Dear Ben:
May I ask you something? How long did you spend on BuzzFeed before deciding to invest $50m? I’m not talking of Jonah Peretti’s PowerPoint deck or spreadsheets, which, I’m sure, must be quite compelling. But did you sample the real thing, the BuzzFeed site?
And how many times a day do you log in? Please, don’t tell me it’s part of your mandatory media diet, I’ll have to struggle not to express polite disbelief.
Frankly, your investment leaves me bewildered.
Judging by your blog and your remarkable book (I energetically proselytize both), you embody a mixture of vista, courage, combining focus on details with broad systemic vision, all supported by deep hands-on experience.
In addition, you are of the generous type and I was even happier to buy two copies of your book (including a paper version for a friend) knowing all proceeds will go to Women in the Struggle — a noble cause.
In short Ben, I have a great deal of respect for you. You are the type of person our modern economy needs.
Except that I don’t share your vision of the news business. In fact, I’m standing at the polar opposite of it.
Let me be clear: I do not question the goals and means of the VC business you’re in. In fact, I think this extraordinary ecosystem of financing innovation has long been a vital booster to the economy. Whenever I get the opportunity, I preach this in France, only to find out that my plea is beyond the cognitive grasp of the French governing elite (our VC perimeter is 33 times smaller than yours for a GDP only 6 times smaller.) The whole system sounds fine to me: investors gives you money — $4.15bn for Andreessen Horowitz at my last count — your mission is to multiply, you create scores of high qualified jobs. Great.
But is BuzzFeed really such a good multiplier?
Obviously, you know more than I do about BuzzFeed’s long term’s prospects: Impressive growth, heavy reliance to technology. From a pure business perspective tough, I would be very careful to put other people’s money in a traffic-machine that depends for 75% on social referrals because not all clicks are born equal. BF’s are myriad, but they are worth a tiny fraction of, say, a click on The New York Times.
I spent some time trying to overcome my reluctance to BuzzFeed’s editorial content. I wanted to to convince myself that I might be wrong, that BuzzFeed could in fact embody some version of journalism’s future. But if that’s the case, I will quickly resettle in a remote place of New Mexico or Provence.
BuzzFeed is to journalism what Geraldo is to Walter Cronkite. It sucks. It is built on meanest of readers’ instincts. These endless stream of crass listicles are an insult to the human intelligence and goodness you personify. Even Business Insider, a champion practitioner of cheap click-bait schemes, looks like The New York Review of Books compared to BuzzFeed. And don’t tell me that, by hiring a couple of “seasoned editors and writers” as the PR spin puts it, BuzzFeed will become a noble and notable contributor of information. We never saw a down/mass market product morphing into a premium media. You can delete as many posts as you wish, it won’t alter BF’s peculiar DNA.
Fact is, quality content does exist in BuzzFeed (an example here), but in the same way as a trash can contains leftovers of good food: you must go deep to find it. It won’t change the fact that what people enjoy the most on BuzzFeed is unparalleled ability to package, organize and disseminate mediocrity broken down in this promising nomenclature:
Ben, don’t tell me you’re proud of A16z investment in BuzzFeed. By funding it, you are contributing to the intellectual decrepitude of readers, the youngest ones especially — already severely damaged by Facebook and Snapchat sub-cultures. Did it ever cross your mind that these people are going to vote some day?
Two years ago, one of your competitors, the Founders Fund (I believed it held values similar to yours) published an essay titled What Happened to the Future?. Their article outlines the conflict between “funding transformational technologies (like search or mobility)” and supporting “companies that solved incremental problems or even fake problems”. Do you realize that, by funding a company such as BuzzFeed, you fall on the wrong side of the fence?
Look, I’ve no problem to see BuzzFeed or The HuffingtonPost thrive. They’re run by super-smart people (such as this one) who developed audience-building techniques that legacy media should pay more attention to.
What bothers me the most is to see smart money such as A16z’s being diverted to such a shallow product.
Ben: You want to invest in the information business? Consider what the Sandler Family did with ProPublica: they provided the seed money for a fantastic public interest journalism project (which, in passing, snatched two Pulitzers). Technology-driven ProPublica is now financially autonomous. Or consider emulating Pierre Omidyar who supports First Look Media, which promotes the kind of journalism a democracy badly needs.
Of course, these two ventures won’t produce VC-caliber ROI, but you already have plenty of items in A16z portfolio to keep your investors salivating. So, why wallow in BuzzFeed?
And if you want to put your excess of cash into something even more meaningful, hop on a Netjets plane and go to Africa. I recently bumped into an investment banker from Lazard who gave me the full picture of the economic potential of African countries, in every possible field — including leapfrogging technologies that build on the explosion of the mobile internet. For that matter, I’m personally exploring opportunities and the development of mobile apps for health and education in poor countries (a non-profit project). I started modestly by lending an Android phone and other items to an eye surgeon who runs (pro-bono) surgery campaigns in Sub-Saharian Africa. After her last campaign in Burkina-Faso last spring, we debriefed and the conclusions are staggering in terms of demand and opportunities. And I know the same thing is happening with mobile education. I decided to put €10,000 of my own money, just to see some of the ideas I’m nurturing could fly. If I were you Ben, I’d put a million dollars to explore this. And if I were running A16z, I would invest millions in long-term projects such as the automated large-cargo drones system described at the end of Alexis Madrigal’s recent story in The Atlantic that could change a whole continent economy. Or in mobile phone-based projects in Africa funded by PlaNetFinance Group or others. Tech investment in developing countries is indeed a Next Big Thing — much bigger than listicles. Risks and upsides are both huge. Right up your alley.
Best regards,
Frederic Filloux
