An important part of a16z’s origin story, which you may already know, is that we were founded by Marc & Ben to be “CAA for the tech industry.” When Michael Ovitz founded CAA (The Creative Artists Agency) in 1975, Hollywood was completely controlled by a few dozen big entities, who served as gatekeepers to the entertainment industry. Ovitz built CAA to help the creative actors and artists build franchises on their own terms and forever changed how entertainment worked.
A half century later, a similar transition is happening in tech – or at least, has half-happened. The old guard of legacy capital, legacy media, and legacy distribution can now be sidestepped; anyone can go viral, and gain relevance for a day. But what do you do with this? As a founder, what would you want from your VC – whose purpose is to give you power and legitimacy – to navigate media today?
That’s why we built the a16z New Media team.
Our goal is to build the best turnkey media operation in venture: a single place where founders acquire the legitimacy, taste, brandbuilding, expertise, and momentum they need to win the narrative battle online. The team is a few months old, and we’re the only VC firm on the TBPN New Media Map (in fact, we’re on it twice). And we consist of:
- An in-house team at a16z, made of online legends
- “Forward deployed New Media”, embedded with portfolio companies
- An ecosystem of “next up” high signal talent, ready to attach to great up-and-coming stories
And starting in January 2026:
- The a16z New Media fellowship: an 8-week program for operators, creators and storytellers. Learn more and apply here:
The end goal of Venture doesn’t change: to help founders build generational businesses. But founders are asking more from their investors, and we’re eager to compete on this new playing field: delivering immediate, tangible wins for founders when they launch and grow their brands.
Here are three core parts of our “menu of options”, which at this time we offer to particular companies where we think we can move the needle:
- The essentials. We build & run owned channels that are habit-forming and great brands; we build in-house creative muscle, and we make it all available for portfolio companies.
- Timeline takeover. We offer “win the internet for a day” as a service, in any combination of particulars you want: a great video, an insightful podcast, essays, tweets, everything. A successful launch day is a critical opportunity to recruit top talent and find marquee customers: we give founders day-of help, and help build their own New Media foundations, including hiring their team.
- High-signal talent ecosystem. We host the events, the group chats, and the high-trust environments where talented people decide on their next challenge. We make sure the a16z ecosystem is the obvious place to make your next move, and we make sure our founders get maximum advantage from having that ecosystem in their back yard.
Here’s how we do these things in some more detail; including selected slides from a presentation Erik gave to the a16z GPs a few months ago.
Own your distribution; or better yet, use ours
Once upon a time, “Own your distribution” was a radical idea in media. But now it’s just table stakes. You need a big audience, who hears from you a lot, and likes to hear from you a lot, because you deliver on your brand promise consistently. Andreessen Horowitz has a history of great owned content (e.g. the original a16z podcast, built by our good friend Sonal), and we want to build on that heritage, for this new moment in tech media.
As anyone who’s ever worked in media knows, you can’t just wave a magic wand and grow a high-quality audience. It takes craft, skill, and day-to-day persistence, to drive impressions up and to the right week after week. “It takes a lot of work to make it look easy”, as the saying goes. You’re fortunate and rare if you can find a partner who already has an audience and distribution, and whose incentives are completely aligned with yours, to help establish your distribution. But that’s exactly the relationship between us and our portfolio companies. We have every incentive to help launch you as enthusiastically as possible, and get you flying.
The craft of storytelling
Launching a product or a brand requires a tremendous amount of attention to detail. Yes, you can go viral and get lucky; but preparation is a big part of luck. We offer an extensive menu of services for our portfolio companies, up and down the New Media stack, that add up to one experience: “shipping a great story”. We’ve been there before; we know what it takes.
Style and joy
Great online content is half skill, half serendipity. For example, this short video of Marc Andreessen talking to David Perell about “Why hyperlinks are blue” was a delightful little joy on the timeline, because of the work that went into it: shortening it, animating it, making it delightful in little ways. Someone actually took the time to break down why this video performed so well, which we loved and appreciated. Seeing that kind of “if you know, you know” audience meta-commentary is a great reward for our work, and if you’re seeing a lot of it, something is going well. (Chartposting is another great example where a lot of work goes into the little details, like developing a house style.)
The a24 of a16z
Video is more than just podcast production: it can also mean first-party production, like for events such as Runtime. We have a team in-house, trained on set and inspired by New Media legends like Mr. Beast, and who can turn around beautiful videos out of a skunkworks operation. This means we aren’t beholden to outside contractors for turnaround time, style and taste, or anything else. And we accrue the learning benefit and production know-how it takes to scale up high-quality production to meet the whole portfolio’s cadence. (As Elon put it: anyone can make one Roadster; it’s really hard to make a million Model 3s, profitably. You have to do it in-house!)
Be habit-forming.
Owning a habit among your consumer or your customer is one of the most valuable things you can get in the world of New Media. Ben Thompson is successful not just because Stratechery is a brand, but also because Stratechery is a habit. That’s where we’re aiming with our owned media channels: why we’ve amped up our podcast to ship 5x a week, our newsletter to ship 5x a week, while raising the quality bar.
The other reason we ship daily is because that’s how you get in reps. If you ship something every week and get 1% better each time you ship on average, by the end of the year you’ll be around 65% better than you started. But if you ship every day, even if you only get .02% better (one fifth the benefit, but x5 the days), by the end of the year you’re 165% better. That’s why it’s so important to get in daily reps: because our portfolio companies directly benefit from that compound learning.
Timeline takeover: where it all comes together
If the goal of a VC firm is to get you power and legitimacy, then what does the New Media team do? Well, it should be able to help you dominate the timeline, on demand. This is an obvious goal to offer, but a very hard thing to actually be able to execute.
“Launches as a service” is designed to catapult your brand forward, with our brand. And a lot of ingredients go into it: a great launch video, a powerful interview, a provocative blog post, banger tweets, these all matter. But what also matters is having a team that can snap their fingers and execute it at the turnaround speed that startups need. The old agency SLA of 3 to 6 months to plan a launch is just archaic; you have to be able to execute all of this in a shockingly short period of time.
Every company tells a unique story, but there is a hard-learned formula to telling them right, and we’re going to make sure we get more reps than anybody else, and learn faster than anybody else. Since our earliest launches (like in the slide below), we’ve gotten good, fast; and more reps means more value the next time for our founders.
Taking “forward-deployed” to its logical conclusion
As we get really good at “win the day online”, one campaign at a time (“catching a fish”), the next logical thing we’ll do is teach our portfolio companies how to do this themselves (“teach them to fish.”) There are two ways to do this. One is with “Forward deployed New Media”, where team members embed themselves in portfolio companies for critical periods, and execute a launch together. The other, which is an exciting one we’re announcing today, is we’re going to help recruit and train the next generation of New Media, and help place them at portfolio companies.
This initiative, the New Media Fellowship, is how we really scale our impact across the whole a16z portfolio. We’re training a cohort of builders who know how to execute a timeline takeover, who can drop into a company, embed for a launch, and leave behind muscle memory for storytelling, distribution, and community. Over time, many will stay at those companies and rise up to influential positions, some will spin out, and some may even go on to start companies of their own, which we’d be excited to welcome back into the a16z family.
Ecosystem: the bottom-up vector of trust
Once you have a well-oiled New Media machine that can reach people on command, what do you do with that asset?
One of the most important things you can do with that asset to help founders and to help a16z is to reach the next cohort of great founders and key hires. Help the best people preferentially attach to our portfolio companies – and to a16z itself. Seeding that relationship, and building that trust, takes a long time. So we’re building an ecosystem team within New Media who is seeding the group chats, the dinners, the events, and the hidden networks that help talented and trusted people find each other and vouch for each other. And when the time comes, help each other find their next great challenge. You’ll be hearing more about this soon.
From David Booth: “I’m joining a16z”
All together: A16Z new media is the F1 Pit Crew of Venture
Venture is a team sport, but it’s not a team of equal participants. It’s a bit like Formula One. GPs are the drivers: they have to be great thinkers, great pickers, and great board members. And we want to augment them with the best pit crew in the business.
Media and brand building in venture is actually a lot like a pit crew’s job. You have to prepare over a long time, by building taste and authority to make good calls years in advance, and building trust with the ecosystem as they form a long-term relationship with you. And you also have to execute in the moment: turning around a critical video, launch campaign, or timeline takeover has to be executed perfectly, instantly, every time – like changing a tire mid-race.
And it’s like F1 for one more very important reason: which is everything downstream from raceday. The most amazing thing about F1 is how it inspires, organizes and tests the very best of our design and manufacturing ability, for the downstream benefit of all car manufacturers and drivers. We want every New Media production to serve the same role, but for building great tech companies: not only within the a16z family, but for all of tech. Because we’re all on the same team, which is team progress – and that’s what we celebrate.
If you made it to the end of this post, we’d love to hear from you about the a16z New Media Fellowship: whether you’re interested in it, or you know someone who’d be perfect. We’re also hiring for full-time roles, for podcast production, writing, social media, video, research, comms, marketing, portfolio support, events, and other community functions. The team is growing fast, so if this is the opportunity you’re looking for, get in touch.
