Every week, another startup launch rolls across your timeline looking less like a press release and more like a movie trailer: a founder on a soundstage, crisp cinematography, a product reveal timed to a music cue. A lot of those videos come from the same place. On June 18, the venture firm a16z published an essay explaining exactly how it makes them, and what it believes about winning attention in 2026.
The piece, "New Media, One Year In," marks the first birthday of the firm's in-house media team. It reads as both a victory lap and a how-to, and the ideas in it apply far beyond Silicon Valley.
"Go direct, and be interesting"
a16z's central belief is that the old way of dealing with media is finished. For decades, the essay argues, the game was to stay on message and avoid saying anything that got you in trouble, because a small set of newspapers and TV shows controlled whether anyone heard from you at all. Now you can publish your own story, in your own format, and reach people directly.
That freedom comes with a catch the firm states plainly: to go direct, you have to be interesting. "New Media," as they define it, is about being interesting and saying what you actually mean, which is a much higher bar than staying on message. Marc Andreessen summed up the whole essay in six words on X: "It's time to build new media."
Distribution is still the whole game
Here is the part worth underlining for anyone outside venture capital. Being interesting does not matter if nobody sees it, and a16z is candid that its real edge is distribution. The firm owns its channels outright: an X account approaching a million followers, a newsletter with around a quarter-million subscribers, a podcast pulling roughly a million downloads a month, and a fast-growing Instagram.
That is why, when a16z works with a founder on a launch video or an essay, it can promise the thing most agencies cannot: that people will actually see it. The firm describes its whole offering as "go-direct as a service." It leans hard into the cinematic ambition, too. The AI researcher Fei-Fei Li recounted that a16z's team proposed shooting her company's launch on a 3D LED volume stage, with the product generating the environments in real time. The launch, she said, went viral.
What to actually steal from it
Underneath the firm's self-promotion are a few tactics anyone can copy. The biggest reframe is that New Media is not really about making content at all; it is about packaging what is already interesting about you so it travels. As a16z puts it, the job is not to "ship a bunch of content," it is to highlight what is already compelling and make it resonate.
The concrete version of that is what the firm calls a barbell: make one piece of longform (a deep essay or an hour-long conversation), then cut a stack of short clips from it. Their shorthand is "one-hour podcast, one-minute clip." From there, you amplify your own work, including by quote-tweeting your longform to give it the algorithmic push it needs to reach the right people. Counterintuitively, the firm says the best press comes "because you don't need it" once you have an audience of your own.
The other half is signal. a16z's line is that "signal is what's important, and people confer signal, not brands," which in plain terms means a real person vouching for something now carries more weight than any company logo. And it only works if you are relentless: one charming video or one good essay does not compound. As the essay paraphrases Elon Musk, "Anyone can make a nice car once."
It is not all reverence. The writer Lenny Rachitsky joked in reply, "I want to start a company just to raise money from a16z," which is half a compliment and half a comment on how slick the whole operation has become.
The useful part for the rest of us is the method, and it scales down to a team of one: a few things you are actually interesting about, one solid piece on each, then smaller clips cut from it.
a16z also makes a point that lands for anyone in an office. The new "New Media" roles, the data storytellers and heads of socials popping up on job boards, are mostly classic marketing and comms work repackaged. As the tools change, the jobs get renamed. If your work touches content or communication at all, that is the direction it is drifting, so it is worth getting fluent in the packaging now.