a16z's New Media Playbook

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.

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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 a 16Z, 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

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they pitched to us this idea of with a virtual production using Marvel

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scene and we look at the calendar. This is such a crazy idea.

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Hi, I'm Jessica. Hi, I'm Jay. I'm Kevin Moody, founder of Photo Labs. Eve Sola has raised a 17 million

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Series A led by a 16Z.

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Mark, Priscilla, Sam, Zu, Jenna.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to the A16Z podcast.

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We've entered a world where attention is

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the scarce resource, 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. The world of media is completely different than what we serve VCs market themselves.

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

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

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One quick story I want to tell is to the video that we put out for the fundraise 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 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.

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Yeah. Yep, that sounds like something I said.

3:00

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

3:04

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 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. And so they miss. Or maybe it's the Wall Street Journal, one of the two, but they misinterpreted the results. So they kind of said, well, the early funds, good, because those had enough years to get kind of returns in them. But fund three 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 and blog post explaining, like, why they were wrong. But it didn't land. And it was such a, like a. Inside the firm, it was such a big crisis that actually, I'm pretty sure Balaji quit because he thought we were dead. Cause the New York Times had just ruined the whole firm with that article. So it was like that kind of existential 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

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

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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 permanent in that once it was out there it was very hard to deal with and it would 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 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 a 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 fucking. 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.

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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 thrilled because, like, he had made no news. Like, mission accomplished.

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Right.

7:09

Anyway, so, Eric, to your question, like, basically, I think the retrospective view on this, what happened was basically in the past, 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, 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. And it just, it turns out, as our friend Mitt Romney famously said, corporations are people too. Right? And like poor Mitt, 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. When 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. It's the 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 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, number one. Number two, how about they actually tell us what they think? 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 ut 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. Yeah.

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

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And Eric, you know, 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. Akin was 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. So because we live in a healthy world now, so less self destructive world. So, you know, Ben pointed out that 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 gotten myself into like serious trouble, like in public over the last decade, it's because I tweeted something. 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 100, 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. 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 that, basically what's happened is it's out of context. 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 and just observationally like, 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. When people actually do the full 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. 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 of television. A lot of the moral panic of television always was around the concept of sound bites, 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 hour, hour and a half, two hour discussion with somebody who's like deeply into something and is really involved in something. Like, we all experience this as consumers. Like, it's just so much better than the 32nd bit that might have been on the NBC Nightly News 30 years ago.

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And by the way, you know, the long form of almost anything that's interesting, complex, a systems problem, which is most everything in politics and in technology, you need the long form. There is no sound bite that gives you any information. And so you have to have a long conversation. So it is Actually, much better. Oreos are vegan as far as there's always that thing with sugar, you know, using bones or whatever to be whiter, that kind of thing.

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I'm going to eat a. I'm going to eat a gigantic package of Oreos tonight in Deborah's honor. I really appreciate that.

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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 Zio, 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 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, because 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.

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It's.

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People want to invest in. And if you're powerful and interesting, you're going to be controversial. And that's something that you guys have also helped me get more accustomed to is like, hey, 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 that is, in some ways, that's a good thing. That's evidence of our power and our interestingness.

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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, 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, 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, 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 is all to our advantage because we basically deal almost entirely with founder CEOs.

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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 McLuhan quote. If it's on TV, it's a TV show. And just talk about how the different formats yield different types of content. Do you want to talk about.

16:20

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

16:38

Yeah.

16:40

Okay.

16:41

All right. Okay, this is the thing. Okay. So, yeah, Marshall McLuhan was the great media theorist of the TV era. And actually his work has actually held up really well and it's worth reading. But he had this thing Eric just said. He said, if it's on tv, it's a television show. In other words, like, basically, as he said, the medium is the message. Basically what he said is, look, 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, 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 in, 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, mass broadcast video. 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 the both. And it's basically a little story. And it's a little story that plays it 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, with 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 these very like self contained little, basically, you know, plays, little stage plays broadcast on video. And then they're 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 medium that literally puts somebody

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in your living room.

18:08

And so basically it's like these little morality plays, right? 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 this is kind of the running joke of like following, I don't know, whatever current events or politics on TV right now, which is kind of a running joke which is on either party. But it's just kind of like, oh, it's time for the next season. Oh, this is the new main plot that's happening. And then this is the new secondary plot that's happening. And if you watch CNN every night, they're just kind of, they're kind of just playing with these stories kind of over time the way that a soap opera might, or that a drama might, or occasionally how comedy might. And so basically we've just lived in a world where it just seem like everything's a TV show 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 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 TikTok, it's the viral Instagram, right? It's the 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 the one that really rips. And so basically you're right, right? So my theory is if it's on the Internet, 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 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, the politician said, or it might be on what, you know, a business leader set or whatever. But like, it's something that like causes people to like flip out, right? You know, you know, and maybe some people flip out, possibly some people flip out negatively or something. Cause 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. They have this really rapid rise. Like they tend to, 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 fall off 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 could even say probably 10 years. What we've lived through is just literally just like thousands of cycles of viral posts. Okay, is this good or bad or something in the middle? You could have a big debate about that. I would argue it's its own form of emotionality. It's basically things that spike the cortisol and so that sort of things that are controversial and so it leans into that. But the other side is it's things that are interesting, right? And then the Other part is the people get a vote of what goes viral. Right. It's not just up to a news producer what shows up on tv. So 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 something 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 you a while back. The meme of the current thing. 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. And then that leads to the new version of the old time honor strategy of getting through media crises, which is just like basically make sure something else becomes the new viral post. You know, get something else elevated into that thing. So there's this way to kind of deal with these things. 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, this is the cycle. Now it's like a 24, 36 hour cycle. By the way. The traditional media in the form of 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.

18:09

Right.

22:18

And so. Right. So they're being driven by the Internet viral post. Which is why I think that the Internet viral post is the. And I also think like that that's not going to change. Like they, the whole long thing I could 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 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 basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our life is just going to be to follow the Internet viral posts.

22:19

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

22:45

That's good.

22:55

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 was expecting to get this glowing coverage on the Daily show. And whoever it was shows up in the office and says what Ben just said. And the editor is just completely confused. He clearly has no idea what the Daily show guy is talking about. And he's like, well, what do you mean? And he's like, he points that there's a pilot, literally physical newspapers in the guy's desk. And he says, look, 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. I already know everything that's in that. Like, you know, and so, yeah, and like it's just basically like again, what do they have? They're very proud of this. They have their editorial process, they have their publication process. Like they have multi layer, you know, bureaucratic mechanism for, you know, all the news is fit to print. You know, it's at least a 24 hour cycle to figure that out. 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 another example of 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.

22:58

Yeah, they are pissed.

23:54

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 spirit of the platform. And we've gone all in to start on X because those are just where the most interesting conversations are happening and where people are the most plugged in.

23:56

And so when I think about the

24:15

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

24:17

You were about to say something, Mark? Oh, yeah, no, I was just going to say. Yeah, no, look at what Ben said is. Yeah, 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, and that's that then that's not in 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. Obvious. Obviously, it's also true that TikTok and Instagram have just much more reach. Like, they're just much bigger. They reach the mass kind of global audience more. And so they certainly play a role. But if you're on the leading edge of a field, it's very rare that whatever is kind of the. Kind of the edge of that process of kind of idea formation, propagation, people in positions of authority kind of figuring out what they think. That's almost entirely unethical, by the way.

24:44

This is another huge difference between old media and new media. So if you come from old media world, there's just reach. Yeah, right. Like, the targets. You know, if you were going for a target audience, there was no real easy way to do it. I mean, you know, like, maybe, like, if you were sports, you'd be in Sports Illustrator or whatever, but, like, there wasn't really a way to do it. But now with podcasts and blogs and accents, you can go to an exact audit. 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.

25:42

Yeah.

26:38

Two more structural things, Mark, I want you to explain, and then I want to present some slides, you know, give some detail about what we're doing 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 social media 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.

26:41

Yeah, okay. So these are both long topics, and so I'll try to do the Cliff Notes version. Yeah. So, and I'll link to the book on this. But in military theory, there's this concept called maneuver warfare, which basically just says, like, speed wins. Like, speed wins as compared to mass winning. Speed wins. And so if you believe that, then there's basically, there's this framework called the Ooda Loop. Ooda Loop, which originally was developed for fighter pilots and then later 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 observe is like view the outside world. Orient is like figure out where you are in respect to the outside world. Decide, of course, decide what to do. Act, Act. And basically what this guy Boyd, who came up with this idea said was like any military opera, 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 we just talked about, the New York Times has their OODA loop. It's like 24 hours to go through their process, right? Basically what he said is 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 other thing can happen is if you can have a sustainably faster OODA loop processing cycle than the next guy. Then if you think about what happens, let's say it takes you, whatever, 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 an even playing field. You both start your decision making cycles, you operate, you make your decision within an hour. The other guy is still 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. And then of course project forward. It's like, okay, then you decide again within an 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 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, he was a famous fighter pilot. He was a, he was a famous fighter pilot called 15 second Boyd because his claim was, which was true, is he could beat any other fighter pilot dog fight within 15 seconds using this method. And so it's basically this premium on speed and quality of execution such that you are actually causing the decide to have a psychological break. By the way, like again, go back to the like. I think this is also 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. This is what Elon does to his competitors like in the aerospace industry. This is what Anduril's now doing to companies in the defense industry. You know, this quite frankly is what we try to do to our competitors in the venture industry. So yeah, so that now to do that you have to be willing to commit to being fast. Right. And so you can't have long bureaucratic processes, you can't have a risk adverse posture, you can't stress, you need enough time to make the decision properly. But you can't run the fully deliberate strategy that a lot of companies used to have in the past where it was days to weeks to months to figure out what they were going to say about something. By the way, 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 in I think in 88 where they called the war Room, where they show this and now they call it rapid response. And if you go to basically any political operation on the Internet right now, they'll have an X account that's literally. They call it rapid response. So it's like actually 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 everybody else's OODA loop. Yeah, okay, so there's that and then yeah, the oral versus written thing 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 kind of famously the book or the scientific journal article, or the math equation, or the business plan, a written artifact. And basically the characteristic of orality or oral communication is it's sort of inherently emotion first, right? Because it's literally 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? It 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's all 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, a written culture? And it turns out the answer is the Internet's 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, because the fact that it's short means that it has to be like again, sort of this burst of, sort of say, triggering emotionality in order to go viral. So actually, tweets, I would say, are oral culture even though they 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, that's necessarily something where you're kind of getting abstractions in depth beyond just kind of a flash moment of emotion. And so the Internet lets you kind of play with these formats and the kind of impact that you want to have in a way that, you know, in the past was kind of determined by exactly which fixed media you were in. And look, we all live this. Like, if you want to have the Internet experience of like doom scrolling and getting really pissed off at 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 then of course, you know, we, you know, know, firms like ours, you know, need to think hard about how we communicate because of, of the differences.

27:08

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, whether it's a substack podcast, Instagram, you know, X, YouTube, etc. We have a expert running it who is obsessed 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, grew up on Instagram and knows it like the back of his hand. And that really matters, that makes a difference. And so with that as a segue, I want to share just a few slides that just show a little bit about what we've done so far. So what we're really trying to do is king make our companies 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. The superpower that companies like Anduril have to punch way above their weight class and other brands wish that they had that level of, 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 media empire across platforms. We do that by making sure that we know everybody else who's got those is my screen paused for some reason. Oh my screen share. But everybody else who's got those powers of distribution and having great relationships with them and then also by just making sure that we have the expertise to be able to deploy to our companies as well. Lulu put this well that people don't really invest enough in people running these platforms. And 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 art platforms, we're going to deploy them to, to work on behalf of our companies. And so we're, you know, Casser from Applied Intuition, you know, he's, he's always been. I was an angel in caster as well, so 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. Not our company, given how good we are? And I'm Casser, you know, you've never tweeted in your life. How do you expect to have tremendous, tremendous mindshare? And he, he finally, you know, thanks to a lot of pushing that we did bit the it and his first tweet got like 4,000 likes. And 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, this founder Go Direct Motion. You know, we're working with Casser, we're working with Garrett from Flock Safety. You know, that's a heroic company that should be at the stature of a Anduril as well and have really helped them build that machine. So speaking of the launch of the service offering, this was, you know, inspired. Early on I was asking you know, some of the gps, hey, what would. Where could we make the biggest difference? Like what new products should we have? And you know, Sarah said if we could guarantee a viral announcement, you know, I think that'd be a superpower for us. So we built out this launch as a service. You know, everything soup to nuts from you know, all the social media copy, the messaging, the, you know, the rollout. We created these custom videos. You know, we hired Richard, another 18 year old who you know, we convinced him to go straight from high school at the end of I. E. Not go to college or at least not right now. And he had previously done the clulu video 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 could 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, 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 just want to call out. 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 poach. And we said, hey, no, we can't lose. You know, 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, let's create this fellowship. And that's the new Media fellowship was born to, to help us hire them, but also help help our companies hire them. And so because, you know, there's this sweet spot where you need to be online enough to really know the, the have a taste and have a sensibility and understand these new platforms, 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 do both. And so we've really tried to create 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, you know, 2,000 applications. We picked 65 people. We think they're incredible. Two hires for 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 I think we were really popularizing this term new media, seeing a number of people with new media, JDs, they want ahead 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 Nuby. And so it's cool to see our thought leadership there and more to come. So, yeah, those are the things I'll leave you with in our presentation. Our channels are up tremendously and we're continuing to invest in them. We've got this portfolio offering launched as a service. We're now launching our 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 tremendously engaged. And then we're really building out this new media category creation, this new media talent base for us because we're continuing to hire, but then also our companies.

34:28

Yeah. So, Ben, any closing thoughts?

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I would just say that particularly if you've spent time in the prior media regime of old media, you know, you really have to rethink every instinct that you have, because it's one of the weirdest things where all your instincts are wrong. I mean, we're actually experiencing a little bit of this in AI too, which Martin 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. What happened is, 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 we have to kind of play by the new rules.

41:30

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 a 16z rage on Reddit. Not surprising. For what it's worth, every technical conference I've been at while at A16Z has always had an A16Z fanboy raving about our podcast. Yeah. So Eric, read the contents, read the comments. Don't read the comments.

43:01

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, it doesn't affect me. So I read the comments. But, you know, I. Well, you know, and Markaban 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, you know, raging in their basements, etc, etc, but yeah. In short, don't read the comments.

43:27

Yeah, so I'll just, I'll. 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, like 100% of the time at some point they will tell you, oh, the one thing I never do is read the, read the critics, right? I never read the reviews. 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 my definition, are like, you know, basically bitter, you know, bitter people, you know, who aren't writing novels or whatever. And so of course they're going to be mad. And I know I shouldn't read. I know it's very bad for me. I know it's going to really screw me up. And then I try and then it's like a magnetic pole. I always end up reading them, you know, because it's like three in the morning and I can't resist and then I always end up getting mad. And so 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, we all kind of have that. It's, 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. It has a great title called Kill All Normal Armies. And it's a book actually from like a decade ago that talked about like this kind of very angry Internet culture, you know, that kind of developed after the 2000s and because by the way, the Internet was not always like this. Like in the very, very early days, the Internet was so hard to get onto that the only people who were on the Internet were like basically super, basically like smart, super successful people.

44:02

Yeah, news groups were really good then.

45:45

Yeah, yeah. Like pre1993 news groups were like utopia. And then sort of post 1993 things started going sideways and then things started start. The modern kind of caustic Internet culture really developed in the 2000s and 2000s. But basically it actually turns out there's a genealogy to it. And it actually turns out a lot of it is literally, it's like Call of Duty lobbies for online gaming. So it's literally online gaming lobbies because like when the Xbox and the PlayStation kind of rolled out voice interaction for the first time, they're like, oh, it'd be great for players to be able to talk to each other. And it turns out you just get 12 year old boys in these lobbies just like torching the fuck out of everybody and literally trying to get under their opponent's skin and then being willing to anonymously say absolutely anything to do it. And so that led to very coarse, very vulgar, very offensive kind of thing. And then that kind of culture kind of expanded into early Internet forums, like something awful. And then it started metastasizing into things like YouTube comments. And then obviously social media kind of blew that open and stuff. So there is this, you know, there is this kind of, you know, I don't know, like rage undercurrent to everything. And I guess it 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.

45:46

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

47:07

So yeah, by the way, that includes

47:17

a little interesting to breathe in them, I would say. Yeah.

47:20

And that includes when it's hey Mantra Vanoji.

47:22

Yeah. Yes,

47:24

thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, 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 X16Z and subscribe to our subscribers substack@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

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discussed in this podcast.

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For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com disclosures.

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