Andrew Nusca, Editorial Director at FORTUNE Brainstorm

Next month, Fortune Brainstorm Tech will once again bring together the top thinkers in tech and business in Park City, Utah. And for the first time since 2020, Andrew Nusca will be leading the show as editorial director. He promises the typical knockout conference with big-name keynotes, Olympic-level networking and panels on everything from AI to security to how to communicate with Gen Z. The son of a dance instructor and a nurse - yes, he can tap - the Philly-bred Nusca played drums in a rock band for a while. But while we’re sure he’s a darn good drummer, he’s a really great storyteller. So we’re quite pleased that he eschewed rock and roll for reporting. He’s proof that hard work works. He turned  a dizzying array of internships while attending NYU and Columbia, into his first tech reporting job with ZDNet, and then - in his mid-20s - into an editor gig at FORTUNE in 2013. After a brief three-year rumspringa with stops at Morning Brew and Activision PR, Nusca rejoined the FORTUNE team earlier this year. Ahead of the show, Andrew joined us to discuss his the many faces of his FORTUNE job, why he considers himself a publisher and a journalist, and who he thinks the world’s best drummers are - he picked two - for this episode of Pressing Matters, from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with the top media and influencers in B2B Tech.  I’m Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing’s Media + Influencers Practice and your host. Through research and good old-fashioned relationship-building, we’ve identified B2B Tech’s Top 200 media and influencers, including Andrew Nusca. Here’s my chat with Andrew. Enjoy.

Transcript

Dave Reddy (00:00): Next month, fortune Brainstorm Tech will once again bring together the top thinkers in tech and business in Park City, Utah. And for the first time since 2020, Andrew Nusca will be leading the show as editorial director. He promises the typical knockout conference with big name keynotes, Olympic level networking and panels on everything from AI to security to how to communicate with Gen Z. The son of a dance instructor and a nurse – yes, he can tap – the Philly-bred Nusca played drums in a rock band for a while, and while we're sure he is a darn good drummer, he's a really great storyteller. So we're quite pleased that he issued rock and roll for reporting. He's proof that hard work works. He turned a dizzying array of internships while attending NYU and Columbia into his first tech reporting job with ZDNet, and then in his mid twenties, an editor gig at Fortune in 2013. After a brief three year Rumspringa was stops at Morning Brew and Activision PR, Nusca rejoin the Fortune team earlier this year. Ahead of the show, Andrew joined us to discuss many faces of his fortune job, why he considers himself a publisher and a journalist and who he thinks the world's best drummers are. He picked two.

(01:08): For this episode of Pressing Matters from Big Valley Marketing, the podcast that brings you conversations with top media and influencers in B2B Tech. I'm Dave Reddy, head of Big Valley Marketing's Media and Influencers Practice, and I'm your host. Through research and good old fashioned relationship building, we've identified B2B tech's, top 200 media and influencers, including Andrew Nusca. Here's my chat with Andrew. Enjoy. Andrew, thanks so much for being on the show today. A real treat. We go way back and it's wonderful to have not only a great journalist, but good friend on the show, so thanks for joining us.

Andrew Nusca (01:54): Thanks for having me. It's fabulous to be here. 

Dave Reddy (01:56): Let's start at the beginning, as I often do, based on our conversations with regards to sports. I believe you grew up outside Philadelphia. What was that like and what did Mom and dad do and where exactly in Philadelphia were you?

Andrew Nusca (02:08): Yeah, yeah, absolutely. That's right. I grew up in Montgomery County. My family is a Philadelphia family, so that's all the sports all at once. Just have to say right at the top, go Grizz and so, yeah, yeah, my parents are city kids and moved to the burbs to raise us kids. I'm one of four and pretty straightforward suburban situation. My mom ran a dance school for years before she retired her own, and then my dad started his career as a nurse at the Veterans Affairs Hospital in Philadelphia and then changed careers and kind of moved into the pharmaceutical industry, which is a big employer in Philadelphia.

Dave Reddy (02:51): Wow, so you're the son of a dancer and a nurse that is a pump.

Andrew Nusca (02:55): I suppose so. I've never thought about it that way, but yeah.

Dave Reddy (03:00): I know you're not a nurse, but do you dance?

Andrew Nusca (03:02): I did when I was younger. I don't know if I'd trust myself on the dance floor these days, but absolutely. Mom can't be a dance teacher without all the kids taking classes.

Dave Reddy (03:14): Of your three siblings, how many, not to sound like the old man that I am, but how many were girls since

Andrew Nusca (03:20): Just one? The last one? The youngest. But again, that had no bearing on whether we were all taking those classes and did for many, many years,

Dave Reddy (03:30): Ballet Irish chance hip hop,

Andrew Nusca (03:34): Mostly tap dancing and acrobatics. That's just kind of my mom's specialties, and obviously we wanted to take class with mom.

Dave Reddy (03:43): So how did one go from the dance floor to storytelling? Where did you catch the journalism bug? Was that at Fort Washington High or was that when you got to NYU, when did you suddenly realize, oh, I love telling stories.

Andrew Nusca (03:56): Right, and my high school was Upper Dublin High School, which is in Fort Washington. I arrival high school to that of several famous people like Bradley Cooper and Kobe Bryant and all that sort of thing. They went

Dave Reddy (04:11): To high school.

Andrew Nusca (04:12): Yeah, they did.

Dave Reddy (04:14): The only semi-famous person that went to your high school.

Andrew Nusca (04:16): Yeah, yeah. But Bradley Cooper grew up in Abington, which is just over the line from where I grew up. So anyway, I had no bearing whatsoever on journalism. I think a lot of you hear a lot of stories about, I always wanted to be a reporter when I grew up and I went around delivering papers when I was really young, and I do not at all have that story, although I did actually deliver papers one summer and it was a very difficult job because you had to get up extremely early to do that. But no, I really had no idea what I wanted to do. I knew what my kind of preferences were studies wise. I really liked biology. I didn't particularly like math, but when I went to NYU, I very much chose the, I want this kind of college experience, which if you know New York University is essentially the Antico experience,

Dave Reddy (05:04): Right, you're in the student.

Andrew Nusca (05:05): Yeah, that's right. I ended up luck out because when you're in New York, that's the headquarters of finance, that's the headquarters of fashion and certainly media, and so I did an internship at Popular Mechanics magazine. They had us fact checking and writing on the website, which was very novel at the time. There were many magazines with websites offering original stories back then, and they really just treated their interns. They didn't even call us interns. They called us special projects assistants and being in that very genteel magazine environment, I thought it was fantastic. It just really felt creative and I wanted more, and so I just kept going.

Dave Reddy (05:46): So when you say you kept going, where'd you keep going? I know you eventually ended up at Columbia getting a master's in journalism, but were there any moves in between Popular Mechanics and that, or was that the same time when officially did you say, oh, okay, this is what I want to do?

Andrew Nusca (05:59): Absolutely. I had a lot of steps in between then, but I was very fortunate. I was already in New York so I could just keep interning at other publications. They were all headquartered in New York, and so I did Popular Mechanics after a semester abroad in Paris, and then I switched to, I believe the New York Daily News. I worked on what was then called the Money Desk, the Business Desk doing stories about, I remember writing one about, you should try to use this thing called LinkedIn, just helping regular New Yorkers understand business. It's not the Wall Street Journal, it's the Daily News. And so we did that and I worked for a pair of really great editors, picked up a non journalism gig for a little while to make ends meet New York Rent being what it is, cold. Emailed the number two editor at the late Great Men's Vogue to get an internship there, which I did, and that brought me kind of to the end of my student time at NYU graduated. Cannot remember how I, oh yeah, cannot remember how I made ends meet, but I made ends meet just enough to start graduate school at Columbia, the journalism school, immediately after my undergraduate period. And then when I got out of Columbia, again, New York rent being what it is, I secured a postgraduate internship at Money Magazine at Time Inc. So I went to the time life building for a few months and did that, and so quite a few internships at the end for different publications. I was lucky.

Dave Reddy (07:36): Yeah, I mean to talk about taking advantage of not just the city, obviously there is no city like New York, which I hate to admit as a Bostonian, but it's true, but also just taking advantage of the college career. You were a generation ahead man. That's what my kids do. They do everything. I tell 'em to slow down. You really did keep going, as you said, and you were the news editor at the NYU Daily to Boot. I worked on my student newspaper and I really enjoyed it, and that definitely helped shape my career and solidified that I wanted to do journalism and then ultimately public relations. What was that experience like for you?

Andrew Nusca (08:11): I loved everyone that I met at the Washington Square News, WSN. It was such an intense job that I wasn't news editor for very long. I only spent a semester doing it, and then I was a correspondent for another one for a friend and of course editor of a different section where I wrote columns rather than edited news, but it's a daily print publication. It was intense. I remember rolling out of the office, which was on 12th Street in Greenwich Village, a little too frequently as the sun was coming up, and candidly, I was very worried about my studies. It was just such a commitment, which is a testament to everybody who works there. It really is that I was just worried about getting derailed. So I took a step back into more of a correspondent role, which allowed me to get my grades a little bit more on track.

Dave Reddy (09:05): It's funny you just reminded me of we were weekly, thank God, and we printed on Mondays, but I can remember many a Sunday morning walking back to my house from campus, not too long a walk, but so quiet in northwest Washington, DC I went to American University that I could hear the stoplights change.

Andrew Nusca (09:27): Yeah,

Dave Reddy (09:28): Right. Yeah, click. That is one of the loneliest and most tiring feelings in the world,

Andrew Nusca (09:36): And that's it for me. I mean, I heard him click as I went up university place, and thank God I was staying right on Union Square that semester, and so I didn't have to go very far. But yeah, no, that's seared into my brain as well.

Dave Reddy (09:51): Yeah, it's quite an experience. It's very spooky. Getting into your professional career. So you talked about time, money, which we'll come back to in a second, but you also ended up doing an internship at CBS Interactive, which seems to, if I'm reading this correctly, led to your first full-time gig and a tech reporting. So tech probably wasn't always the plan, or was it, or was that just the gig you got?

Andrew Nusca (10:13): No, tech was never the plan and nor was business. I have to admit. I actually wanted to kind of go into more cultural confines, and I remember entering in Columbia journalism school quite sure that I didn't want to do business journalism jokes on me. I had a side gig interviewing musicians for a magazine that I picked up while being a musician with my own band. So I love culture, I love that sort of thing, and I never wanted to give that up, but if there's a theme for me, it's how can I make ends meet while doing what I love? A lot of those internships paid me minimum wage that allowed me to support in a very meager fashion, living in New York, that continued all the way through. So while I was at Columbia, I was looking for ways to bridge the gap after graduation, I did secure that internship at Money, but I also started doing newsletter production for ZDNet, which for historians of the internet, that's one of the original tech websites, tech journalism websites.
(11:20): It had a vicious rivalry with another called cnet, and then over the years, CNET Networks, its parent acquired ZDNet and they spun it into a more B2B business style thing. So I was more than happy to get a paying gig and it was something that I could do. I have always been techie, for lack of a better description. When I was really young, I put together desktop computers and towers out of parts. I coded HTML websites back before anybody knew what HTML was. I always had a facility with it, and so when the opportunity came up, I was more than happy to take it on and cover companies like Oracle and SAP and so forth.

Dave Reddy (12:07): And I mean, you're still doing it, so you must have enjoyed it to some extent. How quickly did you take to it? How quickly did you get used to the jargon or how quickly did you get used to taking the jargon out of your stories is probably the better way of putting it?

Andrew Nusca (12:19): The jargon out of the stories. I think part of it is that because I didn't imagine myself as a business journalist initially, I was allergic to that sort of thing. I couldn't just pass through jargon without going, what am I saying? So actually that was the easy part where I needed to bulk up was business reporting fundamentals. I had a really great boss, Larry Dignan, who led ZDNet for many, many, many years as his editor in chief, and he's the one who taught me how to read an earnings report, how to know the difference between gap and non GAAP accounting measures and all those sorts of details that business journalists know and virtually no one else does. And that gave me the fundamentals to go with the kind of tech facility. But look, it was changing rapidly. Right around that time, we moved from a world of blackberries to a world of smartphones. I remember having the very first one T-Mobile G one in my bag walking around Manhattan. We were kind of at an inflection point. We didn't know it yet, but we were. And so it was very easy to stick with it because it just felt like everything was rapidly changing.

Dave Reddy (13:23): You left for Fortune in 2013. I want to come back to that because you also came back to that, but I want to jump a few years ahead to a bold choice you made in 20 21, 8 years at Fortune in a variety of roles. You left to become executive editor of Morning Brew. It's a fresh title, very different model, maybe a little bit more like that. Cultural journalism. You were talking about broader scope, but fortune's a heck of a place to leave. How hard was leaving a place you'd been at eight years with a title that distinct and why did you choose to move on?

Andrew Nusca (14:01): It was really hard, really, really hard. I loved Fortune. I loved Fortune. I loved everybody I was working with at that time, and some of them I still work with today. When you get to Fortune, you realize how fantastic all of your colleagues are, and that ends up being the distinction, the brand and the reputation and the history lures you in, but actually it's the colleagues who keep you there. And giving that up was very, very, very hard, but a lot had changed. 2021, we went through Covid. That was difficult on media companies across the country and world. It was a time of tremendous change. I had been in that position, the digital editor, which just means the head editor of the website and the newsletters and social media, which was kind of part of the triad of the top editors at Fortune. It no longer exists, by the way, which is the right decision.
(14:58): We don't need a website editor anymore in the year of our Lord 2024. But I had gone many, many rounds with Fortune. I had gone through Fortune at Time Warner, time Inc. Time Inc. Independent in the markets, Meredith and then Fortune Media Group Independent. I had been through at that time, three editors in chief, probably four CEOs. I had just seen everything I had, felt like I had done every job. And when Morning Brew came calling as a startup, the novelty, the freshness of the task, don't figure out a way to transition a legacy brand, figure out a way to create a new, and the thing that really attracted me was that they had genuine engagement after a decade of media games with growing Facebook audiences and then having them being taken away by meta and those sorts of elusive wins that were experienced by every media company in that decade. They had millions of actual with their email address subscribers, and they didn't just receive the email. They engaged with it, they responded to it. The audience was rabid for it in the best of ways, and what more could you ask for as a journalist, but a hyper-engaged huge audience,

Dave Reddy (16:24): And it lasted almost two years, and I appreciate you talking openly about this, but like many journalists as you referred to earlier in that time, you got laid off. Well, that ends well. We'll get to that in a couple of questions, but if I remember correctly, you either had just become a dad or about to become a dad. I mean, that's a tough thing and there's a lot of folks going through that. I mean, how did you manage that in between gigs? I know you did some freelance stuff, but how did you manage all that?

Andrew Nusca (16:50): I did. It was a surprise. Okay. Not all layoffs can be a surprise, but that one was definitely a surprise. I think at that time was the beginning of a snowball of layoffs in journalism and media and marketing and every side of that general ball for a prolonged period of time, and I just happened to be on the early side of it, so it was very surprising. It's a big macroeconomic thing. I was certainly disappointed. Let me just say I really loved everybody I worked with at Morning Brew. It's just a fantastic group of people, so willing, so open, so excited to come to work every day, to suddenly not be on that team anymore. Overnight is a bummer. I mean, that's the nature of a layoff. You're right. I had my son now almost four years old this summer, so at the time he was, gosh, just passed a year or something like that, very, very young, and we had also moved into a new house and a new location and all that sort of thing.
(17:52): So tremendous change in the wake of a pandemic. It was very, very difficult. I am not in the position to just hang it up and go, well, I'll just find myself for a year and then reenter the job force. No, no. I needed to get back to work right away. And so I was grateful to have several colleagues, contacts, however you describe them, extend me some work. I had some inbound things that came round like I engaged with Milk Road, a wonderful crypto newsletter that was looking to kind of get that morning Brew magic for its product, and I was happy to help them do that. It kept me busy, it kept me engaged, kept me feeling like a part of a team. All of those are good things. Kept money flowing in, and then when a full-time job came a knocking, I took it and it was a very different kind of job than I

Dave Reddy (18:42): Congratulations.

Andrew Nusca (18:43): Yes, yes, very much so.

Dave Reddy (18:47): How was the dark side? I have grown to like it, but perhaps your short stint would suggest you didn't like it as much, but what was it like working at Activision and Public Relations?

Andrew Nusca (18:59): It was such a tantalizing prospect to work at Activision Blizzard in part because I had covered them as a fortune journalist in part because they were here in Los Angeles and over my years working at Fortune, I had moved from New York to LA and so you're working for a company in a different time zone. It's kind of weird and nice to have one in your backyard again. And I must say again, I mentioned that I was a kind of geeky growing up. I played those games. I played StarCraft more than some Warcraft as well. If you go back into some of the really old Activision titles, I played a bunch of those too. So I was just very familiar with the products, at least at that time, and certainly the mindset of a gamer, and so I was keen to do that. To their credit, they didn't bring me over to the dark side so much as respect my light, shall we say. And I was put on a sort of branded content exercise, meaning I was trying to create editorial content directly for gamers, which again was at the time that journalism was taking it right on the nose in every regard, it seemed like the closest thing I could do short of actually rejoining a newsroom,

Dave Reddy (20:14): And yet I'm a big believer that my father drilled this into me. Good things happen to people who work hard and are good to other people. And fate kismet, your old job opened up at the beginning of this year. You are back at Fortune. How did that come to pass?

Andrew Nusca (20:33): Yeah, I cannot say that I was expecting to return to Fortune, but I'm obviously delighted to do so. I had dabbled in every part of Fortune's business before I left. I was the website editor, but of course I did about two print pieces of my own a year plus a couple edits here and there. I did an array of conferences and I was co-chair of Fortune's Brainstorm Tech conference from 2015 to the year that I left, and there was just no part of the business that I didn't participate with great excitement in. I did a video show for a long time at a New York, all sorts of things. One of the things I was most disappointed at putting down was the conference business. It's fantastic. For starters, it's a five star affair. Fortune puts on absolutely just such amazing events. The people are amazing. The digs are amazing.
(21:28): The experience is amazing. I mean, it's, I've never been to such a top notch event and Fortune does dozens of them a year for different audiences of interest to it, and so I was disappointed to put that down because when you're writing an article and you post it to a website or if you record a broadcast video for TV or something like that, you don't always get that return feedback from your reader, viewer, that sort of thing. You could just put it out there into the world broadcast, like the literal definition broadcast, but conferences, your audience is right there in front of you, and if they don't like it, they're going to tell you, and if they do like it, they're also going to tell you, and if they have some thoughts about it, they're going to find you during a reception come up and tell you their mind. So I loved that. I loved that, and so I was delighted when Fortune reworked its live media business as it calls itself in recent years to just structure it differently, put editorial leads over top of the communities as had been kind of before in my previous stint and when the brainstorm tech one came up and some folks on staff reached out to me, I was delighted, just truly elated to return to a franchise that I knew so well.

Dave Reddy (22:52): You once said to me years ago that you're not just a reporter, you're a publisher, and I'm curious, particularly given what the litany of things you've tried, many of which have worked, a couple of which have not at Fortune, how has that mindset served you at Fortune and has that mindset sort of served people at Fortune in general given how many different things you guys do?

Andrew Nusca (23:09): Yeah, I mean it's constant because Fortune has completely revamped itself several times over in the years that I've known it. I joined the Fortune newsroom when print and digital staffs were divided. I joined when there were three or four conferences at most. Now there's probably a dozen franchises like brands of conferences, and so the business model and the audience and all the components of that have always been top of mind. I don't know how you could operate at Fortune otherwise, and candidly, in media in general, where that comment comes from is that very often among journalists you hear, well, journalism is troubled or It's such a difficult, and I always pause and say, journalism isn't a business, it's an act. It's an act of witnessing and committing to page or pixel or whatever what you see and reporting on it and all of that, but it's not, the underlying business is in fact publishing. So when they say like, oh, the business of journalism is, and there is no business of journalism. Journalism is a very, very important feature and a point of differentiation in a publishing business, but make no mistake, we are competing for attention with things that are not journalistic at all, and it was always important for me to say that and be mindful of it myself.

Dave Reddy (24:48): It's a fascinating take. There are some journalists, and as a former one myself, I'm not among these, but some journalists, how dare you. That's crossing the line, but I also hear what you're saying. I mean, any journalist who's being honest themselves probably needs to say, well, you're a publisher too,

Andrew Nusca (25:07): And obviously the broader trend of disintermediation in media kind of tugging at these strings, right? You didn't have to question it before. You could treat it all as one nice rolled up lucrative business. Obviously those things are being blown apart and recombined and then blown apart again, the longer you stick around, the more that recurs make you question that, but that was always a distinction I wanted to draw because great journalism is journalism, Dave. If you witness an atrocity on your street in your neighborhood and you write about it and tell everybody what happened, then you are a journalist in that moment. There's no clearinghouse of accreditation for good reason. Despite the challenges of that that says who is and isn't a journalist, and I'm very, very much on the side of anybody can be a journalist or commit an act of journalism. Some of us just happen to do it professionally.

Dave Reddy (26:07): Let's shift back to the show you came in back in as co-chair of Brainstorm or Fortune Brainstorm Tech. I want to make sure I got that right.

Andrew Nusca (26:17): I used to be a co-chair of brainstorm tech, part of a program team that in the later years included an editorial director so that the chair of the chairs chairman of the board, if you will, that is now the job I'm in. I'm the editorial director of the brainstorm series, so that includes brainstorm tech, the one that I know and love, but also brainstorm ai, which is now a three location series that kind of started when I was last at Fortune, but really grew in the years I was gone. And then there are other brainstorms. We just completed Brainstorm Health in Southern California.

Dave Reddy (26:52): How has the show or perhaps the shows, which could partially answer the question evolved over the years?

Andrew Nusca (26:59): Very much so if I can just go back to history for brainstorm. Brainstorm was born just as brainstorm, no tech, just brainstorm in 2001, think about what the world was like in 2001, smartphones, Uhuh laptops, maybe the notion of experiencing something in person where the value is in the grand scheme of how you can consume media was very, very different at that time. It started as a way for the editors to convene smart people. It was literally called an editor's invitational to address the world's problems. That's how Brainstorm got started, and that's why it's called Brainstorm. Over the years, it refined to this tech idea became kind of a mix of corporate folks and technologists and investors, but where I've seen it change the most is just how it has become part of a larger media offering for lack of a better term. You don't just go to the conference anymore and think of it as a single date or destination. We livestream it globally. We cut up all those sessions and put them on places like fortune.com and YouTube and certainly social media after those channels really grew and lit up, and so now you can experience brainstorming in a number of ways and not just on site. And I think that has made us really think about why would you go to a place versus experience these conferences, these events remotely or honestly asynchronously.

Dave Reddy (28:41): Well, that leads to the question, the only PR question I want to ask. I get a lot of questions from clients on if I'm not going to speak, why should I go to forts and brainstorm tech? Tell me why.

Andrew Nusca (28:52): If you're thinking about speaking as your sole value for going to brainstorm tech, you're already misguided. Brainstorm Tech is a place where you meet the smartest people in the world. That's certainly the way we try to program it, invite people. It's very exclusive and I mean that in the best of ways. We're trying to give you the best of the best, the smartest people, the most powerful and influential people too. Could you watch the clips from brainstorm at home on your tablet? Sure. Are you really going to make connections with all of those amazing people if you stay at home? No.

(29:32): The purpose is totally different. So if you go, you're really going for that. I can point to several deals that have happened in the marketplace of the business marketplace that I know originated at Brainstorm Tech because the right people got talking, Hey, I should buy your company, or Hey, I should fund your company, or whatever it is. That's the magic. That's the benefit of being on site, and it's not just going to come from a 20 minute opportunity to share your thoughts. That's a core part of it. That's the brainstorm part, but it's not lost on us that a lot of magic happens off stage at brainstorm.

Dave Reddy (30:15): Talk to me about Fortune Brainstorm Tech 2024 this July and Park City. I know you came in a bit later than you'd like to pull it all together, but you pulled it all together, so what can we expect?

Andrew Nusca (30:28): It's going to be a good one. I'm very excited, candidly, to go to Park City because that move was made while I was gone, and so my brainstorm experience is rooted thus far in Aspen and I'm excited to try it in a new environment. We're going to have a great number of speakers. We're going to have Mary Daley from the San Francisco Fed. We're going to have Roloff, Boha, Sequoia. We're going to have the Wiz CEO as sa Rappaport. It's always going to be a mix of really institutional, big, powerful folks who have tremendous sway over the direction of the future. It's like Mary Daley is part of the voting committee. I forget what it's called at the Fed. That leads to interest rate changes, and she will be voting shortly after, shortly after she appears at brainstorm. So I think all of us are going to be hanging on whether or not we're due for more inflation trouble or relief or that's very, very directional and meaningful for every business person there.
(31:31): Roloff is going to tell us where he's placing his bets. Okay, ai, we know that, but what specifically? What's overhyped? What's undervalued? We love an investor who can give us that sort of thing. And then I mentioned that's one of the fastest growing, most highly funded startups around, and we're all about catching the wave at brainstorm. We've had an array of amazing companies that were much smaller when they showed up everybody from Airbnb to Uber to Lyft, and we worked, I mean really everybody, and you want to see what they're made of, the stuff they're made of. So we're really going to have a good group. It's still coming together. We've still got a little bit of time left, but it's looking very good, and I'm just excited to get back in the swing of things and get out and see members of the community. Again,

Dave Reddy (32:23): You're focusing quite a bit on AI this year, as you should, as well as other topics, but AI obviously is the hottest topic in technology. How do you think that affects the programming for Fortune? Brainstorm AI? I mean, do you need Fortune brainstorm ai if you're going to do fortune brainstorm tech?

Andrew Nusca (32:40): It's a fantastic question. Again, all the years that I did, tech AI came in at the very, very end. The first one was in 2019 if memory serves. So you're right when it started, it seemed like the equivalent of saying brainstorm quantum computing or brainstorm. If I'm going back a few years in tech trends, virtualization, it just seemed like a specialty thing, but AI has absolutely consumed everything. Mark Andreessen wrote years ago that what software is eating the world, and it really feels like AI is eating the world right now, doesn't it? Absolutely. I think our greatest challenge right now as programmers is figuring out a way to get past the otherwise very helpful mental leap you make when we say ai, because it's AI for everything now. It's AI for planes. It's AI for cars, it's AI for enterprise, it's AI for literally everything.
(33:38): But this is the way tech trends go. So our hope with AI Brainstorm ai, the series is that we really focus on the practitioners, the people who are building that, those capabilities. I will say, I'm not even going to say technology as I'll say, capabilities for AI because it really is a whole suite of things. The people who are implementing them, CTOs, CIOs, things like that, corporate Fortune 500 corporations, and certainly the investors who are specializing in them. Tech, we want to be much more cross-disciplinary. So we're going to try to draw broader lessons and more common lessons at that event. You're going to get people from different industries, that sort of thing. So we're going to look at ai, I think more intently as a way to go drill down deeper into the topic where we might lose even super smart technologists and we'll retain that top level discussion for tech, which is what tech has always been about.

Dave Reddy (34:38): Flipping that question a bit, how is AI affecting fortune? How is it affecting the conferences? How is it affecting journalism and publishing and on balance, good, bad still to be seen?

Andrew Nusca (34:52): Well, you know that with every new technology comes good and bad, you can dig a hole with the shovel and you can bludgeon someone with it. So a tool is just the tool. What you use it for is up to you. I think a few different things. Fortune is, and we announced this at our brainstorm, AI London conference, fortune is starting to look at working its own AI tool to help us, what's the word, to help us really draw insights from and certainly crunch faster on a more base level. The tremendous data that we have, remember we call them Fortune 500 companies, the fortune is for Fortune magazine. So we have all of this incredible data and we have staff dedicated to doing that and an artificial intelligence tool, and particularly a generative one, which is what we're exploring and announced a month ago, is going to just give us more capability in that regard, and we're very excited to do it. Our CTO of course announced that for the conference so far, AI hasn't touched the conference too much, but for the programming obviously in so far as we want to talk about it and slice and dice it and talk about the role of AI in society and really address all of the core issues that a new capability raises, whether that's around job destruction and preservation or broader economic trends. So that's that pretty straightforward there. I think for media generally, journalistic media, but also just broader media.
(36:31): AI is the kind of thing that's going to separate the wheat from the chaff, meaning AI is the kind of capability that if you are engaged in creating commodity content, something that is not distinctive, but you are a distribution platform reverse engineered into a content strategy, AI is going to blow up your spot. If you are a journalist who finds information that is not readily available on the internet, which of course is a core part of the best investigative journalism, then you should rest easy knowing that things are fine. I think for journalistic brands in particular, we are confronted with things like deep fakes and the concern around accuracy and is this real what I'm looking at or listening to? Because remember, AI is not just text, it's sound, it's video, and I think a lot of folks, smart folks are thinking about how to identify that for readers, viewers and so forth, listeners, but I'm confident that the core act of journalism will remain untouched by the AI revolution.

Dave Reddy (37:46): You do some teaching, so I'm curious if that's where you get some of that confidence. So when you meet that next generation, are you optimistic about what they will bring to the business or not?

Andrew Nusca (38:01): Well, it's a mixed bag. It's a mixed bag, Dave. I think my industry is in tremendous transition, and it still is. I'm a little surprised myself to say that we're still going through this grand transition. I thought it would've been over by now. The big move to digital and the big reestablishment of business lines has not worked out quite as simply as I had hoped, but at the same time, we are reading, listening to watching more than ever, ever, right? So it is kind of a golden age for content consumption, and it is a very difficult time for monetizing it. Forgive the jargon. So for me, it's a mixed bag. I think student journalists should absolutely feel empowered to find ways to commit acts of journalism and get it to more people than ever before on their own. By the way, they have access to a publish button every time they tweet, every time they post to Instagram or TikTok. I mean, they have all these platforms that I think the extent of what I had at their age was blogger. They can publish at will now. No editor or publishing companies standing in their way at the same time that might imperil their livelihoods if they can't figure out how to pay the bills. So it's mixed.

Dave Reddy (39:31): A lighter note. Final four questions. I want to have a little more fun. Not that we haven't had fun, we've also been serious, so let's have a little bit of fun. So you mentioned earlier that you profiled musicians for drum magazines. Are you a drummer? You mentioned you were in a band.

Andrew Nusca (39:48): That's right. I was in a band in college. I played drums. I played guitar too because I have a young son and drums don't really get on in a small living space. But yeah, when I was playing drums, I was actually in the recording studio with my band and the fellow who was setting up some of our equipment said that, I guess he overheard me talking, I can't remember. It was years ago now, but he realized that I did journalism or writing or something like that, and he said, Hey, I write for this magazine. Would you like me to introduce you to the editor? He's always looking for good writers, and that kickstart a 10 year or more engagement writing for a magazine that was distributed on music store counters nationwide and gave me a beautiful excuse to, while I was writing about, again, quantum computing and cybersecurity and the earnings of Snapchat and all that, to a perfect excuse to talk directly to or go meet the drummers for some of the biggest musical acts in the world, and what a lovely thing to do.

Dave Reddy (40:57): Favorite or craziest interview among the drummers, because drummers are crazy.

Andrew Nusca (41:01): Yeah, we have our moments a few come to mind for very, very different reasons. I remember early on with my engagement with Drum, I interviewed the Avenged Sevenfold drummer for the kind of heavy metal hard rock folks out there. His name was Jimmy, the Rev Sullivan, and he passed shortly after I did that. And that was kind of a strange moment. You had this long period of time that you spent with them, and then they're just gone. I hadn't had that happen to a subject mine before, let alone one so young on Happier notes. I got to visit Amir "Questlove" Thompson of the Roots when he was, I mean, he still does band leading Jimmy Fallon's show. I got to go to 30 Rock and hang out with him and talk shop and also talk about our shared home city of Philadelphia, so deeply enjoyable.
(41:53): At every turn, I got to go to Harlem and interview Beyonce's drummer, which was amazing. Beyonce's had many drummers over the years, but this was just the one at the time, and that was very, very enjoyable. I got to interview Carl Emerson of Emerson Lake and Palmer to talk about what it was like to be an aging drummer. I'm not sure if you've noticed, but drumming is kind of a physical activity. It's a little harder to get on being a drummer and especially a big drum set, rock drummer type rather than like a Ringo Star small drum set type. And we had a nice chat about pacing yourself in the later years while being a touring musician. He also very memorably started our interview by saying, do you know who you're talking to? A legend. You're talking to a legend.

Dave Reddy (42:43): Was he joking or serious? He's right, but was he joking? 

Andrew Nusca (42:45): I Wasn't sure, and that's why it made it so fun. If that's the way you start, this is only going to go in interesting ways. So yeah, look, I interviewed dozens and dozens of drummers, some in person, some over the phone, some over video, especially for those in Europe. But I got to just, it was just such an enjoyable relief.

Dave Reddy (43:04): That's a fascinating story. I mean, you think of what's happened to Phil Collins to a somewhat lesser extent, to Larry Mullen of you too. I mean, it ain't just playing it's work when you're behind that kid. I have no idea. I can barely play the tambourine, but I have tremendous respect for the people driving the beat. So which leads me to the best drummer ever is,

Andrew Nusca (43:27): Oh, this is not fun. Possibly one

Dave Reddy (43:33): Five guys, and

Andrew Nusca (43:35): I couldn't tell you the two that inspired me coming up. How about that? I couldn't just say the best. I am a very eclectic listener. I like certain drummers for certain things. One common thing you'll hear as you interview a lot of drummers is about serving the song. It's not about going nuts and showing off. It's really about doing what you need to do. And obviously each of them serve the song in different ways. The two that inspired me growing up, one was Carter Beauford, who is the longtime drummer of the Dave Matthews Band. I don't listen to Dave Matthews much, but I just really love Carter's feel over the set, and he honestly plays with such joy. I've had the opportunity to see him in person do that, although I've never interviewed him for Drum, and I'm constantly inspired by what he does. The second is Jimmy Chamberlain of the Smashing Pumpkins, both nineties references, but that should tell you about how old I am. I once again, just love the kind of thunders approach that he has, and the commonality between those two is that they're both jazz drummers reapplied to a different style of music, so they both have a very, very light touch. They're not the kinds of drummers that just bash away, and I very much take that to heart when I play.

Dave Reddy (44:50): Interesting. I am merely coming at this from a fan's ear because again, I have a hard time playing the triangle, but Carter Beaufort is definitely the best drummer I've ever seen live, and while it's probably cliche to say, I think John Bonham of Led Zeppelin is untouchable,

Andrew Nusca (45:06): I couldn't even saying John Bonum is being a guitarist and saying, Jimi Hendrix, John Bonum is cannon. Okay? There is not a sound, not a note that John Bonum has not played that every drummer certainly, at least in the Annals of Rock references. So to me, it's a given. It's like breathing oxygen.

Dave Reddy (45:24): Very good. Well, I'm glad we agree. Okay, finally, three cities, my friend. You've lived in three cities, Philly, New York, or LA

Andrew Nusca (45:36): And actually I've lived in Paris too,

Dave Reddy (45:38): Oh?

Andrew Nusca (45:39): Paris. I mean, I don't know how I can answer this question. One's a hometown, one's a long time hometown. One is my current place of residence, and one has global allure that can't be matched. Have you ever smelled fresh bread in Paris? I mean, truly. Look, I actually quite like living in Los Angeles right now as a parent of a young child, as somebody who is rapidly closing his thirties, LA fits and suits right now. But I am truly a northeasterner and a truly like an urban northeasterner at heart, and there's nothing I love more than a street grid and walking with my own two legs. I just don't get to do it too often anymore with one in a car seat. 

Dave Reddy (46:23): So, I hear you as a guy who's lived in the cul-de-sac capital of the world, foster City, California for the last 20 years. Andrew, thank you so much. We're all looking forward to Fortune brainstorm tech. We're all thrilled that you've come back to be part of the fold, and we're looking forward to what you're going to bring us next. Thank you so much for your time.

Andrew Nusca (46:43): I'm so excited. Thanks for having me.

Dave Reddy (46:45): I'd like to thank you all for listening today, and once again, a big thank you to our guest, Andrew Nka fortune. Join us next month when we interview another member of the B2B Tech Top 200. In the meantime, if you've got feedback on today's podcast or if you'd like to learn more about Big Valley Marketing and how we identified the B2B tech Top 200, be sure to drop me an email at dreddy@bigvalley.co. That's DRE double DY at Big Valley, all one word.co. No m. You can also email the whole team at Pressing matters@bigvalley.co. Thanks again, and as always, think big.