The New Media Playbook with Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz

Today’s going to be a fun one. We’re going to dive into all things new media: what new media is, what the new media team is doing here at a16z, what we’re focused on, and where we’re going in 2026. I’m really stoked to be making this happen.

Ben 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, and 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.”

Yeah. That sounds like something I said.

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

Yeah, so it’s a really weird adjustment going from—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 defended against was leaked results.

The reason goes back to the pretty early days of the firm. The New York Times got a leak of our results. They were very—I mean, we were a young firm, so most of the funds were about a year old. 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.

They misinterpreted the results. It might have been the Wall Street Journal—I mean, one of the two. They said, “The early funds were good because those had enough years to get returns in them, but fund 3 was terrible,” and so forth. Because old media was still powerful, it was very hard to combat. We put out statements, blog posts, and everything else explaining why they were wrong, but it didn’t land.

Inside the firm, it was such a big crisis that I’m pretty sure Balaji quit because he thought we were dead—because the New York Times had just ruined the whole firm with that article. It was that kind of existential threat.

We were very oriented around, “Don’t let anything out that could be misinterpreted,” because you can never correct it. It goes out there, and you’re never going to come back from it.

Say more about the “flood the zone” concept in terms of why it works, why it’s so different from what happened in the past.

Traditionally, it didn’t count if it wasn’t in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, The Economist, CNN, or one of the maybe eight channels that could say something. Whatever they said was permanent, and once it was out there, it was very hard to deal with. It would be at the top of the Google results—the whole thing.

But now, Marc 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 basically—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.

Without commenting on what’s a better world, the laws of physics are completely different in this world than in the other world. To be effective as an organization in marketing and media, you have to embrace the new world. 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.

You have to commit: “We’re going to really care about what goes down through the old channels,” or, “We’re not going to give a—sorry to use the language—we’re just going to say interesting things and flood the zone.” We’re doing the latter, by the way.

There’s a whole history to this. Basically, the whole idea that there’s a corporate brand, that there’s a corporate trademark, and that as a business you load everything into that thing—whether it’s General Electric, International Business Machines, or whatever. The idea is that the corporation is somehow abstracted away from the people involved, and the main job of the people involved is to buff that thing.

When we look at it retrospectively, that led to this reign of everything being synthetic, plastic, and boring. Ben and I have had this experience for many decades at this point. The job of a corporate CEO for a very long time was to get up onstage and say absolutely nothing at any sort of public event.

I was on a board with a CEO who very firmly believed this. He would literally come offstage having very deliberately said absolutely nothing and would have been thrilled, because he had made no news. Mission accomplished.

Erik, to your question, the retrospective view is that, in the past, our communication channels were incredibly narrow. How could you get a message through to the mass market, or to your audience or customer base? You could only do it by sending a message encoded into as few bits as possible, because that was your only shot. It was always limited by television broadcast airtime, newspaper column inches, or whatever.

You had to crystallize everything down to the most minimal and least offensive position possible. But that’s always been unnatural, because as human beings, it never felt right. It always felt weird. The corporation was this strange, alien thing, but we got used to it.

It turns out, as our friend Mitt Romney famously said, “Corporations are people, too.” He was using it in a different context—he was not calling for a change in PR—but for our purposes, it’s all about people. It’s all about the decisions that people make.

When a big company, a government agency, a nonprofit, a venture firm, or a startup is making decisions and acting in the world, that’s people. There are some set of people who are sitting around making that decision.

It’s almost like shock therapy when the people who are actually making the calls show up, talk on their own behalf, explain themselves, and say what they think. It blows everybody’s minds. It’s the response people have to Elon and to certain other people who are now very notable in the environment, who are running large organizations and are very public and vocal.

It’s this thing of, “They can’t say that.” Well, wait a minute. Number one, they can say that. They’re allowed to. They’re an adult in the United States of America; they’re allowed to say whatever they want. Number two, how about they actually tell us what they think? How about we hear directly from them so that we can understand what they’re thinking, who they are, how they’re processing reality, and what their assumptions are?

The technological catalyst for this is that the narrow media funnel just got completely blown to smithereens, in large part as a consequence of all the work that all of us on this call have done over the last 30 years.

You could say, “Love it or hate it,” but the days of narrowcasting through a narrow channel, followed by what I would argue was the inherently deceptive practice of abstracting things away from people—that world is clearly fading. In the new world, we’re going to hear directly from people.

I’m not a utopian, and it’s not going to be 100% better, but I think there’s no question that it’s a big net improvement.

Yeah. The other thing that’s really interesting in retrospect is the number of things that people got in trouble for, were canceled for, or were fired for because of what they said in the press. They were all just misinterpretations.

Somebody would say something, and because the channel was so narrow, because you could never erase it, and because you could never come back and defend it—the audience would be a thousandth of the size on the defense.

People just—it was all—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 people say much more aggressive things, I would just say, in terms of not being mainstream thinking but having room to explain it, that rarely happens anymore.

Everything from Howard Dean to—you name it. In today's world, that would be nothing. But in that world, because there was no chance to say, “Well, this is what happened,” there were just thousands of times when people have gotten into incredible trouble for things that they said that were misinterpreted, that they could not correct.

And Erik, Ben gave me good advice before you came on board, which I'm trying my best to stick to, although I will tell you it is a significant personal challenge.

Yeah.

Again, it 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. Because we live in a healthy world now—a less self-destructive world.

Ben pointed out that what he just said basically applies to the new world just as much as the old world, in the sense that every time I've gotten myself in serious trouble in public over the last decade, it's because I tweeted something. Everybody on here probably knows how much I love Twitter, and it's great to be able to riff off the 140. I was really good at compressing something supercontroversial into 140 characters and then really letting it rip with 280 characters.

But Ben pointed out, “Look, every time somebody gets mad at you, every time somebody just gets completely riled up at you over that, basically what's happened is it's out of context.” So what Ben said is, “Look, just say everything that you think, but say it on a podcast. Say it in the context of an hour-and-a-half discussion, so that whatever it is, you've surrounded it with the full explanation. Or say it in the form of an essay where you've fully articulated your argument and it's fully in context.”

Observationally, not just playing to myself but 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 too short. When people actually do the full, long-form explanation of what they think, even if it's imputed to be highly controversial, if it's the full explanation, it's actually harder to blow people up.

Again and again, you could say it's actually really funny. When I was a kid, the moral panic was around television, pre-internet. A lot of the moral panic around television was always around the concept of sound bites, which is that you only ever get to hear 5 seconds of what anybody's thoughts are. Somehow television is now the gold standard for information transmission and the internet is evil. Somehow it all flipped.

But anyway, the point is that the internet gives us the chance not only to express ourselves in short form; it specifically gives us the chance to express ourselves in long form and fully explain things. The hour-, hour-and-a-half-, or 2-hour discussion with somebody who's deeply into something and really involved in something is just so much better than the 30-second bit that might have been on the NBC Nightly News 30 years ago.

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

Or is it really? As far as things go, there's always that thing with sugar, using bones or whatever to be whiter, that kind of thing.

I'm going to eat a gigantic package of Oreos tonight. Deborah's on her. I really appreciate it.

Oh, yeah. We've also talked about media training in the past. It used to be around how to stay out of trouble, this kind of thing. And now, if you're a CEO, you want to be something—Jordi from TV's concept of a Joe Rogan CEO. I mean, someone interesting enough to go on Joe Rogan for 3 hours, someone like Alex Karp or Palmer Luckey, right?

The flip side of that is that if you're interesting, if you're powerful, it's because you're interesting. That's what people want to work for. It's people they want to be customers of. It's people they want to invest in.

And if you're powerful and interesting, you're going to be controversial. That's something that you guys have also helped me get more accustomed to: “Hey, this is the big leagues. There are people who are going to be mad at what we're doing, and that is, in some ways, a good thing. That's evidence of our power and our interestingness.”

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And I think 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 try and keep all the dust off the brand and try to be something that nobody hates, I guess, for lack of a better word.

And then I think, in today's world, to be good at marketing, you've got to be interesting. If you're interesting and powerful, there are going to be a lot of people who don't like you. That's a good thing.

I was very happy to see, by the way, the infrared piece, because we can get a nice piece on a subsection of the firm, but nobody's ever going to write a really nice thing about the whole firm.

I think 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 professional CEOs often get to that position through very careful politicking, which is kind of the opposite: You want to be uncontroversial. Nobody can ding you as you get to the thing.

Marc and I have been on large boards—Marc much more than me. On large boards, 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. That is all to our advantage, because we basically deal almost entirely with founder CEOs.

I want to transition to one more structural mechanic because it's a segue into how we've built our team a little bit. It's this media system and the McLuhan quote: “If it's on TV, it's a TV show.” Let's talk about how the different formats yield different types of content. Do you want to talk about it?

Okay. You want me to do it?

Okay. All right. This is the thing. Marshall McLuhan was the great media theorist of the TV era. His work has held up really well, and it's worth reading. He had this thing that Erik just said: “If it's on TV, it's a television show.”

In other words, basically, as he said, “The medium is the message.” TV is a specific kind of technology. It's a specific kind of media technology. Basically, all of the questions around TV are: Is it a 3-minute news segment? Is it a 20-minute sitcom? Is it a 40-minute drama? There's very little variation in what you can do because it's just linear, straight broadcast video.

He said, basically, the medium in its first 10 or 20 years evolved 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 two. It's basically a little story. It's a little story that plays out 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.

Now they're doing streaming. They're doing serial stories. But television shows, properly, generally were one-offs. You could watch episodes out of order. And so they're these very self-contained little, basically, plays—little stage plays broadcast on video. They're self-contained little stories, and they need to appeal to emotion because it's an emotional medium.

Right, it's not an information-dense medium. It's a medium that literally put somebody in your living room. Basically, they're little morality plays: there have to be good guys and bad guys, a very simplistic story, a few mild plot twists, and then everything wraps up at the end.

And he said the consequence is that everything on television has to be a television show. That includes everything in the real world that gets talked about on television: it has to be turned into a television show. This is the running joke of following current events or politics on TV right now. On either party, it's like, “Oh, it's time for the next season. This is the new main plot that's happening, and this is the new secondary plot that's happening.”

If you watch CNN every night, they're just playing with these stories over time the way a soap opera might, or a drama might, or occasionally how a comedy might. We've just lived in a world where everything seems like a TV show. It's a world where all the edges are sanded off, everything is smooth and professional, and everything is within this very narrow band of what can be put into these little morality plays.

Okay, Marshall McLuhan is unfortunately long dead, but I assert that if he were alive today, he would say, “If it's on the internet, it's a viral internet post.” What's the native medium of the internet? What's the form of media on the internet that rips and dominates? It's clearly the viral post. It's the viral tweet, the viral TikTok, the viral Instagram, the viral Facebook post, the viral Substack, and the viral YouTube video. It's very clearly the post, and specifically the viral post. It's the one that really rips.

Basically, you're right. My theory is, if it's on the internet, everything is a viral post. Then you ask yourself 2 questions. What's the characteristic of a viral post? 9 times out of 10, it's something that really gets people cranked up.

It might be about whatever your favorite pop star said yesterday, whatever a politician said, or whatever a business leader said, but it's something that causes people to flip out. Maybe some people flip out positively and some people flip out negatively. Something caused people to flip out.

The other thing with viral posts that's really interesting is you can observe this in the data: they have a very rapid rise. If they're going to take off, they tend to do so within 12 hours. Then they spike like crazy as everybody retweets or reposts, emails it around, and talks about it. Then there's a half-life falloff: 12 hours up, 24 hours down, and 36 hours later it's gone from our collective memory.

The reason is that another one has popped up and taken off instead. If you take a step back and chart the media landscape that we've all been living in for the last 5 years for sure, but you could even say probably 10 years, what we've lived through is literally thousands of cycles of viral posts.

Is this good or bad or something in the middle? You can have a big debate about that. I would argue it's its own form of emotionality. It's basically things that spike the cortisol, so it's things that are controversial. It leans into that, but the other side is that they're things that are interesting.

People get a vote on what goes viral. It's not just up to a news producer what shows up on TV. There's that aspect to it.

Another aspect, by the way, is that stories come and go much more quickly now. There'll be something that pops, and it's the world's biggest crisis in whatever sector it's talking about, and everybody in the world has an opinion. This is where I was using, a while back, the meme of “the current thing.” Everybody has to have an opinion on the current thing. It's the most important thing in the world.

Then 24 hours later, it's like it never happened because something else has become the current thing. That leads to the new version of the old-time strategy for getting through a media crisis: just make sure something else becomes the new viral post. Get something else elevated into that thing.

But anyway, I think as long as the internet is the medium of choice, we're going to live in a world in which this is the cycle. It's a 24-to-36-hour cycle.

By the way, traditional media in the form of newspapers and television, at least the way I read them, are basically covering whatever was the viral post yesterday or a week ago. They're being driven by internet viral posts, which is why I think the internet viral post is the higher-order thing.

I could do a whole long thing on that, but if you're a television producer, a news editor, or whatever, you can't possibly move your organization fast enough to stay ahead of these cycles. What you end up doing is chasing them. That's basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our lives: to follow the internet viral post.

I never saw a funny joke on The Daily Show years ago where they were talking to the newspaper guy, and he said, “Why do you call it news? You should call it olds.”

That's good. He was interviewing the managing editor of The New York Times at the time. He was in his office, and The New York Times was expecting to get glowing coverage on The Daily Show. Whoever it was shows up in the office and says what Ben just said, and the editor is completely confused. He clearly has no idea what the Daily Show guy is talking about.

He's like, “What do you mean?” The guy points to a pile of literally physical newspapers on the editor's desk and says, “Look, it's all old news.” He says, “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.”

Again, what do they have? They're very proud of this. They have their editorial process, their publication process, and their multilayered bureaucratic mechanism for all the news that's fit to print. It's at least a 24-hour cycle to figure that out.

24 hours later, the internet has already moved on from whatever the last thing was. It's another example of the dog chasing the car, except now they have to chase it every single day, which might be why they're so upset all the time.

Yeah, they are pissed.

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

Almost all of the tech world is on X, whether you like it or not. Our world lives on X, just because that's also where all the AI researchers, AI influencers, and crypto influencers—everybody in our world—lives, at least in part. So we can't avoid it, even if we didn't like it. But we love it.

Were you about to say something, Marc?

Oh, yeah. No, I was just going to say, what Ben said is—yeah, I posted a link to a book called The True Believer that talks about this. The old characterization is elites and masses, which is a little bit 20th century, but people who are spending 24 hours a day trying to understand domains like AI or politics or whatever, they're on X.

That's not the mass market. That's not most of humanity, but that's most of the people who are basically in what you might—I don't know what you want to call it—the knowledge-synthesis business, or whatever, where they're trying to understand and formulate policies on things and so forth.

Obviously, it’s also true that TikTok and Instagram have much more reach. They’re much bigger; they reach the mass 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 leading—the edge of the process of idea formation and propagation, where people in positions of authority are figuring out what they think—is almost entirely on X. That’s almost entirely on X.

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

Yeah.

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

Yeah. The 2 more structural things that, Marc, I want you to explain—and then I want you to present some slides and give some detail about what we’re doing that relates to what I’m about to say—are, first, the OODA loop and why that makes Twitter and social media so much more powerful in terms of forming consensus. The other is the difference between written and oral culture, and what’s prioritized as we transition to oral.

Yeah. These are both long topics, so I’ll try to do the CliffsNotes version. I’ll link to the book on this, but in military theory, there’s a concept called maneuver warfare, which basically just says, “Speed wins.” Speed wins, as compared to mass winning. If you believe that, then there’s this framework called the OODA loop, which originally was developed for fighter pilots and later for broader military strategy.

The OODA loop is an acronym. It stands for observe, orient, decide, act. It’s basically the decision-making cycle. Observe is viewing the outside world; orient is figuring out where you are with respect to the outside world; decide, of course, is deciding what to do; and act is acting. Basically, what Boyd, who came up with this idea, said was that any fighter pilot, any military operation, any basketball player, any company, or any government goes through a decision-making cycle like that in order to make decisions.

We just talked about how The New York Times has its own OODA loop. It takes 24 hours to go through its process. Basically, what Boyd said is that 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. One question is simply whether your OODA loop is faster than the other guy’s. But the other thing that can happen is that if you can have a sustainably faster OODA-loop processing cycle than the next guy, then you can get inside the other guy’s loop.

Let’s say it takes you an hour to figure something out and it takes the other guy 2 hours to figure something out. You start out on an even playing field, and you both start your decision-making cycles. You make your decision within an hour, while the other guy is still inside his own OODA loop. You make your decision and act within an hour; he’s only halfway through his process.

He now has to start his process over because you’ve changed the landscape and the parameters of what’s going on. He has to go back, re-observe, reorient, and start over. Then you decide again within an hour, and by the time he gets halfway through his process, he gets interrupted. He has to go back.

What Boyd says is that 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. The result of that is psychological breakdown. You destroy the psychology of the other side because they simply can no longer operate or function at all. They go into complete panic. Nothing seems to make sense. They can never get oriented, and they can never make decisions.

They become completely defensive and completely responsive. You completely dominate the playing field. Boyd was a famous fighter pilot called 15-second Boyd because his claim, which was true, was that he could beat any other fighter pilot in a dogfight within 40 seconds using this method. It’s basically this premium on speed and quality of execution such that you’re actually causing the other side to have a psychological break.

By the way, going back to what I think is also a big explanation for what’s happened to traditional media, the fact that the internet moves events so much faster, and the internet’s collective crowd decides what’s important so much faster, causes all the people who were television producers or news editors who thought they were in charge of the narrative to have a psychological breakdown. How can you even function when the internet is cycling much faster than you can?

I think the same is true of companies. This is what Elon does to his competitors in the defense and aerospace industry. This is what Anduril is now doing to companies in the defense industry. Quite frankly, this is what we try to do to our competitors in the venture industry.

To do that, you have to be willing to commit to being fast. You can’t have long bureaucratic processes. You can’t have a risk-averse posture. You can’t stress that you need enough time to make the decision properly. You can’t run the fully deliberate strategy that a lot of companies used to have in the past, where it took days, weeks, or months to figure out what they were going to say about something.

In politics, they adapted to this probably 30 years ago with the concept of the war room. There’s a famous documentary about the Clinton campaign in '88 called The War Room that shows this. 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 called something like “rapid response.”

The Department of War has one, just as an example: Department of War Rapid Response. It’s literally responding in real time to things that are happening because they want to stay inside everybody else’s OODA loop.

The oral-versus-written thing would probably take an hour to go through in full, but the long and short of it is that, in human culture, there are 2 ways to communicate—2 fundamental modes. There’s oral communication, and there’s written communication.

Oral communication is the original form. You can think about it literally as people around a campfire telling stories, singing songs, or reciting poetry. Written communication would famously be a book, a scientific journal article, a math equation, or a business plan—a written artifact.

The characteristic of oral communication is that it’s inherently emotion-first because it’s literally live interaction with another person. The characteristic of written communication is abstraction and, hopefully, logic, the scientific method, intellectual rigor, and analytical rigor.

It used to be the case that you could really divide these. In traditional mass media, newspapers and magazines were written, so they would be calmer and more dispassionate. Television was oral—it was literally people talking—so it was going to be much more emotional and hotheaded.

That’s all broken down because of everything we’ve talked about. The modern version of that is the internet. Is the internet an oral culture or a written culture? It turns out the answer is that the internet is both, because the internet is everything. It supports every kind of media.

A YouTube video—and for sure a short-form TikTok or Instagram Reel—is oral culture. It's something short and bursty, emotional, interpersonal, and an experience. A long-form Substack post is for sure written culture. But then things get more complicated, because a short tweet, even though it's written, is actually an oral culture thing, right? The fact that it's short means it has to be, again, this sort of burst of 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 3 hours, that's necessarily something where you're getting into abstractions in depth, beyond just a flash moment of emotion.

The internet lets you play with these formats and the kind of impact that you want to have in a way that, in the past, was determined by exactly which fixed medium you were in. And look, we all live this. If you want to have the internet experience of doomscrolling and getting really pissed off at the world, you go on TikTok and X and you can do that. If you want to learn a lot of stuff, you can go on Substack and long-form YouTube podcasts and live in that world, and you can raise your IQ a point a day. It's absolutely amazing.

And so there is a choose-your-own-adventure aspect to it. And then, of course, firms like ours need to think hard about how we communicate because of the differences.

I love that as a segue because it just emphasizes how different every platform is. A lot of people or companies will just have one idea and then cross-post it across every platform, but it doesn't fully appreciate what that platform is built for and what that platform rewards. And so, for every platform that we have—with Substack, podcasts, Instagram, X, YouTube, et cetera—we have an expert running it who is obsessed with that medium.

On Instagram, we're up 35% month over month right now. We have this guy, Hero, who's 18 years old and grew up on Instagram and knows it like the back of his hand. That really matters. That makes a difference.

And so, with that as a segue, I want to share just a few slides that show a little bit about what we've done so far. What we're really trying to do is give our companies such a superpower in terms of getting their message out, reaching their customers, and reaching their talent—the superpower that companies like Anduril have to punch way above their weight class, and that other brands wish they had: that level of resonance, that level of reach.

We're trying to give them those superpowers, and we do that by building our own channels, our own media empire across platforms. We do that by making sure that we know everybody else who has those powers of distribution and have great relationships with them. And then also by making sure that we have the expertise to be able to deploy to our companies as well.

Lulu put this well: people don't really invest enough in the people running these platforms. We've really spent a lot of time recruiting the right expert talent to do it. I'm stoked because now that we've had them build our platforms, we're going to deploy them to work on behalf of our companies.

Kaster from Applied Intuition—I've known him for a while, and he's always been complaining, saying, “Hey, why are we not valued more? Why do we not have more resonance? Why is everyone whining about other companies, not our company, given how good we are?”

And I've said, “Qasar, you've never tweeted in your life. How do you expect to have tremendous mind share?” He finally, thanks to a lot of pushing that we did, bit the bullet. His first tweet got around 4,000 likes. The first product we have, which I'll get to in a second, was this launch-as-a-service offering.

The second one is going to be this founder go-direct motion. We're working with Qasar, and we're working with Garrett from Flock Safety. That's a heroic company that should be at the stature of Anduril as well, and I really helped them build that machine.

Speaking of the launch-as-a-service offering, this was inspired early on when I was asking some of the GPs, “Hey, where could we make the biggest difference? What new product should we have?” Cyrus said, “If we could guarantee a viral announcement, I think that'd be a superpower for us.”

So we built out this launch-as-a-service offering—everything soup to nuts, from all the social media copy and the messaging to the rollout. We created these custom videos. We hired Richard, another 18-year-old, who we convinced to go straight from high school to the MBA, i.e., not go to college, or at least not right now.

He had previously done the “Cruelty” video and the browser-based video, and he's got this phenomenal taste for what really does well. So we built this video team. Richard, Ben, and Henry have really led this product, and you can see the views here. It's just done phenomenally well—millions and millions of views for our companies.

We've now scaled up this offering to offer it to all of our companies. That's our first product.

After working with companies, they were saying, “Hey, how do I hire people like that?” And thus the New Media Fellowship was born, to help us hire them but also help our companies hire them. There's this sweet spot where you need to be online enough to really know the platforms, have taste and sensibility, and understand these new platforms, but you also need to be functioning enough and professional enough to work at one of these companies. Not many people can do both.

We've really tried to create this program to identify these people and then give them a little more technical know-how. For our first fellowship, we had 2,000 applications and picked 65 people. We think they're incredible. 2 hires for us came from that so far, and we think this is going to be a franchise.

The other part of it I'll just leave is that I think we were really popularizing this term “new media.” We're seeing a number of people with new media JDs. They want a head of new media. They're looking for that. In the way that we popularized American Dynamism and other people have American Dynamism practices, we're starting to see that with new media. It's cool to see our thought leadership there. More to come.

Those are the things I'll leave you with in our presentation. Our channels are up tremendously, and we're going to continue to invest in them. We've got this portfolio offering, launch-as-a-service. We're now launching our go-direct motion and 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 and this new-media talent base for us, because we're continuing to hire, but then also for our companies.

I would just say that, particularly if you've spent time in the prior media regime of old media, you really have to rethink every instinct that you have, because it's one of the weirdest things where all your instincts are wrong.

We're actually experiencing a little bit of this in AI, too, which Martin wrote a great post on. In the old world of software, the one thing you knew was that you couldn't throw money at a problem. Now you can throw money at a problem. You don't even realize how much of your thinking is affected by that old rule.

I would say this is that in spades: every single instinct you have is incorrect if you're in this world, and you just have to let it all go. This is why people lament, “Oh, the right wing built this big podcast network,” blah blah. That's not what happened. What happened is Trump just understood new media.

For whatever reason—I don't know why he did, because he's so old and he's been in old media the whole time—but he just rolled right into it, not at a technological level, but as a medium. I think we've got to do that. We have to understand, and we have to play by the new rules.

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 a16z rage on Reddit. Not surprising.

For what it’s worth, every tiny little conference I’ve been at while at a16z has always had an a16z fanboy raving about our podcast. So, Erik, read the comments or don’t read the comments.

Don’t read the comments if they’re going to affect what you say. It’s kind of like the Yelp problem: people who care enough to post either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it. At this point, it doesn’t affect me, so I read the comments.

Marc and Ben have helped me not get too concerned about some of the commentary on Twitter by certain anonymous Twitter posters who are raging in their basements, et cetera. But, in short, don’t read the comments.

I’ll maybe close on 2 things. There’s a long history of this, and if you read any sort of biography or autobiography of any professional author who writes books for a living, 100% of the time, at some point they will tell you, “The 1 thing I never do is read the critics. I never read the reviews.”

And then they’ll say, “Well, actually, no, that’s not true. I always read the reviews,” because they know they shouldn’t. They know they shouldn’t because critics, by definition, are basically bitter people who aren’t writing novels or whatever, so of course they’re going to be mad.

They know they shouldn’t read them. They know it’s very bad for them. They know it’s going to really screw them up. And then they try, and it’s like a magnetic pull. They always end up reading them because it’s 3:00 in the morning and they can’t resist, and then they always end up getting mad.

There is this push and pull. It used to be that only professional authors or professional filmmakers or whatever had critics—reviews. Now, basically, the entire world is a critic. I think we all have that. It’s a little bit of a push and pull, and that is a little bit difficult.

Another thing to bear in mind: I couldn’t resist. I posted a link to another book on this topic with a great title called Kill All Normies. This book is actually from about a decade ago and talked about this kind of very angry internet culture that developed after the 2000s.

By the way, the internet was not always like this. In the very early days, the internet was so hard to get onto that the only people who were on the internet were basically super-smart, super-successful people.

Yeah, newsgroups were really good then.

Yeah, the pre-1993 newsgroups were utopian. Post-1993, things started going sideways, and the modern, caustic internet culture really developed in the 2000s and 2010s.

Basically, it turns out there’s a genealogy to it, and a lot of it is literally Call of Duty lobbies for online gaming. It’s literally online gaming lobbies, because when the Xbox and the PlayStation rolled out voice interaction for the first time, they thought, “It’d be great for players to be able to talk to each other.” It turns out you just get 12-year-old boys in these lobbies torching the shit out of everybody, literally trying to get under their opponents’ skin and being willing to anonymously say absolutely anything to do it.

That led to a very coarse, very vulgar, very offensive kind of culture, and then that culture expanded into early internet forums like Something Awful. It started metastasizing into things like YouTube comments, and then obviously social media blew that open.

There is this rage undercurrent to everything. You do literally have to think about it: these are people literally in their parents’ basement.

By the way, generally, when we get attacked in the comments or anything like that, it’s somebody with 4 followers or a bot or something like that.

And by the way, that includes when it’s, “hey Montra Venod.”

Yeah, and that includes when it’s, “hey Montra Venod.”

Yeah. Yes. Yes.