I actually disagree with a few things you've said already. One, I think it's the platforms that have torn down the institutions. I don't think that they are a good partner for any media brand, and I think the idea that journalists and influencers are the same or should be the same is actually quite dangerous. There's not a singular television network that you can advertise on and drive product and growth. There is not a singular platform that you can advertise on and drive growth. That fragmentation and disruption has been happening for over 20 years. But we are continuing to work on what does it mean to be organically discovered in a world that's, you know, Google zero.
Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Nilay Patel, editor-in-chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Sarah Pette, the CEO of Puck, a fancy newish media company that's been around for about five years now. Puck has a really interesting model. The company hires big stars and gives them newsletters that are all mostly part of a subscription bundle. And these reporters and their newsletters are often must-reads in their categories. Everyone in Hollywood reads Puck's Matt Belloni, for instance. Those reporters then get equity in Puck and a share of the company's revenue. The idea here is to combine the financial incentives of the personality-based influencer economy with the rigor of old-school journalism. You'll hear Sarah say, "Journalists were the original influencers," which is basically Puck's catchphrase. And if you're a Decoder listener, you'll know that I have a lot of questions about that and how that fits into our modern media landscape. Now, I've had versions of this conversation with lots of media people over the years. Everyone from the CEO of The New York Times to the publisher of The Wall Street Journal to streaming service executives, digital media folks, and of course, a bunch of creators. Usually these conversations are pretty loose and pretty fun because, well, I'm also in the media and all of us share these same basic problems. I was really hoping to get a fresh view on this from Sarah because before she became the CEO of Puck, she actually worked for the platforms, first at Facebook and then for Twitter. So I asked her a lot of questions about Puck's business and how it operates within the platform environment. I have to admit though, I'm not sure I got the answers I was looking for. Have a listen and let us know what you think. We really do read all the emails. Okay, Puck CEO Sarah Pette. Here we go. Sarah Pette, you're the CEO of Puck. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you, Nilay. What a pleasure to be here.
I'm really excited to talk to you. I have a million thoughts about the creator economy and journalism and the information ecosystem. You're a fascinating person to talk to about all that because you worked at the big platforms. You worked at Twitter and Facebook and now you're at Puck, which is a media company that has an interesting perspective on being integrated with the creator and influencer world. I just want to start at the start. You've been the CEO at Puck for a little over two years now.
Correct. About two and a half.
Before that, again, you were at Facebook and Twitter during some periods of pretty rapid change there. You spent a minute at Refinery29. Quickly describe your experiences at the platform companies.
Very different, actually. I think when I first started at Facebook, that was back in around 2009, 2010. And so the company was around a thousand people. And even though that sounds like a large company, it actually was more of a startup and operated with a startup mentality. You used to hear Zuck say a lot, "Move fast and break things." And then fast forward three or four years post-IPO and it was "move fast and build good infrastructure." So just even in that small amount of time, sort of seeing the maturation of the company, the growth of the company, it moved from being a singular big blue app to also being a family of apps and services where we had acquired Instagram. We had to integrate that appropriately. We spun out Messenger actually into a singular application. We acquired WhatsApp. We acquired Atlas and used that as sort of our measurement tool and foundation. And then with that you also had this massive technological shift, which is actually really applicable, I think, to the rise of the creator economy and sort of the impact on publishers and media companies that I know we'll get into. But during the time that I was at Facebook, which was over about an eight-year period, we also had the shift from desktop to mobile. And that was a really profound technological change that had an impact, I think, certainly on employees, on the way that the company was run, and also had a significant impact on the way that businesses operated, the way that they became mobile-first, the way that they interacted and communicated with consumers in a totally new and direct-to-consumer way. So that was sort of my Facebook experience. And then you take the Twitter experience where I was the chief customer officer for about five years through to the sale of the company to the current ownership. And that was really interesting because the pattern recognition of having gone through so many different stages of growth. And to zoom out for a second, when you think about organizational change and organizational change theory, there's a belief that systems, structures, and processes break in threes and tens. So when a company grows from three people to 10 people, 10 people to 30 people, 30 people to 100 people, etc., that those systems, tools, and structures essentially need to be rewritten. And within the Twitter sphere or the Twitter ecosystem, I came in where we actually had the opportunity to sort of rewrite a lot of those systems and structures and really rebuild the ad tech stack. We had the opportunity to really think holistically about how we were serving the public conversation in each and every engagement. We also were able to really think through how do we serve and deliver value for our advertisers when they're trying to launch a brand or connect with what's happening in the world. That shift, I think, was really powerful because the evolution and the stages and gating that I experienced in the Facebook world were some of the things and the best practices I was able to bring to my Twitter experience, which was just truly one of the greatest honors of my life was to be able to lead that, be a leader in that company during that time.
You mentioned Twitter's current ownership. Obviously, it's X now. It's owned by Elon Musk. You left when Elon bought it. What was that like?
Excellent question. I can't really speak about the current state of the company for several reasons. But what I can share with you is that during that acquisition, which was obviously a very public acquisition, you know, I talk about it being one of the greatest honors of my life and truly it was. In so many ways, we live in a very volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous world. And that acronym is not by mistake. VUCA is actually a type of leadership structure that I've used in almost the entirety of my career to help lead teams. And during that time, I think my team was around 2,000 people around the world. Being able to communicate with them around what was happening, why it was happening, how we help customers understand the value of the acquisition and the reason to stay on the platform. Being able to navigate those types of changes is something that makes every single individual just a much better leader. And as those folks have both stayed at the company and as clients have continued to stay on with the company, as well as those folks that have moved on to other roles inside of the industry, I know that they look at that time and I think they look at the way that I try to communicate with real deep transparency and empathy and sort of surround things around evidence-based decisioning that has stayed with them and made them stronger leaders over the course of time. So really just a powerful, powerful part of my career.
Can you wait, can you say what that acronym is again?
Yeah, it's called VUCA. V-U-C-A. And the origins of VUCA actually come from the National War College following the Cold War. There was a realization that there's no longer this sort of stability in a bipolar world and that when you were thinking about how to structure for a new system of enemy, if you will, that you needed to be more planful and more capable of navigating within a highly volatile, again, very complex, ambiguous world. And so I've sort of taken that philosophy and applied that at significant moments in time in my career with my teams because I think if you're operating in a VUCA world and you're leading in a VUCA world, you're always really mindful of establishing and communicating clearly with each other, developing trust inside of your organization so that when things like Cambridge Analytica occur or things like a public acquisition occur that you're ready for it and those things can be large and globally proliferated and those things can be really small because in so many ways I think work in business is the most personal thing and how we manage ourselves is a big part of how we also collectively manage a team.
I do like the idea that your approach to the Twitter acquisition by Elon Musk was to compare it to Cold War bipolar power dynamics.
Not at all a comparison. VUCA I have been using well before. I actually was introduced to the concept from the CEO of Build-A-Bear, Sharon John. She is just, she's an exceptional human and an exceptional leader and she, at some conference that she was at, she was introduced to it and I used to sit on her board and she brought that back to a meeting and I was like, this is something that really, I certainly has had staying power for me.
Okay, now I'm just dying to know why the Build-A-Bear CEO thinks that she needs Cold War-era political philosophy. But we will do that episode. The producers will book that another time.
Should book her as a guest. She is phenomenal.
You mentioned the idea that some customers stayed on. I actually just, I'm curious about this, right? Your roles have been more advertising-focused, I would say, broadly, right? Making people spend money on the platforms. Elon's approach to advertisers who had concern about that platform after he bought it was to sue them and to threaten them and to tear down their brand safety initiatives. That's all stuff that, you know, in the administration that you were a part of, Twitter actually built up, right? That Facebook at some point was a big part of, right? The idea that we're going to have a wide open spread of content from our users. We will build the tools to make sure you're in the right places at the right time. You're not next to the bad stuff. We'll have content moderation to make sure people don't see the bad stuff at high rates. That's all basically been torn down, particularly in X, but even maybe on Facebook. How do you see that world playing out? Because the idea of a company like Puck or any other premium media organization, the pitch to advertisers is like, we're special and that's bad, right? Like it's very bluntly like that's noise and it's full of garbage and they're tearing down the things that make your brand special and you should come over here where you have a smaller audience that cares for the kind of premium journalism we make. But you built all that up and now it's being torn down and now you're at Puck trying to make that sale. How do you feel about all that stuff being torn down?
Well, I can't comment on the current state of the company, but what I would love to zoom out and talk about is I think some of the technological shifts that impacted and have impacted where we are today as a talent-led journalism organization. And so I'll kind of start you with these four numbers or five numbers: 38, 14, 7, 4, and months. 38 is the number of years that it took radio to hit 100 million listeners. 14 is the number of years it took TV to hit 100 million viewers. 7 is 100 million for the desktop internet. 4 is the migration of 100 million to mobile. And then months is the adoption of AI by 100 million people. So now the reason why I bring that up and why I think those numbers matter and the progression of how they get incrementally and deeply smaller is because we have lived through in our lifetime and certainly in our careers some of the fastest technological shifts that have ever occurred. Now why, like you might be like, that's great and yes you did the different platforms go through that, but why does it matter for news and media? Well, if you go back to the 1970s, which was the industrial media model, you had a really interesting, very neat landscape. You had 90% of viewership for news was concentrated in ABC, CBS, and NBC. You had local newspapers thriving, like absolutely thriving from a circulation perspective. And it was actually a good business model to be in. And you had trust at an all-time high. Trust was at I think like 72% when Gallup was doing the research at the time. And so that's particularly interesting because distribution was really scarce. It was quite controlled, but you also had a lot of these very clear shared experiences between people. And when I walked through those changes and those shifts from a technological perspective, the first thing that happened was really the rise of the internet. And the internet and digital disruption didn't just dismantle journalism. It actually rebuilt and reshaped journalism sort of layer by layer. And I think that's only the first shift because that's where new voices emerged. That's where local stories traveled faster. I'm not sure if you're familiar with the Panama Papers. That was like a great example of the internet and journalism at its best. You had reporters from multiple different countries coming together to report around corruption. But at the same time, you sort of had some challenges. You had this system starting to break. That very capital-intensive world now no longer was capital intensive. With a keyboard and with access to Wi-Fi, you could be a journalist. And that was awesome. But you also had scarcity disappear. You had attention fragment. You had sort of the gatekeepers, the editors of the world move from being capable of editing to really editing being dominated by algorithms. And so, you know, it's just like quick numbers. During a 15-year period, 2,500 local newspapers closed and 36,000 newsroom jobs disappeared. So that rebuilding was just starting to get under control and then mobile disruption occurred and now all of a sudden information is in our pockets and that is, there's so much power in that. But what also comes with that is that now news and media, which used to be invited into our homes for, you know, the 10:00 or 11:00 news, became a little bit more disruptive and interruptive. And then the rise of AI, which has experienced the steepest acceleration curve out of any technological shift and presents many powerful and very positive aspects of what it can do for workflow, what it can do for operational excellence. I mean, there are many positives, but at the same time there was, I think, with this another challenge in that if anything, any object, any article can be created by something that is artificial, then who can we trust? Because trust, I think, like 2023 Gallup did another poll and trust had declined from that 72% in the 1970s to 32%. So very seemingly obvious, the answer to who we can trust is people. And that is why for Puck being a talent-led organization and Jon Kelly, the founder of our company, you know, he had this thesis years ago. I don't know if he went through the technological shifts that sort of my mind goes through, but he knew that journalists were the original influencer. And he knew that in order to really, I think, reclaim trust for the reader it required putting talent at the center for so many different reasons, but in particular I think that reclaiming of trust was really, really important. And so now when this is why Puck's, you know, talent-first model I think is so influential and why we actually see others trying to copy it is because when you hear from Matt Belloni, you know that he has deep-seated relationships in Hollywood and in entertainment. You know he is extremely well-sourced. You also know that because we have a primary distribution model of newsletters, you know that you can respond to his email and he's going to respond back to you.
Wait, is he going to respond?
He always, he responds to every single email.
I mean, I can't speak for him. I don't have access to his inbox, but he prides himself on both listening to all of his readership as well as responding to his leadership. And it's not just Matt. So, you know, within the Puck ecosystem, we have eight different franchises that serve the professional elite. We have the entertainment franchise under Matt Belloni. We have Lauren Sherman who leads our fashion content and our fashion franchise. Marian Maner who leads our art content. We have Bill Cohan who leads all of our finance content. Ian Krysburg who we just brought on last year for the introduction of our AI and technology franchise who is exceptional. All of these individuals are people who have points of view and relationships and sourcing capabilities that put the personality and the person at the center so that our subscribers, that direct reader relationship, can really thrive in a high-trust community. And that's, you know, I think the story of how we got to a talent-led business and a talent-led business model where journalists are at the center and equity incentives are aligned. Each of our journalists have ownership inside of the company which is not anything that used to exist in legacy media before. That is a really, really powerful sentiment and a really powerful point in, I think, where to the, you know, the top of the question, all of these technology shifts have really driven to where we are today and why I wanted to be CEO of this company because you don't have a lot of CEOs of media companies that come from technology companies, but I think the pattern recognition that comes in that scale and influence of what we tried to do inside of those companies matter so much today and what we're designing.
You've kind of gotten to my structure question. I ask everybody on Decoder to describe the structure of the company. It seems like you've got Jon Kelly. He's the editor-in-chief.
And so he operates deputy editors, it sounds like, in a bunch of verticals and they do, they have reporters?
Yes. So I'll zoom out. So Jon Kelly is both editor-in-chief as well as the founder of the company. He is truly just one of the smartest individuals that I've ever worked with. And I say that having worked with Jack Dorsey and Sheryl and so many others. He is really exceptional. So, he oversees the entirety of our content organization. That's inclusive of Puck as a media brand and that's inclusive of Airmail as a media brand.
That's your big acquisition.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah, we acquired Airmail back in the end of October. So I know you'll have questions around that, but Airmail is run by editor-in-chief Julia Vitagliano who grew up underneath Graydon. She is absolutely exceptional and she's come over to lead that team.
That's great. And Carter, the writer of Vanity Fair who started Airmail. Okay. Just making sure our audience, like one of the things that's really interesting here is we have a young audience, a big audience. I'm not sure that they know what Puck is or what that history is. And I think this is one of the bigger questions I have for you as a whole, right? This is a pretty storied legacy that you're trading on. Buying Airmail is a big deal that I do want to talk about because it was Graydon Carter because that was his venture after Vanity Fair. I read his memoir. It was very fun. But I know my audience doesn't know any of these things. And actually the dynamic between do I follow Matt Belloni or do I care about Puck as an institution, I think is one of the most challenging dynamics in all of media. And I will tell you I actually disagree with a few things you've said already. One, I think it's the platforms that have torn down the institutions. I don't think that they are a good partner for any media brand. And I think the idea that journalists and influencers are the same or should be the same is actually quite dangerous. And I would actually, I would pull those ideas as far apart as I can because I think journalism is a process. It's a way of working.
Being an influencer is a way of making money. And like those things are not aligned. And I'm very curious how you can pull all of these ideas together and try to have the cost structure of the old way, the prestige of the old way, the Graydon Carter way with the economics that are pulling everyone towards integrated brand deals in influencer world. Because it doesn't matter if the journalists are influencers if they're not doing the direct brand integrations the influencers are actually doing to support that level of work.
I appreciate your disagreement and it makes for a very good podcast. I would disagree with your disagreement. The thing that I would say is challenged in legacy media and you can't really say that legacy media had it figured out because as you look around we've seen just constant layoffs happening inside of the industry for the last, you know, 5 to 10 years and Dylan Byers who runs our media content has written about it. One of the challenges with that is that the majority of layoffs were not coming from the sales teams, were not coming from the operation side. The people that were being laid off were the people that made the product, the people that influenced society, the people that helped to create a world that ideally would define what trust looked like in journalism. And that was the journalists. So for me on the technology side when I think of heroes inside of the organization it's usually the product and engineering folks but for whatever reason the way that media grew up it wasn't the people that were making the product, it wasn't the journalists, it was actually, those were the people that were ultimately being let go. And so where I think
But the reason they were being let go is because they cost money and there was no money associated with their product because their distribution was torn down by platforms, right? Like
That, like my biggest problem in my cost structure and my reporters know I say this to them all the time is that I pay them money and then they tweet for free, right? This is like the dynamic in every newsroom in the world is that we give our work to other people's distribution for free all the time. And I know that you have a subscription model and that's different, but that is specifically the dynamic that has led to the hollowing out of newsrooms is that we don't control our distribution.
Can we put the platform piece to the side for one second and just
No, no, I will address that, but I don't because I don't think those two things are connected. And the reason for that is we do have a subscriber-based model. Our subscription revenue grew over 50% last year and that is really critical. We do control distribution and our journalists are not a cost center. The way that we look at each franchise is thinking through the economics of each of those franchises and we do a business by annual business review with each of those reporters who anchor each of our franchises. So the operating leverage that we bring into this system still allows for the job to be done. The job to be done is not, and I wouldn't define influencers and creators only as those that do like integrated brand partnerships, but like
But that's how they all make their money.
That might be how they make their money, but Matt Belloni is very influential in the world of Hollywood because he is reporting on it and that influence matters, but also the relationship that he has. This is why I started out by saying he goes so deep into his sourcing. And this is not Matt, that's an illustration of all of our journalists. But when you are in that industry, you know, you have to read him because he is reporting on the inside story. He's giving you access to information that you would not normally have access to. And he does that with a high-margin business. So yes, our revenue model is twofold. You know, we have a subscriber revenue model and we have a commercial revenue model, an advertising model. Those things like that that you're describing that you can't have a profitable business that is talent-led and journalist-led, I would disagree with. I think that is absolutely possible and that is the reason why each of our journalists have equity and ownership in the company is because we want them to be incentivized to make hard decisions around cost. Like we are very diligent in those things. We also have the luxury of being four and a half years old and not having been built, you know, for the last 20 years. And so that's also, I consistently say it is again a real honor to be able to lead this company and to lead it through significant advancements in growth from a revenue perspective, from a content perspective, from a talent perspective and then also from a subscriber growth perspective. We just hit over 100,000 paying subscribers. We have, you know, upwards of a million just, you know, folks overall that are reading the publication and that's significant. To get to your platform piece.
Wait, actually, can I just ask you the last public number from 2025 was 45,000. So the 65,000 is from the Airmail acquisition.
I'm sorry, 55,000 is from the Airmail acquisition to get to over 100.
It is the last public number we announced with Brian Morrissey and The Rebooting. I announced that we had hit 100,000. We don't break out actually the difference between because that 45,000 I think was a 2024 number. But with the acquisition of Airmail, we will exceed 100,000.
Okay. So you can just kind of back into it. You had one public number, you made an acquisition, you had a big jump to another public number. Does Airmail have the same structure? Do they have equity? Do they have a revenue share?
Yeah. So, right now with the acquisition, we're working through all of the employee-based comp for equity and ownership. It's all one collective company and all one same compensation structure.
Airmail was a brand, right? Graydon Carter is a brand person. Vanity Fair was a brand. You were not really supposed to know who Graydon Carter was unless you were the sort of person who needed to know who Graydon Carter was. And then he was very important. Airmail was kind of built in that model, right? How many people worked at Airmail?
I think we have 45 to 50 people from Airmail and 45 to 50 people from Puck. We're about 50/50 in terms of talent overall. Although with the integration, as just for your listener base, as you do an acquisition one thing that you think about is the post-merger integration and how you bring two companies together. How you think about centers of excellence where you might have four finance people on one side and you have four finance people on the other side. So we did a lot of that synergy work. And
Usually when people say synergy work, they mean layoffs. Did you lay people off?
We laid off a few people from the Airmail side and a few people from the Puck side. Yes, absolutely. We did. We were really thoughtful and really careful. We communicated that within the first 24 hours of the acquisition and reviewed where we felt like we had too many people within one team and then where we would port folks over from either side of the business.
And then the total split between the talent who's supposed to go out and be the face of the company and make all the money and the management is what now?
Management. We have nine people on our leadership team and then we have across our journalist and editorial teams probably 40 and then maybe, yeah, 40 to 50 and then the rest are in sales, marketing, our technology team. We have a very small strategy and ops team.
One of the reasons I'm asking this is, you know, I have friends who've left big media jobs to go to Substack or Ghost or whatever. And then I have friends who have left Substack to go to another email provider because they think Substack's 10% is too much. They're not getting the value out of Substack. You're taking more than 10%. Like I just describing that overhead for an individual journalist, that's a lot to pay into to support a sales team or whatever else you might have compared to the revenue you might get back. How do you justify the split you're taking from the individual reporters?
From a compensation perspective. And we do on an annual basis, we look at our comps on compensation relative to the industry and our journalists and editors.
Wait, the industry is the media industry or the Substack industry or the Instagram influencer industry?
The media industry. And our comps are well higher than at or very much above the current comps and then also our journalists, but all of our employees have equity and ownership in the company. So I feel very confident that the way we pay our people is very much aligned and incentivized with the holistic company. I think on the Substack side. So,
Wait, can I just ask about that equity? Are you paying dividends on that equity or is that just paper money?
No, we are not because we're not a public
I'm asking what the equity is worth. I'm the person who owns a bunch of paper equity in a media company. It's great. Sometimes I think about it. It doesn't pay the bills, right? Like, does it pay the bills for your people?
Well, I appreciate that. Not at the current moment, but the value and especially with the recent acquisition, but what everything was built on prior to that has made the value of the equity significantly higher. And as someone who was also at another company pre-IPO, I believe in ownership as a component part of a compensation structure. For your listeners, I would also encourage them to really consider that as well. There is a ton of value to think about your total compensation package. So Nilay, while I appreciate your point, I just want to make sure you're guiding your young listeners.
