a16z's New Media Playbook

16:06Ben Horowitz:or let's write with her. And so you get these very vanilla 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.

16:20Erik Torenberg:I want to transition to one more structural mechanic because it's a segue into how we've built our team a little bit. And it's this, Mark, it's this McLuhan quote. You know, if it's on TV, it's a TV show. And just talk about how the different formats yield different types of content. Do you want to talk about that?

16:38Marc Andreessen:Okay, you want me to do it? You want me to do it? Yeah, yeah. Okay, this is the thing. Okay, so yeah, Marshall McLuhan was the great media theorist of the TV era. And actually, his work has actually held up really well and it's worth reading. But he had this thing, Eric just said, he said, if it's on TV, it's a television show. In other words, like basically, as he said, the medium is the message. Basically, what he said is like, look, like TV, TV is a specific kind of technology. It's a specific kind of media technology. And basically like all of the questions around TV are like, you know, is it a, is, you know, it's all basically just like the only real parameter is length.

17:14Marc Andreessen:Like, is it a three minute news segment? Is it a 20 minute sitcom? Is it a 40 minute drama? Like there's very little kind of variation, like what you can do. Cause 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 evolved, 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 a combination of both. And it's basically a little story, and it's a little story that plays in over 20 to 40 minutes, and it kind of has to be a self-contained story because you don't know when people are going to watch it.

17:43Marc Andreessen:And, you know, now they're doing, you know, streaming, they're doing serial stories. But, you know, television shows properly generally where, you know, where everything was a one-off, you can watch episodes out of order. And so there's like, they're these very like self-contained little basically, you know, plays, little stage plays broadcast on video, and then they're these self-contained little stories. And then they need to kind of appeal to emotion because it's like an emotional medium. Right. It's not like an information dense medium. It's a, you know, it's a it's a it's a it's a medium that literally puts somebody in your living room.

18:09Marc Andreessen:And so basically it's like these little morality plays. Right. And there's got to 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 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 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.

18:37Marc Andreessen:But it's just kind of like, oh, you know, you know, oh, it's, you know, it's time for the next season. Oh, 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 soap opera might or that, you know, that a drama might or occasionally, you know, how comedy might. And so basically we just like lived in a world where it just seems like everything's a TV show. And 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 morality plays.

19:11Marc Andreessen:Okay, so Marshall McLuhan unfortunately is long dead, but I assert that if he were alive today, he would say, 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 the viral tweet. It's the viral TikTok. It's the viral Instagram, right? It's the 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 the one that really rips.

19:44Marc Andreessen:And so basically you're right, right. So my theory is if it's on the internet, 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 like nine times out of 10, it's something that like really gets people cranked up, right? like on whatever topic, right? It might be on whatever your favorite pop star said yesterday, or it might be on whatever, you know, 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?

20:10Marc Andreessen:You know, and maybe some people flip out 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 they're going to 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, it's like 12 hours up and then it's like 24 hours down.

20:35Marc Andreessen:And then 36 hours later, it's like gone from our collective memory. And the reason is because another one has popped up and has 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 could even say probably 10 years. What we've lived through is just literally literally just like thousands of cycles of viral posts. Okay. Is, you know, is this good or bad or something in the middle? You could have a big debate about that. You know, I would argue it's its own form of emotionality, right?

21:04Marc Andreessen: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. And then the other part is, you know, the people get a vote of what goes viral, right? It's not just up to a news producer, what shows up on TV. So there, there, there's that aspect to it. Another aspect to it, by the way is that stories come and go much more quickly now, right? And so there will be something that pops and it's like the world's biggest crisis in whatever sector is talking about.

21:30Marc Andreessen:And it's just like everybody in the world has an opinion. This is where I was using a while back, 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 version of the old time modern strategy of getting through media crises, which is like just like basically make sure something else, you know, becomes the new viral post, you know, get something else elevated into that thing.

21:56Marc Andreessen:So that, you know, there's this way to kind of deal with these things. But anyway, I just think like as long as the internet is the medium of choice, we're going to live in a world in which this is what, you know, this is the cycle now. It's like a 24, 36 hour cycle. By the way, the traditional media and 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 they're being driven by the internet viral post, which is why I think that the internet viral post is the high order thing.

22:26Marc Andreessen:And I also think like that's not gonna change. Like the whole long thing I can do on that, but like they, literally, if you're a television producer or if you're a news editor or whatever, like 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 basically the role of mainstream media for the rest of our life is just gonna be to follow the internet viral post.

22:45Ben Horowitz:yeah there was a funny joke on the daily show years ago where they were talking to a newspaper guy and he said why do you call it news you should call it old that's good um he was he was

22:58Marc Andreessen:interviewing at the time the managing editor of the new york times um and he was in his office and the new york times you know was 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's talking about. And he's like, well, like, what do you mean? And he's like, he points there, there's like a pile of literally physical newspapers in the guy's desk. And he says, like, look, it's all old news. And he's like, no, no, it's today's paper.

23:22Marc Andreessen:And he's like, no, no, it's yesterday's paper. Like, I already know everything that's in that. Like, you know, and so, yeah. And like, it's just basically like, again, what do they have? They're very proud of this. They have their editorial process. They have their publication process. Like they have multi-layered, you know, bureaucratic mechanism for, you know, all the news that's fit to print. 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 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.

23:54Marc Andreessen:Yeah, they are pissed.

23:56Erik Torenberg:You know, we've really made sure to hire people who really understand the platform, not just how the platform works technically, but also the vibe and the taste and the spirit of the platform. and we've gone all in to start on X because those are just where the most interesting conversations are happening and where people are the most plugged in.

24:15Ben Horowitz:And it's the way I think about it. 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 the kind of AI researchers and the AI influencers and the crypto influencers, like everybody in our world lives there. you know, at least in part. So we can't avoid it, even if we didn't like it. But we love it.

24:44Erik Torenberg:You were about to say something, Mark?

24:46Marc Andreessen:Oh, yeah. No, I was just going to say, yeah, no, look at what Ben said is, yeah, like this is, I posted a link to a book called The True Believer that kind of talks about this is, you know, the old characterization is elites and masses, which is a little bit 20th century. But yeah, like 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. And 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, 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 so forth.

25:18Marc Andreessen:Obviously, it's also true that TikTok and Instagram, you know, have just, like, much more reach. Like, they're just much bigger. You know, they reach the mass kind of global audience more. And so, you know, they certainly play a role. But if you're on the leading edge of the field, like, you know, it's very rare that whatever is kind of the lead, you know, kind of the edge of that process of kind of idea formation, propagation, people, you know, in positions of authority kind of figuring out what they think, that's almost entirely honest.

25:42Ben Horowitz: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, there was no real easy way to do it. I mean, you know, like maybe like if you were sports, you'd be in Sports Illustrated or whatever. But like there wasn't really a way to do it. But now with podcasts and blogs and accents, you can go to an exact audit. 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 two more structural things mark i want you to

26:43Erik Torenberg:explain and then i want to present some some slides you know give some detail about what we're doing that relate to what I'm about to say. One is, I want you to explain the Boyd loop and why, you know, that makes Twitter and social media so much more powerful in terms of, you know, forming consensus. And then the other is the difference between written and oral culture and what's prioritized, you know, as we transition to oral.

27:08Marc Andreessen:Yeah. Okay. So these are both long topics. And so I'll try to do the Cliff Notes version. Yeah, so I'll link to the book on this. But in military theory, there's this concept called maneuver warfare, which basically just says like speed wins. Like speed wins as compared to mass winning speed wins. And so if you believe that, then there's basically this framework called the OODA loop, O-O-D-A loop, which originally was developed for fighter pilots and then later for broader military strategy. And the OODA loop, what OODA stands for, it's an acronym. It stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. And so it's basically the decision-making cycle, right?

27:45Marc Andreessen:And so observe is like view the outside world. Orient is like figure out where you are in respect to the outside world. Decide, of course, decide what to do, act. And basically what this guy, Boyd, who came up with this idea said was like any military operator, any fighter pilot, any military operation, any, you know, basketball player, any company, any government, 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 has their own OODA loop and it's like 24 hours to go through their process. And so, and so, and then, Bessie, 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.

28:26Marc Andreessen:But he said, there's a second order thing that happens. So one is just like, is your OODA loop faster than the other guys? So that's one question. But he said the other thing that can happen is if you can have a sustainably faster OODA loop processing cycle than the next guy, 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. Think about what happens is like, okay, you start out on an even playing field. You both start your decision-making cycles. You operate, you make your decision within an hour.

28:58Marc Andreessen:The other guy is still, say, is 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 re-observe and reorient and start over, right? And then, of course, you 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, he has to go back.

29:23And so what he says is if you can be sustainably faster at running your decision loop, you can get inside the other guy's loop in a systematic and perpetual way.

29:30Marc Andreessen:And basically the result of that is psychological breakdown. Basically, you destroy the psychology of the other side because they just simply – 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 – they become completely defensive, completely responsive. You completely dominate basically the playing field. And he was a famous fighter pilot. He was a famous fighter pilot called 15 Second Boyd because his claim was, which was true, is he could beat any other fighter pilot in a dogfight within 15 seconds using this method.

30:01Marc Andreessen:And so it's basically this premium on speed and quality of execution such that you are actually causing the other side to have a psychological break. By the way, like, again, go back to, like, I think this is also a big explanation for what's happened to traditional media. that 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 can you even function when the internet is just basically cycling much faster than you could?

30:31Marc Andreessen: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 Andrel's now doing in companies in the defense industry. You know, this quite frankly is what we try to do, you know, 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 can't you can't have long bureaucratic processes. You can't have, you know, a risk adverse posture. You can't, you know, stress, you know, you need enough time to make the decision properly.

31:00Marc Andreessen:You know, but you can't run the fully deliberate, you know, 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 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 it's 88, where they're called the war room where they show this. And now they call it rapid response. And if you go to basically any political operation on the Internet right now, you know, they'll have an exit count.

31:27Marc Andreessen:It's literally they call it like rapid response. So it's like actually Department of War has one just as 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, you know, everybody else's OODA loop. Yeah. OK, so there's that. And then, yeah, the oral versus written thing is it's probably take an hour to kind of go through the whole thing. But, yeah, the long and short of it is 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.

31:53Marc Andreessen:There's written communication. You know, oral communication, you know, is the original form. And you can think about it literally as like people around a campfire telling stories, singing songs, you know, reciting poetry. 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, you know, a written artifact. and that basically the characteristic of orality or oral communication is it's sort of inherently emotion first, right, because it's, you know, literally, you know, live interactions with another person.

32:27Marc Andreessen:The characteristic of written communication is sort of abstraction, you know, and, you know, hopefully logic, the scientific method, you know, intellectual rigor, analytical rigor. 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 literally people talking. And so it was going to be much more emotional and hotheaded. You know, basically like, you know, that's all broken down because of everything we've talked about.

32:58Marc Andreessen: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 answer is the internet's both because the internet is everything, right? It supports every kind of media. And so a YouTube video, I will say for sure, a short form TikTok or Instagram reel for sure is oral culture. Like it's something short and bursty and emotional and interpersonal in its experience. A long-form substack post is for sure written culture. But then things get more complicated because a short tweet, even though it's written, is actually an oral culture thing, right?

33:29Marc Andreessen:Because the fact that it's short means that it has to be like this, again, this sort of this burst of sort of, say, triggering emotionality in order to go viral. 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 going to talk about something for three hours, that's necessarily something where you're kind of getting into abstractions and depth beyond just kind of a flash moment of emotion. And so the internet lets you kind of play with these formats and the kind of impact that you want to have in a way that in the past was kind of determined by exactly which fixed media you were in.

34:02Marc Andreessen:And look, we all live this. If you want to have the internet experience of doom scrolling and getting really pissed off at the world, you go to TikTok and 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, you know, it's absolutely amazing. And so there is a choose your own adventure aspect to it. And then of course, you know, we, you know, firms like ours, you know, need to think hard about how we communicate because of the differences.

34:28Erik Torenberg: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 across every platform, but it doesn't fully appreciate what that platform is built for and what that platform rewards. And so for every platform that we have, we have a Substack, Podcast, Instagram, X, YouTube, et cetera. We have an expert running it who is obsessed with that medium. On Instagram, we're up 35%. Month over month right now, we have this guy, Hero, who's 18 years old and has been, you know, grew up on Instagram and knows it like the back of his hand.

35:14Erik Torenberg:And that really matters. That makes a difference. And so with that as a segue, I want to do a share just a few slides that just show a little bit about what we've done so far. So what we're really trying to do is king make our companies, right? Is give them such a superpower in terms of getting their message out, in terms of reaching their customers, in terms of reaching their talent. You know, the superpower that companies like Anderl have to punch way above their weight class and other brands wish that they had that level of resonance, that level of reach. We're trying to give them those superpowers.

35:56Erik Torenberg:And we do that by building our own channels, our own media empire across platforms. We do that by making sure that we know everybody else who's got those, is my screen paused for some reason? Okay, screen share. But everybody else who's got those powers of distribution and having great relationships with them. And then also by just making sure that we have the expertise to be able to deploy to our companies as well. Lulu put this well, that people don't really invest enough in people running these platforms. and, you know, we've really spent a lot of time recruiting the right expert talent to do it.

36:39Erik Torenberg:So I'm stoked because now that we've had them build our platforms, we're going to deploy them to work on behalf of our companies. And so we're, you know, Kasser from Applied Intuition, you know, he's always been, I was an angel and he has also known him 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? Why do people, you know, why is everyone talking about other companies, not our company, given how good we are? And I said, Kasser, you know, you've never tweeted in your life. How do you expect to have tremendous, tremendous mindshare?

37:11Erik Torenberg:And he finally, you know, thanks to a lot of pushing 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 in a second, was this launch as a service. The second one is going to be this founder go direct motion. You know, we're working with Kasser, we're working with Garrett from Flock Safety. You know, that's a heroic company that should be at the stature of a andrel as well. And I really helped them build that machine. So speaking of the launch of the service offering, this was, you know, inspired early on. I was asking, you know, some of the GPs, hey, what would where can we make the biggest difference?

37:44Erik Torenberg:Like what new products should we have? And, you know, Sarah said, if we can guarantee a viral announcement, you know, I think that'd be a superpower for us. So we built out this launch as a service, everything soup to nuts from all the social media copies, the messaging, the rollout. We created these custom videos. We hired Richard, another 18-year-old who we convinced him to go straight from high school to the NBA, i.e. not go to college, or at least not right now. And he had previously done the Cluey video and the browser-based video. And he's just got this phenomenal taste for what really does well.

38:27Erik Torenberg:And so we built this video team, Richard, Ben, Henry has really led this product. And you can see the views here. It's just done phenomenally well. Millions and millions of views for our companies. We've now scaled up this offering to offer it to all of our companies. and that's our first product. From there, we're going to go deeper and do more embedded engagements, not just, hey, let's get this announcement viral, but let's build this repeatable motion to help companies build their foundations. And that's one thing I also want to call out. After working with companies, companies were saying, hey, how do I hire people like that?

39:10Erik Torenberg:In some cases, they were talking to them individually and seeing if they were approachable. and we said hey no we can't lose that you know they say how do I find someone like Henry or Brent or Richard or whoever and so we said hey we want to well first we're trying to hire more of them too 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 help our companies hire them and so because you know there's this sweet spot where you need to be online enough to really know the the the have taste and have a sensibility and understand these new platforms.

39:44Erik Torenberg:But you also need to be functioning enough and professional enough to work at one of these companies. And there's not many people can do both. And so we really, you know, tried to create this program to be able to identify these people and then just give them a little bit more sort of technical know-how. And And so our first fellowship, we had 2 ,000 applications. We picked 65 people. We think they're incredible. Two hires from us came from that so far. And we think this is going to be a franchise to come. And the other part of it I'll just leave is, you know, I think we were really popularizing this term new media.

40:29Erik Torenberg:Seeing a number of people with, you know, new media JDs. They want ahead of new media. They're looking for that. And I think we're sort of in the way that we've popularized American dynamism, other people have American dynamism practices. We're starting to see that with with with Nubi. And so it's cool to see our thought leadership there. And, you know, more to more to come. So, yeah, those are the things I'll leave you with in our presentation. The, you know, our channels are up tremendously and we're continuing to invest in them. We've got this portfolio offering launch as a service. We're now launching our GoDirect motion of really helping our CEOs and companies do that.

41:13Erik Torenberg:It has to come from the CEO. So every engagement we do, the CEO is tremendously engaged. And then we're really building out this new media category creation, this new media talent base for us because we're continuing to hire, but then also our companies.

41:28Ben Horowitz:Yeah, so Ben, any closing thoughts? I would just say that, you know, particularly if you spent time in the prior media regime, you know, of old media, you know, you really have to rethink every instinct that you have because 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, Martine 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 at a problem. And so, like, you don't even realize how much of your thinking is affected by that old rule.

42:16Ben Horowitz:and you know 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 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 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

43:02Marc Andreessen:etc always tell their guests don't read the comments 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. 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. Yeah, so Eric, read the comments. Don't read the comments.

43:27Erik Torenberg:Don't read the comments if they're going to affect what you say. It's kind of like the Yelp problem. People who care enough to post either absolutely love it or absolutely hate it. At this point, And it doesn't affect me, so I read the comments. But, you know, I, well, you know, and Mark and Ben have helped me not get too concerned about some of the commentary on Twitter by, you know, certain anonymous Twitter posters who, you know, raging in their basements, et cetera. But yeah, in short, don't read the comments.

44:02Marc Andreessen:Yeah, so I'll just maybe close on two things. So one is, there's a long history of this. And so if you read any sort of biography or autobiography of any sort of professional author, you know, you know, writes books for a living, like 100 percent of the time at some point they will tell you, oh, the one thing I never do is read the critics. Right. I never read the reviews. And then they'll say, well, actually, no, that's not true. I always read the reviews because 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.

44:39Marc Andreessen:who aren't writing novels or whatever. And so, of course, they're going to be mad. And I know I shouldn't read. I know it's very bad for me. I know it's going to really screw me up. And then I try. And then it's like a magnetic pull. 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. And so, you know, there is this push. And it used to be, right, only professional authors or professional filmmakers or whatever had critics, right, reviews, and now basically, right, the entire world is a critic. And so I think we all kind of have that.

45:07Marc Andreessen:It's a little bit of a push and a pull. And so that is a little bit difficult. You know, I will say, I think maybe a thing to kind of bear in mind, I couldn't resist. I posted a link to it, another book on this topic. It has a great title called Kill All Normies. And 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. Because, by the way, the internet was not always like this. Like in the very, very early days, the internet was so hard to get onto that the only people who were on the internet were like basically super, basically like smart, super successful people.

45:45Ben Horowitz:Yeah, news groups were really good then.

45:47Marc Andreessen:Yeah, yeah. Like pre-1993, news groups were like utopia. And then sort of post-1993, things started going sideways. And then things start, the modern kind of caustic internet culture really developed in the 2000s and 2010s. But basically, like it actually turns out there's like a genealogy to it. And it actually turns out like a lot of it is literally, literally it's, it's like Call of Duty lobbies for online gaming. So it's like literally like online gaming lobbies. Because like when the Xbox and the PlayStation, you know, kind of rolled out voice, 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.

46:22Marc Andreessen:And it turns out you just get like, you know, 12 year old boys in these lobbies just like torching the fuck, you know, out of everybody. And literally trying to get under their opponent's skin and then being willing to, you know, anonymously say absolutely anything to do it. right and so that led to you know 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 you know like YouTube comments and then you know and then obviously social media kind of blew that open and so there is this you know there is this kind of you know I don't know rage undercurrent to everything.

47:01Marc Andreessen:And I guess you just say, you know, you do kind of literally have to think about it. These are people literally in their parents' basement. And by the way, the other

47:09Ben Horowitz:thing is, generally when we get attacked in the comments or stuff like that, it's somebody with like four followers or like a bot or something like that. Yeah. And by the way, that includes when it's... It's very little interesting to read in them, I would say.

47:22Marc Andreessen:Yeah, and that includes when it's Hey Montrevin. Yeah. Yes. Yes.

47:29Erik Torenberg:Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

48:08Erik Torenberg:Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.

48:27Thank you.