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Vivek Ramaswamy, who revealed a significant stake in BuzzFeed last week, sent a letter to the online publisher’s board demanding major changes in terms of staffing and direction of board composition , as well as an apology for previous reports. CEO Jonah Peretti declined the mea culpa but agreed to meet with the former Republican presidential primary candidate and Donald Trump surrogate, who he said has “fundamental misunderstandings” about the company’s business.
“Hi Vivek – Thanks for reaching out, nice to finally hear from you. I’m glad you think BuzzFeed is undervalued – I completely agree! “, he wrote.
BuzzFeed went public in 2021 after merging with a SPAC. Ramaswamy revealed last week that he had acquired well over 8% of the company, making him one of the company’s largest individual shareholders.
“BuzzFeed needs a complete restructuring from the ground up to accommodate the AI-driven changes coming to your business,” he wrote in an article today on X (formerly Twitter). “Once you scale back to startup size, invest more in areas where BuzzFeed has a competitive advantage: creator-led audio and video content. Make BuzzFeed a bold and distinctive brand. Distinguish yourself from your competitors by openly admitting your past journalistic failures and redefine the BuzzFeed brand around the pursuit of truth,” he said, citing reports on the Steele, Hunter Biden and Kevin Spacey dossier.
He said the company should “seek talent from across the political and cultural spectrum.” Be bold. Don’t be afraid to challenge your audience. From Candace Owens to Destiny, from Tucker Carlson to Bill Maher, from Aaron Rodgers to Charles Barkley, no talent should be off limits.
“I am very skeptical of the commercial relevance of making BuzzFeed a creative platform for incendiary political pundits,” Peretti said in his response. “And we’re certainly not going to apologize for our Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism.”
Ramaswamy’s letter was lengthy, dissecting BuzzFeed’s financial data and divided into headings including The Worst is Yet to Come, The Way Forward and the three phases he believed would set the company up for success. Below is the opening.
On the BuzzFeed Board of Directors,
BuzzFeed has lost its way. The company pioneered the social internet, at a time when referral traffic from Facebook seemed to never stop. Traditional media companies and publishers believed BuzzFeed had the secret sauce, so much so that they invested at sky-high valuations, copied the strategy, or both. Today, the social Internet model is dying or dead, and BuzzFeed is left without a viable strategy.
I’m not the only one who believes this. BuzzFeed went public in December 2021 at a valuation of $1.5 billion. When I began purchasing shares of your company on January 30 of this year, your stock price had fallen more than 94% from its initial trading price (and even more from its peak). At current prices, it is still down more than 75% from the quote. The public markets have spoken.
I am now your second largest Class A shareholder with an 8.37% stake in your company and I continue to increase my position. I own your stock because I believe BuzzFeed can still become a more valuable company than when it initially listed, but doing so requires a major change in strategy.
There will be a temptation to dismiss what you are about to hear on partisan grounds, as I was recently a Republican presidential candidate. It might not be a bad thing for you to hear from someone who shares the views of more than 150 million Americans who you largely miss today, but that’s beside the point. I write from my experience as a serial founder who has built fast-growing startups in three different industries, the largest of which is a ~$9 billion NASDAQ-listed company that has additionally returned over of $1.5 billion in cash to shareholders in its first 10 years of existence. Nearly two decades after its founding, BuzzFeed is now a startup with a paltry market capitalization of around $100 million. I see this as an opportunity.“
News Source : deadline.com
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