a16z Podcast - Brand Building Ideas… and People

Episode Date: November 20, 2019

Many technical founders, academics, and other experts often believe that great products -- or great ideas! -- sell themselves, without any extra effort or marketing. But in reality, they often need PR (public relations).The irony is, most of the work involved in PR is actually invisible to the public -- when it works, that is -- and therefore hard for those from the outside to see let alone understand. So how does such brand-building really work? In this 10-year anniversary episode of the a16z Podcast (and our 499th episode), a16z operating partner Margit Wennmachers shares the case study of her work at The Outcast Agency (which she co-founded) and of building the a16z brand (where she heads marketing and was the first and one of the earliest hires).What's the backstory there? What's the backstory behind some of the most popular media stories and op-eds -- like "software is eating the world" -- and what can it teach us about how PR and brand-building works in practice? Because -- like many software companies -- the product is so abstract, and not something you can physically touch, what kind of subtle decisions and tactics big and small does it take? Answering some frequently asked questions (in conversation with editor in chief Sonal Chokshi) that we often get around how things work, Wennmachers reveals (just some;) of the details behind the scenes. Given that technology is all about disintermediating "brokers" in the middle, will tech one day replace PR? And finally, what's the hidden Silicon Valley network mafia that NO one talks about?

Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal, and I'm here today with one of our special episodes for our 10-year anniversary year. This is also the 499th episode of the A6 and Z podcast, and the 500th will come next week. Both are special behind-the-scenes shows where for the first time we answer some of the frequently asked questions we often get about how things work and how they came about. We also did another episode earlier this year for our 10-year anniversary in case you missed it, where we had Stuart Butterfield, CEO of C, Slack turn the tables on the show by interviewing A6 and Z co-founders Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the topic of entrepreneurs then and now. They covered everything from tech shifts to changes and entrepreneurship. But in this episode, we go behind the scenes on the building of the A6 and Z brand during the early days up to 2014 because many technical founders, academics and other experts often believe that great products or their great ideas sell themselves without effort. But But in reality, they often need PR. How does such brand building work?

So A6 and Z operating partner and head of marketing, Marget Wenmockers, shares her insights using the example of A6 and Z, which she joined very early on, coming from a leading PR agency she co-founded in Silicon Valley called Outcast. Finally, in this episode, we reveal how popular pieces like Software's Eating the World came about, as well as the many small and big decisions that go into what to do and what not to do when it comes to building a brand, particularly when the product. is something abstract as many software products are. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as investment advice, nor is directed at any

investors or potential investors in any A6 and Z fund. Please be sure to see A6NZ.com slash disclosures for more details. So tell me about how you first came to Andrewson Horowitz's the backstory. Did they reach out to you or you one of many firms they pitched? So the way it happened is that I met with a startup founder. They wanted to higher outcast. There was a tiny bit of potential overlap with Facebook. So we have to avoid conflicts as an agency. You can't sort of represent the companies that compete for business, right? So we checked with Facebook and Facebook said, like, no, thank you. Please don't represent this company. So I went back to the entrepreneur. And the entrepreneur was kind of upset and knows Mark and

asked Mark to intervene. But then Mark asked for my contact information. And I had no idea why. So he reached out and he's like, we'd like to meet. I met Ben and Mark at this place in Palo Alto, I think it's called the Creamery. Oh, yeah, that's like their hangout, or apparently it's like a hangout. It was their hangout because they didn't have an office. So I go to the creamery and have my little audience. And I made the mistake of bringing sort of a standard capabilities presentation. And any time you put a piece of paper in front of Mark, he'll just go read it.

He'll also draw on it, by the way, as you well know. Yeah, we were not in a doodling stage at a doodling stage at the time. But so, and then it's like, here's how we hear with the kinds of clients we like to work with, blah, blah, blah. And they're like, thank you. And at the time, Ben had just left HP, and they were both angel investing. So I thought, well, maybe they'll do potential referrals if one of their portfolio companies is looking for PR representation. That was the end of that. I forgot about the meeting because nothing was happening. And then a couple of months later, Mark got back in touch, and it's like, we'd like to meet again. Then they said, well,

we're going to start this venture capital firm, and we're going to launch it next year. Why do they, so this is actually a very cutting-edge idea and I want to talk about this, because it's actually very similar to a lot of our founders who don't understand the importance of PR and marketing in the early days. They're both tech founders who understood the value of, hey, we want PR. Like, what was behind that? My view is that if you look at the landscape of venture capital firms at the time, the list of the top four or five firms was basically like etched in stone. It hasn't changed in like 20 years. And guess how that list marketed itself, with the logos of the companies that invested in. We funded Apple, you know.

So that was the marketing. It's basically reference selling, if you will. So we would have to do something, right? And they had done a really thoughtful job of thinking about this, like how are we going to be different? And it turns out the model is actually different. So there was actually something to talk about story-wise. But we decided to go like, okay, if we're going to win deals,

we need to see deals. Exactly. You need the flow to get to the actual deal itself. So then the marketing job was essentially initially to go like, hello, we're here. Dear entrepreneurs come see us. And that came in flavors, which was, we have a point of view on the market. Famously, we argued that there was no bubble, right?

When everybody was like, oh, there's a bubble. And Ben had a debate with Steve Blank, like an Oxford-style debate, which he lost, but we were right. There was no bubble at the time. You booked that as part of the PR engagement? Yeah, so initially the way we launched the firm was we, essentially I thought, like, look, Mark is famous. He co-wrote the browser, so that's got to be account for something, right? they're both pre-articulate. So I wanted to try and get a cover story because this sounds old-fashioned now

because everybody reads their news on Twitter and it's all online, whatever. But like there's still a statement that comes with a cover story that is in print that you see at the airport newspaper. So that's fantastic because I've heard Ben tell this story. Ben basically was like, this woman is coming to us and saying, like, so do you want fortune or do you want this cover? And they're just like, oh, my God, this person knows what they're doing. You can get something if you don't ask for it.

So it was worth a try. I didn't know going in that it was. was a done deal, but it turns out it was happening. Well, I'm glad you brought up the part about Mark having an existing brand and being known as a co-inventor of the browser, because quite frankly, I think a lot of people kind of assume this is an easy game because it's like, oh, it's Mark Andreessen, it's like a given. So it's someone who's actually co-invented a core piece of what we now take for granted.

That's a big deal. To any engineer that's like, I want to meet that guy, right? The challenge of it was that there was a big imbalance between Mark's brand. brand and Ben's brand. So the people who knew Ben were the people who were also in the struggle of building a company that was having a hard time. He had a really strong reputation with all those founders, Bill Campbell, but he did not have a brand, if you will. Right. So yes, Bill Campbell, fellow CEOs, they were all like, oh my God, Ben has done such a great job because he took this company from LaGlaude to Opsware to the sale to HB, actually making money. And

Ben has written very eloquently about it. That was the challenge from a brand point of view, because you don't want entrepreneurs to come in the door and say, like, well, I'll take your money if that guy is on my board. A, that doesn't scale, and B, that's also, it doesn't do anybody justice. Well, the big picture that I love about that if you spin it forward 10 years, is that if you think about all the new people coming in, the brand is now a brand. It's an A6 and Z.

It's not just Andres and Horowitz. Exactly. And in fact, we have this funny argument. I told Mark, I'm like, your name is terrible, Andrewsson Horowitz. And I didn't even know that we were going to have 17 general partners. However, one could argue that the Andreessen and the Horwitz and the Horwitz and the or what's named, there are assets, particularly in the core community, right? I was thinking broadly, but the core entrepreneur community, those are fake assets.

What you needed in the early days. So what I love telling people when people ask about the editorial operation, the brand, is that much of it's built on the strong existing culture of writing and communicating that's been here from day one. Like one of the things you guys did, for instance, which is really interesting, was write blog posts about each announcement. Like, tell me about that. So my observation, having worked with many venture capital firms and with companies that

took their money is that VCs don't do any marketing and you don't really stick their neck out to support the portfolio company until there's the IPO. And then they will call every reporter and say like, well, you know, we've known money and we've, but at the beginning of the journey, if you're like, here's why we invested, here's what we see in the company, you can help them just very tactically with recruiting and business development and like sticking your neck out for them. If we're calling it venture capital and it's high risk, we can't put all of the owners of the risk-taking onto the portfolio company. They take the lion's share anyways, right?

At least, I mean, the whole point of a brand is that the portfolio companies that don't have a brand yet can kind of borrow our brand. It's an umbrella. Right? It's just sort of this brand halo, hopefully. But if you don't actually bother to support them actively and visibly, then what's the point? I love that because it's about skin in the game.

And so you guys started writing these posts. And what I also appreciate as an editor is that they weren't actually straight press releases. They talked about the investment. Well, nobody reads press releases. There's no story in press release, right? There's no story about like how this founder's idea is particularly well suited for their experience, the founder idea fit that we talk about. There's no arc and there's no rawness to it.

Like anything that is worth reading has to have some sort of raw element that's real and it's also plain English. I call it slippery and I agree with you. It needs to have a raw, authentic, slippery feel that's not perfectly polished with every bow tied. In fact, I hate things when they're perfectly done that way. And they need to sound like the person, right? And that's why the editorial team, it's their voices that you help shape, right?

Exactly. So just one more quick note. Going back, when they hired you, what did they ask you to do? Like, be their in-house PR person? So the hired outcast, I basically said, and Mark was really the leader in the main pusher of this, although I think Ben was very supportive, but Mark's like, we want to properly announce it, we want to treat it very seriously, we want to make a... statement. Can you help us do that? I think they called my boss before Outcast. I don't know who

else they called. I just remember Simone called me, just like they asked me about you. And she told them, it's like, there will be absolutely never zero BS, which they decided was a feature, not a bug. Yeah. And then we decided to launch the firm and we did the cover story. We did lots of other interviews and whatnot. And then it was sort of a regular client partner relationship. But you were the co-founder of the firm. Like, how did you choose to be on this account? Like, why don't you just outsource it to all the junior people? No, no, no, that's not how we ran outcast. We were always working on work because how can you give, quote-unquote, strategic advice if you have no idea what media is thinking and whatnot. So at any given moment in time, I was always working

on a very specific thing. Yeah, and then the rest of your time, you help, you know, a mentor and empower and advise the rest of the agency and clients where you kind of sprinkle in, right? And I mean, selfishly, I like doing those things where you go, like, can we get a cover story? Because it's my, it's like running a marathon, you're proving to yourself that you can do it. I love all of that. So it was fun. I think very shortly, Mark, basically it was the lead recruiter, if you will, say like, look, this function is, turns out it's pretty important, it's critical, like would you ever consider? And then we did this dance for a while.

And it turns out at the same time, Karen and I had both decided that we wanted to change our roles at outcast, less from running it more to, you know, if you will, like doing actual work and very dusting. And we had tried to recruit this fabulous woman for like four years. Alex Constantinople. Who runs it today? Who is amazing. And she finally said, like, I'm ready to do something.

And so that actually allowed me to even think about, leaving my non-human child. It's like your baby. Yeah, it totally is. But like those happen in parallel. We had sold outcasts, I think, three or four years prior. But it was not your sell and leave. sale, we sold it to a holding company. So the day-to-day actually didn't change. So I'm glad you brought this up because one of the things that I think is an undertold aspect of this

story is that there's some parallels between VC and picking clients and agency. What are they? So the good clients you always have to compete for, same with deals, right? The thing that makes an agency is the reputation, not the revenue. And then the client list you keep, right? Just like the portfolio company, that speaks for you. That speaks like, are you smart? Do you have good judgment? Do you know what you're doing, right? That's by the company you keep, right? And then the thing about how to build a business at Outcast is very similar,

although the money is very different. The way you build a business is you find a company that you think has great promise. You're hopefully right about that, and you cannot afford to be as wrong as you are in venture capital. Definitely not. And then you grow with their success. So Salesforce was a client when it was Mark and three engineers and his apartment at a Coit Tower.

And Alcas had that business for 12 years. Well, guess what happened? The fees went up over time, right? And that is much easier from a business point of view than adding, you know, a thousand, $5,000 accounts, right? But what I love it is you took some very early bets in making bets, like to make your choices for whether to make Salesforce a client or Facebook. Tell me a little bit about that.

So here's my theory on this on like picking clients is what people actually say they enjoy is not really, in all cases, what they enjoy. What they end up enjoying is success and making a difference. Are you going to be able to put on your resume? You worked on that. And on the enterprise side at Outcast, in that decade, there were two enterprise software franchises that were created, Salesforce.com and VMware.

And we had them both. And then you go, like, okay, of the clients, right, do we have anything in Clean Tech? We made a decision that Clean Tech wasn't for us. It seemed very prescient, in fact, on your. part. Trust me, our staff would be like, I would love to run our clean tan. Like, it's all felt so good. But they were all science experiments and there's nothing really to do because it takes forever to find out if there's a product in there. Right. And like that's about for venture capital

as a model. But for us, you're going to do PR for five years, spend a bunch of fees, right, that I have a hard time justifying because like there's no actual business, right, where you can see an impact. Right. So those are some of the choices that we make. It seems to me like you would have been much better than some of the others who made the bets in the clean tech space. I did have a VC tell me, you know, your portfolio is better than ours. It was good, but like it was also sad. The last parallel, which I think is underappreciated, is like both are services firms. Like in one case you take money and another case you give money.

But both what distinguished you is like how you treat the entrepreneurs, what you do for them besides the money, right? So I think the parallels are just striking. In venture capital, what's slightly different is in venture capital, you make your money on the easy deals and you make your reputation on the really hard deals but both entities it's all about reputation in the outcast case obviously

it's a two-sided marketplace right you have to have a great reputation with both press and clients right I love that analogy actually tell me more about this two-sided marketplace for more context for those that are interested in learning more about the mechanics of PR how to hire an agency how to manage crises

we've actually done other episodes at market and other guests you can find those on a660.com under podcasts, but in this context, tell me more about that matchmaking dance. So I think if you want to succeed, you need to broker what the client's business goals are with what actually makes for a good story. And if the client is unreasonable or in an ethical case ask you to like lie or whatever, you just can't do that, right? You want your client to be a client for 12 years or in the Amazon Kindle case, I think even for longer, like Outcast launched the Kindle and Amazon is still a client. So,

For that, you need to have high integrity with a client and perform and actually do all this stuff. But you also need to be an honest broker with a reporter because if you go to the Walter Journal three times in a row with a terrible idea that's just off and they would never run, you should know better. You would ignore them. I mean, frankly, this is true of your team. When I was at Wired, many of them pitched me. Well, there was only two of them at the time, but I loved them because they were some of the very few who stood out to me as not driving me nuts. I love how people like dumping on PR people. There's just as many bad lawyers and lazy reporters.

It's like everybody's favorite punching back. I will say, like, one of the best compliments was like this guy managing editor, I think of InfoWorld, Computer Weekly. He basically said we would say, like, well, if the pitches from Outcast, we'll take the meeting. That is the best compliment. So I have to ask you a hard question about this. Why do you think, so I love that you use the analogy of a two-sided marketplace. Do you really believe that that broker will exist in the future, especially because our business and technology is to disintermediate things?

I think about that all the time. Sometimes I go like, yes, deaf. And then sometimes I think, like, no. Because there is such an element of translation that I'm not sure AI in matchmaking that AI is still well suited. Like Google translates really good, but I speak a bunch of languages and it's just kind of off. Well, you don't mean literal translation.

You're meaning translation. No, like the subtlety of knowing the 10 last stories. I think that the level of EQ and stories. weaving of those two sides together, I have a hard time seeing how that's going to get disintermediated right away. Now, I fully realize that a lot of people say that. And I cross my arms and I'm like, that is such a BS. I don't know. But I sort of feel like jobs that require a lot of empathy on both sides are going to be pretty safe, I think, for a really long time. It reminds me of this line that if you act like a robot, expect your job to be automated away.

And so when Chris Anderson... Well, that's good. It wrote this post because he was so annoyed about all these pitches. He got, we outed all the email addresses of all the people who kept pitching him instead of the right editors. And that's a perfect example of essentially doing your job robotically. Were you just sending an email? You're not really customizing it.

Whereas what you're describing is less robotic. It's creative, empathetic. It's understanding what one side wants. What is actually the story? And what does a person want to hear in the other side? The two-sided marketplace. Of course, the positive part of the two-sided market is the more good relationships you have, the more it benefits your clients.

The more good clients you have, the more reporters will want to talk to you, right? So I have a question. So Cade Met's a friend of mine from Wired. He's now at the New York Times. This is before that. Very good reporter. He's one of the best. Are you kidding?

He's literally, he and I used to compete for the top slots at Wired, actually, in a good way. We were friendly competitors because we were the unliked ones. Anyway, I saw him recently. And I'm going to tell this backstory. He did a piece for Wired on the A6 and Z library. And he reached out to me to be introduced to you, hey, can you just me to market? because I'm going to do this piece.

And he's sort of annoyed because he's like, why does this person tell me I can and can't do this piece? A. And B, he didn't understand the concept, which he wrote about in his piece. And I explain it to him where he's like, what is she talking about overexposure? You basically said no to him initially. So look, in the beginning,

it was all about having the chance to compete for the deals, right? And therefore we were loud and proud. But like, you can overdo that where you basically at some point started doing gratuitous PR. So people come to the office, right? and the office is also, like, the entrance doubles as a library, right? So Kate is at the office and it's like, I want to write about this. And I was getting to that stage where I put the brakes on a lot,

where it's like, we're not doing, no, no, no, no. I was like, this is another one of those pieces where, like, I love Kate. He does a really good job. It's wired. But like, do we need another thing about us? I wanted to be away from us. I wanted to talk more about the technologies, the future, the entrepreneurs. For me, it's about a larger picture of, like, are we actually spending too much time on the wrong thing?

Well, that is what I think is so amazing. I'm so glad we're talking about this because that is the orchestration behind the scenes that is entirely invisible that people don't see. In fact, that there's so many decisions that go into the thing you see and so many decisions that go into things you don't see. The most important decisions you will never see. Well, especially when in your job in particular, it's probably the opposite in mine, in fact, I would say. Well, actually, no, it might be the same because I would argue just in the early days, too, though, that one of my number one philosophies as an editor is that the more you kill, the better you have content because you're actually working on the right things. But that said, on the K thing,

the thing that you didn't mention is that the reason you were concerned about overexposure at that point in the firm's evolution, I think it was actually six years in almost. So this was about four years ago, is that you had just approved that the New Yorker could do a profile on the firm. So let's talk about one of the most unique pieces I think you've done at A6 and Z that you oversaw, that you had your team do, which is around the fact that we let a reporter into our hallways and in our pitch room, in fact, to do a profile of the firm for the New Yorker. So tell me what your rationale and logic was in green lighting that piece. So it's not an easy decision. At that point, I was at a stage

where it was like, enough. We're done talking about ourselves, right? So enough. They came to us, and the way they do these stories is they do the story about like a profession or a type of business, and they do it through the lens of following this one person. Very classic. formula. So then the ask was, we would like to do this kind of story, and we would like to do it with Mark's participation. So the decision is then, okay, the New Yorker is the New Yorker. So how often is the New Yorker going to write the definitive piece on venture capital? Once in a decade, maybe? Well, do I want that to be about whoever or do you want that to be about us? At that point, I want to occupy that spot because that's leadership and that's voice of innovation, which is what

all about. So what I remember you telling me, it was very eye-opening for me at the time, was you said you wanted not only the firm to have that definitive spot, but you wanted the East Coast audience to really understand it. Yeah, look, people in the other power centers, right, like primarily New York and D.C., sort of feel like we don't explain ourselves well, right? Silicon Valley, there's some bridging that needs to happen. However, here's the New Yorker, right? Like, it hits those audiences and it's a chance to explain our business to the those audiences in a very legit, very, you know, future forward way, right? And I think the headline was like the future's frontman or Silicon Valley's front man. Now, we have never let anybody

sit in on a meeting and whatnot, right? But like the New Yorker comes with that. In fact, I think there was a lot of compromising on both sides that needed to happen. You had to ask permission for entrepreneurs. Being able to, you know, talk off the record and then give the entrepreneurs some choices about what could go on the record. Could they really participate in all of that? And what I try to balance is, you know, again, being an honest broker, right? Like, you get an actual peak and an actual pitch meeting and the actual reactions, but I do need to protect our entrepreneurs. Like, that's our reputation, right? And the other concession that the New Yorker made, which they didn't like, was that all of these meetings were staffed. Right. This is actually

a firm policy that I think people here didn't even understand. Even the own part, the general partners, I don't think even saw the point of that until they got it. Right. No, they definitely get it now. But the New Yorker was like, no, no, no, we like the familiarity that develops blah, blah, it's like, we're not doing that. That was going to be a deal breaker. Scott Rubin at the time was staffing up a bunch. But I think Tat Friend did a really good job. In fact, the thing that I think is really interesting, you talk about it being the one story of the decade. I think it did so well that they ended up doing that kind of a profile of multiple people after that in the Silicon Valley VC world. I mean, they did Sam Altman, they did a couple others and they sort of did this ongoing thing.

Occasionally they asked for suggestions. Like, what do you think? You gave them suggestions. I remember that. So let's talk about one of the most defining things. That's, again, about five years in. Let's talk about maybe two years into the firm, which is software eating the world. Well, first of all, it came up completely organically, right? Like, I think people sometimes think PR people sit and go like, we should X. It's just not how it works, right? So the way it came about was, you know, the economist writes these special reports, they're super in-depth. At the time, Martin Giles was the Silicon Valley person for the economist. And he came to me and was Ben, Mark, Martin, and me. We're talking about the internet and the future of

the internet. And Mark basically sort of starts to riff. And he goes, well, your way to think about it is really, it's like software's eating the world. And he goes through his little thesis. And I'm sitting there and going like, that is a freaking op-ed. This needs to have shelf life. I basically gave the idea to the reporter. And the reporter's like, well, if Mark Andreessen will write it and it's like that big, we will run it. And then I told Mark, like, it's placed, here's your deadline, and then kindly he obliged. That's one of the most defining pieces, not just for the firm, but just for the industry. I mean, people refer to it over and over and over again.

A few years later, in fact, maybe a month before I started, there was also a New York Times op-ed on why Bitcoin matters. What's a backstory there? So there was an opinion written about Bitcoin that was really negative about Bitcoin, but more important, it didn't fully appreciate, I think, what was actually how. happening underneath the currency. So Mark wrote a response just as an email to the person who have written the op-ed and basically just said, like, look, I read your op-ed and we've been studying this space and I thought it might be helpful for me to lay out how we're thinking

about it. And he just writes this whole piece on why Bitcoin matters and he sees me on. I'm like, Mark, there's an op-ed. So I think, I guess the lesson that I'm learning on this podcast is like I got to just like identify versus ask him to do op-eds, right? Yeah, yeah. Totally. But what I love about that is that the narrative was very much about the Mount Gawks and the scary, but the reality is that the co-inventor of the GUI has a perspective on Bitcoin as a protocol. I mean, it's certainly a legitimate opinion, right? And we did not get an answer on our email. So, well, let's run it. Actually, funnily, if you had, you might not have run it.

Exactly. So we've been talking about the story of the brand. You've talked about your background and PR and communications, but you actually run marketing, which at A6 and Z has three distinct functions all under the banner. there's communications in PR, which is where it started, the team you first grew, then events, and then editorial. Tell me about that and what they're thinking. Yeah, so, I mean, like, marketing for a venture capital firm looks very different from marketing for a product company. It's just very different. We have such a breadth of investment

areas, right? We're not beholden to having to market a product. The communications part is figuring out for the general partner, sort of like an exec comms function. What is your platform? What's our point of view on X topic, right? So that, sort of figuring out what they want to do? What are the big things they want to do for the year, whether the smaller things for the year, and like how to respond to incoming opportunities and whatnot? Which they get a lot of because of the brand. Tons. And it varies by general partners. Some are very much in brand building mode, right? Some are not in brand building mode. I'm glad you pointed that out, by the way, because one of

the things you said about the evolution of the firm is that there's a right time in a place and that these things have ebbs and flows. You're not just like automatically, robotically applying some script. It's like there's a timing to this. There are like 17 flavors of this at that sort of platform level. It's not like a cookie cutter thing. So that's the comms function, right? And then the events function, if you think about our brand, is we don't have features, we don't have news, there's nothing you can touch, you can't review it, right?

So we're not a product company. So events is really the only way to really experience the brand, right? Physical. I think people will be shocked. I think they're going to end up doing 200 events this year. That's huge. Some of them are tiny, very important, but small. Very curated things where there's a lot.

content component but really is a way of convening people and like generating like productive relationships with our core constituents right and then we have tent pool events like with Ben's barbecue which he's now famous for and then we have our big summit every year so the events team like this is a broad range right and then obviously the content operation I'm here sitting talking to you that is really like okay so what is the space between the stories what is the stuff that participants in the future want to know but like they won't necessarily find in existing outlets, right, or the most in-depth. We're for builders, for participants.

The key verb, I think, is explained, right? And then there's a whole thrust of content, sort of the how-to stuff. Yeah, it's like the two pillars, tech trends, and then company building. And we need to have a direct channel for two reasons. One is to reach our entrepreneurs directly, to reach the participants in the future directly, right, in an unfiltered way that we want to. And then they can decide how they feel about it, right? But you also defensively, right, like if stuff doesn't go your way, you need to have other options.

Like, how would you completely be disintermediated from contacting your customers other than, like, a customer support email? Why would you not want to have that control? I completely agree. You totally want the ability. And you also, it is a major way to express your brand. You don't want to outsource that. You know, and then the way this happened is Kim had an op-ed, and then she wanted to place it in wire. She pitched me and guess who she contacted you, right, because you were not.

charge of that operation. And then she kept saying to me, she's like, you know what, this woman is really good. Well, by the way, the funny backstory, I don't know if you know this, I thought she hated my guts because quite frankly, I took the position because I cared very much about my section where I'm sorry, you guys, I know you're used to placing things that edits. That is not happening on my platform. Well, but the thing is, as you know, that sometimes when you're dealing with an editor, reporter, and a PR person, like interests aren't always aligned. So the whole genius of Kim and the rest of the team is to work through that productively, right? But she ended up coming back Then we went after you.

So the backstory on the content operation is that we all had decided, like, we want to build out our direct channel, right? And then Kim, who is not an editor, not a reporter, she took it upon herself, and she found Michael, who got the initial podcast off the ground. And then you obviously got the podcast to where it is today. I've given this talk a lot where people ask me, you know, if you've given talks on editorial and how it works, one of the lines I always say is that I believe that you need to have a two-word lens with which to distill the thing you're looking at. So for me at Park, it was entrepreneurial scientists. At Wired, it was informed optimism. And when I was interviewing here, I was looking for that two-word lens,

and you actually gave it to me in the form of innovation brand. And that's when I knew I could come here and work here because I was like, I'm not doing editorial for a B.C. I'm not shilling bullshit. No, I need to have, like, big ideas and big things to work on. Like, for those who want to participate and build and understand the future, I want them to go, like, I wonder what Dresen Hallwards thinks about that. And, of course, that comes in all kinds of flavors, right?

whether that is op-eds or podcasts or written decks or press interviews and any flavor, right? That is what the overall ambition is of the marketing function. And then if you look at the way the team is organized, we basically have four vertical areas roughly of investing, right? So it's a consumer, it's enterprise, and then crypto and bio. Fintech and real estate belongs sort of in the consumer slash B2B bucket, if you will, right? So the entire team is aligned around those vertical areas. So you can really develop depth in bio or consumer or enterprise. So to the extent that we can be useful to the portfolio,

we do all kinds of advising, right? We call it counsel. Here's how you should think about, like, the agency world. Here's how you think about the funding announcement. Should you disclose this X or the other? And then, of course, we get very involved when something has gone sideways. I was not to say crisis, and that's a whole topic of two, multiple three podcasts, if you want to check them out on our website.

So you talked about this model of the councils and bringing all these networks together. I often describe A6 and Z as a network of networks. There's all these different folks and people that come to play. The question I have for you is the network that you never talk about is the outcast mafia. It struck me. I went to like multiple events and I was like, holy, there's an outcast mafia, not just in the valley, but all across the United States and around the world, where there are people who worked at outcast at some point. And people talk about the PayPal mafia.

They talk about the Uber Mafia. There's a New York Times articles written about it. Tell me about the Outcast Mafia. Well, it's actually something I'm actually really proud of. You're making someone's career. People spend, you know, in one case, 17 years, like there's this woman Jessica, who's now been at Outcast longer than I have, right?

But you're making someone's career, right? So the time that they're with you ought to be meaningful and ought to forward into whatever they want to do next. There are people who started, and we did this thing where we never liked the senior talent at the other agencies because we were very, you know, our way blah blah blah but like so we did this intern program and i'm telling you there are so many people

who started out as an intern at outcast who now run big teams they have big budgets they have a great career right like and nearest to my heart is grace grace is the first person i hired who came out of that intern program yeah and she came out of them and she's so great i mean everybody who thinks that ben is so amazing and famous and whatnot he's great she made him you know how the asset was you know Andresen had co-invented the browser, right? Like, the challenge of that was, you know, Ben's brand was just not as big, right? So we did a bunch of things. Like, we did, like, little tactical things.

Like, we would never do any more press meetings with the two of them. Because then you're directing questions at the person you've already met before. But, like, the much bigger effort was Ben, his best format is writing. He's very good writer. And he's very specific and it's very him, right? So he's going, you know, and all of his coachiness, right? All of his advice, like, we'll just drip from the blog, right? And that turned into the first book, right?

So Grace then went and fixed that imbalance. So the first book, the media interviews, the Forbes cover, right, on him. And she's added again because she's like working, she's on the road with him right now doing his second book, right? Yeah, because by the way, a book doesn't sell itself, fun fact. No. What I also love, by the way, about that Ben and Mark thing is that people actually tend to pigeonhole them. Even I did before I got here and I realized this, they pigeonhole Mark as a big ideas guy, and Ben is a business guy,

they're actually kind of also swapped. Mark is equally as into, if not more, into the human side of the business and the sales and the marketing and the business building. And Ben is actually really into the big ideas and the trends. And so I think it's really fine that people

stereotype them sometimes. It's funny how people talk about superpowers and how important they are. But I think there is sort of this risk that, yes, recognize people's superpowers and put them in that role. But don't reduce the person to one feature. Maybe just like marketing is not just PR.

So one last one. Can you give me what you learned from building this Outcast Mafia? What was it about the culture that let you build this kind of a mafia? Well, it took us like three or four years in. And then we were very deliberate about like, okay, what are our values and how do we define them? And we were very meticulous. Like, so for example, we would never hire someone who came in and interviewed and they said, like, I want to work on the Salesforce business. We needed them to actually want to work at Outcast. Because what you get is you get people who didn't get the job at Salesforce. And that's why the wrong ambition, the pressure to hire and to compete, you know, because we don't have stock options and all that kind of. It's like it was really, really difficult hiring environment. So we had to have a really strong culture and we had to hold the line.

And Karen was very, very good at that. But we had a very, very high bar. And then the other thing that we did very rigorously, Heather England, who was our CEO, did a great job, was training, consistent training. Look, we're going to roll our own, right? That internship program, like people were. taught how to do these things, how to do a meet, how to staff a press briefing, like, what is your role, all these kinds of things. We didn't leave it up to chance. That's great.

Thank you for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Oh, thanks so much. This was a blast.