Erik Torenberg is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he invests and leads marketing and ecosystem work. He previously founded Turpentine and helped build On Deck, Village Global and Product Hunt.[1][2]
Start with Introducing Erik Torenberg →
X Career
Torenberg’s first-person biography identifies him as Product Hunt’s first employee and later as co-founder and general partner at Village Global, chairman of On Deck and founder of Turpentine. Product Hunt organized discovery around new products; On Deck connected people preparing to build companies; Turpentine built a network of shows. Those organizations used different formats to connect founders, ideas and audiences before his current work at a16z.[1][3]
Contributions
The a16z announcement describes Torenberg’s remit as investing and helping lead the firm’s media and network efforts. In this arrangement, recurring conversations can give specialists an audience that might later become collaborators, customers or investors. Distribution and relationship-building are therefore part of his job alongside investment decisions.[2]
Ideas
His 2026 Scheming post revisits his work almost a year into a16z. Read alongside the hiring and startup essays listed on his site, it offers a view of how he thinks about projects, networks and career direction. The useful starting distinction is between the job of allocating capital and the job of building the communication and relationship infrastructure around founders. His current role explicitly includes both.[1][4]
Tools, writing & talks
Writing, research & talks
Start here
Introducing Erik Torenberga16z.comThe firm explains Torenberg’s investing, media and network responsibilities as he joins a16z.
Begin with the joining announcement to understand the scope of his current job. Read the annual update next for his own project priorities; neither requires venture-capital expertise.
Co-author and subject[2]Grepr CEO Jad Naous tells a16z's Martin Casado how coding agents changed a 10-person team's output, why operating production systems is harder than generating code, and whether AI can form hypotheses and run experiments to troubleshoot incidents. Based on the episode description only.
Catalog workOriginal source- Building Cyber Defense for the Agentic Erayoutube.com
a16z talks with Armadin's Kevin Mandia about AI-scale attacks, why pen testing is giving way to continuous AI attack simulation, autonomous defense, the future SOC, and lessons from the Hugging Face incident.
Catalog workOriginal source - Why Specialized AI Could Beat The God Modelyoutube.com
a16z talks with OpenRouter's Alex Atallah and Replit's Amjad Masad about specialized models over a single god model: routing, fusion, enterprise open-weight adoption, agent-to-agent communication and security.
Catalog workOriginal source - 2026 Schemingeriktorenberg.substack.com
A first-person update on his work and plans after joining a16z.
Author[4]