"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.
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?
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.")
G/O either had their own tax shelters that meant they wouldn't benefit additionally from the favourable tax treatment, and/or didn't want to take the risk of assuming unknown liabilities (which Zach Seward could have known didn't exist, but would have required more DD from G/O to rule out).
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.
So would you say that the investors… became cynical?
People will spend a lot more time (and money!) reinforcing their existing beliefs/prejudices than learning about something new.
This little detail seems to sum up so much about this kind of acquisition.
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.
And I was a little sad when my friend stopped texting me.
I'd overlapped with Kevin during a different period, and he was always a fountain of fascinating ideas. At Quartz, I though he showed great skill in championing expertise in niche areas, under the banner "Our Obsessions." He (or his team) were uniquely bold online in the way they let memorable photos carry more of the weight.
Once Kevin left in 2019, at least from my reader's perspective, all the air went out of the balloon
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?
Even Google froze hiring.
It was a good time to have a conservative balance sheet. I bought some good stock on the cheap, and hired my best programmer.
And they're still around? Or moved on when hiring defroze again, to get a non covid salary?
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.
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.
[0] - https://www.axios.com/
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.
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?
But never a paid subscriber. In retrospect, I could and maybe should have been. I was a paid subscriber at one point for both The Economist and The New Yorker. But for those, I got physical copies. Paying for something purely digital is the only aspect of my not paying for Quartz that I remember.
The capitalist globalists have done what capitalists do, search for the lowest costs and the lowest quality that continues to sell for the highest price. That's economic globalism.
But the social globalism, of having human rights upheld around the world, a common attitude towards personal liberties, freedom of thought, speech, & work, entitlement to shelter, safe food & water, education, health care etc.
I don't understand why people are against that? You don't think everyone deserves to live with the same level of freedom as you do? They don't deserve to choose their government and leadership like you do?
What is it about that side of globalism that people hate so much?
You can always wonder what there is left for people to do for a living if there's always someone willing to do it for less and have fewer kids, working longer hours. (with economics they simply say that there should always be something to do in a service based economy, but obviously service based jobs can be hit as well) So if you take it to the conclusion it looks fairly bleak. It raises a lot of existential questions of what group you belong to and how you can meaningfully contribute.
The person youre responding to is a victim of the US culture wars. That is clear as day with the mention of a feminist blog Jezebel, that's entirely irrelevant to the story of Quartz, a business focused website. I'm not going to speculate why a word like 'globalism' results in the clutching of pearls but i think there are some historical precedents around certain similar phrases like 'cosmopolitan', that provide a clue.
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.
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.
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.