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The OpenAI saga was, in many ways, a perfect story for The Information. Reporters at the influential tech site spent the week of Thanksgiving obsessively chronicling the chaos inside the company behind ChatGPT, after its board of directors abruptly ousted its CEO Sam Altman.<\/strong> Five days later, Altman, the generative AI poster boy, was reinstated. By then, The Information had published 17 exclusive news articles on the company that had been picked up hundreds of times by other news outlets. \u201cHis firing was announced, and then everyone on my team was sending me all these tweets, where people were saying, \u2018Oh, if The Information gets the scoop on this, I\u2019ll subscribe,\u2019 or \u2018I really hope my Information subscription\u2019s worth the money,\u2019\u201d editor in chief Jessica Lessin<\/strong> recalls. \u201cAnd so it really felt like game on.\u201d Lessin\u2014who has followed Altman from the start, writing the first extensive profile on him back in 2005\u2014supported her team throughout the week by, among other things, \u201creporting in bathrooms while serving my friendsgiving\u201d and at the ENT doctor with her four-year-old.<\/p>\n The small-but-mighty Silicon Valley publication, which turns 10 this week, has spent the past decade rolling out ad-free scoops and analysis to a targeted audience willing to cough up $399 a year for total access. Back in 2013, when Lessin left The<\/em> Wall Street Journal<\/em> to start her company, it was generally accepted that \u201clegacy media was where serious journalism was. And then there were a couple of upstarts trying to do new things, but trying to fuel it with venture capital and ad dollars,\u201d she says, adding, \u201cThose businesses have evaporated.\u201d But The Information, fueled by subscriptions, has survived and seemingly paved the way for a new cohort<\/a> of outlets offering niche industry reporting at a premium price, from Puck to Punchbowl News. Today, more outlets, like Axios and Politico, are also offering B2B subscription products along with their free content.<\/p>\n \u201cThere were a number of media start-ups around that moment, and she was very unconventional\u2014that she was doing paid subscriptions and was not that interested in social,\u201d says Ben Smith,<\/strong> a former editor in chief of BuzzFeed News, who last year founded Semafor, one of the start-ups in which Lessin has invested. \u201cIt kind of pains me to say it, but obviously, she\u2019s been totally vindicated, and most of her competitors are no longer around.\u201d Those former competitors include BuzzFeed News, the Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning online news site that shut down<\/a> in April. There was also Recode, a brand Vox retired<\/a> in March; Quartz, which is still around but has changed hands multiple times<\/a> over the years, most recently to G\/O Media; and Vice, which, the Times,<\/em> while reporting that the company had filed for bankruptcy in May, referred<\/a> to as a \u201cdecayed digital colossus.\u201d Lessin was ahead of her time with the business model she adopted and the story she wanted to own. \u201cShe\u2019d come out of The Wall Street Journal,<\/em> and there was a sense that The Information was applying the kind of East Coast financial reporting rigor to an ecosystem that the East Coast publications didn\u2019t really seem to understand very well,\u201d says Smith. Longtime subscriber Roelof Botha,<\/strong> the head of Sequoia Capital and former CFO of PayPal, agrees, noting that when Lessin started The Information, \u201cThe conventional wisdom at the time was, Oh, you\u2019re not going to build a successful subscription-only business at that price point. Who knows if the market is big enough for people who are deeply passionate about technology news of the sorts that they would cover?\u201d He adds, \u201cShe was on the right side of history.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThere is no CEO of any company of significance that was not paying attention to OpenAI over the past week,\u201d Lessin tells me. \u201cI think that was a fundamental bet we took 10 years ago\u2014that you cannot be ahead or even keep up in business without immersing yourself in what\u2019s happening in these companies and technologies.\u201d<\/p>\n Today, per Lessin, The Information has 475,000 active readers (i.e., paid subscribers and unpaid newsletter subscribers). According to Lessin, they expect to be profitable this year. The company will grow its overall revenue by 30% year over year in 2023. They\u2019ve been disciplined when it comes to growth, with only 65 full-time employees working across offices in San Francisco, New York, and Hong Kong, as well as remotely. Lessin is focused on growing The Information\u2019s presence in Asia; they currently have three people assigned to the Hong Kong bureau and two hires in the works. Lessin, meanwhile, traveled with US commerce secretary Gina Raimondo<\/strong> to China in August\u2014a trip she later recapped<\/a> during a special event for subscribers.<\/p>\n She\u2019s also focused on building out The Information\u2019s finance coverage, especially following their coverage<\/a> of the Silicon Valley Bank crisis earlier this year. That was a \u201creal eye-opener for me,\u201d says Lessin, both in terms of how they were serving their audience\u2014\u201ca lot of subscribers said we saved them a lot of money,\u201d she notes\u2014and that they could compete on the finance beat, which she says has \u201cled to a host of coverage around the banking sector overall.\u201d Legacy media outlets like the Times,<\/em> the Journal,<\/em> and Bloomberg, says Lessin, are \u201cgoing to be around forever,\u201d but \u201cthey\u2019re not as relevant\u201d in \u201cmy world, and I think in business,\u201d because of the size of the audience they aim to serve. \u201cThat model really limits how indispensable you can be, especially to a certain class of reader,\u201d says Lessin.<\/p>\n Among that targeted class is Jeff Bezos.<\/strong> \u201cI read it all the time and have been a subscriber for years,\u201d the Amazon founder told me in an email. \u201cJessica has done a terrific job. Always insightful on tech.\u201d Another longtime subscriber is Netflix cofounder Reed Hastings.<\/strong> \u201cCheck it every day,\u201d he tells me, noting that he\u2019s \u201cthrilled from a business-model standpoint that she\u2019s succeeded\u201d\u2014he is, after all, \u201ca subscriber guy\u201d\u2014but \u201cas a reader, what I care about is the thoughtfulness. She curates amazing reporters, and the pieces, from my perspective, are written in-depth, as opposed to clickbaity. Probably subscription is the key to that because then they don\u2019t get paid on clicks,\u201d says Hastings. \u201cPeople care enough about the stories to continue to renew.\u201d<\/p>\n Lessin maintains full ownership of the company and says she has no plans to sell. \u201cI\u2019m in this for the long term,\u201d she says, a view that she says has been key to the site\u2019s success. \u201cYou need the talent, you need the right business model, and kind of that alignment that we\u2019re not going to go chase the latest fancy revenue thing,\u201d she says. \u201cOver the course of the 10 years, I\u2019ve seen every legacy publication build a Snapchat team, and then a TikTok team, and then a video team. We built none of those teams and instead hired journalists or paid our journalists what they were worth. It\u2019s a different formula, and it takes a lot of patience.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s worth noting that Lessin used her own money\u2014\u201cless than $1 million,\u201d she previously said<\/a>\u2014to start The Information. Her father is a partner at the private equity giant TPG, and her husband, the tech entrepreneur Sam Lessin,<\/strong> won big on Facebook stock<\/a> he received when Harvard pal Mark Zuckerberg<\/strong> bought his start-up in 2010. And there\u2019s a perception that Lessin has worked to distance herself from\u2014that she\u2019s too close<\/a> to the people she covers. Her personal relationship with Zuckerberg, for one, has come under scrutiny<\/a>. \u201cYou learn to have dinner with people one night and then edit a tough but true piece about them the next day,\u201d Lessin says, when I asked about the dynamic. \u201cThat\u2019s what we do time and time again.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cFinding the truth and telling people why it matters is a fabulous business. It\u2019s just really hard.\u201d That\u2019s why, she suggests, others haven\u2019t been able to figure it out in the same way. \u201cThey don\u2019t want to sit in a closet during Thanksgiving taking source calls,\u201d she tells me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n