@a16z
It's time to build. https://t.co/A9eTFq6Xbx Posts are not investment advice or an advertisement for investment services. See https://t.co/nX2FtaLE06.
a16z GP Anish Acharya on AI being the first technology built to extend our emotions, not just our intellect: "We've had 40 years of technology that extended our intellect and our minds. But most of the human experience is actually emotional and it's subjective." "Now we have a technology that extends our emotions, our subjective experience, and it can address that." "Let's start to really address the human experience through this next new technology. And I think that's where all this goes." @illscience with @kevinrose
"For most of history, the bottleneck on making something was never the idea, it was the grind: acquiring the years of skill, raising the money, assembling the team, and getting the permission. So most people’s best ideas died inside them, unmade. Lift that bottleneck and the thing that decides what gets built is no longer whether people can justify the VC funding or the enterprise-level capital expenditure, but who has something to say. The most human thing about you stops being a private quirk and starts being the point. Individuality was supposed to be the luxury you bought once you’d made it. I think it’s about to become the thing everyone gets to spend their life on, the work itself." a16z GP Anish Acharya on why AI is the most human technology ever made: t.co/uUmkxHOQuc
The Future of Enterprise Software with Steven Sinofsky Seema Amble, Steven Sinofsky, and Elena Burger sit down to cover what headless software actually means, why enterprise stickiness is harder to kill than anyone thinks, and where the real opportunities are for startups building in the age of agents. 1:00 Intro to the episode and guests 1:58 What is headless software and what changes does it introduce 2:17 Salesforce Headless 360 announcement unpacked 9:49 Historically, what made software sticky 15:26 Steven's "The Death of Software, Nah" essay and why the SaaSpocalypse is overblown 17:11 Why legacy systems like SAP and insurance software are truly irreplaceable 26:04 Why enterprise software's two most-used features are "export to Excel" and "export as CSV" 29:25 The challenge of context, permissioning, and edge case handling for agents 35:07 Is automating the long tail the hardest problem in enterprise AI 36:54 Why productivity gains always create more work, not less 45:31 The rise of MCP servers and history rhyming with the Microsoft middleware era 52:20 Biggest startup opportunities in the agentic software landscape @stevesi @VirtualElena @seema_amble
Happy birthday, USA.
Ben Horowitz says Silicon Valley is hard to recreate because it requires talent, policy, and culture: "The first is you do need the talent... is there a great technical university that graduates people who know how to build things?" "Many countries have that, that don't have a Silicon Valley. And what are they missing? They're missing the other two components." "The second is, do you have a set of laws and policies that facilitate entrepreneurship, are essentially good for business?" "The third one... is the culture such that young people, the most capable young people willing to make the biggest contribution, do they get status, social status reward?" "That's the thing that's so hard to replicate, and it's so hard to build, and it's so easy to destroy." @bhorowitz
Anne Neuberger says technology is now the arena of national power: "Technology moved from being a tool of diplomacy, of national power, to the arena of it." "The supply chain for chips was not a technology issue as much as a foundational economic and national security issue." "A software vulnerability is now not an IT issue. It can be a source of leverage, particularly if that vulnerability is in key parts of your power systems or your water systems." "Deterrence is no longer just the size of a military." "Those technologies today are not being built by governments, they're being built by the private sector, whether that's AI systems, whether that's autonomous systems, whether that's cyber defense systems." @AnneNeuberger
Technology Is the Arena of National Power. Ben Horowitz, Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram, and Jen Kha discuss a16z's expanding international strategy and the growing role technology plays in economic growth, national security, and global partnerships. They cover why America's technology leadership matters beyond Silicon Valley, how AI is reshaping relationships between governments and the private sector, why countries around the world are looking to adopt frontier technologies, and what it takes to build enduring technology ecosystems. 1:00 Why a16z's international strategy starts with America 4:48 Technology as the arena of national power 7:08 Why trusted AI infrastructure matters 9:05 How AI changes international go-to-market 11:18 ElevenLabs, TelevisaUnivision, and globalizing local content 18:33 How a16z prioritizes international markets and allies 29:05 AI, open source, and the future of cyber defense 37:00 What it takes to build a technology ecosystem @bhorowitz @AnneNeuberger @RaghuRaghuram @jkhamehl
Vacation looks very different depending on where you work. Over the course of the year, Germans hold the OOO crown. But not consistently! Swedes and Italians trade places in July and August, and in August, the French take over. Brazil breaks from the European pattern on summer break length. India books vacation days at the last minute. And birthdays are popular days off, but only the big ones. Turning 31? Not worth celebrating, apparently. We teamed up with @deel to look at how startup and tech workers around the world actually take vacation, not just how many days they're offered, but when they take them, how long, and whether they take them at all. North America is stingier than Europe. Most "vacations" are a single day off. Long weekends spike on Mondays and Fridays in summer. And no matter how hard the Europeans work to make their summer holidays count, Christmas break wins everywhere. The British are proportionately at their desks in peak summer; the Dutch over Christmas. Except Armenia, for some reason. Full piece: t.co/UpFUh4KTEF
Airbnb, 2008.
The a16z Editorial team’s summer reading list: open.substack.com/pub/a16z/p/the… x.com/975210510/stat…
VC interest in robotics is surging Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
AI native startups consume less capital Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
AI native startups have fewer employees Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th… x.com/64844802/statu…
Solopreneurs are making it big Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
AI native startups run lean Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
New Media. a16z.com/new-media/ x.com/1475495658/sta…
.@pmarca on the data center build-out and how America is holding itself back: "What's happening literally in the US right now county by county with the ability to build data centers is profoundly destructive." "And that's entirely domestic. And a large number of politicians are feeding that hysteria as much as they possibly can." "A lot of our leading public figures, and a lot of intellectuals, and a lot of the press, and a lot of the analysts, and the rest of it, it's just this kind of hyper paranoia about building data centers and the consequences of data centers." "This completely fake meme about water use, which is just factually not true, which is just running wild through the public discussion that somehow these data centers are basically destroying all the water, which is this completely insane idea. That factor is [such] a bigger factor holding us back than anything involving external trade." "External trade is the thing that's easy to talk about. It's all of our internal issues that are much, much more important." With @NGirishankar @CSISEST
On Easter morning earlier this year, Artemis II Mission Pilot Victor Glover spoke these words: "Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special. But we're the same distance from you, and I'm trying to tell you—just trust me—you are special. In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together." In this piece from astronautical engineer William Whittenbury, a deep dive on the historic Artemis II mission that brought us back to the Moon, and why Glover's words ring true: t.co/HKnNYqsn2S
.@11x_official's revenue agents are generating hundreds of millions of dollars in pipeline for their customers. Here's their full stack of internal agents, AI they run inside their own company, so that they can spend maximum time building agents for customers. We sat down with CEO @prabhavjain and went through their full internal AI operating stack:
1/ Customer qualification skill When @prabhavjain took over from CTO to CEO, he made a rule: They are only selling to customers who will see incredible value from 11x. So he built a Claude skill every sales rep uses. It pulls in emails, call notes, Slack messages exchanged with prospects. It considers industry-specific nuances and patterns from past successful customers. If it's missing information, it tells the rep what questions to ask. The agent gives the rep a confidence score whether the customer is a fit or not. Reps only close deals with confidence >85%.
We're excited to lead Netris' Series A. Data center networking may be changing even more quickly than compute. It is enormously complex to manage, and when it fails, a data center full of expensive GPUs stops working. @netris_io built a powerful and robust network management solution for GPU clouds or anyone running a large GPU data center. What impressed us most was the scale: operators run close-to-$1B data centers on Netris software - and the company has spent 8 years earning that trust. We’re excited to partner with @alex_saroyan, Arsen Arakelyan, Tigran Martirosyan, and the Netris team to take networking into the age of AI. By @appenz, @RaghuRaghuram, and @JasonSCui
We're excited to lead Netris' Series A. Data center networking may be changing even more quickly than compute. It is enormously complex to manage, and when it fails, a data center full of expensive GPUs stops working. @netris_io built a powerful and robust network management solution for GPU clouds or anyone running a large GPU data center. What impressed us most was the scale: operators run close-to-$1B data centers on Netris software - and the company has spent 8 years earning that trust. We’re excited to partner with @alex_saroyan, Arsen Arakelyan, Tigran Martirosyan, and the Netris team to take networking into the age of AI. By @appenz, @RaghuRaghuram, and @JasonSCui
Mirendil Co-Founder and CEO Behnam Neyshabur explains the path to self-accelerating AI: " When you think about what does a scientist or an engineer do, the main skill they have is get very deep in a domain... and build a very sharp expertise that accumulates over time." "As you kind of become expert in a domain, your expertise is becoming sharper and sharper in something that has a tiny bit of volume in the whole set of all possible things you could be working on." "And getting to that point, being able to get there is a capability that is needed to advance all areas of science." "What that view means is that you have to work on what does it take to direct a system toward like a particular angle and make fast improvement, and that's the self-accelerating AI technology." @bneyshabur @MirendilAI
We're thrilled to lead Mirendil's $200M seed round. Frontier AI work has been locked inside a few big labs. @MirendilAI is building a system that can help anyone do AI work: they train frontier models that are expert at AI R&D and build the product around it. The result is a system that loops over research and engineering problems on its own, making progress without human intervention. It's like a coding agent built for AI research that controls its own GPUs. Mirendil is one of the few teams with the experience and the priors to make the end-to-end system work. @bneyshabur, @HarshMeh1a, @shayan_, and @tararezaeikh come out of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Welcome to the a16z family, Mirendil. By @BornsteinMatt and @MaikaThoughts
We're thrilled to lead Mirendil's $200M seed round. Frontier AI work has been locked inside a few big labs. @MirendilAI is building a system that can help anyone do AI work: they train frontier models that are expert at AI R&D and build the product around it. The result is a system that loops over research and engineering problems on its own, making progress without human intervention. It's like a coding agent built for AI research that controls its own GPUs. Mirendil is one of the few teams with the experience and the priors to make the end-to-end system work. @bneyshabur, @hjmehta, @shayan_, and @tararezaeikh come out of Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and xAI. Welcome to the a16z family, Mirendil. By @BornsteinMatt and @MaikaThoughts
a16z's Josh Elman says the Roblox generation will expect to remix all the software they use: "We have a generation of kids growing up that grew up on Minecraft and Roblox. And they were used to playing a game where they controlled the world." "They're going to expect more and more experiences like that, that are rich, that value that sense of control, that sense of ownership, that sense of tinkering." "Once they've got the thing that does most of those functions, they're going to want to tinker with it. They're going to want that flexibility." "The apps that will win in the next generation will give people that sense of ownership at the end." @joshelman @illscience
We're excited to lead Probook's $34M Series A. Every home services business runs on dispatch: which technician goes to which job, in what order, at what time. Almost every AI vendor building for the trades skipped dispatch, instead rushing to build voice agents and chat widgets. @probookai built dispatch first, then expanded outward into intake, data scrubbing, messaging, and outbound. Every customer stays on one text thread from the first call to the technician at the door. @georgeprobook grew up in the trades, pressure washing alongside his dad, and spent a summer inside a $40M HVAC shop before building the software to fix it. Welcome, George, @probookcto, Ben, and the entire Probook team. By @arampell, @dhaber, and @omooretweets
Space is now a warfighting domain, and the only remaining question is how to win a space war. a16z's Christian Keil and Alex Oliver explain: - Why maximizing upmass to orbit, scaling commercial satellite manufacturing, and disaggregating and proliferating military satellite systems are the means to win - How to dominate today's cold war and defend the orbital domain - The ends that secure victory Full piece: t.co/MpHB52uRpk
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX and Cursor through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX or Cursor for this material.
Impeccable creator Paul Bakaus says AI should be cognitive delegation, not cognitive surrender: "Cognitive delegation is, I'm using Google Maps, and Google Maps tells me where I can go as quickly as possible." "But what if I let Google Maps decide where I want to go to? Now I kind of cognitive surrender to the application, and I think that's very true for LLMs if you're not careful." "You prompt something, and then it creates a beautiful plan, and then it's eight pages long. You're not going to read through that plan. You're going to scroll through that plan and skim it, and it's like, 'I guess the model knows what it's doing.'" "I think delegating to the model is great, but preserving that point of view, making sure that you're still the one driving is also really important." @pbakaus
Jake Paul and Geoff Woo on Anti Fund, Investing, and Compounding Attention Anti Fund co-founders Jake Paul and Geoff Woo join a16z's Erik Torenberg to cover Anti Fund's new $100M growth fund, the origin story of Anti Fund, how Jake differentiated his content early on, Jake's path from creator to investor, and more. 00:00 Anti Fund's $100M growth fund 01:20 The portfolio and how Jake & Geoff became partners 13:41 Resilience, therapy, and childhood trauma 17:05 Attention, looksmaxxing vs AI-maxxing, and advice for 2026 25:09 The creator game: YouTube, MrBeast, and lasting power 34:13 Press, controversy, and streamer culture 44:43 Faith, conviction, and getting into politics 54:09 Education, college, and collecting "badges" 1:00:05 Founder taste, investing, and what's next @jakepaul @geoffreywoo @eriktorenberg
Orbits are now battlefields, and it’s time we admitted it. Russia tested an anti-satellite missile in 2021, hacked a commercial satellite in 2022, jammed GPS throughout the Ukraine conflict, tailed an NRO satellite with a potential “counterspace weapon” in 2024, and is intimidating a commercial imaging satellite in 2026. China hauled a dead satellite out of geostationary orbit in 2022, practiced “dogfighting” maneuvers in 2024, and deployed an electronic warfare satellite to orbit in 2025. Space is now a warfighting domain, and the only remaining question is how to win a space war. Full piece by a16z's Christian Keil and Alex Oliver: t.co/MpHB52uRpk
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX and Cursor through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX or Cursor for this material.
We're thrilled to lead Prosper's $30M Series A. Healthcare runs on the office landline: staff in headsets, scheduling patient visits while sitting on hold with insurance companies, typing into the EHR one field at a time. None of it is medicine, and all of it decides whether you get seen and whether your doctor gets paid. @ProsperAI_HQ is an AI-native platform that runs the voice-heavy work for clinic operations end-to-end: appointment scheduling, insurance eligibility and benefits verification, and patient billing. @XDeGracia grew up inside his family's medical practice before going on to run large-scale call center operations. @jm_mingot digitized distribution for some of the largest insurance lines in the U.S. Together, they've felt every pain point Prosper solves. Welcome, Xavier, Josep, and the Prosper team. By @JayRughani and @janerheetweets
In this conversation from the a16z New Media Summit, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz join Gaby Goldberg and Erik Torenberg for a conversation on the present and future of media, including: - Why New Media favors offense over defense - How to go direct and tell a story that people care about - How to hire people who understand New Media - Why messaging matters first and distribution matters second - The skills founders need to become great communicators 00:00 Intro 00:54 Why authenticity wins in New Media 06:50 How traditional press has changed 11:50 Going direct & why founder-led branding matters 19:49 Picking your battles: When to fight back 23:37 Why being polarizing beats being liked 24:37 Hiring a team built for New Media 29:59 The founder messaging mistakes to avoid 33:42 Tell the bigger story: The Alex Karp playbook @pmarca @bhorowitz @eriktorenberg @gaby_goldberg
Why going direct is about telling a story much bigger than your company's: @pmarca: "The story of you and your startup is not inherently an interesting story, but there is almost certainly an interesting story that involves your startup, and this is sort of the cheat code of it." @bhorowitz: "The grand wizard of this is Alex Karp. If you watch his interviews, he never talks about Palantir. The only thing he ever says about Palantir, Marc pointed this out to me, is 'ontology' and 'orchestration,' two words that nobody knows what they mean." "Nobody knows what Palantir does as a result, but it doesn't matter because it's the future of the US military, Palantir. Superintelligence, Palantir. Whatever the story is that's really good, Alex will go tell that story. Neurodivergence." "Whatever is interesting, he'll just start talking about. And then because he's this founder of Palantir, the CEO of Palantir, like that just works." "When something happens in the world, something happens involving US military, AI in the military, or this or that, geopolitics with China, he's the first phone call, right? Because he's the guy who's been out there talking about that." @eriktorenberg: "Ryan Petersen... has done a phenomenal job of that." @pmarca: "The difference between talking about freight versus talking about 'the global supply chain is completely collapsing' during COVID, and 'we're all gonna starve to death.'" "And then therefore, he's the guy who literally goes on 60 Minutes to explain to the world that in fact, yes, we all are about to starve to death." @typesfast
Why going direct is about telling a story much bigger than your company's: @pmarca: "The story of you and your startup is not inherently an interesting story, but there is almost certainly an interesting story that involves your startup, and this is sort of the cheat code of it."f @bhorowitz: "The grand wizard of this is Alex Karp. If you watch his interviews, he never talks about Palantir. The only thing he ever says about Palantir, Marc pointed this out to me, is 'ontology' and 'orchestration,' two words that nobody knows what they mean." "Nobody knows what Palantir does as a result, but it doesn't matter because it's the future of the US military, Palantir. Superintelligence, Palantir. Whatever the story is that's really good, Alex will go tell that story. Neurodivergence." "Whatever is interesting, he'll just start talking about. And then because he's this founder of Palantir, the CEO of Palantir, like that just works." "When something happens in the world, something happens involving US military, AI in the military, or this or that, geopolitics with China, he's the first phone call, right? Because he's the guy who's been out there talking about that." @eriktorenberg: "Ryan Petersen... has done a phenomenal job of that." @pmarca: "The difference between talking about freight versus talking about 'the global supply chain is completely collapsing' during COVID, and 'we're all gonna starve to death.'" "And then therefore, he's the guy who literally goes on 60 Minutes to explain to the world that in fact, yes, we all are about to starve to death." @typesfast
Ben Horowitz says in new media, the brand is the person: "So old media, you had very restricted channels with very restricted formats, and the brands were the companies." "You were forced into a quote or a very short interview... and then you were representing a brand that wasn't you." "Then you get to new media, and new media is so the opposite in that it's unlimited formats, unlimited channels, and the brand is now the person." "Is it Palantir, or is it Alex? And is it Anduril, or is it Palmer?" @bhorowitz
"New Media is about being interesting and saying what you really mean, versus Old Media where you were mostly trying to stay on message and keep out of trouble." "The world has always had interesting people who are expansive but not polished; fascinating but frequently off-message, whatever. There have always been niche media formats where these people can shine. What's different now is that the world changed, in many ways that reward being interesting over everything else. So now there are ambitious people, and very profitable business models, pursuing New Media as a deliberate offensive business strategy."
.@pmarca explains why startups need preferential attachment and how great VCs help them get it: "If you think about mechanically what's happening with a startup, a startup needs to basically get into a loop in which it's accruing more and more resources as it goes." "When a company gets momentum, what it means is the next resource that you need is preferentially willing to attach to your thing as opposed to somebody else. That's the mechanical process that drives the power law curve." "A top-tier VC is a bridge loan of credibility at a point in time when the startup maybe deserves it, but just doesn't have it yet. And that credibility is harvested in the form of primarily personnel, money, and brand. And those three things turn out to be really important early on." With @collision and Charlie Songhurst on Cheeky Pint
a16z GP Anish Acharya on how AI is democratizing services and giving power back to the consumer: "I think we all agree that a better informed consumer is just a better informed society. If we look at all of these areas like healthcare, where the consumer just probably doesn't know enough and can't exert enough agency, I think this dramatically helps that." " I also think there are pockets of consumers, like senior citizens, for whom there's all of this stuff going on in their lives where they're making suboptimal decisions ... and this technology can help address that." "Besides all the hard economic benefits, it's a very pro-social technology that's going to lead to more human flourishing." "I know that sounds like a big statement, but if you actually just look at the details, it's already doing that." @illscience at @NYSE
a16z GP Anish Acharya on how AI agents make new careers possible for many: "If you're not a programmer, your only channel for digital entrepreneurship was YouTube. So there was creators, and there was this whole moral panic about, 'Oh my God, the kids don't want to be astronauts, they want to be YouTube creators now.'" "Instead, we're actually seeing kids that can express their desire for almost digital homesteading in a different way by making software despite being non-technical." "I think that's a big and under-discussed phenomenon that's going to come soon." @illscience at @NYSE
We're thrilled to lead Telepatia's $33M Series A. @Nicobot01's father was a physician in Colombia who died at 58 from a drug interaction AI could have flagged in seconds. Nicolás is building the product that could have saved him. Telepatia is the AI-native clinical platform for Latin America spanning an AI scribe, clinical decision support, and AI auditor, each connected to every data source across the hospital. Since launching in July 2025, the platform has deployed across 25+ hospital systems in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, reaching 14M patients. Welcome, Nicolás and the Telepatia team. By @daisydwolf, @GEVS94, and @evajsteinman
"AI will transform pharma, but not evenly and not all at once." "Building an enduring company in the age of AI is hard precisely because advantages can dissipate rapidly as models improve." "The companies that win will predict the uneven frontiers correctly, absorbing each model improvement as a tailwind rather than a headwind." "Our view: discovered drugs are becoming abundant while clinical development remains the binding constraint — so the durable position is built around that bottleneck, not in the path of advancing discovery models." Formation Bio CEO Benjamine Liu on how AI will transform biopharma, and why the sequence of change matters: t.co/2fQ0M0Dg9G
We’re excited to lead Convey’s $38M Series A. @ConveyAI lets non-technical teams build and run AI teammates that take entire categories of operational work off their plates - no engineering required. You onboard Convey like a new hire: share your screen, walk through a process, and its agents own the outcome, running inside your existing systems and asking the right person when it gets stuck. Convey teammates have already completed 1.1M+ hours of real work inside companies like NBCUniversal, TelevisaUnivision, Unity, Samsara, ChargePoint, and Faire. Welcome, @rohanbchopra and the Convey team. By @joeschmidtiv and @omooretweets
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX for this material.
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The SpaceX iteration loop: 1. Question every requirement. 2. Delete any part or process you can. 3. Simplify and optimize. 4. Accelerate cycle time. 5. Automate. Most engineering organizations skip directly to step five. They take a process that should not exist and then automate it. SpaceX runs the steps in order, every time, on every part of the company. When the Algorithm has been run enough times on a piece of hardware, it starts to look like nothing else in the industry. @elonmusk
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX for this material.
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX for this material.
.@pmarca on failure pmarchive.com/guide_to_caree…
Ideogram CEO Mohammad Norouzi says image models need taste: "We think taste is extremely important and we really want our models to have taste, and it's very hard to explain it." "One element of taste is going outside of the normal a little bit and not conforming to the average opinion, which is a little against being on top of the leaderboard." "Ultimately, we work with all the arenas... but we care about our own internal evaluation." "AI is not very good at doing the actual taste evaluation yet, so we work with designers... to really push on the taste." @mo_norouzi with @stuffyokodraws and @venturetwins
Marc Andreessen on how @elonmusk works: "He has an operating method that he's developed that I would say is very unusual by modern standards. I'm not aware of another current CEO who operates the way that he does." "The top-line thing is this incredible devotion from the leader of the company to fully, deeply understand what the company does and to be in the trenches and talking directly to the people who do the work." "Basically what Elon does is he shows up every week at each of his companies, he identifies the biggest problem that the company's having that week, and he fixes it." "He does that every week for 52 weeks in a row, and then each of his companies has solved the 52 biggest problems that year." "Someone who used to work in one of the other aerospace companies and went to work at SpaceX said... 'It's like being dropped into a shocking zone of competence.'" "Most of us never have that experience. Most people are never in an organization where the bar is held that high." @pmarca with @ChrisWillx
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX for this material.
Cursor CEO Michael Truell on the future of writing code: "Our goal with Cursor is to invent a new type of programming." "It looks like a world where you have a representation of the logic of your software that does look more like English." "You can imagine kind of an evolution of programming language towards pseudocode. You have written down the logic of the software, and you can edit that at a high level." "It won't be the impenetrable millions of lines of code, it'll instead be something that's much terser and easier to understand and easier to navigate." @mntruell with @lennysan on Lenny's Podcast
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX and Cursor through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX or Cursor for this material.
Michael Truell says we're still early in automating software: "It's really easy at an executive level to underestimate just how far away we are from the limit of automating software." "I think that there's a really, really long way to go. There's a really long, messy middle." "We are in a market that's had an iPod moment, and it's going to have an iPhone moment and another iPhone moment. And I think that there have been a couple of those so far. I think that there are definitely more in the future." @mntruell with @martin_casado
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX and Cursor through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX or Cursor for this material.
The mission statement SpaceX adopted when it absorbed xAI in February reads: "scaling to make a sentient sun to understand the Universe and extend the light of consciousness to the stars." This is, depending on how you read it, either the most ridiculous thing a serious company has ever put on its mission page or the most honest. We think it’s the latter. If you squint at the org chart, SpaceX is a launch provider with an internet subsidiary and a recently-acquired AI lab. If you squint at the technology roadmap, it’s the only company on Earth assembling the full prerequisite stack for the post-scarcity transition. If you squint at the mission statement, it’s a serious attempt by one of the most operationally capable founders of our time to push humanity through the bottleneck that ends with us either as an interplanetary species sharing the cosmos with intelligent machines we built, or as a footnote on one rocky planet that didn’t make the leap. SpaceX & the Sentient Sun, by @mikemcg0 and @pmarca: t.co/0CkG3Dvyi6
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX through its managed funds, and thus has a financial interest in the company’s performance and future prospects. In particular, a16z benefits if the company grows in value; and a16z funds will receive any customary dividend payments in connection with their status as a shareholder of the company. However, a16z is not being compensated by SpaceX for this material.
Quite a few SaaSCos have some ground to make up to complete the V-shaped recover Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th… x.com/64844802/statu…
Many cyber & observability stocks have looked closer to hockey sticks than V-shaped recoveries Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th… x.com/64844802/statu…
The publicly traded software rollercoaster keeps going Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
AI summaries are the likely driver of search's decline as an online traffic source and the recent uptick in zero-click searches Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th… x.com/64844802/statu…
American investment in industrial capital stock has mostly focused on AI build-out Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
American manufacturing's capital stock problem: Across all the major industrial categories, imports have grown more quickly than the capital stock of equipment used to make the things that we’re currently importing. Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Ready to drink cocktails are almost 1/3 of spirits sold Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
An increasing share of searches ends in no links being clicked Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-th…
Ad Astra x.com/441439253/stat…
This material is solely for educational purposes and is not investment advice or an offer of investment advisory services. This material should not be used as the basis for an investment decision. a16z is an investor in SpaceX through its managed funds, and thus has a financial
"The whole premise of tech companies as attractive investments is that technology yields increasing returns to scale." "If there’s one thing we’ve learned, working closely with these success stories, it’s that this is true because founders make it so." a16z.news/p/late-stage-v… x.com/441439253/stat…
"It goes against every investor's instinct to expect 100% a year revenue growth, over and over again, without eventually slowing down." "It is human nature to eventually concede a terminal value that seems reasonable. But not for elite founders." "Founders are the rare x.com/441439253/stat…
"Why We Prefer Founding CEOs" by @bhorowitz April 28, 2010 x.com/441439253/stat…
"Late-stage venture is about late-stage founders. It's about a specific kind of person, who can keep deploying dollars attractively, indefinitely." "The existence of founders like Ali Ghodsi or the Collisons has proven that the right kind of person can keep growing ambitiously, x.com/441439253/stat…
.@pmarca: "The person who writes down the thing has tremendous power." @david_perell x.com/11216662/statu…
Most work conversations are now being recorded by default. You should probably assume that everything you say at work is getting recorded from here on out. What’s emerging is a new category of enterprise software, organized around voice instead of text. The system of record x.com/11216662/statu…
.@pmarca on why God models don't eat all AI usage: "There's one version of the world in which you have a small number of what we sometimes call God models... millions of processors, with billions or hundreds of billions or trillions of dollars of CapEx and training, investment x.com/14379660/statu…
Rillet is making ERP AI-native: - A ledger that's always accurate, complete, and reviewable is "continuously closed." - That means no more month-end scramble. There's almost no manual work left at the end of the month. - The manual journal entry is nearly extinct. Entries are x.com/72101256835411…
American Dynamism at its best. @Saronic is remarkable.
World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li says AI must change how we teach and evaluate students: "AI must change learning. AI must change K-16 learning." "The most precious resource of our entire world is human capital." "When we have gotten the technology that can answer standardized
World Labs CEO Dr. Fei-Fei Li explains says "world model" has become an overloaded term & explains what each kind of world model does: "Right now there are three ways of calling world models when it comes to spatial intelligence." "One is what I call a renderer, when the model x.com/130745589/stat…
Benedict Evans says AI means more software, not less: "There's going to be a bunch of stuff you could do with software that you just couldn't do before at all. And so there will be more competition." "If you think about the enterprise software fleet today, you've got three x.com/64844802/statu…
Benedict Evans says infinite demand for tokens does not guarantee pricing power: "Right now, we're in this period of extreme disequilibrium of supply and demand and price and CapEx and capacity. But just because demand for tokens is infinite, that doesn't mean that you can't get x.com/64844802/statu…
Benedict Evans on Why AI Feels Like the Internet in 1997 Benedict Evans joins Erik Torenberg for a conversation on the state of AI, including how coding agents hit product-market fit, why foundation models should be thought of as infrastructure, the value of vertical products,
.@tylercowen on why AI creates more jobs than it destroys: "One of the neatest properties of current AI models is they allow a small number of individuals working with AI to really do a lot more work than was possible previously." "This will mean more companies, more projects, x.com/441439253/stat…
Ash Ashutosh from @pinecone describes why agentic traffic surpassing human traffic was never a surprise: "Wherever there were humans, they've been now completely subsumed by agents that they've gone off and asked to go perform tasks for them." "We suddenly have this entire data x.com/20292711464458…
Mira Murati says the outcome of frontier AI is not predestined: "Predicting a dystopia or a utopia, to me, feels very simplified because the truth is we actually have a lot of agency in how we build this technology, in the tools that we're building, how we're deploying it."
Mira Murati says human-AI collaboration needs models that can listen while they think: "The types of models that we work with today, they're very turn-based. You talk, they talk, then they go off and think." "While they're thinking, it's almost like they're deaf and blind. They
Mira Murati says frontier AI should be built like a tandem bike: "Having humans in the loop doesn't quite describe it because it sounds like a checkpoint where we're signing off something, and then you're good to go." "It's more like creating systems that are not just
