People

Andreessen Horowitz’s ‘Future’ is a media machine

It's part corporate blog, part opinion page. And all Future has to do to win is persuade founders of the firm's love of technology, its creators say.

Andreessen Horowitz’s Marc Andreessen

Andreessen Horowitz's Marc Andreessen once spoke frequently at tech conferences. Now he prefers to "go direct."

Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Andreessen Horowitz wants to invest in the future, so the venture capital firm has launched its own standalone media property, Future, to tell you exactly what that is.

Its new media venture is taking the fundamentals of a corporate blog, but supersizing its ambitions to fold in outside voices and articles written by experts. What it's not doing is writing about tech news, picking favorite companies or hosting takedown articles about the industry, said Andreessen Horowitz's Margit Wennmachers. Instead, Future will have a defined voice of techno-optimism and, if all goes to plan, become a way to win deals by convincing founders to work with the firm.

"If you're a venture capital firm, you want to advance the future. And that's what this media entity is designed to do," Wennmachers said. "If we help accelerate the advancement of the future, and by reputation we are viewed by entrepreneurs as like, 'These people get me, I'd like to take their money,' then I think the community will be happy, the world with more tech will be happy and our [limited partners] will be happy."

Future will blend outside writers' voices and opinions with the content that a16z has already been producing. Wennmachers is adamant that it's not going to be just a corporate blog under a new domain name. Instead, she views it as a "radical departure" with much higher ambitions to become a media entity. There's a team of seven editors working to bring in outside writers to contribute, and other venture firms are welcome to join in the fray. It's launching with articles like Assassin's Creed co-creators' view on intellectual property in gaming and a paleobiologist's take on what you can learn about the future from the past.

"We will include outside voices because we don't have a monopoly on good ideas, and if you want to be credible, it can't just be a thing like, 'Here are our ideas,'" Wennmachers said. "That said, it's in a way a natural evolution of what we've been doing because we've been blogging about why we invest in so-and-so or why we think open-source business models should be thought about X or Y way."

Thought leadership is par for the course in the venture capital industry, but Andreessen Horowitz turned the occasional blog post into an entire media machine. The firm already produces an array of content, from its podcasts on crypto and "bio eating the world" to essays on startup building to Clubhouse audio shows hosted by partners like Wennmachers and Sriram Krishnan.

When the firm first announced in January that it planned to build out its own media entity — and called it "the go-to" place for entrepreneurs — many tech journalists were apprehensive about what it would look like and whether it would be direct competition.

It also hasn't helped that a16z's relationship with the media has shifted over time, as Eric Newcomer first detailed, to being wary of what Wennmachers views as an increasingly negative press. The firm prefers to "go direct," an increasingly common mantra in tech circles of publishing directly to an audience instead of speaking through the press. (A16z's stance on going direct made it all the more surprising when Marc Andreessen granted an interview to a satirist who degraded journalists and repeatedly used a slur against the developmentally disabled. Wennmachers told Protocol she disliked the questions, though she retweeted and liked approbatory tweets about the interview.)

"I was a little surprised by the upset because if you look at our current content, or if you think about the paleobiology example, I don't think the stuff that ends up on our properties is the stuff that you would see on Protocol or on The New York Times," Wennmachers said. "It's much more analysis, it's a take, it's much less like the takeoff of what's happening [that] day and who said what, and all of that. It may be spicy and controversial, but it's more about the ideas than the day's news."

The question now of Future is whether it is also the future of media. A16z's former in-house prognosticator, Benedict Evans, has long viewed the firm as a "media company that monetizes through venture capital." Future's content is not supposed to feel like it's marketing, but Wennmachers oversees both functions at the firm. It is supposed to influence how people are thinking about the future in a specific way, and as a result, also shape how they view Andreessen Horowitz.

"We have a business to run, and we're in the business of investing in the future and providing returns for LPs," Wennmachers said. "So as much as I can help advance the future and the narrative of the pro case for the future … that's what I'm trying to do. That is the goal."

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

Keep ReadingShow less
Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

The financial technology transformation is driving competition, creating consumer choice, and shaping the future of finance. Hear from seven fintech leaders who are reshaping the future of finance, and join the inaugural Financial Technology Association Fintech Summit to learn more.

Keep ReadingShow less
FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

It will be the second re:Invent with CEO Adam Selipsky as leader of the industry’s largest cloud provider after his return last year to AWS from data visualization company Tableau Software.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison (@dgoodison) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

Keep ReadingShow less
Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

Keep ReadingShow less
Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

Latest Stories
Bulletins