Tag: Media

How Founder-CEOs Got Their Superpowers

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Julian Fong | Flickr

Embattled, scandal-ridden leaders don’t just go quietly. If they’re going to bow out, they need to be pushed, and whoever’s pushing them needs leverage.

This principle holds for business and politics alike. Only Congress can remove a president, so unless President Trump really pisses off his Republican Congress, he isn’t going anywhere, no matter how many Russian connections get uncovered. Similarly, don’t expect Uber CEO Travis Kalanick to throw in his hand without a massive fight, no matter how many stories of malfeasance emerge.

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Soda Pop Protest Ad Goes Bust, Bigly

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories


If only racism, like tooth enamel, would just dissolve under the sweet balm of Pepsi-Cola! Then we’d solve all our problems. Alas, it is not to be — as everyone in the world pointed out to Pepsi after it unveiled, and then withdrew, a new ad in which a Kardashian-clan scion hitches a ride on the Black Lives Matter movement (Tracy Jan in The Washington Post).

Surely someone at Pepsi understood that drafting a white celebrity model like Kendall Jenner to play the part of peacemaker in a hostile confrontation between a diverse crowd of young protesters and police might not be a great idea — and would cause the world to cringe. The whole thing is a sugar-coated, white-washed, ludicrously tone-deaf trivialization of everything that is actually at stake in a divided America today. The firm and its ad agency either (1) failed to include anyone of color in its decision-making process; (2) did have such people in the room, but ignored them; or (3) didn’t really care as long as the world ended up talking about their spot.

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C’mon Facebook. It’s Time For Your Toddler Twin Media Party.

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File Under Humble Suggestions

There’s only one company that can possibly spin media gold on Facebook. And that’s Facebook.


Round and round and round goes the debate — Facebook’s not a media company, Facebook’s not a traditional media company, Facebook’s a new kind of media company. Facebook’s gonna pay media creators to make stuff on Facebook! Wait, no they’re not. Wait, maybe they will make it themselves! Gah.

We’ve seen this debate before — Google refused to call itself a media business for years and years. Now, well…YouTube. And Play. Twitter had similar reluctancies, and now…the NFL (oh, and college softball!). Microsoft tried, but ultimately failed, to be a media company (there’s a reason it’s called MSNBC), and had the sense to retreat from “social media” into “enterprise tools” so as to not beg confusion. Then again, it just bought LinkedIn, so the debate will most certainly flare up (wait, is LinkedIn a media company?!).

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Can Trump Manage America’s Brand?

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Let’s take a hard look at how he’s managed his brand in the past…

I recently asked a salesman at Nordstrom’s if dropping the Ivanka Trump brand had impacted business. “Nope,” he smiled. “A guy just came in and dropped $700 on shirts he’d planned to buy somewhere else.” Nordstrom’s stock price is up since the President went on a tweet warpath over their decision.

On the Trump-positive end of the spectrum, Ivanka’s perfume sales increased on Amazon, and after a group organized a boycott of Trump wine, retailers sold out. But politically-motivated purchases are an unsustainable long-term brand strategy.

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Facebook Wants to Be Your Everything

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Mkhmarketing | Flickr

When a tech company hits the peak of its dominance, it believes it can be all things to all users. Think Microsoft in the ’90s, or Google in the aughts. Today, it’s Facebook’s turn.

This week, Facebook announced that, among all the other roles it now plays in your life — connecting you with friends, delivering your news, processing your text messages, and so forth — it will help you find a job (Kurt Wagner in Recode). Maybe you thought Facebook was supposed to be for your personal profile, and LinkedIn was for your resume? That’s so 2011 of you! Now Facebook wants companies to post job openings on their pages, and the service will pre-populate application forms with the user’s Facebook data before sending it in (via Messenger, of course). Where LinkedIn and Craigslist charge employers for listings, Facebook’s plan is free.

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How Far to the Right Will Tech Tilt?

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The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories

Fiona MacGinty-O’Neill | Flickr

It may be time to retire the oversimplified notion that the tech industry is inherently liberal, progressive, or pro-Democratic Party. As Thomas B. Edsall lays it out in The New York Times, the corporate political action committees (PACs) that funneled money from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon to congressional candidates gave more to Republicans than Democrats in 2016.

It could be that these companies see their interests better represented by tax-cutting Republicans, or it could be that these donations always end up favoring the incumbent party. What hasn’t changed is the sympathies of the employees at these and similar companies, whose donations heavily favored Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump last year.

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Do They Have to Go?

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Kara Swisher wrote a solid and popular post lamenting what will be the painful visit of our fellow tech citizens to the evil Trump Tower this week.

While one would hope for a substantive discussion, it’s pretty clear to me that this is just going to be that media-saturated geek reality show episode, in which real billionaires walk the gantlet of prostration at Trump Tower and get exactly nothing for handing over their dignity so easily.

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How Index Funds Disrupted Wall Street

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Ken Teegardin | Flickr

Every maker of change in the business and technology world today fancies him or herself a disrupter. But Jack Bogle, the Vanguard founder who made index funds the dominant feature of today’s investment landscape, was disrupting things long before that word came into fashion. In an interview with Bloomberg, Bogle recalls how hard it was to round up support for the first-ever index fund in 1976.

Indexing is bad for the brokerage business and the mutual fund managers, but retail investors love it. Today the low-cost passive-investing approach Bogle pioneered has won nearly $3.5 trillion in assets at Vanguard and lots more elsewhere. He says the transformation unleashed by index funds is still gathering momentum, steadily “shifting the allocation of stock market returns away from Wall Street and toward Main Street.”

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Welcome to Our New Home on Medium

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We’re thrilled to debut NewCo Shift on the new Medium for Publishers platform today. If you haven’t heard of us yet, NewCo Shift is a multi-channel business publication, with a central home right here on Medium (if you want to learn more, you can read this overview). We’ll be publishing on a weekly and daily cadence, and interacting with the tens of thousands of readers and followers who care about the largest shift in our economy since the industrial revolution.

In addition to our Medium publication, we also publish an email newsletter, the NewCo Daily. This week, we’re adding a weekly version, with a new column by yours truly, as well as a new series of video interviews with NewCo leaders we call NewCo Spotlight.

NewCo Shift is the brainchild of folks from places like Wired, HBR, the New York Times, and other excellent publications. It’s a work in progress, and we’re honored to be teaming up with the talented designers and product minds at Paul Ford’s Postlight and Erik Spiekermann’s edenspeikermann. NewCo Shift complements the real world experience of the NewCo Festivals, which celebrate business on a mission through experiential events which connect attendees to founders and senior leaders inside company offices throughout North America, Europe, and Latin America. Oh, and yes, we partner with great brands, as well — huge thanks to Adobe for being our first presenting sponsor.

We’d love to get your feedback as we ramp up our content offerings during the course of this year. Drop us a line and give us a Follow, and if you want to help us spread the word, please recommend this story by clicking on the heart below!

NewCo Shift: An Overview

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Covering the biggest shift in capitalism since the industrial revolution. Keeping our wit nearby as we do.

What Is NewCo Shift?

A new business media property brought to you by folks at NewCo Festivals, who also founded or worked at places like Wired, The Industry Standard, The New York Times, HBR, and other excellent publications. Launched in beta in April, with new features rolling out through 2016.

What Is the Premise of NewCo Shift?

Here’s how we think about it (it gets a bit serious, but stick with us). The muscular brand of American capitalism that dominated the post-WWII era is in fundamental transition. The central premise that companies exist to drive shareholder value above all is increasingly under scrutiny. This “true north” of shareholder value incented our most valuable companies to shape our economic, political, and social landscape to reward short term and blinkered thinking. But society is now demanding that businesses consider the entirety of their impact — on employees, customers, partners, and communities — before making decisions that otherwise might be justified by “shareholder returns.” The result is the greatest shift in our business ecosystem since the industrial revolution.

Four distinct but interconnected forces inform this shift. These forces have been building for the past five decades, but recently they’ve hit a tipping point. First is the role of digital technology in our society. Until recently, technology was understood as a rising new vertical industry. But in the past two decades, technology has become a horizontal force across all industries, driving both a renaissance and a reckoning in every sector of our economy.

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