Nothing is more important than learning from your elders. As part of Back To School week, we decided to swap notes with the best: 404 Media, a website that’s an entire three months older than ours. Please enjoy this very special crossover episode of Aftermath Hours, which is also inside-baseball-y enough that it could probably have qualified for our previous theme week as well. An incredible value!
We’re joined by 404’s Emanuel Maiberg, who tells us about the site’s first year of existence and all the highs, lows, and scoops that entailed. The short version? 404 is doing great, and other independent outlets can achieve similar success if they have a firm idea of what they’re going for and a willingness that borders on demonic to just gun it for a year or so.
Then we discuss Back To School week more broadly, with a special focus on Luke’s piece about game developers who – faced with unprecedented layoffs and grim future prospects – are leaving the industry entirely and learning how to do something, anything else. After that, we touch on the news of the week: PS5 Pro? Looks bad! More Microsoft layoffs? Also bad! Lastly, we extol the virtues of sleeping on the floor.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that in the distant future of three months from now, we can pay ourselves real grown-up salaries just like 404.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Gita: We learned how we went from just writers to [being] literally everything. What were some of the growing pains in that process for you?
Emanuel: Vice was obviously very dysfunctional, so it’s not as if it was a near year and someone came over and was like “Here’s the budget. Here’s the number. This is what you have to work with.” That has never happened, right? We asked for that. We asked “What number are we working with, and what are we trying to hit?” We always sought that clarity and we wanted to meet our goals so that they’d let us have more hires instead of doing more layoffs. And whatever goals they gave us, we crushed because we wanted Motherboard to survive. And I think that’s the reason Motherboard lasted longer than others and why we had a bigger staff towards the end while other parts of the company were cut.
I personally at the moment don’t find [doing everything] that bad. It’s not fun. It’s not rewarding in the same way that publishing an article – and seeing people talk about it or having it go viral or having real impact on the world – is rewarding, but I find so much relief in the clarity of “This is what is coming in” and “This is what is going out.” We have to make hard decisions, and we have conversations constantly, and some of those conversations are difficult, but the whole idea for us was: Now we are in control. Because if Vice just let us grab the wheel, we thought, we would’ve been able to make it work. And what we would’ve done probably is go “You can’t have a $700,000 bonus, executive that does nothing. You have to publish articles, because that’s what we do here.”
So I really appreciate the clarity. This is kind of a tortured connection, but I’ve been flying a lot, and I’m a control freak, right? That’s what I don’t like about flying: just sitting in the back and not being in control. Now I’m in the cockpit. I have my hands on the wheel, and I’m like “Now I’m comfortable.”
We’re successful now. The idea of this being some sort of failed experiment or disaster is no longer a possibility. It’s definitely a big success. But [we said at the beginning that] if we make mistakes, at least we own it and we know what happens – as opposed to the way things were at Vice and the way they were at G/O and all these other media companies.
And by the way, I come from games media. I did video game writing for years and years.
Nathan: You served your time in the mines.
Emanuel: Yeah, and I follow it, and I see what happens. It’s been such a terrible time for games media, also. But it’s not the thing where you’re sitting in the office or working from home and you think everything is going well; you had a big ad deal and you met all your goals. Then someone comes in, and they’re like “That’s all good, but something happened at this totally different, unrelated part of the company, and now you have to lay off five people.” That’s how things were [at Vice].
Nathan: Part of the company died in a yacht explosion.
Emanuel: The Saudi Arabia deal fell through, so now five people have to go – or something like that.
Gita: I loved waking up and checking union Slack and being like “We did not know about this Saudi Arabia deal” and then months later being like “And it fell through!”
Emanuel: Some billionaire in Turkey that you’ve never heard of walked away from the deal, so now all your friends are unemployed.
Gita: The experience of Jason [Koebler] firing me in an airport was one of the worst things ever, because we were both crying, because neither of us wanted to do it. Neither of us wanted to be in that Zoom meeting. It just sucked. I knew it wasn’t something that he was personally responsible for. Someone else in some other company had to balance numbers on a sheet because some executive that has no idea who I am made a choice.
It’s infuriating, and there is a lot of freedom in being like “OK, well if I’m gonna make a decision that is not 100 percent what I want to have happen with the business, at least I know what the numbers are, and I’m in some level of control over my own fate.”
Nathan: And you can wake up whenever you want to!
Gita: That’s true. I do wake up at a gentleman’s 10 AM every single day.
Riley: But that’s another hard part: How do you balance [those elements]? Because in some ways it’s your dream job; you can do whatever you want. And in other ways, I think it’s not. You know, doing math is definitely not my dream job. How do you set your own boundaries? How do you rein yourself in? What are the expectations you form together? And how do you not recreate negative patterns while also recognizing that some things exist for reasons?
Emanuel: So first of all, I have a baby, and I wake up when the baby says so. The baby is the boss.
Gita: Boss baby!
Nathan: A real boss baby.
Emanuel: Baby is life, baby is boss, I do whatever baby says. It’s hard, but I don’t get to choose if I sleep in late. But we’re definitely having that conversation now. We just closed out a year, and this year has definitely been a sprint. We launched the company, and we very much wanted it to succeed. We put all the energy that we have – and some that we don’t – into the company, and we got it to a pretty good place, and we’re happy. It’s pretty stable.
And I think now we’re having a conversation of, OK, the sprint is over, and the company is a success. Now it’s about sustainability. Now it’s about the marathon. How do we balance how much energy we can put into this without killing ourselves and each other? I don’t have a good answer. It’s one of the great questions of our age regarding burnout and how much of your worth are you taking from your job? All these things come to the surface when you’re talking about this.
Back to School is a week of stories about changes, nostalgia, and learning new things. It's part of our big goals for 2024; if you like what you see and want to help us get there, please consider subscribing.
