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Having a platform is pretty ace. It gives you access to a lot of very interesting people, like Eric Ries, whom I interviewed just a couple of days ago (in post-prod as we speak). Eric is a business God thanks to his first book, The Lean Startup, which for a lot of us was effectively the startup Bible.

I interviewed him for the release of his new book, Incorruptible, which I started reading last night. I guess what I’m trying to say is, if you are thinking about starting a channel of your own—newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel—it’s a huge strategic advantage on the network-building side. Anyway, that’s all for now. Enjoy today’s writing.

GUEST POST 💄

The Future New Media: a16z

Media is changing. Those who are aware of this fact will reap the rewards for this new social media-driven, influence-obsessed age. We “are the media now,” if you believe Elon, someone who not only dominates our narratives but personally owns the Internet’s long-standing town square.

Owning the narrative is something I’ve spoken about a lot. This newsletter acts as a megaphone for myself and my endeavors. It serves as a channel to help me distribute stories, but also to weave in my own messages from time to time. Smart founders are doing this; as are companies; as are venture capital firms. In this case, the best example is Andreessen Horowitz.

a16z has led from the front with its bold new media strategy, designed to dominate the technology distribution game. Grow the firm’s awareness, invest in startups, amplify their messages, compound. To help tell the story of a16z, I’ve called on my buddy Isaac Peiris, founder of Pistachio, a B2B content agency, and Brand Chemistry, a weekly newsletter on how brands build trust and connection. Let’s dive in.

a16z's New Media Playbook

Hey, Isaac here! In September 2016, The Wall Street Journal published a story arguing that Andreessen Horowitz's fund returns trailed the venture-capital elite. Ben Horowitz later described the fallout as existential. They published a detailed rebuttal the same day, explaining exactly why comparing unrealized paper valuations across VC firms is methodologically meaningless. Nobody read it.

The correction reached a fraction of the audience the original story did. The damage held. a16z had spent seven years becoming one of Silicon Valley's most prominent firms. They'd backed Airbnb, GitHub, Coinbase, and Lyft. None of that insulated them from a single story they couldn't respond to effectively. A handful of publications controlled the narrative. Whatever they printed first, stuck. a16z drew one lesson from it. Own the channel.

Distribution is the product

a16z now runs what amounts to a mid-sized media company. Their podcast publishes five times a week. They have newsletters, a video team, and coordinated distribution across every major platform. A dedicated New Media team treats content production the way a startup treats a product roadmap, with roadmaps, KPIs, and dedicated platform experts for every channel. They’ve got an 18-year-old named Hiro who runs their Instagram and grew it 35% month-on-month.

Erik Torenberg, who leads the team, recently said a16z can now reach 90% of the founders they care about directly, without going through any intermediary.

For a VC firm, that's deal flow. The best founders choose a16z over competing term sheets partly because they're already in the orbit; the content has been doing relationship work for years before the first meeting. Being in the a16z ecosystem has value before you've signed a deal. Content is the vehicle. The audience is the asset.

Three products. All for portfolio companies.

The New Media team are a lot more than a content publisher. They productized the playbook for portfolio companies. The first is Launch-as-a-Service, a coordinated announcement operation covering social copy, video production, messaging, and rollout timing, designed to guarantee a viral launch. The team has run this for multiple portfolio companies and tracked millions of views per launch.

The second is a go-direct motion for portfolio CEOs. Qasar Younis, CEO of Applied Intuition, had never posted on X before working with the team. His first tweet got 4,000 likes. He now has a direct line to the engineers he wants to recruit, customers in adjacent markets, and journalists who know who he is. That's a growth channel that didn't exist six months earlier.

The third is the New Media Fellowship, an eight-week program to find and train platform-native talent. Two thousand applications for the first cohort. Sixty-five accepted. The goal is to build a pipeline of people who understand how platforms actually work, then deploy them to portfolio companies that need it.

The pattern across all three is the same. They're not teaching portfolio companies how to do PR. They're helping them build assets they own.

The OODA loop and the viral half-life

Marc Andreessen frames the current media landscape through the OODA loop, a military decision-making framework. Whoever cycles through observe-orient-decide-act the fastest wins. The Wall Street Journal has a 24-hour editorial cycle. Internet-native platforms run on a 24 to 36-hour viral half-life. Traditional media is constantly chasing the internet, which means owning internet-native distribution puts you upstream of where attention is formed.

Every time Andreessen has gotten into trouble on Twitter, it was because short-form stripped context. Context is the only thing protecting a complex idea from being misread.

Long-form is context insurance. The podcast episode you spend two hours recording is what makes the viral tweet land correctly when it does. The two work together. But without the long-form, the short-form is a liability.

Platform fluency matters for the same reason. Their Instagram growth doesn't come from cross-posting. It comes from someone who grew up native to the platform and understands its specific logic. Every platform compounds differently. Treating channels as distribution points for the same asset doesn't compound at all.

The Joe Rogan CEO test

The professional CEO was trained to say nothing. In the old media world, the risk/reward math made it rational. A handful of major outlets, 24-hour editorial cycles, no real counter-channel. One misquoted sentence could define you. So executives learned to speak in a way that couldn't be misquoted, which meant speaking in a way that couldn't be remembered either. That's a growth failure in the world we're in now.

Jordy from TBPN coined the Joe Rogan CEO test: is this founder interesting enough to hold a three-hour conversation? Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus, passed it—he literally sat on Joe Rogan's podcast and held the room for hours. These are people who attract talent, investors, and customers before any formal process starts, because people want to work for and buy from people who have something worth saying.

Anduril is the clearest case. They have brand presence in defense circles that a company their size has no business having. None of it comes from advertising. It comes from founders and executives who are genuinely worth paying attention to. The inbound that generates, in recruiting, in partnerships, in public perception, doesn't show up cleanly in a CAC spreadsheet. But it absolutely drives the business.

Having a point of view, and saying it consistently, is how a founder earns attention they didn't pay for.

Winning the internet for a day

That's a founder earning attention on their own. a16z built a department to do it for the whole portfolio, on purpose and on repeat. They call it the "A24 of a16z," an in-house studio that makes launch films for its companies.

The aim is unusually blunt for a finance firm. Win the internet for the day. That's the kind of target you'd expect from a media company, set here by people whose day job is writing cheques.

The machine works. When World Labs launched its Marble model, a16z's team produced the announcement film, shot it on the same virtual-production stage used for The Mandalorian, and it went viral. It repeats, too. Fal's funding announcement pulled 1.3 million views. Sola's hit around 320,000. EliseAI's nearly 244,000. a16z says the output has driven tens of millions in contract value, doubled hiring pipelines, and waitlists you couldn't fill with a press release.

A firm whose entire job is capital allocation looked at the modern internet and decided that manufacturing viral moments was core enough to staff, fund, and run like a product team. They own and operate distribution in-house, every week, the same as any other part of the business.

The most sophisticated investors on earth now treat attention as infrastructure. If a VC is building a viral video department, the question is what are you still filing under "marketing" that belongs at the center of how you grow?

Playbook / how you can apply this

• Pick one platform and go genuinely native to it: Don't cross-post the same content everywhere. Study the platform's specific logic: what it rewards and what only works there. Depth on one channel compounds faster than shallow presence on five.

• Build distribution before you need it: The worst time to start is during a crisis, a fundraise, or a launch. a16z's lesson is to build the channel first so that when you need it, it already exists. Start before the product is ready, not after.

• Use long-form as context insurance: Short form gets the attention. Long-form protects the idea. Record the podcast, write the essay so that when a tweet lands, it lands correctly and doesn't get stripped of everything that made it worth saying.

• Pass the Joe Rogan test: Ask whether you're interesting enough to hold a three-hour conversation on something your audience actually cares about. If the answer's no, that's the content gap. Have a real point of view. Say things people remember.

• File it under growth, not comms: Distribution is a growth function. The companies getting the most from new media strategies treat the audience as an asset on the balance sheet — not a vanity metric on a monthly report.

Future

AI is dropping the cost of mediocre content to near zero. The supply of forgettable content is about to explode. In that environment, owned distribution becomes more valuable, not less. If you've spent the last few years building an audience that trusts you, a real one, not a bought one. You have something that can't be replicated overnight.

a16z understood this before most. The lesson is about what it means to have a direct line to the people who matter to your business and what happens to the companies that never build one. The content is the channel. Build it like infrastructure.

Extra reading

• If You Ain’t AI First, You’re Last - November, 2025

• Battle Royale: ChatGPT vs Claude - February, 2025

• The World’s Hottest Industry: Post-Training - March, 2026

And that's it! You can connect with Isaac on LinkedIn, and also don’t forget to check out Pistachio and Brand Chemistry.

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