Hyping founders you _didn't_ invest in is sort of the opposite of nepotism though.
I disagree. It's a small VC world. I'm not going to assume the author was rooting for the failure of the other four operations. One of them even was interviewed on the A16Z podcast later (the one who tragically died). If you had a graph of all the people who contributed to Palantir's success and all the ones who have made money for A16Z, I bet you'd see a lot of overlap.
Consider I have five artists in my collection, and I write an article about five artists but four of them are not in my collection. If I were to write about only the five in my collection, I might be called on it. By writing about the others I'm making it seem like the one in my collection just belongs in the group; and maybe the group will elevate my artist by association.
I might actually like all five of the artists I write about! They might be true visionaries and altruists besides! They might paint all the time except when they are running!
(Actually this kind of thing happens all the time in the art world, which makes my analogy a little depressing when I think about it...)
Sure, if you hype your own investment and add 4 more as decoy then you are hyping your own company, so that would be self serving.
The Arrillaga family fortune goes up any time the value of "SV" as a brand (or concrete asset) goes up. It's a nice trick to not have a formal COI while still closely and actively managing your interests.
I don't know anything about the Andreessens' personal investments but just as a general rule you might question the propriety of someone that close to the VC money using your storied newspaper to promote startup founders. I'm not going to hold up the NYT as some bastion of journalistic ethics, but still.
https://a16z.com/2011/07/24/meet-our-newest-portfolio-compan...