Are AI Agents the New Media Business Model?

Michael Blau left a16z Crypto to build Drip, a marketplace where AI agents pay writers per article. No subscriptions. Just micropayments, settled on-chain, every time an agent reads.The thesis: everyone's about to give their ChatGPT or Claude a wallet, and when they do, those agents will need somewhere to buy premium analysis. Drip lets Substack and newsletter writers sell their work to agents on a pay-per-read basis, starting with finance and tech. Writers set their own price. A trading agent might buy 100 articles for pennies each before it ever places a trade.Matt Medved sits down with Blau to get under the hood of agentic commerce and what it means for the media model.In this conversation:– How Drip works and why it's additive to subscriptions, not a replacement– Why micropayments need stablecoins (credit cards can't process a one-cent transaction)– The x402 standard and why it feels like the early NFT/ERC-721 days– Investor brain vs. founder brain, and lessons from Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon– The three ways to play the agent economy: be the wallet, sell to agents, or own discovery– Blau's personal AI stack: Codex, "brain folders," and switching off Claude overnightSubscribe to Now Media: https://nowmedia.co/Drip: https://dripstack.xyzMichael Blau: https://x.com/blauyourmindMatt Medved: https://x.com/mattmedvedSubscribe and rate the show wherever you listen. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.