Business

Terry Boyd: Why Dispatches is the new new thing in digital media

Tech Sister Cities ™

We started putting together our Tech Sister Cities initiative back in 2016 to link worthy Eindhoven startups to more risk-tolerant Americans investors in the Midwest, specifically St. Louis, Louisville, Nashville and Columbus.

EINDHOVEN COUNCILOR ROB GORDON, CENTER, CONFERS WITH JONATHAN BLUE, LEFT, AND JOHANN BEELEN FROM BRAINPORT EINDHOVEN.

TSC brought private equity investor Jonathan Blue, chairman of Blue Equity, to Eindhoven in September 2018 to meet with local startups and scale-ups, an event funded by the United States Department of State.

• A month later, TSC brought two groups of highly skilled internationals to Eindhoven – one from Portugal and a second Italy – for Tech Trek, a program sponsored by Eindhoven Airport. Tech Treks showcase local ecosystems and business opportunities for innovators from other countries.

Tier1 ™

Tier1 Tech Talent is our newest subsidiary, operating at the intersection of tech, talent and capital. We’ve covered the tech and innovation space since our first days. With Tier1 Tech, we’re applying the CAA model to tech talents because they’re the global 21st Century stars.

Founded in early 2018, we’re not an incubator or accelerator. We really are a talent agency. Instead of putting together movie deals, we’re in early supporting early stage startups and fast-growing scale-ups with marketing and communications and connections to capital in the U.S.

THE ORIGINAL CONCEPT

The revolution continues

We’ve incorporated some of the business model and revenue approaches from our first media company, which I founded in 2010. Our original business plan turned out to be a reliable roadmap of what actually happened, somewhere between prophecy and a lucky guess.

In 2015, we wrote Dispatches initially would be:

… a digital news and entertainment platform that will help expats do everything from finding a home to avoiding tax snafus to having the best possible travel experience. Later, we add complimentary … services for multinational corporate clients.

And that’s what we’ve done.

We’re not going to BS you – with Facebook and Google owning digital advertising, this is a tough time to roll out a media play. Unless you stop thinking like a conventional media company.

We’re leveraging our global reach and our global talent and investing in new proprietary technology and IP. Because we collect information and intelligence from across Europe, we can do things other media can’t do such as aggregate and curate career opportunities.

I never complain, but I do have one slight peeve, if you will. The main criticism of what we’ve always done – the meetups, the corporate work and the services – is that our business model requires too much friction. Guilty.

But the newspaper business model was pretty complicated, when you think about it, and it was wildly profitable for 150 years. The conventional press was really the logistics business, with huge investments in presses and in fleets of big trucks that took papers to the smaller trucks that took them to the delivery people who took it to end users.

We’re a tech company, no question. But we never forget we’re really in the people business.

If you’d like to come along with us on our journey, ping me at: [email protected]

Website | + posts

Co-CEO of Dispatches Europe. A former military reporter, I'm a serial expat who has lived in France, Turkey, Germany and the Netherlands.

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