Nothing about that article surprises me regarding G/O but there is one point that Zach makes about his transaction that he is wrong about:
"Thanks to G/O's stubborn insistence that it only wanted Quartz's assets and not the corporate entity"...
this is not stubborn it's quite common and is absolutely the right thing to do for many companies interested in another business. If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes with all the legal liability.
Zach probably doesn't understand how much more likely his deal was to close as an asset purchase rather than a stock purchase. A stock purchase comes with lots more diligence and legalese. If they are buying your stock they are buying all your baggage and potential legal matters, it requires a lot more work including a laundry list of representations by the seller. G/O did everyone a favor by sticking to an asset purchase and getting the deal done. that's where the positives end it seems.
> If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes with all the legal liability
For dying companies, most of the time it's fraudulent and illegal to create a transaction divesting the good assets from the bad debts. Why is that potential problem not an issue for a proposal to sell off everything good and leave behind an insolvent shell?
I mean, this is literally what an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (ABC) acquisition is (or an Article 9) and the specific goal of an ABC is to allow for some semblance of the company's assets to persist unencumbered by an acquirer and without creditors having any further rights to their debts, aside from what they can claim from the proceeds of the ABC.
It's an alternative to bankruptcy that allows for the continued functioning of the business in many cases, and it absolutely leaves behind an insolvent shell. (And acquirers will go through great pains to avoid incurring "successor liability.")
He also states the corporate entity was quite valuable for complicated accounting reasons. I take that to mean he was not paid for the white valuable thing since it wasn't transferred. After the money and assets were transferred, I take it that he eventually realized that a corporate entity has no actual value by itself, the buyout price can be anything and could have included the value of the corporate entity if he wanted, even if it wasn't transferred, and that statement was just a trick to pay him less money.
Lack of a viable business model is precisely what Zach points to in the article, which doesn't preclude him from feeling a bit sad about how it was stripped for parts.
> it. In the subject line of his email announcing the deal, he spelled our name "Quarts," and that set the tone for the level of care in what he had bought.
This little detail seems to sum up so much about this kind of acquisition.
Zach nails it. He is the reason why I was involved briefly at the start and for where I am today.
It was my first time leading a product team. We tried a lot of things that seemed strange at the time; no homepage, no app, native ads (done well imho), a scrolling stream instead of pages. Some of that broke. Some of it worked. A lot of it stuck around.
Yeah, you might be right. I was gone by then so not 100%. Sam Williams was behind that app. I’m not a fan of chat apps but that was done really well and I was surprised by it.
I really loved the Quartz chat app. I loved how carefully curated it was, how it didn't waste my time, how it gave me an outlay of just the things I care about. It felt a little like a friend was texting me about the news rather than just a dump of news itself.
And I was a little sad when my friend stopped texting me.
Ditto on loving Quartz and the chat app around 2015 I think it was. After Quartz was gone, I didn't really find what I was looking for until I discovered Axios.
I remember browsing Quartz back in 2014-15 and being impressed that there was finally a current affairs focused "digital media" startup that wasn't styled like the odiously click-chasing Business Insider. The website design felt fresh, with a widescreen layout as opposed to the amateurish, single-column blog-like designs of Gawker and Buzzfeed.
But things seemed to change not long after. Paywalls appeared everywhere, so while I could "see" the topics they covered, I couldn't read them. Over time I kept coming back to the website, remembering its cool design, and was disappointed to find fewer and fewer new articles.
Just took a look at the site now, and sadly it just resembles any of those dime-a-dozen "content aggregator" sites like Forbes.com.
> The Paycheck Protection Program, for small businesses affected by the pandemic, helped keep us afloat.
In the grand scheme of PPP shenanigans it’s nothing, but how was an online-only _news_ website negatively impacted by perhaps the most globally relevant, urgent, and ongoing news story of the internet age?
That Uzabase ownership of Quartz never made sense. What a clueless decision. Buy an ad-based media property and change it to subscription- of course you'll make less with a major change in the business model.
I used to read Quartz everyday. As a gen z digital native, Quartz was my first foray into reading journalism daily. It's clean interface, direct and high-quality writing style, and lack of clickbait appealed a lot to me.
These days, I read print newspapers everyday. But I still find myself wishing Quartz existed. I have not found any suitable replacement for it, and I am on the lookout for the same.
Quartz was a great site - definitely felt like a proto-Axios both from a UX and content standpoint. Sad they weren't able to survive the pandemic era news industry implosion.
Quartz was a great site, with a really innovative iOS app on multiple fronts. They were always doing something interesting.
It's sad that independent media faces such an uphill battle. At this point, what ambitious entrepreneur would ever entertain the idea of starting a media platform? The economics are simply not there.
That's digital media in a nutshell. Either you try to do things the right way with subscribers and in-house advertising, or you chase clicks and Google Ads revenue like Buzzfeed and SPAC your way to riches before the bottom falls out of your valuation.
> He had just bought the business news organization, Quartz, that I had spent the past decade building and, most recently, trying desperately to save from oblivion.
If he believed in the business so much, why did you sell his company?
Seems like you lose all rights to comment, the moment you sell your company.
> But Quartz never made money. We grew, between 2012 and 2018, to nearly 250 employees and $35 million in annual revenue. The dismal economics of digital media meant losing more than $40 million over that stretch just to grow unsustainably large.
Those are laughably terrible numbers. $35M/year ain't much, and, even at a glance, there's no way to support 250 decently-paid employees on it. All things considered, even 50 is pushing it.
But if they thought outside-the-box a little bit, there might have been a way out: They could have gone into academic publishing. Academic publishers make money hand over fist. Elsevier made $3.5B in profit and >$10B in revenue just last year.
Doing social sciences and political science stuff would have been a good fit for Quartz. You don't need any special permits to become an academic publisher. Most of your employees (reviewers) do it for free, like jannies. The industry is ripe for, uh, "disruption." Oh well.
Nothing about that article surprises me regarding G/O but there is one point that Zach makes about his transaction that he is wrong about:
"Thanks to G/O's stubborn insistence that it only wanted Quartz's assets and not the corporate entity"...
this is not stubborn it's quite common and is absolutely the right thing to do for many companies interested in another business. If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes with all the legal liability.
Zach probably doesn't understand how much more likely his deal was to close as an asset purchase rather than a stock purchase. A stock purchase comes with lots more diligence and legalese. If they are buying your stock they are buying all your baggage and potential legal matters, it requires a lot more work including a laundry list of representations by the seller. G/O did everyone a favor by sticking to an asset purchase and getting the deal done. that's where the positives end it seems.
> If they buy your entity (stock transaction) it comes with all the legal liability
For dying companies, most of the time it's fraudulent and illegal to create a transaction divesting the good assets from the bad debts. Why is that potential problem not an issue for a proposal to sell off everything good and leave behind an insolvent shell?
I mean, this is literally what an Assignment for the Benefit of Creditors (ABC) acquisition is (or an Article 9) and the specific goal of an ABC is to allow for some semblance of the company's assets to persist unencumbered by an acquirer and without creditors having any further rights to their debts, aside from what they can claim from the proceeds of the ABC.
It's an alternative to bankruptcy that allows for the continued functioning of the business in many cases, and it absolutely leaves behind an insolvent shell. (And acquirers will go through great pains to avoid incurring "successor liability.")
He also states the corporate entity was quite valuable for complicated accounting reasons. I take that to mean he was not paid for the white valuable thing since it wasn't transferred. After the money and assets were transferred, I take it that he eventually realized that a corporate entity has no actual value by itself, the buyout price can be anything and could have included the value of the corporate entity if he wanted, even if it wasn't transferred, and that statement was just a trick to pay him less money.
Quartz wasn't "destroyed" by cynicism; it collapsed due to its own financial unsustainability.
Investors didn’t kill Quartz—they stopped subsidizing losses once it was clear Quartz couldn't become self-sufficient.
The "cynical" narrative obscures Quartz’s fundamental flaw: lack of a viable business model.
Calling Quartz a victim overlooks that it repeatedly failed commercially, despite many chances and significant investment.
Ultimately, Quartz’s fate wasn't about cynicism, but about investors deciding to stop throwing money into a losing bet.
Lack of a viable business model is precisely what Zach points to in the article, which doesn't preclude him from feeling a bit sad about how it was stripped for parts.
> Ultimately, Quartz’s fate wasn't about cynicism, but about investors deciding to stop throwing money into a losing bet.
So would you say that the investors… became cynical?
They say an optimist is just a cynic lacking experience
Skeptical and cynical are not the same thing.
> it. In the subject line of his email announcing the deal, he spelled our name "Quarts," and that set the tone for the level of care in what he had bought.
This little detail seems to sum up so much about this kind of acquisition.
Zach nails it. He is the reason why I was involved briefly at the start and for where I am today.
It was my first time leading a product team. We tried a lot of things that seemed strange at the time; no homepage, no app, native ads (done well imho), a scrolling stream instead of pages. Some of that broke. Some of it worked. A lot of it stuck around.
RIP Quartz.
the first publication (that I recall) that offered a chatbot for news too, right?
Yeah, you might be right. I was gone by then so not 100%. Sam Williams was behind that app. I’m not a fan of chat apps but that was done really well and I was surprised by it.
I really loved the Quartz chat app. I loved how carefully curated it was, how it didn't waste my time, how it gave me an outlay of just the things I care about. It felt a little like a friend was texting me about the news rather than just a dump of news itself.
And I was a little sad when my friend stopped texting me.
Ditto on loving Quartz and the chat app around 2015 I think it was. After Quartz was gone, I didn't really find what I was looking for until I discovered Axios.
I really miss the Quartz I used to read a decade ago, does anyone know of any similar media orgs out there?
Spanfeller believing "it's impossible to kill a media brand" goes a long way towards explaining everything I've ever heard about him.
I remember browsing Quartz back in 2014-15 and being impressed that there was finally a current affairs focused "digital media" startup that wasn't styled like the odiously click-chasing Business Insider. The website design felt fresh, with a widescreen layout as opposed to the amateurish, single-column blog-like designs of Gawker and Buzzfeed.
But things seemed to change not long after. Paywalls appeared everywhere, so while I could "see" the topics they covered, I couldn't read them. Over time I kept coming back to the website, remembering its cool design, and was disappointed to find fewer and fewer new articles.
Just took a look at the site now, and sadly it just resembles any of those dime-a-dozen "content aggregator" sites like Forbes.com.
> The Paycheck Protection Program, for small businesses affected by the pandemic, helped keep us afloat.
In the grand scheme of PPP shenanigans it’s nothing, but how was an online-only _news_ website negatively impacted by perhaps the most globally relevant, urgent, and ongoing news story of the internet age?
That Uzabase ownership of Quartz never made sense. What a clueless decision. Buy an ad-based media property and change it to subscription- of course you'll make less with a major change in the business model.
How does spanefeller and g/o have enough money to keep buying properties?
All I ever hear about are his decisions that take unprofitable-but-beloved brands and turn them into detestable slop.
Is slop actually that profitable?
It’s almost free to produce, so anything you do make with it is pure margin. Quality media is expensive. Profit is income minus expenses.
Maybe they're riding the AI hype and burning investor money?
Destroyed "We believed that a news organization should stand for something, which in our case was globalism."
Destroyed Jezebel.
What a hero, thank you mister Spanfeller.
Right? There are globalists in mass media everywhere. But, for them to be so openly like that, they must have a lot of contempt for the human race.
Thanks Mr. Spanfeller!!
I used to read Quartz everyday. As a gen z digital native, Quartz was my first foray into reading journalism daily. It's clean interface, direct and high-quality writing style, and lack of clickbait appealed a lot to me.
These days, I read print newspapers everyday. But I still find myself wishing Quartz existed. I have not found any suitable replacement for it, and I am on the lookout for the same.
Quartz was a great site - definitely felt like a proto-Axios both from a UX and content standpoint. Sad they weren't able to survive the pandemic era news industry implosion.
Axios?
A similar short form news site primarily aimed at decisionmakers [0]
[0] - https://www.axios.com/
Quartz was a great site, with a really innovative iOS app on multiple fronts. They were always doing something interesting.
It's sad that independent media faces such an uphill battle. At this point, what ambitious entrepreneur would ever entertain the idea of starting a media platform? The economics are simply not there.
Not really sure why this is on Hackernews but let me be first to say: Spanfeller is a herb.
He is a herb, but no sage. Was a deadspin member back when you had to email Will to get an account.
Jim Spanfeller is a herb!
Go woke, go broke rule applies here, too.
Expected something about MacOS' Quartz.
… and I thought it was about Quartz scheduler. Wrote too much Java back in the days.
Or at least something about the quartz mineral.
I was expecting something about Magma's static timing engine Quartz (EDA world)
Then you dodged a bullet!
"It's impossible to kill a media brand," "Still, we also hoped to endure on the scale of centuries"
2012 to nowt.
I feel very sorry for Quartz and its staff. I'm not a fan of private equity firms or parasites as they are generally known.
That's digital media in a nutshell. Either you try to do things the right way with subscribers and in-house advertising, or you chase clicks and Google Ads revenue like Buzzfeed and SPAC your way to riches before the bottom falls out of your valuation.
> He had just bought the business news organization, Quartz, that I had spent the past decade building and, most recently, trying desperately to save from oblivion.
If he believed in the business so much, why did you sell his company?
Seems like you lose all rights to comment, the moment you sell your company.
sometimes, selling to someone with deep pockets is the only way to save a company.
> But Quartz never made money. We grew, between 2012 and 2018, to nearly 250 employees and $35 million in annual revenue. The dismal economics of digital media meant losing more than $40 million over that stretch just to grow unsustainably large.
Those are laughably terrible numbers. $35M/year ain't much, and, even at a glance, there's no way to support 250 decently-paid employees on it. All things considered, even 50 is pushing it.
But if they thought outside-the-box a little bit, there might have been a way out: They could have gone into academic publishing. Academic publishers make money hand over fist. Elsevier made $3.5B in profit and >$10B in revenue just last year.
Doing social sciences and political science stuff would have been a good fit for Quartz. You don't need any special permits to become an academic publisher. Most of your employees (reviewers) do it for free, like jannies. The industry is ripe for, uh, "disruption." Oh well.