All 17 Media & Entertainment posts we have indexed from venture capital blogs and newsletters, plus the highest-scoring pieces of the past year and the people who write about it most.
McKenzie Lock, Netflix's former GM of Product, Operations & Creative, explains how she led a 300-person org through an AI overhaul by starting with human outcomes—not AI capabilities—and building buy-in from skeptical creative teams through transparent workflows, concrete "today vs. tomorrow" scenarios, and shared accountability across product, tech, ops, and creative functions.
Mattel's head of digital gaming reveals how studios win IP licenses: pitch the unexpected, not the obvious. The company rewards creative risk alongside polish, targets specific audience cohorts, and values dormant IP arbitrage over marquee brands.
Sensor Tower's inaugural ad monetization report ($12B across 19 countries) underestimates the true market size and reveals that ads now represent 13–23% of mobile game revenues—a primary revenue engine, not a side system. The real opportunity lies in IAA-first hybrid games that monetize attention without cannibalizing their core ad loop.
Playtika's acquisition of SuperPlay and its breakout hit Disney Solitaire created a paradox: the game is phenomenally successful but generates accounting losses, threatening debt servicing and forcing owners to choose between selling the studio to Tencent or keeping their growth engine.
CD Projekt Red's Cyberpunk 2077 disaster wasn't driven by public market pressure but by remote work that fragmented visibility across a complex pipeline—a waterfall process where no one saw the whole picture. The studio's recovery, transmedia strategy, and structural culture offer lessons on franchise building and the risks of scaling.
As AI-generated content erodes baseline trust in all media, marketing is bifurcating into two paths: Stealth Acceleration (viral manipulation, astroturfing, cheap reach) and Intentional Slowdown (analog formats, IRL events, long-form content, localized trust). Anthropic's cultured brand positioning via intimate dinners and print outperforms OpenAI's incoherent influencer trips, signaling a shift away from social media scale toward offline credibility.
LLMs are driving a cultural phenomenon around Larry McMurtry's 1985 novel Lonesome Dove by consistently recommending it to users, creating a shared reading experience across a fragmented media landscape and suggesting AI tools may become a distribution channel for canonical older works.
Tech hiring is shifting from skills-first to experience-first as AI creates new roles where the needed skillset hasn't yet been defined; simultaneously, YouTube is cannibalizing Netflix's audience, cybersecurity threats are accelerating (zero-day exploit time compressed to ~1 day), and AI infrastructure buildout is generating 300,000+ construction jobs.
Deconstructor of Fun (6) · The Sociology of Business (4) · A16Z (4) · BIG by Matt Stoller (2) · Sequoia (2) · Not Boring (1) · Feld Thoughts (1) · Newcomer (1) · First Round Review (1) · A Wealth of Common Sense (1)
Suggest a blog or newsletter for the SandHill index. We track the RSS feed and feature the best pieces in the weekly digest.
The latest theses & analyses from 800+ venture investors, curated into one email. Join 5,000+ investors, founders and LPs.