Welcome to Startups Weekly, a nuanced take on this week’s startup news and trends by Senior Reporter and Equity co-host Natasha Mascarenhas. To get this in your inbox, subscribe here. To end the year, let’s continue to return to columns that I wrote that have aged, well, interestingly. In July, I wrote about how Y Combinator is building a Product Hunt, Product Hunt is building an Andreessen Horowitz and Andreessen Horowitz is building a Y Combinator. It was a not-so-subtle nod to how top institutions are trying to be accelerators, discovery engines, content marketers and check-writers all in one. Enter the latest. Future, Andreessen Horowitz’s formal foray into tech media, is shutting down less than two years after first launching, according to Business Insider. To me, the shutdown is less about a venture firm failing to jump into the editorial space — the firm is still very much creating content and even building a new podcast on tech and culture as we speak — and more about how the medium is truly the message. The whole allure of going direct as a founder and venture capitalist is built around assumptions. First, that you have something important to say. Second, you have to believe that you can package that content in a compelling way, consistently. And third, perhaps most importantly of them all, your important, well-packaged content needs to find an audience that trusts it. It’s one of the many reasons that media is a hard business, and one… Click below to read the full story from TechCrunch
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Copycats can drown
