Latest update from CEO Jarrod Dicker
"Why did you leave Jeff Bezos' Washington Post?"
For the past ten years I worked in the media business. My focus was to build hyper growth engineering and product teams and pave a path for future business models to not just sustain, but set a new path for the entire industry. It started at the Huffington Post, where we piloted native advertising in early 2010 and then sold to AOL. Then Time Inc., where we built an asset valuable enough to spin off from Time Warner and operate as an independent public entity. The Huffington Post core team reunited at RebelMouse in 2012, where we built an industry best solution for all publishers to build and think differently about Web 2.0, launching some of the largest and well known social brands like the Dodo, Distractify, Paper Magazine and Axios.
Then was the Washington Post. The Post was a place of imagination. A place where we practiced Amazon 'Day One' philosophy in the media space, to rethink what a modern media company should be. This was proven with our launch of Arc Publishing and team RED, which brought in new revenues and awareness to the Washington Post brand, sparking a model where we were not just a media company, but a technology company as well. It was so effective, NPR recognized us as trailblazing the modern day media model where "newspapers" were not just media companies but technology companies as well. This was peak value for a media company and its value in every corner of the media and marketing space. A shining example of success for Web 2.0. But what happens post Web 2.0? Then it's time to take it a step further.
When I announced I was leaving the Washington Post to join Po.et as CEO, the question I was continuously asked was "Why would you leave Jeff Bezos' Washington Post?" As someone who was obsessed with building and evolving modern day media companies, this was the ideal place to be. And not only that, all of the work over the past three years was paying off, not just in notoriety and growth but financially as well. The Post was, and is, an amazing media business. But the answer was simple, and mission clear. There was a lot of work left to do in the media and marketing space outside of the Post. That is now the job of Po.et.
Over the past month we have been hard at work building the foundational layers of Po.et. Our work has already been covered (in just 4 weeks!) by AdAge, Business Insider, Axios, Variety, Wall Street Journal, eMarketer, The Drum, Poynter, Columbia Journalism and more. We are changing the way the industry thinks not just about technology, but about opportunity and evolution with blockchain. We are not just future disruptors. We are future enablers. And through Po.et, we are working to partner with everyone who has an idea, from long tail creators to the largest media and marketing companies in the world. We will do this through our investment in community and technology, and empower opportunities to allow all to seamlessly integrate into our products and systems. Po.et will define what attribution, valuation and an "idea" means in the Web 3.0 era.
What else? We officially have an HQ! We signed a lease in New York this month so that we can grow our footprint in the media capital of the world. We are making two key hires across product and strategy in the next week that will help propel our engineering development and deliverables. And being a distributed company means that we're expanding our distributed team. We now have Po.et employees in Buenos Aires, Brazil, Sweden, Cape Town and all over Asia. It's truly an exciting growth period for Po.et in every aspect of the word.
We are getting the word out. Po.et is traveling the globe, speaking at marquee conferences and meeting with partners, clients and creators around the world. We will be in Deconomy next week, followed by Shanghai, Canada and ending the run with a presentation at ISOJ in Austin.
I'm proud to say that our community is also growing larger than ever. We have over 50,000 active users across Telegram, Twitter, Reddit and the platforms. We update the community weekly on our developments and get feedback to make sure that we're constantly delivering on our promises to make Po.et the greatest web protocol of the blockchain era.
We are delivering on our road map and, as mentioned last week, have updates coming next week on finalized token use aligned with the original scope. The community is asking and we are delivering on how those utilities will evolve and be exercised on the Po.et platform. Our engineering efforts will accelerate, as you will see more commits, deliveries and documentation not just from the core Po.et team but recognition of community efforts as well. It's all happening.
Po.et is long term. We are a technology company building the next great protocol for Web 3.0. The community efforts in both ideas and executions show that. The team we are assembling and will continue to announce show that. The applications that will be built on top of our protocol will show that. And all of this will happen very soon. With the effort and belief of you all, we are building the web that we deserve. Not just in media and marketing, but across many utilities and industries.
Go POE!