a16z Partner Torenberg: A True Interest Graph Should Be Built
Erik Torenberg stated that there is still no true interest graph online: a place to find everyone's favorite books, movies, artists, and the individuals or institutions they admire. He listed possible features: finding like-minded individuals, rewarding early discoveries, allowing creators to directly access fan emails and sponsorship networks, and wrote, "Someone should do this."
Torenberg is currently a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, having joined the firm in April 2025 with the acquisition of the podcast network Turpentine, where he is responsible for media and ecology. He previously founded On Deck, focusing on curating circles through reading lists, thinker lists, and podcasts.
In the same week, a16z launched Cosign, which positions itself as a professional reputation graph: connecting individuals, companies, and products willing to endorse. The interest graph proposal is parallel to the reputation graph, one managing "what you like" and the other managing "who you are willing to endorse."
The product gap he described corresponds to the dismantled old infrastructure: MySpace and early Facebook had personal profile fields for books and media interests, which were later replaced by information feeds, short videos, and advertising graphics. Goodreads, Letterboxd, Spotify, and Patreon each lock in single-category relationships, without connecting to form a cross-media fan graph.
Rewarding "early discovery" points to a timestamp of taste rather than post-hoc popularity. Direct connections for creators to emails and sponsorship networks rewrite the fan relationships that platforms take a cut from into transferable ownership. This overlaps with existing channels of subscriptions, memberships, and paid communities, but lacks a unified identity layer.
In market mechanisms, what is bought are high-intent relationships that can be monetized through advertising and memberships, while what is sold are attention lists fragmented by algorithms. Funds will flow from social advertising budgets and creator economies to graph companies that can simultaneously possess discovery rights and connection rights; beneficiaries will be platforms that can turn early tastes into tradable signals, while those under pressure will be streaming and short video distributors that only have view counts and lack fan communication rights. The event-driven aspect comes from venture capital partners identifying gaps, rather than from already launched daily active user data.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Torenberg's career path is about productizing circle lists: On Deck sells access, Turpentine sells dialogue, a16z sells ecology and media, and Cosign sells endorsements. The interest graph is the same methodology extending down to consumer taste—rewriting "what you read, watch, and follow" from profile decoration into a retrievable, rewardable, and chargeable edge.
Capital will flow along two validated pipelines. One is the direct connection tax of the creator economy: email lists and Patron-style sponsorship allow platforms to no longer rely solely on advertising. The other is the matching tax of the venture capital ecosystem: like-minded graphs can deliver high-quality attention to projects, media, and schools. a16z itself invests in consumer social, operates media and new academies, and proposing gaps is akin to publicly tendering a product to be included in the ecosystem.
Comparable examples include Last.fm to Spotify in music, Letterboxd in film, Goodreads in books, and LinkedIn in careers. These products are all stuck in single categories, lacking a cross-media "fan" as a primary object. The industry phase is that social is transitioning from attention graphs to reputation graphs, and the taste graph is the next layer that has not yet been monopolized as an identity layer.
Structural judgments belong to the reconstruction of the industry chain. The mechanism is that attention platforms turn interests into training data and advertising features, but do not return discovery rights and connection rights to users and creators; whoever first writes cross-media fan relationships into a portable graph will reprice memberships, sponsorships, and early taste premiums.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Attention graphs sell time, interest graphs sell discovery rights.
Creators want not traffic, but a list they can write to.
Reputation graphs manage endorsements, interest graphs manage taste, and together they constitute identity.