--:-- Host: What is the job of a VC? The job of a VC is literally to be the legitimacy bank. Your job is to make founders powerful. As you put in the work to write and as you put in the work to read, what happens is that it reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about in such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading.
--:-- Host: Fresh off the news of his move from Shopify to join A16Z, Alex Danco 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 direction of a pitch, a partnership, or a company.
--:-- Host: We'll hear about the formats he's most excited to explore at 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.
--:-- Host: We have Alex Danco. The news broke today. He's going from Shopify to A16Z. And Dreesen Horowitz. Eric Torenberg's latest pick up. There he is. Alex, welcome to the show. How are you doing?
--:-- Alex Danco: Welcome to the show. Hey, guys. Thank you for having me on.
--:-- Host: Break it down for us—the anatomy of the deal. What happened? Did Mark Andreessen sit down with your mom? Did he tell them you have a bright future and they want to take you to the big leagues?
--:-- Alex Danco: The call 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.
--:-- Host: No way. That's amazing. He's a notorious blocker and unblocker. What did you do to get blocked by the goat?
--:-- Alex Danco: 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 before, had to apologize. I don't know exactly why I got blocked. But you always live to fight another day.
--:-- Host: What's at the top of your to-do list today, this week, this month? What are you going to be doing for Andreessen Horowitz?
--:-- Alex Danco: I'm coming on board to help make all the written content coming out of Andreessen 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 being a founder. I've worked in VC before. I've been at Shopify for five years. But most people, I think, know me just from writing and mouthing off on the internet and generally doing the craft that has been internet blogging, right?
--:-- Host: 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 it 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 essays. 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 sloppy AI-generated text, and I was like, yes, the models are going to get better, but in a few years, at what point is all the text that you're reading online and throughout your day just generated and there's no soul and craft put into it.
--:-- Alex Danco: I like to think of it as 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 in the work to read, what happens is it reshapes your brain a little bit. It reshapes your understanding of what you're talking about in such a way that the person writing can actually transfer some legitimacy to the person reading, right?
--:-- Host: 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.
--:-- Alex Danco: 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 Marc Andreessen op in the Wall Street Journal—Software is eating the world. It's time to build. These like big, 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-honored 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 Andreessen used to do these interviews with founders in the portfolio. Just basically like it's like what's your everyday carry but in the digital world? So it was 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 and maybe even more. But what's exciting to you? What's interesting? What kind of formats are you going to be exploring?
--:-- Alex Danco: 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, interesting. 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, right? 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. Like, 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.
--:-- Host: Either way though, so you mentioned all these different types of content, right? Yes, speech is incredibly underrated. We utilize them internally with the team and they're not every week. They're not on a schedule. Sometimes you need a speech. You need to just nail it and they can really set the tone and the energy within the company. and I'm long speechless. I'm thinking about Mark Andreessen 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. Because it's hard. To test the ability of our LPs. To test the capital markets. To measure them. Why do we go to the moon? To test the health of the global capital markets. There will never be enough venture capital. I mean, yeah, like a well-defined phrase Andreessen has been fantastic. 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. Where else should we go with this?
--:-- Alex Danco: I think speeches could be an entirely new launch video meta, right? Everybody, like the- Barn burners. Everybody has a launch video. There's like three new launch videos every day. A lot of them 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 rant at the camera and you can get people to truly listen to that, it probably ends up being pretty powerful. Those kinds of things can go viral in really powerful ways because it tells people that you have something to say. And it 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 tell you what all bloggers know right 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 AVC was cooking and Semel Shah 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. 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 it's time to go – if you go bring the output of a firm as legendary as A16Z with all the amazing things they have to say and the statements of record that they want to put out into the world, 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 brand that's going to shine. I can't wait for your first software is eating the world moment.
--:-- Host: Also, I feel like the speech thing really ties into the new A16Z brand. When I see the coin, I feel like that's like... The Art Deco coin with the abacus. I feel like speech is kind of Art Deco in some ways. I don't know why I'm making that association, but it feels somewhat linked. Is it Art Deco or is it Bozar? Remember the line, it's like, Art Deco is made by dwarves, Bozar is made by elves. But it's very, what is it? It was like the style. It was Randy in. And I feel like in Ayn Rand's writing, there's a lot of speeches that happen throughout the book. There sure are, famously. Makes sense. Yeah, famously.
--:-- Host: Anyway, thank you so much for hopping on. Congratulations on the trade deal. Congratulations on the move. And we're looking forward to seeing your work and hearing it.
--:-- Alex Danco: Thank you for having me on, guys. Come on and give a speech soon.
--:-- Host: Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Speech. Thank you, Alex. Take care, everybody. Cheers.
