll initially focus on curating the best of what they’ve already written. But once the model is proven and the publication is regularly reaching millions of people per week, it will be a desirable distribution channel for ideas.

The first guest essay will be Becoming Steve Jobs Foreword by Marc Andreessen. It was written by Marc Andreessen who co-founded Netscape — a web browser that revolutionized the Internet and changed the world. It celebrates Steve Jobs, someone who inspired a generation of startup founders. And it challenges the next generation to aim for great, rather than good enough. I hope it inspires you as well!

— Mike McGuiness

FAQ

How will you make money if all of the content is free and there are no ads?

We will make money by building great products. The Founders’ Tribune will operate as a subsidiary of Perch (the startup I cofounded with my brother Matt). If you haven’t tried Perch yet (it’s still in beta), you can think of it as the first reading app for the Internet — all of your blogs and newsletters in one place. The more great writing there is in the world, the more useful Perch becomes and the closer we get to our mission of making great writing accessible. We’re taking a long-term view, similar to what Stripe is doing with Stripe Press.

How can I help?

If you know a great founder who has ideas they’d like to get out into the world — or you are one yourself — please email me at mike @ perch.app or send me a DM on X (@mikemcg0).

Also, we’re hiring at Perch!