# A16Z New Media Strategy: Speed, Authenticity, and Viral Dominance

**Podcast:** a16z Podcast
**Published:** 2026-02-27

## Transcript

This episode is from a recent A16Z All Hands meeting where Ben Horwitz, Mark Andreas and I discussed the firm's new media strategy.
We cover why the old media playbook no longer works, why being interesting matters more than being inoffensive, and how speed and authenticity have replaced polish and caution.
Really stoked to be making this happen.
Today's gonna be a fun one.
We're gonna dive into all things new media.
First start with a high-level conversation about what is new media, how the media industry has changed, and then get into what the new media team is doing here at A16Z, what we've done so far, what we're focused on, and where we're going in 2026.
But first, we thought we'd start with a little sizzle reel that gives a little bit of uh insight into some of the activity that we've done here.
So they pitched to us this idea of working with a virtual production using Marvel Thing.
And we look at the calendar, this is such a crazy idea.
Hi, I'm Jessica.
Hi, I'm Jay.
I'm Kevin Moody, founder of Sola has raised a 17 million Series A led by A16Z.
Mark Basella, Sam, Jugenet, welcome, welcome, welcome to the A16Z Podcast.
We've entered a world where attention is the scarce resource.
There's unlimited channels.
And then the brands are mostly people.
If you grew up in Mark, your whole concept of the laws of physics is different.
You have to approach new media with new media thinking, new media people, that kind of thing.
The world of media is completely different than when we started VCs that market themselves.
There's actually tremendous hunger in the country and in the world for actual law-form intelligence commentary.
If you want to do something larger than yourselves and make the world a better place, we are 100% for it.
One quick story I want to tell is to the video that we put out for the fundraise announcement, which is our third most popular post ever.
On the last night before putting it out, we had trouble getting one of the rights cleared for one of the songs that actually was like the backbone for the video.
So the team using 11 Labs recreated a different song that I think was actually better, but it was a sort of an amazing last night sprint to make it all work.
And I want to start there with the fundraiser announcement because Ben, you had this quote which I think summarizes one of the main principles of new media.
I just want to read a small part of it and then have you elaborate.
Old media is defense-oriented.
In new media, offense is always better than defense.
We've spent many years fretting about our results being leaked.
Old media tries to please every audience.
Old media is terrified of upsetting people, and new media only cares about being interesting when in doubt, flood the zone.
Yeah.
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 actually it's interesting.
It's a really weird adjustment going from, you know, I mean, I spent my whole career in old media or dealing with old media, and now we're in new media.
In the history of the firm, the one thing that we really, really, really, really defended against was basically leaked results.
And the reason, and it goes back to in the pretty early days of the firm, the New York Times got a leak of our results.
And I mean, we were like a young firm, so most of the funds were like a year old.
And venture capital firms don't have high returns in the first year because nothing happens in the first year.
It's not like a stock market type thing.
And so they missed, or maybe it's a Wall Street Journal.
One of the two, but they misinterpreted the results.
So they kind of said, well, the early funds were good because those had enough years to get kind of returns in them.
But fund three was terrible and like and so forth.
And because old media was still powerful, it was very hard to combat it.
Yeah, we put out statements and this and that and the other and blog posts explaining like why they were wrong, but it didn't land.
And it was such a like a inside the firm, it was such a big crisis that actually I'm pretty sure Bology quit because he thought we were dead because the New York Times had just ruined the whole firm with that article.
So it was like that kind of existential threat.
And so we were very oriented around, okay, don't let anything out that could be misinterpreted or this or that, because you can never correct it.
It goes out there and you're never gonna kind of come back from it.
And say more about the flood the zone concept in terms of why it works and why it's so different than what would happen in the past.
So in the past, traditionally, it didn't count if it wasn't in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times or like The Economist or CNN or like there were maybe eight channels that could say something, and then whatever they said was permanent, in that once it was out there, it was very hard to deal with.
And it would be top of Google results, like the whole thing.
But now, look, Mark and I, if we really had a problem, could go on 30 podcasts, all of which get a much bigger audience than any of the publications I talk about.
And we wouldn't have to talk about that.
We could go talk about something else more interesting and erase that from everybody's memory very quickly.
So it's just without commenting on what's a better world, like the laws of physics are completely different in this world than the other world.
And I think to be effective as an organization in marketing and media, you have to embrace the new world because you can't be half and half, because the whole motion of the old world will kill you in the new world.
Yeah.
And vice versa.
And so you have to kind of commit to we're gonna really care about what goes down through the old channels, or we're not gonna give them flood.
Sorry to use language, and we're just gonna say interesting things and flood the zone.
And we're doing the latter, by the way.
There's a whole history to this, but basically, like the whole idea that there's like a quote-unquote corporate brand, like the whole idea that there's like a corporate like trademark, and then the whole idea that you like as a business, you basically load everything into that thing, and that that thing, whether it's General Electric or international business machines or whatever, the idea that that thing is somehow abstracted away from the people involved, and then that the people involved, their main job is to try to kind of buff that thing, which kind of led to this one way to look at it is like it led to this like 80-year kind of reign of everything being synthetic and plastic and boring, right?
Where like Ben and I have had this experience for many, many decades at this point.
It's just like the job of a corporate CEO for a very long time was to get up on stage and just say absolutely nothing in any sort of public event.
I actually was on a board with a CEO who very firmly believed this.
And he literally would come off stage having very deliberately said absolutely nothing and would have been thrilled because like he had made no news and like mission accomplished, right?
Anyway, so the Eric to your question, like basically I think the retrospective view on this, what happened was basically in the past you communication channels were just like super narrow, right?
And so how could you get a message through to the mass market or to your audience to your customer base?
You could only do it by kind of sending in a message that was encoded into as few bits as possible, right?
Because that was kind of your only shot because it was always limited by TV broadcast airtime, or it was limited by newspaper column inches or whatever.
And so you just you had to kind of crystallize everything down to this kind of minimal and sort of least offensive kind of possible position.
But it's always been unnatural because as human beings, like it never felt right.
It always felt like weird because it's like this corporation is like this weird other kind of alien thing.
It always felt weird and uncomfortable, and we just kind of got used to it.
And it just, it turns out, as our friend Mitt Romney famously said, corporations are people too.
Right.
And like poor Yeah, he was using it in a different context.
He was not calling the change in PR, but for our purposes, like it's all about people.
It's all about the decisions that people make.
When a big company or a government agency or a nonprofit or a venture firm or a startup is like making decisions and acting in the world.
That's people.
Like there's some set of people who are sitting around making that decision.
And then it's kind of this almost, I don't know, like shock therapy or something where it's just if the people who are actually making the calls actually show up and talk on their own behalf and explain themselves and actually say what they think, it like blows everybody's minds, right?
You know, it's the response people have to Elon and response people have to certain other people who are now kind of very notable in environment who are running large things who are very public and vocal.
It's just kind of this thing, and it's just almost like this thing where it's like, well, they can't say that.
And it's well, wait a minute.
Number one, they can say that, like they're allowed to.
They're like an adult in the United States of America, like they're allowed to say whatever they want.
Number one, number two, how about they actually tell us what they think?
Like, how about we hear directly from them so that we can actually understand what they're thinking and who they are and how they're processing reality and what their assumptions are.
And of course, the technological cause for this is just that that narrow media funnel just got like completely blown to smithereens, right?
In large part is a consequence of all the work that all of us have done on this call over the last 30 years.
And you could kind of maybe say, love it or hate it, like the days of kind of this narrow channel, narrow casting, and then what I would argue is just this like inherently deceptive practice of abstracting things away from people, that world is just clearly fading.
And in the new world, we're just gonna hear direct from people.
And look, I'm not a utopian and it's not gonna be like 100% better, but I think there's no question it's a big net improvement.
Yeah, and by the way, the other thing that's really interesting in retrospect is the things that people got in trouble for, canceled for, fired for, et cetera, in the past that they said in the press were all just misinterpretations.
You know, it was somebody saying something, and because it was so narrow, and because you could never erase it, and because you could never come back and defend it, because the audience would be, you know, a thousandths of the size on the defense.
You know, it wasn't I said what I thought, and people thought I was a horrible person.
It was I said something, it got misinterpreted, and people thought I was a horrible person.
So now in this world where like, you know, people say much more like aggressive things, I would just say, in terms of, you know, not being mainstream thinking, but have room to explain it.
Um, they that that rarely happens anymore.
So, like, I mean, everything from like Howard Dean to you know, you name it, like in today's world, that that would be nothing.
Um, but in that world, because there was no chance to say, well, like this is what happened, um you know, like there were just thousands of times when people got into incredible trouble for things that they said that were misinterpreted uh that they could not correct.
Yeah.
And and Eric, you know, but Ben Ben gave me good advice, you know, uh uh actually before you came on board, which I am trying my best to stick to, although I will tell you it is a significant personal challenge.
Um, again, with not eating an entire box of Oreos and uh drinking an entire bottle of scotch every night, both of which I'm also trying not to do.
Um, so because we live in a healthy world now.
So um uh uh less self-destructive world.
So um, you know, Ben Ben Ben pointed out that like the the see the what Ben just said basically applies into the new world actually just as much as the old world, and in the sense of like when every time I've gotten myself into like serious trouble, like in public over the last decade, it's because I tweeted something.
Um and I mean, you know, everybody on here probably knows how much I love Twitter, and like it's great to be able to rip off the hundred, you know, and I was really good at like compressing something super controversial in 140 characters and then really letting it rip with 280 characters.
But Ben pointed out, like, look, every time, every time somebody gets mad at you, you know, everybody just gets like completely ripped at you over that.
Basically, what's happened is it's out of context.
Um, and so what Ben said is look, just say everything that you think, but say it on a podcast, right?
So say it in the context of an hour and a half discussion so that you can whatever it is, you've surrounded it with the full explanation, or say it in the form of an essay where you've like fully articulated your argument and it's fully in context.
Um and and just observationally, like it in and not just playing to myself, but just more broadly.
It's actually interesting if you watch this to this day, when public figures get blown to smithereens, it's almost always because of something that's basically too short.
Um when people actually do the full long-form explanation of what they think, even if it's on a highly controversial, you know, even if it's imputed to be highly controversial or whatever, if it's the full explanation, it is actually harder to blow people up.
And again, and again, you could kind of say it, it's actually really funny.
You know, when I was a kid, like, you know, the moral panic was around television, right?
Kind of pr pre-the internet.
And the moral panic and television, a lot of moral panic of television always was around the concept of sound bites, which is you only ever get to hear like five seconds of what anybody's thoughts are.
Right.
And and somehow television is now the gold standard, you know, for information transmission.
The internet's evil, like somehow it all flipped.
But anyway, the point being is like the internet gives us the chance to not only express ourselves like in short form, the internet specifically gives us the chance to express ourselves in long form, right?
And fully explain things.
And that's that's just so different.
Like the the hour, hour and a half, two hour discussion with somebody who's like deeply into something and is really involved in something.
Like, yeah, I mean, we we all experience this as consumers, like it's just so much better than the than the 30 second bit that you know might have been on the NBC Nightly News 30 years ago.
And by the way, you know, the long form uh uh of almost anything that's interesting, complex systems problem, um, which is most everything in politics and in technology, you need the long form.
There is no sound bite that gives you any information.
Um, and so you have to have uh a long conversation.
So it is actually much much better.
As far as there's always that thing with sugar, you know, using bones or whatever to be white or that kind of thing.
I'm gonna eat a I'm gonna eat a gigantic package of Oreos tonight in Deborah's honor.
I really appreciate that.
The well, yeah, it's interesting.
We've also talked about, you know, media training of the past used to be around sort of, you know, how to stay out of trouble, this kind of thing.
And that now you, you know, if you're a ZO, you want to be you know, something uh, you know, Jordy from TV PN has this concept of a Joe Rogan CEO, i.e., someone interesting enough to go on Joe Rogan for three hours, you know, someone like an Alex Carp, someone like a Palmer Lucky, right?
And um and the flip side of that is that uh you know if you're interesting, you know, if you're powerful you're you're it's because you're interesting.
Uh because that's what that's what people that's what people want to work for.
It's you know people want to be customers of it's people want to invest in.
And if you're powerful and interesting, you're going to be controversial.
And and and that's something that you guys have also helped me get more more more accustomed to is like hey we're you know this is the big leagues that you know and there are people like who are going to be mad at what we're doing and and that is that that's a in some ways that's a good thing.
That's it's evidence of our of our power and and our interestingness.
Yeah no I think that's right.
And I think it you know it's hard this is another kind of crossover between the old world and the new world because if you're a corporate brand, then you know you try and keep all the dust off the brand and and you know try and be uh something that nobody hates uh I guess for lack of a better word.
And then you know I think in today's world to be good at marketing you've got to be interesting.
To be interesting.
If you're interesting and powerful, there are going to be a lot of people who don't like you.
Um, and that's like that's a good thing.
Um, and I was very happy to see by the way the infra piece, because we can get like a nice piece on like a subsection of the firm, but nobody's ever going to write like a really nice thing about the whole firm.
Um I think that you know, also uh it's a th this whole new world is much better for founder CEOs because to be a founder, you have to have an original idea.
And original ideas are interesting by nature.
I think that professional CEOs um often get to that position through very careful politicking, which uh kind of is the opposite where you want to be uncontroversial.
Like nobody can ding you right as you get to the thing.
And you know, Mark and I have uh been on, you know, Mark bench more than me, but been on large boards, where in the large boards, you know, when it comes to picking the professional CEO, they're all about what's not wrong with him, not what's right with him or what's right with her.
And so you get these very vanillic characters who definitely could not go on Joe Rogan, and that you know is all to our advantage because we basically deal almost entirely with founder CEOs.
I want to uh transition to one more structural mechanic because it's a segue into how we've built our team a little bit.
And it's um this uh markets this in a glue and quote, you know, if it's on TV, it's a TV show.
Um, and to talk about how the different formats yield different different types of content.
Um do you wanna talk about it?
Okay, you you want you you want me to do it?
You want me to do it?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, sorry.
Okay, okay.
This is the thing.
Okay.
So yeah, Marshall McLuhan was the great media theorist of the of the TV era.
And actually, his work has actually held up really well, and it's it's it's it's worth reading.
Um, but uh he he had the he had this this thing, Eric Eric just said he said if it's on TV, it's a television show.
Um in other words, like basically the the the you know, as he said, the medium is the message.
Um basically what he said is like, look, like TV, TV is a specific kind of technology, it's a specific kind of media technology.
Um and basically like all of the questions around TV are like, you know, is it a is it, you know, it's it's all basically just like the only real parameter is length.
Like, is it a three-minute news segment?
Is it a 20 minute sitcom?
Is it a 40 minute drama?
Like they there's very little kind of variation in like what you can do, because it's just a linear, you know, it's just a straight, you know, just you know, broadcast video, you know, mass broadcast video.
And so he said, you know, basically the medium in its first you know, 10 or 20 years involved, you know, basically the concept of what we now know to be a television show, which is basically either a comedy or a drama or or combination of the both.
And it's basically a little story, and it's a little story that plays it over 20 to 40 minutes, and it kind of has to be a self-contained story because you don't know when people are gonna watch it.
And you know, now they're doing you know, now they're doing you know with streaming, they're doing serial stories, but you know, television shows properly generally were you know, where everything was a one off, you can watch episodes out of order.
So there's like there are the there are these very like self-contained little basically, you know, plays, little stage plays broadcast on video, and then they're there, they're these self-contained little stories, and then and then they need to kind of appeal to emotion because it's like an emotional medium, uh, right?
It's not like an information dense medium.
It's a, you know, it's a, it's a, it's uh it's it's a medium that literally puts somebody in your living room.
Um and so the basically it's it's like these little morality plays, right?
Where there's and there's gotta be like good guys and bad guys and kind of a very simplistic story, and there's like a few, you know, a few mild plot twists, and then everything kind of wraps up at the end.
And what he said and what he says, sort of the consequence of that is like everything on television has to be a television show, and that includes everything in the real world that gets talked about on television, has to be turned into a television show, right?
And and and this is kind of you know the running joke of like following, you know, I don't know, whatever current events or politics on TV right now, which is kind of a running joke, which is you know, on either party, which but it's just kind of like, oh, you know, that you know, it, you know, oh, it's you know, it's time for the next season.
Um, you know, this is the new, you know, main plot that's happening, and then this is the new secondary plot that's happening.
And if you watch CNN every night, you know, they're just kind of, you know, they're kind of just playing with these stories, you know, kind of over time the way that a the way that a soap opera might, or that uh, you know, that a that a the the that a that a drama might, or occasionally, you know, how comedy might.
And so basically we we've just like lived in a world where it just seems like everything's a TV show.
Um and it's it's a world where like all the edges are sanded off and everything is kind of very smooth and professional, and everything is kind of within this very narrow band of what can be put into these kind of little little morality plays.
Okay, so Marshall McLuhan, unfortunately, is long dead, but I I assert that if he were alive today, he would say, if it's uh if it's on the internet, it's a viral internet post, right?
So like what's the native medium of the internet?
Like what's the thing that what's the form of media on the internet that like rips and dominates?
And it's clearly the viral post, right?
It's it's the viral tweet, it's the viral TikTok, it's the viral Instagram, right?
It's the it's the it's a viral Facebook post, it's the viral Substack, it's the viral YouTube video.
Like it's very clearly the post, and specifically it's the viral post.
Like it's it's the one that really rips.
And so, so basically, you're right, right.
So my theory is if it's on the internet, um uh everything is a viral post, and then you just ask yourself two questions, which is like, okay, what's the characteristic of a viral post?
And and like nine times out of ten, it's something that like really gets people cranked up, right?
Like uh on whatever topic, right?
It might be on whatever your favorite pop star said yesterday, or it might be on whatever you know, what a politician said, or it might be on whatever you know, a business leader said or whatever, but like it's something that like causes people to like flip out, right?
Uh you know, you know, and maybe some people flip up positively, some people flip out negatively, or something caused people to flip out.
And then the other thing with viral posts that's really interesting is you can actually observe this in the data.
They have this really rapid rise.
Like they tend to, if if they're gonna take off, they tend to take off within like 12 hours, and then they spike like crazy as everybody retweets or reposts and you know emails it around and talks about it.
And then there's basically this like half-life fall-off where like within 24 hours, it's like 12 hours up, and then it's like 20 24 hours down, and then 36 hours later, it's like gone from our collective memory.
And the reason is because another one has popped up and that's taken off instead.
And if you kind of take a step back and kind of chart the media landscape that we've all been living in for the last whatever, you know, for sure, five years, but you know, you can even say probably 10 years.
What we've lived through is just bait literally literally just like thousands of cycles of viral posts.
Um, okay, is you know, is this good or bad or something in the middle?
You you could have a big debate about that.
Um, it uh you know, I would argue it's its own form of emotionality, right?
It's it's basically things that spike the cortisol, and so that you know it's sort of things that are controversial, and so it leans into that.
But you know, the other side is it's things that are interesting, right?
Um, and then the other part is you know, the the people get a vote, a book goes viral, right?
It's not just up to a news producer what shows up on TV.
So there's that aspect to it.
Um, another aspect to it, by the way, is that stories come and go much more quickly now, right?
And so there will be some thing that pops, and it's like the world's biggest crisis in whatever sector is talking about.
And it's just like everybody in the world has an opinion.
This is where I was using you a while back, the the meme of the current thing.
Like it's the current thing.
Everybody has to have an opinion on the current thing.
It's the most important thing in the world.
And then 24 hours later, it's like it never happened.
Because something else has become the current thing.
And then that leads to, you know, the new the new version of the old time honor strategy of getting through media crises, which is like just like basically you make sure something else, you know, becomes the new viral post.
Um, you know, gets get something else elevated into that thing.
So that you know, there's there's the the there's the there's this way to kind of kind of deal with these things.
But but anyway, I just think like as long as the internet is the medium of choice, we're gonna live in a world in which this is what it, you know, this this is the cycle now.
It's like a 24, 36 hour cycle.
By the way, the traditional media in the form of newspapers and television, like at least the way I read them, is they're basically covering whatever was the viral post like yesterday or a week ago, right?
And so, right, so they're being driven by the internet viral post, which is which you know, which is why I think that you know the internet viral post is is the high order thing.
And and I also think like that that's not gonna change.
Like they it the whole long thing I can do on that, but like they literally, if you're a television, if you're a television producer or if you're a news editor or whatever, like you you can't possibly move your organization fast enough to stay ahead of these cycles.
And so what you end up doing is you end up chasing them.
And and that's and basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our life is just gonna be to follow the internet viral post.
Yeah, there was 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 old.
That's good.
Um it was he was iterating at the time, the managing editor of the New York Times, uh, when he was in his office and the New York Times, you know, is expecting to get this glowing coverage on the Daily Show.
And whoever it was shows up in the office and says, says what Ben just said.
And the guy and the editor is just like completely confused.
Like he clearly has no idea what the Daily Show guy is talking about.
And he's like, Well, like, what do you mean?
And he and he's like, he points to there's like a pilot, literally, physical newspapers in the guy's desk.
And he says, like, look, it's it's all old news.
And he's like, it's like, no, no, it's today's paper.
And he's like, No, no, it's yesterday's paper.
Like, I already know everything that's in that.
Uh, like uh, you know, and so and yeah, and and like it's just basically like again, what do they have?
I they're very proud of this.
They have their editorial process, they have their publication process, like they they have multi-layer, you know, beer bureaucratic mechanism for you know, all the news that's fit to print.
That you know, it's at least a 24-hour cycle to figure that out.
And I mean, and you know, 24 hours later, the internet has already moved on from whatever the last thing was.
And so it's just it's it's uh it's a it's another example of the dog chasing the car, except now they have to chase it like every single day, which might be why they're so upset all the time.
Yeah, they are pissed.
You know, we really made sure to hire people who really understand the platform, not just how the platform works technically, but also the the vibe and the taste and the and the spirit of uh of the platform, and and we've gone all in to start um on on X because that those are just where the most interesting conversations are happening and where where people are the most plugged in.
And it's a way I think about most of the tech world is on X, you know, like it or not, like our world lives on X just because that's also where all the both both the kind of AI researchers and the AI influencers and the crypto influencers, like everybody in our world lives there, uh, you know, at least in part.
So we can't avoid it even if we didn't like it.
Yeah.
But we love it.
You were about to say something, Mark?
Oh, yeah.
No, I was just gonna say, yeah, no, look at what Ben said is yeah, that like this is uh I posted a link to a book called The True Believer that kind of talk talks about this is you know, the the old characterization is elites and masses, which is a little bit 20th century.
But yeah, like the the like people who are spending 24 hours a day trying to understand, you know, basically in these domains like AI or you know, politics or whatever, like they're on X.
Like that, and that and that's the that then that's not the mass market, like that's not most of humanity, but like that's most of the people who are like basically in the what you might like, I don't know what you want to call like knowledge synthesis business or whatever where they're trying to like understand and formulate policies on things and and so forth.
Um obvious, obviously it's also true that TikTok and Instagram, you know, have just like much more reach.
Like they're you know, they're just much bigger, um, you know, they they reach the mass kind of global audience um more.
And so that you know, they certainly they certainly play a role.
But if if you're on the leading edge of the field, like uh, you know, it's it's very rare that the whatever is kind of the lead, you know, the you know, kind of the edge of that process of kind of idea formation propagation, people, you know, in positions of of authority kind of figuring out what they think.
It's uh that's almost all entirely on edge.
By the way, this is another huge difference between old media and new media.
So if you come from old media world, there's just reach.
Yeah.
Right.
Like the targets, you know, if you were going for a target audience, um, there was no real easy way to do it.
I mean, you know, like maybe like if you're sports, you'd be in sports illustrator or whatever, but like that there wasn't really a way to do it.
Um, but now with podcasts and and blogs and X and so I mean, you can go to an exact audience.
You can really get down to an extremely narrow target in new media world.
And, you know, for us, that's great because the audience, our audience is founders, um, not the world.
Uh and so, you know, having a way to talk to 90% of founders as opposed to four percent of the world is just a much better thing for us.
Yeah.
The the two two two more structural things, uh, Mark, I want you to explain, and then I want to present some some some slides, you know, give some detail about what we're doing that that relate that relate to what I'm about to say.
One is I want to explain the the Boyd um loop and and why, you know, that that makes Twitter and and the social media so much more powerful in terms of you know, forming consensus.
Um, and then the other is the difference between written and oral culture and and and what's prioritized um in you know, as we transition to oral.
Yeah, okay.
So these are both long topics.
And so I'll try to do the cliff notes version.
Um, yeah, so um I'll I'll I'll link to the book on this, but in in in in military theory, it there's this concept called maneuver warfare, which basically just says like speed, speed wins, like speed, speed wins as compared to map map mass winning uh speed wins.
And so if you if you if you believe that, then there's basically this framework, there's this framework called called the OODA loop, uh OODA loop, uh, which originally was developed for uh fighter pilots and then later for for broader military strategy.
Um and the ODA loop, that the what OODA stands for, it's an acronym, um, it stands for observe, orient, decide, act.
Um, and so it's basically the decision making cycle, right?
And so and uh observe is like uh uh view the outside world, orient is like figure out where you are in respect to the outside world, uh, decide, of course, decide what to do, act, uh, uh, act.
And basically what this guy, Boyd, who came up with this idea said was like any military operate, any fighter pilot, any military operation, any you know, basketball player, any um, you know, company, any government, um you basically goes through a decision-making cycle that's like that in order to make decisions.
What we just talked about, the New York Times ha has their own OODA loop, it's like 24 hours to go through their process.
Um uh, right, and so um, and so um and then basically what he said is like if speed is the thing that matters, then the person who gets through that cycle the fastest is the one who's going to win.
But he said there's a second order thing that happens.
So one is just like, is your OODA loop faster than the other than the other guys?
So that's one question.
But he said the other thing can happen is if if you if you can have a sustainably faster OODA loop processing cycle than the next guy, um, then if you think about what happens, like let's say it takes, you know, you whatever, you know, an hour to figure something out, it takes the other guy two hours to figure something out.
Uh think about what happens is like, okay, you start out on an even playing field, um, you but you both start your your your your decision-making cycles.
Um, you operate, you you, you make your decision within an hour.
The other guy is still saying it's inside his own OODA loop when you make your decision, right?
And so you make your decision, you act within an hour.
He's only halfway through his process.
He now has to start his process over, right?
Because you've changed the landscape, you've changed the parameters of what's going on.
So he now has to go back and reobserve and reorient and start over, right?
And then of course project forward.
It's like, okay, then you decide again within an hour, and then by the time he gets, and again, he gets halfway through his process, he gets interrupted, um, he has to go back.
And so what he says is if you if you can be sustainably faster at running your decision loop, you can get inside the other guy's loop in a in a systematic and perpetual way.
And basically the result of that is psychological breakdown.
Uh basically you you destroy the psychology of the other side because they just simply they they just can no longer operate or function at all.
They just like basically go into complete panic, nothing seems to make sense.
They can never get oriented, they can never make decisions, they can never change, they become completely defensive, completely responsive, you completely dominate, you know, basically the playing field.
Um and he, you know, and he was a famous fighter pilot.
It was a uh uh he was a uh famous fighter pilot called 15 second boyd, because he the his claim was in which was true is he could beat any other fighter pilot in dogfight within 15 seconds using this method.
And so it's basically this this this premium on speed and quality of execution such that you are actually causing the other side to have a have have a psychological break.
Um, by the way, uh like again, go back to the like I think this is also a big explanation for what's happened to traditional media.
The the fact that the internet moves events so much faster and the sort of internet collective crowd decides what's important so much faster, causes all the people who were television producers or news editors who thought that they were in charge of the narrative to just basically have a psychological breakdown.
Like how how can you even function when the internet is just basically cycling much faster than you could.
And I think this, by the way, the same is true of companies, you know, this is what Elon does you know to his competitors like in the defense, you know, in the aerospace industry.
This is what Andrew's now doing in companies in the defense industry.
You know, this quite frankly is what we try to do to our competitors in the venture industry.
So yeah, so that now to do that you have to be willing to commit to being fast, right?
And so you you can't you can't have long bureaucratic processes.
You can't have you know a you know a risk adverse posture.
You can't you know stress, you know, you you you you need enough time to make the decision properly but you you can't you can't run the fully deliberate strategy that a lot of companies used to have in the past where it was days to weeks to months to figure out you know what they were going to say about something.
By the way in in politics they adapted to this probably 30 years ago with the concept of the war room.
And there's a famous documentary in the Clinton campaign and I think in 88 where they called the war room where they they show this and now they call it rapid response.
And if you if you if you go to basically any any political operation on the internet right now, you know, they'll they'll have an ex account that's literally they call it like rapid response.
So it's like actually Department of War has one just as an example.
Department of War rapid response.
And it's literally like they're responding in real time to stuff that's happening because they want to stay inside um you know everybody else's OODA loop.
Yeah, okay.
So there's that.
And then yeah the the the oral versus written thing is it's it would probably take an hour to kind of go through the whole thing.
But yeah the the long and short of it is there there's basically in sort of human culture, there's kind of two ways to communicate.
There's two fundamental modes.
There's oral communication, there's written communication.
You know, oral communication, you know, is the original form.
And you could think about it literally as like people around a campfire telling stories, singing songs, you know, reciting poetry.
Um you can think about written communication would be, you know, kind of famously the book or the scientific journal article, right?
Or the math equation or the business plan, right?
Um, you know, uh uh, you know, a written artifact.
Um, and that basically the characteristic of a orality, or oral communication is it's it's sort of inherently emotion first, um, right?
Because it's it's you know, literally, you know, live interactions with another person.
Um the characteristic of written communication is sort of abstraction, you know, and then you know, hopefully logic, the scientific method, you know, intellectual rigor, analytical rigor.
Um it it used to be the case that you could kind of really divide these, you know, in traditional mass media, it used to be the case.
You could say that like newspapers and magazines are written, and so they would be like more calmer and more dispassionate.
You could say, you know, television was oral, right?
It was people literally people talking.
And so it was going to be much more emotional and hot-headed.
You know, but basically, like, you know, that that that's all broken down because of everything we've talked about.
Um, but the modern version of that is like the internet, like, okay, is the internet an oral culture or a written culture?
And it turns out the the answer is the internet's both, because the internet is everything, right?
It's it supports every kind of media.
Um, and so a YouTube video, or I will say for sure, a short form TikTok or Instagram reel for sure is oral culture.
Like it's it's something short and bursty and emotional and interpersonal and it's experience.
Um, a long form Substack post is for sure written culture.
Um, but then things get more complicated because a short tweet, even though it's written, is actually an oral culture thing, right?
Because the fact that it's short means that it has to be like this again, there's sort of this burst of of of of sort of say triggering emotionality uh in order to go viral.
So 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 gonna talk about something for three hours, like that's necessarily something where you're kind of getting edge abstractions in depth, you know, beyond just kind of a flash moment of emotion.
Um so the internet lets you kind of play with these formats and and and the kind of impact that you want to have um in a way that, you know, in in the past was kind of determined by exactly fixed which fixed media you were in.
But and look, we we all live this.
Like if you want to have the internet experience of like doom scrolling and getting really pissed off at the world, like you go to TikTok at X and you can do that.
If you want to like learn a lot of stuff, you can go on Substack and long form YouTube podcasts and you can live in that world and like you can like you know raise your IQ a point today, like it, you know, it's absolutely amazing.
And so there is a choose your own adventure aspect to it.
Um, and um, and then of course, you know, we, you know, firms like ours, you know, need to think hard about how we communicate because of uh of the differences.
I I love that as a segue because it just emphasizes how different every platform is.
And it's not, you know, a lot of people or companies will just, you know, have one idea and then cross post it, you know, across every platform, but it it doesn't fully appreciate um, you know, what that platform is built for and what that platform rewards.
And so for every platform that we have, we have a, you know, whether it's Substack, podcasts, Instagram, you know, uh X, YouTube, et cetera, we have uh expert running it who is obsessed with with that, with that medium.
Um, you know, on Instagram, we're up 35%, you know, month over month right now.
We have this guy, Hero, who's uh who's 18 years old and has been, you know, grew up on on Instagram and knows it like the the back of his hand.
Um and and that really matters.
That makes a difference.
And so with with that as a segue, I want to do a uh share just a few slides that just show um a little bit about what we've uh what we've done so far.
Second so what we're you know really trying to do is uh is is king make our companies right is is is give them such a a superpower in terms of getting their message out in terms of reaching their customers in terms of reaching their um their talent um you know the superpower that companies like Anderl have to you know punch way above their their weight class and and and other brands you know wish that they they had that level of of resonance that level of reach we're we're you know trying to give them those superpowers and and we do that by by building our own channels our own you know media empire um across platforms uh we do that by making sure that we know everybody else who's got um those uh my screen pause for some reason.
Okay, screen share uh but everybody else who who's who's got those powers of distribution and and having great relationships with them um and then also by just uh you know making sure that we have the expertise um to be able to deploy to to to to our companies as well you know Lulu put this uh put this well you know that people don't really spent a lot of time recruiting the right expert talent to do it.
So I'm I'm I'm stoked because now that we've had them build art platforms, we're going to deploy them to work on behalf of our companies.
And so we're, we're, you know, Casser from Applied Intuition, you know, he's he's always been, I was an angel in Haser as well, so known for a while, and he's always been complaining of like, hey, you know, why are we not valued more?
Or why do we not have more resonance?
Uh why do people, you know, why is everyone talking about other companies, not our company, given how good we are.
And I'm said, Casser, you know, you've never tweeted in your life.
How do you expect to have tremendous, tremendous mind share?
And he he finally, you know, thanks to a lot of pushing that that we did, bit the bullet and his first tweet got like 4,000 likes.
And you know, the first product we have, I'll get to it in a second was this launch as a service.
Um, the second one is gonna be this this founder go direct motion.
You know, we're working with Casser, we're working with Garrett from Flock Safety, you know, that that's a heroic company that should be at the stature of an Android as well.
And and have really helped them build that machine.
So speaking of the launch as a service offering, this was you know inspired early on.
I was asking, you know, some of the GPs, hey, what would where could we make the biggest difference?
Like what new product should we have?
And you know, Sarah said if we could uh guarantee a viral announcement, you know, I think that'd be a superpower for us.
So so we built out this this launch as a service, um, you know, everything souped to nuts from from you know all the all the social media copy to the messaging, the um, you know, the the the rollout.
We we created these custom videos.
You know, we we hired Richard, another uh 18-year-old who uh you know, we convinced him to go straight from high school with the MBA, i.e.
not go to college, uh or at least not right now.
And um he uh he had previously done the Cluley video uh and um and uh the browser-based video.
And he's just got this you know phenomenal um taste for for what really does well.
And so we we built this video team, Richard, Ben, you know, Henry, you know, has really led this, led this product.
And you could see the the views here.
It's it's it's just done phenomenally well.
Um, you know, millions and millions of views for for our companies.
We've now scaled up this offering to be to uh to offer it to to all of our companies.
And um that that's our first product, you know, uh from there where we're gonna go deeper and do more embedded engagements, not not just, hey, let's get this announcement viral, but let's let's build this repeatable motion to uh to to help companies you know build their foundations.
And and and that's one thing I also want to call out.
Um, we um after working with companies, companies were saying, hey, you know, how do I hire people like that?
In some cases, they were talking to them individually and seeing if they were appoachable.
Um, and uh, we said, hey, you know, we can't lose uh, you know, they're just saying, how do I find someone like Henry or Brent or or Richard or whoever?
And so we said, hey, we wanna, well, first we're trying to hire more of them too.
Um, and so let's let's create this fellowship.
And thus the new media fellowship was born to to help us hire them, but also help uh help our companies hire them.
And so uh because, you know, there's this sweet spot where you need to be online enough to really know the the the have taste and and ha have sensibility and understand these new platforms, but um you also need to be functioning enough and professional enough to work at one of these companies.
And and there's not many people can can do both.
And so we've really uh, you know, tried to create this this uh this program to be able to identify these people and then just give them a little bit more sort of technical know-how.
And so our first fellowship, uh we had, you know, uh 2,000 applications, we picked 65 people.
We think we think they're incredible.
Uh we two hires from us can't came from that so far.
Um, and we think this is gonna be a franchise um to come.
And and then the the other part of it I'll just leave is um, you know, I I think we were really popularizing this term new media, seeing a number of people with you know, new media JDs.
They they want ahead of new media.
They're they're they're looking for that.
And I think we're uh sort of in in the way that we've popularized American dynamism, other people have American Vitamism practices, um, we're starting to see that with with with new media.
And so it's cool to to see our thought leadership there.
Um and uh, you know, more to uh more more to come.
So yeah, those are the things I'll I'll leave you with in our our our presentation.
The um, you know, our our channels are are up um tremendously, and we're continuing to to invest in them.
We um we've got this portfolio offering launches of service.
We're we're you know now launching our go-direct motion and really helping our our CEOs and and companies do that.
It has to come from the CEO.
So every engagement we do, the CEO is is tremendously engaged.
Um and then we're really building out this this new media category creation, this new media talent base for for us, because we're continuing to hire, uh, but then also our our our our companies.
Yeah.
So Ben, any closing thoughts?
Um I I would just say that uh, you know, particularly if you spent time in uh the prior media regime, um, you know, of old media, you you know, you really have to rethink every instinct that you have, because uh it's it's one of the weirdest things where all your instincts are wrong.
I mean, we're actually experiencing a little bit of this in AI too, which you know, Martin wrote a great post on, which is like in the old world of software, the one thing you knew is you couldn't throw money at a problem.
And now you can throw money out of problem.
And so like you don't even realize how much of your thinking is affected by that old rule.
Um, and you know, uh, I I would say this is that in spades where like every single instinct you have is incorrect if you're in this world and you just have to let it all go.
And this is why you you know, this is people lament, oh, like the right wing built this big podcast network and blah, blah.
That's not what happened.
What happened is Trump just understood new media for whatever.
I don't know why he did, because he's so old and he's been in old media the whole time.
But like he just rolled right into it, and you know, not at a technological level, but uh as a media, uh as a medium.
And I think that uh, you know, we've got to do that.
We have to understand it.
Uh, and and we have to kind of play by the new rules.
Uh, all my favorite comedians, podcasters, et cetera, always tell their guests, don't read the comments.
Okay.
Uh, 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.
Uh, for what it's worth, every technical conference I've been at while at A16Z has always had an A16Z fanboy raving about our podcast.
Um, yeah.
So Eric, read the contents or read the comments, don't read the comments.
Uh don't read the comments if they're going to affect what you say.
Um it's it's kind of like the yell problem, you know, people who care enough to post either either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it.
And we we've definitely got at this point, I I I it doesn't affect me, so I I read the comments.
But uh, you know, I um I well, you know, and Mark and have helped me not uh not get too concerned about some of the some of the commentary on Twitter by you know certain anonymous uh Twitter posters who who uh you know raging at their basements, et cetera.
But uh yeah, in short, don't read the comments.
Yeah, so I'll just I'll I'll just maybe close on on two things.
Um so one is um uh there's a long history of this.
And so uh if you read any sort of biography or autobiography of any sort of professional author, you know, um uh you know who writes writes books for a living.
No, that like a hundred percent of the time at some point they will tell you, oh, the one thing I never do is read read read the crit read the critics, right?
Uh I never read the reviews.
Um and then and then they'll say, well, actually, no, that's not true.
I always read the reviews.
Um I know I shouldn't, right?
Like I know I shouldn't.
I know I shouldn't, because like critics, like by definition, are like, you know, basically bitter, you know, bitter people, um, uh, you know, who aren't who aren't writing novels or whatever.
And so of course they're gonna be mad.
Um and and I know I shouldn't read.
I know it's very bad for me.
I know it's gonna really screw me up.
Um and then I try, and then it's like a magnetic pull.
I I always end up reading them, you know, because it's like three in the morning and I can't resist.
And then I always end up getting mad.
Um and so there, you know, there is this push.
And it used to be right, only professional authors or professional filmmakers or whatever had critics, right?
Yeah, reviews are now basically right.
The entire the entire world is a critic.
And so I I think we all we all we all we all kind of have that.
It's it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit of a push and a pull.
Um, and so um uh that is uh that is a little bit a little bit difficult.
Um, you know, I will say I I think maybe a thing to kind of bear in mind.
Um I I couldn't resist, I posted a link to it, another book uh uh on this topic uh with it has a great title called called Kill All Normies.
Um and it's this it's a book actually from like a decade ago that talked about like this kind of very angry internet culture, you know, that kind of developed after the 2000s.
Um because by the way, the internet was not always like this.
Like in the in the very, very early days, the internet was so hard to get on to that the only people who were on the internet were like basically super basically like smart, super successful people.
Yeah, news groups were really good, man.
Yeah, yeah.
Like pre-1993 news newsgroups were like utopia.
Um and then uh and then uh and then sort of post 1993 things started going sideways and then things start the the modern kind of caustic internet culture really developed in the in the 2000s and 2010s.
Um but but basically it like it it actually turns out there's like a a genealogy to it.
And it actually turns out like a lot of it is literally literally it's um it's like Call of Duty lobbies um uh for online gaming.
So it's like literally like online gaming lobbies.
Um, because like when the Xbox and the PlayStation, you know, kind of uh rolled out uh voice uh you know voice interaction for the first time, you know, they're like, oh, it'd be great for players to be able to talk to each other.
And it turns out you just get like you know, 12 year old boys in these lobbies just like torching the fuck uh you know out of everybody and and and literally trying to get under their opponent's skin and then being willing to, you know, anonymously say absolutely anything to do it.
Um, right.
And so that led to, you know, the you know, very, very coarse, very vulgar, very offensive, you know, kind of thing.
And then that, you know, kind of flipped, you know, that kind of culture kind of expanded into early internet forums like something awful.
And then it started metastasizing into things like um, you know, like YouTube comments, um, uh, and then, you know, and then obviously social media kind of blew that open.
And so um, there is this um uh, you know, there is this kind of, you know, I don't know, like rage undercurrent to everything.
Um, and I guess it just to say, you know, you just got you, you do kind of literally have to think about it.
These are people literally in their in their in their parents' basement.
And by the way, you know, the other thing is generally when we get attacked on the comments or or or stuff like that.
It's somebody with like four followers or like a bot or something like that.
So yeah.
By the way, that that includes when it's very little interesting to read in them, I would say.
Yeah, and that includes when it's hey monitor than not.
Yeah, yes.
Yes.
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