Earlier this week, I was chatting with someone in the new media space, and they asked me: "In the future, will every tech company just buy a media brand?"

With the news of OpenAI acquiring TBPN, we seem to have our answer.

I know just about every podcaster is drooling at the eye-watering rumored acquisition numbers (to the tune of hundreds of millions) and wondering: Could that be my brand too someday?

My take: we will definitely see more of these deals, but not every media brand should aspire to be acquired by a tech company. This is a one-of-a-kind deal for many reasons, namely that OpenAI is the defining company of our generation and they have a vested interest in shaping the convo around AI & the future of tech. I still have a lot of questions about how TBPN can maintain true editorial independence under that umbrella, and what this means for the integrity of tech media overall.

But I don't want to speculate on the OpenAI deal [Matt McGarry had a great write up!]. I want to focus on the dizzying two-year span that got them there.

In just 14 months, John Coogan and Jordi Hays launched a podcast, built massive distribution, and engineered one of the biggest media acquisitions we've seen in a very long time. Whether you're building a media business as a creator or navigating the new media world as a founder, there is a ton we can learn from the new rules they wrote.

-Taylor

In late 2024, if you scrolled through X (formerly Twitter), you might have stumbled across a strange video. Two men, dressed in sharp suits, sitting behind a mahogany desk, holding up a printed sheet of A4 paper. On the paper was a tweet from an anonymous finance account. The men were reacting to it, live on camera, in 4K.

They called them "love letters to Silicon Valley."

"When TBPN had almost no audience, we had one growth strategy," co-founder John Coogan later explained. "Find an interesting tweet. Print it out. On paper. Hold it up on camera in suits. React to it. Quote-tweet the person who tweeted it with the video."

It was an absurd growth hack, but the contrast between the high-end production value and the low-tech act of printing a tweet made it impossible to scroll past. "When someone quote tweets your tweet with a video of themself in a suit holding a printed out version of your post, it's completely unignorable," Coogan said. "You have to watch it."

The network effects were immediate; the featured accounts—often with massive followings—would retweet the videos, exposing the show to hundreds of thousands of new viewers.

That was the beginning of the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN — originally called Technology Brothers as a play on “tech bros”).

Within fourteen months of that first episode, TBPN was drawing more than 130,000 simultaneous viewers on its best days, had hosted Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella, Sam Altman, and Marc Benioff, and was on track to generate more than $30 million in revenue in 2026. 

Then, on April 2, 2026, OpenAI bought them.

This is the story of how two founders (and a team of 11) built the internet's most influential B2B media property without raising a single dollar of outside capital—and what this deals represents about the future of niche media.

To understand TBPN's model, you have to look at the backgrounds of its founders. Coogan is a builder obsessed with craft. He co-founded Soylent and Lucy, and spent years building a documentary-style YouTube channel that grew to nearly half a million subscribers. He understood the mechanics of video production at a deep level.

Hays is a dealmaker focused on distribution and monetization. He started a YouTube ad network in college, which evolved into Branded Native, a company that brokered thousands of advertising deals between brands and creators. He then co-founded Party Round (later Capital), a fintech platform known for its attention-grabbing marketing.

As Hays explained in an interview with writer Jackson Dahl: "I feel like we both started working on TBPN a decade ago. We were able to stack those learnings and combine that with the fact that we don't take ourselves very seriously, which is an important part of the show."

When they launched TBPN, they made a format decision that defined the company's trajectory: rather than making a polished, pre-recorded podcast, they went live. Three hours a day. Five days a week. On X.

As anyone in media will tell you, live television is expensive, unforgiving, and difficult to clip for distribution. But Coogan and Hays recognized that X was more than just a distribution channel for their target audience. The show was, in Coogan's words, a productized version of the group chat that every founder and investor already had.

"Everyone has that group chat now where they send posts from X, hoping there's a little bit of discussion around it," Coogan said. "We just productize that."

The format also gave them something that no pre-recorded podcast could: the ability to react to news as it broke. As Hays told Fast Company, "We basically leverage the algorithms. Love them or hate them, they do a really good job of sorting what people are interested in." Producers at CNBC wake up and look at the public markets to plan their lineup. Coogan and Hays wake up and look at what is trending on X. Then they gab — covering, by Hays's estimate, somewhere between 50 and 100 topics in a single three-hour session.

The visual language of the show was equally deliberate. Rather than pulling inspiration from other tech podcasts, Coogan and Hays looked to Hollywood. They studied the newsroom aesthetics of The Morning Show and The Newsroom. They shot on cinema cameras instead of TV cameras. The lighting was moody and contrasty — more like a film set than a cable news studio.

The result was a set that looked, as Fast Company described it, like "someone took a Wall Street trading floor from the '80s, sent it through the matrix, and spat it out in present-day California."

One of the least-discussed aspects of TBPN's rise is the operational rigor behind the scenes. Every day after the show ended, Coogan and Hays would debrief. What worked? Which interview was too slow? Which segment needed better information? Then they would adjust for the next day.

This daily compounding—hundreds of small improvements stacked over a year—created a product that became increasingly difficult to replicate.

"Going from zero to what we are today would be almost impossible, even for us," Hays said. "We started with a once-a-week show: one camera, two mics, talking through some posts. Then we added another show, then another camera, then new microphones. We added an overlay, then we added live, then guests, then five days a week, then new channels. It's just this constant compounding."

The live performance looks effortless because of the preparation. Coogan and Hays meet at 6:30 every morning to talk through the day's topics. "I've never had writer's block because I'm just transcribing the discussion we already had," Coogan noted.

This operational intensity is also why the show's niche focus was non-negotiable. "We make content for 200,000 people in the world,” Hays explained. These are people that run companies, that invest, and that work at the most important tech companies in the world. It's the founder that just applied and got into YC. It's a very small group of people, and we're very intentional about making sure that the content is interesting to them."

They could have increased their view counts by pivoting to political commentary or stock tips, but that would have destroyed the economics of the business. The business model was a function of the niche.

This is where the TBPN story is so fascinating to me, and where it diverges most sharply from the legacy media playbook.

To produce a daily live business show at this scale, a traditional network like CNBC or ESPN requires a production staff of hundreds, with executive producers, segment producers, bookers, graphics teams, makeup artists, camera operators, technical directors, and ad sales teams. That infrastructure was built in an era when distribution was scarce and the cost of entry was prohibitive.

TBPN did the same thing (a daily live show, multiple cameras, professional lighting, a polished set, high-profile guests) with just 11 employees.

They didn’t need outside capital to grow, nor did they have venture investors to satisfy. Compared to legacy media, they didn’t have a bloated organizational chart inherited from a previous either. And because they were profitable from the start, they never needed to raise money to scale.

The key to making this work was treating advertising revenue as the primary business from day one. Hays, drawing on his experience at Branded Native, understood that the revenue model had to be designed before the show launched.

The model they landed on was the "Formula One" sponsorship structure: annualized, category-exclusive partnerships that gave brands omnipresence across every piece of content TBPN produced for an entire year. 

"I wanted revenue predictability, and so every deal that we did this year and for next year, we did on an annualized basis," Hays explained to Axios. "I pitched every advertiser that we were basically building like a kind of Formula One team."

In Formula One, a team's sponsors buy the entire season. Their logo is on the car at every Grand Prix, in every broadcast, and in every press photo. TBPN offered the same thing: a brand that signed on would appear in every episode, every clip, every newsletter, every live event, and every social post for the full year. Because each category was exclusive—one fintech sponsor, one cloud sponsor, one enterprise software sponsor—there was no competitive noise.

"We work with a lot of enterprise software companies," Hays noted. "You don't just decide to spend a million dollars on software from seeing one ad. We wanted to make sure that every advertiser was effectively in every piece of content we put out."

This is fundamentally different from the CPM (cost per mille) model that dominates digital media. In CPM advertising, you sell eyeballs—a price per thousand impressions. The math only works at scale; to generate meaningful revenue, you need tens of millions of impressions.

TBPN's audience was not tens of millions of people. It was a concentrated group of perhaps 200,000 highly influential decision-makers. But those 200,000 people controlled enterprise software budgets and shaped the direction of the industry.

A single TBPN viewer might be responsible for millions of dollars in annual software spend. The value of reaching them repeatedly in a trusted context required a pricing model that reflected audience quality rather than quantity.

The financial results validated the approach. TBPN generated approximately $5 million in advertising revenue in its first full year, 2025. By January 2026, Dylan Abruscato — TBPN's new president and tenth employee, a veteran of livestreaming pioneer HQ Trivia — had already sold out the entire year's ad inventory. The company was on track to exceed $30 million in revenue for 2026.

[Editor’s note: To put that in context: a traditional cable news show generating $30 million in annual revenue would require a production budget of tens of millions of dollars and a staff of hundreds. TBPN was generating that revenue with the cost structure of a small startup.]

The TBPN story is the clearest proof yet of something I've been writing about for a while now, what I'd call the "right-sized audience" thesis. The idea that in the modern creator economy, the size of your audience matters far less than the specificity of it.

This runs counter to the logic that has dominated media for most of the past century. In the broadcast era, distribution was scarce and attention was the primary commodity. The goal was always to reach as many people as possible, because advertising rates were set by volume. A show that reached 10 million people was worth more than a show that reached 1 million people, almost regardless of who those people were. The entire infrastructure of legacy media — the networks, the cable channels, the print publications — was built on this premise.

The internet did not immediately change this logic. In fact, the early years of digital media largely replicated it, with publishers chasing page views and platforms optimizing for engagement at scale. The CPM model migrated from print and television to the web, and with it came the same pressure to grow audiences as large as possible, as quickly as possible.

But as the internet has matured and audiences have fragmented, the value of a highly specific, deeply engaged niche audience is increasingly clear — particularly for B2B and enterprise brands, where the decision-making unit is small and the lifetime value of a customer is enormous.

A fintech company selling to CFOs does not need to reach 10 million people. It needs to reach the 50,000 CFOs who might actually buy its product. And if there is a media property that has built a trusted relationship with exactly those 50,000 people, that property is worth an enormous amount to that fintech company — far more than its raw audience numbers would suggest.

As Hays put it: "We make content for 200,000 people in the world. These are people that run companies, that invest, and that work at the most important tech companies in the world." That is not a large audience by traditional media standards. But it is perhaps the most economically valuable audience in the world for the category of brands TBPN was selling to.

The right-sized audience thesis suggests that creators do not need to chase mass distribution to build a sustainable, profitable media business. What they need is a deep, specific relationship with a defined community — and a monetization model that reflects the actual value of that community to the brands that want to reach it.

A show for independent restaurant owners, a newsletter for procurement managers at Fortune 500 companies, a podcast for early-stage biotech founders — all of these represent audiences that are small by mass-media standards but extraordinarily valuable to the right sponsors.

We don’t yet know how much OpenAI paid to acquire TBPN; although some speculate it to be somewhere in the $100M - $200M range.

As Matt McGarry noted, on paper, it's not worth $100M+. The acquisition math only works if you understand what OpenAI was actually buying. OpenAI is facing increasing public scrutiny and regulatory pressure, and traditional corporate communications—press releases and sanitized blog posts—are proving insufficient.

Fidji Simo, OpenAI's CEO of Applications, explained the rationale in an internal memo: "The standard communications playbook just doesn't apply to us... it made a lot of sense to bring them in."

What OpenAI was acquiring was not just a show. It was a trusted relationship with the exact community, like founders, engineers, investors, operators, that OpenAI most needed to keep onside as it navigated an IPO, regulatory scrutiny, and the broader public debate about artificial intelligence (and I have more thoughts on this for a future date).

TBPN's audience are the people building on OpenAI's APIs, deploying its models, and shaping the cultural conversation about what AI was actually for.

Sam Altman, who had publicly called TBPN his favorite tech show, acknowledged the inherent tension in the deal with characteristic directness. On X, he wrote: "I don't expect them to go any easier on us, am sure I'll do my part to help enable that with occasional stupid decisions."

Under the terms of the deal, TBPN will wind down its advertising business — the very engine that had made it one of the most profitable bootstrapped media companies in recent memory.

The TBPN story is a case study in what becomes possible when you treat a media company like a startup. Every decision Coogan and Hays made — the daily live format, the niche focus, the Formula One sponsorship model, the relentless iteration — was a startup decision. They were not trying to build the biggest audience. They were trying to build the most valuable one. Rather than trying to be everywhere, they were trying to own one specific corner of the internet so completely that their competitors could not follow.

The results speak for themselves. In 14 months (a dizzying timeline!), with no outside capital and a team of eleven, they built a media business generating $5 million in year one and heading toward $30 million in year two. They attracted the most powerful guests in the technology industry. And they sold for hundreds of millions to one of the most influential AI companies in the world.

For anyone building in the creator economy, the TBPN playbook offers four lessons that are worth sitting with. 

The most powerful distribution channel in the world is a community that trusts you. OpenAI did not buy TBPN because it needed a podcast. It bought TBPN because Coogan and Hays had built something that no amount of money could manufacture from scratch — a genuine, earned relationship with the people who are building the future.

That, in the end, is what the creator economy is actually about

Key Resources

If you want to go a bit further, I recommend these sources:

Sources: Variety · OpenAI · TechCrunch · Fast Company · NetInfluencer · Jackson Dahl / Dialectic · John Coogan on LinkedIn · Jordi Hays on LinkedIn · John Coogan / Personal Website

This is what Creator Diaries is here for — covering the stories of people building the future of the creator economy, from niche media to local news to lifestyle businesses. If this story resonated, stick around. There's a lot more where this came from. And if you also love to nerd out about these sorts of things, I’d love to chat!