The New Media Advantage with Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen

One rule of old media is: don’t be interesting. That’s the worst thing you can do. There is no way to get to anything resembling a story that you’re going to like through the traditional media anymore. It’s basically not possible.

In old media, you had very restricted channels with very restricted formats. New media is unlimited formats on unlimited channels, and the brand is now the person. The grand wizard of this is Alex Karp. If you watch his interviews, he never talks about volunteering.

Everybody just naturally thinks inside out: me and my company and my product out into the world. Don’t think that way. Think in terms of what are the most interesting things happening in the world, and then how do those things relate to us?

Old media is defense-oriented. New media is offense.

Talk more about why that is.

There’s still this anxiety that people have that legacy media is somehow where the respectability and prestige are. I don’t believe that anymore, and I think it’s very important for people to get that out of their system.

First, I just want to say it’s Gaby’s birthday today. I’m so excited for the next one in five, for many reasons, but one is that Ben had floor seats to Game 6 and wasn’t going to make it today, so we’re very lucky that we get to have Ben here.

And, you know, Marc is not a huge basketball guy, but he did tweet about Jaylen Brunson. He had a comment that Brunson operates purely on instincts, not on introspection, and Marc appreciates that.

Richard Nixon, obviously working.

Exactly. Many people are saying that across industries. I actually think that’s pretty interesting, because one of the rules of new media, Marc, that we were talking about with the CEO last week in our growth portfolio, is authenticity—being able to have the same conversations on camera that you would have in person, behind closed doors.

Why don’t you talk about that a bit more, and why it’s so important to really nail your voice and build that presence? A lot of mistakes founders make are trying to be too buttoned-up, trying to be too media-trained, and so on. As we uncover the new rules of new media, where do you start?

I had this really formative experience when I was younger. In the ’90s, when Ben and I were coming up, it was pre-blogs, pre-YouTube, all that stuff. The assumption was that 100% of what you did, if you were running a company or doing anything, was going to have to work through established media, legacy media.

Everybody, of course, would get media-trained in how to do it.

Most painful experience in the world.

Oh, yeah. For people who haven’t been through media training, it’s actually—

Watching yourself on TV—it’s a—

Yeah. So, here’s how media training worked. I don’t know if they still do it, but do they still do it? You guys still do it? Okay. For people who haven’t been through it, you get put in front of one of these cameras in your face, and somebody who you think is your friend does a full 60 Minutes interview with you.

They do it for an hour, and then they literally make you sit there and watch it.

And critique you. You’re looking at yourself fucking it up, and they’re going, “You see how you fucked that up?” And you’re like, “Well, I’m really uncomfortable now. I’m never going on TV.”

Exactly. And you’re like, “Can we just fast-forward?” No, you can’t fast-forward. We’re going to watch the entire thing. And then maybe we’ll watch it again.

It is very revealing. You discover all kinds of things about your personal affect. You discover all the things you do—all the extra words.

How much you hate your voice.

Yes, exactly. How much you hate how you look. I mean, it’s incredible. It’s incredible.

If your ego just survives the beating, you go on to a successful career. That’s what you did. But it was always so weird, because the result always struck me as: wow, you see important people with important things to say on TV, and they just seem like plastic people. They seem fake and staged.

And, by the way, in the old days, all the anchors and interviewers were using an anchorman voice. Then you get a CEO up there who just says the most innocuous things possible.

A lot of CEOs in those days—and, by the way, still—rank their success in doing an interview or giving a speech based on minimum controversy. They come offstage and they’re very proud of themselves because they didn’t make any news.

All news is bad news.

Yeah, that is a key.

Right. So, at the time, we hired what was considered the best media trainer, a guy who had previously been a producer at 60 Minutes.

Lee LeSeldin

We hired Lee Les Elden, who had been a producer. He was actually quite a well-known guy at the time. He had been Lowell Bergman’s producer. Lowell Bergman—no, I mean Mike Wallace. It was that whole complex.

He said, “We’re not doing any of the classic media training that we do. We’re going to do the thing that everybody always underrates, which is we’re going to get you to basically just say all the things in public that you would say if you were sitting having lunch with a friend.”

I remember the back of my head just blew open. It was like, “Okay.” Immediately, you’re like, “Why are we paying this guy? That’s very obvious advice.” And then it’s like, nobody else will give you that advice. What’s going on?

He said, “If you are onstage or in an interview and you’re talking about something and you don’t know that topic inside out already, what the hell are you doing there? The only thing you should ever be talking about is something that you know intimately. If you know it intimately, you should be able to talk about it in a viscerally interesting way that really relates your thoughts on the thing.

“You ought to be able to come across as a very interesting person because you’re talking in the same way you would if you were sitting across the table from a friend. My training is 100% to try to get you to not do all the other stuff and basically be able to do that.”

The other part, because you assume the media is adversarial, was the—I forget what he called it—the pivot or whatever, which was basically just the thing where you answer their questions. You always answer your own questions.

Which, by the way, makes it a little unnatural, right?

It does. It’s the Jedi knight thing that made that whole approach work. You’re talking naturally, but one of the ways you talk naturally is you just refuse to answer the bad questions and substitute in your good question.

We’ve been watching the evolution of the whole new media landscape for 30 years, and it’s just like: wow. If you watch what Palmer Lucky does, or Alex Karp, or Elon, or any of the great communicators, that’s what they’re doing. I’d put Jensen Huang in that rank lately.

By the way, this is the rise of the long-form podcast—the 3-hour conversation—and the re-rise of the idea of interesting people having interesting conversations, which was very radical at one point and is now a common thing.

I think that remains the actual advice. And, of course, Erik, your point is that what this gets across is authenticity. In addition to what’s being said, does the viewer or audience actually feel like they’re meeting a real person?

Yeah, very good points. Related, we’ve been talking about how old media is defense-oriented and new media is offense. Talk more about why that is and what that playbook looks like.

One of the things we were talking about more in that meeting is the importance of outside-in thinking, situating your story within the context of what’s happening externally.

The press, in my view—and reporters get furious with me when I say this, which is why I know that I’m correct.

The traditional press, the legacy press, defined itself as having 2 functions. One was impartial journalism—objective journalism—sometimes called the “voice from nowhere,” which meant presenting both sides of something. By the way, that was under the assumption that everything has 2 sides, and not more than 2 sides, so there’s always something a little bit weird about that. But at least the idea was showing an issue, explaining it, articulating it, and letting different spokespeople for the different points of view actually say it.

The second mission was to speak truth to power. That was the one that got in the way of the first one. That became the way they ended up describing it: “afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.” But it devolved into “power to truth.” So it was the press’s way of intimidating you into not saying what you thought.

Yeah, there’s a line between being actually objective and being activist—somebody with an agenda. My view is that what happened over time is that the second one just swamped the first one, and then it became the thing. As a consequence, the very nature of the interaction changed.

The short version is, I did tons of traditional media between 1994 and 2017. Every once in a while there was a hit piece, a bad-faith thing, or whatever, but 90% of the time I felt like it had been a good idea to do it. I felt like I’d been given a chance to tell my story.

By the way, for almost that entire run, most people in the country and in the press thought startups were kind of cool, and tech was kind of cool and fun. It was kind of good for America that there were these tech companies, and the products were kind of fun to use.

I kind of remember those days.

Yeah, in the ancient mists of the past, everything was exciting. A lot of reporters and editors genuinely viewed it as, “Oh, we need to explain this to our readers and our viewers and really have this come across.”

Then, as we like to say, in 2017, things changed. Basically, since then, my view is that the second mode of being—which is agenda-driven—really took over, and I think it probably will never actually unwind.

The practical reality is we always tell the founders that there is no way to get to anything resembling a story that you’re going to like through the traditional media anymore. It’s basically not possible. Every once in a while, you can land a story, but you can’t run a strategy.

Some people point to individuals with success, and I just feel like, “Okay, that’s the exception that proves the rule.” There are 99 others that are not like that. So there needs to be a new approach.

I think the new approach comes in 2 parts. It comes in what we all now call “go direct,” which is that you have to tell your own story increasingly through your own channels and through the channels of allies. Then the other thing is new voices and new media.

Because the legacy press has gone so bananas, there’s obviously this massive opportunity that’s opened up for the creation of new media, and the examples—many of them are in this room—are spectacular.

I think what’s happening is really funny. Even in the golden age of media, if you wanted to watch a smart person talk about something for an hour, it was Charlie Rose. When I was a kid in the ’80s, it was Charlie Rose at midnight. It was something called the CBS Overnight CBS News Overnight, and he was literally on at midnight. This was before the VCR, so you’d stay up until midnight to watch a smart conversation.

To go from that to what we have today in the podcast world and the Substack world is such an incredible advance, and it’s going incredibly well. I think the new-media world is supremely high quality and doing incredibly well.

There’s still this anxiety that people have, which is that the legacy media is somehow where the respectability or the prestige is. It sounds so silly to say anymore, but I don’t believe that, and I think it’s very important for people to get that out of their system because the world has changed.

To your point, we were just in Washington, so we were with all the Washington people—senators and whatnot. I was asking them, “What does everybody in Washington read?” It’s the Mark Halperin newsletter, which is new media.

I fully expect Axios, The Washington Post, and so forth. The one holdout from people in the firm on old media is, “Well, except for Washington. They all read this old stuff.” Not even that is true. So I think Marc’s right.

Yeah.

Marc, you mentioned going direct. We’re certainly in the era now of going direct. It feels like it’s table stakes for founders, but I’ve talked to a lot of founders who feel that they now have a second job: being the spokesperson for their company on top of running the business day to day.

You can even think of a lot of great founders who spent their lives or careers in a lab or staring at a computer, and this is not what they’ve been trained in. I’m curious about both of your advice for founders who may be uninterested in doing this, or who don’t know where to start. Do they have to get good at it, or are there other paths for them to get their company the attention it deserves?

Yeah, I think this is tricky. If you just go, “Okay, old media,” how did that work in new media? Old media had very restricted channels with very restricted formats, and the brands were the companies. That’s basically the setup.

Yes, you could talk to The New York Times or CNN or whatever if you wanted to get the word out, but then you were forced into a quote or a very short interview or something like that. You were representing a brand that wasn’t you, and that’s just kind of how it worked.

The whole media strategy was basically just to get your name out there without tainting the company to the point where it could never recover. That’s how you got into this very defensive posture, because you could never take back anything. That was a big rule in old media.

Then you get to new media, and new media is the opposite: unlimited formats, unlimited channels, and the brand is now the person. When every Democrat came out and was mad about SpaceX, they weren’t mad at the company; they were mad at Elon because he’s a brand. The same thing: Is it Palantir or is it Alex Karp? Is it Anduril or is it Palmer Luckey? That’s just over and over again.

The companies that are winning in marketing—the brand is the person. If you had another founder or somebody who is a really permanent fixture and not the CEO, you could imagine that person becoming the brand, but it’s going to be a person. I don’t think there’s a way around that.

The rule of new media is that it has to be interesting, because otherwise it’s going to get drowned out. You have to be a person, and that person has to be interesting. That’s why old media is so dangerous, because the one rule of old media is, “Don’t be interesting.” That’s the worst thing you can do. You’ll screw everything up.

So I don’t think a company can get away without it. If you look at us as a firm, technically I’m really the CEO, but Marc is more the brand, I would say, in terms of he just does way more media than I do. That works because it’s Andreessen Horowitz, and nobody knows the difference on the outside. It’s fine.

You can set up your company that way, where people don’t have to know how you’re run. That’s fine. But it’s got to be somebody who’s there kind of forever with the organization. It can’t be the vice president of marketing who’s here for a 3-year run and then is gone. That will never work.

Enron is another example.

One of my favorite things that happens about once a week is when somebody congratulates me on writing Ben’s book.

But he always takes full credit for it.

I do. I do. I really poured a lot of my blood, sweat, and tears into that book. I’m just so glad that somebody finally read it.

I think there’s actually a technological explanation for what Ben said that’s quite important. Up until basically the 1930s or so, companies didn’t have corporate brands. You had the Ford, you had people. It was the Ford Motor Company; it was the Edison Electric Company. It was literally a name on the door. I’m positive it never occurred to Henry Ford to name his company anything other than the Ford Motor Company.

Well, he did have a company before the Ford Motor Company, right? I think somebody’s got to look it up. I think it became Cadillac or something, or it was actually a car company that lasted. He was CTO; he wasn’t CEO. He got into such a furious fight with the CEO—Henry Ford was a hothead—that he quit his own company.

Yeah, a lot of those were named after people. Chrysler was another one with the other guys.

Oh, yeah, they’re all named after themselves. I think maybe it was Ford, and then when he quit, they renamed it. That could be it.

Yeah, something else. So it was a name on the door.

Yeah.

It was just taken as a given because that’s the guy running the company. That’s what you do. Then I think, in the 1930s and 1940s, you started getting International Business Machines, General Electric, and General Motors. You started getting these abstract names.

Then you got the consumer-brand thing with Procter & Gamble. You had Tide, Colgate, Crest toothpaste, and all these things. The Nifty 50, the conglomerate era, led to the conglomerates, which were basically just piling up as many brands as you could.

I think what happened was, in retrospect, that was because of the rise of centralized media. Before the 1930s, media was very decentralized. Every town had 15 newspapers. There were tiny little radio stations everywhere. Then, starting in the 1930s and 1940s, media centralized hard in a way that was very unprecedented historically. It was probably a once-in-a-thousand-year thing that happened.

The thing with centralized media was that it was like drinking everything through an incredibly narrow straw. By definition, if there are 3 TV networks and 24 hours in the day, there’s only ever so much time you’re going to get. If there’s the front page of 3 big newspapers, how many column inches are you ever going to get?

The message from any company had to get distilled down to the absolute minimum to be able to get through those very narrow straws. I think that was the corporate-brand phenomenon: getting the thing down to an atomic unit of a brand, to be able to get it through that straw.

Everybody became convinced that was just universally the way the world worked. But I think that only made sense in the centralized-media world. I think what we’re seeing, as the centralized-media world is now unwinding and collapsing, is that mechanically, that’s why this new approach is working and is necessary.

There are many examples of this, but do people running for president have to go on Joe Rogan? Up until 2024, the answer was absolutely not. After 2024, the answer is 100% yes. A big part of all the Democratic retrospectives of what happened in 2024 was that Kamala didn’t go on Rogan. 100% of the people who work in that world now think that the next person is going to have to go on Rogan.

To go on Rogan means you’re going to have to be on Rogan for 3 hours, and you’re going to have to talk about anything. If you think about what that means for the bar for the person who’s going to run, for whatever party—for both parties, or any party—that’s the new bar. You have to be able to do that. You have to be interesting, and then it goes right back to your question. You have to be the person who can do that. If you’re not the person who can do that—

It’s a big marketing deficit. Let’s just put it that way. You just put a ceiling on your whole opportunity, I think.

The line from Succession, of course—I can’t avoid that. I can’t not use it in answering your question—is when Shiv said, “If you can’t ride two elephants at the same time, what are you doing in the circus?”

Yeah.

I’d love to hear how you apply this thinking to your own work. You mentioned earlier that you and Marc spend a lot of time discussing how and when to respond to things publicly, and also when not to say anything. I’m curious what those discussions are like for you both. How do you decide when to fight back versus stay quiet? Maybe there are times you wish you had done things differently.

Yeah, it’s interesting with that because anytime somebody says something negative about us, we want to respond. But you have to determine whether that’s going to improve your position, or whether they’re just feeding you bait to get you to highlight their stupid opinion.

It’ll always improve your situation to fight back.

Yeah, always, 100%. You have to have some discipline, otherwise you’ll spend your whole life responding. The bigger you get, the more people can come at you.

It’s kind of like the degenerate version: dealing with people who comment on Twitter—or X, sorry. If you start answering the X replies of people who have 50 followers—by the way, my father always did that—then it’s a colossal waste of time, and you’re amplifying somebody who has no audience. What are you doing?

Those people shouldn’t even be talking to you. They didn’t do anything in life to have the right to talk to you, but there you are, talking to them and wasting your time. That’s the extreme degenerate case.

However, if somebody comes out with something and it hits, and it’s going after you, that’s a real opportunity to boost the brand and come across with your own point of view, your own position. This could be something in the media or something somebody does in new media.

A reasonable portion of the brand that we built was just responding to people attacking us. I always saw that every time it happened as a great opportunity: “Let’s go.” One of my favorite things I ever wrote was about Instagram. We got into this kerfuffle over Instagram with The New York Times. We had a conflict; whatever, it was a thing. But I responded, and it was the biggest post I had ever written at that time. Everybody was like, “Yeah, fuck The New York Times.”

It took us from here to here in one shot because everybody loves a fight. Fights are good for brand building. You just have to pick the right fight so you don’t just build somebody else’s brand.

Well, to that end, when I first joined, I would bring up these negative tweets we were getting and say, “These anons are saying bad things about us.” You guys would be like, “Who cares?” This is, in fact, part of our success: we’re going to have more and more people saying negative things.

Well, specifically, they were saying mean things based on the things that we were funding. They were saying, “The whole model is flawed.”

So you’re putting slop.

You’re funding slop. And it’s like, bro, it’s great that we’re funding things. Even if you think that, what is better in this world than the transfer of wealth from people who have a lot of money to people who have ideas and want to build something? Even if we’re wrong about everything, that’s still good for humanity. So shut up, hater.

Yes.

Idiots.

Yes.

Hater, hater. So, yeah, my response was, “No, that’s a great thing to criticize us for. We’re funding startups and supporting those startups.” That’s fantastic.

There’s a point within that that’s also an important change in new media, which is that you really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don’t want to be neutral. You don’t want to be lukewarm, because then you’re uninteresting.

You can’t be interesting and not have people both hate you and love you.

Just because there’s too much—no matter what you do, there’s too much jealousy and hatred in the world for it not to be that way. As soon as you get big, that’s what happens. There’s nobody—I used to say, when people got upset about things that were written about us, “Nobody writes a puff piece on Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk. It’s never going to happen again. It’s over.”

When you get to a certain size, people hate you, and that’s good, because that means you did it. You did something important. You made a mark on the world. People care about what you’re doing, and you have to take it that way. If you take it like, “Oh, I’ve got to stop doing that so people like me,” you’ll ruin your marketing.

Yeah.

Marc, since I’ve used the term, they have all the right enemies. It’s picking the right people to hate you that galvanizes the people who love you. What about building the right marketing and media team in the age of new media? What have you guys learned, or what advice do you have for CEOs in terms of making sure you get the right personality? What’s the principle you think about when building that team?

Well, the first principle is that if you’re trained in old media, it’s very, very, very hard to do new media. You have to be a very exceptional person to make that transition, because if you spent 10 years doing old media, there are laws of physics and rules of the game—things that you do every single time. From vetting reporters to rude Q&As to this and that, everything about it is opposite world.

There are very few people who can go, “Okay, I’m getting out of opposite world and going into a new media world.” You just have to be careful, on the new-media side of what you’re doing, about hiring too much experience in not-new media. It looks like marketing, but it’s not the same. It’s a completely new skill set, so I would say that’s probably the thing I’d worry about the most.

With Erik, what we looked for when we brought you on, for example, is that the best thing in new media is: Have you done it? Have you built some brand around something and some audience? Do you know how to build an audience? Because that’s the core thing. If you can’t do that, it doesn’t matter if you’ve got this skill and that skill and the other skill. You have to be able to deliver it end to end.

Yep. And in terms of people we’ve brought on, like Alex Danco, Henry, or Brent, they’re product managers, founders, or investors, but they were obsessed with the discourse. They were listening to the podcast and writing themselves. You could tell in the proof of work, even though they weren’t doing the thing.

Yeah, storytelling on your new media team—that’s such a good point. The reason why Alex is so good is that he’s a world-class storyteller. Forget marketing for a second: can you put together a story that somebody wants to read or listen to, or whatever? That’s a real skill, and the elite level of that is way higher than the average level of that.

The people who can’t do it, by the way, can never do it. Many people from the old marketing world don’t have that skill because you would always rely on the principal, the CEO, or somebody else for that story. But if you can build a team with multiple good storytellers, that’s a huge power boost.

By the way, there’s a really big disconnect that goes back to the authenticity point. There’s a really big disconnect in how people in the media sphere think about this, because every reporter listening to what we’re saying would be like, “Oh, there are only 2 things: there’s journalism and there’s propaganda.” The mainstream press, the traditional press, does journalism, and if you’re doing any kind of direct anything, it’s propaganda. It’s just marketing. It’s just trying to sell something.

That’s a distinction that we 100% don’t agree with. There’s a critique aspect of it, which is that I don’t think the press does much of what even they would describe as objective journalism anymore. But the positive side of it is, I think it goes right back to one of the reasons you want to be authentic: you want to actually have people understand who you are. You want to have people actually understand what you do. And you want people to understand the context within which you’re doing what you’re doing.

So you want to actually explain yourself and explain the world. And when you talk about storytelling, it’s very much not storytelling like a made-up story. It’s storytelling like, “Here’s what’s actually happening,” in an interesting way.

With tension, with a beginning and an end, so that somebody is interested in following it the whole way.

Yeah, that’s right. And as a consequence—and we really look for this—when Ben and I get feedback from the street, we’re routinely told, “Wow, I watched the podcast. I saw this interview. I read that post from the firm.” 100% of the time, they’re like, “Wow, that was great. I really understand what that topic is about.”

That’s a very honest, legitimate, positive, worthwhile reaction to very honest, positive, legitimate action on our part. The other way to put this is that this isn’t just something people should do. This is, I think, a responsibility for people in our world and for people in tech now.

The changes happening in tech right now are profound. They’re really hard to understand from the outside, and they’re really complicated. There are huge amounts of noise in the environment. So actually explaining honestly what’s going on—

I’ll just brag on our team. We put a SpaceX post up today. Although it has my name on it, I had nothing to do with writing it. I cannot take any credit for it. The feedback I’m already getting is that it’s the best thing anybody’s ever written on SpaceX, and I think that’s true. It literally lays out the actual truth, and I’m really proud of that.

It’s awesome. I want to close by going deeper on some advice for founders about going direct. Gaby, I’ll start with you. What are some mistakes that you see CEOs making, and what things should they avoid?

I would say there are 2 mistakes that I commonly saw when working with founders. They’re sort of related. The first one is that it can be very easy to overdo this—it’s a trap to fall into because the timeline feels so addicting—but a lot of founders really overindex on distribution and tactics before actually getting the message right.

Distribution is really just a multiplier on the message. If the message is wrong, now you’ve amplified something that is either irrelevant for your business, not what your audience needs to hear, or, as we’ve talked about, maybe worst of all, uninteresting. And now you’ve told everybody you care about that you’re not very interesting.

In practice, a lot of founders would come to us and say, “How do we go viral?” or “How do we get on Joe Rogan?” If you actually think about it, you could get on Joe Rogan and then not say the right thing. This is maybe the worst thing ever.

This is important because it applies not just to old media, but to new media, too. You could go on Bloomberg or Fox and get the message wrong, and you could also do the same thing with new media or by going direct. The first mistake is not actually spending the time to get the message right. That’s the highest-leverage, most important thing to get right.

From there, I guess the next mistake is figuring out how to do that. The way that I saw that happen is that you can get the message wrong if you focus too much on the inputs as opposed to the outputs or outcomes that you want to drive toward. This is sort of paradoxical, because the companies that are very successful struggle with this the most.

There are a lot of interesting things that you could say about your company. There are so many milestones, the mission is really compelling, and there are a lot of different things that you would want to say. But depending on what you’re trying to achieve, the thing that you want to say should probably be different. Just because everything is true doesn’t mean it’s all relevant or strategic for your business.

Instead of starting with the inputs—“Here’s this huge, massive list of everything that we could say. Let’s just say it all right now and hope people remember potentially the thing that we think is most interesting, but we haven’t identified that thing”—start with the outcome. Do we want to sell to a certain type of enterprise customer? Do we want to hire a certain type of engineer who believes a certain thing about us and our role in the market?

Now you can work backward from there. We know who these people are, we know what they believe, we know what they probably believe or need to believe about us, and we know what feels urgent, timely, and personal to them in the discourse.

And then we can work backwards and get the message right. So, going back to point 1, you pair that with really powerful distribution, and then you have a really winning strategy.

And by the way, a really important point in what Gaby said is that it really determines how you have to put the team together. If you put together a team that you can't have a conversation with, where you're aligned on your message and what you're saying, then you've kind of done yourself a disservice. You need the team to help make the story great before they go, because it's really easy to go, “Okay, market this empty box.”

There are a few marketers who could probably do that, but it's hard. So you really want the team to be invested in the message, and then all the variations you need to distribute that message are going to be really good and on point. But if the team doesn't have an opinion on the message, that's very difficult.

Marc, one of the things we said in that meeting with the growth portfolio company the other week was what you admire about people like Alex Karp, Palmer Luckey, Elon Musk, or others: the ability to not just focus on what they're doing, but also go outside in and talk about what's happening in the world and how they situate their worldview, their company, their product, et cetera, within that. Would you talk a little bit about that principle and how people get good at it?

Yeah. So the most common VC story—the marketing story—is, “Oh, I met this great founder, and we went on a walk, and then I called him 8 times, and I thought he was great, and I eventually convinced him to take money.” The most common startup story is, “Oh, we're a brand-new company. We're all fired up. We're ready to go. It's going to be great. We have a new product. We hope you try it.” And those stories just make you want to stab yourself in the neck, right? I mean, it's just like, “Oh my God.” It's just the lamest story in the world.

By the way, details. One of the keys on this is that good storytellers have great details. Details matter a lot. The one thing about Marc's story that makes it so horrible is that it has no details, just, “Blah, blah, blah, I'm so great. I talked to the founder, he really liked me. You'll probably really like me, too.” Who cares?

And it's almost the thing where they come across as fake humble, right? Because it's just like—

Or they say—

“I'm humbled by—”

That's the most fake-humble thing in the world: “I'm humbled by—”

You're not even remotely humble. And so, yeah, it's just the worst. There are a whole bunch of critiques: it's fake bragging, it's boring, it's egocentric to no purpose, and it's passive-aggressive. And then it's indistinguishable—there are just a thousand of them. It's every single startup.

Everybody can gaze at their navel, right?

Everybody can do that. There's nobody who can't do that. So that's not a differentiated story. And so that's the default kind of narrative that people fall into.

It also feels, I think, like doing anything bigger than that is arrogant, because it's just like, who are we to go tell some bigger thing? I don't even know what the bigger thing would be. Aren't the people who tell the bigger thing full of themselves and trying to make themselves look even bigger? So there's just this real reluctance to expand the telescope out.

But what I would tell people is the exact opposite of all of that is true. The story of you and your startup is not inherently an interesting story, but there is almost certainly an interesting story that involves your startup. And that's the cheat code: the story is something else in the world that's happening that is incredibly interesting, that your company relates to.

And then, by the way, the grand wizard of this is Alex Karp. If you watch his interviews, he never talks about Palantir. The only thing he ever says about Palantir—Marc pointed this out to me—is “ontology” and “orchestration,” 2 words that nobody knows what they mean. [Laughter]

Nobody knows what Palantir does as a result, but it doesn't matter because it's like, you know, the future of the U.S. military: Palantir. Superintelligence: Palantir. Whatever the story is that's really good, Alex will go tell that story. Neurodivergence.

He's just like, whatever is interesting, he'll just start talking about it. And then, because he's the founder and CEO of Palantir, that just works. I say it kind of facetiously, but it's really a good strategy. He takes it to the very extreme, but that's the right idea: find the most interesting story that you can plug your company into, and then tell that story.

Yeah, because what happens is then when something happens in the world—something involving the U.S. military, AI in the military, geopolitics, or China—he's the first phone call, right? He's the guy who's been out there talking about that. By the way, Ryan Petersen is in the audience, who's done a phenomenal job of that.

He's good at that. Exactly. Right, the difference between talking about freight versus talking about the global supply chain completely collapsing during COVID and us all going to starve to death, right? [Laughter] And therefore, he's the guy who literally goes on 60 Minutes to explain to the world that, in fact, yes, we're all about to starve to death.

From the helicopter, right?

Yes, from the helicopter. Look at all those ships that are never landing. Your children are about to starve. By Flexport. [Laughter]

And you don't even have to say “by Flexport.” It just happens.

It's implicit. It's implicit. And then the other thing, especially for enterprise—anything involving enterprise sales, which is certainly Flexport but also Palantir—is that a big part of it is: are you important enough to meet with the CEO of your customer? Are you important enough to get in the room with the decision-maker? Are you important enough to meet with the Secretary of War? Are you important enough to be in the White House? Are you important enough to be with Fortune 500 CEOs?

I have a little startup that's doing interesting things that's not doing that, but I am attached to it, and you have seen me talk about the big, important things that are happening in the world, how they relate, and how we potentially have an answer to them. That's absolute catnip. Everybody wants that.

The way I describe this is: everybody naturally thinks inside out—me, my company, and my product out into the world. Don't think that way. Think in terms of what the most interesting things happening in the world are, and then how those things relate to us.

And by the way, this is where CEOs go off the rails, because they're so focused on what they're doing. All they want to do is tell their story, and they're not even paying attention to what's going on in the world, which is understandable because you're trying to build something. But to do the marketing exercise, investing in understanding what's happening out there is critically important. You can't do it without that.

This, by the way, happens also in investor relations. Every company—you know this—every public company, by law, does these S1, K1, Q, whatever-Q filings. They have you spend all this time and all this effort on these documents. This filing fully explains everything the company does, and they have every possible hedge and mea culpa, and all these incredible descriptions of people. And then there are the annual letters and all this stuff.

What percentage of the investors in Palantir have read the S1, K1? Like, 0.0001%. What percentage have seen Alex on YouTube doing his thing?

Yeah, exactly.

100%.

Yeah, yeah. And the amount of time that goes into that document, right? So you just take that time and understand enough about the world to put together a good story.

On that note, we'll end with this idea that the skill set is not only something you're born with; it can be developed, learned, and cultivated. Marc, you were saying the other day that when you look back at Alex Karp's old interviews, they're very different. And so when you look at Alex, Palmer, Elon, Ryan, or Amjad, who came here earlier, you look back at their old tweets or their old interviews, and they're nowhere close to where they were.

Oh yeah, it’s a skill set for sure. There are people who are gifted, and then people who are less good. If you look at Donald Trump’s interviews in the 1980s, they’re very old-media interviews. He’s actually restrained.

[laughter]

And then he figured out new media, and he’s always super entertaining and interesting, which is kind of the magic of his popularity. So even at that level, you can develop it.

Yeah. On that note, it’s a great place to wrap. Let’s do a round of applause for Gaby, Ben, and Marc.

Thank you.

[applause]