Van
Le-Gray

Most people know Andreessen Horowitz through its partners, its portfolio announcements, its podcasts, its opinions. Fewer people think about what it takes to get 500 founders in a room with 50 general partners and have it feel like the most important place to be on earth. That is Van Le-Gray's job - and she has been doing it since 2017.

Le-Gray joined a16z as an events partner on the Marketing Team, arriving from a B2B marketing career that had already taught her something most event marketers take years to figure out: events are not logistics. They are strategy delivered in real time. At Radius, she did not just book venues and hire caterers. She built an account-based marketing strategy from scratch, grew field event volume by 50 percent, and produced a playbook that the company adopted as its standard. At BrightTALK, she ran virtual conferences and sponsorship programs at a time when the industry still regarded online events as consolation prizes.

When she landed at Andreessen Horowitz, she brought that same systems-level thinking to a firm with an outsized desire to be everywhere at once. a16z does not just invest in technology. It shapes the conversation about technology, and events are one of the primary tools it uses to do that. The firm's marketing calendar - summits, founder dinners, portfolio days, city-wide activations - reads less like a marketing plan and more like a cultural program. Le-Gray is among the key people responsible for making it work.

Then came Tech Week.

Tech Week is the clearest expression of what Van Le-Gray has helped build. It is billed as "a decentralized tech conference presented by a16z" - which is a polite way of saying that a16z figured out how to make an entire city into its event infrastructure. No single venue, no badge lanyards in a convention center. Hundreds of individual events - hackathons, panels, dinners, meetups - cascading across the host city over several days, all happening under the a16z umbrella.

The concept rewards a very specific kind of event expertise: the ability to hold a structure together without centralizing it. Tech Week's value comes from its distributed energy - but that energy has to be channeled, branded, and curated enough that it still feels like something. That is the tension Le-Gray navigates.

In 2026, Tech Week expanded to Boston for the first time, running May 26-31, with the flagship New York edition following June 1-7. The program has become one of the most anticipated gatherings on the tech calendar.

The path from a UC Davis economics degree to a Partner role at Andreessen Horowitz is not obvious. But it makes a certain kind of sense if you understand what event marketing actually is at the highest level: it is applied economics. You are allocating scarce attention, producing returns on relationship investments, building network effects through physical gatherings. Le-Gray figured this out early.

a16z is not a normal company to work for. It manages approximately $39.6 billion in total funding, operates with roughly 950 employees from its base in Menlo Park, California, and has its hands in venture capital, crypto, biotech, enterprise software, consumer tech, gaming, and American dynamism. The portfolio is vast. The ambition is public. The media operation rivals actual media companies.

In this context, events are not supplementary. They are core to how a16z builds and maintains relationships with founders, limited partners, portfolio companies, and the broader tech ecosystem. An event done wrong is not just a bad party - it is a signal. Le-Gray has been managing those signals for eight years.

The firm raised $1.7 billion as recently as February 2026, maintaining its position at the top tier of global venture. With that comes a portfolio of companies spanning early-stage to pre-IPO, all of whom benefit from the network effects that a16z events help generate. Le-Gray's work is, in this sense, a form of portfolio value creation.

Economics is, at its core, the study of how people make decisions under constraints - which is a pretty good description of what event marketing actually involves. Resource allocation, incentive design, network effects, market-making. Le-Gray's academic training in economics likely did more to prepare her for a career in high-stakes marketing than any marketing degree would have.