Have you ever ever had the need to see Sam Altman and Palmer Luckey square off over a moderately suspenseful card game? In that case, you’re in luck.
Silicon Valley’s leaders are rushing to embrace the power of media for the needs of marketing and political capital. Now, in an indication of the times, Founders Fund, the enterprise capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, has launched its own game show.
“MAFIA the GAME,” will apparently be an ongoing thing, where distinguished tech luminaries get together and face off over a game of cards (the show is known as after the party-game favorite).
The spectacle is moderated by Pirate Wires editor Mike Solana (who can also be the chief marketing officer at Founders Fund). The debut episode features a who’s who of players — Sam Altman; Palmer Luckey; Bryan Johnson, the famed biohacker who will (in accordance with him) live ceaselessly; and Moxie Marlinspike, the founding father of encrypted chat app Signal.
“I’m so f*cking tired of VC content,” Solana told Newcomer, which originally reported the show’s existence. “There needs to be a more interesting method to get to know someone, and I feel that it is a far more interesting method to get to know someone.”
TechCrunch reached out to Founders Fund for more information on this system.
In some ways, having a reality-TV-esque platform is just good business today. The web has turned the world right into a population of chronic media consumers, and the typical American spends around 2.5 hours on social media per day. Much of that point is spent scrolling through an limitless flood of advertising-laced memes and videos.
In the fashionable era, the road to power and influence is paved with infotainment.
Corporations and executives have sought to benefit from this recent reality in other ways. OpenAI recently raised some eyebrows when it procured TBPN, the buzzy founder-led podcast. Meanwhile, a lot of tech’s most distinguished players have leveraged virality to their advantage. Johnson, for example, has managed to grow his following through a really lively (and quite bizarre) social media presence. Elon Musk, meanwhile, has also managed to leverage his public persona to go viral (although arguments could possibly be made that his online presence has sometimes hurt slightly than helped his businesses).
This trend has also spread to the startup space, where people like Cluely CEO Chungin “Roy” Lee have demonstrated the ability of being a one-man viral hype machine.
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