Developer Media The New Stack Sold to Investment Firm Insight Partners: An Unusual Buyer Purchasing "Engineer Trust"

Why We’re Covering This Deal

In 2021, The New Stack, a specialized media outlet covering the cloud-native and DevOps space, was acquired by major investment firm Insight Partners. The sale price wasn’t disclosed. We’re still covering this deal because the buyer is unusual. Not a media company, not a tech company — a VC/PE firm managing roughly $90B in assets (about ¥13.5T at ¥150/$1) bought an entire 10-person media outlet outright. It’s a deal that shows just how much the range of answers to “who buys media?” has widened over the past decade.

Two Founders, One Still Working as a Nurse

The New Stack was launched in 2014 by married co-founders Alex Williams and Judy Williams. Alex was a tech journalist who had passed through TechCrunch, SiliconAngle, and ReadWrite; as containers and Kubernetes began entering enterprise systems, he saw a lack of reporting that truly understood the technology of development, operations, and management, and struck out on his own. In year one, Judy kept working full-time as a nurse while handling copyediting, accounting, and operations. For all its billing as a specialized media outlet, the reality of its founding was the same kind of tightrope walk as any other husband-and-wife small business.

From there, over seven years, it grew into a 10-person team that, alongside articles, produced a podcast, ebooks, a newsletter, and developer-focused events. The podcast, “Makers,” had racked up 1.5 million cumulative plays by May 2020. Most individual articles drew readerships in the 5,000–10,000 range, but some had an average read time exceeding 8 minutes. This is a media outlet measured not by the flashiness of its reader counts, but by the depth of its reading.

The New Stack by the Numbers

Not Ads, But a Revenue Structure of “75 Corporate Sponsors”

The New Stack didn’t build its revenue around traditional banner ads. Its pillar was sponsorships from 75+ vendors, including AWS, Confluent, Docker, and Oracle. Alex describes the company as “in some ways a hybrid of a media company, an analyst firm, and a marketing agency.” What vendors were paying for was not ad-unit square footage but involvement in a context that developers trust enough to actually read.

The tightrope walk built into this structure is obvious: if editorial independence can’t be maintained in articles covering a sponsor’s own product space, trust from the developer readership collapses, and the moment it does, the value to sponsors evaporates too. It’s precisely because developers, as a professional class, ignore advertising and are suspicious of marketing that a technically accurate, editorially independent media outlet becomes a scarce resource. The New Stack held that balance for seven years through a tone of “we can loosen up precisely because this is a stiff industry” combined with real technical depth, and that accumulated track record became the acquisition value itself.

The Logic Behind an Investment Firm Buying Media

Insight’s portfolio contains hundreds of B2B software companies. Their shared challenge is “reaching developers, and being trusted by them.” The New Stack’s readers are exactly those developers, and for an investment firm, this acquisition amounts to acquiring a “conduit of developer trust” usable across the entire portfolio. Put another way, they picked up, as fund-level infrastructure in one purchase, something no individual portfolio company’s own marketing budget could buy.

This is the institutional-investor version of the pattern seen when a sports-league company bought Bitches Who Brunch. A media outlet’s buyer isn’t necessarily in the same industry, anyone who wants to reach that readership is a candidate buyer, and now even investment firms have joined that line.

On the mechanics of the deal itself, Alex offered only that “the partnership with Insight aligns with their goals.” But given that the couple continued to run the operation after the acquisition, and that Alex has said “this lets us keep going for years to come. We’re going to broaden and deepen our coverage,” it reads as a deal premised on maintaining and reinforcing the outlet as infrastructure, not one aimed at a sell-off or headcount cuts.

Why Trust Sells for More Than Revenue

Trust accumulates more slowly than revenue does, but it sells for more. A site packed with short-term affiliate content and a media outlet that protected its trust while earning thinly will find very different faces among the buyers waiting at their respective exits. DigitalOcean’s purchase of CSS-Tricks happened for the same reason. When a buyer is buying “the relationship with the reader,” any short-term monetization that damages that relationship trades away exit options in exchange for near-term revenue.

Where This Model Gets Risky

Some caveats are worth keeping in mind. Sponsorship revenue rises and falls together with the cloud-native industry’s fortunes, if vendor marketing budgets tighten, that line of 75 sponsors shrinks. Because the sale price wasn’t disclosed, “this was a good exit” can’t be numerically verified, and no benchmark multiple can be drawn from this case. And the balance of editorial independence with sponsorship revenue is a personal operating skill with no guarantee of surviving the founders’ departure, the fact that the couple’s continued involvement was itself a premise of the post-acquisition arrangement is, in a sense, the flip side of that same risk.

Conditions for Replication

The equivalent of this model in Japan would be a specialized media outlet focused on a specific technology domain or industry, run on sponsorship revenue. Two things generalize. Choose a domain specialized enough that its professional readership “doesn’t trust advertising” (which is exactly what makes trust a scarce resource). And base revenue not on PV-linked advertising but on sponsorship that sells involvement in context (which lets the economics work even without massive PV scale).

On the other hand, a buyer like Insight Partners, one that buys media “for the sake of the portfolio”, barely exists yet among Japanese VC/PE firms. The replicability of this kind of exit is currently low, and anyone attempting this model in Japan should design it to work on operating revenue alone, without assuming a sale. If an exit comes, treat it as a windfall. If it doesn’t, fine. The New Stack itself was run on exactly that footing for seven years.

Related Reading

• CSS-Tricks — another media outlet acquired for the same “developer trust”
• Bitches Who Brunch — the pattern of “whoever wants to reach that readership” becoming the buyer