The a16z Show
The a16z Show discusses tech and culture trends, news, and the future – especially as ‘software eats the world’. It features industry experts, business leaders, and other interesting thinkers and voices from around the world. This show is produced by Andreessen Horowitz (aka “a16z”), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Multiple episodes are released every week; visit a16z.com for more details and to sign up for our newsletters and other content as well!
What Happens When a Public Company Goes All In on AI
David Haber speaks with Owen Jennings, executive officer and business lead at Block, about how the company rebuilt itself around AI agents, small squads, and internal tools like Goose and Builder Bot after restructuring more than 40% of its workforce. They discuss what it took to execute a major restructuring, how teams of three are now doing what teams of 14 used to, and how Block is shipping AI-native products like Money Bot and Manager Bot that generate custom interfaces on the fly for tens of millions of users.
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How Radiant and Heron Are Rethinking Power Generation and Delivery
a16z general partners Erin Price-Wright and Erik Torenberg speak with Doug Bernauer, founder and CEO of Radiant, and Drew Baglino, founder and CEO of Heron, about rebuilding American energy infrastructure. They discuss portable micro nuclear reactors, solid state power electronics, why delivery rather than generation is the real bottleneck, the case for modular manufacturing, and whether data centers are actually good for the grid.
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Marc Andreessen on Evaluating Founders and AI's Consumer Surplus
This episode originally aired on The Twenty Minute VC with Harry Stebbings. Marc Andreessen explains why learning from past investment mistakes can be a trap, shares his framework for evaluating founder greatness through IQ, courage, and drive, and makes the case that venture investors should back the person over the business plan. They also discuss why AI is reconcentrating the tech industry in Silicon Valley, the concept of consumer surplus and where 99% of AI's value will actually go, and why the labor displacement narrative is fundamentally wrong.
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The SpaceX and Tesla Playbook for Hard Tech Startups
Erin Price-Wright speaks with Chandler Luzsicza, founder and CEO of Galadyne, and Turner Caldwell, cofounder and CEO of Mariana Minerals, about what they actually learned building Starship and Tesla's lithium refinery, and how those lessons translate to their own startups. They cover decision velocity, flat organizations, critical path management, vertical integration, hiring for high-talent-density teams, and how to set aggressive milestones without burning people out.
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Security, Resilience, and the Future of Mobile Infrastructure
David Ulevitch speaks with Justin Fanelli, CTO of the Navy, and John Doyle, founder and CEO at Cape, about how the Navy is transforming its approach to technology adoption, from running bootcamps for program managers to piloting commercial solutions in months instead of years. They discuss the Salt Typhoon breach that exposed China's infiltration of American cellular networks, how Cape built a secure alternative, and what defense tech founders need to understand about selling to the government.
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Submarines and the Future of Defense Manufacturing
David Ulevitch speaks with Chris Power, founder and CEO at Hadrian, and Vice Admiral Robert Gaucher, the Pentagon's first direct reporting portfolio manager for submarines, at the opening of Hadrian's Factory Four in Cherokee, Alabama. They discuss the state of America's submarine industrial base, why the Navy now needs more than five times the manufacturing capacity it had a decade ago, and how software-driven factories and a new workforce can close the gap.
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The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare
Erin Price-Wright speaks with Adam Warmoth, founder and CEO of Chariot Defense, and Alex Miller, CTO of the U.S. Army, about the power crisis at the heart of modern military operations. As the battlefield becomes more distributed and electronics-heavy, the Army's legacy power infrastructure, built around diesel generators and lead-acid batteries, is struggling to keep up. They examine how commercial breakthroughs in EV and aviation technology are being adapted for the front line, why fuel convoys are a military liability, and how procurement reform is letting startups get hardware into soldiers' hands faster than ever.
Why Every Satellite Needs Earth | Northwood CEO on a16z
Bridgit Mendler, Co-founder and CEO of Northwood, joins a16z’s Erik Torenberg to discuss the critical but overlooked bottleneck in space: ground infrastructure. Northwood is building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth, enabling faster, more scalable space missions.
They cover Bridgit’s unconventional path to founding a space company, why vertical integration matters in hard tech, and how modern ground networks could unlock the next wave of innovation in the space economy, from national security to new commercial applications.
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Inside Palantir: Building Software That Matters with Shyam Sankar
In this conversation, Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies, discusses his new book Mobilize, his commission in the U.S. Army, and why he believes the most important thing America can do right now is inspire its latent heretics to step forward. He also breaks down how he thinks about the SaaS market under AI pressure, what the "alpha versus beta software" distinction means for which companies survive, and why he started a film production company.
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<...AI Just Gave You Superpowers — Now What?
A new paper, “Some Simple Economics of AGI,” is making the rounds—Web3 with a16z we sat down with author Christian Catalini (MIT Crypto Economics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO of a16z crypto), in conversation with Robert Hackett, to unpack what AGI could mean for work and markets.
EPISODE NOTES:
A hot paper — "Some Simple Economics of AGI" — has been making the rounds, so we sat down with the author, covering:
Automation vs. verification: the key economic split Why AI agents now feel like coworkers - What's happening to junior roles and the “codifier...AI, Supply Chains, and the Future of Economic Power
Erik Torenberg sits down with Jacob Helberg to discuss AI, manufacturing, supply chains, and the new geopolitics of technology. Drawing on themes from Helberg’s book The Wires of War, they explore why hardware, industrial capacity, and secure supply chains have become central to both economic strength and national security.
They also unpack what it means to “win the AI race” — from model leadership and global adoption to energy, compute, tariffs, and reindustrialization in the U.S.
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What's Missing Between LLMs and AGI - Vishal Misra & Martin Casado
Vishal Misra returns to explain his latest research on how LLMs actually work under the hood. He walks through experiments showing that transformers update their predictions in a precise, mathematically predictable way as they process new information, explains why this still doesn't mean they're conscious, and describes what's actually required for AGI: the ability to keep learning after training and the move from pattern matching to understanding cause and effect.
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AI Startups vs. Big Chatbots — With Olivia Moore
In this episode, originally aired on Big Technology Podcast, Olivia Moore discusses whether AI startups can compete with the big chatbots, why American sentiment toward AI is so negative, and what she learned from giving LLMs personality tests. She also breaks down where ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are diverging, why Open Claw signals a new wave of agentic products, and what makes memory the most underrated feature in consumer AI.
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Marc Andreessen on the Mindset of Great Founders — with David Senra
Marc Andreessen joins David Senra on the Founders podcast for a conversation about entrepreneurship, history, and what drives some of the world’s most ambitious builders.
In this conversation with David, Marc reflects on patterns he’s seen across great founders, why many of them focus relentlessly on building rather than introspection, and how technology and entrepreneurship continue to shape the future.
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Emil Michael: Iran, Anthropic and the Future of AI at the Pentagon
This conversation with Emil Michael, undersecretary of defense for research and engineering and acting director of the Defense Innovation Unit, was recorded at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. Michael walks through how he inherited a department running 14 undefined technology priorities, cut them to six, and made applied AI number one. He also gives the first detailed account of why commercial AI contracts written under the previous administration created a vendor-lock crisis that put active military operations at risk.
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Palantir CEO Alex Karp on the Zero-Sum AI Race
This conversation with Alex Karp, cofounder and CEO of Palantir, was recorded at the a16z American Dynamism Summit in Washington, D.C. Karp discusses the role of technology in modern warfare, Silicon Valley's obligations to national defense, and why he believes America's single greatest competitive advantage is its ability to cultivate and protect unconventional talent.
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What It Takes to Clear a Million Crimes a Year with Flock Safety's CEO
In this episode, previously aired on Cheeky Pint, Garrett Langley describes how a stolen gun in his Atlanta neighborhood led him to build Flock Safety, now deployed in more than 6,000 cities and involved in clearing over a million crimes last year. He covers how the product has evolved from license plate cameras to drones, real-time 911 integration, and an AI-powered orchestration layer for city safety.
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The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps
Anish Acharya speaks with Olivia Moore about the latest edition of the a16z Top 100 AI Apps report. They cover why ChatGPT is still 30 times bigger than Claude on web, how the three major platforms are specializing for different users, what global adoption data reveals about cultural attitudes toward AI, and why agents, memory, and voice are about to change everything.
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Andrew Huberman: Peptides, Sleep Tech, and the End of Obesity
Daisy Wolf speaks with Dr. Andrew Huberman, professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford University and host of the Huberman Lab podcast. They discuss how the pandemic sparked a consumer health revolution, the emerging peptide and GLP landscape, what the science actually says about focus drugs, and the neurotechnologies Huberman believes will let us write to our own biology within the next five years.
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Atlassian CEO on the SaaS Apocalypse, AI Agents & What Comes Next
Alex Rampell and Erik Torenberg speak with Mike Cannon-Brookes, cofounder and CEO of Atlassian, about how to make sense of the SaaS selloff, why not all software companies face the same AI-driven risks, and how Atlassian is thinking about the shift from records to processes. They also examine the real design challenge of getting everyday users to trust and benefit from AI agents in enterprise workflows.
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Ben Thompson: Anthropic, the Pentagon, and the Limits of Private Power
In this conversation, previously aired on TBPN, John Coogan and Jordi Hays speak with Ben Thompson, founder of Stratechery, about his essay "Anthropic and Alignment" and the broader collision between AI power and state power that the Anthropic–Department of War standoff revealed.
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Ambience CEO Nikhil Buduma on AI in Clinical Workflows
a16z general partner Julie Yoo talks with Nikhil Buduma, CEO and cofounder of Ambience Healthcare, to discuss how AI is transforming clinical workflows. They cover the early days of deep learning, why Ambience started by running a medical practice before building a platform company, and what it takes to achieve high clinician adoption rates at major academic medical centers. They also dig into the challenge of building products when AI capabilities change every few months, the real ROI that's finally converting CFOs, and why this might be the moment to reimagine the legacy EHR stack.
Ben Horowitz On What Makes a Great Founder
On the show Long Strange Trip, Sequoia Capital partner Brian Halligan speaks with a16z’s Ben Horowitz about what separates great founder CEOs from everyone else. Ben explains why first-time founders lose confidence, defer too much to senior hires, and let decision debt paralyze their companies. They discuss where founder mode works and where people are taking it too far, why the VP of Sales is the hire founders mess up more than any other, and why Andy Grove's "constructive confrontation" matters more than most CEOs realize. Ben also shares what he's learned working with Zuckerberg, what Jensen Hu...
Chris Dixon: From Quant Trading to Building a16z Crypto
In this feed drop from the Internet History Podcast, host Brian McCullough speaks with Chris Dixon, general partner at a16z, about his path from 1980s hobbyist programmer to one of the most prominent venture capitalists in tech. Chris traces his career from quantitative finance to founding SiteAdvisor, cofounding Founder Collective, starting an early machine learning company, and eventually building a16z's crypto practice from the ground up. They also discuss his framework for spotting unconventional investments, the current state of crypto regulation, and why New York is becoming a serious tech hub.
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a16z's New Media Playbook
Erik Torenberg, Ben Horowitz, and Marc Andreessen discuss how the media landscape has fundamentally changed and what a16z is doing about it. They cover why offense beats defense, why individuals now matter more than corporate brands, why speed wins in the new media landscape, and the difference between oral and written culture on the internet.
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When Giants Don’t Go Public: Inside the $5 Trillion Private Tech Market
Bloomberg's Odd Lots hosts Joe Weisenthal and Tracy Alloway speak with David George, general partner at a16z and head of the firm's growth fund, about why $5 trillion in tech market cap now sits in the private markets, how that figure has grown 10x in a decade, and what it means for founders, employees, and investors. They also cover SPVs, tender offers, the collapse of legacy software valuations, and why AI companies may be speed-running the path to public markets. This episode originally aired on Bloomberg's Odd Lots podcast.
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Ben Horowitz: RSI, Crypto as AI Money, & Classified Physics
Moonshots host Peter Diamandis speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at a16z, alongside regular cohosts Salim Ismail, Dave Blundin, and Dr. Alexander Wissner-Gross, about whether AI can or should be paused, what happened when Horowitz told a Biden administration official that regulating AI means regulating math, why crypto is the natural money for AI agents, and why the gap between AI capability and societal adoption may be wider than people think. This episode originally aired on Peter Diamandis's Moonshots podcast.
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Patrick Collison on Stripe’s Early Choices, Smalltalk, and What Comes After Coding
Michael Truell, CEO of Cursor, sits down with Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe and an investor in Anysphere, to talk about Collison's history with Smalltalk and Lisp, the MongoDB and Ruby decisions Stripe still lives with 15 years later, why he'd spend even more time on API design if he could do it over, and whether AI is actually showing up in economic productivity data. This episode originally aired on Cursor's podcast.
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Capital, Compute, and the Fight for AI Dominance
a16z's Martin Casado and Sarah Wang join Latent Space hosts Alessio Fanelli and Swyx to discuss what makes this AI investment cycle unlike anything in the history of venture capital. They cover why the lines between venture and growth, apps and infrastructure are blurring, how frontier model companies can raise more than the aggregate of everyone built on top of them, and why the industry-wide gap between perception and reality has never been wider.
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From Copilots to Agents: Rebuilding the Company Around AI
a16z's Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez speak with Carlos García Ottati, founder and CEO of Kavak, about building Latin America's largest online used car marketplace across Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, and the Middle East. They discuss why building in emerging markets means constructing four businesses underneath your business, how Kavak replaced copilot tools with AI agents handling 90 to 95% of customer interactions, and what it took to go flat for a year during the transition before growing four times on the other side.
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WSJ x a16z: The Next 25 Years of Defense Innovation
In this episode from WSJ Invest Live, Andy Serwer speaks with Katherine Boyle, general partner at a16z, about the American Dynamism practice she helped launch four years ago. They discuss why saying "America" out loud stunned Silicon Valley in 2022, how Russia's invasion of Ukraine changed everything, and what it means to invest in companies that support the national interest.
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Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan on Transforming a 250-Year-Old Company
a16z general partner Jorge Conde talks with Vasant Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis International, about transforming a 250-year-old conglomerate into a pure play medicines company and unlocking $180 billion of value in the process. They cover Novartis's platform technologies: cell and gene therapies, RNA medicines, and radioligand therapies. They also discuss AI in drug discovery, the rise of China as a biotech competitor, and what Vasant looks for when evaluating startup partnerships, including his advice on the killer experiments and CMC work that can make or break a deal.
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Balaji and Dan Wang: The Engineering State vs Lawyerly State
Balaji Srinivasan speaks with Dan Wang, author of Breakneck, about China's industrial rise, America's competing strengths in software and finance, and what happens when an engineering state and a lawyerly state collide. The conversation covers manufacturing dominance, the future of the dollar, why both superpowers keep making costly mistakes, and where builders fit into what comes next.
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Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI?
In this episode from 20VC, Harry Stebbings talks with Anish Acharya, general partner at a16z, about the future of SaaS in an AI world. Anish argues that software is completely oversold and that the general story about vibe coding everything is flat wrong. They discuss why SaaS switching costs are actually going down thanks to coding agents, where startups versus incumbents will win, and whether the apps layer or foundation models will capture more value. They also cover agent overhype, the changing UI paradigm, what defensibility looks like now, and why boring wins versus weird wins in this...
How Magic Johnson Built a Billion-Dollar Portfolio in 30 Years
a16z’s Chris Lyons speaks with Earvin "Magic" Johnson about his 30-year journey from athlete to billionaire businessman. They cover the art of deal-making, lessons from mentors Michael Ovitz and Dr. Jerry Buss, why boring businesses often make the best investments, and Magic's sports ownership portfolio, from the Dodgers to the Commanders to the Sparks. They also discuss what the next generation of athletes and entertainers should know about equity, building teams, and taking risks.
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Marc Andreessen: Who Runs the World’s AI?
Cisco president and CPO Jeetu Patel speaks with a16z cofounder Marc Andreessen about why AI may finally break a 50-year productivity slump—and what's at stake if America doesn't win the race. They discuss where value will accrue in the AI stack, why open source complicates the US-China competition, and what's blowing Andreessen's mind right now.
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The State of Markets
a16z Head of Investor Relations Jen Kha speaks with general partner David George about the state of AI and private technology markets. David shares data on why AI companies are growing 2.5x faster than traditional software while spending significantly less on sales and marketing, driven by massive market pull and record-breaking ARR per employee. They discuss the rise of Model Busters, which are companies that grow faster and longer than anyone would have modeled, like the iPhone. They also highlight real-world adoption at Chime and Rocket Mortgage alongside portfolio breakouts like Harvey, Abridge, and ElevenLabs.
Balaji & Benedict Evans: When Tech Breaks Industries
This episode originally appeared on the Network State Podcast. Balaji Srinivasan and Benedict Evans sit down in Singapore for a wide-ranging conversation on the mechanics of disruption. Evans, a former Andreessen Horowitz partner who now writes one of tech's most-read newsletters, argues that the conversation about any technology peaks during the transition—not at 0% or 100% adoption. They cover AI's real capabilities and limits, the politics of technological disruption, why crypto's killer metric is block space, and what smart glasses, elevator attendants, and the elephant graph reveal about how change works.
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Why This Isn't the Dot-Com Bubble | Martin Casado on WSJ's BOLD NAMES
Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins of the Wall Street Journal sit down with a16z General Partner Martin Casado on WSJ’s Bold Names to ask whether the AI spending boom is a bubble waiting to burst. Martin explains why the fundamentals differ dramatically from the dot-com era—when WorldCom had $40 billion in debt versus today's tech giants with hundreds of billions on their balance sheets—and why a speculative valuation correction shouldn't be confused with systemic collapse. They also discuss where a16z sees opportunity in the "long tail" of AI companies beyond the state-of-the-art large language models.
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Why America’s Health Crisis Is an Incentive Problem
a16z general partner Erik Torenberg speaks with Justin Mares, founder and CEO of TrueMed. They discuss why American health outcomes are so poor compared to the rest of the developed world, how crop subsidies created a food system that "systematically outputs unhealthy people," and what it would take to treat the chronic disease crisis as a national security issue. Mares explains how TrueMed allows people to spend tax-free HSA and FSA dollars on lifestyle interventions like gym memberships, sleep aids, and healthier food—and why he believes this could redirect hundreds of billions of dollars toward prevention. They al...
