a16z Sep 19, 2026 1h 0m 34m saved
With Josh Elman, Partner at a16z, who led product at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, invested in Discord and musical.ly at Greylock, and later worked on Siri at Apple
Josh Elman said getting a consumer's attention has never been easier than it is now. What has got harder is getting that consumer to keep coming back.
Most consumer product advice treats distribution as the problem to solve. Elman said the channels already work, because something compelling spreads on TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube within days, and that the real constraint is that a new product has to displace something a person already does.
"It has to be such a good product doing that one thing really well out of the box, that I either stop doing something else or I turn more behaviors over to it."
Elman, a partner at a16z, on a16z, led product at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, joined Twitter in late 2009 and was there through 2010, invested in Discord and musical.ly at Greylock in 2015, and worked on Siri at Apple before joining the venture firm this year. This was his first podcast since taking the job.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 60 minutes of audio, 26 minutes of reading.
Here are the 18 insights that matter.
Key Takeaways
Channels are cheap and substitution is expensive: the product has to replace a habit, not add one
The screening question he asks users of any new product is "what did you stop doing"
Utility beats trust early, trust wins at scale — a product breaking into the hundreds of millions needs a policy on customer data, not just a feature
He has not used Google search in ages, and goes to Claude, ChatGPT or Gemini instead
A general assistant that promises everything never earns the right to do anything
Siri earned calls, timers, reminders and texts, then spent its credibility trying to do more
A voice-only agent "doesn't really make sense" to him, because people switch modes by situation
Infrastructure costs came back as variable inference costs, after fifteen years of cloud making them fixed
Competitors can copy the shipped product, not the roadmap — "I can only clone what I see"
No major social network has launched in years because the attempts were derivative of X and Instagram
He thinks group chats may already be the new network nobody named
He wants agents that push people back into physical rooms, using a board-game cafe in Noe Valley as the example
San Francisco is where you scale a consumer company, not where you have to start one
He named Lovable in Sweden and musical.ly's team in China as counter-examples
1. Back on the Founder Side
Elman was asked why he had returned to investing after operating roles. He said the pull was the same one he had in the late 1990s: products that reach hundreds of millions of people.
He had a first run as an investor at Greylock starting in 2011, after stints at LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Eight years ago he went back to operating, first at Robinhood and then at Apple, where he worked on Siri and Apple Intelligence. He joined a16z this year.
He left Apple because he thinks consumer AI is about to open up
But at the same time, I was like, we're about at the beginning of a Cambrian explosion of new consumer experiences around AI. Now is the time I really believed it could happen.
Josh Elman
He describes the job as picking a side rather than a strategy
I want to get back on the side of founders. I want to help founders create incredible companies.
Josh Elman
2. After COVID, a Rebalance
Asked to compare consumer behavior now against five years ago, Elman went back to the pandemic. Video calls stopped being strange, sharing rose, and mobile and social gaming grew sharply, with Roblox the example he named as having kept growing since.
His reading is that digital time hit a ceiling. Once people could go out again, some of the new behavior stuck and some of it did not, and what people now want from software is help being somewhere else.
The demand is for tools that return time, not tools that absorb it
And we actually, with this incredible rise of AI, we want things to help us actually be more present in the world.
Josh Elman
3. Three Buckets of AI Users
Elman split the AI population into three groups. Early adopters in Silicon Valley have AI running their work and their calendars, and developers direct swarms of agents rather than typing code. The workforce is next, with coding, spreadsheets, document analysis and research now routine.
Consumers are the third group and the least far along. Most use a chat assistant as a better search box, for homework, for a financial or legal question, or to draft an awkward email.
Consumer AI is still at the search-replacement stage
When I look at consumers, we are very early.
Josh Elman
On entertainment he was more cautious. AI is arriving as both a production tool and a disruption to how stories get told, and his position is that audiences do not care where a story comes from.
Audiences buy the story, not the production method
People want great stories and they want to just consume them wherever they come from.
Josh Elman
4. Consumers Move Slower
The host put to him that ChatGPT now has around 900 million weekly active users, four and a half years after launch, and asked what comes next. Elman's answer was about pace rather than capability.
He compared the AI release cycle with Apple's annual hardware and software cadence, and said the industry keeps forgetting that ordinary users are on the slower one.
The capability step change came at the end of last year
The models got so much better. Towards the end of last year that they could do long-running tasks. They could actually have loops of improvement. Agentic tasks finally started to work, and the coding and envisioning of something got so much better.
Josh Elman
He used OpenClaw as the marker for what that unlocked — a single person, working alone, producing a new way of interacting with models, including memory held in skills files.
One person in an apartment reset the interaction model
And that class of models resulted in something like OpenClaw that one person wrote by himself almost in his apartment and came up with a whole new way of interacting with models
Josh Elman
The consumer version of this has to be staged
But to really bring this to consumers, it's going to take a more measured pace. We have to bring people step by step into understanding, what does it mean to have AI doing things for you? What does trust mean here?
Josh Elman
5. Trust Beats Utility Later
Asked whether trust is the new competitive advantage in consumer AI, Elman drew a line between the early market and the mass market.
Early users forgive; mainstream users do not
I think in these early days of adoption, utility, often trumps trust. People will try new things and they'll experiment with it. But if you truly want to break into the mainstream and really get to the hundreds of millions or billions, trust ends up becoming paramount.
Josh Elman
The test he named is what a company does with customer data: whether it uses the data to improve its own model and trade it onward, or only to make that customer's experience better. He expects that to be the dividing line as products scale.
He then gave his own behavior as evidence of how fast the underlying habit has already moved.
He has stopped using Google search
I don't know when the last time you Google something, but I haven't Googled something in ages.
Josh Elman
Josh Elman on search: the change is already done
The fundamental way we search for online now has radically changed forever.
Josh Elman
6. Shopping Wants a Concierge
The host described searching for a splittable valet keychain, failing on Google and Amazon, and getting a usable answer from a chat assistant, including a maker in Michigan, but still wanting to browse a shortlist at the end. Elman's answer was that the target is a person, not an interface.
The benchmark is an expert in a store whose only incentive is you
But when I think about shopping, what's really interesting is the best experience is when you can have a concierge experience at a store. And you have somebody who's a true expert.
Josh Elman
Alignment is the part that is hard to fake
And even better is when you know that their only incentive is your success.
Josh Elman
He gave a worked example from his own wardrobe: the black polo sweater he was wearing on the call.
He designed the garment he was wearing with AI
This thing I'm wearing, I actually designed completely with AI, where I said I wanted a new black polo sweater and it actually helped me figure out the design
Josh Elman
It was then manufactured for him in China. The host suggested fashion design as a fallback career; Elman credited the tool.
7. Agents, Worlds, Verticals
Asked what he wants to fund, Elman named three areas. The first is a personal agent — scheduling, health, finances, weekend plans, and a daily check-in. He was explicit that the same feature is either useful or irritating depending on execution, and that a check-in done badly is nagging.
The second is interactive entertainment. He watches For All Mankind on Apple TV and said the thing he wants is to go deeper into the backstory, or change what happened, and then share that with someone. He treats Roblox as the proof that shared, generated worlds work, and thinks the same pattern extends well beyond games.
The third is vertical services. Travel was his clearest case: people spend their hardest-earned time and money on a trip without full visibility into what is there, and without a way to express what they actually like.
Travel is a visibility problem an expert could solve
Having an expert that can actually help bridge that gap is an incredible opportunity.
Josh Elman
He listed shopping, fashion and setting up a home as the same shape, and finished on connection: an agent that rehearses a difficult conversation with you, then does some of the outreach, so the human meeting goes better.
8. Whatnot Sells the Story
The host raised live shopping, and Whatnot's recent funding round, and noted that the format worked in China and Asia long before anyone believed it would work in the US or Europe. Elman, whose firm has backed the company, said the difference from a normal storefront is participation.
Live shopping is participation, not a catalog
But what's really fun with something like live shopping is that it's much more about participation.
Josh Elman
A buyer hears the story behind the product, asks questions, and talks to the designer or the curator who selected it. His argument is that the purchase carries a relationship with it, which is why buyers come out more confident and more attached to what they bought.
He also said the China evidence was clear before the US market believed it, and that when the behavior does take hold it moves quickly.
9. AI Microdramas Next
Asked about AI microdramas, Elman traced the format back to musical.ly, which he backed at Greylock, and to the idea that a short video with a soundtrack can create a real connection before the viewer moves on. musical.ly was sold to ByteDance and became TikTok.
Short-form built the appetite; microdramas answer it
I think that microdramas are a huge part of the next wave of entertainment.
Josh Elman
The constraint he named is supply. A studio, a cast and a set are what limit how many of these get made, and that is the constraint AI removes.
The barrier moves from production capacity to taste
But with AI, we can open up this creativity to so many more people who might not have a studio or a cast or sets to go film something, but they can still imagine what is truly a great story and have that made.
Josh Elman
He expects new marketplaces for this — a destination a viewer goes to for a story, rather than discovery running through existing social feeds.
The host said the show had just published its first AI microdrama, made with an early-stage startup called Plot Party: a four-to-five-minute origin story about Nike, the first in a planned series about how well-known companies started. Elman compared it to the Nike film Air and said corporate stories are hard to make cinematic.
Creation stops being the scarce input
And the hardest part now is going to be less about the creation. We can have a lot of people with talent. But it's still going to be the things that resonate, finding an audience, figuring out how to build a relationship with the audience where they come back to you.
Josh Elman
His advice to creators is to own the thing they build
I kind of feel like creators should be building products that they can own.
Josh Elman
The host added that a creator's identity and the relationship built through their work is what carried the last wave of user-generated content companies, and that an AI-heavy future still runs on people telling stories rather than a machine generating them.
10. No New Social Network
Asked why no major social network has emerged in years, Elman's first answer was that there has been no need for one: the existing networks run at hundreds of millions to billions of users.
He then went back to 2015, the year he invested in both Discord and musical.ly, and said the same objection was raised then. Instagram, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and LinkedIn already existed. Both new products won because they solved a different problem — Discord for playing games together and talking while doing it, musical.ly for making something rather than displaying something.
Instagram was a camera pointed outward; musical.ly was one pointed at you
So much of Instagram I used to say was the back facing camera. Look at the incredible place I'm in or the incredible latte I'm having.
Josh Elman
The attempts since have copied rather than differed
But I think a lot of the attempts at social media between then and now were things that felt derivative, that felt like, well, I'm already doing it elsewhere, come and do it here slightly differently.
Josh Elman
He named the many variants of X and Twitter as the clearest case: a slightly different group of people doing the same thing, which is hard to take mainstream.
The host listed Bebo, and said he had interviewed its co-founder Michael Birch that week, the first podcast Birch had done in about a decade. He also named Clubhouse and Substack, both a16z portfolio companies, as evidence that consumer appetite keeps shifting rather than disappearing.
Elman's candidate for what has already replaced the new social network is the group chat.
Group chats may be the network nobody labeled
Group chats have become such a popular form of social media. Maybe that is in some ways the new network that we aren't thinking about that we really have developed over the past few years.
Josh Elman
He also named Partiful, an a16z portfolio company, as an example of software pushing people toward events and out into the world.
11. Agents as Social Glue
The host asked what multiplayer agent communication would look like in practice. Elman said today's consumer AI is single-player: it knows the individual and not the group.
His example was the awkwardness of asking a group of friends what they are doing at the weekend and getting silence back. An agent could do the asking, compare notes with other people's agents, and produce a match.
He calls the matchmaking version of this glue rather than dystopia
And in some ways, people say this sounds a little bit dystopian. But I think in some ways, it's actually AI being the glue that brings us together
Josh Elman
The end state he wants is a table booked in the physical world
And it recognizes, hey, there's like, 10 of you in San Francisco, in Noe Valley, why don't you all go to the board game cafe and just play there? They got two tables ready. I can even reserve them for you right now.
Josh Elman
Pushed on how far this could go, he described waking on a Saturday to a day already assembled: a morning meeting, an afternoon break, dinner with friends who were also looking for something, plus a replacement shirt ordered on the way.
The purpose is to protect time, including time alone
And the goal again is to save you time from the things you don't want to be doing to do more of the things you do and that you enjoy and that you love.
Josh Elman
He used his mother as the model for the tone he wants from an agent, and said the same person should be able to encourage and to push back.
The agent he describes is a cheerleader and a critic
I love my mother and she's great at doing both of those. Sometimes being my biggest cheerleader, sometimes being my biggest critic.
Josh Elman
12. Earn the Right to More
Asked whether only a platform with existing distribution, such as ChatGPT or Claude, can build this, Elman said the path is narrow and sequential rather than broad.
Start with a few things done well, then extend
I'm a big believer that if you want to become a very big company, you can't start by trying to do everything, but you have to start by doing a few things really well and earn the right to do more.
Josh Elman
Discord was his example again: it earned the right to be where people played and talked, that produced more chat, and eventually people who did not play games came for the chat. Each expansion was paid for by the last one working.
A general-purpose promise earns nothing
I think for a lot of these assistants, if you just say, I'm a general thing, I can take care of everything, you don't earn the right to be really, trusted for getting me a few things done.
Josh Elman
He then applied the same test to the product he spent years on.
Siri won four tasks and then overreached
Siri was actually amazing to earn the right to do a few things for you really well. Place phone calls, set timers, set reminders, send a text message.
Josh Elman
When it failed at the things people then expected, the credibility went with it, and he said a product gets only so many chances to ask a user to try one more thing. His view is that an assistant that can explain why it cannot do something does better than one that simply refuses.
13. Voice Is Lossy
Asked what excites him about voice, Elman started with throughput: speech is faster than typing, and he thinks out loud until the point is formed. Then he gave the counterweight.
Speech carries more, and refines less
Voice is also lossy, though.
Josh Elman
Typing, he said, comes with editing built in — a typed message is tightened before it is sent. So the opportunity he sees is an assistant that lets a person ramble and then distills the point, which meeting note-takers already do at work and nothing does well in personal life.
He does not expect voice to take over
I'm not yet a believer, though, that we're all going to move to voice for everything. I think it's always going to be a balance. And I think the idea of a voice-only agent doesn't really make sense.
Josh Elman
The determining factor is situation: he uses voice in the car, where his attention is on the road, and types on the couch. His conclusion is that the product problem is switching smoothly between modes.
Rehearsal is the voice use case he likes most
Voice is also such a great tool. If you're coming into like a podcast show or if you're preparing for a speech, it's actually a pretty cool interaction tool as a sparring partner.
Josh Elman
The host said he had prepared for an interview with Reid Hoffman by bouncing questions off a chat assistant and found it useful. Elman, who worked with Hoffman at Greylock, pointed to Reid AI — a model trained on Hoffman's own material.
A trained double is preparation, not a substitute
Now, it's still very different than having the real live person and interacting in the moment, but it's an incredible proxy to understand how he thinks, how he might go about certain situations to test things.
Josh Elman
14. Inference Costs Return
Asked whether giving AI products away is still the right playbook, Elman told the history in three stages. In the late 1990s a website meant buying servers and racking them, which is why building one required capital.
Moving racks took the whole of LinkedIn
I remember in my first week when I joined LinkedIn, one of the things we did was move from one set of racks to a much bigger set of racks in the data center. And they needed the entire company. It was maybe 15 or so people at the time to actually go and move computers from one rack to another.
Josh Elman
Cloud services removed that upfront cost, and for about fifteen years the product mattered more than the infrastructure bill. AI reversed the shape of the cost.
The cost is back, and it scales with usage
Fast forward to today, we have costs again. And actually, they're variable costs. They're these inference costs. They aren't just even this fixed cost of infrastructure.
Josh Elman
Enterprise software can push that cost onto a contract, or onto an employee who expenses it. Consumers cannot. What has changed in his favor is the willingness to pay.
App stores and mobile gaming trained consumers to pay
With the rise of mobile gaming, the rise of subscriptions, consumers are much more used to paying for digital things than they were 10 or 15 years ago, let alone 20 or 30 years ago.
Josh Elman
He expects falling inference costs, from cheaper models, model switching and open-source options, to meet rising willingness to pay somewhere in the next couple of years, and advertising, purchases and subscriptions all to have a part in covering the bill. His caveat was the same one he applies to everything else.
No pricing model rescues a product nobody values
But it all starts with a product of value.
Josh Elman
15. His Four-Step Test
Asked what makes him say yes, Elman gave a sequence: intrigue, adoption, spread, retention.
The first test is whether the value can be said in a sentence
Things that I look for in a product are where it has a really clear value that you can describe to somebody.
Josh Elman
AI makes that first step easy, he said, because so many new capabilities raise eyebrows. The second step is whether the user's own experience matches the pitch, and whether the substitution it requires is easy or painful.
The question he asks every user of a new product
And so I always like to ask people, what did you stop doing when you started using this new thing.
Josh Elman
Spreading is third — whether users evangelize, either through a network effect or through simple enthusiasm, which is how chat assistants moved. Retention is fourth and, in his account, decisive.
Retention comes from accumulated history as often as network effects
And one of the best ways to keep somebody using something is with a little bit of a network effect that keeps them and other people using it together. But it's not the only way.
Josh Elman
The alternatives he named are accumulated personal history, which raises the cost of moving, and a marketplace where creators go for the audience and the audience goes for the creators.
16. Attention Is Easy
The host framed attention as scarcer than ever. Elman disagreed with the premise.
Getting noticed is the part that got easier
The first thing is I actually think it's never been easier to get consumers attention.
Josh Elman
TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube move anything compelling quickly. The hard part is what follows, and it is structurally different from the mobile era.
Fifteen years ago products added behavior; now they have to replace it
These are very hard challenges because you're substituting versus just expanding, which I think 15 years ago, we were all getting our first phones.
Josh Elman
The host said cloning an idea now takes days rather than months. Elman accepted that and named the limit of a copy.
A copy reproduces the release, not the direction
And the hardest part there is, if you're that founder who has the idea and the insight, even if other people can copy what you did, they can't copy where you're going.
Josh Elman
Josh Elman on cloning: what a competitor cannot see
But I can only clone what I see. I can't clone where it's going and I can't clone the next thing.
Josh Elman
What defends a product over time, he said, is the relationship with the user: personality, identity, a point of view, and a model that gets more personal the longer someone uses it. His own admission was that telling a durable product from a clonable one early is the hardest part of the job.
17. Where Consumer Gets Built
Asked why American startups win at consumer social, Elman rejected the premise. He named Lovable, out of Sweden, and ElevenLabs as companies that did not start in San Francisco, and pointed out that musical.ly's team was in China.
The Chinese ecosystem is producing patterns the US then imports
And there's so much innovation that's been happening in the Chinese ecosystem, for example.
Josh Elman
He traced live shopping in the US back to what happened in China first. What the Bay Area has, on his account, is not the founders but the second wave — people who have taken a working idea to a durable business before.
Expertise compounds faster in one place
I think to get that acceleration can happen anywhere, but you can really get the right expertise even faster when you're interacting with people from the Bay Area.
Josh Elman
The host then asked whether San Francisco is still the best place to start a company, a question he said he had taken from another interview.
He separates starting from scaling
I don't think it's the best place in the world to start a company, but I think it's a very important place in the world to scale a company.
Josh Elman
For a business-to-business company, he said, the density of nearby customers makes the city a good place to start. For a consumer company the calculation is different, because the product is being built for a culture.
Silicon Valley culture does not export cleanly
But honestly, if you're building for consumers, a lot of what you're also building for is culture. And I'm not sure that the SF tech culture is 100% transferable.
Josh Elman
18. The Twitter Years
Asked to pick a favorite among Apple, Robinhood, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and musical.ly, Elman named a window rather than a company.
Late 2009 to late 2010
He joined Twitter in late 2009 and described the following year as the most special of his career: a platform people believed in, hard unsolved problems, and a group he worked with daily before the company had to become a mature business.
He puts himself in a category other than founder
I was never a founder myself. I never went and started a company from scratch, but I was always what I call an early joiner where I'd go find these things and say, we're going to go make something great.
Josh Elman
He still thinks Twitter fell short of what it could have been
And the stuff we did at Twitter is probably some of the most meaningful work of my life and still see it to this day play out.
Josh Elman
Asked how large the user base was when he left, he gave both ends of his tenure.
Twitter grew roughly tenfold while he was there
When I left, we had gotten well over 100 million users. And when I joined, we were at maybe barely 10 million actives.
Josh Elman
The retweet decision
The host asked for the most interesting lesson he learned from Jack Dorsey. Elman corrected the premise.
He was there for the Evan Williams era, not Dorsey's
It's funny is I didn't actually work with Jack. When I was at Twitter, it was the Evan Williams era.
Josh Elman
Williams, who had built Blogger before Twitter, saw the product as the next form of media.
The lesson was to listen to users before deciding
We got a lot of smart people who are using our product every day. Let's not just think we know what's best. Let's listen to them. Let's learn.
Josh Elman
The retweet is the case he used. Users had invented their own version, posting from their own account with "RT" and the original author's name. Twitter's response was to build the behavior but refuse the reattribution: the retweet showed the original poster's face and words in a follower's timeline rather than rewriting them as the sharer's. Elman said the quote tweet works on the same principle, and that the change was unpopular at first because it altered a habit.
Listening and holding a position are not opposites
And there was this incredible lesson on listening, but still having a strong point of view, and then communicating that back out.
Josh Elman
Bonus Insights
Developers already work differently from everyone else
Elman said developers who used to write code by hand now direct swarms of agents, and that people are completing tasks in ways they could not have imagined before.
The check-in is the feature most likely to be done badly
that moment of something even just checking in with you can either be naggy, if done poorly, but amazing when done right
Josh Elman
Four and a half years is his unit for how fast this moved
But I think it goes to show this is how far we have come in four and a half years.
Josh Elman
He said the next twelve months should be more interesting still.
Passive consumption is the gap in entertainment
Right now, there's so many things to watch and things to experience, but you end up having to just consume and absorb. And what's really fun is when media is interactive and exciting and it's your world.
Josh Elman
Discord and musical.ly were both 2015 investments
You mentioned discord and musically, which musically became TikTok, both really started growing in 2015. That was the year that I got to invest in both of them in those early days.
Josh Elman
The show closed on a16z's Tech Week
The host plugged SF Tech Week, the a16z-run event he said he attended last year and which ran to roughly 2,000 events.
Elman's bottom line is that the scarce resource in consumer AI is no longer attention, capability or production capacity, but the right to occupy a habit someone already has — which is won one narrow task at a time and lost the moment a product promises more than it can do.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
a16z (The firm he joined this year, after knowing partners there for a long time; this was his first podcast since taking the job)
Apple and Siri (Where he worked before a16z; his example of a product that earned four tasks — calls, timers, reminders, texts — and lost credibility trying to do more)
Twitter (He joined in late 2009 at "maybe barely 10 million actives" and left after "well over 100 million"; the retweet design is his Evan Williams lesson)
LinkedIn (Where his first week involved the whole 15-person company physically moving servers between racks)
Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp (The incumbent networks he says removed the need for a new one — Instagram being "the back facing camera")
Greylock (His first venture firm, from 2011; he invested in Discord and musical.ly there in 2015)
Robinhood (The operating role he took eight years ago, between venture and Apple)
Discord (His running example of earning the right to do more: games first, then chat, then people who never played)
TikTok and ByteDance (musical.ly was sold to ByteDance and became TikTok; he calls its content some of the richest anywhere)
ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini (What he uses instead of search; the host cited roughly 900 million weekly users for ChatGPT)
Google (He says he has not Googled anything in ages, and that search behavior has "radically changed forever")
OpenClaw (Written by one person in an apartment; his marker for what the model generation he dates to late last year unlocked, including memory in skills files)
Roblox (Grew through COVID and kept going; his proof that shared generated worlds work, and that the pattern extends past games)
Whatnot (An a16z holding; live shopping as participation, where the buyer hears the story and questions the seller)
Amazon (Where the host failed to find the keychain that a chat assistant then sourced from a maker in Michigan)
Plot Party (The early-stage startup the show used to make its first AI microdrama, a four-to-five-minute Nike origin story)
Partiful (An a16z portfolio company he names as software that pushes people toward real-world events)
Bebo (Raised by the host, who had just interviewed co-founder Michael Birch — Birch's first podcast in about a decade)
Clubhouse and Substack (a16z portfolio companies the host cites as evidence consumer appetite shifts rather than disappears)
Lovable and ElevenLabs (His counter-examples to the claim that consumer winners only come out of the US)
Amazon Web Services (The shift that removed upfront infrastructure cost for about fifteen years, before inference costs brought it back as a variable)
Apple App Store and Google Play (Where consumers learned to pay for digital goods, which he says makes asking for money an invitation rather than an insult)
YouTube (Named with TikTok and Instagram Reels as the channels that make getting attention easy)
Tech Week (The a16z-run event in San Francisco the host plugged at the close, saying last year's ran to about 2,000 events)
Books & Resources Mentioned
For All Mankind (His example of a show he would want to explore sideways — deeper backstory, alternate outcomes, shared with someone else)
Reid AI (Reid Hoffman's model trained on his own material; Elman calls it a proxy for how Hoffman thinks, useful before a meeting rather than instead of one)
Air (The Nike film he half-remembered when the host described the show's Nike microdrama, offered as how hard corporate stories are to make cinematic)
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