a16z's New Media Playbook

Erik Torenberg, Ben Horowitz, and Marc Andreessen discuss how the media landscape has fundamentally changed and what a16z is doing about it. They cover why offense beats defense, why individuals now matter more than corporate brands, why speed wins in the new media landscape, and the difference between oral and written culture on the internet.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Erik Torenberg?

  This episode is from a recent A16Z all hands meeting where Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen and I discuss the firm's new media strategy. We cover why the old media playbook no longer works, why being interesting matters more than being inoffensive, and how speed and authenticity have replaced polish and caution.

• 0:19Erik Torenberg?

  Really stoked to be making this happen. Today's gonna be a fun one. We're gonna dive into all things new media. First, start with a high level conversation about what is new media, how the media industry has changed, and then get into what the new media team is doing here at A16Z, what we've done so far, what we're focused on, and where we're going in 2026. But first, we thought we'd start with a little sizzle reel that gives a little bit of insight into some of the activity that we've done here, so.

• 0:55Speaker 01

  They pitched to us this idea of working with a virtual production using Marvel's thing. And we look at the calendar. This is such a crazy idea.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Hi, I'm Jessica.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Jay. I'm Kevin Moody, founder of

• 1:09Speaker 02

  Boda Labs.

• 1:10Speaker 03

  E.

• 1:10Speaker 02

  Dola has raised a 17 million Series A led by A16Z.

• 1:14Erik Torenberg?

  Marc, Chris, Sam, Zujen, welcome, welcome, welcome to the A16Z podcast. We've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource.

• 1:22Ben Horowitz?

  There's unlimited channels. And then the brands are mostly people. If you grew up in marketing, your whole concept of the laws of physics is different. You have to approach new media with new media thinking, new media people, that kind of thing.

• 1:41Ben Horowitz?

  The world of media is completely different when we start. These things that market themselves.

• 1:46Marc Andreessen?

  There's actually tremendous hunger in the country and in the world for actual law form, intelligent commentary.

• 1:52Ben Horowitz?

  If you want to do something larger than yourselves and make the world a better place, we are 100% for it.

• 2:02Erik Torenberg?

  One quick story I want to tell is to the video that we put out for the fundraiser announcement, which is our third most popular post ever. On the last night before putting it out, we had trouble getting one of the rights cleared for one of the songs that actually was like the backbone for the video. So the team using 11 Labs recreated a different song that I think was actually better, but it was a sort of an amazing last night sprint to make it all work. And I want to start there with the fundraiser announcement because, Ben, you had this quote, which I think summarizes one of the main principles of new media. I just want to read a small part of it and then have you elaborate. "Old media is defense oriented.

• 2:44Erik Torenberg?

  In new media, offense is always better than defense. We've spent many years fretting about our results being leaked. Old media tries to please every audience. Old media is terrified of upsetting people, and new media only cares about being interesting. When in doubt, flood the zone."

• 3:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that sounds like something I said.

• 3:04Erik Torenberg?

  Why don't you share some of the tenants behind that idea and how you came to it?

• 3:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so actually, it's interesting. It's a really weird adjustment going from, you know, I mean, I spent my whole career in old media or dealing with old media and now we're in new media. In the history of the firm, the one thing that we really, really, really, really defended against was basically leaked results. And the reason, and it goes back to in the pretty early days of the firm, The New York Times got a leak of our results. And I mean, we were like a young firm, so most of the funds were like a year old. And venture capital firms don't have high returns in the first year because nothing happens in the first year. It's not like a stock market type thing.

• 3:54Ben Horowitz?

  And so they miss, or maybe it's the Wall Street Journal, it was one of the two, but they misinterpreted the results. So they kind of said, well, the early funds were good because those had enough years to get kind of returns in them. But Fund III was terrible and like da, da, da, da, and so forth. And because old media was still powerful, it was very hard to combat it. You know, we put out statements and this and that and the other blog posts explaining like why they were wrong, but it didn't land. And it was such a like, inside the firm, it was such a big crisis that actually, I'm pretty sure Balaji quit because he thought we were dead because the New York Times had just ruined the whole firm with that article. So it was like that kind of existential

• 4:38Ben Horowitz?

  a threat. And so we were very oriented around, okay, don't let anything out that could be misinterpreted or this or that, because you can never correct it. It goes out there and you're never going to kind of come back from it.

• 4:51Erik Torenberg?

  And say more about the flood zone concept in terms of why it works and why it's so different than what would happen in the past.

• 4:58Ben Horowitz?

  So in the past, traditionally, it didn't count if it wasn't in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or like The Economist or CNN or like there were maybe eight channels that could say something. And then whatever they said was permitting in that once it was out there, it was very hard to deal with. And it'll be top of Google results, like the whole thing. But now, look, Mark and I, if we really had a problem, could go on 30 podcasts, all of which get a much bigger audience than any of the publications I talked about. And we wouldn't have to talk about that. We could go talk about something else more interesting and erase that from everybody's memory very quickly. So it's just, without

• 5:43Ben Horowitz?

  commenting on what's a better world, like the laws of physics are completely different in this world than the other world. And I think to be effective as an organization in marketing and media, You have to embrace the new world because you can't be half and half. Because the whole motion of the old world will kill you in the new world and vice versa. And so you have to kind of commit to we're going to really care about what goes down through the old channels, or we're not going to give them, sorry to use language, and we're just going to say interesting things and flood the zone. And we're doing the latter, by the way.

• 6:21Marc Andreessen?

  There's a whole history to this, but basically like the whole idea that there's like a quote unquote corporate brand, like the whole idea that there's like a corporate like trademark and then the whole idea that you like as a business, you basically load everything into that thing. And that that thing, whether it's General Electric or International Business Machines or whatever, the idea that that thing is somehow abstracted away from the people involved. And then the people involved, their main job is to try to kind of buff that thing, which kind of led to this, one way to look at it is like it led to this like 80 year kind of reign of everything being synthetic and plastic and boring, right? Where like Ben and I have had this experience for many, many decades at this point. It's just like the job of a corporate CEO for a very long time was to get up on stage and to say absolutely nothing in any sort of public event. I actually was on a board of the CEO who very firmly believed this and he literally would come off stage, having very deliberately said absolutely nothing and would have been

• 7:06Marc Andreessen?

  thrilled because like he had made no news, like mission accomplished, right? Anyway, so Eric, to your question, like basically, I think the retrospective view on this, what happened was basically in the past, your communication channels were just like super narrow, right? And so how could you get a message through to the mass market or to your audience or to your customer base? You could only do it by kind of sending in a message that was encoded into as few bits as possible, right? Because that was kind of your only shot because it was always limited by TV broadcast airtime or it was limited by newspaper column inches or whatever. And so you just, you had to kind of crystallize everything down to this kind of minimal and sort of least offensive kind of possible position. But it's always been unnatural because as human beings, like it never felt right. It always felt like weird because it's like this corporation is like this weird other kind of alien thing. It always felt weird and uncomfortable and we just kind of got used to it.

• 7:49Marc Andreessen?

  And it just, it turns out, as our friend Mitt Romney famously said, corporations are people too. Right? And like

• 7:54Ben Horowitz?

  Poor Mitt.

• 7:55Marc Andreessen?

  Right. Yeah, he was using it in a different context. He was not calling the change in PR, but for our purposes, like it's all about people. It's all about the decisions that people make. But a big company or a government agency or a nonprofit or a venture firm or a startup is like making decisions and acting in the world. That's people like there are some set of people who are sitting around making that decision. And then it's kind of this almost, I don't know, like shock therapy or something where it's just, it's the people who are actually making the calls actually show up and talk on their own behalf and explain themselves and actually say what they think. It like blows everybody's minds, right? You know, it's the response people have to Elon is response people have to certain other people who are now kind of very notable in environment who are running large things who are very public and vocal. It's just kind of this thing and it's just almost like this thing where it's like, well, they can't say that. And it's, well, wait a minute. Number one, they can't say that, like they're allowed to. They're like an adult in the United States of America, like they're allowed to say whatever they want.

• 8:40Marc Andreessen?

  Number one, number two, how about they actually tell us what they think? Like, how about we hear directly from them so that we can actually understand what they're thinking and who they are and how they're processing reality and what their assumptions are. And of course, the technological cost for this is just that that narrow media funnel just got like completely blown to smithereens. Right? In large part as a consequence of all the work that all of us have done on this call over the last 30 years. And you could kind of maybe say, love it or hate it, like the days of kind of this narrow channel, narrow casting. And then what I would argue is just this like inherently deceptive practice of abstracting things away from people. That world is just clearly fading and in the new world, we're just going to hear direct from people. And look, I'm not a utopian and it's not going to be like a hundred percent better, but I think there's no question it's a big net improvement.

• 9:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And by the way, the other thing that's really interesting in retrospect is

• 9:24Ben Horowitz?

  the things that people got in trouble for, canceled for, fired for, et cetera, in the past that they said in the press were all just misinterpretations. You know, as somebody saying something and because it was so narrow and because you could never erase it and because you could never come back and defend it because the audience would be, you know, a thousand and size on the defense. You know, it wasn't, I said what I thought and people thought I was a horrible person. It was, I said something, it got misinterpreted and people thought I was a horrible person. So now in this world where like, you know, people say much more like aggressive things,

• 10:05Ben Horowitz?

  I would just say in terms of, you know, not being mainstream thinking, but have room to explain it, they, that, that rarely happens anymore. So like, I mean, everything from like Howard Dean to, you know, you name it. Like in today's world, that, that would be nothing. But in that world, because there was no chance to say, well, like this is what happened. You know, like there, there were just thousands of times when people got into incredible trouble for things that they said that were misinterpreted that they could not correct.

• 10:42Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And Eric, you know, Ben, Ben gave me good advice, you know, actually before you came on board, which I am trying my best to stick to, although I will tell you it is a significant personal challenge. Again, with not eating an entire box of Oreos and drinking an entire bottle of scotch every night, both of which I'm also trying not to do. Um, so, cause we live in a healthy world now. So, um, uh, less self-destructive world. So, um, you know, Ben, Ben pointed out to like, what Ben just said basically applies into the new world, actually just as much as the old world in the sense of like, when every time I've got myself into like serious trouble, like in public over the last decade, it's because I tweeted something. Um, and I mean, you know, everybody on here probably knows how much I love Twitter and like, it's great to be able to rip off the hundred, you know, and I was really good at like compressing something super controversial in 140 characters and then really letting it rip with 280 characters.

• 11:26Marc Andreessen?

  But Ben pointed out like, look, every time, every time somebody gets mad at you, you know, just gets like completely ripped at you over, over that, basically what's happened is it's out of context. Um, and so what Ben said is look, just say everything that you think, but say it on a podcast, right? Say it in the context of an hour and a half discussion so that you can, whatever it is, you've surrounded it with the full explanation or say it in the form of an essay where you've like fully articulated your argument and it's fully in context. Um, and just observationally, like in, and not just applying to myself, but just more broadly, it's actually interesting if you watch this to this day, when public figures get blown to smithereens, it's almost always because of something that's basically too short. Um, when people actually do the full long, long form explanation of what they think, even if it's on a highly controversial, you know, even if it's imputed to be highly controversial or whatever, if it's the full explanation, it is actually harder to blow people up.

• 12:11Marc Andreessen?

  And again, and again, you could kind of say, it's actually really funny. You know, when I was a kid, like, you know, the moral panic was around television, right? Kind of pre the internet and the moral panic and a lot of moral panic and television always was around the concept of soundbites, which is you only ever get to hear like five seconds of what anybody's thoughts are, right? And somehow television is now the gold standard, you know, for information transmission. The internet's evil, like somehow it all flipped. But anyway, the point being is like, the internet gives us the chance to not only express ourselves, like in short form, the internet specifically gives us the chance to express ourselves in long form, right? And fully explain things. And that's, that's just so different, like the, the, the hour, hour and a half, two hour discussion with somebody who's like deeply into something and is really involved in something. Like, yeah, I mean, we all experience this as consumers, like, it's just so much better than the, than the 30 second depth that, you know, might have been on the NBC nightly news 30 years

• 12:56Marc Andreessen?

  ago.

• 12:57Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, you know, the long form of almost anything that's interesting, complex, systems problem, which is most everything in politics and in technology, you need the long form. There is no soundbite that gives you any information. And so you have to have a long conversation. So it is actually much, much better.

• 13:27Ben Horowitz?

  There's always that thing with sugar, you know, using bones or whatever to be white or that kind of thing.

• 13:33Marc Andreessen?

  I'm gonna eat a, I'm gonna eat a gigantic package of Oreos tonight in Deborah's honor. I really appreciate it.

• 13:39Erik Torenberg?

  The, well, yeah, it's interesting. We've also talked about, you know, media training of the past used to be around sort of, you know, how to stay out of trouble, this kind of thing. And now, you know, if you're a CEO, you want to be, you know, something, you know, Jordy from TVPN has this concept of a Joe Rogan CEO. I use someone interesting enough to go on Joe Rogan for three hours, you know, someone like an Alex Karp, someone like a Palmer Lucky, right? And, um, is in, and the flip side of that is that, you know, if you're interesting, you know, if you're powerful, you're, it's because you're interesting, uh, cause that's what, that's what people, that's what people want to work for. It's, you know, people want to be customers of, it's people want to invest in. Um, and if you're powerful and interesting, you're going to be controversial. And, and, and that's something that you guys have also helped me get more, more accustomed to is like, hey,

• 14:23Erik Torenberg?

  you know, this is the big leagues, you know, and there are people like who are going to be mad at what we're doing. And, and that is, that's, in some ways, that's a good thing. That's, it's evidence of our, of our power and, and our interestingness.

• 14:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think, you know, it's hard. This is another kind of crossover between the old world and the new world because if you're a corporate brand, then, you know, you try and keep all the dust off the brand and, and, you know, try and be something that nobody hates, I guess, for lack of a better word. And then, you know, I think in today's world, to be good at marketing, you've got to be interesting. To be interesting, if you're interesting and powerful, there are going to be a lot of people who don't like you. And that's like, that's a good thing. And I was very happy to see, by the way, the infra piece because we can get like a nice piece on like a subsection of the firm,

• 15:17Ben Horowitz?

  but nobody's ever going to write like a really nice thing about the whole firm. I think that, you know, also it's a, this whole new world is much better for founder CEOs because to be a founder, you have to have an original idea. And original ideas are interesting by nature. I think that professional CEOs often get to that position through very careful politicking, which kind of is the opposite where you want to be uncontroversial. Like, nobody can ding you right as you get to the thing. And, you know, Mark and I have been on, you know, Mark much more than me, but been on large boards where in the large boards, you know, when it comes to picking the professional CEO,

• 16:02Ben Horowitz?

  they're all about what's not wrong with him, not what's right with him, or what's right with her. And so you get these very vanilla characters who definitely could not go on Joe Rogan. And that, you know, is all to our advantage because we basically deal almost entirely with founder CEOs.

• 16:20Erik Torenberg?

  I want to transition to one more structural mechanic because it's a segue into how we've built our team a little bit. And it's, this markets this in a Glu and quote, you know, if it's on TV, it's a TV show. And just talk about how the different formats yield different, different types of content.

• 16:38Erik Torenberg?

  Do you want to talk?

• 16:38Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, you want me to do it? You want me to do it?

• 16:40Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 16:41Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, all right. Okay, this is the thing. Okay. So yeah, Marshall McLuhan was the great media theorist of the, of the TV era. And actually, his, his work has actually held up really well and it's, it's, it's worth reading. But he, he had, he had this, this thing, Eric just said, he said, if it's on TV, it's a television show. In, in other words, like basically the, the, you know, as he said, the medium is the message. Basically what he said is like, look, like TV, TV is a specific kind of technology. It's a specific kind of media technology. And basically like all of the questions around TV are like, you know, is it a, is, you know, it's all basically just like, the only real parameter is length. Like, is it a three minute news segment? Is it a 20 minute sitcom? Is it a 40 minute drama? Like there's very little kind of variation like what you can do because it's just a linear, you know, it's just a straight, you know, just, you know, broadcast video, you know, mass broadcast video.

• 17:26Marc Andreessen?

  And so he said, you know, basically the medium in its first, you know, 10 or 20 years evolved, you know, basically the concept of what we now know to be a television show, which is basically either a comedy or a drama or a combination of both. And it's basically a little story and it's a little story that plays at over 20 to 40 minutes. And it kind of has to be a self-contained story because you don't know when people are going to watch it. And, you know, now they're doing, you know, now they're doing, you know, a streaming, they're doing serial stories. But, you know, television shows properly generally where, you know, where everything was a one-off, you can watch episodes out of order. And so there's like, there are the, there are these very like self-contained little basically, you know, plays, little stage plays, broadcast on video, and then there, there, there are these self-contained little stories. And then, and then they need to kind of appeal to emotion because it's like an emotional medium. Right? It's not like an information dense medium. It's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a medium that literally puts somebody in your living room.

• 18:10Marc Andreessen?

  And so basically it's, it's like these little morality plays, right? Where there's, and there's got to be like good guys and bad guys and kind of a very simplistic story. And there's like a few, you know, a few mild plot twists and then everything kind of wraps up at the end. And what he says, sort of the consequence of that is like, everything on television has to be a television show. And that includes everything in the real world that gets talked about on television has to be turned into a television show. Right? And, and, and this is kind of, you know, the running joke of like following, you know, I don't know, whatever current events or politics on TV right now, which is, it's kind of a running joke, which is, you know, on either party, which, but it's just kind of like, oh, you know, that, you know, you know, oh, it's, you know, it's time for the next season. Oh, you know, this is the new, you know, main, main plot that's happening. And then this is the new secondary plot that's happening. And if you watch CNN every night, you know, they're just kind of, you know, they're kind of just playing with these stories.

• 18:51Marc Andreessen?

  You know, kind of over time, the way that a, the way that a soap opera might, or that a, you know, that a, that a, that a, that a drama might, or occasionally, you know, how comedy might. And so, so basically, we, we just like lived in a world where it just seems like everything's a TV show. Um, and it's, it's a world where like all the edges are sanded off and everything is kind of very smooth and professional. And everything is kind of within this very narrow band of what can be put into these kind of little, little morality plays. Okay. So Marshall McLuhan unfortunately is long dead, but I, I assert that if he were alive today, he would say, if it's, if it's on the internet, it's a viral internet post. Right? So like, what's the native medium of the internet? Like, what's the thing that, what's the form of media on the internet that like rips? And dominates. And it's clearly the viral post, right? It's, it's the viral tweet. It's the viral Tik Tok. It's the viral Instagram.

• 19:35Marc Andreessen?

  Right? It's the, it's the, it's a viral Facebook post. It's the viral Substack. It's the viral YouTube video. Like it's very clearly the post and specifically it's the viral post. Like it's, it's the one that really rips. And so, so basically you're right, right? So my theory is if it's on the internet, um, uh, uh, everything is a viral post. And then you just ask yourself two questions, which is like, okay, what's the characteristic of a viral post? And, and like nine times out of 10, it's something that like really gets people cranked up, right? Like on whatever topic, right? It might be on whatever your favorite pop star said yesterday, or it might be on whatever, you know, with the politician said, or it might be on whatever, you know, a business leader said or whatever. But like, it's something that like causes people to like flip out. Right? Uh, you know, you know, and maybe some people flip up positively, some people flip up negatively, or something caused people to flip out. And then the other thing with viral posts that's really interesting is you can actually observe this in the data.

• 20:19Marc Andreessen?

  They have this really rapid rise, like they tend to, if, if they're going to take off, they tend to take off within like 12 hours. And then they spike like crazy as everybody retweets or reposts and, you know, emails it around and talks about it. And then there's basically this like half life falloff where like within 24, it's like 12 hours up and then it's like 20, 24 hours down. And then 36 hours later, it's like gone from our collective memory. And the reason is because another one has popped up and has taken off instead. And if you kind of take a step back and kind of chart the media landscape that we've all been living in for the last, whatever, you know, for sure, five years, but you know, you can even say probably 10 years. What, what we've lived through is just literally, literally just like thousands of cycles of viral posts. Okay. Is, you know, is this good or bad or something in the middle? You could have a big debate about that.

• 21:02Marc Andreessen?

  You know, I would argue it's its own form of emotionality, right? It's, it's basically things that spike the cortisol. And so that, you know, it's sort of things that are controversial. And so it leans into that. But you know, the other side is it's things that are interesting, right? Um, and then the other part is, you know, the, the people get a vote of what goes viral, right? It's not just up to a news producer, what, what shows up on TV. So there, there, there's that aspect to it. Another aspect to it, by the way, is that stories come and go much more quickly now. Right. And so there will be some thing that pops and it's like the world's biggest crisis in whatever sector is talking about. And it's just like, everybody in the world has an opinion. This is where I was using a while back, the meme of the current thing. Like, it's the current thing. Everybody has to have an opinion on the current thing. It's the most important thing in the world. And then 24 hours later, it's like it never happened. Because something else has become the current thing.

• 21:44Marc Andreessen?

  And then that leads to, you know, the new, the new version of the old time honored strategy of getting through media crises, which is like, just like, basically, make sure something else, you know, becomes the new viral post. You know, get, get something else elevated into that thing. So that, you know, there's, there's, there's this way to kind of, kind of deal with these things. But, but anyway, I just think like, as long as the internet is the medium of choice, we're going to live in a world in which this is what, you know, this is the cycle now. It's like a 24, 36 hour cycle. By the way, the traditional media and the former newspapers and television, like, at least the way I read them, is they're basically covering whatever was the viral post like yesterday or a week ago. Right. And so, right. And so they're being driven by the internet viral post, which is, which, you know, which is why I think that, you know, the internet viral post is, is the higher order thing.

• 22:26Marc Andreessen?

  And I also think like, that, that's not going to change. Like they, the whole long thing I can do on that. But like they, literally, if you're a television, if you're a television producer, or if you're a news editor or whatever, like you, you can't possibly move your organization fast enough to stay ahead of these cycles. And so what you end up doing is you end up chasing them. And that's, and basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our life is just going to be to follow the internet viral posts.

• 22:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, there was a funny joke on the Daily Show years ago where they were talking to newspaper guy. And he said, why do you call it news? You should call it old.

• 22:55Erik Torenberg?

  That's good.

• 22:57Marc Andreessen?

  It was, he was interviewing at the time, the managing editor of the New York Times. And he was in his office and the New York Times, you know, was expecting to get this glowing coverage on the Daily Show. And whoever it was shows up in the office and says, says what Ben just said. And the guy, and the editor is just like completely confused. Like he clearly has no idea. What the Daily Show guy is talking about and and he's like, well, like, what do you mean? And he and he's like, he points there. There's like a pile of literally physical newspapers in the guy's desk. And he says, like, look, it's it's all old news. And he's like, no, no, it's today's paper. And he's like, no, no, it's yesterday's paper. Like, I already know everything that's in that, like, you know, and so, and yeah, and like, it's just basically like, again, what do they have? And they're very proud of this. They have their editorial process. They have their publication process, like they have multi-layered bureaucratic mechanism for, you know, all the news that's fit to print, that, you know, it's at least a 24 hour cycle to figure that out.

• 23:42Marc Andreessen?

  And I mean, and, you know, 24 hours later, the internet has already moved on from whatever the last thing was. And so it's just, it's, it's a, it's a, it's another example, the dog chasing the car. Except now they have to chase it like every single day, which might be why they're so upset all the time.

• 23:54Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, they are pissed.

• 23:56Erik Torenberg?

  You know, we've really made sure to hire people who really understand the platform, not just how the platform works technically, but also the vibe and the taste and the and the spirit of the platform. And we've gone all in to start on on X, because that, those are just where the most interesting conversations are happening, where where people are the most plugged in.

• 24:15Marc Andreessen?

  And and so I think a bit of what's

• 24:16Ben Horowitz?

  Most of tech world is on X, you know, like it or not, like our world lives on X, just because that's also where all the

• 24:25Ben Horowitz?

  both the kind of AI researchers and the AI influencers and the crypto influencers, like, like, everybody in our world lives there, you know, at least in part. So we can't avoid it, even if we didn't like it.

• 24:42Marc Andreessen?

  But we love it.

• 24:44Erik Torenberg?

  You were about to say something, Mark?

• 24:46Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, yeah. No, I was just gonna say, yeah, no, look, what Ben said is, yeah, so that like, this is, I posted a link to a book called The True Believer, that kind of talks about this is, you know, the old characterization is elites and masses, which is a little bit 20th century. But yeah, like the like, people who are spending 24 hours a day trying to understand, you know, basically in these domains like AI or, you know, politics or whatever, like they're on X like that. And that's, then that's not the mass market, like, that's not most of humanity, but like, that's most of the people who are like, basically in the, what you might, I don't know what you want to call like, knowledge synthesis business or whatever, where they're trying to like, understand and formulate policies on things and so forth. Um, obvious, obviously, it's also true, the TikTok and Instagram, you know, have just like much more reach, like they're, you know, they're just much bigger, you know, they they reach the mass kind of global audience. More and so that, you know, they certainly, they certainly play a role.

• 25:28Marc Andreessen?

  But if you're on the leading edge of the field, like, you know, it's very rare that whatever is kind of the, you know, the, you know, kind of the edge of that process of kind of idea formation, propagation, people, you know, in positions of authority, kind of figuring out what they think, it's, that's almost entirely on us.

• 25:42Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, this is another huge difference between old media and new media. So if you come from old media world, there's just reach.

• 25:53Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 25:53Ben Horowitz?

  Right. Like the target, you know, if you were going for a target audience, there was no real easy way to do it. And I mean, you know, like, maybe like if you're sports, you'd be in Sports Illustrated or whatever, but like, there wasn't really a way to do it. But now with podcasts and blogs and X and so, you can go to an exact audience. You can really get down to an extremely narrow target in new media world. And, you know, for us, that's great because the audience, our audience is founders, not the world. And so, you know, having a way to talk to 90% of founders as opposed to 4% of the world is just a much better thing for us.

• 26:39Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. The, two, two more structural things, Mark, I want you to explain, and then I want to present some, some, some slides, you know, give some detail about what we're doing that that relate to what I'm about to say. One is, I want you to explain the Boyd loop and why, you know, that makes Twitter and the social media is so much more powerful in terms of, you know, forming consensus. And then the other is the difference between written and oral culture and what's prioritized as we transition to oral.

• 27:08Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, okay. So these are both long topics, and so I'll try to do the Cliff Notes version. Um, yeah, so, um, I'll, I'll link to the book on this, but in, in, in military theory, there's this concept called maneuver warfare, which basically just says like speed, speed wins, like speed, speed wins as compared to mass, mass winning, uh, speed wins. And so if you, if you believe that, then there's basically this framework, there's this framework called, called the OODA loop, uh, O O D A loop, uh, which originally was developed for fighter pilots and then later for, for broader military strategy. And the OODA loop, what OODA stands for, it's an acronym, it stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And so it's basically the decision-making cycle, right? And so, and Observe is like, view the outside world. Orient is like, figure out where you are in respect to the outside

• 27:50Marc Andreessen?

  world. Decide, of course, decide what to do. Act, and basically what this guy, boy who came up with this idea, said was like, any military, any fighter pilot, any military operation, any basketball player, any company, any government, basically goes through a decision-making cycle that's like that, in order to make decisions. What you just talked about, New York Times has their own OODA loop, and it's like 24 hours to go through their process. Right? And so, and so, basically what he said is, like, if speed is the thing that matters, then the person who gets through that cycle the fastest is the one who's going to win. But he said, there's a second order thing that happens. So one is just like, is your OODA loop faster than the other guys? So that's one question. But he said, the

• 28:34Marc Andreessen?

  other thing that happened is, if you can have a sustainably faster OODA loop processing cycle than the next guy, then if you think about what happens, like, let's say it takes, you know, you, whatever, you know, an hour to figure something out, it takes the other guy two hours to figure something out. Think about what happens is like, okay, you start out on even playing fields, you both start your decision-making cycles, you operate, you make your decision within an hour, the other guy is still, as I say, is inside his own OODA loop when you make your decision, right? And so, you make your decision, you act within an hour, he's only halfway through his process, he now has to start his process over, right? Because you've changed the landscape, you've changed the parameters of what's going on. So he now has to go back and re-observe and reorient and start over, right? And then, and then, of course, project forward. It's like, okay, then you decide again within an

• 29:18Marc Andreessen?

  hour. And then by the time he gets, and again, he gets halfway through his process, he gets interrupted, he has to go back. And so what he says is, if you can be sustainably faster at running your decision loop, you can get inside the other guy's loop in a systematic and perpetual way. And basically, the result of that is psychological breakdown. Basically, you destroy the psychology of the other side because they just simply, they just can no longer operate or function at all. They just like basically go into complete panic. Nothing seems to make sense. They can never get oriented. They can never make decisions. They can never, they become completely defensive, completely responsive. You completely dominate, you know, basically the playing field. And he, you know, and he was a famous fighter pilot. He was a, he was a famous fighter pilot called 15 Second Boyd because he, his claim was, which was true, is he could beat any other fighter pilot in dogfight within 15 seconds using this method. And so it's basically this, this

• 30:03Marc Andreessen?

  premium on speed and quality of execution such that you are actually causing the other side to have a, have a psychological break. By the way, like, again, go back to, like, I think this is also a big explanation for what's happened to traditional media. The fact that the internet moves events so much faster and the sort of internet collective crowd decides what's important so much faster, causes all the people who were television producers or news editors who thought that they were in charge of the narrative to just basically have a psychological breakdown. Like, how can you even function when the internet is just basically cycling much faster than you could? And I think this, by the way, the same is true of companies. You know, this is what Elon does, you know, to his competitors, like in the defense, you know, in the aerospace industry. This is what Andro is now doing in companies in the defense industry. You know, this, quite frankly, is what we try to do, you know, to our competitors in the venture industry. So, yeah, so that,

• 30:46Marc Andreessen?

  now, to do that, you have to be willing to commit to being fast, right? And so you can't, you can't have long bureaucratic processes. You can't have, you know, a risk adverse posture. You can't, you know, stress, you know, you, you, you need enough time to make the decision properly, you know, but you, you can't, you can't run the fully deliberate, you know, strategy that a lot of companies used to have in the past where it was days to weeks to months to figure out, you know, what they were going to say about something. By the way, in, in politics, they adapted to this probably 30 years ago with the concept of the war room. And there's a famous documentary in the Clinton campaign, and I think, is it 88, where they called the war room, where they, they show this. And now, now they call it rapid response. And if you, if you, if you go to basically any, any political operation on the internet right now, you know, they'll, they'll have an X account that's literally, they call it like rapid response. So it's like, actually,

• 31:29Marc Andreessen?

  Department of War has one, just as an example, Department of War Rapid Response. And it's literally like they're responding in real time to stuff that's happening because they want to stay inside, you know, everybody else's Oodaloo. Yeah, okay, so there's that. And then, yeah, the oral versus written thing is it's it would probably take an hour to kind of go through the whole thing. But yeah, the long and short of it is there's basically in sort of human culture, there's kind of two ways to communicate. There's two fundamental modes. There's oral communication. There's written communication. You know, oral communication, you know, is the original form. And you could think about it literally as like people around a campfire telling stories, singing songs, you know, reciting poetry. You can think about written communication would be, you know, kind of famously the book, or the scientific journal article, right, or the math equation,

• 32:11Marc Andreessen?

  or the business plan, right, you know, a written artifact. And that basically the characteristic of orality or oral communication is it's sort of inherently emotion first, right, because it's, you know, literally, you know, live interactions with another person. The characteristic of written communication is sort of abstraction, you know, and, you know, hopefully logic, the scientific method, you know, intellectual rigor, analytical rigor. It used to be the case that you could kind of really divide these, you know, in traditional mass media, it used to be the case, you could say that like newspapers and magazines are written, and so they would be like more calmer and more dispassionate. You could say, you know, television was oral, right, was people, literally people talking. And so it was going to be much more emotional and hot headed. You know, basically like, you know, that that's all

• 32:55Marc Andreessen?

  broken down because of everything we've talked about. But the modern version of that is like the internet, like, okay, is the internet an oral culture or written culture? And it turns out the answer is the internet is both, because the internet is everything, right? It supports every kind of media. And so a YouTube video, I will say for sure, a short form TikTok or Instagram reel for sure is oral culture. Like, it's something short and bursty and emotional and interpersonal in its experience. A long form Substack post is for sure written culture. But then things get more complicated, because a short tweet, even though it's written, is actually an oral culture thing, right? Because the fact that it's short means it has to be like this, again, this sort of this burst of sort of, say, triggering emotionality. In order to go viral. So, so actually tweets, I would say are oral culture, even though they

• 33:38Marc Andreessen?

  look written. And then long form podcasts are actually written culture, even though they look oral, right? Because if you're going to talk about something for three hours, like that's necessarily something where you're kind of getting into abstractions and depth, you know, beyond just kind of a flash moment of emotion. And so the internet lets you kind of play with these formats and, and, and the kind of impact that you want to have in a way that, you know, in, in the past was kind of determined by exactly which fixed media you were in. And, and look, we, we all live this, like, if you want to have the internet experience of like doom scrolling and getting really pissed off with the world, like you go on TikTok and X and you can do that. If you want to like, learn a lot of stuff, you can go on Substack and long form YouTube podcasts and you can live in that world and like, you can like, you know, raise your IQ a point today. Like, you know, it's absolutely amazing. And so there is a choose your own adventure aspect to it. And, and then of

• 34:22Marc Andreessen?

  course, you know, we, you know, firms like ours, you know, need to think hard about how we communicate because of, of the differences.

• 34:28Erik Torenberg?

  I, I love that as a segue because it just emphasizes how different every platform is. And it's not, you know, a lot of people or companies will just, you know, have one idea and then cross post it, you know, across every platform, but it doesn't fully appreciate, you know, what that platform is built for and what that platform rewards. And so for every platform that we have, we have a, you know, with Substack, Podcast, Instagram, you know, X, YouTube, et cetera. We have an expert running it who is obsessed with, with that, with that medium. You know, on Instagram, we're up 35%, you know, month over month right now. We have this guy, Hero, who's, who's 18 years old and has been, you know,

• 35:08Erik Torenberg?

  grew up on, on Instagram and, and knows it like the, the back of his hand. And, and, and that really matters. That makes a difference. And so with, with that as a segue, I want to do a, share just a few slides that just show a little bit about what we've, what we've done so far.

• 35:28Erik Torenberg?

  So what we're really trying to do is king make our companies, right? Is give them such a superpower in terms of getting their message out, in terms of reaching their customers, in terms of reaching their talent, you know, the superpower that companies like Andorl have to punch way above their weight class and other brands, you know, wish that they had that level of resonance, that level of reach. We're trying to give them those superpowers and we do that by building our own channels, our own, you know, media empire across platforms. We do that by making sure that we know everybody else who's got those, my screen paused for

• 36:09Erik Torenberg?

  some reason, okay, it's picture, but everybody else who's got those powers of distribution and having great relationships with them. And then also by just, you know, making sure that we have the expertise to be able to deploy to our companies as well. You know, Lulu put this, put this well, you know, that people don't really invest enough in people running these platforms. And, you know, we've really spent a lot of time recruiting the right expert talent to do it. So I'm stoked because now that we've had them build our platforms, we're going to deploy them to work on behalf of our companies. And so we're, you know, Kasser from Applied Intuition, you know, he's always been, I

• 36:52Erik Torenberg?

  was an angel and he has also known for a while and he's always been complaining of like, hey, you know, why are we not valued more? Or why do we not have more resonance? Why do people, you know, why is everyone talking about other companies, not our company, given how good we are? And I said, Kasser, you know, you've never tweeted in your life. How do you expect to have tremendous, tremendous mind share? And he finally, you know, thanks to a lot of pushing that we did, bit the bullet and his first tweet got like 4,000 likes. You know, the first product we have, I'll get to in a second, was this launch as a service. The second one is going to be this founder go direct motion. You know, we're working with Kasser, we're working with Garrett from Flock Safety, you know, that's a heroic company that should be at the stature of Andorl as well and have really helped them build that machine.

• 37:35Erik Torenberg?

  So speaking of the launch of the service offering, this was inspired early on, I was asking some of the GPs, "Hey, where can we make the biggest difference? Like, what new products should we have?" And Cyrus said, "If we can guarantee a viral announcement, I think that'd be a superpower for us." So we built out this launch as a service. Everything soup to nuts, from all the social media copy, the messaging, the rollout. We created these custom videos. We hired Richard, another 18-year-old, who we convinced him to go straight from high school to the MBA, i.e. not go to college, or at least not right now. And he had previously done the Clouly video

• 38:19Erik Torenberg?

  and the browser-based video. And he's just got this phenomenal taste for what really does well. And so we built this video team. Richard, Ben, Henry has really led this product. And you can see the views here. It's just done phenomenally well. Millions and millions of views for our companies. We've now scaled up this offering to offer it to all of our companies. And that's our first product. From there, we're going to go deeper and do more embedded engagements, not just, "Hey, let's get this announcement viral," but let's build this repeatable motion to help companies build their foundations. And that's one thing I also want to call out.

• 39:04Erik Torenberg?

  We, after working with companies, companies were saying, "Hey, how do I hire people like that?" In some cases, they were talking to them individually and seeing if they were approachable. And we said, "Hey, no, we can't lose." They say, "How do I find someone like Henry or Brent or Richard or whoever?" And so we said, "Hey, we want to..." Well, first, we're trying to hire more of them, too. And so let's create this fellowship. And thus, the New Media Fellowship was born to help us hire them, but also help our companies hire them. And so because there's this sweet spot where you need to be online enough to really know the... have a taste and have a sensibility and understand these new platforms.

• 39:45Erik Torenberg?

  But you also need to be functioning enough and professional enough to work at one of these companies. And there's not many people can can can do both. And so we've really, you know, tried to create this this this program to be able to identify these people and then just give them a little bit more sort of technical know how. And so our first fellowship, we had 2000 applications, we picked 65 people. We think we think they're incredible. We two hires from us came from that so far. And we think this is going to be a franchise to come. And the other part of it, I'll just leave is, you know, I think we were really popularizing this term

• 40:28Erik Torenberg?

  new media, seeing a number of people with, you know, new media JDs, they want a head of new media, they're looking for that. And I think we're sort of in the way that we've popularized American dynamism, other people have American dynamism practices, we're starting to see that with with newbie. And so it's cool to see our thought leadership there. And, you know, more to more to come. So yeah, those are the things I'll leave you with in our presentation. The, you know, our channels are up tremendously, and we're continuing to invest in them. We we've got this portfolio offering launches of service, we're, you know, now launching our

• 41:09Erik Torenberg?

  go direct motion of really helping our CEOs and companies do that. It has to come from the CEO. So every engagement we do, the CEO is is tremendously engaged. And then we're really building out this this new media category creation, this new media talent base for us, because we're continuing to hire, but then also our our companies.

• 41:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So Ben, any closing thoughts? I would just say that, you know, particularly if you've spent time in the prior media regime, you know, of old media, you know, you really have to rethink every instinct that you have because it's one of the

• 41:51Ben Horowitz?

  Weirdest things where all your instincts are wrong. I mean, we're actually experiencing a little bit of this in AI too, which, you know, Martine wrote a great post on, which is like, in the old world of software, the one thing you knew is you couldn't throw money at a problem. And now you can throw money at a problem. And so like, you don't even realize how much of your thinking is affected by that old rule. And, you know, I would say this is that in spades where like, every single instinct you have is incorrect if you're in this world and you just have to let it all go. And this is why, you know, this is, people lament, oh, like, the right wing built this big podcast network and blah, blah. That's not what happened.

• 42:36Ben Horowitz?

  What happened is Trump just understood new media for whatever. I don't know why he did, because he's so old and he's been in old media the whole time. But like, he just rolled right into it. And, you know, not at a technological level, but as a media, as a medium. And I think that, you know, we've got to do that. We have to understand it and, and we have to kind of play by the new rules.

• 43:00Marc Andreessen?

  All my favorite comedians, podcasters, et cetera, always tell their guests, don't read the comments. What do you guys think? Do the manic Reddit posters drive you nuts? I have not dived into our podcast comment section, but I have seen a60z rage on Reddit. Not surprising. For what it's worth, every technical conference I've been at while at a60z has always had an a60z fanboy raving about our podcast. Yeah. So Eric, read the contents or read the comments? Don't read the comments.

• 43:25Erik Torenberg?

  Don't read the comments if they're going to affect what you say. It's kind of like the Yelp prop, you know, people who care enough to post either, either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it. And we've definitely got, at this point, I, it doesn't affect me, so I read the comments. But, you know, I, I, well, you know, and Mark and Ben have helped me not, not get too concerned about some of the, some of the commentary on Twitter by, you know, certain anonymous Twitter posters who, who, you know, raging in their basements, et cetera. But yeah, in short, don't read the comments.

• 44:02Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I'll just, I'll just maybe close on two things. So one is, there's a long history of this. And so if you read any sort of biography or autobiography of any sort of professional author, you know, you know, who writes, writes books for a living, that like 100% of the time, at some point, they will tell you, oh, the one thing I never do is read, read, read, read the critics, right? I never read the reviews. And then, and then they'll say, well, actually, no, that's not true. I always read the reviews. Because I know I shouldn't, right? Like, I know I shouldn't. I know I shouldn't. Because like, critics, like, by definition, are like, you know, basically bitter, you know, bitter people, you know, who are, who aren't writing novels, or whatever. And so, of course, they're gonna be mad. And I know I shouldn't read. I know it's very bad for me. I know it's gonna really

• 44:46Marc Andreessen?

  screw me up. And then I try. And then it's like a magnetic pull. I always end up reading them, you know, because it's like 3:00 in the morning, and I can't resist. And then I always end up getting mad. And so, you know, there is this push. And it used to be right, only professional authors, or professional filmmakers, or whatever, had critics, right, reviews. And now, basically, right, the entire, the entire world is a critic. And so I think we all, we all, we all, we all kind of have that. It's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a push and a pull. And so, that is, that is a little bit, a little bit difficult. You know, I will say, I think maybe a thing to kind of bear in mind, I couldn't resist, I posted a link to it, another book on this topic, with, it has a great title called Kill All Normies. And it's this, it's a book, actually, from like, a decade ago, that talked about like, this kind of very angry internet culture,

• 45:31Marc Andreessen?

  you know, that kind of developed after the 2000s. And, because, by the way, the internet was not always like this. Like, in the, in the very, very early days, the internet was so hard to get on to, that the only people who were on the internet were like, basically super, basically like, smart, super successful people.

• 45:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, news groups were really good then.

• 45:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, like, pre 1993, news, news groups were like utopia. And then, and then, and then sort of post 1993, things started going sideways. And then things start, the modern kind of caustic internet culture really developed in the, in the 2000s and 2010s. But basically, it like, it actually turns out there's like a genealogy to it. And it actually turns out like a lot of it is literally, literally, it's like Call of Duty lobbies for online gaming. So it's like literally like online gaming lobbies. Cause like when the Xbox and the PlayStation, you know, kind of rolled out voice, you know, voice interaction for the first time, you know, they're like, it'd be great for players to be able to talk to each other. And it turns out you just get like, you know, 12 year old boys in these lobbies, just like torching the fuck, you know, out of everybody and, and, and literally trying to get under

• 46:29Marc Andreessen?

  their opponent's skin and, and then being willing to, you know, anonymously say absolutely anything to do it. Right. And so that led to, you know, the, you know, very, very coarse, very vulgar, very offensive, you know, kind of thing. And then that, you know, kind of flipped, you know, that kind of culture kind of expanded into early internet forums, like something awful. And then it started metastasizing into things like, you know, like YouTube comments. And then, you know, and then obviously social media kind of blew that open. And so there is this, you know, there, there is this kind of, you know, I don't know, like rage undercurrent to everything. And I guess to just say, you know, you just got, you do kind of literally have to think about it. These are people literally in their, in their, in their parents basement.

• 47:07Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, the other thing is generally when we get attacked in the comments or, or stuff like that, it's somebody with like four followers or like a bot or something like that.

• 47:17Marc Andreessen?

  And by the way, that, that includes when it's

• 47:20Ben Horowitz?

  Very little interesting to read in them.

• 47:21Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And that includes when it's hay mantra of another.

• 47:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Yes.

• 47:29Speaker 06

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment and subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

• 48:13Speaker 06

  For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.