a16z Podcast - Alex Danco on Speechwriting, Blogging, and Giving Founders Power

Episode Date: August 13, 2025

Fresh off the announcement of his move from Shopify to a16z, Alex Danco joins TBPN to talk about the “trade deal” that brought him here and his mission to make the firm’s written content truly world class.He discusses why he believes writing still matters in the age of AI, how great prose can act as “power transfer technology” for founders, and why he’s betting on the overlooked art of speechwriting. Alex also reflects on his years as a founder, investor, and longtime blogger, and shares the formats he’s most excited to explore, from deal memos to launch speeches. Timecodes: 0:00 Joining a16z0:41 The Power of Writing & Speechwriting2:45 Reflections on Blogging & Communication5:10 Writing as Power Transfer Technology6:46 Formats & Content at a16z8:09 The Underrated Art of Speechwriting11:21 The Evolution of Blogging & Audience12:23 Looking Forward: Brand & Legacy Resources:Find Alex on X: https://x.com/Alex_DancoWatch TBPN: https://www.tbpn.com/Follow TBPN on X: https://x.com/tbpn Stay Updated: Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16zFind a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenbergPlease note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

What is the job of VC? The job of VC is, literally, you are the legitimacy bank, right? Your job is to make founders powerful. As you put in the work to write and as you put into work to read, what happens, this actually reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading. There is something that is missing of the craft of, like,

putting in an extraordinary amount of tortured effort into creating, you know, like a five, thousand word delivery of what is it that you have to say this year. Fresh off the news of his move from Shopify to join A16Z, Alex Dancoe joined TBPN to talk about the trade deal that brought him here and what he's setting out to do next. Alex shares why he's betting big on the craft of writing in an AI saturated world, why speech writing might be venture's most underrated medium, and how great writing can serve as power transfer technology for founders. He reflects on his years at Shopify, his long-running career as a blogger, and why giving people the right words can change the directory of a pitch, a partnership, or a company.

We'll hear about the formats he's most excited to explore A16Z, the role of legitimacy in venture capital, and why sometimes the most important negotiation point is just getting unblocked on Twitter. Let's get into it. We have Alex Denko. We got a trade deal. Trade. The news broke today. He's going from Shopify to A16Z. Andresen Horowitz.

Eric Torrenberg's latest pickup. There is, Alex. How are you doing? Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on. Break it down for us. Anonymy of the deal.

What they do. Did Mark Andresen sit down with your mom? Did Mark Anderson sit down with your parents? Tell them, you've got a bright future. We would like to take your son to the big rooms. I did have to have the phone call with Mark Andreessen right next to my mom. Because I was on vacation that week. We were seeing my parents.

Fantastic. And the call. All with Mark was actually a stressful one because I had to give him my final negotiation demand, which was he had to unblock me on Twitter. No way. That's amazing. He's an notorious blocker and unbacker. What did you do to get blocked by a goat?

Never give up if you've been blocked by the ghost. So we don't know. We've decided not to look into it. Some things are best left as mystery in life. But we reserve the right to find out later. I've been blocked by people, had to apologize. I don't know exactly know why I got blocked. But, you know, you always lived to fight another day.

It could have been an accident. It could have been an accident. So what's at the top of the to-do list today, this week, this month? What are you going to be doing for Andrews and Horowitz? So I'm coming on board. Eric brought me into this amazing group of people he is putting together, not to be understated and also not complete. There's more.

Eric has more work to do yet. I'm coming on to help them. Yeah, jobs not finished. I'm coming on to help make all of the written content coming out of Andresen be truly world-class and as good as it can be. I think a lot of people on the internet know me from my writing online. I've been a blogger for a long time despite having done other things, like be a founder, I've worked in VC before. I've been at Shopify for five years. But most people think know me just from, you know, writing and mouthing off on the internet

and generally doing the craft that has been internet blogging, right? which is just a really amazing and valuable part of tech that has been around for such a long time. You know, a really formative conversation in my career was, you know, once upon a time when I was a founder, my co-founder and I were trying to figure out how to launch a product. We didn't know what was involved in that or what that meant, and we went to a more experienced founder, our friend Amanda,

and said, hey, what do we do? How do we launch this product? And she said, oh, well, I think you should email your email list and say, hey, we're going to go and do this. Tell us what you like. Tell us where we should reach you. tell us, get lots of feedbacker on all these things, and then they'll help you out.

And I said, wait, wait, wait, stop. What do you mean email your email list? What's an email list? She's like, oh, you don't have thousands of fans that adore you and wait for your every email every week? And I was like, I need to be someone with one of those. So ever since then, yeah, writing and newsletters and just the craft of having something to say

has been a really important part of how I've always, you know, thought about how to be a great live player on the internet. How do you think about breaking through with text because the link ban on X is tough, AI is going to, yeah, yeah, or is, like, should you just lean into more of the formats? I mean, there's certain amounts of, like, you can just be built different, like Chris Pike, who just drops a link to a Google Doc and it always works somehow. People do screenshot, I say, is like, what's interesting? Something that stands out to me and why I'm excited for you to take this new role is I was having this thought yesterday. I was reading some particularly, like, sloppy AI-generated text. And I was just, I was like, yes, the models are going to get better.

But, like, in a few years, like, at what point is, like, all the texts that you're reading online and throughout your day just generated? And there's no soul and craft put into it. And it's like, you can still, you can remove hyphens and delve and it's not this. It's, you're not this. You're that, like, language. and you can still identify writing today. And I just think, like, the craft of writing and thinking clearly and coming up with, trying to come up with new ideas is super important.

It's Lindy. Very Lindy. Yeah, so I like to think of it is that writing is power transfer technology, right, when you do it. It takes a lot of work to write something down, and it takes work to read something, right? It takes more work to read something than to listen to it. But the important thing that happens is that as you put in the work to write and as you put into work to read, what happens is this actually reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading. They can actually speak to this thing.

They have words for something that they knew, but didn't quite know how to say before. And that gives them power, right? And it doesn't work the same way when you're talking, right? there is this fabulous complimentary kind of media called podcasts, which is listen for three hours and hear about all these great things. But to me, podcasts are an invitation to go find out something more. But if you actually want to do that power transfer from the writer to the reader and give them something that gives them that power, like you've got to write it down.

And if you think about this for the job of a VC firm, right, it's like, what is the job of VC? The job of VC is literally you are the legitimacy bank, right? your job is to make founders powerful, right? And having an amazing free tier of that by saying, we think a lot about these things. We want to give you words to express what you're trying to say so that a client, a hire, an investor will take you a little more seriously is really important to do.

So that's a big part of why we want to emphasize. The goal is to give founders power. This is the job of the whole firm, and writing is just a pretty good part of that. When I think about writing at A16Z, I think of a few buckets, there's a ton because the firm's written a lot for a long time. I think about

maybe it was like a decade ago, but I don't know how often it still happens, but the general partner who does the deal writes basically a deal memo and says this is why we're investing in this company. And that's very interesting. There's also the Mark Andrewsson op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Software is eating the world.

It's time to build. These like big, like, just like, like, you know, bombs on the timeline that drop and stick around for a long time. Then there's the market map, which is, it's been maligned, but I think it's deeply underrated. It's a time honor tradition. And I think these are in a unique position to actually put out great content there. And I've actually really enjoyed digging into those as we've been doing the show. And then there's also like the wildcard ones.

Like I remember Indrisen used to do these interviews with founders in the portfolio. Just basically like, it's like, what's your everyday character? but in the digital world. So it's like, what apps are you running, what tools are you using? Those are really cool. So there's a ton of stuff, and I probably mentioned,

I missed like half of it, but maybe even more. But what's exciting to you? What's interesting? What kind of formats are you, do you see as like fertile ground to go explore if you've had the time to think about it so far?

Yeah, so I'll tell you what I think is a really interesting meta that I'm going to spend a lot of time going after is speech writing. Okay. Speech writing is an interesting and kind of thrown by the wayside craft because now when you think about long form,

it's like when you are interesting and you have something to say, you can go on a podcast, you can talk for a long time, or you are going to tweet about it, right? But there is something that is missing of the craft of like putting in an extraordinary amount of tortured effort

into creating, you know, like a 5,000 word delivery of what is it that you have to say this year? And if you're a GP, right, it's like, hey, you know, you get time and perspective to figure out like this year, what is the core thing that you want to say, right? That is going to help inform all the other content, frankly.

People like Catherine at A16Z are already incredible at this. And bringing that sort of to more throughout the culture is going to be important. Either way, though, so you mentioned all these different types of content. Speech is incredibly underrated. We utilize them internally with the team. And they're not every week. They're not on a schedule. but sometimes you need a speech, you know, just nail it,

and they can really set the tone and the energy within the company. I'm getting chills, thinking about Mark Andrewsson standing on stage in front of thousands of people saying, we chose to raise this growth fund not because it is easy, but because it is hard. That gives us hard. To test the ability of our LPs. To test the capital markets. To measure them against the under-hit elements.

To test the health of the global capital markets. There will never be enough venture capital. I mean, yeah, like a well-defined phrase. Andy Driesen has been fantastic. Your coinages, and I feel like, yeah, the speeches, that's an interesting answer. I was not expecting that, but that makes a ton of sense. Well, it's good to buy low on things. I think buying low on speeches is your daily tip.

That's great. That's great. Where else should we go with this? I think speeches could be an entirely new launch video meta, right? Everybody, like the... Bar-burners. Launch, everybody has a launch video. There's like three new launch videos every day. A lot of them

like blur together because they're cool graphics and this person invested and here's this product UI and if you just have the CEO just like rant at the camera and you can get people to like truly listen to that, it probably ends up being you know, pretty powerful.

Those kinds of things can go viral and really powerful rays through it because it tells people that you have something to say. And it's doubly important because you talk about all these different forms of writing that are all great in their own way. And the one thing that they all have in common is I'll tell you what all bloggers know about writing is you have two audiences. Right. The first audience is the people who actually read what you said, which is small. The second audience is the people that they tell that thing, right?

Because they get something out of retelling it, right? Like they get that legitimacy. They get that ability to express themselves or whatever. and there is a trade between the writer and the inner circle of people who are going to actually listen to that speech or actually read that thing all the way through. And something that was great about the old VC blogging meta

way back in the day, so 10, 12, 15 years ago when, you know, like, A.V.C. was cooking and Semmel Shaw and Mark Schuster and people like that is the way a blog worked, like the microstructure of blogging was you had a blog and you had readers and a comment section. And everybody came to your blog and the readership would be there and the way that you would tell what blogs were good was you would have lots of comments, right?

And that's where your primary readership would then go and invisibly tell other people about it. Then the feed emerged, right? We got Twitter, we got Hacker News, right? We got places where suddenly the discussion moved in public. And what happened then is that, first of all, the ability to reach a secondary audience exploded. So the returns to writing only got bigger,

but it became less obvious to do, right? The trade became a little bit obscured by virtue of the fact that it's all in public, right? and it's all based on how many retweets and likes you get. And I think what's happening now, as we go even further past this, is that the returns to writing and reading have never been more valuable, but never been less obvious. So, you know, it's time to go, if you go bring the output of a firm

as legendary as A16C with all the amazing things they have to say and the statements of record that they want to put out into the world, you know, my job is to go help Eric and the whole GP crew and Ben and Mark bring this back and make it amazing again. making a really, like, a brand that's going to shine. I can't wait for your first software is eating the world moment. Also, yeah, I mean, I feel like the speech thing really ties into the new A16Z brand. Like, when I see the coin, I feel like that's like...

The Ardeco coin with the abacus. Yeah, I feel like speech are kind of Ardeco in some ways. I don't know why I'm making that association, but it feels somewhat linked. Is it a bygone era? Is it Art Deco or is it a Bozar, right? Like, do you remember the line? It's like, Ardeco is made by dwarves, bozars made by elves? Yeah.

But it's very, it's very, what is it? It was, like, the style, it was Randian, and I feel like in Anne Rand's writing, there's a lot of speeches that happen throughout the book. There sure are, famously. Makes sense. Yeah, famously. Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the trade deal.

Congratulations on the move. Yeah, excited to see your work. Seeing your work and hearing it. Thanks for having me on, guys. Come on and give a speech soon. Absolutely. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech.

Speeds. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, Alex. Thank you, everybody. Cheers. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoy the episode, let us know by leaving a review at rate thispodcast.com slash A16Z. We've got more great conversations coming your way.

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