Alexandru Stan is a Romanian tech entrepreneur, the founder of Tekpon — a US-based B2B SaaS marketplace — and the investor and CEO of The Next Web (TNW), the 20-year-old European technology media brand he acquired from the Financial Times rather than watch it be switched off. Building businesses since 2007, he went through years of failures before finding his footing around 2014; today TNW reaches on the order of a million readers a day. He recorded his Boringly Effective conversation at the Romanian Creativity Pavilion during Cannes Lions 2026.
Key ideas
- Clients buy positioning, not traffic. On why TNW was worth saving: "They don't buy traffic. Or access to traffic — they buy positioning." Media brands are trust infrastructures, not audience counters.
- Business exists to deliver value first. "I didn't understand that a business isn't built so you make money; it has to bring value to the market, to people or companies, and that's how you make money, as a result of the extra value you bring."
- Institutions shouldn't die for convenience. Acquiring a 20-year institution from the FT was a statement: some brands compound trust over decades and are worth more alive than their traffic numbers suggest.
- Failure is the tuition. A decade of failed ventures taught him the discipline that made Tekpon and the TNW acquisition possible — the lesson is sequencing, not genius.
Appears on Boringly Effective
- Alexandru Stan on Buying The Next Web: Why Clients Buy Positioning, Not Traffic — Episode 6 — media, trust and positioning, recorded at Cannes Lions 2026.