Stephanie
Palazzolo

The Banker Who Learned to Break Stories

Stephanie Palazzolo knows what a company looks like before it's famous. When she was at Morgan Stanley in San Francisco, she was reading their financials in draft form - writing S-1 IPO filings, modeling valuations, advising on M&A. Then she walked away from all of it to become an intern at a media company. Her mom - Chinese, practical, and understandably alarmed - was not thrilled.

That was early 2023. By the end of the year, Palazzolo had covered the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, been part of the team that broke the OpenAI CEO firing story, launched a newsletter at The Information, and won a SABEW Best in Business Award. That's not a typical intern-to-staff journey. That's a particular kind of ambition made visible.

Today, she authors the AI Agenda newsletter at The Information - published multiple times per week, tracking every seismic move in artificial intelligence: the startups raising hundreds of millions before they have a product, the research labs eating each other's researchers, the chip wars playing out in datacenters, the policy fights happening in rooms most reporters can't access. She is one of the most closely watched voices in AI journalism, and she got there by treating the beat the way she once treated a pitch deck: with relentless preparation, precise sourcing, and the habit of asking the question everyone else is too polite to ask.

From S-1 Filings to Front-Page Scoops

At Morgan Stanley, Palazzolo was on the inside of tech's biggest transactions. She wasn't reporting on fundraising rounds - she was structuring them. She understood how Silicon Valley worked not from the press release but from the spreadsheet. That's an unusual foundation for a journalist. Most reporters learn the industry from the outside. She had seen the seams.

The pivot started at Business Insider, where she arrived as a VC and startups reporter covering the AI wave before most newsrooms had realized it was happening. She wasn't playing catch-up. She already spoke the language - valuations, cap tables, TAM calculations - and she'd spent years at Morgan Stanley earning trust with exactly the kinds of people who were now writing the biggest checks in AI.

That kind of measured skepticism - from someone who was covering AI more aggressively than almost anyone - is what distinguished her work. She wasn't breathless about it. She understood the hype cycle because she had watched companies manufacture it during IPO roadshows. She kept one eye on the technology and one eye on the money, and she knew which one was driving what.

When The Information came calling in July 2023, it was a natural move. The Information is the publication of record for the startup ecosystem: expensive, source-rich, and relentlessly focused on what's actually happening behind the polished public narratives. She was already thinking that way. The newsletter format - AI Agenda, dispatched multiple times per week - let her operate at the tempo AI required: fast, precise, and constantly updated.

Everything AI - and the Money Behind It

The AI beat is enormous and Palazzolo covers the whole thing. That means the research labs, the startups, the investors, the cloud providers, the chips, and the policy fights. It means tracking who's hiring from whom at Anthropic and OpenAI. It means being in the room - or the next best thing - when billion-dollar decisions get made.

The most significant stories she has broken read like a timeline of the AI industry's most consequential moments. The Anthropic-OpenAI rivalry - she's reported both sides of it, including how Anthropic has gotten inside OpenAI's head, and the internal memo from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei attacking OpenAI's "mendacious" announcement. She reported OpenAI's H1 2025 financials with Amir Efrati and Cory Weinberg. She was first on Anthropic topping $30 billion in annualized revenue, ahead of OpenAI. She reported Anthropic's $400 million acquisition of AI biotech startup Coefficient Bio.

Earlier, at Business Insider, she was already ahead of the curve: reporting on Sequoia Capital's strategic shift toward AI investments before most publications had caught on, and breaking the story of how AI startups were pulling PhD candidates out of universities before they could finish their degrees. She spotted the talent war forming. She understood who was winning before anyone announced it.

Texas Roots, Mixed Identity, New York Pace

Palazzolo grew up in College Station, Texas - a university town built around Texas A&M, far from Silicon Valley by every measure except ambition. She's the daughter of a Chinese mother and an Italian-surnamed father, a combination she has written about honestly. For Cold Tea Collective, a publication focused on multicultural Asian identity, she explored how Chinese superstitions shaped her sense of self - how her mother's worldview, practically speaking, made her who she is, even when it also made her pivot to journalism very hard to explain at family dinner.

She does not code. She didn't come up through computer science or technical roles. What she brings is the kind of fluency that comes from being deeply embedded in the ecosystem - she spent years advising tech companies, she studied economics rigorously, and since entering journalism she has made a point of learning the correct terminology, consulting regularly with VCs, founders, and technical experts. She makes the complexity legible without dumbing it down.

Off the beat, she is a horror movie enthusiast and an uncompromising Texas BBQ loyalist. She receives forty to fifty pitches a day and has developed a system for managing it - morning and evening blocks, bullet points preferred, short emails only, video calls over phone calls. She is, in other words, exactly as organized as you'd expect from someone who used to manage IPO timelines.

The Method Behind the Scoops

There's a particular kind of reporter who breaks stories consistently. Not the one who gets lucky once, but the one whose sources call them first because they trust how the story will be handled. Palazzolo built that reputation fast, partly because she arrived with credibility that most journalists spend years trying to accumulate. When you've sat across from a CFO during a roadshow, you know how those conversations go. When you've modeled the downside scenarios, you ask different questions.

Her stated approach is methodical: she carves out time to read pitches rather than triaging them constantly. She asks for bullet points. She prefers video over phone because she can read a room better. She keeps her contact information public - including a Signal number for sensitive tips - because she understands that the most important stories usually come from people who need to trust you before they speak. That's not a journalism tactic. That's how investment banking works too.

At The Information, she has the resources and the editorial latitude to develop stories across weeks or months. That shows in the depth. The AI Agenda newsletter operates at news speed - fast, precise, daily - but the big investigative pieces take longer and land harder. The Anthropic revenue story wasn't a press release. The Anthropic-inside-OpenAI piece wasn't a leak from a single source. These are built stories, and the building requires the kind of institutional trust that only comes from treating sources well over time.

The Details That Make the Profile

The Timeline

• 2016-2020
  Studies Economics at the University of Chicago
• 2019
  Summer Analyst at J.P. Morgan, Sales & Trading
• 2020-2022
  Technology Investment Banker at Morgan Stanley, San Francisco - writes S-1s, advises on IPOs and M&A for tech companies
• January 2023
  Joins Business Insider as an intern (first journalism job) covering VC & startups - "much to the dismay of my Asian mom"
• March 2023
  Breaks stories on Sequoia Capital's pivot toward AI; covers the AI PhD talent drain from universities
• 2023
  Covers the SVB banking crisis and the OpenAI CEO firing - among the biggest tech stories of the year
• July 2023
  Joins The Information as AI Reporter; launches the AI Agenda newsletter
• January 2024
  Panelist at FTC Tech Summit on AI data and models
• 2024
  SABEW Best in Business Award (team) for coverage of "OpenAI Fires Its CEO"
• September 2025
  Hosts AI Agenda Live NYC: The Next Wave - interviews Vinod Khosla of Khosla Ventures live on stage
• 2025-2026
  Breaks Anthropic $30B revenue story; reports Anthropic's $400M acquisition of Coefficient Bio; continues as primary AI industry voice at The Information

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