Fei-Fei Li is a Stanford professor, co-director of Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, and co-founder of World Labs. She created ImageNet, the dataset that sparked the deep learning revolution. 

Justin Johnson is her former PhD student, ex-professor at Michigan, ex-Meta researcher, and now co-founder of World Labs.

Together, they just launched Marble?the first model that generates explorable 3D worlds from text or images.

In this episode Fei-Fei and Justin explore why spatial intelligence is fundamentally different from language, what's missing from current world models (hint: physics), and the architectural insight that transformers are actually set models, not sequence models.

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Recently, a16z General Partner Anish Acharya joined Ollie Forsyth on NEW ECONOMIES. They talked about why consumer tech is surging again, how AI is enabling 100M-user products at unprecedented speed, and what founders need to understand heading into 2026 ? from distribution shifts to founder mindset to the mechanics behind the fastest product cycle in tech history.

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a16z General Partners David Haber, Alex Rampell, and Erik Torenberg discuss why 19 out of 20 AI startups building the same thing will die - and why the survivor might charge $20,000 for what used to cost $20.

They expose the "janitorial services paradox" (why the most boring software is most defensible), explain why OpenAI won't compete with your orthodontic clinic software despite having 800 million weekly users, and reveal how non-lawyers are building the most successful legal AI companies. Plus: the brutal truth about why momentum isn't a moat, but without it, you're already dead.

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A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz joins Shaan Puri and Sam Parr on My First Million to talk about how to be a great leader.

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Russ Fradin sold his first company for $300M. He?s back in the arena with Larridin, helping companies measure just how successful their AI actually is.

In this episode, Russ sits down with a16z General Partner Alex Rampell to reveal why the measurement infrastructure that unlocked internet advertising's trillion-dollar boom is exactly what's missing from AI, why your most productive employees are hiding their AI usage from management, and the uncomfortable truth that companies desperately buying AI tools have no idea whether anyone's actually using them. 

The same playbook that built comScore into a billion-dollar measurement empire now determines which AI companies survive the coming shakeout.

Timecodes: 

0:00 ? Introduction 

2:15 ? Early Career, Ad Tech, and Web 1.0

3:09 ? Attribution Problems in Ad Tech & AI

4:30 ? Building Measurement Infrastructure

6:49 ? Software Eating Labor: Productivity Shifts

8:51 ? The Challenge of Measuring AI ROI

14:54 ? The Productivity Baseline Problem

18:46 ? Defining and Measuring Productivity

21:27 ? Goodhart?s Law & the Pitfalls of Metrics

22:41 ? The Harvey Example: Usage vs. Value

25:18 ? Surveys vs. Behavioral Data

28:38 ? Interdepartmental Responsiveness & Real-World Metrics

31:00 ? Enterprise AI Adoption: What the Data Shows

33:59 ? Employee Anxiety & Training Gaps

38:31 ? The Nexus Product & Safe AI Usage

42:08 ? The Future of Work: Job Loss or Job Creation?

44:40 ? The Competitive Advantage of AI

53:45 ? The Product Marketing Problem in AI

55:00 ? The Importance of Specific Use Cases

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In this episode, a16z GP Martin Casado sits down with Sherwin Wu, Head of Engineering for the OpenAI Platform, to break down how OpenAI organizes its platform across models, pricing, and infrastructure, and how it is shifting from a single general-purpose model to a portfolio of specialized systems, custom fine-tuning options, and node-based agent workflows.

They get into why developers tend to stick with a trusted model family, what builds that trust, and why the industry moved past the idea of one model that can do everything. Sherwin also explains the evolution from prompt engineering to context design and how companies use OpenAI?s fine-tuning and RFT APIs to shape model behavior with their own data.

Highlights from the conversation include: 

? How OpenAI balances a horizontal API platform with vertical products like ChatGPT
? The evolution from Codex to the Composer model
? Why usage-based pricing works and where outcome-based pricing breaks
? What the Harmonic Labs and Rockset acquisitions added to OpenAI?s agent work
? Why the new agent builder is deterministic, node based, and not free roaming

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Ben Horowitz reveals why the US already lost the AI culture war to China?and it wasn't the technology that failed. While Biden's team played Manhattan Project with closed models, Chinese developers quietly captured the open-source heartbeat of global AI through DeepSeek, now running inside every major US company and university lab. The kicker: Google and OpenAI employ so many Chinese nationals that keeping secrets was always a delusion, but the policy locked American innovation behind walls while handing cultural dominance to Beijing's weights?the encoded values that will shape how billions of devices interpret everything from Tiananmen Square to free speech.

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Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz sit down with Margit Wennmachers?the woman who turned two unknown entrepreneurs with $300 million and zero investing track record into the most talked-about firm in venture capital. She unpacks how they weaponized transparency in an industry built on secrecy, why Fortune's cover story triggered a cartel meltdown, and the exact moment a casual lunch conversation became "Software Is Eating the World." This is the origin story of how A16Z broke every unwritten rule, made enemies of every top-tier firm, and permanently rewired what it means to build companies in public.

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Half a billion people can access the world?s best AI on their phone. So why are most using it to write emails while only some are using it to build empires?

In this conversation with Mark Halperin from Next Up, Marc Andreessen reveals why small bakeries are beating Fortune 500 companies at AI adoption, how to turn ChatGPT into your personal board of directors, and why Silicon Valley just reversed five years of geographic dispersion overnight. He also shares the questions that unlock AI's real power?including one of his favorite prompts: "What questions should I be asking?"

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Epoch AI researchers reveal why Anthropic might beat everyone to the first gigawatt datacenter, why AI could solve the Riemann hypothesis in 5 years, and what 30% GDP growth actually looks like. They explain why "energy bottlenecks" are just companies complaining about paying 2x for power instead of getting it cheap, why 10% of current jobs will vanish this decade, and the most data-driven take on whether we're racing toward superintelligence or headed for history's biggest bubble.

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Vlad Tenev built Robinhood by breaking every rule Wall Street wrote: zero commissions when competitors charged $10, mobile-first when "serious" investors demanded desktop, a brand that made finance feel like rebellion instead of a club you'd never join.

By 2021 they'd forced every major brokerage to slash fees and attracted millions who'd never owned a stock, but then GameStop happened: trading restrictions during the meme stock frenzy triggered congressional hearings, user fury, and a two-year brand crisis that nearly buried them despite the real culprit being antiquated clearing mechanics no one understood. 

Now Tenev's pushing an even more radical vision?tokenizing private company shares so retail investors can own stakes in AI giants before IPO, turning prediction markets into "truth machines" that beat polls and pundits, and building what he calls the end of financial nihilism: a platform where your seventy-year-old parents and your Gen Z cousin both manage everything from retirement accounts to election bets in one place.

The question isn't whether traditional finance survives this; it's whether Robinhood can move fast enough to own the entire wealth transfer before someone else does.

Timestamps:

0:00 - Introduction
3:52 - Financial Relationships vs. Pinterest Boards: The Higher Bar
5:27 - Building in a Regulatory Catch-22
7:53 - Three Simultaneous Contrarian Bets
12:15 - From Institutional HFT to Retail Revolution
17:40 - January 28th: The Day Trust Died
27:40 - ?Simple Lie More Powerful Than Complicated Truth?
30:02 - Tokenization: The Antidote to T+1 Settlement
32:52 - IPO Access: From Asking For Favors to Everyone Wanting In
39:22 - ?Series D Was Called an IPO?
43:06 - WTF Happened in 1971?
47:42 - Going Broad While Going Deep
53:26 - The $120 Trillion Wealth Transfer
58:16 - Debunking ?Financial Nihilism?
58:40 - ?Speculation Is Critical For Functioning Markets?

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The former bank regulator who invented deposit networks just revealed why SVB's collapse was inevitable?and why the solution that could have saved them is finally being rebuilt. 

Gene Ludwig ran the OCC during the Clinton administration, created a half-trillion-dollar market solving a problem his Aunt Betty faced riding buses between banks, then watched his invention fail to save Silicon Valley Bank because the technology, economics, and incentives were fundamentally broken. 

Now he's partnered with Paolo and ModernFi to build what could become America's eighth systemically important financial utility: a bank-owned consortium that's signing 25 institutions per week and racing to protect the 4.8 trillion in uninsured deposits that make the next crisis inevitable.

Resources:

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Palmer Luckey got fired from Meta for backing the wrong candidate?now he's the hero saving American defense, and that shift tells you everything about how fast the ground moved beneath Silicon Valley's feet. For decades, tech and defense were allies, then came 15 years of hostility so visceral that Google employees revolted over a Pentagon AI contract, and when leadership caved, only three people showed up to hear what border security actually involves. But something broke: COVID exposed our inability to make things, Ukraine revealed wars now iterate in days not decades, and suddenly the Harvard dorm room generation realized the people building satellites and drones weren't just necessary?they were the future, while legacy defense contractors still operate on Soviet-style five-year plans that guarantee cost overruns and obsolescence. Now the question isn't whether Silicon Valley returns to its Cold War roots, but whether America wins by becoming more like China's centralized system or doubles down on the chaotic creativity that built nine of the world's ten most valuable companies in 25 years?and the founders flooding into defense, energy, mining, and manufacturing suggest the second American century is just getting started.

Resources:

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Emmett Shear, founder of Twitch and former OpenAI interim CEO, challenges the fundamental assumptions driving AGI development. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg and Séb Krier, Shear argues that the entire "control and steering" paradigm for AI alignment is fatally flawed. Instead, he proposes "organic alignment" - teaching AI systems to genuinely care about humans the way we naturally do. The discussion explores why treating AGI as a tool rather than a potential being could be catastrophic, how current chatbots act as "narcissistic mirrors," and why the only sustainable path forward is creating AI that can say no to harmful requests. Shear shares his technical approach through multi-agent simulations at his new company Softmax, and offers a surprisingly hopeful vision of humans and AI as collaborative teammates - if we can get the alignment right.

Resources:

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Two venture capitalists dissect why biotech burns billions while China runs trials in weeks?and why the next Genentech won't look anything like the last one. Elliot Hershberg reveals the "three horsemen" strangling drug development as costs explode to $2.5 billion per approval, while Lada Nuzhna exposes how investigator-initiated trials in Shanghai are rewriting the competitive playbook faster than American founders can file INDs. When the infrastructure that built monoclonal antibodies becomes the commodity threatening to hollow out an entire industry, the only path forward demands inventing medicines that are literally impossible to make without tools that don't exist yet?and they're betting everything on which approach survives.

Resources:

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Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are pioneers in AI. While the world has only recently witnessed a surge in consumer AI, they have long been laying the groundwork for the innovations transforming industries today.

With the recent launch of Marble, the first product from their company World Labs, we are revisiting this conversation to explore the ideas that started it all. World Labs is focused on spatial intelligence, building Large World Models that can perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D world. Marble brings that vision to life, allowing anyone, from individual creators to major platforms, to generate 3D scenes directly from text or image prompts and turn complex 3D creation into a simple, creative process.

In this episode, a16z general partner Martin Casado talks with Fei-Fei and Justin about the journey from early AI winters to the rise of deep learning and multimodal AI. From foundational breakthroughs like ImageNet to the cutting-edge realm of spatial intelligence, they discuss the evolution of the field and what is next for innovation at World Labs.

Timecode:

0:00 ? The Next Decade of AI
2:45 ? Origins: Backgrounds of the Founders
6:50 ? The Rise of Deep Learning & ImageNet
8:00 ? Algorithmic Unlocks: Compute, Data, and Supervised Learning
12:00 ? From Predictive to Generative AI
16:20 ? The Journey to Spatial Intelligence
18:35 ? Defining Spatial Intelligence
21:15 ? 3D Data, Computer Vision, and Breakthroughs
23:15 ? Reconstruction vs. Generation in Computer Vision
24:45 ? Spatial Intelligence vs. Language Models
29:00 ? Applications: Virtual, Augmented, and Physical Worlds
39:55 ? Building World Labs: Team and Vision
41:55 ? The North Star: Measuring Success in Spatial Intelligence

Resources:

Learn more about World Labs: https://www.worldlabs.ai

Learn more about Marble: https://Marble.WorldLabs.ai

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The Empire State Building took 110 days to build?today, changing a window would take two years. 

Alex Rampell (a16z) and Varun Krishna (Rocket CEO) expose how asset inflation turned housing from the American Dream into a wealth transfer machine where the median homebuyer age jumped from 30 to 38 in just fourteen years. While Silicon Valley burns billions on products people use daily but never pay for, Rocket quietly assembled a $10 billion profit engine and is now buying up the entire housing funnel?from Redfin's 50 million monthly searchers to one in six US mortgages?betting they can crack the code everyone else gave up on: turning a once-in-a-lifetime transaction into an everyday relationship.

Resources:

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Grant Lee was told Gamma was "the worst idea ever heard" by an investor who hung up mid-Zoom?yet he built it to 100 million users and $100M ARR without spending a dollar on advertising.

While competitors hired aggressively, Grant's team of seven refused to grow, dedicating 25% of their tiny team to design and personally onboarding every influencer themselves. 

They reveal how ignoring AI for their first two years, then orchestrating multiple models in ways the frontier labs can't replicate, let them steal the presentation market from Microsoft and Google?going from 60,000 signups in eight months to 50,000 per day.

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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 credentials, and the strategic decision to own the editor when conventional wisdom said it was impossible.

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The regulatory environment has completely inverted. Stablecoins are now a top 20 holder of US treasuries. Every major bank wants in. In a16z Crypto's 2025 State of Crypto report, Daren Matsuoka (Head of Data) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO) reveal how crypto hit $4 trillion market cap while fundamentally reshaping how institutions think about payments, with surprising data on why developers aren't following prices this cycle and what privacy's inevitable rise means for mainstream adoption.

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Adam D?Angelo (Quora/Poe) thinks we're 5 years from automating remote work. Amjad Masad (Replit) thinks we're brute-forcing intelligence without understanding it.

In this conversation, two technical founders who are building the AI future disagree on almost everything: whether LLMs are hitting limits, if we're anywhere close to AGI, and what happens when entry-level jobs disappear but experts remain irreplaceable. They dig into the uncomfortable reality that AI might create a "missing middle" in the job market, why everyone in SF is suddenly too focused on getting rich to do weird experiments, and whether consciousness research has been abandoned for prompt engineering.

Plus: Why coding agents can now run for 20+ hours straight, the return of the "sovereign individual" thesis, and the surprising sophistication of everyday users juggling multiple AIs.

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Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg join a16z?s Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Vineeta Agarwala to share how the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is building the computational tools that will accelerate the cure, prevention, and management of all disease by century's end. They explain why basic science needs $100 million-scale projects that traditional NIH grants can't fund, how their Cell Atlas became biology's missing periodic table with millions of cells catalogued in open-source format, and why their new virtual cell models will let scientists test high-risk hypotheses in silico before investing in expensive wet lab work. Plus: the organizational shift unifying the Biohub under AI leadership, what happens when biologists and engineers sit side-by-side, and why modern biology labs are expanding compute instead of square footage.

Timestamps:

4:17 - Building tools to accelerate scientific discovery

5:47 - The credible path to funding basic science

7:21 - Biohub = Frontier Biology + Frontier AI

9:05 - Challenges building on a 10-15 year timeline

9:43 - How CZI chooses what to work on

11:15 - Making sense of science with LLMs

11:31 - Measuring success in the therapeutic realm

13:32 - ?Most diseases should be thought of as rare diseases?

15:39 - Inspiration: building a periodic table for biology

19:27 - Why virtual cells?

21:17 - The Biohub Master Plan

21:51 - How virtual cell models allow more risk taking

28:15 - Bringing CZI & Biohub together

30:32 - Why Biohub matters

33:36 - The importance of interface design in democratizing scientific discovery

35:34 - How Biohub encourages cross-functional collaboration
40:38 - Looking ahead: the broader impact of AI on biotech

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Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Wabi and AI pioneer behind Replika, joins Erik, Anish, and Justine to reveal how personal software will transform from a developer monopoly to a creative medium for all. She exposes why command-line AI interfaces are the new MS-DOS, explains how mini-apps will become as shareable as TikToks, and details her decade-long journey from training language models in 2012 to building the platform where your mom can create custom apps in minutes. Plus: untold stories from OpenAI's apartment days and why voice-only devices completely miss the point.

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ElevenLabs CEO and co?founder Mati Staniszewski joins Jennifer Li to explain how the team ships research?grade AI at lightning speed?from text?to?speech and fully licensed AI music to real?time voice agents?and why voice is the next interface for human?computer interaction. He shares the small, autonomous team model, global hiring approach, and how the Voice Marketplace has paid creators over $10M while evolving into an enterprise platform.

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David Sacks, White House AI and Crypto Czar, joins Marc, Ben, and Erik to explore what's really happening inside the Trump administration's AI and crypto strategy. They expose the regulatory capture playbook being pushed by certain AI companies, explain why open source is America's secret weapon, and detail the infrastructure crisis that could determine who wins the global AI race.

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As global tensions rise, AI and autonomy are transforming how nations prepare for conflict.

In this episode, Horacio Rozanski, CEO of Booz Allen Hamilton and Gary Shield, CEO of Shield AI join Erik Torenberg to discuss how technology, speed, and public?private partnerships are reshaping America?s defense strategy.

They cover lessons from Ukraine and Taiwan, the rise of autonomous systems, and why the future of warfare will be defined by software, agility, and innovation.

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In this closing keynote from a16z?s Runtime conference, General Partner Erik Torenberg speaks with our firm?s cofounders, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on highlights from throughout the conference, the current state of LLM capabilities, and why despite huge capex, AI is not a bubble.

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In this conversation from a16z?s Runtime conference, Gavin Baker, Managing Partner and CIO of Atreides Management, joins David George, General Partner at a16z, to unpack the macro view of AI: the trillion-dollar data center buildout, the new economics of GPUs, and what this boom means for investors, founders, and the global economy.

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AI isn?t just changing software, it?s causing the biggest buildout of physical infrastructure in modern history.

In this episode, Raghu Raghuram (a16z) speaks with Amin Vahdat, VP and GM of AI and Infrastructure at Google, and Jeetu Patel, President and Chief Product Officer at Cisco, about the unprecedented scale of what?s being built ? from chips to power grids to global data centers.

They discuss the new ?AI industrial revolution,? where power, compute, and network are the new scarce resources; how geopolitical competition is shaping chip design and data center placement; and why the next generation of AI infrastructure will demand co-design across hardware, software, and networking.

The conversation also covers how enterprises will adapt, why we?re still in the earliest phase of this CapEx supercycle, and how AI inference, reinforcement learning, and multi-site computing will transform how systems are built and run.

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Google DeepMind?s new image model Nano Banana took the internet by storm.

In this episode, we sit down with Principal Scientist Oliver Wang and Group Product Manager Nicole Brichtova to discuss how Nano Banana was created, why it?s so viral, and the future of image and video editing.

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From Netscape to VMware, Raghu Raghuram has been at the center of nearly every major inflection point in enterprise technology.

In this episode, Raghu joins Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado and David George to reflect on the early internet wars with Microsoft, how Netscape?s browser battles shaped a generation of founders, and the inside story of one of the most successful tech acquisitions in history, VMware?s $1.3B purchase of Nicira, which redefined modern networking and grew into a multi-billion-dollar business.

They discuss how VMware scaled from tens of millions to over $13 billion in revenue, what it took to outlast the cloud revolution, and why AI is now triggering the biggest infrastructure reset since virtualization. Raghu shares his vision for the next decade ? from data-center robotics and energy-aware compute to how AI is reshaping both startups and giants alike.

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In this episode of Monitoring the Situation, Marc Andreessen, Katherine Boyle, and Erik Torenberg dive into the movies that best explain America, from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood to Tropic Thunder to Fight Club.

They explore how Tarantino?s revisionist masterpiece reimagines 1969 and the end of America?s cultural innocence, why Tropic Thunder was the last truly un-cancellable comedy, and how Fight Club evolved from a left-wing critique of capitalism to a right-wing prophecy about alienation and identity.

Along the way, they trace the parallels between the counterculture of the 1960s and the internet culture wars of the 2010s, and debate whether we?re living through another great American cultural reset.

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Amjad Masad, founder and CEO of Replit, joins a16z?s Marc Andreessen and Erik Torenberg to discuss the new world of AI agents, the future of programming, and how software itself is beginning to build software.

They trace the history of computing to the rise of AI agents that can now plan, reason, and code for hours without breaking, and explore how Replit is making it possible for anyone to create complex applications in natural language. Amjad explains how RL unlocked reasoning for modern models, why verification loops changed everything, whether LLMs are hitting diminishing returns ? and if ?good enough? AI might actually block progress toward true general intelligence.

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In this episode, a16z's Anish Acharya joins Kevin Rose for an in-depth, fast-paced conversation on the rebirth of consumer technology, and how AI is reshaping what it means to build, invest, and create.

They talk about why AI has reignited the consumer renaissance, what it means to build ?weird and working? products, and how the next wave of apps will blend emotion, utility, and creativity in entirely new ways. From AI companions and ?emotional interfaces? to the tools making it possible to build entire startups solo, Kevin and Anish explore what?s emerging at the edge of culture and code.

This is a conversation about the future of creation, where consumer tech meets human feeling, and why the next big ideas will come from people bold enough to be weird.

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Augusto Marietti, CEO and cofounder of Kong, has one of the most remarkable founder stories in Silicon Valley history.

In this conversation with Martin Casado, Aghi shares how he went from a garage in Milan to building one of the world?s leading API infrastructure companies, surviving years of rejection, living in the U.S. on $1,000 a month, and raising his first $50K while sleeping on Travis Kalanick?s couch. 

They talk about the near-death moments that defined Kong?s journey, the seven-year grind before breakout success, and how APIs became the ?assembly line of software.? Aghi also explains how Kong evolved into the backbone of modern API and AI connectivity, and why the coming wave of AI agents will make APIs more essential than ever.

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Reid Hoffman has been at the center of every major tech shift, from co-founding LinkedIn and helping build PayPal to investing early in OpenAI. In this conversation, he looks ahead to the next transformation: how artificial intelligence will reshape work, science, and what it means to be human.

In this episode, Reid joins Erik Torenberg and Alex Rampell to talk about what AI means for human progress, where Silicon Valley?s blind spots lie, and why the biggest breakthroughs will come from outside the obvious productivity apps. They discuss why reasoning still limits today?s AI, whether consciousness is required for true intelligence, and how to design systems that augment, not replace, people.

Reid also reflects on LinkedIn?s durability, the next generation of AI-native companies, and what friendship and purpose mean in an era where machines can simulate almost anything. This is a sweeping, high-level conversation at the intersection of technology, philosophy, and humanity.

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Hollywood is going through a major cultural and creative reset, and Marc Andreessen thinks it?s long overdue.

In this episode of Monitoring the Situation, Marc joins Erik Torenberg and Katherine Boyle to dissect the past decade of filmmaking, from the rise of ?the message? in every movie to the return of genuine comedy and art. They cover the post-woke shift in Hollywood, the financial collapse of the streaming era, and why AI could spark a renaissance for a new generation of independent filmmakers.

Marc also shares his favorite recent films (and the ones he thinks aged terribly), why Edington might be the first true ?Capital-A Art? film in years, and how AI could democratize storytelling the way digital cameras did in the 1990s.

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From politics to technology to real estate, Keith Rabois has bold predictions for America?s next decade.

In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, Keith breaks down why he believes the U.S. is entering a new economic expansion driven by AI, productivity, and sovereign technology. They discuss how AI could lift GDP growth to 5%, why sovereign AI projects are inevitable, and why America can ?grow its way out? of debt.

Keith also shares his takes on Trump?s second term, the decline of legacy institutions, OpenAI?s dominance, the future of Google and Microsoft, and how startups like Ramp and Opendoor are rewriting the rules of fintech and housing.

Resources:

Follow Keith on X: https://x.com/rabois

Follow Alex on X: https://x.com/arampell

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Ben Horowitz founded Loudcloud in the middle of the dot-com bust and sold it for $1.6 billion, then led Andreessen Horowitz from its founding to $46 billion in committed capital. Ali Ghodsi co-founded Databricks, stepped in as CEO during a crisis, and led it to a valuation of over $100 billion.

In this episode of ?Boss Talk?, Ben and Ali join a16z General Partners Sarah Wang and Erik Torenberg to share founder war stories, how to hire and make deals, how to keep culture intense without burning employees out, and why founders should raise their ambitions even higher.

Resources:
Follow Ali on X: https://x.com/alighodsi

Learn more about Databricks: https://www.databricks.com/

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Nathan Labenz is one of the clearest voices analyzing where AI is headed, pairing sharp technical analysis with his years of work on The Cognitive Revolution.

In this episode, Nathan joins a16z?s Erik Torenberg to ask a pressing question: is AI progress actually slowing down, or are we just getting used to the breakthroughs? They discuss the debate over GPT-5, the state of reasoning and automation, the future of agents and engineering work, and how we can build a positive vision for where AI goes next.

Resources:

Follow Nathan on X: https://x.com/labenz

Listen to the Cognitive Revolution: https://open.spotify.com/show/6yHyok3M3BjqzR0VB5MSyk

Watch Cognitive Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/@CognitiveRevolutionPodcast

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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From GPT-1 to GPT-5, LLMs have made tremendous progress in modeling human language. But can they go beyond that to make new discoveries and move the needle on scientific progress?

We sat down with distinguished Columbia CS professor Vishal Misra to discuss this, plus why chain-of-thought reasoning works so well, what real AGI would look like, and what actually causes hallucinations.

Resources:

Follow Dr. Misra on X: https://x.com/vishalmisra

Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Zach Dell is founder and CEO of Base Power, an energy tech company that builds affordable, reliable power via home batteries.

In this episode of Monitoring the Situation, a16z General Partners Erik Torenberg, Katherine Boyle, and Erin Price-Wright sit down with Zach to discuss the current state of home power generation, what?s misunderstood about the data center buildout, and how to fix the US electricity grid. Plus, Erik and Katherine talk with a16z crypto CTO Eddy Lazzarin about Silicon Valley?s favorite Dark Enlightenment philosopher, Nick Land.

Resources:

Follow Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyle

Follow Eddy on X: https://x.com/eddylazzarin

Follow Zach on X: https://x.com/ZachBDell

Learn more about Base Power: https://www.basepowercompany.com/

Learn more about Nick Land: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/who-is-nick-land

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Sam Altman has led OpenAI from its founding as a research nonprofit in 2015 to becoming the most valuable startup in the world ten years later.

In this episode, a16z Cofounder Ben Horowitz and General Partner Erik Torenberg sit down with Sam to discuss the core thesis behind OpenAI?s disparate bets, why they released Sora, how they use models internally, the best AI evals, and where we?re going from here.

Resources:

Follow Sam on X: https://x.com/sama

Follow OpenAI on X: https://x.com/openai

Learn more about OpenAI: https://openai.com/

Try Sora: https://sora.com/

Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Opendoor is trying to make it easier to buy a home. Kaz Nejatian just joined as CEO to help them succeed.

In this episode, a16z General Partners Alex Rampell and Erik Torenberg sit down with Kaz to cover all things real estate and marketplaces. They cover Kaz?s vision for Opendoor, the problem with copying the hedge fund model, how to build through economic downturns, and the importance of ambition and long-term thinking.

Resources:

Follow Kaz on X: https://x.com/CanadaKaz

Follow Alex on X: https://x.com/arampell

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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From high-speed rail to electric cars to batteries to AI, it?s clear that China can operate with incredible speed at massive scale. Can the US still compete?

We sat down with Dan Wang, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of ?Breakneck: China?s Quest to Engineer the Future? to discuss.

Timecodes: 

0:00  Introduction

1:36   Lawyers vs. Engineers: Cultural and Economic Differences

4:06  Urban and Rural Life: Comparing Infrastructure

7:20  Barriers to Progress: Regulation and Governance

11:00  Industrial Policy and Public-Private Partnerships

14:20  The Double-Edged Sword of Legal and Engineering Mindsets

16:50  Social Engineering and Policy in China

23:00  Competition, Intellectual Property, and Business Culture

27:10  Manufacturing, Scale, and Global Supply Chains

36:00  Lessons from Japan and Korea

41:30  Complacency, Quality, and the Future of Competition

48:45  Strategic Resources and Industrial Policy

54:00  Foreign Policy: Engineering Diplomacy vs. Alliances

59:00  Taiwan, Demographics, and the Future of US-China Relations

Resources:

Follow Dan on X: https://x.com/danwwang

Read Dan?s blog: https://danwang.co/

Buy Breakneck on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1324106034/

Follow Steven on X: 

https://x.com/stevesi

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Two trends in media have been abundantly clear since 2020: legacy media is dying, and independent media is rising.

a16z General Partners Erik Torenberg and Katherine Boyle sit down with Tablet founder and editor-in-chief Alana Newhouse to discuss the great media realignment, why real institutions will outlast the new ?internet pirates", Alana?s deeply personal case for gene editing, and how faith, science, and community can coexist without giving in to government referees.

Resources:

Read Tablet magazine: https://www.tabletmag.com/
Follow Alana on X: https://x.com/alananewhouse

Follow Tablet on X: https://x.com/tabletmag

Follow Katherine on X: https://x.com/KTmBoyle

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Software has fundamentally changed the way we record, store, and share information. Its next act is to fundamentally change the nature of our economy, capturing trillions of dollars of value in the process.

In this talk from the 2025 a16z LP Summit, a16z General Partner Alex Rampell discusses the history of filing cabinets and databases, how SaaS pricing moved from seats to outcomes, and how AI agents will accelerate the trend of the last 70 years of software progress.

Timecodes: 

0:00 Introduction

0:58 The Scale of the Labor Market vs. SaaS  

1:41 Capital, Labor, and Automation: A Historical Perspective  

3:32 The Filing Cabinet Metaphor: Digitizing Work  

3:50 Case Studies: From Airlines to Accounting  

8:42 The Limits of Efficiency: Humans Still in the Loop  

9:02 Rethinking SaaS Pricing Models  

10:21 The Impact of AI on Labor and Software  

11:41 Outcome-Based Software: Moving Beyond the Filing Cabinet  

17:41 Real-World Examples: AI in Action  

22:05 The Expanding Market: New Opportunities with AI  

25:44 Conclusion and Takeaways  

25:48 Podcast Outro and Disclaimers 

Resources: 

Follow Alex on X: https://x.com/arampell

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Ben, Marc, and Erik Torenberg are joined by Brian Schimpf, Co-Founder & CEO of Anduril, and Chris Power, Founder & CEO of Hadrian. Together, they dig into America?s defense production gap: why the U.S. can out-innovate but not out-produce?and what it will take to turn that around.

They discuss why U.S. war games show we run out of munitions in a week, the myth of ?exquisite-only? systems, how to rebuild industrial capacity with software-led automation, financing factories like data centers, and what it takes to create real deterrence in a Taiwan scenario.

Timecodes: 

0:00 Introduction

0:27 Technical Superiority vs. Industrial Scale  

3:59 The Decline of US Manufacturing  

7:23 Challenges in Onshoring & Skilled Labor  

13:27 Supply Chains & Rare Earths  

15:34 Automation, Software, and Catching Up  

17:15 Complexity of Modern Production  

23:34 Strategic Policy & Industrial Planning  

26:37 Regulatory Barriers & State vs. Federal Roles  

35:27 Talent, Data Centers, and Financial Engineering  

38:33 China?s Industrial Policy & US Response  

46:07 US Manufacturing, National Security, and the China Challenge  

52:00 Demographics, Long-Term Outlook, and Closing Thoughts  

Resources: 

Find Chris on X: https://x.com/chris_power

Find Brian on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bschimpf/

Marc on X: https://x.com/pmarca

Marc?s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/

Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz

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Find us on X:https://x.com/a16z

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The views expressed here are those of the individual personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any a16z funds. PLEASE SEE MORE HERE: https://a16z.com/disclosures/

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Today we?re sharing a feed drop from Cheeky Pint, where Stripe cofounder and president John Collison chats with legends in technology over a pint of Guinness.

In this episode, John is joined by a16z cofounder Marc Andreessen and tech investor Charlie Songhurst for a candid conversation about bubbles, downturns, and the psychology of markets. They discuss what makes Silicon Valley so hard to replace, the deep history of the Valley?s ecosystem, and the future of media. From the lessons of the dot-com crash to the future of venture capital and startups, this is an inside look at how big cycles shape innovation and what it takes to build on the frontier.

Timecodes: 

0:00 Introduction 

1:56 Marc Andreessen?s early internet stories

3:10 Silicon Valley, risk, and downturns

8:30 Marc Andreessen?s early internet days

11:52 Investing across cycles

16:30 Can you tell when you?re in a bubble?

19:10 Trust, high-status VCs & preferential attachment

27:00 Venture capital, startups, and investment cycles

33:34  East Coast vs. West Coast: risk and culture

44:00 High trust culture in Silicon Valley

50:00 Why Silicon Valley, not Boston or Europe?

55:00  Company tragedies and missed opportunities

1:00:00 The internet boom, bubbles, and AI parallels

1:15:00 AI?s impact: productivity, jobs, and society

1:35:00 Crypto, stablecoins, and fintech

1:50:00 Public vs. private markets & venture strategy

2:00:00 Big companies, competition, and bureaucracy

2:05:00 Boards, governance, and the Elon Musk method

Resources: 

Watch more episodes from Cheeky Pint: https://www.youtube.com/@stripe

Listen to Cheeky Pint on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/cheeky-pint/id1821055332

Find John on X: https://x.com/collision

Find Charlie on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlessonghurst/

Follow Marc on X: https://x.com/pmarca

Marc?s Substack: https://pmarca.substack.com/ 

Stay Updated: 

Find us on X: https://x.com/a16z

Find us on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

This information is for general educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described in this podcast are not representative of all a16z investments and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by a16z is available at https://a16z.com/investment-list/. All investments involve risk, including the possible loss of capital.  Past performance is no guarantee of future results and the opinions presented cannot be viewed as an indicator of future performance. Before making decisions with legal, tax, or accounting effects, you should consult appropriate professionals. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but a16z does not guarantee its accuracy.

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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Scaling laws took us from GPT-1 to GPT-5 Pro. But in order to crack physics, we?ll need a different approach. 

In this episode, a16z General Partner Anjney Midha talks to Liam Fedus, former VP of post-training research and co-creator of ChatGPT at OpenAI, and Ekin Dogus Cubuk, former head of materials science and chemistry research at Google DeepMind, on their new startup Periodic Labs and their plan to automate discovery in the hard sciences.

Follow Liam on X: https://x.com/LiamFedus

Follow Dogus on X: https://x.com/ekindogus

Learn more about Periodic: https://periodic.com/

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