Given the state of legacy media these days — talk shows cancelled, a venerated investigative news series in turmoil — you’d think VC firms would want little to do with the industry of creating content. But the lure of making old-school TV is just too strong for Silicon Valley to resist.
The latest, and maybe most curious product, is from Founders Fund, which is launching a TV-style game show featuring A-list founders and investors playing a fierce game of Mafia. It’s the brainchild of Mike Solana, the Pirate Wires impresario and Founders Fund chief marketing officer. He wants to see if there’s an audience for partners and friends of the firm competing in a deception game.
They filmed the show a few months back at Tosca Cafe, the fabled North Beach hangout that once served as the setting for the PayPal Mafia photoshoot in Fortune. The players include Sam Altman, Bryan Johnson, Dylan Field, Trae Stephens, Palmer Luckey, Ryan Petersen, Cyan Banister, and Moxie Marlinspike. The show will live on YouTube and X.
There’s points for creativity here, especially in a landscape of uninspired VC media efforts. A16z, always claiming to push the envelope with its media plays but ending up with fairly anodyne results, funded a knockoff of TBPN called Monitoring the Situation in April. TBPN itself was acquired by OpenAI, which doesn’t suggest fresh creativity is coming.
Beyond that is a bottomless supply of VC podcasts featuring partners and founders recounting their origin stories, lightly discussing industry trends and making some mild predictions.
Solana says he’s over it.
“I’m so fucking bored with VC content,” he told us in an interview. “There has to be a more interesting way to get to know someone, and I think that this is a way more interesting way to get to know someone.”
Where the VC content effort ends and the Solana passion project begins is debatable here. He’s a big fan of the game, which challenges a group of people — some mafia members, others townspeople — to suss out which is which. He said he began playing it in college and brought it with him to Silicon Valley.
Since then it’s become something of an underground scene in the tech world — a poker circuit for the ruthless, performative and yes, a little dorky. These days it’s rare to find any conference featuring a critical mass of the founder/VC class that doesn’t have a Mafia game going on one night.
(For those wondering, Solana said Peter Thiel has played but had a rough go of it. “Everyone tried to kill him immediately because they were terrified of him,” Solana said. “It is exactly confirmation of his fears of group dynamics. He was immediately witch-burned.”)
The game at Tosca featured a slew of founders in the firm’s broader network — Flexport, Anduril, Figma, and OpenAI are all portfolio companies. Stephens is a partner. Banister was formerly one. Others like Johnson, Marlinspike, podcaster and poker player Liv Boeree, and bio-hacker Josie Zayner are Solana’s friends.
As the game progressed, you could see elements of what makes some of these people successful start to emerge. Altman, who Paul Graham famously anointed the inevitable king of the cannibals, tried to slyly deconstruct other people’s deflections in order to suss out the mafia members. He was killed off early in the first game, but walking back to the loser’s lounge had correctly deduced who the mafia members were.
Marlinspike and Stephens were standouts, quickly taking control of the conversation and directing lines of inquiries away from themselves.
“Some people have really obvious “tells”, some people have crazy strategies that I’ve never seen before, and some people kind of “wilt” in ways I wouldn’t have expected them to,” Stephens later said in an email.
Mafia can be fun to play. But is it good content? The show was hard to follow at times, and absent truly memorable characters — or, let’s be honest, real celebrities — it’s hard to know how enjoyable it will be to watch if it isn’t your friends playing.
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