# Erik Torenberg **Erik Torenberg** is a general partner at [[Andreessen Horowitz]] and one of Silicon Valley's best-known builders of networks: communities, podcasts and private group chats. He joined the firm in April 2025, when it bought his podcast company, Turpentine. Before that he was the first employee of Product Hunt and a co-founder of the venture firm Village Global and the founder fellowship On Deck. He's on the map for two jobs that look like opposites. Starting in 2020 he organized some of the private, political Signal chats where Silicon Valley's turn toward [[Donald Trump]] was argued out, including the large group known as Chatham House. Since 2025 he has led Andreessen Horowitz's effort to build public media of its own. The private chats were for the elite; the owned media is for everyone else. Both serve the same goal of going around the established press. ## Career Torenberg studied at the University of Michigan and co-founded rapt.fm, an app for online rap battles. In 2013 he became the first full-time hire at Product Hunt, the startup-discovery site that Andreessen Horowitz backed in 2014. In 2017 he co-founded Village Global, an early-stage venture firm whose backers reportedly included [[Jeff Bezos]] and [[Mark Zuckerberg]]. In 2019 he founded On Deck, a paid fellowship for founders. He hosted podcasts including *Venture Stories*, *Upstream* and *Moment of Zen*, and in 2023 founded Turpentine, a network of tech and business podcasts. On April 21, 2025, Andreessen Horowitz announced it had acquired Turpentine and made Torenberg a general partner. In the announcement, [[Marc Andreessen]] wrote that he talked with Torenberg nearly every day in group chats. Torenberg's job combines early-stage investing with building out the firm's podcast and media operation. A week later he moderated *The Ben & Marc Show*, the founders' own podcast. ## The group chats According to Semafor's April 2025 report on the [[Tech Right Group Chats]], Torenberg started his own set of tech chats on WhatsApp in 2020, independently of [[Sriram Krishnan]]'s chats for Andreessen. He also started some more political chats on Signal. Andreessen joined many of them. Torenberg told Semafor that people in 2020 felt social media was a "monoculture," and group chats became a safe space to debate and build consensus. The best known is Chatham House, a large Signal group whose reported members have included [[Joe Lonsdale]], Mark Cuban, [[Tucker Carlson]] and [[Ben Shapiro]]. When Trump's tariffs split the group in April 2025, [[David Sacks]] called it "worthless" and told Torenberg to start a new one "with just smart people." In a podcast conversation with Torenberg, Andreessen said the members were having private conversations because they "weren't allowed to have the public conversations." Semafor's story ran six days after Torenberg's hiring was announced. ## Building the firm's media At Andreessen Horowitz, Torenberg leads what the firm calls new media. The firm has funded "Monitoring the Situation," a tech-news livestream on X whose stated aim is "techno-optimistic" coverage. The San Francisco Standard described Torenberg as one of the show's biggest promoters and reported that the firm ran a media fellowship that trained some of its hosts. See [[Marc Andreessen]] for the firm's broader argument that tech should skip traditional media. ## Why it's on the map - **An organizer of the private network.** With Krishnan, he built much of the chat network where the [[Tech Right]] worked out its politics in private. - **From backchannel to broadcast.** His move to Andreessen Horowitz connects the two halves of the firm's media strategy: closed chats among the powerful, and public media the firm owns. - **The paradox of "going direct."** The bypass around the press hasn't removed intermediaries. It has put the firm's own people in that role. ## Connections - [[Tech Right Group Chats]] · [[Sriram Krishnan]] · [[Marc Andreessen]] · [[Andreessen Horowitz]] - [[David Sacks]] · [[Joe Lonsdale]] · [[Tucker Carlson]] · [[Ben Shapiro]] - [[Social Audio]] · [[Clubhouse]] · [[Tech Right]]