Gabriel Stan — founder of Tekpon and the CEO of The Next Web (TNW) — joins Andrei Tarnovski on Boringly Effective to explain why trust, not traffic, is the real product of a media brand.

Gabriel is the Romanian entrepreneur who acquired The Next Web from the Financial Times rather than let a 20-year internet institution be shut down. In this conversation, recorded in Romanian at the Romanian Creativity Pavilion during Cannes Lions 2026, he and Andrei discuss the fundamentals behind durable businesses: create value before you chase money, watch cash flow more than your bank balance, and focus on the client instead of the trophy.

They also cover what it actually costs to run a media brand people trust more than the truth, why advertisers buy positioning rather than reach, how a single 2014 article followed two people for over a decade, and why — in a market flooded with AI-generated news — the people behind a brand may be becoming its most defensible asset.

Boringly Effective is hosted by marketing strategist Andrei Tarnovski. No magic. No hacks. Just the fundamentals, argued properly.

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Produced by SYMBOLON, with support from the RoCreativity program by FEPIC and ARICE.

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