Resilience Media Secures Investment, Scales its Editorial Team
Issue 35: After closing an investment round into Resilience Media, we are excited to announce our new writing team, new branding, and our Editorial and Advisory Boards
Good morning from the team at Resilience Media
Our newsletter is coming out earlier than usual this week because we have an announcement.
We have closed an investment round into Resilience Media, the company that runs both this publication and our events. The investors are all from NATO and Allied countries. With this investment in place, we have been building out the editorial team to scale our dedicated coverage of the defence, security, and resilience tech sectors. We’ve also formed an Editorial Board and Advisory Board to support and guide our work as we grow.
We have done a lot of work to maintain our position as an independent voice in this complex landscape. Our investors have all signed up to clear terms designed to protect our independence as a media company, all of which are enshrined in our Articles of Association. Just as nobody pays to be on our stage or to be covered in our publication, our investors cannot influence our editorial decisions. We have also established a separate Editorial Board to oversee editorial decisions and help maintain this independence.
Leslie will lead Resilience Media as founding Publisher and Tobias will serve as the founding Editor-in-Chief. Read on to meet the rest of the team, learn about our brand refresh, and our commitment to security-first journalism.
Thank you to our readers for your support as we’ve built Resilience Media. We couldn’t do it without you and look forward to what comes next. We’ll be back in your inboxes in our usual format next week.
-Leslie and Tobias, co-founders, Resilience Media
Introducing the editorial team
Our new writing team brings together an exceptional group of experienced journalists across a number of geographies. They have written previously for Fortune, The New York Times, TechCrunch, Wired, Reuters, Gizmodo, Venture Beat, and The Irish Times, among other notable publications.
Key editorial hires include:
Ingrid Lunden, former International Managing Editor at TechCrunch, joins as our Managing Editor.
John Biggs, former New York Times reporter and TechCrunch editor, Natasha Lomas, former correspondent at TechCrunch, and Jonathan Shieber, former senior editor at TechCrunch, join as Editors-at-Large
Fiona Alston, covering Estonia; Julia Gifford, covering the Baltics; Anna Heim covering Central and Western Europe; Oleksandr Ihnatenko covering Ukraine; Carly Page, covering cybersecurity; and Paul Sawers, covering news and open source.
Matt Burns, former Managing Editor at TechCrunch, will run the Launch at Resilience Conference startup showcase
We are open to news announcements, pitches, and tips; write to us.
Our Editorial Board
The Resilience Media Editorial Board is in place to ensure we maintain our editorial independence in relation to our investors, sponsors, and any other partners or government organisations. This independence means we can create value by being an objective and neutral platform both in our writing and our events. Jessica Cecil, Caroline Daniel, and Andrew Pike CBE bring a wealth of editorial and media experience from careers including the BBC, the Financial Times, and GCHQ. You can read more about them here.
Our Advisory Board
We have also formed an Advisory Board that will help ensure we cover the most important topics, find the best speakers, and scale up our content and networks over time. The Advisory Board will also support us ensuring Resilience Media remains a platform that is useful to the wider ecosystem, supporting the strong sense of mission we all share. Our Advisory Board currently consists of the following people, with a few more additions to come:
Graham Chynoweth, Investor, Operator, and US Naval Officer
Chris Magazzeni, Investment Director, Lakestar and Co-founder, UK Defence Investor Network
Clayton Williams, Managing Director, IQT International
Dr Ilana Wisby, Deep Tech Entrepreneur and Quantum Physicist
A Security-First Media Company
The defence tech ecosystem exists in a context where our friends and allies are at war, and our own countries are experiencing almost constant cyber attacks, espionage, arson, and disinformation. Within this context, we believe that media needs to be responsible, careful, and must put security first. It is important that we are critical and we can talk openly about our own challenges and failures as well as celebrating our successes and strengths. However, we do not think it is appropriate or helpful for our media to attack our own institutions, individuals, or companies. Our adversaries want to divide us to weaken our alliances and partnerships. We should not help them do this.
We will seek to write in a balanced way that is independent, critical, but also constructive and responsible. Furthermore, as a security-first media company we will prioritise safety and security over everything else. That means we sometimes write about events without saying where they were, may write about people without naming them, and sometimes avoid going into detail about technologies where we believe our adversaries may benefit from that detail being written about openly.
This is a learning process, and we will adapt these approaches as we develop and as the geopolitics change around us. When we do not write about people or details this is driven by a concern about safety and security, and our Editorial Board are there to scrutinise how we approach this, and to guide us.
About the Griffin
Our new corporate identity incorporates the griffin, or gryphon, the ancient legendary creature associated with protection, military victory, strength, and leadership. We chose the griffin because Resilience Media is about all these things. We are focussed on how technology can help protect our way of life. That protection comes first in the form of deterrence, and should that deterrent fail, then in military victory. We want to avoid conflicts by making sure our adversaries know that our strength means they will pay too high a price if they attack us. This means that we need demonstrably to be able to defeat them in battle.
We believe that innovative technology plays a fundamental role in both our deterrent and our ability to win a war, as has been shown clearly in the leadership, ingenuity, bravery, and inventiveness of our friends in Ukraine.
More about Resilience Media Ltd
Resilience Media Ltd is the parent company that runs the media publication and the conference. We founded this business because we want to help develop the defence tech ecosystem, shape the narrative around this topic, and to support people in government and tech to work together to defend our democracies.
This is a mission-driven company. Our success metric is better engagement between the public and tech sectors in the defence, security, and safety of our countries.
We do not want to rely on restrictive funding, such as government grants or tenders, that would influence how we run our business, what we write, or who is on our stage. We also do not want to be trapped in grant funding cycles. So, we have built Resilience Media as a mission-driven, for-profit business that can support of our activities using commercial revenues from our events. We believe this is the best way to support our independence and make the business sustainable.
Congratulations on closing your investment round into Resilience Media!