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Why startups have begun to return to IRL events/activities to launch their products and build their communities Starting tomorrow, SF/LA Tech Week (@techweek_) kicks off, and it will be one of the biggest tech conferences in the world. Across the cities, there are 1100+ events over the next 14 days with many 10,000s of people attending. Our firm, a16z, has played a big role in organizing things, but the heavy lift is being done by hundreds of amazing organizers. These include gig guys like Open AI, HSBC, Fenwick, AWS, Google, Stripe, Atlassian, to scaled startups like Mercury, Deel, Eleven Labs, and hundreds of brand new startups and community members. Huge kudos to the a16z Tech Week team for making this happen. But wow -- why is this happening? I can't help but wonder: Why has there been such an outpouring of interest and support to build the IRL communities within these startup hubs? Shouldn't we be in the era of fully digital everything all the time? A few major reasons: - the AI revolution is more B2B than B2C, and events are one of the best ways to sell into startups - as social media and paid marketing saturates, IRL is cost effective and authentic. While IRL activities don't scale, they give quality over quantity - there's an exchange of value in IRL, because attendees hand over contact info and you know they're highly qualified - Many transactions, like VC funding, big partnerships, etc require the kind of relationships/trust that can only happen IRL - after lockdown, people want to get together Let's discuss a few of these topics below.

There’s over 400+ events going the whole week! Register and check out the calendar here: tech-week.com – at Manhattan, NY

Amazing kickoff to New York Tech Week @techweek_ Great to see many local investors and founders, plus folks visiting from SF/LA And of course these days we have almost 50 a16z team members in New York 😎 and it was awesome to catch up with lots of folks Congrats to @KatiaAmeri @inakipl3 @perciasafar Domino and the tech Week team for putting it all together!