Metadata
- Author: Benn Stancil
- Full Title:: For the Brand, I Guess
- Category:: 🗞️Articles
- URL:: https://benn.substack.com/p/for-the-brand-i-guess
- Read date:: 2025-02-27
Highlights
Taste Is Eating Sillicon Valley
Penny is, I suppose, a different character from the same story. It’s unlikely that he has a traditionally useful Rolodex, but he is, to some, a trophy in the culture war. Putting him on the payroll proves Andreessen Horowitz’s political bona fides: That they are aligned, boldly aligned, with the increasingly emergent aesthetic of masculinity, meritocracy,6 and Elon Musk—which is an aesthetic that is especially fashionable along the booming frontiers of AI, crypto, and the various Elon Musk sci-fi adjacencies. Though that brand—and Penny, to say the least—has plenty of other, uh, “problematic” associations, no matter: The ethics of the thing are immaterial.7 He was hired for the vibe—and today, vibes are business decisions. (View Highlight)
Consider David Perell. The self-described “Writing Guy” has nearly half a million followers on Twitter, hosts a podcast that’s booked some impressive guests, and used to run an online writing course called Write of Passage. But one thing Perell doesn’t seem to do very much of is write. As best I can tell, he’s written two posts for his blog over the last year. Perell’s brand is definitely writing, and his career is kind of writing, but his work is not writing. Writing is a means to famous ends.8 (View Highlight)
If you run a big venture capital firm, how do you decide who to hire? Whoever gets you attention. Whoever inspires more tweets and Substack posts. Whoever is provocative, and gets the people going. All press is good press, it seems, because even capitalists—from financiers to founders—have more base desires and addictions than money. (View Highlight)