Andreessen Horowitz Stops Producing Marketing Gunge at Future.com ⇥ businessinsider.com

Hey, remember Future — the kind with an uppercase F? It launched last June as a way for Andreessen Horwitz to promote its investment activities, almost explicitly:

“We want to write about stuff we know and that we invest in,” says [Margit] Wennmachers. This includes topics like crypto, biotech, fintech and real-estate, which all have dedicated partners at the firm.

Wennmachers’s job title at A16Z is “Operating Partner, Marketing” and was part of Future’s leadership. At the time of its launch, she said it was a long-term investment and effort, and I suppose fifteen months is “long-term” by somebody’s standards.

Rob Price and Melia Russell, Insider:

Future hasn’t published a new article in months, most of its editorial staffers have left, and its newsletter is defunct. A source familiar with Andreessen Horowitz’s content strategy confirmed to Insider that Future is shutting down.

[…]

Andreessen Horowitz remains committed to “going direct” and plans to continue to crank out content at a regular cadence, a person familiar with the firm’s content strategy said, but such material will live on its main website instead. A16z concluded over the past year that it wasn’t worth spending the time and energy building a new, separate brand given the firm’s prominence, the person added.

Jeff John Roberts, Fortune:

[…] As several people in Silicon Valley have told me, the firm wants to be another William Morris talent agency that mints celebrities—but with a client base composed of tech geeks and crypto oddballs rather than singers and actors. […]

For more on A16Z’s political and cultural ambitions, see last week’s Fortune feature by Eric Newcomer and Jessica Mathews.