The a16z Show

Elena Burger is joined by a16z’s Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez to discuss the rise of the "borderless founder": entrepreneurs who bring the networks and insights of their home markets together with the talent, capital, and speed of Silicon Valley to build global companies. Angela and Gabriel trace how a16z's international investing efforts grew from early work in Latin America into a broader global network, and why AI has accelerated the flow of founders and talent between Silicon Valley and startup ecosystems around the world. They explore the advantages borderless founders can bring, from di...

a16z General Partner David George is joined by Grant LaFontaine, co-founder of Whatnot, to unpack how a marketplace that started with collectibles evolved into one of the world's leading live shopping platforms. Grant traces the company's origins from selling Pokémon cards online as a kid to discovering live commerce by watching Whatnot's earliest customers hack together sales on social media. They discuss why Whatnot thinks less like a traditional e-commerce marketplace and more like a digital shopping mall, where discovery, entertainment, community, and commerce all happen at once. Today, users spend roughly 95 minutes a day o...

a16z's Joel De La Garza is joined by Nick Warner of Neo and Max Pollard of Cotool to discuss what happens when cybersecurity tools built to defend against humans and malware suddenly have to contend with AI agents. As frontier models become more capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, many of the assumptions underlying traditional security are beginning to break. They explore why guardrails designed to stop AI-powered attackers can also prevent security teams from doing their jobs, why defenders increasingly need access to multiple models, and how agentic software creates an entirely new endpoint security...

a16z General Partner David George is joined by Will Gaybrick, President of Product & Business at Stripe, to discuss how AI is changing the way Stripe builds products, organizes teams, and thinks about the future of internet commerce. Stripe has evolved from a payments company into a multi-product financial infrastructure platform, while a new generation of AI companies is growing and monetizing faster than previous software cohorts. Will explains why Stripe sees AI productivity as an opportunity to build more rather than simply cut costs, including how its internal coding agents now generate thousands of pull requests each...

Ben Horowitz, Travis Kalanick, and Erik Torenberg take the stage at Atoms' launch event for a candid fireside conversation about entrepreneurship, company building, and why Kalanick believes the next industrial revolution will be powered by AI. They revisit pivotal moments from Uber's history, including the decision not to acquire Lyft, lessons from scaling one of the world's fastest-growing companies, and how Kalanick has evolved as a founder. The conversation also explores Atoms' vision for industrial AI, why software is moving into the physical world, what it takes to build enduring company cultures, and why Kalanick believes the...

Elena Burger is joined by a16z's Andy McCall and Joe Schmidt to break down two very different ways AI startups can go to market: the lighthouse and the landgrab. Should founders win a handful of marquee customers whose credibility unlocks an entire industry, or move quickly across a broad market where the ROI already speaks for itself? Drawing on Joe's Lighthouse or Landgrab framework and Andy's experience building sales organizations at Samsara and Meraki, they explore how founders can determine which strategy fits their market, when social proof matters more than math, and why the current...

Anish Acharya is joined by Garry Tan, President and CEO of Y Combinator, for a conversation about how AI is rewriting the startup playbook, why founders should be more ambitious than ever, and what two decades of Silicon Valley booms, busts, and missed opportunities have taught Garry about building what's next. Garry reflects on turning down an early opportunity to join Palantir, why chasing what's "hot" is often the wrong strategy, and why the best ideas tend to begin with people pursuing strange, earnest obsessions outside the mainstream. They also explore how AI changes the economics of...

a16z's Joel De La Garza is joined by Emilio Escobar, Chief Information Security Officer at Datadog, to discuss what it takes to secure a company where nearly every employee is using AI and more than 4,000 engineers are working with coding agents. Rather than trying to block new tools, Emilio explains why Datadog chose to embrace AI early and build the security infrastructure needed to use it safely. They unpack how AI changes traditional assumptions around data permissions, credentials, developer access, and software supply chains. Emilio shares how Datadog uses role-based MCP servers and ephemeral credentials, as...

Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez are joined by Alejandro Maza Ayala, Chief Product & AI Officer at Kavak, to unpack how the Latin American used-car marketplace rebuilt itself around AI agents, with 96% of customer interactions and 95% of transactions now handled by agents. Alejandro explains why Kavak decided that simply giving employees AI tools wasn't enough, and instead redesigned the company's systems, teams, and customer experience around agents. They discuss why Kavak spends as much engineering effort on evals as it does building agents, how its AI sellers outperform its human teams, and an experiment where an AI "CEO"...

Joel De La Garza is joined by Dylan Ayrey, co-founder and CEO of Truffle Security, and Feross Aboukhadijeh, founder and CEO of Socket, to discuss one of the biggest shifts happening in cybersecurity: AI models are no longer just finding vulnerabilities—they're exploiting them. As frontier models become increasingly capable of hacking, software security, supply chain attacks, and cyber defense are entering a fundamentally new era. The conversation explores AI-powered hacking, software supply chain attacks, leaked credentials, zero-day vulnerabilities, package manager security, and why the path of least resistance for increasingly autonomous AI systems may also be th...

Elena Burger and Matt Bornstein are joined by Simon Mo, co-founder and CEO of Inferact, the open-source inference engine powering many of today's most advanced AI applications. Together, they explore how open-source AI evolved from a research project into critical infrastructure, why inference has become one of the most important layers of the AI stack, and what it takes to bring frontier intelligence to developers around the world. The conversation covers vLLM's origins, the rise of open-weight models, why companies increasingly want control over their AI infrastructure, and how open-source inference enables the next generation of AI...

This week, a16z American Dynamism Films premiered three short documentaries highlighting companies tackling some of America's biggest industrial challenges: Ulysses, Mariana Materials, and Radiant. Before watching those films, we're revisiting conversations with the founders behind each company. You'll hear Will O'Brien explain why autonomous underwater robots could unlock a new era of ocean exploration and security, Turner Caldwell discuss rebuilding America's critical minerals supply chain and modernizing mining, and Doug Bernauer share why portable nuclear microreactors could transform how we generate power. Together, these conversations offer a look at the technologies—and the founders—working to rebu...

Theo Jaffee is joined by Joshua Achiam, Chief Futurist at OpenAI, for a conversation on AI cybersecurity, frontier model capabilities, and why he believes society may have already crossed the threshold into an AGI-era without fully recognizing it. They discuss AI's rapidly advancing cyber capabilities, state-sponsored hacking, model jailbreaks, recursive self-improvement, and what happens when AI systems begin discovering vulnerabilities faster than humans can patch them. Joshua also explains why most people have quietly adapted to capabilities that would have seemed unimaginable just a few years ago, and why the biggest changes from AI may arrive gradually...

Sophia Dew and Sofia Puccini are joined by Ruby Thelot, designer, artist, cyberethnographer, professor at NYU, and founder of 13101401, for a wide-ranging conversation about internet culture, AI, digital communities, and how technology is reshaping the way we relate to one another. Drawing on years of research into online behavior, Ruby explains how digital cultures form, why algorithms shape more than just what we see, and what AI is changing about creativity, communication, and identity. They discuss cyberethnography, online subcultures, "machinic taste," AI companions, social norms, internet language, and why Americans often say they dislike AI—even as th...

Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and Robert Hackett discuss one of the most consequential policy debates facing the crypto industry: the push for comprehensive U.S. market structure legislation and what regulatory clarity could mean for innovation, financial markets, and America's technological leadership. They explore the CLARITY Act, stablecoins, securities law, consumer protection, and why both builders and financial institutions are calling for clear rules of the road. Along the way, they discuss the lessons of the early internet, FTX, open financial networks, and why they believe thoughtful regulation can strengthen innovation rather than slow it down. <...

Sarah Wang and Kimberly Tan are joined by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, co-founders of Decagon, to discuss the evolution of enterprise AI agents, why the company increasingly relies on open-source models, and how it is helping some of the world’s largest companies deploy AI in production. Decagon has become one of the fastest-growing AI companies by building agents that automate customer support, sales, and operational workflows. Jesse, Decagon’s CEO, and Ashwin, its president, explain how the company is building enterprise AI at scale. They unpack why Decagon moved most of its inference to o...

Alex Rampell and Olivia Moore speak with Lassie cofounders Steijn Pelle and Frédéric Renken about bringing AI to one of the most overlooked parts of the economy: small businesses. Inspired by time spent working inside dental practices, Pelle and Renken set out to automate the administrative work that keeps healthcare providers away from patients. They discuss how AI agents are changing billing, insurance claims, patient payments, and other operational workflows, allowing practices to spend less time on paperwork and more time delivering care. The conversation explores AI agents, software that performs work rather th...

Justine Moore, partner at Andreessen Horowitz, joins New Economies to explore the rapid evolution of generative media and why AI-native content is reaching an inflection point. They discuss the rise of AI micro-dramas, how creators are building entirely new forms of entertainment, and why the biggest opportunities may lie not in replacing Hollywood—but in expanding who gets to create. They also cover the future of creator tools, AI agents for individuals, generative video, AI "slop," the economics of AI-native studios, and where founders should be building next as consumer AI enters a new phase.   ...

Last week, World Labs announced its acquisition of SceniX, bringing together two teams working on one of AI's biggest unsolved problems: how to give machines a true understanding of the physical world. Martin Casado sits down with Fei-Fei Li, co-founder and CEO of World Labs, creator of ImageNet, and pioneer of spatial intelligence, alongside Yunzhu Li, co-founder of SceniX and assistant professor at Columbia University. They discuss why World Labs acquired SceniX, how simulation can unlock the next generation of robotics, and why training robots may require a fundamentally different approach than training language models. ...

Steven Sinofsky joins Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini for a conversation on AI regulation, open-source models, and what history can teach us about technological revolutions. Drawing on decades of experience leading products at Microsoft, Sinofsky argues that governments are rushing to regulate AI before they fully understand the technology, risking innovation in the process. They discuss the "precautionary principle," why open source has historically accelerated innovation, the role of regulation in emerging technologies, the AI competition between the U.S. and China, and why existing laws may already address many of the risks people attribute to AI.<...