The Journey of Revolutionizing News with Kira Shishkin

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Highlights

When Josh Broward cites Paul Ricoeur's point that no one has a perspective from nowhere, Kira argues that bullets cut to the essential facts end before opinion can creep in. The pair trade lessons on firing faster, and Kira admits an anti-ad stance made informed.now hard to advertise. He tells seed stage founders to stop obsessing over venture capital.

Top Quotes

"News had a fact crisis that turned into a trust crisis, and now it's an epistemological crisis where we lost any reference point to what the facts even could be." (Kira Shishkin)

"The same basic facts happened, but the way that they're shared and interpreted, they don't even sound like the same event anymore. America has an epistemology crisis." (Josh Broward)

"Fundraising and engaging with investors is a direct opportunity cost against actually building the company." (Kira Shishkin)

Transcript

Kira Shishkin: There was a fact crisis that turned into a trust crisis, and now I would definitely say it's an epistemological crisis where we lost any sort of reference point to what the facts even could be.

Josh Broward: Hi, welcome to Founder Real Talk. I'm your host, Josh Broward, CEO of Wisdom Partners. And in case you're joining us for the first time, let me just tell you about what we're doing here. The whole point of Founder Real Talk is to help founders understand the journey of other founders. Sometimes I say being a founder is the loneliest job in the world. It's like being on a rowboat in the middle of an ocean during a hurricane. And sometimes it's helpful just to know there's other crazy people in rowboats not far away, and their experience is pretty similar to yours.

So today we have an experienced rower, 4-time founder Kira Shishkin. His most recent company is informed.now, which is trying to deal with the news and information crisis in the world today. It's the number 1 news by text app in America. He's won a host of awards, has education from top tier schools, but helping us get our news is where he's spending most of his time now. So without further ado, Kira, great to have you here.

Kira Shishkin: Josh, thank you so much for having me. It's a very generous introduction, and I'm delighted to join you.

Josh Broward: Thanks. Kira, can you tell us about informed.now and what got you into this?

Kira Shishkin: I feel like with this venture, even more than the previous ones, there's a real alignment of purpose to skill set to just the timing that we're living through. informed.now is a news concierge, a first-of-its-kind news concierge service for the everyday American. We also serve Canada, so for the everyday North American, so to speak. Our mission is really to take the clickbait, the bias, the solicitation, all the advertisement, and the sensationalism out of the news, and make news readable again for the everyday person who doesn't have a lot of time and can't afford to spend hours a day researching and trying to cross-check and figure out what the truth is in the news media. We make that process easy, and we like to describe our mission this way: We're on a mission to put the power of facts back in the palm of the everyday American.

Josh Broward: That's great. I was thinking, and I won't name any names because I don't want to throw anybody under the bus, some people close to me, I was talking with them this last week and I said, you heard about Venezuela, right? And they hadn't. And this was 2, 3, 4, 5 days after. I think they're so frustrated with normal news outlets that they just don't have a news intake that they are willing to engage.

Kira Shishkin: You can't blame them, because the systems that are, don't make it attractive and don't make it worthwhile to stay informed. You're bombarded with information. As you're trying to read, you're also being solicited aggressively every step of the way. And you have to do so much additional cognitive work to figure things out, to actually get informed, that a lot of people naturally say, I don't have time to do this.

I don't think it's a personal fault. I think it's the fault of the systems that we inherited and that we are sort of stuck with. But part of the spirit of our mission is that we know we can rebuild information integrity and rebuild information infrastructure, so that the systems are more user-friendly and more reader-friendly in the future.

Josh Broward: So I imagine most people listening have probably never heard of news by text. Saying we're the biggest news by text service in America, they're like, how many are there, 3? I don't know. And what does that mean? So if someone were to become a customer of informed.now, what would they get? What does that even mean for them?

Kira Shishkin: Simply put, a news by text service is, in our case, a news by SMS service where we send an SMS to our readers every morning of every weekday. We chose that channel for its minimalism, for its immediacy, and because it cuts through all the noise. There are no accounts, no account management, no passwords, no privacy-violating products, no platform, and no app store. It's just the most direct channel from our mind into yours.

The minimalism of the platform also doesn't allow for rich media. No videos, no fancy images, no tons of links, none of that sort of stuff jumping out at you from your screen. We picked this format for the urgency and the immediacy of it, but also for the inevitable, unavoidable minimalism that we stand for, and we thought SMS would be the perfect channel for that.

Josh Broward: So basically you get a text message every morning with 4, 5, 10 short news summaries.

Kira Shishkin: Very short. News summarization is nothing new, of course. The news digest space has been around for, I think, as long as news has been around, so forever. But we do summarize a little bit differently, and I think the way we summarize is rather unprecedented. First of all, I would mention this is the primary focus: We're sort of the opposite of clickbait. We're trying to give you the length of a headline, so a very brief summary of the story or the development that's going on.

We look to pack as much insight as possible into the fewest words, even down to the fewest characters, so that you get the meat, the juice, the point of what is being talked about, without suggesting a perspective or suggesting how you should feel about this or that. In our daily SMS you get, I would say, from 5 to 7 usually bullet points that are chosen for their significance, for how much they've changed the world in the last 24 hours.

The summaries are extremely laconic. They're extremely concise, and they're that way both to avoid bias, because at some point if you get too long you're going to have to introduce perspectivism into it, and because we practice the art of getting to the point without telling you a whole essay. Part of it is to reduce any suggestion of a perspective.

Josh Broward: All right, let me offer a potential philosophical pushback. There is a French philosopher, mostly in the second half of the 20th century, Paul Ricoeur, and he said no one has a perspective from nowhere. It's kind of a double negative, but the point is everybody has a perspective. There is no position from which you can be unbiased. Now, he's coming from a philosophical perspective, so he might not be using bias in the same way that you are. But how do you reflect on that?

Kira Shishkin: I think it's a really valuable point to bring up. It's the most common criticism we hear from non-users, and it's one of the most common delights that we hear from users: Oh wow, it is possible to do this. I would say maybe 3 things. One is that stripping content and writing of bias is not impossible. It's just not been done before. When you look across the media landscape, no one's attempting to provide neutral or objective news. There's always some sort of spin that is guided either by advertiser incentives, sponsor incentives, investor incentives, or the editorial pen of the publication.

There haven't really been any credible large-scale attempts in the news media of folks actually trying to be objective and meaning it too. Meaning it, I think, is the more important part, because everyone says that. With the intention, you are able to certainly get a lot further than if you're a Fox News type of publication or a CNN publication, where they have a perspective and they're calling to their tribe from the vantage point of their perspective. So one is the intention.

The second piece is the concision, the brevity that I spoke of earlier. The only way I would correct the philosopher's point is that there's a certain threshold of writing or speaking at which point you have to have perspective, because you run out of the essential things to say. We intentionally limit ourselves to just the essential facts, basically bullet points, where we stop short of saying any more that would lead us to providing a perspective or an opinion. So there's the concision piece. Those are the 2 main points. Maybe there was only 2, maybe there was no 3. They were good enough. Who needs a third one?

Josh Broward: So I'll have 1 more philosophical take, and then we can jump into business stuff. Even though in some ways your business has philosophical underpinnings. I'll start with a story. When I'm driving, especially on road trips, I go kind of old school. I don't use a playlist or Spotify or anything. I just flip through the radio. Way old school, right? Sometimes I'll even do AM radio just for kicks, because I'm curious.

I remember I was driving through a Southern US state during COVID, not long after President Trump had recovered from COVID. I'm flipping through these different channels, and I would go from a conservative Fox-oriented talk show to an NPR more liberal-oriented talk show. They're describing when Trump got off of the helicopter and returned to the White House after leaving the hospital. And I just realized it's as if these people are living in different worlds. The same basic facts happened, but the way that they interpret them, they don't even sound like the same facts anymore. And I realized, oh, America has an epistemology crisis.

Epistemology being the study of knowledge. So how do we know what we know? The truth is, we don't know. And now it's even worse with AI and all that kind of stuff. We don't know how to trust information anymore. We don't know if we can really be sure of what we see or think we see or hear or read. I'll just stop there and let you riff on that for a bit.

Kira Shishkin: That resonates so deeply, because that's the spirit and the zeitgeist that we were responding to. There was a fact crisis that turned into a trust crisis, and now I would definitely say it's an epistemological crisis, where it's not just a matter of having lost the facts. Well, definitely we did that 10 years ago. But we lost any sort of reference point to what the facts even could be.

When folks ask me about the breadth of people that we serve, I like to say that informed.now serves, importantly, the entire ideological spectrum of America. And I like to point out that people can't even agree on what they disagree on these days. There's a real schism in the fact basis. To a great degree this is across all kinds of media, but it's most consequential in information and news media, which is why we're building in that space. We think it's the most consequential environment where we need to align on the facts, so that we can constructively engage, constructively connect, and constructively disagree as well.

I do find it very funny, but not funny. The story of hearing the same story reported in different ways is such a daily American experience. It's such a classic, modern American story. And it's not just the two of us who are feeling it. When you go into the real world, into the streets, into the bars, into just where people spend their time, everyone is feeling this. As a result, people have also not been able to interact with each other much across the ideological lines. You can't bring up politics anymore in a casual conversation. You can't really talk about policy in a bar, because there's so much polarized sensitivity around these things, because we all live in these different echo chambers.

I think it's extremely consequential. We're going through an inflection point in American history. And this is ultimately, like you kind of landed for me, why we're building informed.now: to bring people back to the same fact base and to the same dinner table, so that we are able to constructively engage with each other.

Josh Broward: Cool, well, I support that mission. I think we have to have a common understanding of reality, even if we think it means different things or has different implications. If we don't even agree on the facts, there's very little common ground for us to begin to dialogue. What is a win that you are especially proud of for informed.now over the past year or so?

Kira Shishkin: It's funny you mention this, because it actually just happened this morning. We were featured on the cover of USA Today, and for us that's a real mainstream publication. It has 150 million unique monthly readers, which is practically half of the United States, considering that USA Today doesn't operate outside of the USA. For us, it's not just about another PR feature. It's about our story being understood. I feel like that has been the biggest challenge of the past year: trying to get people to understand our story, to understand what we are trying to do, because it isn't another agency. It isn't another marketplace platform. It isn't another SaaS product. It's not something that has a precedent in many ways.

No one has ever combined the research methodology of open source intelligence, called OSINT, which is the methodology used by the CIA, with AI that is purpose-built for just this one specific use case, not jack of all trades, with a channel that is so familiar and so unfamiliar, which is the SMS channel, and done this at a time when there is this crisis going on. We're in this very interesting moment of combining and stitching together a few things that aren't new, but their combination is completely unprecedented. So it's been a hard story to tell. Convincing people that, hey, it's safe to text a number, and hey, this number is trying to do good by you, trying to do right by you. Combining this research methodology with an AI framework and an unapologetic focus on the human. It's been a hard story to tell, frankly, Josh. I think that's been the biggest challenge.

Over the last few months, and definitely crowned by the feature today, we're suddenly getting that story understood by mainstream media and the mainstream person who is reading mainstream media. I think the hard part to wrap your head around is that mainstream media was almost forced to tell the story of its disruption, because it's happening enough that it is a story that needs to be told. They're asking, are the people who are saying we're doing a bad job the future? We can't avoid it anymore. I'm not saying USA Today is doing a bad job. I enjoy reading their paper when I'm in a hotel that still carries newspapers.

The story that we used to tell was rather hostile, with the news media as the bad guys and the legacy media as wrong, and make way for the new generation of news. I think that was very much a first draft of the story, and I'm very glad we updated it, because it wasn't faithful to the reality that we observe. I don't know if this framework of bad guys and good guys is balanced or correct or proper. The story that we are observing a lot more is from a systems perspective. The way the news media industry has evolved through the invisible hand of incentives has created an environment where no one in particular is desiring this. No one particularly wants clickbait news. Nobody wants to be solicited every step of the way.

But the way the system has been guided by the invisible hand through advertiser incentives and sponsor incentives, and the way the cards fell to create the house of cards, is not prioritizing the reader as it stands today. I think of it much more as a systemic issue, a much more anonymous and bigger structure that is at fault. And frankly, you might be a news company and say, hey, why would we talk about an alternative to news? But news companies are also made up of people. When we talk to other journalists, other reporters, and other folks in media, they've been waiting for a solution like this, it's the second coming, because they also happen to be humans and they also happen to be reading news when they're off shift, when they're not doing their work.

Everyone is feeling this misinformation overload that's been plaguing the country, and it's still around. We're just getting started in terms of trying to create an alternative to it. So I do think the corporations might not immediately jump on this, but the humans behind the corporations have been very eager to partner, to help, and to spread the gospel of facts.

Josh Broward: Yeah, that's a good signal for you. Cool. So obviously lots of things have been going right for informed.now, but I'm sure some things have gone wrong. If it's the startup on the rowboat in the middle of the ocean, you get some waves that threaten to capsize your boat on a pretty regular basis. One thing we say is wisdom is failure redeemed. So I wonder what kind of mistakes or failures you have experienced that have enabled you to learn or earn some wisdom that you could share with us.

Kira Shishkin: I would say there are 2 things that come to mind. One is very common and I think would resonate with a lot of other founders, and one is very specific to us. The common one is the hiring side. I think hiring decisions are so important these days, in the early days of a startup and at any point really, but they have an especially compounding effect when you are in the early stages of building. I can't say we've made mistakes. I think we've been very lucky with our hiring, and we've been very aggressive and very fast. If anything, I wish we fired faster. I wish we made decisions faster.

There's an example that comes to mind just from last month. We kept a person on for way too long, and it had emotional and cognitive bandwidth costs for us that we can never get back. It always feels wrong. It's like, do I really want to fire this person? Do I want to let them go? Because you start thinking of the optimistic story, at least I do. You start thinking of their comeback story. You start thinking of how great it's going to be once they recover from an underperformance moment or a moment of not doing their best. I just think that has a place when you're an enterprise. It does not have a place when you are in the early stages of building.

When you're in a growth stage, in a hyper growth stage, every second matters. The cultural decisions of hiring really, really matter. I think firing faster is a type of wisdom that we are still growing into. I don't know if there is time for performance improvement plans at the earliest stages of growth. You either find your person and right away it's going to be very clear, or if not, right away, part ways in the most respectful and most empowering way you can, and just move on, because that hiring pace and getting the right people means everything. That's one wisdom that we're earning and still continuing to earn.

Josh Broward: Yeah. Before you get to your second one, one of the things I say a lot as a coach is that this is normal. I know you know this, but this is normal, to the point that my co-founder, who runs a PE firm and has scaled companies, sold them to Apple and Facebook, and had hundreds of employees, and I were just talking last week and he relearned the same exact lesson. I think there are 2 things I have to keep reminding myself of. One is that if they're not in the right job, it's not good for them. The kindest thing I can do for them is to help them get to the right job. And sometimes all I can do is say, this ain't it, you've got to find something else. The second thing is that if they're not in the right job, that's not fair to the rest of the team. I can't risk their jobs by keeping somebody in the wrong job.

Kira Shishkin: I love that mutual responsibility framework. It's not a simple binary decision of I like them, I don't like them in terms of their performance. It's their relationship to the team, and their relationship with their own career. It matters. I love that there are so many layers of responsibility to hiring. You want to be as honest as possible with yourself and with them, and as quickly as possible. Sometimes it's really hard, because I think it comes down to conviction, and conviction is really hard. Feeling convicted in a startup environment is everything. This is sort of a micro conviction of, I know this is the right person, maybe we haven't invested in them correctly, or, hey, this is not going to work no matter what. Let's resolve it in hard ways before it becomes more costly for everyone: the team, them, and the company.

Josh Broward: Yeah. And then you had a second one you were going to share.

Kira Shishkin: This one was very specific to us. Our anti-advertisement stance has made it very difficult for us to advertise ourselves. It would be weird if a company that says we hate advertisement in news, you discovered through an advertisement. That's been really hard for us, because we realized, okay, we want to have this stance, it's an ethical stance, it's a philosophical stance, it's the ethos of why we exist, but wait a second, how are people going to find out about us exactly? It's led to some evolution in our thinking around what advertisement means to us. We still don't do paid advertisements to this day, but we have leaned into more organic ways of telling the story, a lot of it through creators, through people who are genuine users of our platform, which is really important to us, who feel like they want to champion and be a public referral for the work that we do. We try to enable that and empower that as much as possible.

It is a kind of advertisement, but it feels a bit more right than the classic seeing an ad on a Google page, Google ads, Meta ads. We were still not there to do something like that. It's just too contrary to what we stand for.

Josh Broward: Great. I love the shift to figuring out how to do organic stuff and how to foster that organic ecosystem.

Kira Shishkin: It's been a tricky part. I can't say we have figured that out yet. We have not.

Josh Broward: Yeah. That's normal. Okay, next question. What are some of the best professional investments that you've made in the past year or so?

Kira Shishkin: When you say professional investments, do you mean investing in other companies, or investing in a relationship and a partnership?

Josh Broward: More investments in yourself, or investing in the growth of the people in your company.

Kira Shishkin: I think the personal brand is the most overdue investment for every single person. I woke up at the beginning of 2025 and I had nothing. I had no personal brand. I had no footprint online. I was just another one of what I call the lurker profile, the profile on LinkedIn that maybe doesn't have a profile picture, and they're just there to consume but not to engage. There's nothing wrong with consuming if that's what you want to do. But if you're serious about building and you're serious about going on a mission to effect change in society, in the market, you don't have an option to be a lurker anymore. You have to make substantial investments, and once you start making them you realize how overdue they are. You have to make those investments in your personal brand.

If I were to meet a young entrepreneur, knowing nothing about them, I'd say, hey, I don't know what you're building, but start building the personal brand immediately, like yesterday. It's a kind of investment that for me has meant a lot of bandwidth, a lot of brain width, as I like to call it, because it's a mix of brain power and bandwidth. It's a lot of energy. It's cognitive, it's emotional, it's social to build it up. It's also financial in many ways. Sometimes you get tools that have costs. And it's also time and patience, all those things combined. It's a very substantial investment. But the return on this investment is practically guaranteed, and it is very, very worthwhile.

The biggest investment I've made over the last year is building a personal brand. It's also something that I've encouraged on my team, substantially. I say, hey, if there is downtime in our work, which there never is, so that's a fiction, build a personal brand. Build that LinkedIn, build your presence, build your personal website. Put the footprint down on the internet and you won't regret it.

Josh Broward: Cool. Thank you. What's one of the biggest challenges you're trying to solve right now?

Kira Shishkin: Where do I start? We are still solving the challenge of telling our story. We are not done. We've had milestones there, but we are not done telling the story. We are also looking to expand from urban America more into rural America, and it requires a different mindset, a different go-to-market, a different approach altogether, I believe. It's a whole black box of decisions that we are just starting to crack open, and we're definitely not even close to figuring it out.

Our mission from the very beginning has been to be the news concierge for the everyday American, and the everyday American isn't just in urban California or the urban East Coast, which is where the vast majority of our users are these days. How do we properly, respectfully, honorably, and strategically present ourselves to a person who has a much narrower solution set when it comes to technology, and perhaps a lower willingness to adopt, a lower willingness to try things, because they are not in the Silicon Valley echo chamber or the New York echo chamber? That's a really big black box that we're just starting to figure out how to approach.

Josh Broward: Interesting. 2 more questions. One is, other than building your personal brand, what kind of advice would you give to seed stage founders?

Kira Shishkin: Help other people build their personal brand. It will come back to help you. That's a bit of a cheeky answer. But I do think you shouldn't obsess over venture capital. We live in Silicon Valley, in California, in tech. We live in this echo chamber that was designed by people who benefit from it, by the venture capital industry, which is an old and very mature industry by now. There is a narrative that you must raise venture capital in order to be legitimate, in order to be validated, in order to be accepted, in order to be respected. It's true for some. But venture capital is just a tool when you need it, when you need substantial upfront investment into growth. It is not the default option. It's usually presented as the default option in the circles that we run in, and it doesn't have to be.

I wouldn't let it be the default option. I would say to a lot of seed stage founders: Stop obsessing over raising money. Stop obsessing over getting that third party validation from some VC. Just put the phone down, and find ways to be as scrappy as possible, as bootstrapped as possible. For most ideas, you don't actually need venture funding. I think that's part of the biggest myths that have been constructed, that in order to be in the startup world, you need to have venture capital. You absolutely don't. There's a small minority of companies that absolutely require it. For most people, you're just not being disciplined enough, rigorous enough, lean enough. Re-read the startup Bible. Letting go of that obsession with fundraising and finding scrappier ways to operate, that's the playbook.

Josh Broward: Yeah, it sounds like it. I just talked with another founder about boot scaling and seed strapping. They're 2 different approaches. You bootstrap until you get product market fit, and then you raise so you can scale faster. The other way is you raise a pre-seed or maybe a seed, and then you never raise again.

Kira Shishkin: I think the less you raise the better. I've always been very fascinated, back in my venture days but also now, by companies that keep raising huge rounds after they're profitable. You can obviously raise forever if you need it. But there's a profile of a company that actually has profitability and just keeps raising anyway. Sometimes I look at those markets and think, you're not Uber, you don't need to be doing this. You don't need to land grab so aggressively. I think it's part of that myth that's sold to us, that you need to raise all the time. You don't need to raise all the time. You don't need to be on the, what do they call it, the venture treadmill.

In fact, if you can afford not to step foot on it, better. If you can step foot on it just once, as you mentioned, at the seed stage, great. Get off the treadmill as soon as possible and focus on actually building. This shouldn't come as a surprise: Fundraising and engaging with investors is a direct opportunity cost against actually building the company. I'm a big advocate for building the company and allocating your time and energy to that instead of chasing investors.

Josh Broward: Yeah, great. Thank you. So if somebody out there is listening and they're like, I like informed.now, this sounds cool, I think there are 2 questions. How can they sign up to start getting your service? And then the other question is, how can they help? If people want to help deal with this crisis of epistemology, this crisis of knowledge and fact in the world, how can they support your mission?

Kira Shishkin: The 2 answers are definitely combined, because we're looking for our people. We're looking for fellow news minimalists who want to have peace of mind and be informed at the same time. What a crazy ask. We are easy to find. Our brand name is informed.now and that is also our website, so you can head right over to it to learn more about what we do and the minimalism that we pioneer, and obviously sign up and be part of the mission.

This is part answer to your question, part advice: If someone wants to help, just sign up and give feedback. That's the gateway to helping. As you sign up and this is resonating with you, you can literally text us. They can't do that with a lot of companies, but for us, you can literally text us and say, hey, here's some feedback, here's some thoughts I have. That opens the door for so many other ways that we could engage, we could partner, we could help each other. I want to leave that door open to anyone who's resonating with some of the things I've shared tonight.

Josh Broward: Thanks, Kira. So glad to have you on the podcast. I love that we talked philosophy and business and wove it all together into one story. I really appreciate you taking the time, and I wish you well.

Kira Shishkin: Thank you, Josh. This has been delightful. Thank you very much for having me.