Own your media

Every company should now own its distribution.

For most of history, reaching an audience meant going through someone else. It required access to infrastructure and institutions, such as printers, publishers, booksellers, publishing houses, and media companies.

Every so often someone turns against that arrangement and takes distribution into their own hands.

William Caxton learned the press abroad, translated the books himself, and sold them from his own shop at Westminster in 1476. He basically decided what England would read. In 1517, Martin Luther challenged the Catholic Church and used the printing press to spread his arguments across Europe. He wrote in the language of ordinary people, bypassed traditional religious authorities, and helped turn a theological dispute into a mass movement.

The takeaway is that both Caxton and Luther bypassed traditional gatekeepers and went direct. This advantage now exists today for companies and the people behind them.

Yet most companies still rent their distribution. They buy attention and rely on rented distribution through paid ads, sponsorship, and PR. This is all borrowed credibility, and when you stop paying the attention stops too.

We think the next generation of companies will operate differently. They will build audiences around their own people and hold the relationships directly.

They will own their media.

AI only makes this more necessary.

AI removed the constraint on making software. It is doing the same to content.

It has never been easier to produce slop. Check any one of Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn. At the limit, if the cost of making something tends to zero, the output tends to infinity.

A canonical example is paper. Cheap paper was standardized in China, written material got far less expensive to produce, and woodblock printing, movable type and the Gutenberg press each made it cheaper again.

It enabled mass creation of text and the advantage moved from production to those behind it.

Content is abundant now.

You cannot prompt your way into building a reputation that took decades to earn, or manufacture what you learn from a thousand conversations with customers.

The best spokesperson for a company is not necessarily the best writer. It is the person who knows something worth knowing: the founder who has spent years in a market, the engineer who knows why the conventional approach is wrong, and the salesperson who has heard the same objection 200 times.

Traditionally, companies communicate like companies. There exists one brand, one account, and a carefully managed voice.

This model is breaking. The individual is becoming the unit of distribution.

Everyone in a company knows something the others do not, and each of them can earn trust with a different part of the market.

This is already happening at the top. Through 2026 the people running the largest technology companies have been more visible than their company accounts, the likes of Jensen Huang and Sam Altman. Their audiences are distribution assets.

It should not stop with the founder. The strongest media company a business can build is itself: one narrative, carried by many people with their own knowledge and experience.

You do not need anyone else to tell your story, and you do not need to manufacture views or rent attention every time you want to reach your market. You build an audience that knows your people, trusts their judgment and comes back for what they say next.

Push a heavy wheel in one direction long enough and every turn comes easier than the last. Jim Collins put that at the center of Good to Great 25 years ago, in a five-year study of why some companies broke away from otherwise identical peers.

Distribution works the same way.

One person publishes something worth reading. It earns attention, attention becomes an audience, and the audience produces the conversations that become the next thing worth publishing. Then another person starts.

Every person opens another route into the company, and every audience makes the next idea easier to move.