New Media, Harry Stebbings Playbook & Mathew Matthew McConaughey AI
From licensed voices to media-first VC and Harry Stebbings’ velocity advantage
Happy Sunday everybody, here’s this week’s recap.
There’s been a clear shift happening across AI, venture, and digital identity, and all the biggest stories of the week point to the same thing:
The people who control media, identity, and access are becoming the new power players in tech.
Let’s dive in 🔥
The content:
a16z’s New Media team and the rise of media-first VC
The Next Billion-Dollar Voice AI Opportunity: Licensed Voice Rights
The Harry Stebbings playbook: velocity, discipline, and founder psychology
Cursor’s $29.3B valuation and what it reveals about AI infra
PMF Founder/Investor Whatsapp Channel
1. a16z’s New Media Team and the Shift Toward Media-First Venture
A16Z just announced its New Media team, led by Erik Torenberg, Alex Danco, Brent Liang, and Henry Williams. This move confirms something that’s been obvious all year: the venture landscape is shifting from a capital game to an attention and access game.
Founders have more funding options than ever. Capital doesn’t differentiate.
But distribution does.
The goal of the New Media team is simple:
Help portfolio companies launch, grow, and go viral.
Systematically.
In practice, it gives a16z something founders value much more than capital alone: the ability to manufacture attention on demand.
This isn’t “marketing.” This is strategic positioning:
If founders know a16z can amplify their story, accelerate their GTM, and drive millions of eyeballs, the firm becomes the default choice in competitive rounds.
And this is why the market behaves the way it does. Capital is cheap and everywhere; truly exceptional founders are not. So the top 20% of funds capture 80% of the best deals, while the remaining 80% of VCs fight over the leftovers. It’s a power-law industry. Brand, access, and distribution determine who wins, not effort or capital.
This is the same pattern my friend Ruben Dominguez & I have been working on this year. By building massive media channels and consistently giving value to founders, we’ve been able to invest in 20+ YC companies alongside top funds, because founders now come to funds for distribution.
The VC game is changing.
He who controls media controls access.
And he who controls access gets the best deals before anyone else.
2. The Harry Stebbings Playbook: Psychology, Discipline, and Velocity
This week I went deep into Harry Stebbings’ interview with Wouter Teunissen, and it might be one of the rawest, most insightful breakdowns of how elite operators think.
Harry describes a pattern that appears in almost every decacorn founder:
a superiority complex (belief they can do what others cannot),
a deep inferiority complex (constant feeling of not doing enough),
a near-masochistic tolerance for pressure.
It sounds contradictory, but in practice it creates the kind of obsessive drive needed for nonlinear outcomes.
But Harry’s true edge isn’t psychological insight—it’s discipline.
He speaks to two LPs every week, even when not raising.
He tracks hundreds of relationships, sends quarterly updates, and asks every person who else he should meet.
This is how he raised $8M → $140M → $400M, sometimes in days and sometimes via WhatsApp.
And his operating tempo is relentless.
He sends follow-ups the same night.
He never brainstorms; he moves.
He always picks the option that increases surface area for luck.
If you want a masterclass in how access compounds, this is it.
Velocity + discipline + media = unfair advantage.
A small detail I loved:
Harry’s cold email formula is absurdly simple and insanely effective. It’s the exact playbook he used to build 20VC at 18. His rules: write a clear subject line, avoid all fluff (“I hope this finds you well”), and state your objective immediately in the first sentence.
3. The Next Billion-Dollar Voice AI Opportunity: Licensed Voice Rights
The biggest development in Voice AI this year wasn’t technical—it was legal.
When ElevenLabs announced that Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine had officially licensed their voices for AI use, it marked the beginning of a new industry where voices become digital, ownable, monetizable assets.
This is the breakthrough:
A human voice can now be recorded once, turned into a programmable model, and used across ads, games, audiobooks, training content, and customer support, instantly translated into dozens of languages and running 24/7 without the talent being involved.
The economics are enormous.
Voice already sits inside trillion-dollar content markets: advertising, gaming, support, creator tools, education, and global localization.
If AI-licensed voices capture even 1% of these categories, the market would reach $20–25B per year, similar to a new Spotify-sized industry.
And just like Spotify, the value won’t accrue to the model makers.
The winners will build the infrastructure—the licensing rails that manage:
consent
rights
usage controls
royalties
provenance
safety and anti-deepfake verification
This is why people are calling this the emerging “Stripe for identity.”
Every application that uses an AI voice or likeness will eventually need standardized rights, permissions, and attribution—handled automatically, at scale.
The same system will extend naturally from voice to image, likeness, avatars, and fully authorized synthetic video.
Identity is becoming an asset class.
And the infrastructure that governs it will be one of the biggest new categories in AI.
Read Full article
4. Cursor raises $2.3B at a $29.3B valuation
Cursor just announced a new $2.3B funding round at a $29.3B valuation 🔥
They’re now doing $500M+ ARR, used by over half of the Fortune 500, and backed by Thrive, Accel, a16z, and DST. The company behind it, Anysphere, plans to use this capital to push the frontier of AI-native coding and make Cursor the default environment for software development.
AI infra is accelerating fast — and Cursor is positioning itself as one of its core rails.
5. PMF Founder/Investor Whatsapp Channel
This week I launched a private founder/investor Whatsapp Channel! It went super viral & I’m still finishing up to review applications, let me know if you applied and didn’t get a reply (got 4/5K messages)
Let me know what you thought of this recap and please share so it finds more people!
Best,
Guillermo