Edward R. Murrow's storied radio broadcasts from the London blitz might seem as distant from today's animated GIF onslaught as caviar from Cheetos. But Chris Dixon, who led Andreessen Horowitz's $50 million investment in BuzzFeed, believes the past is littered with examples of novelty in media being mistaken for lack of quality.

Murrow himself, Dixon points out, was among the first to write and broadcast radio-native copy for news at a time when the new medium was basically seen as an extension of print. Sound familiar?

"You've always had this where the new thing is mocked and seen as silly and lightweight," says Dixon, whose own track record as an investor in companies such as Uber, Oculus, and Pinterest suggests an ability to spot value in other novel ideas.

Chris Dixon at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in 2010. Noah Berger/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Not that Dixon and his firm were investing $50 million in GIFs alone (at a reported $850 million valuation, no less). Rather, he explains the investment as a belief in the sensibility its embrace of new genres and mediums reflects: a willingness to acknowledge that the business of media has changed for good, and the wherewithal to build an entirely new kind of company to make the most of that change. Dixon calls BuzzFeed a prime example of a "full-stack startup," a category that aligns it in his eyes not with other media companies but the most valuable company in the world.

Dixon and company are betting that BuzzFeed, by re-imagining the business of media and its underlying technology, can succeed as a native inhabitant of the social and mobile platforms where so much content is shared and consumed. The question is whether the powerful efficiencies companies like Apple and Uber gain by controlling every aspect of their products and services—the full stack—meaningfully translate into media, an industry where new tech has mostly meant the end of old ways of making a profit.

Apple Versus Microsoft

Not so long ago in the tech industry, Dixon says, the runaway success of Microsoft cemented in the minds of entrepreneurs a particular strategy for achieving success. Bill Gates became the richest person in the world by sticking to software and letting the IBMs and HPs of the world make the computers it ran on. Microsoft didn't build the full stack; it just focused on one layer.

Apple took the opposite approach. Instead of a single layer, Steve Jobs insisted Apple control everything from the operating system to the screen to the store where you buy the device.

"At business school they'll tell you, don't do that, just focus on your core competency," Dixon says. Or at least they used to.

Dixon calls Apple the "giant example" of the full-stack startup. If not really a startup anymore, he says its success represents the triumph of the idea that building the full stack can yield a superior product and a superior experience for customers.

>Instead of a single layer, Steve Jobs insisted Apple control everything from the operating system to the screen to the store where you buy the device.

Other full-stack startups in Dixon's pantheon include Uber and Tesla—companies that instead of trying to sell taxi dispatch software or a new battery technology to existing industry players take those core technologies and build complete products and services around them.

BuzzFeed fits the full-stack model, Dixon says, because it took its original technology—software for tracking viral content online—and decided to build a whole media business around it.

"The results speak for themselves," Dixon wrote in a blog post announcing the deal. "BuzzFeed now reaches over 150 million people per month, is consistently profitable, and will generate triple digit millions in revenues this year."

But to succeed in a lasting way, BuzzFeed will have to turn that expertise in attracting attention into ad products that ad buyers believe are worth more than those other media outfits offer. And to grow, it's hard to see how BuzzFeed can avoid investing heavily in the same expensive resource other content-producing companies have failed to find a way to do without: people to produce that content.

Software's End-Run

And that appears to be exactly what BuzzFeed plans to do with all that new money. The company will divide and expand its editorial operation into three divisions; start producing content "off BuzzFeed" directly for the social web; and even start making movies. But perhaps more importantly to the "full stack" concept, BuzzFeed has already made a special point in investing in some of the most expensive talent of all: engineers. (Its tech team numbers more than 100, according to Dixon.) In Dixon's worldview, that investment—and a company culture where engineering is on equal footing—is money well spent.

The power of building the full stack, as Dixon describes it, lies in a kind of double competitive advantage. In many cases, he says, attempting to build a new business around a single layer is a struggle because many industries are slow or downright reluctant to incorporate new technologies into the ways they do business. Full-stack startups circumvent the laggards altogether and, in turn, build their own businesses around the very efficiencies existing players refused to embrace.

"Software was eating the world but ran into a wall. A lot of industries didn't want to buy software," Dixon says. "Now software has found its way around that wall."

>Hand-wringers who view the rise of BuzzFeed as a harbinger of the end of quality journalism should probably be more worried if it fails.

At BuzzFeed, that software includes its own content management system that allows producers to see exactly how their posts will look on different mobile platforms. It includes its own system for tracking how content is being shared. It has its own ad tech and its own recommendation engine. It has its own stack, and technology is at the center of all of it.

But is a "full stack" enough to engineer sustainable success in the content business, success that since the rise of the web has proven elusive? Ironically, hand-wringers who view the rise of BuzzFeed as a harbinger of the end of quality journalism should probably be more worried if it fails. If a social, mobile, GIF-and-listicle–loving site with 100 engineers building its own sleek tech from scratch—not to mention $50 million from Silicon Valley's premier venture tech firm—can't succeed, who can?

On the other hand, if Dixon is right, BuzzFeed won't end up just a different site but a different kind of media business altogether, one capable of vacuuming up every kind of content, from baby animal antics to dead-serious investigative exposés, and redirecting it at the most receptive eyeballs. In that case, the full stack comes closer to becoming the only stack.

"It's very hard," Dixon says of building a full-stack business. "But if you get very, very good at it, it's hard to compete with."