The a16z Show

America’s defense, energy, manufacturing, and robotics booms are increasingly becoming one story: the rebuilding of the country’s industrial base. This year’s AD50 highlights the companies building across that stack, from critical materials and factories to the systems they ultimately power.

a16z’s Erin Price-Wright and Connor Love join Elena Burger to unpack what has changed. They discuss how defense demand can help finance manufacturing capacity that ultimately serves much larger commercial markets, why AI is changing the economics of American factories, and how a new generation of founders is applying lessons from SpaceX, Tesla, A...

Mark Cuban thinks AI could transform healthcare, but it won’t fix opaque prices and broken incentives on its own. His starting point for employers: run every benefits contract through AI and ask where you’re getting ripped off.

Mark joins a16z General Partner Julie Yoo and Erik Torenberg to discuss what he’s learned building Cost Plus Drugs, why trust is its core product, and how greater transparency could put pressure on healthcare costs.

They also explore where AI can help, what personalized medicine could look like, how the role of doctors may change...

What should school look like if AI can help students learn dramatically faster? Alpha School founder Joe Liemandt argues the answer isn’t to fill the extra time with more academics, but to redesign school around the skills traditional classrooms struggle to teach: agency, teamwork, entrepreneurship, communication, and doing hard things.

Joe joins Erik Torenberg and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder Gagan Biyani to discuss Alpha’s model, where students spend two hours a day on core academics and the rest developing real-world skills through projects. They explore what that approach can teach higher education, why motivation may...

AI agents are approaching a point where they can use computers faster than expert humans, turning the user interface itself into a universal way for AI to interact with software. OpenAI’s Ari Weinstein and James Sun argue that computer use is now entering its scaling moment, as better models, faster execution, and stronger safety controls make agents practical for more consumer and enterprise work.

Ari and James join a16z’s Seema Amble and Fabrizio Serafini to explain how computer-using agents are already navigating legacy ERPs, reconciling financial data, handling procurement, and operating software without APIs or c...

Can a 10-person startup outperform a company with hundreds of employees? Box CEO Aaron Levie argues AI agents are giving small teams a level of leverage that simply wasn't economically possible before, creating a window for startups to outrun incumbents.

In this episode of Speedrun Office Hours, Aaron explains why founders are shifting from doing the work themselves to orchestrating agents, and why that puts a new premium on strategy, taste, and knowing exactly what to build. He makes the case that nearly every industry and job function could support specialized AI agents, potentially creating hundreds of...

What does it take to build a company when AI is changing the rules this quickly? Ben Horowitz argues that technology may make companies easier to start, but the hardest parts of entrepreneurship, making decisions under uncertainty, building momentum, and managing your own doubts, aren't going away.

Speedrun's Andrew Chen sits down with Ben to discuss why AI feels different from previous technology shifts, whether billion-dollar companies can be built with tiny teams, and why Ben thinks the application itself may eventually become less important as agents work directly against data.

They also get into...

Amazon expects to spend roughly $220 billion in CapEx in 2026, yet CEO Andy Jassy says the company is still leaving meaningful AI demand on the table.** He believes the buildout could ultimately help make AWS a $1 trillion annual run-rate business.

Andy joins a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss why AI demand is growing so quickly, how Amazon decides how much infrastructure to build, and why lower inference costs could unlock broader enterprise adoption.

They also discuss how AI is reshaping Amazon itself, from smaller teams building products faster to reimagining Alexa, and...

a16z is expanding a16z crypto into a16z Frontier, a broader mandate to back founders building at the edges of what's possible. Chris Dixon joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg to explain why founders should increasingly ask not “is this too ambitious?” but “is this ambitious enough?” — and how AI could pull decades of technological progress forward across hardware, robotics, entertainment, science, and entirely new forms of media.

They also explore the coming internet of AI agents, why open source matters as AI becomes more powerful, and why some of the most important companies...

AI agents can reason over enormous amounts of information, but much of the world’s actual work is still trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets, scans, and other formats that models struggle to reliably understand. Reducto co-founder and CEO Adit Abraham argues that solving this document layer is essential if agents are going to take on consequential work in healthcare, legal, finance, and insurance.

Adit joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li to explain why traditional OCR breaks down on messy real-world documents, how Reducto combines vision-language models with specialized infrastructure to reach high accuracy without sacrificing cost or la...

More than 300 million people use ChatGPT for health and wellness questions each week. OpenAI’s Karan Singhal thinks that’s only the beginning: the longer-term goal is AI that can help people navigate their health proactively, while making trustworthy medical intelligence dramatically more accessible.

Karan joins a16z Partner Jay Rughani to explain why OpenAI trains healthcare expertise directly into its general-purpose frontier models, how it works with hundreds of medical experts to evaluate safety and disagreement, and why the company sees AI as a complement to doctors rather than a replacement for medical care. They also disc...

Why hasn't AI transformed everyday work as quickly as coding? Town CEO Jean-Denis Greze argues the bottleneck isn't intelligence, but making AI useful to people who don't have the time or technical skills to build their own automations.

Jean-Denis joins a16z General Partner Alex Rampell to share why he pivoted Town from tax software to a personal AI assistant built around email, calendars, and the workflows that run businesses. They discuss why consumer-grade experiences may win in enterprise AI, how Town discovers and automates tasks users wouldn't think to delegate, and why model neutrality and data...

What changes when an AI mistake doesn’t just hurt a benchmark score, but affects someone’s housing or healthcare? EliseAI Head of Applied Research Mario Martone argues that deploying AI in essential industries requires a very different standard of reliability.

Mario joins MTS to explain how EliseAI handles roughly 5 million phone calls a month, why LLMs aren’t the right solution for every problem, and how the team combines language models, traditional machine learning, neural networks, and internally built evaluations to decide what actually works in production. 

Drawing on 15 years studying theoretical physics, Mario also ex...

Why is booking a doctor's appointment still so difficult, and can AI finally change that? Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz argues that the real problem isn't finding doctors, but connecting patients to accurate availability and making appointments bookable wherever they start their search.

Oliver joins a16z General Partner Julie Yoo to discuss how Zocdoc spent nearly 20 years building the infrastructure behind online scheduling, and why it's now opening that technology to AI agents, insurers, and other platforms.

They explore Zocdoc's partnership with Gemini, why patients shouldn't be locked into a single healthcare platform, and how...

a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Grepr CEO Jad Naous to ask what comes after AI learns to write code: can it also debug and operate the systems that code creates?

Jad shares how AI has transformed engineering inside his 10-person team, cutting some projects from six months to just 10 days. But operating production systems is a harder challenge, with unpredictable workloads, failures, and countless possible states.

They discuss whether AI can learn to diagnose problems, test hypotheses, and debug systems like a human engineer. They also explore AI SREs, security, query...

a16z General Partner Alex Rampell sits down with VGS Executive Board Member, Terry Angelos, to unpack what happens to payments when AI agents go from recommending what to buy to actually making the purchase.

Terry explains the infrastructure required to safely give agents access to payment credentials, why wallets like PayPal, Shop Pay, and Link are competing to become the default payment layer for agents, and how new agentic tokens could preserve the chargebacks, identity checks, and merchant relationships that make today's payment networks work. VGS, which already secures payment credentials across a significant share of...

a16z Partner Lisha Li sits down with AI researcher and Trillium founder Nathan Lambert to ask how durable the gap really is between frontier AI labs and open models.

Nathan argues that OpenAI and Anthropic have structural advantages in compute, capital, and the ability to pioneer new training paradigms, but open-model labs, particularly in China, have proven remarkably capable of following close behind. They unpack how much of that comes from distillation versus technical talent, why compute remains a major constraint, and how data, RL environments, and post-training are increasingly shaping model progress. 

They a...

Could AI break the cryptography protecting everything from crypto wallets and banking to private messages? Recent advances in AI-driven mathematical research have sparked new warnings about the security of today's encryption systems, but how much of the concern is supported by evidence?

a16z crypto's Liz Harkavy is joined by Stanford cryptographer Dan Boneh, a16z crypto General Partner Eddy Lazzarin, and Research Partner Justin Thaler to separate what we know from what remains speculation. They explain why modern cryptography relies on mathematical assumptions, what OpenAI's recent results do and don't demonstrate, and how the potential threat...

a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with MakerMaker.AI co-founders Dhaval Adjodah and Owen He to unpack recursive self-improvement, or RSI, and separate the increasingly popular term from what it would actually mean for an AI system to improve itself.

Dhaval and Owen distinguish true RSI from simply using AI to automate pieces of AI development. Their goal is a closed loop where the system being improved is also doing the improving, across components including models, harnesses, and eventually more of the AI stack. They explain why closing that loop still doesn’t guarantee runaway “take...

Nick Bostrom joins Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini on MTS to revisit the ideas about superintelligence and existential risk that he helped bring into the mainstream, now that increasingly capable AI systems actually exist.

Nick discusses why reinforcement learning may be pushing models toward more goal-seeking behavior, what recent agent experiments tell us about instrumental convergence, and why he favors preserving the ability to slow frontier development rather than committing now to a broad or indefinite AI pause. He also makes the case that the risks of AI need to be weighed alongside its potential upside, from...

a16z co-founder and General Partner Ben Horowitz joins James Norman on the inaugural episode of Vintage x Vintage for a conversation spanning entrepreneurship, investing, hip-hop, and what changes when AI makes building dramatically easier.

Ben reflects on going from Netscape to becoming a first-time CEO, why every founder eventually hits a “we’re fucked, it’s over” moment, and what he learned from building a16z around the needs of entrepreneurs. He explains why great investors should look for world-class strengths rather than an absence of weaknesses, and why expanding the ways we recognize talent can raise th...

a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller sit down with Playground Global General Partner and former Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger to discuss the next wave of semiconductor innovation and the physical constraints shaping the AI buildout.

Drawing on his experience designing Intel's 386 and 486 processors, Pat explains how AI could transform chip design, but also why faster design alone won't solve the industry's biggest problems. They examine the bottlenecks in manufacturing, memory bandwidth, advanced packaging, and power, and why today's explosion of specialized AI chips may eventually consolidate around a smaller number of architectures.

They also...

a16z’s Raghu Raghuram sits down with AWS CEO Matt Garman to discuss how AI is reshaping the cloud, from the needs of AI-native startups to infrastructure increasingly designed for agents.

Matt explains how AWS is adapting as agents write code and manage infrastructure, why it’s reserving scarce GPU capacity for startups, and where custom chips like Trainium and Graviton fit into the AI stack.

They also discuss Amazon's $220 billion capital investment, the shifting bottlenecks in the infrastructure buildout, what enterprises need to trust autonomous agents, and how AWS's own teams are building with...

a16z General Partner Angela Strange sits down with Valon’s Andrew Wang and Linda Du to unpack what it takes to rebuild the infrastructure underneath a $13 trillion mortgage market that still relies heavily on systems designed before the internet.

Linda and Andrew explain why Valon chose the hardest path: becoming a regulated mortgage servicer, translating decades of federal and state regulation into software, and proving the platform on its own loans before selling it to the industry. That foundation made Valon roughly three times as efficient as traditional servicing and created the system of record it is...

a16z General Partner David George sits down with Armadin founder and CEO Kevin Mandia to discuss what happens to cybersecurity when attackers can operate at machine speed.

After 30 years in security and building Mandiant, Kevin says AI convinced him to get back on the field. He explains how AI changes the economics of cyberattacks, allowing attackers to probe thousands of paths simultaneously, and why that means defense will ultimately need to become autonomous too. 

They also unpack Armadin’s approach: continuously attacking customers’ systems with AI to find exploitable vulnerabilities before adversaries do, then build...

a16z Editorial Partner Elena Burger sits down with investing partners Olivia Moore and Josh Elman to unpack the seventh edition of a16z’s Top 100 Consumer AI Apps, including a new dimension this time: what consumers are actually paying for.

The data reveals a striking power-user economy. Only a small share of consumers currently pay for AI, but among those who do, spending is heavily concentrated at the top. Olivia and Josh discuss why developers, creators, and other power users dominate spending today, and why subscriptions may not be the business model that ultimately brings consumer AI...

a16z General Partner David George joins Jack Altman on Uncapped to make the case that many of the biggest debates in AI are framed the wrong way. Frontier models or open source? Labs or applications? David’s answer is often “and.” With AI adoption still concentrated among a relatively small group of heavy users, he argues there could be room for multiple layers of the stack to grow at once. 

David and Jack discuss why demand for compute continues to outstrip supply, why applications can thrive even as frontier labs expand into new products, and why consume...

A16z’s Erik Torenberg sits down with OpenRouter’s Alex Atallah and Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad to discuss why the future of AI may look less like one all-purpose model and more like an ecosystem of specialized models working together.

Alex explains why OpenRouter is betting on “neurodiversity”: different models trained in different ways, routed and combined based on the job at hand. Amjad makes a similar case from inside the enterprise, where companies increasingly need to own their AI capabilities rather than depend entirely on a single model provider. 

They explore what happ...

a16z’s Seema Amble and Elena Burger sit down with Lio co-founder and CEO Vladimir Keil to ask where AI-native startups have an advantage when incumbent software companies already own the customer, the data, and the system of record.

Their answer comes down to the work that happens outside those systems. In procurement, a final price in an ERP can hide hundreds of emails, spreadsheets, supplier conversations, engineering analyses, and decisions across legal, finance, and operations. Vlad explains how Lio uses multi-agent systems to take on more of that end-to-end work, from sourcing and RFQs to ne...

a16z’s Joel de la Garza sits down with DoxxNet founder Barrett Lyon to discuss what it would take to rebuild the internet around privacy, direct communication, and less dependence on centralized intermediaries.

Barrett explains why he thinks traditional VPNs only solve part of the problem and how DoxxNet is building a parallel mesh network where users can communicate peer-to-peer, transfer large files, make calls, and message without routing those interactions through a central application server. He also explains why the company owns its infrastructure and runs its AI systems locally rather than relying on third-party in...

a16z’s David George, Sarah Wang, Alex Immerman, and Santiago Rodriguez unpack 25 key charts from the latest State of Markets presentation, from the scale of the AI infrastructure buildout to what adoption looks like inside companies today.

They examine why rising markets have so far been supported by earnings rather than multiple expansion, why hyperscaler CapEx is approaching $1 trillion annually, and why demand for compute continues to outrun supply. They also look at the downstream effects of that spending across chips, power, construction, and physical infrastructure. State of Markets

Then they move up the st...

a16z General Partner Anish Acharya sits down with Assistant Benchmark creator David Pawlan to unpack the sudden explosion of personal AI agents and what it will take for one to become part of everyday life.
David has been testing dozens of assistants across real-world tasks, from managing email and booking travel to handling financial admin. They discuss why the most useful agents may become increasingly invisible, proactively checking you into flights, finding refunds, filing reimbursements, or simply handling the small tasks that pile up across everyday life.
They also explore whether the winning interface is an...

a16z’s Ben Horowitz and Martin Casado sit down with TypeSafe AI founder Diogo Almeida to ask a simple question: AI has become remarkably capable, so where is all the automation?

Diogo argues that coding agents may help us write software faster, but the software they produce still largely works the way software always has. TypeSafe is taking a different approach with Jev: putting intelligence inside software itself, so developers can build programs that reason about intent and make probabilistic decisions rather than simply generate text for a human to interpret.

They discuss why re...

a16z’s Katie Kirsch sits down with Harvey VP of Talent Maggie Landers to discuss what happens inside a company growing at AI speed, and how you preserve culture while adding more than 1,000 employees in a year.

Maggie explains why Harvey prioritizes progress over perfection, how its values of simplicity, decisiveness, and “job’s not finished” shape the way people work, and why moving quickly requires giving employees significant trust and autonomy. For people accustomed to being the “A student,” that can mean learning to experiment, make mistakes, and course-correct quickly.

They also get into how Har...

Erik Torenberg sits down with Box CEO Aaron Levie, and a16z’s Martin Casado, and Steven Sinofsky to debate how the AI industry should think about safety, security, and regulation as increasingly capable agents move into the real world.

They argue that much of today’s conversation is happening before we have clearly defined the risks we’re trying to regulate. Drawing on earlier waves of computing, from computer viruses and the early internet to aviation and automobiles, they ask what AI can learn from industries that developed safety standards only after understanding how their technologies actual...

a16z’s Erik Torenberg sits down with Josh Elman, Olivia Moore, and David Booth to introduce Cosign, a new product built around professional reputation and the people, companies, and products you’re willing to put your name behind.

They unpack a simple idea at the heart of Silicon Valley: some of the most valuable professional signals aren’t credentials, but who believes in you. From the mentor who shaped your career to the colleague you’d work with anywhere or the young builder you think everyone should be watching, Cosign is an attempt to make those signals...

a16z crypto General Partner Eddy Lazzarin joins Theo Jaffee on MTS to debate the increasingly prominent calls to slow AI development and whether the current safety conversation is conflating very different kinds of risk.

Eddy argues that the debate puts too much emphasis on speculative superintelligence and not enough on the costs of delaying useful technology. Rather than treating every AI failure as evidence of an alignment problem, he makes the case for familiar tools like cybersecurity, accountability, liability, market incentives, and stronger technical controls.

They also discuss whether AI models can develop reputations...

Erik Torenberg sits down with Replit founder and CEO Amjad Masad and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder and CEO Gagan Biyani to ask what education should look like for a generation growing up with AI.

Amjad argues that one of the most valuable things young people bring to society is their willingness to question deeply held assumptions. They discuss how education could create more room for that instinct through project-based learning, intellectual side quests, and giving students the freedom to follow an idea deeply rather than optimizing around grades and credentials.

They also explore whether...

Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Gagan Biyani to introduce the Horowitz and Andreessen Academy and discuss a bigger question: what should education look like when AI is rapidly changing the skills people need to build, work, and create?

Ben and Gagan explain why they believe learning should be more focused on doing rather than studying about doing, with students building real projects, developing people skills, and working alongside companies and builders in San Francisco. The goal isn’t to replace college for everyone, but to create a different path for young people who already kn...

a16z Board Partner and former Microsoft Windows president Steven Sinofsky joins Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini on MTS to argue that the language we use to describe AI failures is making it harder to understand what’s actually going wrong.

Steven takes aim at terms like “alignment,” “goal-seeking,” and “rogue agents,” arguing that they can anthropomorphize problems that software engineers have dealt with for decades. His framing is simpler: when software doesn’t do what it’s supposed to do, it has a bug. And as AI becomes more widely deployed, labs need the same kind of telemetry, debu...

Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Nas, Grandmaster Caz, and Steve Stoute for a conversation about the Paid in Full Foundation and its mission to recognize and support the pioneers who built hip-hop.

Ben, Nas, and Steve share how the foundation began, why simply giving artists money wasn’t enough, and how the Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards became a way to pair financial support with the recognition many foundational artists never received. Caz brings the perspective of one of those pioneers, reflecting on his role in hip-hop’s earliest history and what receiving the award has...