Chainfeeds Summary:
The new media team continues to expand, forecasting market growth, coordinating networks to go deeper, and scholarship programs are beginning to place trained narrative experts into portfolio companies.
Article source:
https://x.com/aaronjmars/status/1989055799746843063
Article Author:
@aaronjmars
Opinion:
@aaronjmars: Andreessen Horowitz is undergoing a fundamental transformation. It's no longer just one of Silicon Valley's most influential venture capital firms, but is evolving into a full-stack engine for real-world coordination, simultaneously involved in the construction of capital, public opinion, technology, and political order. A key sign appeared in August 2025: Alex Danco joined as Editor-at-Large, taking full responsibility for a16z's written output. This was not a typical communications role reshuffle. Danco views writing as a power transfer technology, believing that legitimacy is not unilaterally granted by institutions, but co-generated between author and reader. This concept reveals a core shift at a16z: it's not just investing in the future, but shaping which futures are considered reasonable, credible, and inevitable. The subsequent "New Media Manifesto" further clarified this direction, with a16z beginning to export timeline takeover as a capability, providing portfolio companies with collaborative storytelling capabilities across video, podcasts, long articles, and social media. This signifies that a16z is no longer content with being merely a capital allocator, but is actively involved in the infrastructure of meaning production. a16z's new media system is not a series of isolated attempts, but a highly organized machine. Led by Erik Torenberg, the new media team includes internal content creators, storytellers "frontline" during company launches, and a comprehensive, readily deployable high-signal amplification network. Simultaneously, a16z has established a systematic talent pipeline; the New Media Fellowship, launched in 2026, will directly supply portfolio companies with trained storytelling operators. This system echoes a16z's strategy in the prediction market. a16z not only co-led Kalshi's $300 million funding round but also attempted to promote its executive Brian Quintenz to the CFTC chairmanship, although ultimately unsuccessful, clearly demonstrating its regulatory ambitions. Prediction markets experienced rapid growth during the 2024 election, with trading volume surging dozens of times, and began to be seen as actionable signals by the media, traders, and corporate executives. When market prices, in turn, influence decision-making, predictions cease to merely describe reality but begin to participate in its coordination. a16z is building a new "legitimacy infrastructure" at the intersection of capital, narrative, and market signals. a16z's influence doesn't stop at technology and the market. Marc Andreessen's shift in political stance symbolizes a deeper structural change. From supporting Hillary Clinton in 2016 to investing tens of millions of dollars in pro-Trump and crypto-political organizations in 2024, a16z has clearly sided with the camp of "technological optimism + anti-regulatory tightening." More importantly, there's the coordination method behind it: the private WhatsApp groups organized by Andreessen and Torenberg became a crucial "upstream" channel for American political discourse in 2024, forming a hidden yet efficient space for consensus generation among crypto, technology, and political elites. These groups, dinners, and informal networks have been described as the dark matter of American politics and media. By combining its media machine, predictive market strategy, and talent pipeline, a16z is essentially building an infrastructure that determines which futures are understandable, debatable, and believable. As it states internally, the key to the game is no longer predicting the future, but mastering the questions that define it. [Original text in English]
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