The New Media Paradigm Shift

My first real job in college was as a Product Specialist at Tesla. This was in 2012-2013, when Tesla still very much felt like a startup – scrappy, ambitious, and taking pre-orders for cars that didn’t exist yet. The Model S was still in early production, and people were putting down $5K deposits for an EV they wouldn’t receive for over 18+ months. 

I didn’t fully realize it then, but I was witnessing the DTC pre-order model at scale. Tesla wasn’t just selling EV’s, they were selling belief in a future where gasoline cars no longer dominate. Customers didn’t need to be convinced, they were enrolled. They became evangelists because they had skin in the game before the product even shipped.

This experience planted a seed that grew throughout my career in crowdfunding, ecommerce, and fintech – the best business model is one where your customers become invested in your success before you’ve even delivered.

Traditional model: Build product → Find customers → Convince strangers to buy

Tesla/crowdfunding model: Find believers → Co-create the product → Deliver to “investors”

Working with entrepreneurs and companies of various sizes, I watched customer acquisition costs drop – not necessarily because ads got cheaper, but proximity to consumers was becoming the new competitive moat. 

In those days, campaigns took much longer to craft and the winners weren’t always those with the most innovative products. They were those leveraging existing communities. A YouTuber with 10K engaged subscribers could outperform a competitive product with a bigger budget but no audience. Why? Because they were one conversation away from a transaction, not four layers removed.

This is the discovery cost collapse, a network graph where attention flows through people, not institutions. Every creator, brand, business owner, and even individuals casually posting. We’re all becoming media companies because we all represent distribution points and channels for information and attention.

Social media didn’t just create “influencers,” it created an environment where the means of distribution could be owned by individuals. And what I’ve observed over the years confirmed this, companies with aligned, loyal, engaged customer bases consistently outperformed those with larger but disconnected audiences.

Social media doesn’t just represent the collapse of discovery costs. It’s a product of a much larger trend – the collapse of technology costs.

Technological advancements, paired with network effects, have enabled creators to rival legacy institutions. At the same time, AI is collapsing content creation and deployment costs, enabling anyone to generate high-quality media at near-zero cost.

What this means in practice:

Legacy Media:

New Media: 

This isn’t incremental progress, it’s an order-of-magnitude shift that enables billions to participate in the new media landscape versus the thousands who could before. 

Commerce: The Pre-Order Economy Scales

My time at Tesla taught me: the best customers are true believers. They don’t need convincing because they helped will the product into existence through their pre-order. MrBeast’s Feastables isn’t a celebrity endorsement play, it’s a community believing in someone they’ve watched for years, now putting money behind their belief.

This model has scaled beyond consumer products. SaaS companies launch in public, iterating with early adopters. B2B companies build audiences first, products second. The logic is the same across the board, gather believers, then build.

Creator Economy: Distribution Became Ownable

The old adage was “content is king.” Wrong. Distribution is king and creators are the distribution, meaning anyone or any business can function as a media company. 

What matters now:

A fintech startup explained on TikTok hits different than the same explanation on LinkedIn. The platform choice is the message.

AI: Creativity Multiplier

I’ve used AI to create content as well as automation workflows, GTM strategies, MVPs, and more. It’s not just a co-pilot, it’s a creativity and productivity multiplier. 

AI’s real power, enriching limited data. I can feed it sparse market research and get comprehensive analysis. I can sketch a rough campaign and iterate 50 variations in an hour. And that’s just scratching the surface. 

The transformation is clear. AI doesn’t replace human creativity, it amplifies the creator’s leverage. What once took a team of five now takes one person with the right tools. 

Digital Assets: The Great Migration

The new media paradigm would be incomplete without addressing tokenization. Here’s where my fintech experience intersects with crypto, and why I believe tokenized content, in particular, is the next evolution of capital formation.

From a consumer standpoint, NFTs got positioned as “social proof” or “membership tokens,” which undersells the potential. They’re proof-of-concept for something truly game-changing, liquid markets for cultural assets.

But mainstream adoption hasn’t happened yet because:

Today, we’re approaching an inflection point. Regulatory clarity is paving the way for tokenization of various assets and value – traditional financial securities and currencies included. But among all types, one standout represents a completely new domain. And what I consider a huge untapped opportunity – creator and content coins. 

Imagine:

This isn’t equity. This isn’t debt. This is a form of cultural capital formation – betting on which voices and ideas will be relevant, popular, and meaningful. You’re really buying the belief that a creator’s cultural capital will appreciate. It’s social currency meets onchain creator monetization offering a new form of ownership and community participation.

From crowdfunding to tokenized content, crypto taught us a few critical lessons:

What Crypto Proved:

Where Crypto Focused:

Crypto’s Limitations:

Why Tokenized Content is Next:

The psychology is identical, investing in a future you want to exist, but the asset class is entirely new.

Here’s what people miss about new media:

Creators are becoming full-stack entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, full-stack creators. And the distance between creation and transaction, shrinking like never before. While at the same time more opportunities are becoming accessible along this spectrum.

The Playbook:

Example:

Naval Ravikant: 

This is not “influencer marketing,” it’s the evolution of information, media, and technology. 

Each evolution in media, from the printing press to the internet to social media platforms, has progressively expanded who can create, distribute, own, and capture value from content.

Each leap reduced friction between creation and consumption. Each leap empowered more participants. Relevance compounding at each stage. The media that survives is the media that yields the greatest diversity of voices, perspectives, and participation.

What’s being built now:

My prediction is that everyone becomes a media company. But not everyone succeeds at it. The winners will understand: 

This includes AI. This includes tokenization. This includes fundamentally rethinking what “ownership” means when your audience can own a piece of the cultural value you create. 

The future of media isn’t just distribution and content, it’s also new forms of capital formation rooted in cultural values. The Tesla pre-order model, scaled to every creator. The crowdfunding model, applied to every post. And those who understand both the cultural and financial sides of this equation will build the iconic brands of the next decade.