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....