Not 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.
a16z is not one person.
A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
11–20 of 150 posts
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#12There's no glory in shameless self-serving propaganda.
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#13Somebody 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
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#14Most "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.
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#15Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, 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 w…
Hot 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…
Ah the "I could write that in a weekend and still go camping" 1000X developer.
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hot 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…
Ah the "I could write that in a weekend and still go camping" 1000X developer.
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/6d3d80be136002ae28ce2...
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#17Phenomenon is hardly unique to A16Z
Yes, 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.
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#18Nothing surprising about that. Many blogs are.
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#19Not 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.
Oh wow, I forgot about that! What a wild read. It was such a mess.
I loved it. Something about a famous rich person putting that much effort into something so amateurish and clumsy, while apparently being so confident, in an eager-college-freshman sort of way… I dunno, call it endearing, maybe.
I mean it’s either that or it’s horrifying. I choose to pretend it’s endearing because there’s too much horrifying already.
Re: A16Z blogs are just glorified marketing
#20You 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?