The Next Media Mogul is Santa Cruzian Michael Sikand

Michael Sikand was at the University of Michigan studying business administration in April 2020. The pandemic triggered an exodus, sending most students home. Michael returned to Santa Cruz where he was born and raised. He wrestled with ideas on how to stay in touch with the world while he and his family observed strict SIP (e.g., shelter in place). He decided to create a podcast called Our Future, interviewing first the tech titans of our community such as Guy Kawasaki, Craig Vachon, Toby Corey, Mark Randolph, and more. Once he had traction and experience, he spread his net wider to Dan Springer (CEO of DocuSign), Chris Brandt (CMO of Chipotle), and Mike Evans (Founder of GrubHub), and many more.

In July 2021, Michael decided to pivot. He knew that his generations prefers to engage news and facts from short 1-minute videos on social media. And the results? Nothing less than spectacular and brilliant.

Snapshot of Interview

• Our Future viewership between September and November exceeded 150M!

• He and his team are creating 20+ videos a week.

• Their content is consumed primarily by 18-24 year old men.

• Follow Our Future Stories on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.

Interview on December 6, 2021

SCWorks: Perhaps the best way to start is: tell me about your journey from COVID to podcast.

Sikand: Sure. Yeah. So I think Santa Cruz Works gets a bit of credit in hooking me up with a cool gig to write for Santa Cruz Works. I really enjoyed interviewing people. So I said, heck, why don't I start a podcast in this lockdown? A lot of people have some spare time on their hands and seems like a good time to get some Zoom interviews. Ended up doing 150 of those. My thesis from the start was that this podcast was a really great medium for young people to learn about business, immerse themselves, get ahead, educate themselves on the world of startups business, et cetera.

I had a great roster of guests, founders of companies like Netflix, Kayak Grubhub, Spike Ball, some iconic C Suite exacts from companies like Chipotle, Microsoft, New York Times. So great roster. I realized that the majority of my generation is spending their time not listening to podcasts. But instead of watching short videos, decided to pivot the brand to become a short video brand. And yeah, we've cracked collectively. In the past four months, we've acquired over 250,000 followers cross platform across account. And yeah, we're really excited to be kind of creating.

SCWorks: From podcast followers to this new form factor. Compare the performance.

Sikand: It's so obscene you couldn't even compare. Every podcast would get a few hundred listeners. Our average viewers per video now are in the tens of thousands. At the minimum. I think since August, I'd say about a little over 200 million, maybe 200 to 250 million.

SCWorks: That is like… many zeros!

Sikand: Yeah. More zeroes than I was used to doing the podcast. So seemed to be the right pivot.

SCWorks: That's just insane. I love it. And tell me about your secret sauce, the formula that you're using.

Sikand: Yeah. So when I read a piece of what I do is I'm a repurposer. Picasso said that good artists copy, great artists steal. And I wouldn't quite say it's stealing. But I'll take a YouTube video that's already been created or an article or take some form of information that the mainstream media has already reported on, for example. And I'll turn that into a short video. It all starts off with a really strong hook. There's no other way to attract an audience than to have some kind of provocative introduction.

good artists copy; great artists steal

They're scrolling through hundreds, if not thousands of pieces of content per day per week. And when you hit their phone, you have their attention. You're the only guy in the world on their phone at that second of time. And you need to make sure that they have a reason to stick around. So it's always a really strong hook. For some examples, we'll do something like, how did this guy make $100 billion working at nine to five or this kid made 10 million selling NFTs. I think a lot of it comes down to kind of sensationalist headlines like yellow journalism being really creative.

One hook I had once was about how Jeff Bezos had learned about had listened to his customers in an email, a cold email sent by a customer who was upset about how he couldn't find screws. And I ended up making the hook. In that email, a customer told Jeff Bezos to screw himself. So he did. That was the hook. So it's kind of wonky not obscene, but interesting, exciting little hooks that people bite and then they stick around. So it kind of hovers between clickbait and title and whatnot?

And then there's work that goes into how the narrative is set up. Sometimes a video is created where it's like, you're leveraging kind of you're like, okay, this guy did this. We all know that people make billions in business like, it's kind of a contextualization. So you have to think about how do I contextualize the hook and then end up like getting into the story? So you might include a little bit history and then dive into that specific story. So really, like, every story we do has a beginning, middle and end.

And I think that's kind of the common thread. But every second of the video is designed not to be boring, right? These are 30 to 42nd videos, so every word is kind of strategic. There's no waste, there's no fat. It really is just a perfectly polished product that tells the base kind of story that we want people to learn about, as opposed to all the fluff involved in, say, an article or a ten minute video or podcast hour long podcast.

SCWorks: And you're home now, right?

Sikand: No, I'm in Michigan right now. I have one semester left. So I'm just finishing my second last semester now.

SCWorks: Okay. And you are going to after that full time on this. You already started building a team, right?

Sikand: Yeah. We have a cool team. We made our first acquisition recently. We are profitable, and we're really excited to just take this thing the moon. There really needs to be a business media brand for young people, kind of a source of business news for the next generation. They're not reading TechCrunch. They're not reading The Wall Street Journal. So there really is an awesome opportunity to be kind of this social media focused business content brand and really be a location for the next generation to get their business news, information, knowledge and inspiration for their professional and entrepreneurial dreams.

SCWorks: Are you the next media mogul?

Sikand: I'd certainly like to be. I'm pioneering a model in media that hasn't been proven before and that you can build the next kind of prestigious new source or not necessarily prestigious, but the next profitable household brand name media company, through a new technology short for media and monetize it effectively and report on meaningful information.

SCWorks: What about responsibly? I think the big question in everybody's minds after seeing what's going on with Facebook, Google, and both some of the right wing and the Liberal media is how to create factual and responsible content.

Sikand: You bring up a good point in that we do have responsibility to be a great source of information and how we put together these stories. I do like to stray away from politics and from making political insinuations about, say, Twitter would have been. We try to be as objective as we can in our reporting. But people also love big personalities, right? I have a news creator now, and I'm starting to insert more of my opinion into the content. I think people like that. People want to follow people with strong opinions.

What I'm lucky about is that I operate in business and not in politics. So business is obviously right on the intersection of it's hugely affected by politics. But we are insulated somewhat by having to take a stand on certain issues by virtue of just being, hey, we love business. We're nerds. We're going to focus on the strategy. We're going to focus on the objective reporting, objective storytelling part about it at our own flair, but not necessarily take sweeping opinions or involve politics too heavily or ideas about taxing billionaires and all that stuff. I think that's more up to our audience to interpret if we can be the ones who bring them kind of the cool stuff that's going on in business, that other things can kind of just be talked about in the background.

SCWorks: What insights do you have about your viewers?

Sikand: Our audience is always heavily skewed, like 18 to 24, and that's where it's at now. Yeah, we have had older audiences that you wouldn't expect. There actually are a good amount of millennials using our content, like 30 to 40%, 18 to 24, and 30% 25 to 34. So there are some people that you maybe wouldn't expect that again, we're doing business. We're doing like an educational kind of category that a lot of older people have an interest in. You wouldn't see a 25, 35, and 40 year old person watching some young girl influencer in the beauty space or some heart-throbbed TikTok dancer.

They'd probably be more attracted to the educational content, especially because the older people are interested in business. Right? There's a reason why there aren't more outlets for young people in business. Because it is seen as kind of a professional thing, not really something that young people like and want to talk about. But that's changing. We'd like to be the brand that ushers in this new generation of young people really being business nerds and having a brand to be able to represent themselves based off of, like wearing our futures hoodie and being a part of our futures community and watching our stories.

They're part of our community. They love business, and they're part of this new generation of future CEOs who are consuming this constant to make them so smarter and more informed as they go out into the professional world and entrepreneur world.

SCWorks: It's a new trend for consuming news and getting educated. What are the pros and cons?

Sikand: Those are huge new fields, and you have to learn them fast because everything moves faster these days. I was always a kid who loved to read the long form stuff. I'd literally read the full Wall Street Journal every morning as a freshman in college. And that was really weird. And it's because I am weird! I'm a business nerd in every way. I'd crush a whole Forbes magazine on a flight. I think consuming news is just one of the most fun human experiences. We love to be updated on the world. And more than that, we love sounding smart to our friends, and that's the very fabric of social interaction is like virtue signaling through kind of what you consume.

And now there's just so much available that the real issue is curation. How can you feel you're fully informed on the world when there's 500 new sources you have to read? I think that's kind of challenging. So for us, we really just pick that best stuff that we think people will want to share with their friends that day. Like, the dinner table rule. Maybe they tell a friend about it or people at a dinner party about what they heard from our page.

We're just picking the good Nuggets of the day and being a great source of education. People get a great bite on the world or a great story. We really focus on curating for the right audience what they want, what they want to share. But it's not real journalism. Real journalism is like The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal. These companies break stories. They have editorial teams. They do really in-depth research and investigations that all these other outlets just pick up.

And they've done a good job of converting to paying subscribers, which is good to save their business. But they're absolutely essential mechanisms in this world, in this country, and democracy. And we need those sources. But I'm creating a better content experience because my generation doesn't want to log onto The New York Times. We certainly don't get anything physically, but we're not going to go on to The New York Times and read a bunch of articles. We have our phone and we can flip through that.

But really, kids are just spending almost all of their time on Tik Tok, Instagram, and platforms like YouTube. So we become a trusted source of information on those channels, not breaking stories, necessarily because we're not a huge media company with a huge editorial division. But we can just take the good stuff that is reported on the day and then convert it into a better form factor for young people. I think we'll have a good shot at becoming a kind of a trusted news source.

And as long as we continue to source our stories, responsibly, and fact check them ourselves and hold ourselves to a high standard. I don't see a major issue for that, but yeah, consuming news is awesome. I love watching it. You just feel smarter and you can't wait to share with your friends. And that's why our content is so well positioned for virality. People want to share it. They're like watching it. And it really puts a new spin on business, makes it more fun and adjustable, for sure, better than a dense article or a news report on TV, or, say, an earnings call by a company or, I don't know, a long kind of daily podcast environment.

SCWorks: What do you see in the next two years for your company?

Sikand: I want to be the number one source of business content for this specific demographic. We need to build out more content. We would certainly like to create long form content. We'd like to restart our podcast. We'd like to have kind of some diversified types of media, but also more media in general. We'd like to be producing more short form videos per day. We'd like to be breaking more stories. We'd like to just be creating more content as a whole. That's where I see us.

I see us with more personalities under the brand. I see us with me plus our news creator, Jackson. And we bring in a female lead. Like think of PBS, Fox, or CNN. They have all these really cool anchors. We'd like to have the same thing, but have them these individuals report on their favorite parts of the business world. When you see their face, you're going to learn about something specific to their niche: tech, sports, environment, etc. So we have our future bytes, our future stories.

Certainly a female would be a great addition where there is mainly a male audience in the business space. And there's so many women who want to get in. But there isn't just that much media coverage of women and for women in this space. So I think that's a really important thing for us to think about going forward. And I think where I'd like to see us having, of course, more creators, more content, more personalities under the brand and more types of content, but also more revenue streams. Obviously we don’t want to depend entirely on advertising revenues.

We'd like to have direct to consumer products, whether it be kind of a consistently updated merch line for each individual page or creator. We'd like to white label content for business schools, and be a company that creates engaging videos about business cases for MBAs or undergrad business students. We'd like to have that B2B offering or B2E for business education. And we will create a community of events, conferences, CEO interview, hold job fairs and startup workshops. Build a really strong community, but also just continue to have this really expansive reach through viewership of the content itself.

SCWorks: That's excellent vision. We have some massive problems, global problems, from global warming to pandemic, to social inequities. All have a huge impact on business and entrepreneurship. With the upcoming US election, how will you address these issues, and yet stay away from politics if it's going to be once again in our faces?

Sikand: I don't think we can completely stay away from it. I mean, we did that story on Elon Musk and the hunger thing wherein it was like the UN. The United Nations said that he could cure hunger by selling 10% of his Tesla share something like that. Yet our audience loved it. Of course, there's going to be bias by virtue of us being like young guys who love business and creating content.

We have certain political views that might infuse themselves into the content, but I think we aim at staying objective. We'll leave the comment section for people to bring their opinions. But yeah, these are serious topics. And as they come to be more central to the business world and affect the business world, we will report on them. If ExxonMobile decides to just stop drilling oil, that would be a story that we would cover and we'd include context. Or maybe the government pressure increases taxes on billionaires. That's the story we cover. We wouldn't really be making an opinion piece on that. We would just be talking about it and telling people what's going on. We don't really have that much time in our videos to even take that much of a stand.