Attention is the New Venture Capital
A newsletter dedicated to how internet-native culture is reshaping business before it shows up in earnings reports. Subscribe for updates. Best viewed on LinkedIn.
Y Combinator just backed a company called Clad Labs that makes Brain Rot IDE, a coding environment incorporating brain rot tools to keep developers focused while AI generates their code. This got funding.
This shift has been building since Trump won in 2016 as the first meme president back when everyone assumed this was an anomaly. Then Musk spent years acting like a billionaire shitposter and it worked, his companies kept growing. This was followed by meme stocks and meme coins, GameStop and Dogecoin, respectively. Suddenly it became clear that markets were running on attention more than fundamentals. By 2024, a memecoin called Fartcoin hit a $1 billion market cap boosted by venture capital converting absurdity into value.
But something different is happening now, we’re not just seeing attention-driven marketing anymore, we’re seeing attention economy arbitrage as the core business model.
Fahrenheit started with a meme making fun of Celsius energy drinks, saying an American company shouldn’t be called Celsius. The meme spread. Then they made koozies to cover Celsius cans with “Fahrenheit” branding. The koozies sold. Now they’re developing an actual Fahrenheit energy drink. The entire company bootstrapped itself from attention alone, no pitch deck required, just a meme that caught on and a founder who knew how to monetize the crowd before building the product.
Old path: Idea → Funding → Product → Market
New path: Attention → Monetize → Product (maybe)
Attention is the venture capital now.
Beyond Elon, Mark Zuckerberg seems to understand this better than most recognizing his need for entire rebrand from reptilian CEO to “bro who does MMA, wears chains, eats steak.” He finally tapped into the zeitgeist and became memeable in a way that helped lift Meta stock (haters will say it was market recovery and earnings growth). Authenticity doesn’t matter—cultural relevance does, and that runs on attention.
We’ve gamified attention to the point where substance is optional. This is just how business works now. The attention economy is already here, and the infrastructure is getting more sophisticated. The companies still operating like it’s 2015 are already behind. Are you paying attention?
Elsewhere
Torment Nexus1: a16z backed DoubleSpeed lets you control thousands of social media accounts with AI so you never pay a human again.
Squadware2: Founders with Are.na3 boards and Zora orbs4 are drawing boundaries for a new internet with a post from Kickstarter cofounder, Yancy Strickler. If you can beat ‘em, opt out.
Mystic Arbitrage: Founders have discovered Project Stargate5. The betting market, Kalshi is hiring unemployed “tarot card readers, palm readers, psychics, fortune tellers, oracles, wizards, and individuals born with divine intuition.”
Post-Legacy Media Taxonomy: TBPN, the ESPN-styled financial entertainment news media company, has released a Media Market Map fit with in-group networks from “Dark Media” to “Post-Legacy Media.”
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/torment-nexus
https://otherinter.net/research/squad-wealth/
https://www.are.na/
https://x.com/zora/status/1329530028611174401
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargate_Project_(U.S._Army_unit)