If you follow the high-stakes world of venture capital, you've likely seen the name Kate Clark pop up in your feed. For years, she was the reporter everyone in Sand Hill Road either feared or desperately wanted to leak to. While she recently made a major jump to Bloomberg and The Wall Street Journal, her tenure at The Information basically rewrote the playbook for how tech journalism works.
Most people think tech reporting is just rewriting press releases. It isn't. Not even close.
At The Information, Clark wasn't just "covering" startups; she was hunting them. She was the one digging into the messy, often secretive terms of deals that founders and VCs usually keep behind a heavy curtain of NDAs. Honestly, the way she built her reputation was by ignoring the "official" channels. You don't get the scoop on Anthropic raising billions or the internal drama at OpenAI by waiting for a PR person to email you. You get it by being the person that everyone—from disgruntled employees to competitive investors—decides to talk to.
Why Kate Clark and The Information Changed the Game
There’s a specific vibe to the way The Information operates, and Clark was the poster child for it. They don't care about page views. They care about subscribers. This shifted the incentive for Clark. Instead of writing five "snackable" posts about a new iPhone feature, she could spend weeks chasing down the cap table of a "soonicorn" or investigating why a top-tier VC firm was suddenly seeing a mass exodus of partners.
Basically, she made the "Dealmaker" newsletter a must-read. If you were a founder and you weren't reading her, you were flying blind.
The Scoops That Actually Mattered
During her time there, Clark wasn't just reporting on who got money. She was reporting on the power dynamics. You've probably heard about the chaos when Sam Altman was briefly ousted from OpenAI. While the rest of the world was catching up, Clark and her team were already deep into the "why" and the "how."
- xAI and Anthropic: She broke some of the biggest AI funding stories of 2024 and 2025.
- The Middle East Connection: She was one of the first to really highlight how U.S. firms were aggressively chasing sovereign wealth money in the Middle East as domestic liquidity dried up.
- Polymarket: Before it was a household name during the election cycles, she was tracking its movements.
It’s easy to forget how much "hustle" this requires. In a 2020 interview, she mentioned being an "inbox zero" person. That sounds like a productivity hack, but in tech journalism, it's a survival mechanism. If you miss one email from a source at 11:00 PM on a Tuesday, you lose the story to a rival like Axios or Fortune.
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The Pivot: From The Information to Bloomberg and Beyond
As we sit here in 2026, Clark’s career has entered a new phase. She left the subscription-only walls of The Information for the massive reach of Bloomberg’s Global Technology group and later The Wall Street Journal.
Some people wondered if she’d lose her edge. They thought maybe the corporate structure of a giant like Bloomberg would slow her down.
Nope.
In late 2025 and early 2026, she’s been breaking stories at a relentless pace. We're talking about Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deals and Anthropic’s $350 billion valuation rumors. What’s interesting is that she brought the "Information-style" tenacity to the legacy media world. She didn't change; the legacy papers just realized they needed her specific brand of "inside baseball" reporting to stay relevant in a world where AI startups are the new oil companies.
What Most People Get Wrong About Her Reporting
A lot of folks think that being a "scoop" reporter means you have a bunch of "moles" inside companies. Sorta, but not really.
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The reality is much more boring and much more difficult. It's about triangulation.
Clark doesn't just get a tip and hit publish. She talks to the lawyers. She talks to the limited partners (LPs) who fund the VCs. She talks to the former executives who still have stock options and a grudge. When you read a Kate Clark article, you aren't just getting a headline; you're getting the result of a dozen "off the record" coffees.
The Nuance of "Dealmaker"
Her column, "Dealmaker," wasn't just a list of transactions. It was an analysis of leverage. Who has it? Who lost it? When the "ZIRP" (Zero Interest Rate Policy) era ended and the "VC winter" began, Clark was one of the few voices accurately describing how brutal the "down rounds" were actually becoming for founders. While others were sugarcoating it, she was calling it what it was: a bloodbath.
Actionable Insights for the Tech-Obsessed
If you want to understand the tech world the way Kate Clark does, you have to change how you consume news.
- Stop reading the headlines. The real story is always in the third or fourth paragraph where the "terms" of the deal are mentioned. Look for words like "liquidation preference" or "ratchets."
- Follow the people, not the outlets. Reporters like Clark carry their sources with them. Whether she's at The Information or WSJ, the quality of the intel remains the same because the network belongs to her, not the masthead.
- Watch the "Quiet" moves. Clark excels at spotting when a partner at a firm like Sequoia or Andreessen Horowitz changes their LinkedIn or stops appearing on boards. These are the early warning signs of a shift in the industry.
Journalism in the AI age is getting weird. A lot of it is being automated. But you can't automate the trust required to get a CEO to tell you their company is running out of cash. That's why names like Kate Clark still matter. She’s proof that in an era of "content," actual reporting is still the most valuable currency in Silicon Valley.