A Vice alum launched a new SF media company.
With the help of a Dimes Square character.
Hello everyone. Around 200 Feed Me readers came to Bar Part Time in San Francisco last night. There were ten SF Standard employees, two Airbnb employees, one guy who worked at Sequoia, Jasmine Sun, at least four women named Emily, one guy who worked at The New York Times, randa and Christina Loff from Substack, Broke-Ass Stuart, and Dylan Abruscato. Can the woman in the big fur hat who I spoke to at the end of the night please shoot me an email or DM? Thank you to Lilli Sherman for helping it all come together and Notion for partnering with me on the event.
I had a fascinating meeting at Anthropic this morning (more on this in a later letter), and on my way out, a man walking into the building in a suit and tie shouted “great party last night!” Small town. (I left a few hats in the Anthropic office, by the way.)
Today’s letter includes: A new media company from a Vice and Red Bull alum, love letters to Taix, and Substack is creating micro-celebrities.
It’s payday. I made a generous donation to The Immigrant Rapid Response Fund.
A few days ago, donald boat let me know that his friend Dagsen was working on a new media company in San Francisco called Soon, which will cover the machines, minds, and subcultures of tech’s new frontier. It launched today. There was a buzz throughout Feed Me’s party last night because Soon was hosting their own party (a screening of their first doc) a few minutes away. The Cobra Snake photographed the party. Dagsen’s roots run deep in Dimes Square.
This morning, I spoke to Soon’s founder Patrick McGuire, who formerly spent about six years at Red Bull and almost ten at Vice.
Emily Sundberg: You and I are both documentarians. Why did you choose to launch a news company focused on docs as opposed to newsletters or podcasts?
Patrick McGuire: I would say we’re totally focused on docs. Our work is evergreen, as much as it can be with technology. We have four finished films in the pipeline right now, and another batch in production. We are setting up for a weekly cadence on YouTube.
Ultimately the gap in tech media, or really media in general, has been “top of funnel” storytelling about exciting science and technology that both A. has great access and B. examines the social consequences and impact in good faith. Doing so visually and with entertaining touches is what we hope will reach mass audience as we scale.
ES: I just took a meeting at the Anthropic office for a few hours. I’m curious what you think the biggest misconceptions are about AI and the boom it’s having in SF.
PM: I moved here last July from London, and was born and raised in Toronto before that. I had never worked in tech, or had even stepped foot in SF before just jumping into a new life here.
I’ve been really struck by the idea of being a “missionary,” which you hear from a lot of top AI researchers. This idea that the work and its purpose is truly beyond any other reason to be in the field. This is a little hard to reconcile with the salaries that are available for the top 1% of these elite researchers, and yet the belief does seem absolutely genuine. These are people who could be making a lot of money doing a lot less work, I imagine, with a more boring idea, who have basically every opportunity in the world available to them. We dove into this conversation a bit in our fitness show Swole as a Service. At the same time there needs to be more of a bridge between these “missionaries” and the rest of the world. I’m really inspired by how insanely smart and young everyone is here, but at the same time all the conversations about the future of AI are happening on X, and specifically with the top 500 accounts to follow there. That’s being lost by 99.9% of the world.
And so basically, what has surprised me is this subculture of very young people, building very important technology, who really really care about what they’re doing. If you only read about AI in the FT, NYT, WSJ etc, you would miss that aspect of life in SF.
ES: What role do you see in-person events playing in Soon’s business?
PM: “We are laser focused on our content brand right now, specifically YouTube. It’s a grind, and eventually we want to be one of the biggest tech channels out there, filling the gap of generally positive, aesthetically interesting, educational entertainment.
We got some early virality on X, which is super exciting: 0 to 17k followers in 24 hours, and over 1M views on our launch trailer. But again, we want to get out of the tech bubble while still reflecting the tech world back to our core audience in a cool way.
But I would love to have a SoonCon or something. Bringing the worlds of culture into tech is a really exciting alchemy we are playing with already. We had a private launch in SF last night at a beautiful old theater called The Marina, and The Cobrasnake covered it. We saw some tweets today pointing out how fun that is. People aren’t smashing these worlds together, and eventually we would love to play around with that on a large, experiential scale.