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A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
- blackoil 2y agoIt can be sometime worse. During 2008 crisis many of Andreesan's posts for entrepreneurs were actually bad advice which were pro VCs.
- genmud 2y agoMost blogs are just glorified marketing, full stop. A blog that isn't marketing is the exception, not the rule.
- EAtmULFO 2y agoI'm not sure why the author takes such umbrage at A16Z promoting its own portfolio companies. It is their blog after all.
- anonylizard 2y agoYeah, and the quality of the 'marketing writing' is good and informative. Because A16z can afford high quality writing... These 'emerging stack' articles do promote their own companies, but are nevertheless useful for newcomers into a field, to quickly grasp the process and the players. If you don't like it, compile your own version. I've used some companies recommended in their data architecture and it worked very well.
- refulgentis 2y agoHot take: I think the fact vector DBs are even a hot field with multiple competitors speaks to the bending of the branches due to VC weight, so to speak. These things take ~40 LOC and 3 hours to write yourself, they can process ~20 pages/seconds ms, locally, on devices from 3 years ago that fit in your pocket. Having it hosted is a massive privacy risk. Yet how many vector DBs as companies articles have we seen, and how many ONNX tutorials have we seen?
- dboreham 2y agoAh the "I could write that in a weekend and still go camping" 1000X developer.
- refulgentis 2y agohttps://github.com/Telosnex/fonnx https://github.com/Telosnex/fonnx - note thats on 6, count em, 6 platforms, and I need to write 4 implementations (Swift/Kotlin/C++/JS). I'm not kidding. Maybe 4 hours. It's trivial. 93 lines of code. And its extremely rote. Allocate X input arrays. Call run. Pull out Y output arrays. Free. https://github.com/Telosnex/fonnx/blob/6d3d80be136002ae28ce278ccc3676296928193d/lib/ort_minilm_isolate.dart#L141 https://github.com/Telosnex/fonnx/blob/6d3d80be136002ae28ce2...
- mrcode007 2y agoHe’s not wrong, you know ?
- refulgentis 2y agothank you for writing this. even with showing my work, was still downvoted below 1 on both comments. that flipped considerably after your comment.
- ryanai 2y agoSince A16Z is famous, any bias advertisement can lead to monopolization and do damage to the production competition. Any kind of monopolization needs to get supervised.
- dmix 2y agoMonopolization of what? Information?
- swyx 2y agosounds very close to saying speech should not be free if it influences people in any way.
- ryanai 2y agoNot any way but some way, freedom is not always an excuse. This the reason why we need to have police man and why Zuck need to explain himself in the congress
- airstrike 2y agoI think you mean "unfair advantage" rather than "monopolization", and the existence of former is much harder to argue
- ryanai 2y agoThanks for pointing out that. Yes, but these unfair advantages can accumulate to become monopolization
- nabakin 2y agoI mean, I'm glad I know there's a bias in those blog posts now. Until this post, I didn't know a16z funded companies/projects let alone biased their posts toward them and I've read a few of their LLM blog posts.
- defrost 2y agoBugger all umbrage: I have tremendous respect for a16z, a firm that helped pioneer the practice of working with and nurturing founders rather than forcing them out pre-IPO or minmaxing term sheets. more a call to be more transparent and less submarine: but to do so under the guise of being helpful and impartial is just plain silly.
- ajkjk 2y agoit's the lying
- curiousDog 2y agoI mean it's not like they're claiming to be Gartner..who by the way, gasp, do paid marketing for "fair" rankings.
- adamnemecek 2y agoSee are blogs in general as well as HN.
- fullshark 2y agoPhenomenon is hardly unique to A16Z
- refulgentis 2y agoIf you define it widely as "people writing about things they have a vested interest in", maybe. In a16z's case they went out of their way to stand up media pipelines a few years back.
- discodave 2y agoYes, indeed HN is glorified marketing and networking for YC :) But I think a16z has spent a lot more time and money on their marketing efforts, especially as it relates to crypto. I for one am sick of hearing news stories, only to find that they're thinly veiled a16z marketing pitches for crypto scams.
- llm_nerd 2y agoIt isn't even unique to VCs or businesses. Most personal blogs are glorified marketing. Often it's people trying to establish their credibility in some domain.
- henry2023 2y agoNot all of them are marketing. Some of them expose his belief system. After “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” it’s very hard for me to take him seriously again.
- dboreham 2y agoa16z is not one person.
- __loam 2y agoHis name is literally the a9 in a16z lmao. It's his venture capital firm.
- threeseed 2y agoThe manifesto is hosted on the main a16z website. So the obvious assumption is that Ben and the other leadership is supportive of it.
- dools 2y agoIt's also signed Marc Andreesen: https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ Like he's the author of the post, at the top of the page.
- laserlight 2y agoWow. This is so bad that I can't take it seriously.
- klabb3 2y agoThis strengthens my theory that VC vocabulary consists almost exclusively of other people’s hot takes. I know only of two other groups of people who speak primarily in quotes: religious fundamentalists and teenagers during a brief fan-frenzy of some pop culture icon (eg Nirvana).
- vundercind 2y ago
- hipadev23 2y agoJust wait til you read Sequoia’s deleted puff piece on SBF: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027181005/https://www.sequo...
- jjtheblunt 2y agoThere's no glory in shameless self-serving propaganda.
- bburnett44 2y agoSomebody came to a conference that my company hosts and complained it was self promotion. Like yeah no shit. Feels like kinda the same thing here
- gen220 2y agoMost "news" in the tech industry is funded by VCs, if you follow the money. It's not a terrible fact, but it's one to be aware of. All the `"X Technology" [that Y VC firm has recently raised $4Bn of capital to chase, cough cough] has massive potential to upend [big industry], here's why` articles are compensated-for boosterism. There's still signal in there, although it's mostly in the meta-facts of what they choose to talk about and what they choose not to talk about.
- pclmulqdq 2y agoWhen you compare the press coverage of "X VC-backed startup with product A" to "Y bootstrapped startup with product A," it's sort of evident how corrupt startup media actually is. Taking it at face value is not usually a good idea.
- xmprt 2y agoThere's only so much money you can make off of banner ads and at a certain point native advertisements are way more lucrative. I wonder how they get around disclosure requirements but I guess it's probably because the articles are never directly funded but there's some other form of compensation in the backend. Tom Scott made an interesting video about internet advertising regulations a while back. [1] [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-x8DYTOv7w
- StressedDev 2y agoWhat is native advertising?
- bloak 2y agoI wasn't familiar with the term, either, but it's in Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_advertising
- friendzis 2y ago
- andrewstuart 2y agoNothing surprising about that. Many blogs are.
- irjustin 2y agoYou could take this to be true of so many news orgs that are too far left/right. Marketing for - conservative agenda, liberal agenda, gun ownership, gun safety, biden laptop, trump files. If you ask "who is paying for this piece of writing" many times you'll find a pretty clear slant. It's A16z's blog. What did you want them to do?
- htrp 2y agoBlog from 6/20/2023
- discodave 2y agoThis post itself is glorified marketing. I don't know what to call it, something like 'title hacking'. I have no idea what the OPs company does, but I do agree with the title.
- davidu 2y agoWe're not one monolith of content. Folks post what they want and think is interesting. You can also imagine a lot of our portco CEOs don't love when we mention their competitors. Some of us do it more than others, depending on the topic or point of the post. Market maps do it a lot more than position pieces, as you'd expect, for instance. Anyways, the feedback is good.
- 23B1 2y ago"Stung By Media Coverage, Silicon Valley Starts Its Own Publications" - NPR 2021 https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010066447/stung-by-media-coverage-silicon-valley-starts-its-own-publications https://www.npr.org/2021/06/25/1010066447/stung-by-media-cov...
- lebean 2y agoWow, articles about emerging technologies are pushed by people who invest in them? On their blog!? You don't say!
- herecomethefuzz 2y agoThe author is maybe too harsh but Milvus should be there for sure.
- personjerry 2y agoHighly related: https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- cheeseface 2y agoThanks for sharing! A great read indeed.
- em500 2y agoThe last part "Online, the answer tends to be a lot simpler. Most people who publish online write what they write for the simple reason that they want to. You can't see the fingerprints of PR firms all over the articles, as you can in so many print publications-- which is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week." is very dated though. Nowadays pretty much anything on Medium or Substack should probably be treated as ads or personal branding by default.
- EGreg 2y agoThe VCs have their blogs to attract people - it’s lead generation nfx has good stuff about network effects avc talks about stuff from Fred Wilson’s point of view But my favorite is https://worldaftercapital.org https://worldaftercapital.org by Albert Wenger, a partner at USV. Because it is clearly NOT about marketing and it’s about sharing his worldview. A venture capitalist talking about a post-capital world!
- generativeai 2y agoFollow the money
- asdf6969 2y agoSo are McDonald’s posts. Why else would a venture capitalist firm have a blog?
- adolph 2y agoNo kidding, here is “Strangulating the monolith to a pluggable and scalable architecture” on Medium, which thinks so highly of it you have to sign in to read: https://medium.com/mcdonalds-technical-blog/strangulating-the-monolith-to-a-pluggable-and-scalable-architecture-f86f068c4224 https://medium.com/mcdonalds-technical-blog/strangulating-th...
- winter-day 2y agoMost things in america are paid ads in disguise: these posts, blogs by mckinsey/bcg/big 4 accounting firms, news is often a paid ad/agenda in disguise. You're honestly better off spending time with your family and developing a small hobby. ~ musings from a late 30s guy
- vmurthy 2y agoI'd argue that if you are really interested, you can follow a few academics and read up on their papers etc. Of course, that's a big undertaking but it's the only alternative I can think of given the incentives for pushing shit at us
- akvadrako 2y agoThat's just subjecting yourself to more marketing. They're trying to sell you their theory and get you to cite it or even better fund the work. It's quite common to gloss over arguments or ignore data that don't support their cause.
- gengwyn 2y agoI feel like this is equivocating a bit. Scientific papers exist to put forth an argument and change minds, yes. That’s the entire point of science as an endeavor. It’s not perfect, but if we’re going to define “marketing” as “anytime someone tries to convince me of anything”, I think we’re getting a tad reductionist.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y agoOr using all of this and becoming massively wealthy.
- codersfocus 2y agoI think you’re forgetting the ??? step
- 2y ago
- niyogi 2y agodefinitely marketing. they tried so hard to hype clubhouse. i think the experiment was to see if they could birth stars out of nothing only to learn it does not work that way.
- nemo44x 2y agoSounds like a worthy experiment. Why would people on this website condemn a group of people trying to see if a hunch is real? What have you done?
- kaushalvivek 2y agoThis reminds me of Benn Stancil’s post — “The posters decide” Winners in the tech space are increasingly pre-determined by VC-influencer cos/ individuals, who create the buzz around products. https://benn.substack.com/p/the-posters-decide https://benn.substack.com/p/the-posters-decide
- adolph 2y agoWas there a question that they were ever anything else?
- Nicholas_C 2y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_marketing
- Gimpei 2y agoIs this an April fool’s joke?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- aurareturn 2y agoA16z was/is the biggest pump and dump organization in crypto.
- DISCURSIVE 2y agoYup. Back in time, they wrote an article about cloud repatriation (https://a16z.com/the-cost-of-cloud-a-trillion-dollar-paradox/ https://a16z.com/the-cost-of-cloud-a-trillion-dollar-paradox...) and used a very nich use cases to extrapolate to all the cloud workload just to support their own portfolio company. So many people in the industry just thought it was a joke:)
- asadalt 2y agowell submarine! https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- patrickhogan1 2y agoMarc is very specific about this. He had a whole post on it.
- patrickhogan1 2y agohttps://pmarca.substack.com/p/availability-cascades-run-the-world https://pmarca.substack.com/p/availability-cascades-run-the-... Availability entrepreneurs are “social agents who understand the dynamics of availability cascades and seek to exploit their insights. Located anywhere in the social system, including the government, the media, nonprofit organizations, the business sector, and even households, these entrepreneurs attempt to trigger availability cascades likely to advance their own agendas. They do so by fixing people's attention on specific problems, interpreting phenomena in particular ways, and attempting to raise the salience of certain information.” Marc goes on to say very transparently... "What am I doing with this blog post? Trying to spark an availability cascade about availability cascades." It appears that a16z's strategy was successful. You are posting about a16z's blog posts thus contributing to the spread of the blog posts ideas.
- ajkjk 2y agoWhen I worked at a large-ish tech company it was very clear that their big PR pushes were coordinated with articles at major news sites like TechCrunch. It is all completely manufactured and disingenuous.
- geodel 2y ago> I have tremendous respect for a16z, a firm that helped pioneer the practice of working with and nurturing founders Maybe I am ignorant in thinking that by now everyone knows that they are just pump and dump operators. Even without financial implications lot of their blogs appear clueless about technology. They seem to target folks who may find Gartner quadrants too advanced.
- leptons 2y ago>A16Z just stop
- MrYellowP 2y agoPeople have grown shallow and mindless, not even recognizing that there is no substance behind many of the things they hear or read. Now some genius might respond with "people have always been like this" and that is likely true, but the scale nowadays is vastly different. The omnipresence/constant exposure is making it worse and, because parents aren't actually raising their kids anymore, there is no entity left to correct all this nonsense in the minds of the next generation. Or it's being outlawed doing so, of course.
- steveBK123 2y agoMost industry rags are just PR mouthpieces. Once you see it you can't unsee it. I worked at a shop that had some sort of cozy relationship with an online business paper and had many puff pieces published over the years. What was interesting was once things turned for our fund, we must have fired whoever was their source because the paper went hostile and published some really detailed and damaging articles. That or the press is just trend following - always backwards looking trying to come up with reasons for what already happened. (CEO was great until CEO was awful). You will see many cases of this in how the press covers particular companies/CEOs. Guys like Bezos who jump before the worm turns are smart.
- ramijames 2y agoIn all fairness, this is what most blogs everywhere are. We all market. We are all driven to have our voices heard. We all want our positions to improve.
- TradingPlaces 2y agoThe Sequoia puff piece on SBF remains a reminder that this is true for all of them. https://web.archive.org/web/20221109230422/https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/sam-bankman-fried-spotlight/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221109230422/https://www.sequo...
- msarrel 2y agoALL blogs are marketing.
- floatinglotus 2y agoA16Z is a totally f-cktified VC. They made so much money with the pump and dump blockchain startups that they have completely lost their way. Now you have complete moron GP/MD level people in echo chambers talking about technology and you cannot determine if it is a real technical discussion or they are simply targeting YOU as the next mark. There is a HUGE difference between being successful by identifying trends and doing straight up rug-pulls. As a VC, their record is tainted and I would be suspicious of everything out of their mouths.
- Mikho 2y agoThose who think that A16Z—and many other VCs per se—started their own media arms or at least blogs to "help industry" probably lived under a rock. There are just 3 reasons for a VC to invest in its media arm: 1. Help to create a deal-flow by writing about a current thing or their specialization in tech; 2. Promote its portfolio and pump it in every possible way for it to increase in value; 3. Promote its agendas and narratives like regulation/untiregulation. So, yes. A16Z's media channels are a marketing tool.