In May 2015, The New Yorker published a profile of the Silicon Valley investor Marc Andreessen. In it, writer Tad Friend joined Andreessen in his living room to watch an episode of Halt & Catch Fire, the AMC drama chronicling the rise of personal computing in the early 1980s. The scene provided an intimate window into the billionaire’s home life. Friend described a powder room toilet so opulent it wasn’t immediately clear how to flush it; the rooms were grand to accommodate Andreessen’s gigantic presence. Friend chronicled the endearing flourish with which the investor’s wife presented dinner—omelettes and Thai salads for two, served on Costco TV trays. Andreessen’s obsession with a punk software prodigy shed light on his self-conception as a man aligned with the industry’s outsiders.
There was one presence Friend failed to document. That would be Margit Wennmachers, who spent the evening tucked on the couch across from Andreessen and his wife.
An operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Wennmachers is among the most skilled spin masters in Silicon Valley. She has a sixth sense for communications strategy, which has helped her educate the world about the revolution technology is powering. She knows how to create the memorable scene that will shape a story. She understands how to get ahead of bad news that’s about to break and when to push startup founders to take responsibility for their actions. She returns nearly every call within 30 minutes, be it from a blogger, portfolio company CEO, or New York Times reporter. Over the past two and a half decades, Wennmachers, 53, has worked with, advised, or broken bread with nearly everyone who has endeavored to build—or write about—a startup. “She’s like the router at the center of the industry,” Andreessen says.
In many ways Wennmachers is an architect of Andreessen Horowitz, the prestigious investment firm that has backed hundreds of startups, including Facebook, Airbnb, and Twitter. Or, at least, she’s the architect of what the firm appears to be—and her presence has left an indelible imprint on the hundreds of businesses that have come into contact with the firm. Because of her, Silicon Valley looks very different than it did even a decade ago.
We’re all familiar with Silicon Valley’s mythological image of the tech founder: brilliant, nerdy, eccentric, well-meaning. What you don’t know is that, more than just about anyone else in tech, Wennmachers is the person responsible for harnessing that prototype to build the legend of Silicon Valley. Before Andreessen Horowitz launched in the summer of 2009, most venture capital firms believed that no press was good press. They remained lean, behind-the-scenes outfits and won deals because of their back-room reputations. Wennmachers helped put the firm on the map by pushing its founders, Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, to embrace the press and by helping the companies in their portfolio articulate their ideas publicly. In the years that followed, many firms emulated Andreessen Horowitz’s strategy, hiring marketing and communications leads. As a journalist, I’d often get the call: “Hey, we’re trying to hire a Margit. Do you know anyone?”
Yet it’s the nature of the communications role that we rarely hear much about the people who hold it: The best communicators, by definition, go unnoticed. They’re the invisible third person in every interview. It was Wennmachers who coaxed a reticent Andreessen into participating in Friend’s story because she believed it would be good for the firm. It was Wennmachers who set up a number of Friend’s interviews at Andreessen Horowitz and had a colleague staff them. When Friend felt he needed to see more of Andreessen, Wennmachers hit upon the idea of a TV-watching dinner date, correctly suspecting the scene would be just weird enough to guarantee inclusion and that Andreessen would come off exactly as she hoped: a relatable visionary who identifies with oddball hackers and who, when he is not predicting the future of computers, is watching TV shows about people who predict the future of computers.
For years Wennmachers has quietly advanced a narrative that has shaped how the world sees Silicon Valley and how the Valley perceives itself—as a group of brainy outcasts upending the limits of the status quo. But as the Valley’s tinkerers become industry titans, that image is changing. In the wake of the 2016 elections, the industry's largest companies have suffered a backlash. From almost every political perspective, they have been criticized as profit-mongering, irresponsible, privacy-invading, and out-of-touch. In the wake of that backlash, tech is now trying to come to terms with the impact of the tools it has introduced and to manage the wealth it has created. This presents Wennmachers with a new and critical challenge: crafting a revamped image of the techie of the future, one that embraces the great responsibility that arrives with newfound great power.
One afternoon last October, I meet Wennmachers at the Battery, a tony private social club in downtown San Francisco. It had been a busy day. She’d had jury duty but wasn’t selected, which left her time to meet up with a tech executive. The pair hadn’t met before in person, but a few days earlier she’d helped him through an emergency. A friend, not a close friend, had called Wennmachers with an urgent request, saying the man was “about to get skewered by The Journal.” She’d spent four hours helping out over the phone, and then she met him for a coffee because she'd been sprung from jury duty. When you interact with a stranger at a vulnerable moment, a certain closeness is formed, she tells me. “It’s like, ‘I feel like I should give you a hug,’” she says.
The guy wasn’t part of her firm, or even connected to one of its portfolio companies. But he could be important one day. Maybe Apple will acquire his company, and she’d have a friend at Apple. Maybe he’ll start a new company and come to Andreessen for funding. She calls people like this guy “the outside nodes of the network,” and considers them strategic relationships that extend her reach. “It’s not altruism—it just really works,” Wennmachers says. Spending large amounts of time applying her superpower to the problems of people she doesn’t know is a deliberate move to nurture her most important asset: her social network.
In Wennmachers’ view, communications rests on a single choice: One plays offense or defense. Defense, of course, is table stakes. It must be done. But, often, the best way to defend oneself in the world of ideas is to shape those ideas, to author them. To play offense.
Consider, for example, Andreessen Horowitz’s investment in Skype. This was back in 2009, just a few months after the firm had launched, when Andreessen and Horowitz were still working to build a brand with which they could compete alongside top-tier firms like Sequoia and Benchmark for deals. The private equity giant Silver Lake Partners led the Skype deal, which then valued the company at $2.75 billion.
At the time, Skype was a mess—a strong brand with a dud business that had spun through six CEOs. It was a complicated deal, and Andreessen Horowitz wasn’t even the lead investor; the firm had ponied up just $50 million of the $1.9 billion the group had invested in exchange for a majority stake in the service. Still, many people questioned the deal’s rationale. Then, 18 months later, Microsoft bought Skype for $8.5 billion, netting the young firm a significant profit. Wennmachers knew Microsoft would announce the deal with a press release before the markets opened on the East Coast. Reporters would write their stories, and whatever narrative they pieced together from the release would shape the way people understood the deal.
Wennmachers saw an opportunity to set the narrative. So she asked Andreessen to show up at the office by 5 am on the morning the news was set to break. Sometime around 4 am on that Tuesday, as she was speeding down the 101, traveling from her San Francisco home, she noticed a police officer trailing her Mini Cooper. “When the lights go on, I was like, ‘Shit,’” she says, waving her arms and shaking her hands at the memory. “I was like, ‘Sir, I need to be in the office before the markets open.’” The cop let her off. That morning, a colleague worked her way down a call list, phoning reporters to give them a heads up about the deal and offer up 10-minute interviews. In a room nearby, Wennmachers connected them to Andreessen, who repeated his talking points on why the deal was evidence of what Skype could eventually be.