Scoble To Leave PodTech, Heading For Fast Company
Famous blogger Robert Scoble will be leaving his current job at PodTech in mid January, he says. He will likely be joining Fast Company to start Fast Company TV. — Scoble was with PodTech for just a year and a half.
Context & Ripple Effects
Scoble has been mobile before: his resignation from Microsoft in June 2006 was itself a news event, debated weeks earlier in a Naked Conversations post asking whether he should leave. He landed at podcast startup PodTech and stayed about eighteen months.
The exit was telegraphed: an October 'PodTech: RIP' post carried unconfirmed reports that Scoble planned to leave in January anyway. What is new today is Scoble confirming the mid-January departure himself, with a move to Fast Company to build Fast Company TV still unconfirmed.
First-order effects
- PodTech loses its best-known personality mid-January, barely a year and a half into his tenure, deepening questions raised by the October 'RIP' commentary about the company's trajectory.
- Scoble becomes an unrestricted free agent for the second time in two years, with a video-first destination as his stated direction.
Second-order effects
- If the Fast Company move firms up, a legacy magazine brand would be buying reach through a personal brand rather than building an audience organically — a template rivals like Business 2.0 or Fortune's tech desks could feel pressure to copy.
- PodTech's remaining roster and any future fundraising now pitch without its marquee name, shifting leverage toward individual creators over hosting platforms.
Third-order effects
- The pattern — Microsoft to a podcast startup to a magazine's video network in under two years — points to star bloggers operating as portable media franchises whose value accrues to whoever signs them, not to their employer.
- It also signals legacy print brands treating web video shows fronted by known personalities as a credible channel strategy, rather than an experiment.
The trend: Celebrity tech bloggers are becoming portable franchises that established media brands hire to anchor branded online video networks.