Elena

Some news…I’m back at a16z, on the new media team! I couldn’t be more excited to be working with @eriktorenberg, @Alex_Danco, and the editorial team, where I’m collaborating with our partners and founders on longform blogging. I’ve spent the majority of my professional life circling the thing that I love the most: writing. For a period as an investor, it felt like “enough” to be able to write blogposts and theses as a sidequest in the afterhours. Later, as an operator doing comms and marketing, it felt like enough to lead product rollouts, corralling our various almost-live releases into a story that could be legible to the outside world. But in the back of my mind, I knew I wanted to be writing full-time. So, I feel incredibly lucky to be able to do that at a16z, the first place where I truly felt professionally at home. If you love writing, it can be easy to view anything that isn’t writing as a distraction. There’s always a part of you that secretly wants to log off the Zoom call or tune out the strategy session, and open up a blank Google doc. But if you want to write, it’s actually tremendously valuable to do things that don’t involve writing, and pay a massive amount of attention to that work, because that’s how you make contact with reality and begin to build your own world model. Some writing exists to tell the truth. Other writing exists to conceal a lack of knowledge or understanding. When you read, it’s immediately clear which writers have actually experienced the world, and who’s writing secondhand fictions that suit a certain pre-established worldview. There’s a radicalizing thing that happens early on in any career, when you read the news and realize it’s just…flat out wrong about the domain you’ve begun to establish some expertise in. Maybe you work in crypto and wonder why no media outlet covered the wave of debanking experienced by founders in the industry. Or maybe you work in AI and raise your eyebrows in amused bafflement when a longform piece about datacenters contains misinformation about water usage or a digressive accusation about the aesthetic shortcomings of matrix multiplication… The longer I work in tech, the more I feel that the problem with traditional media isn’t (solely) that it gets things wrong. It’s actually that traditional media just doesn’t know how to focus on the parts of the story that actually matter. With that in mind, I find it amusing that “go direct” and organic phenomena like it are sometimes presented as an elaborate conspiracy. In reality, the explanation is a lot more boring and quotidean: the tech industry knows which stories matter to the people who work in it, and publishes as such. Of course, narratives and observations don’t emerge out of thin air. Someone has to do the work of talking to founders and operators, parsing charts, trendlines, and primary sources, and then make sense of it all. There are a lot of reasons why a16z is a special firm, but something that I’ve always appreciated is that the people who work here take the art of parsing what’s really going on very seriously. If you’ve read writing from Justine Moore on the state of video models, Martin Casado and Sarah Wang on gross margins, Jennifer Li on AI voice, or Anish Acharya on new LLM-generated software, (just to name a couple of examples) you know what I’m talking about. And if you haven’t read them, you should really subscribe to the a16z Substack, where we’re publishing every day. Anyway, I’m stoked to be back at a16z, doing what I love most, with the incredible folks on the new media team, the firm’s partners, and our founders. Let’s go!