Bonjour,

The Boys are headed to the birthplace of Boys Club (only the real ones know) next week for Bitcoin Las Vegas with our friends at Block. Keep us in your prayers and follow us to get the play-by-play.

Oh and also this! You got a creator or writer in your corner? Share this with them! Octant is doing cool stuff.

ily,

Writer: Natasha
Editor: Deana, Miranda

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Earlier this month, Vercel announced that Workflows is now available to all users. Since the beta launched in October 2025, Workflows has processed over 100 million runs and over 500 million steps across more than 1,500 customers. Now, anyone can use it to build durable, long-running agents and backends without managing queues, retries, or separate orchestration services. Just write your code and deploy.

Some moves were made this week that demonstrated the money guys also want to be cool.

A new live-streaming show hit the timeline like a ton of bricks. A16z announced that they had invested in a media company called MTS (shorthand for Monitoring The Situation), which in their words is "the first timeline-native news network that's always on," and it appears to have been spun out by one of the dudes who was recently on a16z's New Media team.

They launched with a guest list that many would describe as nightmare blunt rotation surprising. Balaji, entrepreneur and bitcoin maxi. Marc Andreessen, investor and retardmaxxer (literally his words not mine). And Threadguy, crypto streamer and arguably an unserious person.

Day one, MTS streamed for 11 hours, there were some harsh takes on the timeline, but some are saying:

A16z has historically been described by some as “a media company that monetizes through VC.” To which I thought: okay, insane.

Because venture funds have been known to see media as a bet that at best is a steady business with unspectacular returns, and at worst a money pit. So to see the big dog throw their dollars and weight on main behind a new media play (that lives outside of the firm walls) signals a low frequency shift in the category.

Then today, Thrive announced Thrive Eternal, a holding co for iconic cultural assets that can never be replaced with tech.

Thrive Eternal’s first move looks to be buying a stake in the San Francisco Giants.

Both media and sports have always been the cool-kid verticals that the nerds (complimentary) get their hands on once they've made their money. But now, with AGI on the horizon and the tech industry having a bit of an identity crisis, entertainment and experiences are looking hotter and hotter as AI-proof businesses, even to funds that have historically chased 10x returns.

Personally, I'm excited to see tech-forward VCs making big bets in places previously relegated to culturally-impactful-but-not-super-sexy-for-venture-dollars. Buying popularity one sports team, one livestream, and one Cannes party at a time. I’ll take it!

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