Adam Sachs

Love this - AI is the Oppenheimer moment for marketing. It fundamentally collapses the time and cost of production. A $2.5 million campaign that used to take four months can now be delivered for $500,000 in four weeks. Legacy firms that charge based on hours with the 'time-driven' model are existentially threatened by this.

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Apple's got a lot of announcements this week, but one huge risk might get overshadowed amidst the noise — the way they're adding support for video podcasts threatens to enshittify the last truly open online media. It's not too late to push them to keep it open. https://lnkd.in/eR4vJ42T

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Closing out Season 2 of Embracing Erosion with Alena Morris, VP of Product Marketing at Kargo 🙌 Alena has spent 15+ years in ad tech and media, leading product marketing across the publisher, DSP, and SSP sides at PubMatic, Quantcast, and now Kargo. Few people have seen this ecosystem evolve as closely (or as practically) as she has. In this episode, we go deep on where ad tech is actually headed. How AI is unlocking creative intelligence - surfacing patterns, themes, and performance signals that were never accessible before, and turning creative into a true optimization lever. We also dig into: - The blurring lines between SSPs, DSPs, and retail media - Why competition in ad tech is more aggressive than ever - What it takes to lead product marketing and sales teams through real transformation and much more! A fitting way to wrap 20 episodes in Season 2... and 66 total since we started🤯 🎧 Full episode: https://lnkd.in/gwv7JhmW

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Even the most skeptical voices are starting to acknowledge the value of LLM generated code. Not as a replacement for deep expertise, but as a practical tool for acceleration, exploration, and iteration. When someone as famously disciplined about code quality as Linus Torvalds publicly acknowledges that AI generated code can be useful, it signals a shift worth paying attention to. The takeaway is not that AI writes better software than humans, but that good engineers are learning where and how these tools create leverage. https://lnkd.in/eFbNFqYN

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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Every #VentureStudio GP knows some portfolio bets won’t hit. That's expected - and it's one of the reasons studios are such a powerful vehicle for innovation. And while a venture's failure might be what's visible to the outsider, what keeps them up at night isn’t failure at the venture level — it’s failure at the systemic level within the studio. One bad entity design. One IP misstep. One governance gap. That’s how studio operations fall apart. We break down how to spot (and fix) these cracks before they turn into fault lines in our latest paper, "The GP Dilemma" - DM me and I'll send you a copy!

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Most people covered the Warner Bros. Discovery deal as a media story. It's not. It's a power story. Here's what actually happened: 1. David Zaslav spent four years failing to integrate one of the most iconic media libraries in history. His stock fell 60%. He collected $387 million in compensation while doing it. Then he restructured, engineered a bidding war between Netflix and Paramount, and walked away a billionaire. 2. Netflix made a surgical bid — studio and streaming assets only, no legacy cable debt, all-cash. Financially, it was the more disciplined offer. 3. Paramount made nine escalating bids and ultimately paid $31 per share for the entire company. Their regulatory termination fee was $7 billion — among the largest in corporate history. Companies don't post $7 billion against regulatory failure as a hedge. They post it when they're confident failure isn't a real scenario. 4. Two weeks before Netflix withdrew, the DOJ's antitrust chief — confirmed 78-0 by the Senate — was fired mid-review. Her deputy left the same week. The day before the board declared Paramount's bid superior, David Ellison attended the State of the Union as the personal guest of Senator Lindsey Graham. The board's decision was almost certainly the financially and legally sound one. Paramount's bid was higher and more complete. That part is straightforward. The less straightforward part: what made Paramount's bid feel safe to close? And could David Ellison have reached $31 per share without first spending years building the political infrastructure that made his bid viable and his rival's path uncertain? I wrote a long piece trying to answer that honestly — with sourcing, with the steelman case for every party, and without claiming more than the record supports. The conclusion isn't that anything was corrupt. It's something harder to fix than that. "That is not a scandal. It is a system. And the difference between those two things is the most important fact in this story." #MediaIndustry #BigTech #CorporatePower #Streaming #BusinessStrategy

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Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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