a16z
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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.
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Gavin Baker says Grok Bot feels like another ChatGPT moment because it turns hours of Claude Code work into seconds: "You see these 23-year-old kids and just the way they use AI, they're just fluent and native in it. I just feel like maybe in a way that no matter how hard I try, I will never be, and I'm trying really hard." "We got Claude Code. I built some stuff, did some cool stuff, and in, I don't know, 3 minutes of creating Grok Bots, I had much better versions of everything I created." "I love having a podcast summarizer... It takes 10 seconds in Grok Bot. It's amazing, and it's so good." "A Substack summarizer, an X summarizer, an X sentiment tracker for topics and stocks... All of those would have taken me hours working with Claude Code, and they each took 7 to 12 seconds with Grok Bot. And it's better." "To me, Grok Bot does feel like another ChatGPT moment." Gavin Baker David George
a16z6,039,604 Aufrufe • vor 1 Tag
Gavin Baker and a16z's David George on the state of the AI boom: The future doesn't have to be winner-take-all. Labs, open-source, applications, and the clouds can all capture value. Demand for intelligence is still dramatically underestimated. Today's power users number in the millions and will grow to hundreds of millions. Gavin and David argue a compute shortage is a more real risk than an AI bubble, and building through it is an opportunity to reindustrialize America. In this episode, they get into why compute investments pay back so fast, what the data center backlash gets wrong, the case for putting compute in orbit, why enterprises will run several models at once, and how Nvidia ended up at the center of the entire supply chain. 00:00 Intro 01:06 The bear case Gavin couldn't find 05:50 Why a lab would cut its own revenue 75% 08:05 What LPs get wrong about a crash 10:50 Microsoft slowed its capex and regrets it 14:33 The engineers spending 100x the median 17:35 Why 23-year-olds use AI better than Gavin 21:45 How much copper 500M AI users need 23:00 Stop promising to cure cancer 26:00 America's richest county is full of data centers 30:48 Who gets priced out of compute 33:05 The age of Elon and Jensen 34:25 Orbital data centers 44:40 Asteroid mining 48:12 Why Microsoft doesn't need a frontier model 54:02 Who becomes the abstraction layer 55:40 Everyone wanted a deity, Cursor wanted a product 1:00:25 Never take shots at Jensen 1:07:40 What happens when the chip doesn't work 1:12:10 What chip deals reveal about customer demand YouTube: Gavin Baker David George
a16z1,706,098 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
Today, a16z is announcing the Machine Age Fund, a new $1.1 billion fund for founders rebuilding what intelligence runs on: chips, memory, networking, systems software, power, and the machines that bring AI into the physical world. Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and Raghu Raghuram see a new economic law. A thousand engineers cannot erase a two-year software lead, but a massive GPU cluster can turn capital directly into capability. Models are improving faster than the memory, interconnect, power, and cooling beneath them. The founder map is changing with it. Some of the strongest teams are moving from pure software into complex hardware because every constraint in the stack is now a company-building opportunity. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they explain what founders can build, why the opportunity reaches all the way down to the physical stack, and why a16z created a fund for it. 00:00 Intro 01:08 Why AI needs an entirely new infrastructure 02:02 The bottleneck is no longer the model 02:40 Founders saw it before investors did 06:07 Sold out through 2028 07:14 Why this time is different from 1999 08:57 The company whose idle hardware gained value 10:51 "Why didn't this fund exist five years ago?" 13:51 "Nobody likes to use AI more than AI" 17:06 The startup law that capital just broke 21:05 What Grok Bot got right 26:43 The case for a custom chip per model 28:23 Why AC power isn't good enough 32:07 Lots of new electricians 34:14 What one gigawatt can power 35:03 Why utilities can't just build faster 37:22 The data centers that give power back 38:01 Why we should never have called it AI 39:43 Why Nvidia will willingly leave money on the table 48:08 Hardware founders are older 52:36 Why America has to lead YouTube: benahorowitz.eth Raghu Raghuram martin_casado Erik Torenberg
a16z625,473 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
Garry Tan says turning down Palantir for a Microsoft promotion was a $2–4 billion mistake: "Joe Lonsdale and Stephen Cohen were my fraternity brothers at Stanford... they were interns at Peter Thiel's hedge fund." "They said, 'Let's go get Garry. He's up in Seattle.' They flew me down to have dinner with him, and Peter said, 'I'm so sure this is the right thing for you. Here's a check for 70 grand.' That was how much I made at Microsoft at the time." "I said, 'Thank you very much, Mr. Thiel, but I might get promoted to level 60 this year.' Which I did. But that was a $2 to $4 billion mistake at this point." Garry Tan Anish Acharya
a16z1,798,335 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
Travis Kalanick: "A lot of folks think I'm back. I've been working my ass off the whole time. I just haven't been talking about it." Eight years, thousands of employees, multiple industries, none of it on LinkedIn, and now the biggest check Ben Horowitz has ever written. travis kalanick joins benahorowitz.eth and Erik Torenberg for a fireside chat to discuss Atoms: an industrial AI company that sees manufacturing, real estate, and logistics as the CPU, storage, and network of the physical world: 00:00 Intro 01:30 The Uber video from 10 years ago 04:26 Bits, atoms, and the three computing primitives 07:37 Can a delivered meal cost less than the grocery store? 10:16 Standing next to a TCP packet 11:59 Ride-sharing was the gold medal. Transport is full of silver 13:59 Resistance to change is the final boss 22:22 Why he didn't buy Lyft 24:09 Best idea wins 28:13 Blood, sweat, and ramen 32:32 When it gets easy, push harder 36:18 Showing up to the fundraise like a guy selling watches 45:46 Dirty fuel vs. falling in love again 48:31 Be uniconic
a16z1,106,843 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
Travis Kalanick says new media is why he's back after eight years of silence: "The media landscape 10 years ago, 90% of what was said was very negative. Business had become politics, and we didn't know it... If it bleeds, it leads, right?" "Now the media landscape is like, 'yeah, you don't have to talk to those guys.' You can go and talk to a David Senra. You can go and talk to Joe Rogan or name your guy, and you can say what you need to say." "Elon buying Twitter is the beginning of us being able to speak our minds and for disagreeing to not be illegal. That's a big deal. We should all thank Elon for that." "I want to build. I want to not think about what The New York Times is writing when I make decisions about what I build. I had to emulate what it's like being a capitalist in Russia... and that's what I did for eight years." travis kalanick
a16z1,092,215 Aufrufe • vor 19 Tagen
Ben Horowitz on the oldest law in startups, and why the industry no longer has to obey it: "The one thing we all knew in startup world is that if I have a two-year lead on you and you try to catch me by hiring 1,000 engineers, you're gonna wreck your company." "That never works. It's a Mythical Man-Month. Nine women can't have a baby in a month. That's it. That never works." "Okay, now that works. But it's not hiring 1,000 engineers. It's taking $3 billion and lighting up a magnificent cluster, and then all of a sudden, whatever, Grok can come out of nowhere and, oh, all of a sudden it's real." "You can throw money at the problem, and you can throw money at almost any problem, and that works. That is just completely different than anything we've ever lived through. By the way, we're all psychologically adjusting to this." benahorowitz.eth Erik Torenberg
a16z193,297 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
Garry Tan says we'll see a wave of exceptional older AI-native founders: "There's going to be as many Patrick Collisons as ever, but one mega trend that we're seeing is the 35, 40, 45-year-old founder who's been around the block, built a lot of engineering." "Peter Steinberger is a perfect example of that. He's been around the block. He knows what to build." "If you take that person, suddenly there's 400 of those people. You can outperform an entire department of any Mag 7." Garry Tan Anish Acharya
a16z860,069 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
Your startup intuitions were trained on a world that no longer exists. Steven Sinofsky and Martin Casado have watched computing flip from an engineering-bound field to a capital-bound industry. Twenty people can now put a billion dollars to work productively, AI solves the distribution problem that kept startups small, and challengers sit on a level playing field with Microsoft and Meta for the first time. With Erik Torenberg, they get into why some mathematicians are cheering on their own automation, every AI panic that already happened in past eras of computing, and why nobody can predict the capabilities of a model built with $20 billion. 00:55 Why mathematicians love being automated 02:45 Is AI math worth any money? 08:50 The first proof humans couldn't check 14:35 Computing before electricity 19:50 How IBM explained computers in 1953 26:00 The failed computer that birthed the web 27:50 When Harvard banned computers from exams 30:20 Is AI just another abstraction layer? 38:15 When 20 people can spend $1B productively 42:50 The zero-sum VC myth 46:25 Disruption is physics, not business school 53:25 The chip Intel called a printer part 55:05 What a $20B model can do 59:45 What Martin got wrong about AI risk YouTube: Steven Sinofsky martin_casado Erik Torenberg
a16z226,803 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
David Sacks says the biggest risk of AI was described not by James Cameron in The Terminator but by George Orwell in 1984. “I almost feel like the term ‘woke AI’ is insufficient to explain what’s going on because it somehow trivializes it.” “What we’re really talking about is 'Orwellian AI.' We’re talking about AI that lies to you, that distorts an answer, that rewrites history in real time to serve a current political agenda of the people who are in power.” “To me, this is the biggest risk of AI... It’s not The Terminator, it’s 1984.” David Sacks
a16z16,353,699 Aufrufe • vor 10 Monaten
.benahorowitz.eth on why he refused the Databricks founders' $200K ask and wrote them a $10M check instead: "So there were six PhD students, and Ion Stoica, who was their professor." "What they had was this thing called Spark, and the competitor was something called Hadoop. Hadoop had very well-funded companies already running towards it, and Spark was open-source. So the clock was ticking. I think they didn't quite know what they had." "Professors in general, it's a pretty big win if you start a company and you make $50 million. You're a hero on campus... So I'm always a little nervous about a company that comes out of academia thinking too small." "So I said 'I'm not gonna write you a check for $200,000. I'll write you a check for $10 million.'" "You need to build a company. You need to really go for it if you're gonna do this, otherwise you guys should stay in school." Ben Horowitz w/ Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny's Podcast (2025)
a16z227,545 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
![Gavin Baker compares Jensen Huang to Michael Jordan and advises AI chip startups: just be happy to be on the court with him. "[Jensen is] in a very, very good position in his strategy of being vertically integrated but horizontally open." "Let's say there's some accelerator that emerges that is really, really, really good. Almost certainly it will be better if it can plug in." "If you're a semiconductor CEO, the only thing you should ever say is, 'Thank you, Jensen. Thank you for creating this opportunity. Thank you. How can we work with you? We want to enable you.'" "My rule of thumb for accelerators, every 1% share today is probably worth $100 billion. So there's no need to go head-on with Nvidia." "Just try to find a way to plug in, but just be nice to him. Be nice. It's all personal." "Have you ever seen game tape of the Chicago Bulls when Jordan was... it's game 50 of the season... and he's a little bored, and then somebody who's kind of young decides, 'I'm gonna talk shit to him because we're beating him.'" "Just don't do that. Just like, 'Hey Michael, man, I'm so happy to be on the court with you.'" Gavin Baker David George](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2094468432142205143/amplify_video_thumb/2094468344632242176/img/VZRzo_yL0d_j7F_S.jpg)
Gavin Baker compares Jensen Huang to Michael Jordan and advises AI chip startups: just be happy to be on the court with him. "[Jensen is] in a very, very good position in his strategy of being vertically integrated but horizontally open." "Let's say there's some accelerator that emerges that is really, really, really good. Almost certainly it will be better if it can plug in." "If you're a semiconductor CEO, the only thing you should ever say is, 'Thank you, Jensen. Thank you for creating this opportunity. Thank you. How can we work with you? We want to enable you.'" "My rule of thumb for accelerators, every 1% share today is probably worth $100 billion. So there's no need to go head-on with Nvidia." "Just try to find a way to plug in, but just be nice to him. Be nice. It's all personal." "Have you ever seen game tape of the Chicago Bulls when Jordan was... it's game 50 of the season... and he's a little bored, and then somebody who's kind of young decides, 'I'm gonna talk shit to him because we're beating him.'" "Just don't do that. Just like, 'Hey Michael, man, I'm so happy to be on the court with you.'" Gavin Baker David George
a16z44,063 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
Gavin Baker says the future for the world's biggest companies is open models and private context: "I think the future is an ensemble of models. There's a Pareto curve. No one model is going to be the best at everything." "For the global 1,000 biggest companies, you're going to take whatever the best open-source model is. I think probably in the very near future, that's going to be an Nvidia model." "Everybody says 'Well, in a world where open-source wins, who funds the training?' Chip companies can fund the training." "It's trivial to do a $50 to $100 billion training run for Jensen, but I do think you're going to see American open-source led by Nvidia get really close to the frontier." "Sharing your own enterprise context, that's truly your IP, that's truly the value of your company, the context embedded in all of your data, sharing that with a frontier lab may be hazardous for your financial health." "I think what you'll see these companies do is they'll have their own model on their data, and it will work with one or two other frontier models, checking each other... I think that feels like a very likely future to me." Gavin Baker David George
a16z37,580 Aufrufe • vor 1 Tag
.benahorowitz.eth on how a game studio turned it's last $6 million into Slack: "Stewart calls me. He says, 'Ben, I've got $6 million left. I have no way to raise money because I've made really no progress. So I've got three choices. I can pray for rain and try and finish it, I can shut down the company and give you your $6 million back, or we built this tool that we use in our engineering team to communicate with each other, and I could just put that out as a product.'" "I'm like, 'What? You just built some tool to talk to each other and you want to put that out as a product? And you're a consumer guy, and you want to become an enterprise software guy?'" "$6 million is not gonna make any difference in my life. If you really think it's a good idea, go ahead." Ben Horowitz Talks Honesty, Failure, and Secrets at UC Berkeley (2016)
a16z748,242 Aufrufe • vor 26 Tagen
Stripe's Will Gaybrick: "Build everything" Against an industry that sees agents as a way to cut costs, Stripe is using them to build more: agents wrote 30% of code in a week, global tax filing shipped in 1/3 the time the US version took, and after AI made sellers 20% more productive, Stripe hired even more sellers. President of Technology & Business Will Gaybrick sits down with a16z's David George to cover why there's no one left for Stripe to copy, why checkout pages will disappear, how agents plus stablecoins make micropayments real, and why tokens are becoming a currency worth protecting like dollars. 00:00 Intro 01:00 From payments to 30 products 02:30 1 in 6 free trials abused 05:50 Win the startups, then win them again 09:40 Borrowing from Google, Apple, and Ford 14:30 Minions: 7K one-shot PRs a week 18:45 Building everything vs. cutting costs 26:00 Why timelines keep compressing 29:50 What replaces the checkout page 34:20 The case against $9.99 subscriptions 37:20 Stablecoins solve a political problem 41:35 Tempo, a payments-only blockchain 43:10 Tokens are money now 49:00 How Stripe scales taste Will Gaybrick David George
a16z376,089 Aufrufe • vor 16 Tagen
David George and Gavin Baker on why AI demand is just getting started, and the numbers they're seeing across power users: David: "If you actually look at the power law of the actual engineers in those companies, the highest-spending engineers are spending 10 or sometimes 100x more than the median engineer." "And so there's this question of, where are we at in diffusion? There's one and a half billion knowledge workers. It feels like we're nowhere on the demand side and we're massively supply constrained." Gavin: "At Atreides, our internal token consumption has gone up 100x from the month of March. March through August, 100x our token spend." "And we just got access to Grok Bot Enterprise, and with two people using it, it looks like token spend might 10 or 20x in a month from August." David: "It's actually extremely valuable. We have some heavy Grok Bot users here, and it is very productive use. This is not wasteful token spend." David George Gavin Baker
a16z35,026 Aufrufe • vor 2 Tagen
Garry Tan on YC, First Principles Thinking, and Progress in the Age of AI Silicon Valley's advantage is that it gives weird, ambitious outsiders permission to try, find one another, and become insiders through building. Garry Tan learned this firsthand throughout his career at companies like Microsoft, Palantir, and YC. AI may now extend the power of Silicon Valley much further. Garry joins a16z’s Anish Acharya to cover the turns that shaped him, why founders should trust direct experience over consensus, how AI is allowing small teams to do more with less, and why he's deeply optimistic about AI-native companies and the future of SF: 00:00 Intro 00:26 Getting into tech 04:45 Silicon Valley culture & finding your people at the fringe 10:59 What makes YC great: a birthright for tech outsiders 13:54 Solo founders, vibe coding, and founders being 400x themselves 21:05 Business loops: skillifying every task into a markdown file 23:03 Tokenmaxxing: how to live in 2028 today 28:09 Using AI to make conflict constructive 33:10 The torture of the white-collar job & life above the API line 39:08 Why bureaucracy is a whitepill 41:33 What the next computer looks like: voice, memory & the harness wars 44:44 Local politics & making SF a beacon Garry Tan Anish Acharya
a16z445,193 Aufrufe • vor 20 Tagen
![A few years ago Patrick Collison remarked there are fewer younger founders today. Ben Horowitz and Martin Casado agree that's what the hardware era looks like, for now: "If you look at Elon or Travis Kalanick, their companies when they were young were software companies. Even those guys, the best guys, needed some experience to graduate to the more elaborate domains." "When you're learning how to build a company, it's hard enough if you completely understand the product. If you don't completely understand the product and have to learn it while you build the company, that's just such a steep learning curve for a brand new entrepreneur." "[Hardware] has been defocused by the entire industry and academia for the last 20 years... The growth areas have been software, networking, things like that." "You don't go intern and build a chip. But a lot of that's changing now. We're gonna create a whole generation of founders that come from these new companies." "One of the greatest legacies of Elon is of course he's created these great companies, but the amount of entrepreneurs that have come out of SpaceX that are changing the entire industrial complex may be an even greater legacy than the companies themselves." "I think we're gonna see the same thing for computer science and hardware." benahorowitz.eth martin_casado Erik Torenberg](https://image.24vids.com/tw-2093790899146981803/amplify_video_thumb/2093790798907355136/img/wO7uQxKqfKmekq_u.jpg)
A few years ago Patrick Collison remarked there are fewer younger founders today. Ben Horowitz and Martin Casado agree that's what the hardware era looks like, for now: "If you look at Elon or Travis Kalanick, their companies when they were young were software companies. Even those guys, the best guys, needed some experience to graduate to the more elaborate domains." "When you're learning how to build a company, it's hard enough if you completely understand the product. If you don't completely understand the product and have to learn it while you build the company, that's just such a steep learning curve for a brand new entrepreneur." "[Hardware] has been defocused by the entire industry and academia for the last 20 years... The growth areas have been software, networking, things like that." "You don't go intern and build a chip. But a lot of that's changing now. We're gonna create a whole generation of founders that come from these new companies." "One of the greatest legacies of Elon is of course he's created these great companies, but the amount of entrepreneurs that have come out of SpaceX that are changing the entire industrial complex may be an even greater legacy than the companies themselves." "I think we're gonna see the same thing for computer science and hardware." benahorowitz.eth martin_casado Erik Torenberg
a16z67,182 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen