In India, New Media is Subculture Media

In San Francisco, tech is the culture. In India, entrepreneurship is. Mix them up, and you build the wrong media strategy. It’s about taste, trust, legitimacy, and how WTF, India’s got Latent, 22nd Century Indian Documentary, and the website songs you hear in salons have got it right. And why India’s new media wave has to be built here, not borrowed from somewhere else.

To me, the most interesting shift in tech right now isn’t about launching new models. It’s that the biggest tech companies are making their own shows. It’s the race to attention and cultural relevance as a moat.

Meanwhile, most Indian brands are still doing what we’ve always done. We rent visibility from someone else’s press and call it a media strategy, while early signs and trends show new media getting picked because of the serendipity of taste meeting subcultures. Cracking subcultures isn't new; it's the bedrock of how the creator economy works.

Here’s how I’ll explain this.

First, what’s really happening at the frontier? Then, what changes when that trend hits India? And finally, the principles for anyone building here.

I. The Frontier: Silicon Valley Tech is Building Its Own Hollywood

1. Tech is changing fast, but the real revolution is inside media. Tech media is now more valuable than most old-school media companies. Not because it chases big audiences, but because it focuses on its own. In the AI era, this is the shift to watch.
2. A filmmaking industry is being built inside tech. Look at the evidence stack of the last two years. A16Z made “new media” the strategy of the moment. TBPN went from a scrappy daily livestream to being acquired by OpenAI. Founders Fund launched a show where tech-famous founders play a party game on camera. Showrunners, editors, magazine-quality cover shoots, casting selections, season arcs: these are now roles inside venture funds and AI labs. The valley is no longer sponsoring media. It is making it.
3. Why would the world’s most capitalised companies bother? Because they compete for belief as much as for customers, and capital is table stakes while cultural position is not. The theory underneath the whole wave is this:
4. New media means you control the story from start to finish. You have your own studio, your own newsroom, your own IP, and you distribute it to the people and brands you choose. Here, media isn’t just PR or marketing. It’s the bridge between a brand and the culture around it. This is how Stripe works on the Studio model, and Notion is adopting an in-house storytelling team too.
5. Media is an extension of Culture. All of the above works in America because in San Francisco, tech is the culture. The stories, the characters, the drama, the taste: the raw material is ambient. Which is exactly why none of it translates. India saw this wave, liked it, and copied the surface. Hire a video team, start a podcast, call it new media. It felt like building, but really, it was just putting on a costume. To see why, you have to look at what the media has actually been doing here all along. To see what an AI subculture actually is, sit at a dinner table in San Francisco when someone brings up what Dwarkesh asked this week, or who fought whom on the latest All-In. Nobody explains the reference. Nobody needs to. That is a subculture: a place where the references need no additional context. Technology earned that status in the valley, and that is the quiet reason tech media works there at all. Companies are hiring storytellers to spread their mission through cultural conversations.

II. The Subcontinent: India Is Not a Smaller America

1. Legacy Indian media communicates presence, not narrative, unless you are successful. Getting featured feels like arriving in every media market on earth; that emotion is not Indian. What is Indian is the language of the coverage. Our legacy media spoke in announcements: the round raised, the valuation touched, the office opened. It tells the market that you exist. It never tells anyone who you are. It creates trust through popularity: we are out there, we are covered, therefore we are real, when what a brand actually needs is credibility through story: this is who we are, this is why we exist. Brands here have rented visibility for decades while their real narrative sat untold.
2. And even that thin trust mechanism broke. Paid features, advertorials dressed as journalism, coverage that tracked ad spend. Everyone knows which stories were bought, and the audience increasingly knows too. The arbitrage in Indian media is legitimacy, not reach. Reach is cheap now. Being believed is expensive.
3. So the first instinct is to transplant. Frankly, the first instinct is to copy. Honestly, it makes sense: copying is cheaper, it’s already proven, and the algorithm likes what’s familiar. Take a hit format from the valley, put it in Bangalore, and call it done. But every attempt at copying tech media has fallen flat. Novelty comes from fit, and fit can’t be imported. A show isn’t just a format. It’s a bundle: cast, premise, cultural moment, and whether the audience is ready. Copy the format, and you miss the real secret: stories and talented people. A daily tech show needs constant drama, like funding battles, rivalries, big exits, and interesting personalities who want to be out there sharing opinions. Silicon Valley has an endless supply of these. Indian tech, despite its size, doesn’t yet have enough public stories, founders, investors, or thinkers willing to be in the spotlight to support a daily show. That’s the dry patch. But look at areas like comedy, cricket, movies, music, food, and nostalgia; these are overflowing with talent. Stand-up comedy alone has built a bigger pool of personalities in ten years than tech media has in twenty. If new media thrives on great people, draw from where your culture’s talent actually is.
4. Focus on subcultures, not big demographics. Look at the Deluxe Salon trend: a simple website with songs played in Indian salons, especially those 90s Bollywood tracks everyone remembers from haircuts. It went viral, and suddenly every industry wanted to copy it. No big budget, no celebrity, but just a subculture seeing itself in public for the first time. Labels like 'males 18 to 35, tier 1 and 2' are just marketing talk. The salon playlist fans, SIP-and-chill investors, and CA-meme groups are real. New media connects with real groups, not just market segments.
5. India has its own insider circles too: founders, operators, VCs, and angels. It’s a small but tight group, active online all day and chatting in WhatsApp groups at night. Even though it’s small, this community shapes company valuations, talent moves, and the stories everyone else hears.
6. Tech journalism doesn’t create culture; it informs. I strongly believe Shark Tank India did more to make founders famous than twenty years of tech journalism. It’s an outsider show, a reality TV format on national television that created insider celebrities. Now, people know Aman, Namita, and Anupam even if they can’t name a single unicorn company. India’s insider circle was formed by an outsider show. Think about that. This show was a clear adaptation of the global Shark Tank. Though not as successful as the original, it was still a good attempt to make Indians culturally aware of entrepreneurship. The dilution in the quality of conversations also reflects the economy.
7. Nikhil Kamath is a great example of playing the insider game right. His podcast, WTF, isn’t the biggest in terms of subscribers, but that doesn’t matter. The real value is his guest list: builders, ministers, billionaires, even the Prime Minister’s first podcast appearance. The audience size changes, but the influence is huge. He didn’t just become a bigger influencer. He turned into a cultural power player. Those are two very different things.
8. Here’s the cautionary yet inspirational moment of New Media in India: India’s Got Latent. It got explosive attention and real casting genius, but when one crossed the line, the whole thing collapsed amid national outrage. In India, attention without legitimacy is a liability. This country gives fame fast and takes it away even faster. The tolerance for taste is narrow here, and it’s enforced. If you are edgy and wacky, you have an audience, but it has guardrails.
9. That’s why prestige works differently here. In the valley, prestige is about taste. In India, it still comes from trust and institutions: the surname on the shop, the brand your father used, the bank that never failed. In India, trust comes before taste. You earn the right to be tasteful only after people believe you.
10. Now, the wound that bothered me. Skyroot launches private rockets. Here’s the pain point. Skyroot puts private rockets into the sky, a huge story by any measure, but it stays inside India. Global media barely notices. Not because the story is small, but because nobody told it at a level that forces the world to look. India’s problem isn’t a lack of stories. It’s story projection. We have the stories. We haven’t built the studio lens to tell them about global quality. The most local is the most global if you set the taste bar globally.
11. I saw this myself. We made a launch film for Pramaana and screened it in the US. The response was world-class, even for us. The talent is here. The culture is here. What’s missing is the ambition to hold our stories to a global taste standard, and the discipline to find every story on this land and tell it that way back to our consumers, and out to the world.

III. Building a Subculture Media for India

India does not do one-size-fits-all. This is a civilisation of dense pockets, and its subcultures come in every size: thirty people deep, like the crowd that made a salon playlist famous, or three hundred million strong, like cricket and cinema.

Now run the same subculture experiment in Bangalore. Drop the podcast reference and watch the table thin out politely. Then say, "I quit my job to start up and didn't tell my parents for six months," and watch everyone lean in, including the waiter. In India, technology isn't the subculture yet. Entrepreneurship is. Explain your architecture, and you lose the audience. Tell the struggle behind starting the company, and you will go viral by morning. This country's rising emotion is not the stack. It is the leap. And when the right artefact touches that emotion, you can watch the mechanism work in real time. The 22nd Century Indian, Shaurya Sinha's documentary on young Indian builders, drones that never land, and new groceries in under ten minutes, was released on Independence Day and received like a mirror rather than a film. It sat at the exact crossing of four rising currents: India, entrepreneurship, youth, and frontier. Nobody had to be told why it mattered. The room already knew.

That is the ground every principle below stands on. Stories travel through subcultures here, and the game is finding the room where your story needs no context setting.

India rewards the studio before the newsroom. A newsroom needs daily stories, which we mostly don’t have. A studio needs patience and judgment, which you can buy today. Go deep into a story. Make a book, a report, a documentary, or an essay that lasts. Most Indian brands building new media should make fewer, heavier pieces that drive depth and insight and capture the emotion that makes them shareable. Shaurya Sinha's recent documentary, 22nd Century Indian, is a true example of studio-style work that captures the essence of new young Indians building globally disruptive ideas and conveys emotion more honestly than legacy media did. This is the beginning of the rise of micro-documentaries.

1. Artefacts compound. Feeds tend to decay. The proof is already here. Zerodha spent almost nothing on ads and built Varsity, patient, free, unglamorous financial education that became the default textbook for a generation of Indian investors. Blume’s Indus Valley Report gets more credibility from one annual artefact than a hundred podcast episodes. Education creates trust directly.
2. For venture capital, the ROI is deal flow and brand equity, not views. Your new media is subculture media for founders, period. The audience is a few thousand people who might send you their best deal. The scoreboard is deal flow, talent flow, and LP belief. A fund’s studio exists to make its portfolio feel bigger than its cheque size. To build belief, you have to grow your cultural positioning. Much of our approach at BoldCap, where I lead storytelling, has focused on cultural equity as our strategy. We don't host founder events or mixers (at least not yet), but we pick tech subcultures like Founding Engineers, Builders, Researchers, and Students, and create IPs and formats that appeal to them culturally. They feel they belong to this gathering more than to attending a serious conference vibe. We have done watch parties, demo parties, deeply technical summits, etc. For example, the video we made for the verification summit was purely subculture-focused content. It was called AI Stops Saying Sorry.
3. For B2B, own the room where your buyers talk shop. Your buyers are a niche, so your media should be subculture media for that niche. A curated golf experience for CFOs, the retreat experience for HR heads, the community for developers. Own that room, and you become the default vendor before the RFP even exists.
4. For consumer brands, cast into existing culture. This is the mass game, and in India, mass means tapping into culture that already runs deep. Cashify’s Lie Hard with Gaurav Kapoor and the stand-up circuit is the early template. Don’t sponsor someone else’s show; make your own and cast the culture’s talent. Spinny and others are trying the same play.
5. For D2C, own a tribe’s taste completely. This is the subculture game. You can’t outspend HUL, but you can own the gym bros, the trekkers, the chai purists, the sneakerheads of Indore. Salon-website-level cultural specificity, done on purpose, is a real strategy.
6. For India-to-the-world, it’s net new or nothing. This is the segment nobody talks about: you’re in India, but your audience is global. Now you’re not competing with Indian media. You’re up against the whole Western new media machine, on its own algorithms, in its own time zone. Another podcast won’t survive that math. The only way to get global eyeballs is to bring something so new that attention has no choice. Match the global taste bar on craft. Beat it on originality.
7. Bring your own taste to the table, not an imitation of theirs. The trap in going global is trying to please: the launch video in ‘global style,’ the blog in a borrowed voice, every Indian edge smoothed out to fit in. First principles taste wins. Your history, your background, your visual and musical memory are the raw material for a style nobody else can make. They should show up in everything you create. The world doesn’t need another copy of its own media. It wants what it’s never seen, made at a standard it can’t ignore.
8. In India, presence is media. Don’t forget the event IP. India is a gathering culture: weddings, melas, satsangs, conferences that are really darshans. An annual event insiders can’t miss is new media at its highest leverage here, because presence is the deepest form of media consumption in this country.
9. Bharat’s distribution runs on rails the West can’t see. A large portion of India’s new media is in English, but the real cultural liquidity is in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, and nine others. The brand that cracks subculture media in an Indian language will look unstoppable in hindsight. And under it all is WhatsApp: the family group forward is India’s restack. If your artefacts aren’t screenshot-able, forwardable, and explainable by an uncle, it won’t travel beyond your feed.
10. The creator economy isn't just for influencer marketing; it should be leveraged for cultural equity. The line between creator and brand is dissolving. Creators solved the one problem every brand is now desperate to solve: distribution. They are distribution-first engines with taste attached, making them patrons who carry brands and stories to the masses, and making creator styles and aesthetics the new grammar of business content. This line was thick a decade ago. It is thin now, because creators hold the exact playbook for capturing attention that brands are shopping for. The real opportunity is creator x startup, and it goes far beyond influencer marketing: conceiving stories together, building storytelling experiences together, extending the brand to audiences through voices those audiences already trust. And watch the roles this creates. The creator-investor is already walking into venture, and creator seats inside companies are coming next. This builds more cultural equity for the brand than legacy media does.
11. The real brief: legitimacy, taste, expertise, momentum. In that order. Not ‘start a podcast.’ Define what your brand believes. Find the subculture that already half-believes it. Build the artefact, the show, or the room that proves it. Go directly to your consumers and stakeholders until you own the narrative online and offline.
12. Let me break the fourth wall for a second. I’m writing this as a player, not a neutral critic. I work in venture, I build narratives for a living, and I’m betting my own time on this thesis. What works in tech media won’t automatically work in health, finance, or food. Each category has to run its own experiment against its own culture. The pendulum will swing here too, and some of this will age badly. I’d rather be early and partly wrong than wait for the playbook to settle.
13. India won’t copy its way into new media. It will make something only India could. The wave won’t come from importing the valley’s playbook. India, and every Indian startup, will need its own new media strategy: read our cultures and subcultures, unlock distribution through them, and go direct to the audience that matters. Get to the basics of our taste, our trust, our languages, our gatherings, our rockets, our songs in the salon. Find the true stories of this land, tell them at a taste level the world can’t ignore.