Maybe the right path is to reduce costs and fire a good percentage of your employees and create a sustainable business model where Medium can be profitable without paywalls AND liked by its users instead of taking on more and more VC debt and try become the next Unicorn? But that may be impossible depending on the board. I think it's too late to reverse course with the current product. Without knowing anything about internal politics, I think it's nearly impossible to change the public perception that Medium if full of low quality spam behind an ugly paywall, and nobody wants to sign up or pay for that. My brain already skips all Medium content by default.

Like another comment mentioned, if you want to play the VC game, maybe it's a better idea to completely flip what you're dong and make a huge risky bet on something new in e.g. the decentralized space.