On New Media
I joined the a16z New Media team led by Erik Torenberg in June. Some reflections on telling stories at a highly effective venture firm:
- It’s probably more tractable than you think for you to tell your story in a way that will reshape the world, but doing so will probably feel surprisingly hard.
- Being selfless, proactive, responsive, patient, and kind facilitates the opportunity to showcase your thinking. Communication requires context. Without the right context, it is not possible to be heard as you want to be heard.
- People talk about the “attention economy.” I think this term implies that attention and its products tend to be quite fungible. Attentiveness and its products are diverse and have progressive, cumulative features.
- If you are attentive, intelligent, reasonable, and responsible, you can solve problems, learn new things, help people, and win.
- I am incredibly grateful for every moment I spent writing in my youth and don’t think I was anywhere near diminishing returns to writing more. You may not aspire to writing, but you will probably find at least one situation where you can get extraordinary benefit from producing excellent writing.