Five years ago, Jason Yanowitz came on the AMO Show running a bootstrapped crypto media and events company doing $25 million in revenue. Since then, he's cut the news division, killed a conference brand, turned over half the company, and rebuilt Blockworks into a data and software platform now valued at $192 million. In this conversation, Jason walks through exactly how that transition happened, what the revenue actually looks like, why his investors asked him to strip media off the P&L, and why he thinks the Substack era is "mostly cope."
Chapters:
00:00 — Introduction
01:33 — From media company to data platform
06:39 — Cutting news, Permissionless, and half the company
09:33 — Why enterprises replaced investors as the customer
12:44 — Raising at a $192M valuation 18:41 — The three products explained
24:59 — Three-sided monetization and usage-based pricing
32:07 — Are podcasts and events still revenue lines?
37:05 — Should Blockworks kill advertising entirely?
40:00 — The future of news, AI, and print
55:49 — Why Permissionless got cut
58:16 — DAS as an ARR growth engine
01:01:49 — ~$40M ARR, path to $100M by 2028
01:05:32 — M&A: rolling up 50 crypto data companies
01:10:30 — The IPO path 01:13:25 — Why the Substack era is cope
01:14:51 — Advice for operators
