The New Yorker for Two Guys in a Garage

Introducing Originals, a magazine about the human beings building the future of human civilization.

By the time the rest of the world met OpenAI, Sam Altman and Ilya Sutskever had already been trying to build AGI for seven years. The future is always like this. It arrives quietly, years early, in a rented office or a borrowed lab, built by people whose names you won’t learn until a venture capitalist writes a nine-figure check and grants the press permission to care.

The New Yorker for two guys in a garage.
Fortune for founders you’ve never heard of.

Traditional tech media doesn’t lead. It follows. It waits for the funding round, the valuation, the IPO — for someone richer to certify that a thing matters — and only then sends a reporter to tell the story, usually one who can’t tell a transformer from a transmission.

Originals is the opposite. It’s Fortune for founders you’ve never heard of. The New Yorker for two guys in a garage. A magazine about the founders, scientists, and assorted weirdos working on the things that will matter enormously in a decade — and that almost no one is paying attention to today.

Technology is the Substrate of Human Civilization

Bronze. Antibiotics. Automobiles. Computers.

Technology drives human progress.

Technology is the thing behind almost every gain in how long, how well, and how freely a human being can live. This is why I write Accelerate or Die.

If technological progress is essential to solving the problems of mankind, then it is worth your time to meet and understand the human agents of that progress.

And yet the inventors of technology, the people pushing hardest on that frontier, on ideas most people think are crazy, have become the designated villains of the age.

Old Media Traded Truth Seeking for Activism

It wasn’t always like this.

Once upon a time in America, the press celebrated inventors. Steve Jobs was a national treasure. Sara Blakely was someone to emulate. The journalist’s job was to be curious — to go find out what these weird people were actually up to, and come back and tell you.

Somewhere in the last decade, that job changed. The press stopped reporting on technologists and started prosecuting them.

Some of it was rational, of course. In the decade after the 2008 crisis, technology came to dominate the U.S. economy, driving the vast majority of GDP growth. The press, meanwhile, was collapsing: 2018 was the worst year for media layoffs since 2009 — and the year Apple crossed a trillion dollars.

One industry was inheriting the earth; the other was laying off the people paid to cover it. Seeing their industry implode, tech journalists traded curiosity for a verdict, and called it speaking “truth to power.”

Along the way, the distinction between Big Tech and the two guys in a garage flattened. Now the story is almost pre-written: the founder is a proto-billionaire slotted into a morality play with two roles: villain and victim.

This isn’t a complaint that the coverage is mean. It’s that it stopped being true.

I do journalism like a venture capitalist.

A civilization that vilifies its visionaries is a dying civilization.

America is sick.

Faith in media is at an all-time low, down from 72% in 1972 to 28% today. The majority of Americans have confidence in only three major U.S. institutions:

• Small business: 70%

• Military: 62%

• Science: 61%.

Americans haven’t turned on the people who build things. They’ve turned on the people who narrate them.

Originals Takes Technologists Seriously

Originals treats the crazy visionaries of our age — the humans pushing forward the bleeding edge of civilizational progress — with the seriousness the establishment reserves for billion dollar companies and the craft it reserves for high art.

Not press releases. Not hit pieces. Not heroes, not villains — subjects, worth the same rigorous, curious attention The New York Times give a senator or a novelist. Warm to the person. Cold and curious to the claim.

I take the people I write about seriously enough to tell you the truth about them, which is a harder and higher form of respect than flattery.

Why Me

I am the founder of multiple VC-backed companies, an inventor with 9 issued US Patents, and small-time investor in 30+ startups.

Once upon a time, I was an award-winning journalist and photographer for the New York Times and Newsweek. I paid my way through Columbia University as a 911 paramedic in the South Bronx.

I have done CPR on dead babies and dined with billionaires.

So I approach these stories the way a first-check investor does, not the way the press does: I don’t wait for someone else to certify that a company matters before I’ll cover it. I use my own judgment. And between the access that comes from being an investor and a peer, plus a working grasp of the actual science and engineering, I can go where most reporters can’t — into the technical details where the real story lives.

Enjoy!
-Matt Mireles

The first installment of Originals launches on Tuesday…

Death is an Engineering Problem

Alex Mathiasen wants to build a pause button for human biology – so that you can live forever. All he needs is enough GPUs to simulate quantum physics.