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