Alex
Konrad

The Story

The Reporter Who Went Rogue

In February 2025, Alex Konrad posted a quiet announcement on X. After 12 years, he was leaving Forbes. No drama. No public dispute. Just a journalist who had covered hundreds of startup founders deciding it was time to find out if he could do what they do.

He named his new company Upstarts Media. Twice a week, he publishes on Substack: Tuesday free, Thursday paid. He interviews founders from seed stage to IPO. He covers the companies that haven't been named yet, the ones building in the quiet before the storm. He does it the old way - with reporting, sourcing, and the kind of story structure that makes a reader put down their phone and actually read.

This is not a pivot to a content farm. This is a journalist betting that readers - real readers, the kind who pay fifteen dollars a month - still want stories that are both rigorous and human. He conducted 25 conversations with journalists, readers, and founders before he launched, not to validate the idea, but to understand what it needed to be. That's not a media founder. That's a reporter who never stopped reporting.

The timing was either brilliant or insane, depending on your view of independent media. Print journalism is contracting. Newsletters are crowded. AI can now produce something that looks like an article in six seconds. And yet Konrad left one of the most recognized mastheads in business journalism to start fresh. His reasoning was straightforward: "You can just do things." He proved himself right.

The Forbes Chapter

Twelve Years, Eighteen Covers, One Very Good Beat

Konrad joined Forbes as a homepage editor in 2012. That is the kind of role that sounds like a dead end. Set the homepage in the morning, repeat. What he did instead was report. Every afternoon, after the homepage was done, he was pitching stories, making calls, building sources. Within months, he was a full-time tech reporter. Within years, he was one of the best-sourced startup journalists in the business.

His beat: venture capital, cloud computing, enterprise software, startups. The companies most people had never heard of that would, five years later, be names everyone knew. He wrote cover stories on Marc Benioff, Melanie Perkins, Patrick Collison, Masayoshi Son, Frank Slootman, and Ryan Petersen - not because they were already famous, but because he identified them when they weren't.

The Lists That Became Industry Benchmarks

In 2016, Konrad co-created the Forbes Cloud 100 in partnership with Bessemer Venture Partners. It ranked the top private cloud companies each year. Today it is one of the most cited benchmarks in the startup world. Getting on it matters. Getting to the top matters more. He built that from scratch.

He also managed the Midas List - Forbes's annual ranking of the world's top 100 venture capitalists - and then created the Midas List Europe, expanding the franchise across the Atlantic. He helmed the AI 50. He edited 30 Under 30 for the venture capital category. He ran the Midas Touch newsletter. The lists became a language that the industry spoke, and Konrad was one of the people who wrote the grammar.

Then came WeWork. He was one of the first journalists to dig deep into the company, and when the Hulu documentary *WeWork: Or The Making And Breaking Of A $47 Billion Unicorn* was produced, he was the lead Forbes reporter on it - and appeared on screen. The film won a News and Documentary Emmy. Konrad appeared in a documentary. He jokes about this. He should not joke about this. This is exceptional.

In November 2023, OpenAI's board fired Sam Altman on a Friday afternoon. Konrad was one of the reporters leading coverage at Forbes - through the weekend, through the reinstatement, through the chaos. When the Silicon Valley Bank crisis hit, he was there too. He moved, as judges from SABEW noted in awarding him an honorable mention, "deftly between breaking news, profiles, and investigative work."

The Next Chapter

What Upstarts Media Actually Is

Upstarts Media is not a newsletter in the way most newsletters are newsletters. It is a media company with a publication at its center. Konrad publishes twice a week. Tuesday is free, supported by sponsorships. Thursday is paid - $15 a month or $160 a year. He also does Upstarts Live, a monthly video interview on the first Wednesday of each month. A podcast is in development. He hosts community events in major tech hubs.

The editorial philosophy is specific. He covers startups the way Forbes covered them at its best: with original reporting, named sources, real business analysis, and the kind of human story that makes a reader care about a company they've never used. He is skeptical of valuations as a proxy for success. He is interested in revenue, customers, and what founders have actually learned. He writes about the companies most people haven't heard of yet.

His founding tier - $59,000 per year - is priced for institutions and corporate subscribers who want deep access. His standard paid tier is for the individual reader who wants to understand startups before they're in TechCrunch. He has interviewed Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski and Flexport CEO Ryan Petersen. He does not announce scoops for the sake of scoops. He builds stories for depth.

The Tools He Uses Now

Konrad is not anti-AI. He uses Granola for note-taking, Otter.ai for transcription, ChatGPT and Perplexity for research, and Descript for video editing. He is also one of the more thoughtful critics of AI hype - noting that even his toothbrush now claims to be AI-powered. That line between useful tool and marketing noise is exactly where his reporting lives.

The Record

What He's Built and Won

The Human

Indiana Jones Goes to Silicon Valley

Here is a fact about Alex Konrad that helps explain everything else: his Harvard curriculum was self-designed around medieval history, archaeology, Arabic, and Middle Eastern studies. He called it his "Indiana Jones" education. He was going to be an archaeologist. Or something like one. Then he interned at WNYC, then Fortune, and the archaeology never happened - but the digging never stopped.

What journalism and archaeology share is this: you are looking for what is actually there, not what someone tells you is there. Konrad has spent his career doing exactly that. He goes camping with founders. He attends board game competitions. He did karaoke in Tokyo with a CEO. He does not treat an interview like a Q&A. He treats it like a field expedition.

He is married to Natalie Sportelli, a venture capital professional whom he describes as "the COO of our family." They live in New York, and they have a rescue dog named Margot. They deliberately attend arts events and read fiction to avoid becoming people who only talk about tech. This is harder than it sounds when you cover tech for a living.

On Respect vs. Deference

One of Konrad's most-cited pieces of advice to early-career journalists: "Respect and deference are not the same thing. You can be respectful of everyone you speak to without being overly deferential. Carry yourself as if you bring equal value to the interaction."

This is not a throwaway line. It describes the way he operates. He has interviewed billionaires, covered collapse, and held a press credential through some of the most chaotic periods in tech history. He never lost the thread of what the story was supposed to do: tell the reader something true and useful about people who are building things.

The Road

Career Timeline

The Mission

What He's Looking For

Konrad's editorial philosophy at Upstarts is an extension of everything he built at Forbes, stripped of the institutional constraints and sharpened by independence. He is not chasing news cycles. He is not producing content for SEO. He is reporting stories with a clear lesson or insight for the reader.

His test for story selection is simple and brutal: "If this story were about your competitor and not you, would you read it?" If the answer is no, it's not a story yet. He is not impressed by valuation rounds. He is interested in why a company is working, how its founder thinks, and what the business actually reveals about the broader startup landscape.

He is skeptical of PR-driven embargoes and prefers self-directed reporting. He publishes around eight stories per month - deliberately fewer than he could, because each one needs to justify the space. He has gained, since founding Upstarts, a new appreciation for the emotional weight that founders carry. He says he was surprised by how much of it there was. This is the thing journalism teaches you when you stop being a journalist and start being a founder: the story is always harder from the inside.

Upstarts covers companies from seed to IPO. The Tuesday free edition goes to anyone who subscribes. The Thursday paid edition is where the depth lives. Upstarts Live - monthly video interviews - adds a face to the voice. The podcast, planned for a 12-episode first season, will go deeper still. He is building a media company the way he reports: methodically, with sources, at depth, with the reader's time in mind.