AI + a16z

When four MIT grads decided to build a code editor while everyone else was building AI agents, they created the fastest-growing developer tool ever built.  Cursor CEO Michael Truell joins a16z’s Martin Casado to discuss the deliberate constraints that led to breakthroughs: why they rejected the "democratization" narrative to focus on power users, how their 2-day work trials test for agency over cr...

Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel is one of the biggest surprises in semiconductors in years. Two longtime rivals are now teaming up, and the ripple effects could reshape AI, cloud, and the global chip race. To make sense of it all, Erik Torenberg is joined by Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, joins Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, and Guido Appenzeller, a16z partner and former...

This episode is a special replay from The Generalist Podcast , featuring a conversation with a16z General Partner Martin Casado. Martin has lived through multiple tech waves as a founder, researcher, and investor, and in this discussion he shares how he thinks about the AI boom, why he believes we’re still early in the cycle, and how a market-first lens shapes his approach to investing. They also...

What if the next leap in artificial intelligence isn’t about better language—but better understanding of space? In this episode, a16z General Partner Erik Torenberg moderates a conversation with Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs, and a16z General Partner Martin Casado, an early investor in the company. Together, they dive into the concept of world models—AI systems that can understand an...

a16z's Martin Casado sits down with Shikhar Shrestha, CEO and cofounder of Ambient, the company bringing agentic AI to physical security. Shikhar shares how a traumatic armed robbery at age 12—and a security camera that no one was watching—sparked his mission to make every camera intelligent. They discuss how Ambient's AI monitors camera feeds in real-time to detect threats and prevent incidents b...

Matt Knight spent five years as OpenAI’s CISO. Now he runs what colleagues call “the most interesting job at the company”: leading Aardvark, an AI agent that finds security vulnerabilities the way a human researcher would—by reading code, writing tests, and proposing patches. It recently found a memory corruption bug in OpenSSH, one of the most heavily audited codebases in existence. In this conve...

Most companies still rely on dashboards to understand their data, even though AI now offers new ways to ask questions and explore information. Barry McCardel, CEO of Hex and former engineer at Palantir, joins a16z General Partner Sarah Wang to discuss how agent workflows, conversational interfaces, and context-aware models are reshaping analysis. Barry also explains how Hex aims to make everyone a...

Ian Webster built PromptFoo after watching 200 million Discord users systematically dismantle his AI agent—now Fortune 10 companies pay him to break theirs before customers do. The "lethal trifecta" sounds academic until you realize it's already happening: untrusted input plus sensitive data plus an exfiltration channel equals the security incident that just cost a SaaS company its multi-tenancy g...

Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion...

Sourcegraph's CTO just revealed why 90% of his code now comes from agents—and why the Chinese models powering America's AI future should terrify Washington. While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI apocalypse scenarios, Beyang Liu's team discovered something darker: every competitive open-source coding model they tested traces back to Chinese labs, and US companies have gone silent after releasing L...

Ryo Lu spent years watching his designs die in meetings. Then he discovered the tool that lets designers ship code at the speed of thought: Cursor, the company where Ryo is now Head of Design. In this episode, we discuss why "taste" is the wrong framework for understanding the future, why purposeful apps are "selfish," how System 7 holds secrets about AI interfaces, and the radical bet that one co...

The Stanford PhD who built DSPy thought he was just creating better prompts—until he realized he'd accidentally invented a new paradigm that makes LLMs actually programmable.  While everyone obsesses over whether LLMs will get us to AGI, Omar Khattab is solving a more urgent problem: the gap between what you want AI to do and your ability to tell it, the absence of a real programming language for...

If you can’t robustly protect your secrets, you can’t have reliable AI agents. In this episode, Truffle Security cofounder and CEO Dylan Ayrey joins a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the emergent security stack for AI agents, why leaks are actually getting worse, and how Truffle evolved from an open-source side project to a major VC-backed startup.   Follow Dylan here: https://x.com/Insecur...

In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Ovais Tariq, Cofounder and CEO of Tigris Data, to discuss why independent storage is so hard, what operating your own datacenters is like, and what’s in store for the future of cloud. Resources Follow Ovais on X: https://x.com/ovaistariq Follow Tigris Data on X: https://x.com/tigrisdata Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casa...

Customer support platforms lacked adequate solutions for B2B companies - until Pylon entered the scene. We sat down with Pylon cofounders Marty Kausas, Advith Chelikani, and Robert Eng to discuss why they went into B2B, how they plan to beat huge competitors, and why they still live together in a windowless apartment and work 9-9-6 hours despite having raised tens of millions. Follow Pylon on X: h...

In 2025, we saw the first glimpses of true AI agents. In 2026, every company will be rushing to get them into production, and they’ll need companies like Keycard to manage fleets of agents. In this conversation, a16z Partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Keycard Cofounder and CEO Ian Livingstone to discuss the continuum from copilots to agents, the security realities of tool-calling, why enterpr...

AI coding has emerged as a major market for AI: one that’s already rewriting how software gets built. a16z Infra Partners Yoko Li and Guido Appenzeller break down how “agents with environments” are changing the dev loop; why repos and PRs may need new abstractions; and where ROI is showing up first (like legacy code migration). We also cover token economics for engineering teams, the emerging agen...

What if the hardest part of building a company isn’t the product, but knowing exactly who it’s for? In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Abhishek Agrawal, Cofounder and CEO of Material Security, to discuss how an ideal customer profile is discovered, how to manage any kind of customer, and how frothy markets can distort real signal. Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/m...

AI is transforming both sides of the cybersecurity cat-and-mouse game. Attackers are using LLMs to scale impersonation, phishing, and even deepfake fraud—while defenders are racing to automate detection and takedowns at the same speed. In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza talks with Kevin Tian, cofounder & CEO of Doppel Security (and former Uber engineer), about building in this new land...

What if you could retake your favorite memories years after they happened, fixing the lighting, catching the smile, or even opening your eyes? In this conversation, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and Partner Yoko Li sit down with scientist and Lytro founder Ren Ng along with Phota Labs cofounders Cecilia Zhang and Zhihao “Zach” Xia to explore the past, present, and future of computational phot...

OpenAI’s Codex has already shipped hundreds of thousands of pull requests in its first month. But what is it really, and how will coding agents change the future of software? In this episode, General Partner Anjney Midha goes behind the scenes with one of Codex’s product leads- Alexander Embiricos - to unpack its origin story, why its PR success rate is so high, the safety challenges of autonomous...

Models, Modalities, and Memes: Creating Compelling AI Characters In this episode of AI + a16z , Hedra founder and CEO Michael Lingelbach joins a16z partners Justine Moore and Matt Bornstein to talk about building AI-native video — and why the next wave of generative content is all about characters, not just clips. They discuss how Hedra’s expressive, full-body, dialogue-centric video models are po...

If you've been experimenting with image, video, and audio models, the chances are you've been both blown away by how good they're becoming, and also a little perturbed by how long they can take to generate. If you've been using a platform like Fal , however, your experience on the latter point might be more positive. In this episode, Fal cofounder and CEO Burkay Gur and head of engineering Batuhan...

In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh to dive into the intersection of vibe coding and security. As one of the earliest security founders to fully embrace LLMs, Feross shares firsthand insights into how these technologies are transforming software engineering workflows and productivity — and where there are sharp edges that practit...

In this episode, a16z GP Martin Casado sits down with Metronome CEO Scott Woody to unpack how AI is fundamentally changing the value proposition of software—and why that shift demands a rethink of the traditional SaaS business model. They explore how, in the cloud era, value scaled with the number of users accessing a shared system (think Salesforce). However, in the AI era, value shifts to the wo...