The Case for a Gen Z Tech Publication

A week ago, Brent Liang posted the following tweet:



Brent, a 23yo law school dropout, had co-founded the podcast The Quest with Justin Kan last year. The podcast has had guests ranging from Mark Cuban to The Chainsmokers. The podcast has seen a good amount of success -- entering the top 1.5% of all podcasts according to Listen Notes -- but results have been inconsistent, with most YouTube videos hovering at a few hundred views or less.

"We got the playbook down," Brent told me. "We know what kind of content works on what platform." The inconsistent results, though, were on Brent's mind. He attributed them to a lack of narrative-market fit: "a quest to discover the human stories behind icons in tech, business, sports, music, and beyond" had led to great individual pieces of content, but wasn't a compelling enough theme to get viewers to stick around long-term.

This set the stage for Brent's project idea. What if the learnings from The Quest could be applied to content surrounding a stronger narrative? It would be a high-potential personal project, and a potential eventual pivot for The Quest.

What would this narrative be? Brent turned to his own transition from law into tech, enabled by Gen Z Mafia, the community of young founders and technologists. There were so many amazing people in the GZM network, working on inspiring projects, writing exciting stories, and exchanging ideas and resources on GZM's lively Discord server. Here was a community and culture that had changed Brent's life and the lives of hundreds if not thousands of others, and Brent saw the opportunity to share it with the world.

Half a year ago, I had shared my own, similar vision for Gen Z founder-centered content, pitching it to Rahul Rana from GZM:



Immediately after seeing Brent's tweet, I reached out to him, and we exchanged our ideas on a call last Friday, our enthusiasm compounding over its duration.

This post is an initial collection of our ideas: a case for why a Gen Z tech publication should be created, and what it might look like.

Narrative-Market Fit

The first principle Brent brought up to me, and the one I based my intuition on months ago, was that of narrative-market fit. Not all information is valuable: stories that align with larger narratives are the ones that get published, and that an audience can be built around.

The stories of Gen Z founders resonate powerfully with the narratives of the present day. Traditional institutions are failing to serve and empower people at every level, and our society is in need of innovation and change. College specifically is increasingly seen as overpriced and failing to provide young people with what they need to succeed.

Gen Z tech communities and stories illustrate these narratives, and present alternative, better visions. Brent left behind law school for tech, and his only regret is that he didn't do it sooner. After dropping out of Minerva, Ben Laufer founded a network of microcampuses for brilliant 18-23yos outside of traditional institutions, supporting dozens of people in three cities this summer. Young founders have gone on to tackle wildfire prevention, pioneer robotics and AGI technology, build mental health/team culture tools used by household name companies, and so much more.

This Gen Z tech narrative is nothing new. It's the classic Silicon Valley narrative, where vision, grit, and ambition drive unqualified builders to change the world, without asking for permission. It's a near-universally inspiring, if not loved, story, just waiting to be told again.

The potential to build an audience is exciting, but a deeper responsibility drives my passion for this project, which Brent also hinted at.

Shaping the narrative

Media doesn't only profit from knowing what narratives sell: they also influence and determine the narratives of the public.

I'll expose my inner journalism nerd here and quote Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel's The Elements of Journalism:

The news helps us...create a common language and common knowledge rooted in reality. Journalism also helps identify a community's goals, heroes, and villains.

When tech is talked about in public conversation today, it's talked about as "big tech": the evil megacorps of Google, Facebook, Amazon, and others, with unfathomable amounts of power and unimaginably rich CEOs.

Even in tech and tech-adjacent circles, coverage about startups is dominated by fundraising and institutionality rather than the actual spirit of building. If you want to be covered in TechCrunch, the surest way is to raise a few tens of millions of dollars.

Who's there to tell the stories earlier in the funnel? Who's there to ensure that the energy that brings founders into the fold in the first place remains a part of the narrative, and therefore of our reality?

It's not a dire situation. Successful founders don't forget about their scrappy starts, and semi-open communities on Twitter or like GZM thrive in tech more readily than in perhaps any other area.

But we can do a lot better, capturing and communicating the energy of young people in tech from the source stories themselves rather than in retrospectives years down the funnel, or within rooms which, accessible as they are, aren't meant to last.

Power to the people

A publication dedicated to covering young founders and startups also provides immediate value to members of the tech community itself.

For founders and startups, media coverage brings publicity and credibility.

For investors, a centralized news source offers leads for scouting and market research.

A dedicated publication also empowers our stories to be told, and heard, at much larger scales. Members of the public adjacent to or farther away from tech would have a credible, accessible content source to inform themselves with; larger publications would have a jumping-off point to amplify our stories and bring them into larger narratives in better ways.

And should a larger publication distort and misrepresent our stories, a credible publication would provide a new platform to fight back from, a body fighting on the same stage of narrative definition as its formerly relatively unmatched competitors.

Two parallel forms of content

When Brent came up with his idea for this publication, he used The Quest as a jumping-off point. Video and audio content of various forms, on various platforms, were what Brent had learned to distribute and grow well; platforms like YouTube and TikTok have built-in discoverability features, and they're prominent arenas of worldview-selling and narrative definition today.

As you've probably gathered reading this post, my initial vision branched from more traditional journalistic publications, with content taking the form of well-crafted written pieces to be considered with some of the weight of institutional credibility. I imagined regular articles published on a Ghost or WordPress website, engaged with in newsfeeds or email newsletters.

Each serves a different audience and purpose. Creator-style content published through social media engages members of the tech community who are already invested in the stories being told, or general viewers intrigued by a new narrative to subscribe to. Written journalistic pieces published on a dedicated website lends a larger credibility and power to our narrative, and our ability to tell and make impact with our stories.

These visions are intertwining, at their best when they build on each other. It remains to be seen how this project will concretely develop, or if it will it all, but the ideas have been laid out, and they're powerful -- stay tuned to see what becomes of them 😁