Shows / Uphoff on Media Podcast
Uphoff on Media Podcast
Uphoff on Media podcast: A practical take on how technology is rewriting the way B2B companies get built and run, and how to get ahead of it. For those founding, running, and funding B2B information, marketing, and technology companies.
tonyuphoff.substack.com
Episodes
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Three Decisions a Machine Can’t Make for You
Go to Intercom’s pricing page and you will find the same company selling customer service two different ways. Human agents are priced the old way: $29 to $132…
Uphoff on Media PodcastProduction is Getting Cheaper. Judgement Isn’t
Nine months after launching Uphoff Advisory and Uphoff on Media, I had a discovery problem. Seventy-four posts, a growing framework library and a suite of…
Uphoff on Media PodcastIt's Never Just Business
"It's not personal, it's just business" gets said most often at the exact moment it is least true. Across a table. To someone whose job, title, or plans just…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYour Team Got More Productive. Did Your Business?
Every new dollar of revenue, another card on the wall. This fall I've heard the same story three times, from three very different businesses: a B2B agency, a…
Uphoff on Media PodcastI Asked AI Who to Hire. It Recommended Me. Once
B2B buyers still build shortlists. They just don’t build them alone anymore. Google “Tony Uphoff” and you get about 86,000 results. Thirty-five years of…
Uphoff on Media PodcastBefore You Flatten the Org Chart, Make Sure You Can Measure What AI Delivers
I’m a fan of radical thinking. It forces you to test assumptions you didn’t know you were making. You don’t always have to agree with it. Agreement was never…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYour AI Pilot Doesn’t Have a Job
Somewhere in your organization right now, a team is piloting technology nobody can explain the job of. They can describe the vendor. They can describe the demo…
Uphoff on Media PodcastSkydance’s $110 Billion Bet on Netflix’s Order of Operations
Paramount Skydance closed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6. The combined company is now simply called Skydance: roughly $70 billion in…
Uphoff on Media PodcastAI Stopped Being a Story. Now It's in Your Multiple
The Uphoff Value Index tracks what buyers pay for B2B information, marketing and technology businesses, and why it changes. Each quarter, this report shows…
Uphoff on Media PodcastB2B Marketing is Driving Forward, Looking Backward
Ninety-four percent of B2B buyers now use AI somewhere in the buying process. Forrester and 6sense surveyed buyers separately and landed on the exact same…
Uphoff on Media Podcast“Thanks for the Lecture on Price”
The largest contract Computer Intelligence had ever sold came down to one meeting. I was leading sales and marketing for Ziff-Davis’s research businesses, and…
Uphoff on Media PodcastGoals Are for Losers. Systems Are for Winners
That line has been founder gospel for a decade. Scott Adams coined it, and James Clear’s Atomic Habits turned the idea into a movement. It’s also half right. A…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWhat Does It Mean When the Company That Grades Everyone Else’s Disruption Gets Disrupted?
Gartner’s stock is down roughly 71% from its November 2024 high. Market cap fell from more than $45 billion to about $12 billion. Forrester is worse off…
Uphoff on Media PodcastIf Your Moat Was Data, What Happens When AI Can Manufacture It?
In late 2021, ZoomInfo was worth roughly $25 billion. Today it’s worth about $1 billion. The database didn’t get worse. The customer list didn’t disappear…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYour Agentic AI Isn’t Failing. Your Math Is
MIT’s NANDA initiative found in 2025 that 95 percent of enterprise generative AI pilots delivered no measurable P&L return, against an estimated 30 to 40…
Uphoff on Media PodcastBundling Didn’t Die. It Moved.
Comcast recently filed the closing argument in a 25-year experiment. On June 29, it announced it will spin off NBCUniversal and Sky into a separate public…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYou Sell Technology. I Run a Business. You Never Understood Mine
Every technology vendor I have ever sat across the table from was good at exactly one thing: beating the other vendors on the short list. Smarter packaging and…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Miss Isn’t the Failure. What You Do Next Is
The board deck is due. The forecast came in soft a week ago, and everyone in the building already knows it. Nobody has said so out loud, because the first…
Uphoff on Media PodcastBe Careful What You Wish For
I was a newly minted VP at Ziff-Davis, in a job that felt way over my head, and likely was. With my one-year-old daughter asleep on my chest, I started reading…
Uphoff on Media PodcastB2B Thought Leadership and Content Marketing Are Broken
Open your LinkedIn feed and read ten thought leadership posts in a row. Count how many you could tell apart if the names were stripped off. That number, not…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Approval That Should Never Have Happened
A golf equipment company just provided a realtime case study to everyone building, running, funding, or starting a B2B company. It’s the exact risk sitting…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Best, Worst Vendor Response to a Prospect Inquiry I’ve Ever Heard
My wife and I needed a new accountant. Ours had sold the practice, and we wanted someone who could handle more than just tax prep. So we did what everyone…
Uphoff on Media PodcastAI Has Changed the Way B2B Buyers Buy. Just Not the Way You Think
Everything I've argued in recent posts came from the operator's chair, reading the market from the supply side: that B2B media's future belongs to companies…
Uphoff on Media PodcastCareers Don’t Have Linear Paths. Only the Résumés Do
I was thirty minutes into a call with a Korn Ferry recruiter about a search she was running: a $100 million + company, right in my wheelhouse, seven figure…
Uphoff on Media PodcastMotion Is Not Transformation
There are two ways to be wrong about a technology wave. The first is obvious. You move too slow. You dismiss the shift, protect legacy revenue, and by the time…
Uphoff on Media PodcastHow Much Is My Business Worth Is the Wrong Question
Every operator with a timeline, three years to a sale, five to a recap, an exit somewhere out there that hasn’t been dated yet, asks the same question: how…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWhat Are Employers Actually Hiring For Right Now?
Agentic AI didn't just change what companies buy. It changed who they hire, and it changed fast enough that most job descriptions were obsolete before HR…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe 25% Problem
Pendo ran a full year of usage data across 615 SaaS products and published the number that should embarrass the industry: a median feature adoption rate of 6.4…
Uphoff on Media PodcastRage Against the Machines
Open your LinkedIn feed these days and three posts are fighting for the same space: the algorithm rant, the Substack discovery complaint, and the essay…
Uphoff on Media PodcastTwo Layers, Not Five
Most B2B leadership teams are spending their AI planning time in the wrong layer of the stack. That’s not a criticism of effort. It’s a diagnosis of where the…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYour Customer Is Trying to Tell You Something. Your Metrics Can’t Hear Them.
Over the last several months, I’ve had dozens of conversations with founders, CEOs, senior operators, and investors across B2B information, marketing, and…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWhich One Do I Adopt?
“Which one do I adopt?” That question is landing in my inbox constantly right now. Most B2B leaders have already done the easy part: a pilot here, a chat…
Uphoff on Media PodcastIBM Had the Data. It Still Missed the Signal
One Thing I’m Thinking About IBM lost 25 percent of its market value in a single trading day last week. The drop wiped out roughly $69 billion and marked the…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWhy I Keep Running Into the Fire
Quick note: this one's landing on a Friday, outside the usual Monday/Wednesday rhythm. The response to Wednesday's piece made the case for moving faster than…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWho Is the Arrowfly Rebrand For?
WTWH Media rebranded this week. New name: Arrowfly. Same 40-plus vertical media brands, same 45-plus events, same three networks: engineering; healthcare and…
Uphoff on Media PodcastEnterprise Software’s Publisher Moment
Microsoft recently announced it was folding its consumer and corporate Copilot chatbots into one application. The stated reason was to be more competitive with…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Teammate That Never Logs Off
Anthropic and Salesforce announced Claude Tag on June 23, 2026. Most of the coverage framed it as a Slack upgrade. That positioning is wrong. What shipped two…
Uphoff on Media PodcastLoop Engineering: The Bridge to Workflow Transformation
A few posts ago, I made the case that Vibe Coding eliminates the queue: the wait for an engineer to build the thing you need. Last post, Solo Scale showed what…
Uphoff on Media PodcastSolo Scale: The New Business Model AI Just Made Possible
There’s a conversation happening about what AI means for software creation. Elena Verna at Lovable calls it Mom-and-Pop SaaS. The thesis is smart: as the cost…
Uphoff on Media PodcastAI Isn’t a Tool. It’s Infrastructure
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk to the Southern California chapter of the Counselors of Real Estate. Seasoned operators. People who have financed, built…
Uphoff on Media Podcast“I Just Stumbled Across Your Profile and Thought We Should Connect”
Something has gone wrong with digital networking. It was already broken in 2020. I wrote about it then and the response was significant. Thousands of people…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWhen Agentic AI Meets the Physical Economy
I was recently asked to speak to the Southern California chapter of the Counselors of Real Estate about the impact AI is having on their industry. The irony…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe B2B Event Market Is Splitting in Two
Part 3 of B2B Media in the Machine Age A note on timing: This post is publishing on a Friday, a break from our usual Monday/Wednesday cadence. The reason is a…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Vertical Intelligence Company
Part 2 of B2B Media in the Machine Age Something significant is being built from the ruins of ad-supported B2B media. Not a replacement for what was lost…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Relationship Was the Product
Part 1 of B2B Media in the Machine Age B2B media isn’t dying. It’s being restructured by forces most of the industry still hasn’t fully identified. Over the…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWhen AI Builds Itself: What the Anthropic White Paper Means for B2B Leaders
The most useful thing I can offer on the AI disruption isn’t a prediction. It’s a pattern. One I’ve lived through before, at scale, in this sector. I was in…
Uphoff on Media PodcastHow Do We Move?
Last week’s post, “The AI Layoff Myth" generated a ton of discussion: on the blog, on LinkedIn, and in private conversations with operators and executives…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe AI Layoff Myth
Walk into any boardroom or investor meeting right now and you’ll hear the same narrative: AI is eliminating jobs at scale. Executives cite it as justification…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYour B2B Marketing Career in the Age of Agentic AI
This is the fourth and final post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B marketing in the agentic AI era. Post…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Stack That Broke Marketing (And the Architecture That Can Fix It)
This is the third post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B marketing in the agentic AI era. Post 1, “How B2B…
Uphoff on Media PodcastB2B Marketing Is Broken. Brand Is Why. And Brand Is the Fix.
B2B Marketing in the Machine Age | Part 2 of 4 This is the second post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B…
Uphoff on Media PodcastHow B2B Marketing Lost Its Way
B2B Marketing in the Machine Age | Series Opener This is the first post in B2B Marketing in the Machine Age, a four-part series on the state and future of B2B…
Uphoff on Media PodcastYou Don't Know What Your Customers Are Actually Trying to Do
Uphoff on Media | Field-Tested Frameworks When I became President and CEO of ThomasNet.com, I inherited a research project already underway with a firm called…
Uphoff on Media PodcastB2B Is Redesigning Everything. The Customer Still Isn't in the Room
There is a room I keep walking into. The faces change. The industry changes. The agenda changes. But the missing person is always the same. The customer isn’t…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe CPO Moment
When the CEOs of Walmart and Coca-Cola announced their retirements, both cited AI disruption as a contributing factor. Let that land for a moment. Two of the…
Uphoff on Media PodcastWonderwall
There’s a lyric from the Oasis song “Wonderwall” that’s been living rent-free in my head every time I read another paywall story: “I said maybe, you’re gonna…
Uphoff on Media PodcastFrom SaaS to Service as Software: The Model That Replaces the Model
The most important thing Sequoia Capital published in the last year wasn’t a market map or a fund announcement. It was two sentences: “The cloud transition was…
Uphoff on Media PodcastThe Decision Was Made Without You
Gartner’s latest research: buyers spend just 17% of their total purchasing time in direct contact with vendors. 83% define their requirements before talking to…
Uphoff on Media PodcastB2B Branding Has a New Audience. Most Companies Are Talking to the Wrong One
B2B brand building is about to be restructured from the ground up. Not incrementally refined. Not optimized. Structurally inverted. Here’s the reality most B2B…
Uphoff on Media PodcastCulture Still Eats Strategy. But Now It's Also on the Menu.
“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” Leaders have invoked it for decades as a reminder that the human architecture of an organization ultimately determines…