You Are Not Behind on a16z's New Media

In October I broke down how a16z turned venture capital into a media operation, and I ended on three bets about where the next blue oceans were. Live streaming. Owning one vertical's entire stack, and bottom-up distribution (where your founders become your media rather than the other way around).

I did not expect to be checking my own homework this quickly.

Halfway through writing this update Erik Torenberg posted "New Media, One Year In", basically a 3,000 word post on exactly how the operation works and how they pitch it to founders. It is a good read, and it confirms most of what I was going to say anyway.

But what is more significant than any of the launches or the headcount is beyond “building a media operation”. They named it.

"New Media" is unequivocally an a16z term now, the same way "software is eating the world" was theirs, the same way "Dynamism" as a category is theirs.

Coining a term is the most powerful thing you can do in marketing, because once you own the words, everyone else who plays gets read as derivative. You can be a firm putting out genuinely brilliant content and still get brushed with "oh they are doing the New Media thing now" which just hands the credit back to a16z.

On the one hand this vocab is a moat.

Then there is the other side of it... Because they have been so loud and so high volume about it, I get the sense people are a little bit sick of it. The term is so glued to a16z now that leaning into it almost makes you look unoriginal by default (cc Lightspeed?).

Which is kind of funny, because it means doing nothing, or at least doing something visibly different, starts to become a strategy in itself. People want to feel distinct from a16z, not like a smaller version of them.

So this is less an update on a16z and more a question for everyone else.

When the biggest firm in venture has built a machine specifically for industrialising whatever works, and owns the actual language for it… what is left for the rest of the field?

What They Have Done

The simplest signal is headcount. a16z now lists more than 70 people on the marketing team, and that is before you count the speedrun team. For context, most firms have one or two people on marketing and a couple of contractors, even YC is only 7 FTE.

There are probably fewer than ten teams in the world with even 1/10th of what a16z has in terms of marketing. This is beyond a content team now, and is why things have moved so quickly.

Erik is pretty upfront about why they can win this talent, too. He basically claims they hire better people than a normal agency because the job is more interesting and the incentives line up better. It is a bold thing to say, but looking at the writers they are landing, it is hard to argue with.

They brought in Alex Danco from Shopify as a writer. Katie Kirsch (founded Lume), to help lead ecosystem, among other Twitter personalities they hired netcapgirl, and even the content-first logic has now reached investor relations - they brought on Benedikt Langer, who built an audience with LPs through his newsletter Embracing Emergence, as a contractor.

When even your IR hire is a content hire it is beyond marketing and become the operating system of the firm.

Live streaming arrived

(as predicted) Launching MTS Live, a streaming product built on X, leaning into content as a real-time, news-reactive channel.

My honest read is it is not hugely differentiated from what many other livestreams offer especially what TBPN did/does, and the hosts do not have the pull that John Coogan and Jordi Hayes built vs most people could not name the MTS hosts.

But there is a move underneath it - as TBPN got bigger and harder to get on, MTS is high frequency with a more diverse guest list, smaller voices and earlier founders can get airtime… this is on their thesis too that the internet is upstream of everything.

For a16z, that is a way of building relationships with founders way earlier than the established-name circuit would allow. I don’t know many actively consuming MTS, or even referencing it, but the quality looks to be improving, they have signed sponsors, and they are past 200,000 followers.

This all sits inside what Erik frames as the owned-channel advantage, an X account north of a million followers, a daily newsletter with a quarter of a million subscribers, a podcast doing a million downloads a month. His pitch is basically, when you launch with us, we can guarantee you distribution in a way an agency or a smaller fund just cannot. And he is right. That is the core of it.

Bottom-up distribution.

In October I argued the flipped model was coming, where instead of the VC being the media, you help your founders and operators become the media and let their reach compound back to you.

In March, a16z formalised almost exactly this through a16z Build and David Booth’s Lighthouse Playbook.

Find the highly respected, generous operators and founders, build their personal brands using fund resources, and create the spaces where they pull others in.

Founders, researchers, power users, good accounts, those are the characters who make an idea credible, and a16z's job is to make lots of them legible rather than hoard the spotlight for the firm.

And it is not just founders. The same playbook is running on talent through the fellowships. The New Media Fellowship is on its third cohort, and it has been joined by an FDE fellowship, a design engineer fellowship, and a growth one, each of them containerising a role. Which is the coinage move again, just applied to jobs: name the category, own the category.

a16z is not really hiring these people, they are enrolling them into a hiring pipeline for the portfolio, a set of early relationships with people who will be founders pitching them in 3 years, and another few dozen distributors of the a16z brand. Erik says there are versions coming for executives and emerging investors next. This is the part I think will compound hardest over time - scout programs suffer from attribution issues but - a16z FoF kinda makes more sense (angel track by First Round was quite similar too).

This spotlighting of interesting individuals is something I have called an underused resource for VC firms several times on this blog.

The best example I kept pointing to was Gaby Goldberg's 2024 Substack series People Watching, where she would put together lists of great people you probably do not know yet. Coincidentally, a16z has now hired Gaby... There are still plenty of opportunities to do a version of this within your own niche in VC, and Cura has just started doing that (shout out Sharan).

The concierge layer is also more built out - this is the reverse pitch, or as their competitors apparently call it, the Bear Hug. In the fundraise, a16z flips the meeting around and pitches the founder on the 20 tangible things they will do in week one, and New Media has become one of the headline promises. That reframes a media operation from a cost centre to a closing tool in the deal. And you can see them leaning into that, their website is being rebuilt around it, with a New Media page, testimonials, a wall of produced work, and a "work with us" CTA that skews more agency than VC.

The shareable layer industrialised.

One underrated part of what they do now is the chart mogging. A team member finds an interesting chart every day, rebrands it with a16z styling regardless of the source, and posts it. Some are a bit questionable, some are genuinely great finds, and the best clear a quarter of a million views + reposts with their logo. Then the backlog does double duty, embedded into partner long-form to lift the shareability of the writing. It is cheap, constant, and very effective.

Considering how well aggregation pages do across other categories, sports highlights, news, politics etc. I am surprised more firms aren’t doing (non-chart) versions of this.

What They Are Not Doing

The one thing the post does not really dwell on, is the verticalisation reversing.

The thing I gave a16z historically the most credit for in October was how completely they had verticalised their media. A podcast network split cleanly by sector, each vertical with its own show, newsletter, and identity. That is now unwinding.

The health podcast dropped from weekly to biweekly and has not really posted since April. Crypto, once weekly, has gone quiet. The separate shows are folding back into a single a16z show, and the Ben and Mark Show as a standalone is basically gone, absorbed into the main feed.

There are a few ways to read it.

1) It compounds audience into one stream and makes clipping and editing easier.

2) It might reflect ‘American Dynamism’ or AI becoming such a centre of gravity that it cuts across everything else, so it is easier to centralise around one brand.

3) Or that running ten vertical media brands does not scale, even at 70 people, and even a16z decided the dilution was not worth it.

Erik's post is organised entirely around founders and packaging, not verticals, which is also confirmation that the sector-brand is no longer the point. Where they do still verticalise hard is Substack, where crypto, Build, Policy, New Media each keep their own feed and a wide range of partners post in their own voices.

Partner voices, are the healthy too. As the top-line brand grows, the writing is getting more democratic and more personal, spread across more team members on the newsletter. That yields better engagement, because partners can own and distribute their own stuff, and it gives founders and LPs a much better sense of the team. You can see the range on Substack - Katie K on San Francisco's social scene sitting next to David Harbour, a GP, on voice recording - something any firm with multiple partners should be thinking about.

Everything works for about a year now.

In the original piece I made the point that copying a16z's 2009 playbook will not get you their 2025 results, because what they pioneered is now table stakes. This update sharpens that.

The window between a blue ocean and a red one has collapsed. In 2009, a16z could do something everyone else dismissed as vanity, the first full-time PR hire at a VC firm, and have years before anyone copied it. In 2025 and 2026, the lag is months. I named live streaming and bottom-up distribution in October, and both have been productised by spring. The machine they have built exists to spot what works and industrialise it faster than anyone else can react.

For every other firm, it is no longer enough to find something that works, because the moment it visibly works, a 70-person team does it at a scale you cannot match. And it gets worse, because the format itself decays as it industrialises. The launch-video-goes-viral moment that a16z post leads with is already edging into cliché, precisely because it works and is now available as a service. Every quarter it gets a little less viral as everyone gets the same playbook.

So the only durable bets are the ones a16z structurally cannot run, no matter how many people they hire.

So where are the gaps that survive?

Four, and they all come from the same place. They are the things that get worse, not better, when you industrialise them.

The verticals are still vacated.

a16z tried to be the media ecosystem for ten verticals and is pulling back to fewer. That is a generalist admitting that real depth in a single vertical does not scale across a broad firm. A focused fund can still own the entire media and community stack for one domain, fire tech, robotics, defence, a specific slice of bio, in a way a16z has now shown it cannot sustain.

The unscalable layer.

At 70 people, everything a16z makes is industrial by definition. Nothing they produce can land with one person as if it were made just for them. The more the top of the market scales, the more valuable the stuff that cannot be scaled, the memo to a single founder, the personal notes. When I wrote about how Benchmark could do stealth marketing content, this was the engine underneath all of them - unscalable, relationship-grade output that works because it is anti-production line.

Personality and genuine weirdness.

a16z is an institution now, and institutions cannot vibrate at a personal frequency. The vibe is set. and it cannot really be anything else at this point, which leaves the entire rest of the personality spectrum open for everyone else. I have written about both halves of this, why weird, specific content is becoming scarce resource and being known well, and the common thread is that personality is the thing venture has never worked out how to scale. The people actually doing the deals inside a16z are not necessarily personality-matched with a16z institution. A founder aligning with the a16z vibe is aligning with a brand, and then an individual turns up.

Independent voice.

a16z's own post carries a disclosure footer noting that the founders quoted so glowingly are portfolio companies. That is the Future.com problem all over again, they cannot produce media, or endorsements, that fully escape being read as a16z talking its own book. A small fund with a real, specific point of view still earns a kind of trust a narrative operation cannot buy at any headcount.

The original takeaway still holds. Do not ask whether to copy a16z. Ask what they wish they had started 5 years earlier.

But after eight months of watching this machine, I would add something. If a partner at your firm forwards you Erik's post and asks whether you should be doing New Media, the honest answer is that it is the wrong question. "New Media" is just the name a16z gave to their answer. The questions underneath it are the same ones they have always been.

• Who are the specific people you are trying to reach?

• How do they actually want things delivered to them?

• What do you have access or expertise to say that nobody else does?

a16z answered those with 70 people, a streaming product, and 4 fellowships, because at their scale those are the right answers.

Answer the 3 questions honestly and you will mostly end up somewhere a16z is not, because your audience, your access, and your scale are not theirs. That was true in October and it is more true now. The only thing that has changed is the cost of skipping the questions and borrowing someone else's answer - because now the answer you are borrowing has their name on it.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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