a16z Live

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with Dimitri Dadiomov, the co-founder and CEO of payment operations platform Modern Treasury, about the challenges of creating a new category, hiring for marketing before you hire for sales, and why developing new features is similar to birding. 0:00 - 1:20 Intro 1:20 - 8:55 The founding of Modern Treasury 8:55 - 15:28 First customers 15:28 - 20:07 B...

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with Zach Perret, the co-founder and CEO of Plaid, about how Plaid built a community in the early days to acquire customers, how they tracked “free radicals,” and how to orient your first customers around speed.   0 - 1:09 Intro 1:09 - 9:57 Plaid history 9:57 - 16:39 First customers 16:39 - 26:45 Pricing philosophy 26:45 - 29:27 Boring as a brand 29:...

In this episode, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with the founder and current executive chairman of Marqeta Jason Gardner about what it means to be welded to your customer and how to expand in multiple verticals. 0:00-1:10 Intro 1:10-6:01 Marqeta's beginning 6:01-9:15 First customers 9:15-16:25 "Magic" product market fit 16:25-24:58 Building customer relationships/Pricing 24:58-32:18 Advice for fou...

In a new episode of My First 16, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Pilot Waseem Daher on how he thought about the importance of charging, how secondary signals often matter in an area like accounting, and never stepping away from doing founder-led sales.   0:00 - 1:45 Intro 1:45 - 6:36 Pilot's beginning 6:36 - 13:25 First customers 13:25 - 18:02 Pricing 18:02 - 25:29 Buildi...

Sales wants more features. Product gets bogged down with one-off requests. Progress and growth grinds to a halt. It's a familiar story. How Segment turned the sales-product tension into a successful $3.2B acquisition, as told by the former CRO Joe Morrissey and former chief product development officer Tido Carriero. [00:01:29] Joe's start as CRO [00:03:40] The low point: annual planning [00:07:59]...

In a new episode of My First 16, a16z partner Seema Amble talks with co-founder and CEO of Mercury Immad Akhund about the idea of a “minimum delightful product” in fintech, doing the spreadsheet math on unit economics early on, and how to compete in a category already filled with incumbents.   0:00 - 1:28 Introduction 1:28 - 9:14 History of Mercury 9:14 - 19:07 Mercury's first customers 19:07 - 22...

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott, in conversation with a16z's Bob Swan, explains how AI copilots are keeping developers longer in a flow state and why AI copilots more broadly could be the start of an industrial revolution for knowledge work. [0:59] Microsoft's approach to AI [6:15] The next Industrial Revolution [10:47] Developer productivity & flow state [15:46] Reprogramming the American Dream [20:08]...

Cofounder and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei unpacks how far can scaling laws take us and how can AI be used to improve AI, in conversation with a16z's Anjney Midha.  [0:59] Dario's background [2:45] GPT-2's emergent capabilities [5:16] Scaling laws [8:55] Why are there so many physicists in AI? [11:58] Constitutional AI [18:29] Anthropic's Roadmap This conversation is part of our AI Revolution ser...

As CTO of OpenAI, Mira Murati oversaw the development and release of GPT-4 and ChatGPT. Here she tells Martin Casado the story behind the release of ChatGPT—and what it tells us about the future of AI and human-machine interactions.  [0:59] Mira's background [4:55] Math, physics, and AI [7:31] Natural language interfaces [10:51] OpenAI Roadmap [17:47] Scaling Laws [20:48] One model to rule them al...

Roblox cofounder and CEO David Baszucki and a16z's Jonathan Lai discuss the ways AI is changing games and virtual worlds, as well as how we create them.  [1:00] Generative AI in games [4:56] Fully personalized playthroughs [7:50] Roblox's generative model [11:28] Future of interfaces [13:25] impact on creators [16:36] NPCs as copilots [18:49] VR & spatial computing This conversation is part of our...

Will AI take all the design jobs? Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, looks at the relationship between designers, developers, and AI, in conversation with a16z's David George.  [0:58] Will AI replace designers? [4:13] Human vs. AI creativity [8:38] Applying AI to design [11:35] Startups vs. incumbents This conversation is part of our AI Revolution series, recorded August 2023 at a live event i...

Daphne Koller is the founder and CEO of insitro, a company using AI and machine learning to engineer drug discovery. In this conversation with a16z's Vijay Pande, she discusses how an LLM for cells could revolutionize drug discovery and how to bridge the technological and cultural divide between building with atoms and building with bits. [0:59] Why life sciences? [3:42] AI in the life sciences [7...

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and cofounder of Databricks, and Ben Horowitz, cofounder of a16z, explain the data wars happening inside and outside enterprises and how they could impact the evolution of LLMs.  [0:59] Why is it so hard for enterprises to adopt AI? [3:29] Data wars [4:49] Big vs. small LLMs [8:35] Finetuning [14:14] Open source AI [18:13] Benchmarks [19:51] Why Ali isn't afraid of AI This conversa...

Noam Shazeer, Character.ai CEO and cofounder, talks to a16z's Sarah Wang about the dawn of universally accessible intelligence, the compute it will take to power it, and his pursuit of AGI's first use... [0:59] Real Noam vs. AI Noam [6:14] Next unlocks [8:11] First use case for AGI [11:06] Building a full-stack LLM [13:33] Noam calculates global compute capacity [15:24] Universally accessible inte...

a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen and Endeavor CEO Ari Emanuel are interviewed by a16z General Partner Sriram Krishnan at the “Time to Build: LA” event during LA Week. The trio chat about the future of content distribution, the bull case for VR over AR, the end of corporate brands, and why there is (or isn’t) ever anything good to watch on TV.

In this episode of a16z Live, David Banks, a former Riot Games executive who's now the co-founder and CEO of Elodie Games, and Timmu Tõke, the co-founder and CEO of Ready Player Me, a leading platform for cross game avatars, join a16z General Partner and games investor Jon Lai for a conversation about where they think the metaverse is going, and the future of building games

In this episode of a16z Live, Grant LaFontaine, the co-founder and CEO of the livestream shopping platform Whatnot, talks with a16z General Partner Connie Chan about building the company, his experience as the site's first person to go live, and why he prefers Los Angeles over San Francisco. What follows is a slightly edited version of that conversation.

In this episode of a16z Live, Chris Power, the Founder and CEO of the precision parts manufacturing company, Hadrian, talks with a16z American Dynamism Partner Oliver Hsu, about why he decided to build his factories in LA, why software engineers shouldn't be afraid of manufacturing company jobs, and how a single mom and pop machinist shop can affect the national supply chain. What follows is a sli...

To celebrate the L.A. community and the city's growth, a16z recently hosted, "Time to Build Los Angeles," an event where we invited L.A.-based investors, founders, and operators from across a diverse range of industries to talk about company building in L.A. In the first in our series of interviews, we invited Andrew Chen from a16z, Minnie Ingersoll from TenOneTen, and Turner Novak from Banana Cap...

In this episode of a16z Live, we are joined by Titan Invest co-founder and co-CEO Clayton Gardner; a16z General Partner Anish Acharya; and a16z growth partner, Alex Immerman. The trio starts their conversation by diving into the difference between active and passive investment management and where Titan fits into that matrix. Building upon that foundation, they discuss how the fintech market is ch...

Ben Horowitz discusses the leadership styles of Intel’s Andy Grove and Apple’s Bill Campbell, how Okta won its market with culture, and how to look for and hire the talent you don’t have in an interview with David Weiden, founding partner at Khosla Ventures, at the Khosla Ventures CEO Summit. Read a transcript of the conversation here.  0:40: The management legacy of Intel’s Andy Grove 4:26: Why e...

The API economy and a Cambrian explosion of apps are transforming best-in-class tech from monolithic tools to a stack of 20 applications that work together. Amid this unbundling, partnerships have become a critical part of early go-to-market strategy that can lead to higher quality pipeline and accelerated sales. In this fireside chat, recorded at the 2022 Crossbeam Supernode conference, a16z Gene...

a16z General Partner David Haber chats with his former colleague Stephanie Cohen, Goldman Sachs' Global Co-Head of Consumer and Wealth Management, about her journey from being an investment banker to running a global division, how Goldman Sachs stays relevant to different client audiences, and how fintech entrepreneurs can think about partnering with the financial services giant.

As the deputy director for the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Nitin Natarajan spends most of his days worrying about everything from risk identification and mitigation, to educating young people and small businesses on their potential to be victims. In this fireside chat with Joel de la Garza, a16z operating partner for security, the two men discuss what keeps the CISA of...

Katherine Boyle, General Partner at a16z is joined by Hadrian founder and CEO Chris Power, Packy McCormick, founder of Not Boring, and a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen to discuss the opportunity to automate and upskill in the precision parts industry and shore up U.S. manufacturing with new technology.