Greetings, and welcome to The Stratosphere.

Tonight, a deep dive into the political machinations of Marc Andreessen and his firm, Andreessen Horowitz. There’s a ton of scoops for subscribers, including:

• What Andreessen is saying to his right-wing friends on Signal.
• Which powerhouse Republican fundraiser a16z quietly hired to set up the firm’s first PAC.
• A previously unreported summit between the Andreessen team and the DeSantis team last year.
• An inside look at the fight between Ro Khanna and Andreessen that was finally repaired in recent months.
• And the time that the billionaire venture capitalist sent a certain author a meme of Mike Pence when he thought the author had “gone woke.”

And much, much more. Let’s dive in.

Teddy

Andreessen, one of the men who helped invent the modern internet, used to hate Washington. In private conversations with friends—or the conservative rabble-rousers who flood him with ideas for memes—he has often expressed skepticism about the town’s value and its denizens. The man who once helped Al Gore design his website exuded the sense that he was done with these bozos, particularly after the Trump surprise of 2016 left the voracious reader looking inward for answers—a sort of self-conscious reflection and awakening that he has called a “spirit walk.”

Anyway, that was then. These days, Andreessen is back, consumed by ideological fervor and more active in politics than he has been in decades, according to about two dozen friends, politicos, and influencers who have interacted with him over the years. His firm has quietly hired high-powered Republican and Democratic consulting firms to help them navigate Washington while hosting fundraiser after fundraiser at its Sand Hill offices for crypto-friendly candidates, setting up new political-action committees, and preparing to spend its founders’ fortunes to boost their portfolio companies.

Behind closed doors, executives from Andreessen Horowitz have communicated the firm’s willingness to spend tens of millions of dollars on campaigns. Currently, the firm is primarily focused on the deregulation of the crypto industry, where a16z has invested considerably over the past few years. The firm has also quietly provided millions for a new pro-crypto dark-money 501(c)4 group called Digital Innovation for America, per sources. The group, which has strong ties to the Republican-aligned consulting shop Targeted Victory, has attacked politicians seen as skeptical of cryptocurrencies.

More publicly, Andreessen Horowitz’s management committee—under the names of Marc and his co-founder, Ben Horowitz—has also put $22 million into a network of super PACs, called Fairshake, that would oppose anti-crypto legislators, such as current congresswoman and Senate hopeful Katie Porter of California. Willed into existence by Democratic powerbroker and former Gore-ite Chris Lehane, the group has collected similarly sized checks from crypto companies Ripple and Coinbase, and currently has some $85 million to spend, a staggering sum.

Meanwhile, Andreessen, Horowitz, and their other top partner, Chris Dixon, are cultivating their foot soldiers. According to recent filings, they cut personal max-out checks to a number of pro-crypto Democrats in the second half of 2023, including Rep. Ritchie Torres, Rep. Jake Auchincloss (a former crypto investor), and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, all of whom the firm counts as key allies. Last month, I hear, a16z quietly hosted a fundraiser at its Menlo Park offices for Tom Emmer, the powerful House Republican who briefly pursued the speaker’s gavel last year, that raised about $200,000. Marc, Ben and the firm are also hosting a big fundraiser on March 1 for Wyoming G.O.P. Senator Cynthia Lummis, alongside the crypto investment firm Paradigm.

The guy running point on all of this, Collin McCune—a former top aide to G.O.P. Rep. Patrick McHenry—was recently promoted from overseeing a16z’s crypto political portfolio to plotting the firm’s entire political strategy. He is a Hill rat, not a political fixer—no Lehane is a phrase I’ve heard a few times now—but his job is to figure it out. So he has hired Democratic power consulting firm SKDK, as well as individual consultants like Heather Larrison, a prominent G.O.P. fundraiser who most famously banked over $100 million for Jeb super PAC Right to Rise, to work closely with the firm while it makes this new political push, I’ve learned.

Last fall, McCune and Larrison started what could be considered the firm’s very first, homegrown PAC: Keep Startups in America, which got all of its funding from Andreessen, Horowitz, Dixon, and their spouses. Keeping startups in America is indeed an important cause for Andreessen. He visited the White House in late 2022 to talk with President Biden’s head of national cybersecurity, Matt Cronin, according to visitor logs. And when Mike Gallagher, the retiring, hawkish Wisconsin congressman, visited Silicon Valley last year, Andreessen unwound a 20-minute soliloquy over dinner about how tech is a national resource and the U.S. is conceding its leadership role to China, a source told me.

A16z’s bona fide arrival in Washington is happening at precisely the same time as Andreessen’s own political reawakening. The man who entered the cultural consciousness with his 2011 blog post “Why Software Is Eating the World” has spent the past few years refining his own political vision, which his most exuberant fans hope can be an intellectual framework for the entire conservative movement. Last year, in a 5,200-word “techno-optimist manifesto,” Andreessen assailed government regulation as part of a broader culture of progressive wrist-slapping, media spoilsports, and E.S.G. and D.E.I. restrictions that he believes are aligned “against technology and against life.” (His other pet causes are crypto, of course, and A.I. “accelerationism.”)

Andreessen, whose politics became more reactionary during the heady days of Covid, has become fluent in the hyperbolic language of the online right. He maintains a sprawling, rollicking network of Very Online dissidents who flood his DMs and Signal chats. The other month, he gave a fairly ludicrous interview to a prominent pseudonymous conservative activist that had some on the right questioning whether it was authentic, or if he was just really in on an in-joke.

To people who knew him back in the day, his evolution has been painful to watch. “‘Red-pilling’ may be a polite way to describe it,” said one Silicon Valley associate who has talked politics with him for many years, and wonders what motivates his recent re-engagement. “A lot of people have had that conversation out here—what happened?”

Andreessen backed Obama after a private, 90-minute sit-down in 2008, but felt burned by Democrats’ anti-business message, especially amid the financial downturn. Some friends also point to the creeping influence of his more conservative wife, Laura Arrillaga—daughter of the legendary Silicon Valley real-estate developer John Arrillaga—whom he married in 2006. By the following election, he had become a card-carrying member of the vast right-wing conspiracy, donating six figures to back Romney. (I first met him at a Romney ideas summit in Utah.) A typical Andreessen political engagement from this more bucolic period might feature him and Mary Meeker hosting someone like Paul Ryan, as they did at the a16z offices on Sand Hill Road in 2013. G.O.P. fundraisers remember him as a reliable workhorse, someone game to host people at his huge house or an a16z conference room.

When a source of mine asked him, around 2012 or so, whether he identified as, essentially, a libertarian Republican, Andreessen told them that that sounded about right. Around 2014 or so, he told a different source that his politics were effectively “pro-stasis”—don’t change much, and let the markets figure things out. Political friends in his orbit at the time included finance-friendly Democrat Cory Booker and moderate Republicans like Meg Whitman, whom Marc threw a party for in 2010, and Carly Fiorina.

Andreessen was not passionate about Hillary Clinton, but Trump’s victory nonetheless threw him for a loop. “The political events of 2014-2016 made clear to me that I didn’t understand politics at all,” he wrote in a blog post in the fall of 2022. “So I deliberately withdrew from political engagement and fundraising and instead read my way back in history and as far to the political left and political right as I could.” Andreessen took this humbling, and his reeducation, seriously. When he was invited to attend a political fundraiser just a year or two ago, I’m told, he politely declined, saying that he couldn’t because he was now a political rube.

This “spirit walk” happened in private. During the Trump era, it was hard to find Andreessen talking about politics anywhere. Or talking much publicly at all—he nuked his impish, entertaining, histrionic, and political Twitter feed, disappointing many a Silicon Valley executive. The man who supposedly coined the term “tweetstorm” became infamous not for his aphorisms but for his extensive block list. (I was a member until recently.) Notably, the irrepressible fundraiser did not make a single donation to a federal candidate for the seven years between 2016 and 2023.

What happened? Quietly, Andreessen was undergoing yet another political transformation. He was singed by cancel culture, in 2016, when he tweeted that India had been better off under colonialism. The Facebook board member was further “radicalized” by the post-Russian-meddling Democratic blowback surrounding the tech giant, according to a friend. “He felt the company was trying to be liberal and constantly getting punished.” And “resistance” liberalism also rubbed him the wrong way. When Covid struck, he was exasperated, and then enraged, by lockdown policies and new cultural norms that he viewed as onerous. Before the pandemic, Andreessen was famous for being opposed to handshakes, one source told me, preferring to fist-bump. But now, he’s all about handshakes—a small gesture of protest.

But of course, Andreessen Horowitz is Andreessen. His name is on the door. He is half its management committee. His media profile was made enormous by the firm, intentionally, to help the firm—well, here’s the flip side of that. The firm’s political work is done alongside Horowitz, Dixon, and London-based Sriram Krishnan, but its culture is driven by Marc. (This is all to say nothing of Horowitz, the more nominally liberal co-founder who is also the son of a right-wing activist.) “If they’re going to invest in D.C., it feels like they’re signaling toward one party. And they’re respected enough where they could have plenty of friends on the left if Andreessen weren’t doing these Friedrich Hayek screeds, anti-government shit on Twitter, and being super hostile to Biden,” said one veteran lobbyist. “Anybody who is paying attention in tech policy perceives them as being right-of-center. And there’s no reason they couldn’t present as neutral.”

Indeed, Andreessen is now unabashedly a right-winger, and a terminally online one at that. He counts as friends the conservative podcasters Coleman Hughes, anti-D.E.I. crusader Christopher Rufo, and the (allegedly) reformed white nationalist Richard Hanania, all of whom have had the chance to interview him on their platforms. Like his close friend Peter Thiel, Andreessen is an up-all-night group-chatter and Signaler. “His information flow is terrific,” said one of the online influencers who talks to him regularly. He also corresponds with everyone from Nate Silver to the economist Tyler Cowen, with whom he attended the most recent meeting of the Koch network to deliver a talk on A.I.

Not that he actually funds these people. Andreessen’s unwillingness to go beyond flirting with anti-woke projects is a source of much consternation among his right-wing admirers. Several activists described him as almost playing footsies with the movement, the kind of guy to cryptically fave a particularly racy tweet, but smart enough to never post it himself. In fact, some want him to be more of a right-winger. One political associate described his approach as merely “sampling a lot of sub-Reddits.” Said another conservative associate: “He’s a very smart guy who is interested in ideas. Less so in power politics.”

In professional politics these days, Andreessen enjoys a particularly warm texting relationship with Kevin McCarthy. (Andreessen, who briefly employed McCarthy’s son, memorably invited various major G.O.P. donors to his offices in 2015 to have lunch with McCarthy—then proceeded to not show up himself.) He’s also developed a relationship with Tim Scott, whom he met at Sun Valley in 2022, I’m told, after an introduction from Targeted Victory leader Zac Moffatt, another Andreessen associate in the G.O.P. He is also close with even less-establishment figures such as Tom Cotton, for whom he always makes time when the senator journeys to Silicon Valley. Ro Khanna was a beneficiary of Andreessen’s largesse back to 2014, when the tech industry first tried to elect him to Congress, but the two had a falling-out due to Khanna’s vociferous support for Bernie in 2016, and Andreessen declined to support his reelection bids in 2018, 2020, or 2022.

He barely knows Trump, but Andreessen sometimes bristles at coverage of the former president that he sees as too caricatured—on one occasion writing an author I know, and privately poking fun at them for having “gone woke” and attaching a meme of Mike Pence brandishing a cross. His friends in the conservative movement pegged him as a likely DeSantis voter, though I’m told by several DeSantis bundlers that there wasn’t much of an effort made to bring him into the fold. (Last October, McCune had a meeting to trade notes with DeSantis policy director Dustin Carmack.) “My sense is he’s a guy who is semi-retired, extremely wealthy, and he just finds this funny and interesting. Trump is just an entertaining figure,” said one person who has spoken with Andreessen plenty about politics. “Trump comes up a lot, and I haven’t seen him say a negative word,” my source continued. “He finds him an interesting character and phenomenon. He’s not someone who says, “I hate Trump! He’s going to ruin the Republican Party! If only we could nominate Nikki Haley…”

The folks at a16z, I hear, believe they’ve learned a thing or two from the cautionary tale of Sam Bankman-Fried, who hogged all the Washington attention and poured tens of millions of dollars into related political work before FTX imploded. A more professional, decentralized, grown-up approach was clearly warranted in the crypto industry, a16z leaders came to believe, if their startups were to survive.

And so as part of that maturation, Marc and Ben—now Silicon Valley elders by today’s standards—decided that the spirit walk was over, and they had to return to the world of political fundraising, too. In December, seemingly out of nowhere, Horowitz wrote in a blog post that he and Marc were back, but this time that they would pledge to be “single issue” donors. “We believe that advancing technology is critical for humanity’s future, so we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology,” Horowitz wrote, eager to outline the broader context for why they might suddenly support, say, an anti-abortion candidate. A few days later, they announced Fairshake.

Andreessen even patched things up with Khanna, thanks to the firm’s American Dynamism portfolio. Marc and Laura maxed out to his campaign for 2024. “We share a view that we need a bold economic mission for our nation. Marc is someone who is very passionate, has a strong point of view, but is open to being challenged and conversing with people like me who come from a different ideology. He is also a deep patriot,” Khanna told me.

Interestingly, I’m told that Andreessen has privately described his next big project as something else entirely: California Forever, a controversial plan backed by his firm and other tech billionaires to build a brand-new city in Solano County. This could very well be the golden age of his influence—at least until Trump returns to office and scrambles everything once more, requiring the billionaire to weigh in on every Trump tweet. “I think he’s emblematic of this greater movement in tech where people say aloud what they used to say in the Signal group,” said one prominent Silicon Valley conservative in touch with the firm. It’s time to build, as Andreessen says, and it’s time to bundle.