The trust economy

Hey, I’m Isaac 👋 I founded Pistachio, a growth agency working with B2B brands like Atono and Clay to build trust, relationships and loyalty with their current and future customers.

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Read time: 8 mins 50 secs

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Here's a fun one to take to your board: recently, a company torched a rumoured low nine figures on a YouTube channel with fewer than 70,000 subscribers. On paper, it's lunacy. That's north of a thousand dollars a subscriber, or a small country's worth of Meta ads.

The company was OpenAI. The channel was TBPN. And in a single move, Sam Altman and the two blokes below vibemogged Dario Amodei, Anthropic, and just about the whole market, walking off with the loudest voice in tech.

So what does that money actually buy? Not 70,000 subscribers, that's for certain. It buys two things you can't order off a rate card: distribution and trust. Founder brand and owned media are where this whole newsletter is pointed, and the TBPN deal is just the most expensive proof yet that the smart money agrees. So today we'll crack open that deal and a few other companies making the same bet. Buckle up.

Quick hello if we've not met: I'm Bill, though most people call me Doc. I run Athyna and write a newsletter called Open Source CEO, which is really just me doing the very thing this piece is about, building a company by building a voice out loud. So take me less as a neutral observer here and more as a bloke with plenty of skin in the game.

Something just clicked inside comms departments around the world. The appetite for actual storytellers has never been bigger. Vanta, Ramp, Notion, and even Morgan Stanley are all getting in on it. Hiring a head of storytelling is one perfectly good way to start winning trust in the market.

Sounds a touch mad, I know. But it tracks. Humans trust humans. We buy from the people we reckon we could happily share a beer with. That's just who we are and who we've always been. Look at Airbnb's 2023 Winter Release: Brian Chesky's personal post pulled something like 100x the eyeballs of the branded account saying the exact same thing.

It's no fluke that Stripe's John Collison and Vanta's Christina Cacioppo now host Cheeky Pint and Frameworks for Growth. Yes, it's content. Yes, it's distribution. But it's bigger than both. This is founder brand graduating into founder media, the ultimate parasocial relationship.

Picture your bog-standard sales funnel. Most companies are sprinting across a dozen channels just to get noticed: Meta ads, Google too, trade shows, events, podcast reads, and creator deals. The top of the funnel is all about proving you exist. Then comes the middle: nurture emails, case studies, social proof marketing, blah, blah, blah. The bottom is the brutal bit. Trust.

Now flip the whole thing on its head. What if trust came first? 'John Collison seems like a sound bloke, I'd grab a beer with him,' or 'God, I love Frameworks for Growth, this Christina is sharp.' That hijacks the funnel entirely, putting trust up top and opening the door to a far smoother ride to the sale.

The numbers back it up. Roughly 63% of US consumers are more likely to buy from someone they follow and 57% more likely to recommend them. Pick any dataset you like online; it'll tell the same story. Your ape ancestors were never going to swap bananas on the savannah with a primate they didn't trust. Our little monkey brains were wired to partner and do business with people we believe in.

A handful of scale-up founders are out front here, building trust, and in the case of our next example, a whole lot of goodwill, right across the industry. Start with James Hawkins from PostHog, who's grown his name by becoming the single greatest techno-shitposter alive. His trust play is comedy and a flat refusal to take himself too seriously. It lands because it's a dead-on match for PostHog, one of the most gloriously unhinged brands in all of tech.

PostHog is also deep in the owned-media game, same as our Stripe and Vanta examples, in their case via their newsletter, Product for Engineers. It covers how PostHog builds products plus broader technical concepts, written by a rotating cast of the team, James included.

I had a chat with Ian from PostHog about the strategy recently, and his take stuck with me: they've poured a fortune into Meta, Google, and newsletter ads, and the only channel that actually converts is their own newsletter. Same lesson again. Trust, built over time, is what walks the reader all the way to the point of buying.

Another founder I keep an eye on is Tyler Denk, who runs beehiiv and has a serious online presence of his own. If James's archetype is The Joker, Tyler is firmly The Rebel. He loves a scrap with a competitor, and one of the better sights online is the community, present company included, piling in to back him.

Exhibit A is Phillip Moyer’s reply to my Neumannomics piece.

At the time, Phillip was running Vimeo as CEO. Not a bad name to have in your corner, really. Especially knowing the baseline of trust is already there if I ever need to call on it.

Time for the uncomfortable bit. Every tool that lets a founder build a real voice is the same tool letting ten thousand companies hose the internet down with generated sludge. Same gun, wildly different aim. Think of it like any other market. When a thing is scarce, it's valuable. When it's everywhere, it's worthless. Content used to be genuinely scarce, because putting words in front of people cost real money and real effort, and that cost quietly held up a floor on quality. The internet tore the floor out. Then AI took the torn-out floor, set it alight, and launched the ashes into orbit. Welcome, officially, to the slop-cannon era.

We now live somewhere one person with a laptop can out-publish an entire marketing department and where the 'thought leadership' fired at LinkedIn on a single Tuesday would've stocked a 2005 library. Most of it is technically writing and functionally wallpaper. Nothing to say, nobody behind it, no one you'd trust with a lunch order.

Here's the twist nearly everyone misses, though. Drown the world in slop, and you don't cheapen the good stuff, you make it priceless. Trust is the scarce thing now, and scarcity is where all the value ran off to. The harder it gets to fake a real human, the more a real human is worth.

Exhibit A: James Hawkins didn't land 5.2M views on a Microsoft Teams meme because a strategist plotted it onto a content calendar. He landed them because only James could have posted it. Copy his cadence, his format, even his jokes, and you still won't sound like him. That's the moat. Not reach, not frequency, just the simple, unfakeable fact of being a specific person people believe. Speaking of which, this is where I do mine. Consider yourself warned.

Now you've got the lay of the land, you need to know your options. Like any decent opportunity, it sorts neatly into three: build, buy, or partner. Let's take them in reverse.

The lowest-friction way in. You're not building from scratch, and you're not signing a cheque with nine zeros on it. You're borrowing someone else's trust. It's exactly what our sponsors here are up to. When Vanta, Granola, or Framer appears in my newsletter, it isn't just an ad slot. It's a trust transfer. 345,000 people who trust me suddenly have a reason to take your product seriously. You didn't earn that trust. You borrowed it.

There's another flavour of this I run myself: outsourced storytelling lead for partners I rate. Vanta runs campaign after campaign now and keeps coming back to have me document the company. I've done the same for Attio, Paddle, and a few others.

It works for one reason: my partners know my audience trusts me and trusts me when I write about a company. Partnering is a brilliant place to start, and it's where most brands stop. But there are two more rungs on the ladder.

This is the OpenAI/TBPN move. HubSpot buying The Hustle before it. Robinhood snapping up MarketSnacks before that.

You write a fat cheque. You buy an audience and, more importantly, an existing relationship. The trust comes pre-installed. Fastest route to distribution there is, full stop. But here's what people miss about these deals: the real asset isn't the content. It isn't the subscriber count. It isn't even the channel. It's the trust the audience has in the creator, specifically.

Audiences follow people, not brands. If the talent walks twelve months after the deal closes, the trust strolls right out with them. But if you've got the capital and the patience to fold them in without wrecking the very thing that made them valuable, it can be an enormous win. The cleanest example going is HubSpot, which has somehow kept Sam and Shaan firing on My First Million long after acquiring The Hustle.

The proper long game. A newsletter. A podcast. A YouTube channel. Starting at zero and compounding, week after week. No cheque required, just consistency and a willingness to keep turning up before anyone's watching, back when it all feels a bit like a hamster wheel.

The trick is to put a real human voice at the front of the company and actually let them talk. Vanta didn't build Frameworks for Growth because they were short on content. They built it because Christina Cacioppo is genuinely interesting, and people in the compliance and startup world will listen to her in a way they'll never listen to a Vanta product page.

Same story with Stripe and Cheeky Pint. John Collison having an honest sit-down with Satya Nadella is worth more to Stripe's brand than a hundred press releases stapled together. The trust-first funnel, built from the inside out.

Which brings us, at last, to TBPN. On April 2nd, less than eighteen hours after the April Fool's safety window closed at noon on the 1st, the team announced they'd been bought by OpenAI. The business and media world lost its mind, and Twitter detonated into a thousand takes on the future of media and which up-and-comer gets to scoop up TBPN's now-orphaned sponsors. On paper, low nine figures for a channel with a smidge over 50,000 subscribers reads as certifiable. But it's not without precedent.

As recently as October last year, the Ellison family (David, spending father Larry's money) bought the centre-right business-and-politics brand The Free Press for an eye-watering $150M. Big money for a fairly small audience.

And while TBPN's ad arm reportedly did $5M in revenue in 2025 with a run rate around $30M this year, OpenAI plans to wind down the advertising side completely. So if the rumours hold, they bought a media brand at roughly 10x year-end revenue projections, then switched off the money tap. So why on earth buy it? Same reason as The Free Press, and it comes down to one beautifully stupid word: vibemogging.

OpenAI has had an absolute shocker of a year. They're haemorrhaging cash, they pulled the plug on Sora, and Pentagon deal left them looking like the moustache-twirling villains of the piece. More to the point, the chatter for months now has been about how much better Claude is at basically everything: coding, writing, and automations. Claude Cowork's landing was the final nail. It feels like every man, woman, and child has migrated from OpenAI to Anthropic, if they weren't already there.

One tidy way to fight a rising tide of bad press? Go and buy the most consequential up-and-coming tech show on the internet, TBPN, and vibemogg Anthropic at the exact cultural moment everyone's paying attention. Now, through their freshly minted media-mogul hires John Coogan and Jordi Hays, OpenAI gets to trustmaxx by association. Everyone's calling it a distribution play. It's not. It's about repairing and then building on a brand that's been quietly leaking credibility.

Remember that nine figures for 70,000 subscribers? Should look a good deal less mad by now. OpenAI didn't buy an audience. It bought the one asset getting harder to manufacture by the week, and the entire market watched it happen in real time. That's what makes the TBPN deal a milestone. Not the price, but the fact that trust now turns up on a balance sheet.

Owned media, founder brand, hard-earned trust. These have quietly become the sturdiest moats in tech, and the companies building them today are banking on something no rival can wire a payment for two years from now.

And for the rest of us, the ones without a spare nine figures kicking about? Brilliant news: the entry fee hasn't changed in decades. Start showing up in your own voice long before you feel ready. Lean on the trusted people already in your corner. Document the whole messy climb. Do that, and the head start you build while nobody's watching turns into a lead nobody can close. Products get copied. Cheques get cashed. A voice people actually trust is the one thing that compounds. The future, same as it ever was, belongs to the storyteller.

And that's it! You can subscribe to my newsletter here, follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

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