Andreessen: Corporate PR created an 80-year era of synthetic messaging
Marc Andreessen · Marc Andreessen & Ben Horowitz on a16z’s New Media Strategy · Mar 18, 2026 · at 4:49
Marc Andreessen, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), reflects on the history of corporate branding and traditional public relations.
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“The whole idea that there's like a corporate brand. Like, the whole idea that there's, like, a corporate, like, trademark, and then the whole idea that you, like, as a business, you basically load everything into that thing, and that that thing, you know, whether it's General Electric or International Business Machines or whatever, the, you know, the idea that that thing is somehow abstracted away from the people involved and then that the people involved, you know, their main job is to try to kind of buff that thing, which kind of, you know, led to this, you know, one way to look at it is, like, it led to this, like, eighty-year kind of reign of, like, everything being synthetic and plastic and boring.”
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