The best possible critque…

If you're a startup founder who's spent any time thinking about how you tell your company's story, you've likely heard the same two words from people you respect: "go direct."

The very-online tech community has a newfound fascination for media, and the consensus view is that successful startup communications involves aggressively telling your own story without relying on any intermediaries.

Under the new framework, best practices have changed:

• Announce funding via press release/media exclusive → direct-to-camera launch video
• Cultivate relationships with journalists/influencers → "post more", build your own audience
• Filter your message through PR/legal teams → be 100% authentic (no intermediaries)

This is now the gospel of preachers like a16z and the All-In Podcast.

They cite Trump and Elon's success, the decline of legacy media, and the (admittedly true) mediocrity of PR agencies as reasons why your B2B fintech/AI startup should stop pitching and start posting.

Their arguments have gut-level appeal to founders who want to change existing structures. The problem isn't that going direct shouldn't work, it's that it probably won’t (at least for you).

Here's why:

• Trump, Elon, the VCs and tech companies who are successfully going direct already had massive built-in audiences from name recognition (usually created via legacy media) before they could cut out intermediaries.
• If you're a new founder, your audience is your expanded social and professional networks people who already know you. Not the customers, partners, regulators, or institutional investors you actually need.
  • Building a massive audience on social takes time and is a full time practice. On the way there, you’re just posting into a closed loop.
• In regulated, credibility-constrained verticals like crypto, fintech, and AI, you have stakeholders (regulators, institutional capital, partners) who rely on institutional recognition to assess legitimacy and reduce risk.
  • In these spaces, going direct can actually be counterproductive: one poorly considered take can draw regulatory scrutiny, come up in due diligence during M&A talks, or piss off the European customer who doesn’t like your edgelord sense of humor.
• As a general rule, extremely online people are antisocial malcontents whose brain rot poses a genuine hazard both to themselves and whatever real-life social networks and organizations they may be a part of.
  • The opinions of a founder who’s always online are opinions are more likely to shift with "the current thing”, they’re more likely to make erratic business choices or lose conviction in their mission.

The biggest problem with "going direct" however, is that like all maximalist arguments, its origins are grounded in the distorted incentives of its originators.

Marc Andreessen, Chamath, etc. already have generational wealth. They're not optimizing for economic outcomes, they're optimizing for winning status games.

When the media stopped celebrating them, their egos got bruised and they decided to support Trump and build their own media and political institutions. Their advice serves their psychological needs, not your business.

The question you need to ask yourself is whether you want to be an unwitting soldier in someone else’s culture war, or build a generational company that creates economic value?

You Already Know Institutional Validation Matters