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Marc Andreessen on Cheeky Pint. Please do not attempt at 2x speed.

SHORT THE LIES.

Introducing the TBPN Media Market Map. Understanding the evolving media landscape can be confusing, even bewildering. From Neo Trad Media to the East Coast Underground, we put together a simple market map to help make sense of it all.

Introducing Marble by World Labs: a foundation for a spatially intelligent future. Create your world at marble.worldlabs.ai

Brian's First Day As CFO - Live From NYC nitter.app/i/broadcasts/1YpJkkpzM…

one of the projects we spent the most time on @a16z new media will get announced this week

GOOD MORNING NEW YORK CITY COME DO YOUR BEST THINKING AT OUR THINKING SPACE IN THE WEST VILLAGE SAY NO TO SLOP

"my favorite enterprise service is cursor" thanks jensen, glad you like it!

Two paths. Two futures. Teaching sand to think, or being left in the dust. Welcome to Runtime 2025.

I'm excited to announce the a16z New Media Fellowship. Or as many people are saying, the Thiel Fellowship for the terminally online. Finding highly functional people who are also very online is hard, so we are creating a fellowship to gather and train them in the art of New Media. Think X, essays, video production, podcasts, growth, distribution, etc. More details and application here.

Today, we're thrilled to announce our $125M Series C funding round at a $1.5B valuation, led by Meritech Capital, marking our third successful raise in just 12 months! fal’s Generative Media Cloud now powers tens of thousands of applications, supporting over two million developers and more than 300 enterprise customers. From initial prototypes to fully scaled production, we've become the essential infrastructure enabling some of the most innovative and creative work in the industry. Over the past year alone, we've experienced extraordinary growth—averaging 40% month-over-month, consistently exceeding our own ambitious projections. Each month, hundreds of thousands of new developers and thousands of fresh applications join our platform, unlocking entirely new use cases previously thought impossible. With this latest round of funding, we're significantly scaling our engineering, support, sales, and marketing teams to keep pace with the accelerating demand and enthusiasm from our community. Our vision has always been clear: build a generative media platform that effortlessly creates dynamic, real-time content across video, audio, image, and 3D. Thanks to our incredible team, dedicated partners, and visionary customers, that's precisely what fal delivers today—empowering creativity at unprecedented scale.

Today’s founders deserve to win the attention economy. a16z was built as the CAA of venture. We're still advancing our vision to treat founders like Hollywood treats its stars.

life update: I decided to forgo college this fall to join @a16z full time. I’m beyond excited to be part of the New Media team. Our goal is simple: help the firm and its portcos tell their stories, and push the frontier of what’s creatively possible. This path hasn’t been straightforward. Balancing school and work was hard and extremely lonely. But along the way I’ve also found some of my closest friends, worked with people I grew up admiring, and built memories I’ll carry forever. Dropping out is a scary sentence to write. At the same time, I feel an undeniable pull toward this work. It excites and challenges me every day. Here's to a new chapter.

Huge week ahead. Excited for this.

I got fired today. I'm not sure why, I personally don't think there is a reason, or that it's important. When I joined twitter, I joined because of the engineers I met in SF. They seemed happy. They were having fun. Engineers at play. Engineers that were enabled. It was good!

HVAC has beaten out semiconductors, computers/servers, and data centers as the biggest winner of net-new hardware spending since 2022.

Skechers with the most gooner ai slop ad… in the subway… I’m in disbelief… is this the end?

Say hi to Poke.com! 👋🏼🌴

New: Palantir's CTO and several early employees are raising money to launch Founders Films, a film and TV production studio that aims to "say yes to projects about American exceptionalism, name America’s enemies, back artists unconditionally, take risk on novel IP.”

Excited to announce that @SolaAI_ has raised a $17.5M Series A led by @a16z with support from @Conviction @ycombinator, bringing total funding to $21M 🚀 From the start, we set out to reimagine human-AI interaction to push the boundaries of process automation. Our agents watch how people do tasks on-screen, then handle those tasks automatically, even in legacy tools.

“i am gonna do a cinematic launch video for my startup so it stands out”

I’m excited to share that we’ve raised a $70M Series B, led by @a16z and @ICONIQCapital - bringing our total funding to over $100M in under a year. Accounting is a $500B category, and yet most finance teams are still running on systems built in the 90s. @RilletHQ is rebuilding the financial core of modern companies. We’ve rebuilt the general ledger from the ground up to assemble the first AI-native ERP, built for speed, flexibility, and automation. Since coming out of stealth ~12 months ago, we’ve grown lightning fast. We now power the finance stack behind companies like @PostscriptIO, @windsurf, @DecagonAI, @bitwarden and many more across many industries. Windsurf scaled revenue 10x while running global finance with just two people and Rillet. Postscript, with over $100M in ARR and four entities, now closes their books in three days. These are the kinds of results we hold ourselves to. We’ve also partnered with some of the largest and best accounting firms in the country, including @Armanino_HQ, @wissllp and Attivo. The whole industry has been begging for change for decades. With Rillet, it’s here. This round came together very quickly. The first call happened while I was eating a tuna sandwich in SF (I did not finish it). Three days later, we had a signed term sheet. It was a reflection of the momentum we’re seeing both in the product and in the market. Since announcing our Series A just weeks ago, we’ve already doubled our ARR. None of this would be possible without our team of accountants and engineers. A few months ago, I was still jumping on support calls to help customers. Today, our implementation, success, and product teams are delivering outcomes with the same speed and care that got us here. We originally booked an offsite to celebrate the Series A. In classic Rillet speed fashion, it’s now an A + B celebration. It’s proof of how fast things can move when customers love the product and a reminder of how much this team has earned the chance to celebrate together. We’re fortunate to welcome @a16z and @ICONIQCapital to the table. @arampell, @seema_amble, @mandrusko1 and @slpierre, @skstebbins bring clarity, urgency and deep conviction about the future of AI and finance. We’re also grateful to have continued support from our early partners @sequoia, @firstround, @creandum who believed in us from the start, and excited about working with @oakhcft and @FogVentures. To the Rillet team, again - thank you for building with care, focus, and speed. To our customers - thank you for pushing us, trusting us, and helping shape the product. We are honored to serve you. Let’s go!

I’m joining @a16z ! After five years at Shopify, I’m moving onto my next adventure in life, and heading to Andreessen Horowitz. Shopify is an incredible place, and Tobi is one of the great founders of our era. I’ll remember those years as one of the golden chapters of my life. Now, onwards! I’m joining a16z as Editor at Large, and I’ll be responsible for the written output of the firm. A16z has always prioritized great thinking and writing as a deliberate instrument of the firm’s purpose and power. It starts with Ben and Marc: both generationally talented high-agency thinkers, writers, and company builders. And there’s a burning new energy in the firm today, brought by @eriktorenberg - who I’ll work with closely as he takes a16z’s narrative presence to a new level of ambition. Writing is power transfer technology I’ve had a few different vocations over the years - I’ve been a founder, touring musician, venture associate, worked at Shopify - but most people on the internet know me from my writing online. I’ve been blogging since my early twenties, and in that time I’ve seen different online content metas come and go - the golden years of VC blogs like AVC and Haystack, the Medium years, now Substack; the rise of “Go direct” and the crisis of traditional media. What hasn’t changed is how valuable great writing can be. Something special happens when you give someone words to express an idea they always knew, but couldn’t articulate: you give them power. And it didn’t cost you anything. “Power transfer technology” is what the business of VC is. Why does a VC firm care about content? It can’t just be to advertise the firm; or promote their partners and their theses. Those are both consequences of success, but they can’t be the actual goal. The primary objective of a VC firm’s content, particularly their written output, should be to give founders power. The goal is to give them writing that transforms them into someone with more legitimacy, which is what power really is about. Traditional media sometimes helps you accomplish this. A well-written op ed, thoughtfully crafted, can serve this purpose. But I think bloggers are naturally better at this craft, because bloggers have to grow their franchises under the constraint of not having built-in distribution. If you’ve mastered the craft of writing online, you know something important about how to reach and influence people, and what exactly it is you offer to an audience that gives them power. Blogging is a trade Winning, for bloggers, means writing the reference take on a good topic. My favourite example of this is how Byrne Hobart broke out with his piece on the 30-year mortgage. It’s kind of surprising that this kind of post had such influence - it’s wonky, it’s not written for a general audience whatsoever. But it turns out that people think and talk about their mortgages a lot, and like to feel competent when they do. Reading that piece equips them with a kind of legitimacy to speak on the topic. One lesson hiding in plain sight here is that most of the audience of any successful post does not actually read it. They are told it by someone who did read it. There’s a primary audience who carefully reads the piece and does the cognitive work of “restructuring their consciousness” (Walter Ong coded) around good writing. And then there’s a secondary audience, who are re-told the content, either verbally (including group chats, podcasts, Youtube) or in other oral formats like Twitter. (This is broadly true both inside and outside of organizations; e.g. a lot of work goes into writing an annual plan, which only a small number of people actually read, but a lot of people are “re-told” in some way.) The primary audience gets something out of this sequence of events: they get power. This is the great secret of writing in public: the writer and primary audience both put in effort (to pack and unpack the idea); and they jointly reap the rewards, which is the legitimacy earned when the idea gets subsequently retold verbally to the wider secondary audience. This is why, paradoxically, to reach the widest audience, you write to the narrow audience. Your objective as a writer is to give your primary audience material they’ll want to re-tell. They do the work of translating it to wider audiences in specific contexts; you do the general articulation in rich detail. The secret of magic is to transform the magician Today, there’s an amazing idea-sharing format that’s swallowed a lot of the “smart people discourse” on the internet, which is podcasting. The rise of podcasts has been astounding to watch, in the six years since I wrote The Audio Revolution. And a16z has both a great past and a great future in this media format, especially with Erik at the helm and seeing the caliber of talent he’s bringing on board his New Media team. But podcasts are not enough on their own. Great writing, which has gone through the crucible of thinking and editing, transfers something into the reader, and transforms something within the reader, that talking does not. I know a lot of smart people who correctly intuit that blogging is powerful, but can’t justify it on a return-on-effort basis compared to other ways of getting their message out. This is a mistake. Writing matters. It takes more effort to read something than to listen to it. (And much more to write something than to talk about it.) The cognitive work of writing and reading is a real cost, but the benefit is that you get “restructured consciousness” from factoring and negotiating with the idea in written form. When you read an important idea and put in the work to understand it, you gain the subconscious competence and legitimacy to talk about it: you are transformed into someone with more power. Whereas, when you hear an idea, you can usually repeat the idea but not with the same authority. The deep competency is not transferred to the same degree. This is an important idea to understand in a world where most of our information diet is shifting towards oral communication in various forms - “the internet village.” Now, people have been complaining that “nobody reads anymore” for decades - the point here is, the benefits of reading have never been more disproportionate, nor less obvious. The farther we move towards being a default-verbal information culture, the more powerful the trade between writer and primary reader, but the less obvious it is to do. (Why write things if people would rather watch or listen?) If your goal is “I want to maximize the number of people who receive my message” then oral formats like podcasts, Youtube, and Twitter will appear like the obvious choice. But if you articulate the goal as “I want to give people power” then clearly you’ve got to write something down. Founders are customers for legitimacy I remember some days when I was a founder and no one would take me seriously, except for when I could produce a blog post from someone like Paul Graham or Semil Shah and speak to that idea. Something incredible would happen in those moments - people would actually listen to me, as if I’d suddenly become magic. Magic works because it is communication. The founder equipped with the VC’s writing should communicate something higher-signal than the founder alone. Ask, “what must be true of the content for this statement to become real?” and you’ve got a good guide for what kinds of things to write. This relationship between VC and founder scales all the way up to real power-politics: the job of the VC firm is to be the “legitimacy bank” where founders (and other high-agency people) can go to take out legitimacy on credit, or make a legitimacy deposit. I find this to be a wonderful way to frame the founder-VC relationship because it does NOT imply the VCs are the “grownups” in some patronizing sense: it celebrates legitimacy as a thing that VCs and founders incept together, just like how blogging is thing that the writers and their primary readers incept together. This is why VC blogs were such a good product in their heyday. As the “free tier” of the VC, it naturally frames the relationship as one where legitimacy is jointly incepted (by the writer and primary reader), not as one that’s benevolently bestowed. The meta is different now, but the purpose is the same, and I think a16z is probably the best spot in the world to pursue that craft and that thesis. I’m incredibly fortunate to get to join this group of talented investors and company builders, towards a mission that’s never been more important: giving the world’s founders the power they need to build a bright future. Let’s go!

Marc Andreessen says we’re living in the barbell era of attention. "Kids want to watch either two-minute videos or three-hour Rogan episodes." TV formats cut every conversation short. Long-form gives people what they’ve been starving for: depth without interruption.

Been wondering who was gonna take up Thiel Fellowship mantle. @emmalsalinas and @genzmafia looking like stronger contenders daily. Fantastic work @brent_liang. Lazer eyed jump cut was 👨‍🍳👌

Sneak peek of an @a16z New Media production 👀 (we're making movies now)

btw we made this video in one single week from initial idea to storyboards to final animation. a wabi design team x @a16z new media collab. shoutout @richardzphotoz @RMyrsater @Kirschberg_ @humford @bnslevin this crew is cracked

Big day for merch

You can’t look at these bright smiling faces and tell me your not optimistic about the future.

Morning. Here are our guest call-ins today: - @CJHandmer (Terraform) - @PatrickMcGee_ (Apple in China) - @aphysicist (Atomic Industries) - @gaurab (Solugen) - @lukasczinger (Divergent3D) - @pronounced_kyle (Astranis) - @matsiiako (Infisical) - @alexeheath (Verge) - Sean Liu (Founders Fund) - Garth Sheldon-Coulson (Panthalassa) See you all on the stream.

Excited to announce that I've joined the New Media team at @a16z to help craft some of the best conversations in and around tech!

The interns have descended

TBPN Guest Directory now live at TBPN dot com slash guests - search by name, filter by topic, click to jump straight into the interview. Thanks to the amazing @aerosenblum who was able to build this in a cave with a box of scraps.

Our demo day guest directory is now available at @tbpn dot com slash guests. 35+ startups and investors from @ycombinator. History says multiple of these startups will become unicorns.

Morning. Here are our guest call-ins today: - @altcap (Altimeter Capital) - @AJ_Piplica + @Zsshore (Hermeus) - @zebulgar + @EnduroSat (Founders Fund) Thiel Fellow lightning round (@thielfellowship): - @CarloWKobe (Fizz) - @thewildstevenp (Orbit) - @Eliasfiz (Canopy Labs) - @jacksondenka (Azura) - @hoomanrenezhad (Solcoa Industries) - @FerdiDabitz (Ivy) - @RealJPGE (Phase) - @Jlindig0 (AUG Tx) - @WarnerTeddy (Intempus) - @0xSigil (Extraordinary) - @aidanmantine (Innerphases) - @koki_mashita (Aeolus) - Colton Ed-Habr (Orbit) See you on the stream.

Crazy to think how good @a16z media is already and that @eriktorenberg is going to 10x it from here

Two paths. Two futures. Teaching sand to think, or being left in the dust. Welcome to Runtime 2025.

Morning. Here are our guest call-ins today: - @cjpedregal (Granola) - @joshuabrowder (Do Not Pay/Browder Capital) - @bryan_johnson (Don't Die) - @m_franceschetti (Eight Sleep) ++++++ special @a16z deep dive from @pmarca, @eriktorenberg, @martin_casado, @davidu, @AnjneyMidha, @illscience, @DavidGeorge83, @jkhamehl See you on the stream.

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) on why internet ads aren’t going anywhere: “If you really want to get to a billion and then five billion people, you can’t do that with a paid offering… you need an indirect business model. Ads are the obvious one.” “If you take a principle stand against ads, you’re also taking a stand against broad access; global per-capita GDP just isn’t high enough.” “A well-targeted ad at a specifically relevant point in time is actually content; it enhances the experience.”

Pick your reality

ok some personal news: 1. I'm joining @a16z! 2. my family and I are moving back to San Francisco 🇺🇸 👋 I’m joining a16z as a Partner and Head of Ecosystem. Excited to be teaming up with @eriktorenberg for a second round, continuing what has become my life’s work. I'll be focused on expanding and reinforcing the multitude of networks spanning our firm; building pipelines for emerging talent, customer networks; products and communities that help founders, operators and investors connect and build together. Feeling charged up, time to build. Some thoughts on why + what 👇 1- "Preferential Attachment" is how startups win. It starts with @pmarca, in conversation with John Collison and Charlie Songhurst on "Cheeky Pint": "…a startup needs to get into a loop where it’s accruing more and more resources as it goes… qualified executives, technical employees, future downstream financing, positive brand momentum, public perception, customers, revenue, ability to throw weight in the government… all of these resources you need to succeed as a business. You’re either a snowball rolling down the hill, picking up resources, gaining size and scope and scale, power, credibility as you go... or you’re not – you’re stuck at the top of the hill as a snowflake, and you’re just not going anywhere." "…the question becomes how do you get started? ...to the point where the next resource that you need is more likely to attach to your thing, as opposed to somebody else. That’s the mechanical process that drives the power law. Economists call it preferential attachment.” Startups win when everything in their world starts to preferentially attach to them. That attachment doesn’t always come naturally... when a company is early in its life, or when a person is early in their career, there’s a trust and credibility hurdle that must be overcome. Friends or supporters could help catalyze an attachment by staking some of their reputation and/or capital, for example a young person with no assets trying to buy a house might ask a trusted friend, family or community member to “co-sign” their mortgage. Raising from a top-tier VC is another such “co-sign.” As Marc continues… “…a top VC is a bridge loan of credibility at a point in time where a startup deserves credibility but doesn’t have it yet. This is then harvested in the form of personnel, customers, brand.” More and more, we see that the Series A and/or B round lead (or absence thereof) is the strongest leading indicator of the ultimate outcome. One bet I’m willing to take is that as everything around us becomes “technology” and earlier stage VC continues to institutionalize, this will only become more true. 2- VC has traditionally done “preferential attachment” non-scalably. Venture capital firms win through building personal trust, hands-on partnership between GPs and their founders. GP “value add” comes via their ability to allocate personal time and attention, make introductions into their personal network, maintain a sense of intimacy with the company and context around the challenges it’s trying to overcome. This has always been the job of the VC. Some do it better than others. But intimacy doesn’t scale. Each new investment divides partner attention further. You can add headcount, platform functions, but traditional ‘services’ approaches hit diminishing returns to scale. Moreover, it doesn’t help you with all of the follow-on preferential attachment that has to relentlessly compound in the snowball’s trip down the hill; nearly as much as you’d like. As a result, venture can feel like the opposite of a network-effect business: the bigger the portfolio, the more dilute your attention, and the weaker VC’s incremental value-add on helping any particular snowflake attach to the snowball. 3- It doesn't it need to be that way. For years I’ve been obsessed with this idea of “turning VC into a network effect business.” One of my early career inflection points was joining AngelList in 2014, where I first saw how software could turn networks into infrastructure—removing friction from company formation, capital raising, hiring, and distribution. This became a thread that would weave throughout my subsequent decade and ultimately led to my teaming up with Erik the first time in 2017, himself fresh out of a similar formative experience at Product Hunt. The insight: VC firms need to think like networked product builders, not just service providers. Instead of dividing attention across n+1 companies, you build systems where value compounds... where founders connect to other founders; where operators can access expertise across the portfolio & broader firm's network; where any "ask" becomes a rallying point for those who share an interest in the topic. Every company you back expands that network, every talented individual who joins becomes another n^2 on it's value as a whole. This is what unlocks scalable preferential attachment. A strong brand signals credibility. A large network provides resources. But each on its own is not enough. The combination—a brand that attracts top talent into a network that makes them more successful, creates a compounding loop that helps drive power law outcomes. The result: a shift from diminishing returns to compounding value. Intimacy and direct relationships with GPs remain central. But those GPs now have a very long lever with which to help founders move the world, and can focus their time/attention on the really critical decisions that founders are facing. A16z is one among very few who have managed to cross this chasm—delivering intimacy and exclusivity on the front end (direct relationships between vertical fund GPs and founders), AND network power on the back—operating a platform that institutionalizes access to resources at a scale few yet understand. 4- We are building the F1 pit crew of venture. Big VC is like Formula 1. Hyper-competitive. Big budgets. Media & brand-driven. Top teams need to win hearts and minds, as well as races. GPs are the drivers—instinctive, highly attuned to the conditions on the road, thinking about what lies around the next bend. The greats go on to become household names, and go on generational winning streaks: Lewis Hamilton, Michael Schumacher… Don Valentine, Marc Andreessen. But when Hamilton stands on the F1 podium, it’s easy to miss the work that went on behind the scenes to get him there. Races are won or lost years in advance by teams who design the right chassis, hire the right engineers, drill their pit crews, build cult-like fanbases to keep the sponsor dollars flowing. VC is the same. The GP has to win the deal. It’s easy to glamorize the Partner who get to stand by the founder ringing the NYSE bell. But at the best firms there’s an invisible engine behind them, a “Pit Crew” that must execute immediately and flawlessly, every time. Adrian Newey didn’t win any races — but his arrival as CTO at Red Bull transformed them from a cash-burning midfield team into a generational, world-champion franchise. And the generational VC firms of the next decade won’t just have the best drivers; they’ll also make deliberate, thoughtful investments in the machines they drive. I believe a16z is the most effective preferential attachment machine in the world—but we're going to make it even better. If “marketing” is the top-down vector of storytelling, “ecosystem” is the bottom-up vector of trust. While marketing expands brand and visibility, helps shape the conversation; ecosystem creates the rooms and networks in which those conversations take place. Ecosystem is the hidden operating system of venture. It’s an understanding that today’s senior product manager is tomorrow’s founder; today’s founder becomes tomorrow’s angel investor or advisor. It’s about building the infrastructure to support those 5-10 year journeys as they play out. When the two are in sync, you get the compounding engine that made Silicon Valley what it is: a dense network of people who believe in the same future—willing, and able to build it together. I’m stoked to come back to SF and help make it happen. We’ll be launching new communities, opportunities soon… for now, if you’re exploring—or in the very early stages of starting a new company, drop me a DM or email via dbooth@a16z.com ++ follow @david__booth for more updates, opportunities to get involved. See you soon! 🫡

New episode with @mcuban on group chats, politics, entrepreneurship, AI, healthcare, and the NBA. “I look at business as a sport. I just love to compete. There’s always something new, always changing. I like being intellectually challenged. And I like kicking everybody’s a** where I can." (00:00) Intro (03:18) AI’s Impact on Media & Society (06:26) Future of Social Platforms (14:17) Populism, Policy, Political Strategy (16:00) Tech’s Role in Government (17:03) AI’s Impact on Education (18:49) AI & Future of Healthcare (29:46) Entrepreneurship & AI-Native Careers (33:54) Business Success, Investing, NBA (40:05) Luka Trade, Cooper Flagg, New CBA (51:05) Family Time & Unconventional Investing (56:24) Making AI Popular + Closing