By Manuel Scheuernstuhl · Friday, July 17, 2026
Right now, one of the most sought-after jobs in Silicon Valley is filmmaker. Why? In the Valley, having the best product isn't enough anymore. The winner is whoever wins the fight for the narrative, and with it, the market. Take OpenAI and Anthropic. Both are hiring for exactly this: Anthropic, for instance, a video producer at $255,000, OpenAI a storytelling role at nearly $400,000 base salary. The focus of the campaigns: human-first stories.
At the same time, well-known VCs on Sand Hill Road are building their own media arms. Andreessen Horowitz has been doing it since mid-2025 with "a16z New Media," a team that supplies portfolio companies with media services, with the goal of owning the narrative: one strong video, one good podcast, enough to win the internet for a day.
Smaller companies are turning to film too. This April, daydream, a 20-person AI company out of San Francisco, commissioned a video shoot for around $80,000 to announce a funding round on social media.
All of it comes down to winning the narrative, across society at large, yes, but above all in the small arenas: recruiting, investors, the online community. One video, one campaign can tip the balance.
What's long been standard in the Valley has barely arrived in Europe. Word has gotten around that media matters. It just tends to stop at the LinkedIn post, or the corporate video nobody finishes watching.
At Atlas Studios, we're changing that. Based in Brooklyn, New York, with years of production experience for the BBC, the United Nations and Deutsche Welle, we know how stories work and what impact they can have.
Coming out of our work as journalists and documentary filmmakers, we tell stories consistently from the perspective of the people they're about, in multiple languages and formats, with a reach of several million. One example is this eclipse film, shot in Patagonia: it reached 2.7 million people, and drew these reactions.
That experience and that production quality is what we're now offering tech startups. Our goal: to help people with a good idea make it more visible and more accessible, and to shape the narrative instead of leaving it to someone else. Human first, always.
More about Atlas Studios →
“Please algorithm gods, give me more stuff like this please. What a fantastic video”
“Humans are amazing. Hats off for the team effort”
“The final frame of the two persons with the eclipsed sun. Amazing shot”