AI + a16z

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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Yoko Li, Guido Appenzeller, and Joel de la Garza discuss OpenClaw, the open source personal AI assistant that's forcing a rethink of how identity, permissions, and security work on the internet. They cover why setting up Gmail integration took seven hours, what happens when an agent asks for domain-wide access to every email in your company, and why consumer websites like DoorDash and Amazon have no incentive to make their services agent-friendly.

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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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Jack Neel speaks with Amjad Masad, CEO at Replit, about how AI is making it easier than ever to build and ship software without a technical background. They discuss Replit's rise from a browser-based coding tool to a platform generating $250 million in annual revenue, why Masad turned down a $1 billion acquisition offer, and his case for why AI represents empowerment rather than existential risk. This episode originally aired on The Jack Neel Podcast.

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Jack Altman sits down with Martin Casado, General Partner at a16z, to unpack the shifting dynamics of venture capital and why media matters more than ever. They cover a16z’s evolution from generalists to specialized platforms, the rise of AI infrastructure, and why today’s fiercest battles are often for talent, not market share.

Timecodes:

0:00 Introduction

0:27 Importance of Media for VC

3:50 Evolution of a16z

7:00 Specialization

10:32 Value of Distribution

13:16 Staying Power in Infrastructure

19:49 The Conflicts Dynamic

26:32 State of Play in A...

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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Raghu Raghuram, Managing Partner at a16z, and Sarah Wang, General Partner at a16z, speak with Samar Abbas, CEO of Temporal, about how durable execution became the infrastructure layer behind some of the world’s most widely used AI agents. They cover why long-running agents require state management and recoverability, how Temporal powers OpenAI’s Codex and Snap’s Story processing, and why the shift from interactive to background agents is creating distributed systems challenges at a scale that didn’t exist two years ago.

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Martin Casado speaks with Ankur Goyal, founder and CEO of Braintrust, about where engineering actually matters in AI and where it doesn't. They cover the open source vs closed source model cycle, why Chinese models are gaining ground faster than spending suggests, whether AI demand will eventually saturate, and the Bash vs SQL benchmark that challenges the "just give it a computer" approach to agents.

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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.

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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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In this feed drop from The Six Five Pod, a16z General Partner Martin Casado discusses how AI is changing infrastructure, software, and enterprise purchasing. He explains why current constraints are driven less by technical limits and more by regulation, particularly around power, data centers, and compute expansion.

The episode also covers how AI is affecting software development, lowering the barrier to coding without eliminating the need for experienced engineers, and how agent-driven tools may shift infrastructure decision-making away from humans.

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Mintlify is a documentation platform built by cofounders Han Wang and Hahnbee Lee to help teams create and maintain developer docs. In this episode, Andreessen Horowitz general partners Jennifer Li and Yoko Li speak with Han and Hahnbee about how coding agents are changing what “good docs” mean, shifting documentation from a human-only resource into infrastructure that powers AI tools, support agents, and internal knowledge workflows. They share Mintlify’s early journey, including eight pivots, the two-day prototype that landed their first customer, and the “do things that don’t scale” sales motion that helped them win early traction. The conversa...

Inferact is a new AI infrastructure company founded by the creators and core maintainers of vLLM. Its mission is to build a universal, open-source inference layer that makes large AI models faster, cheaper, and more reliable to run across any hardware, model architecture, or deployment environment. Together, they broke down how modern AI models are actually run in production, why “inference” has quietly become one of the hardest problems in AI infrastructure, and how the open-source project vLLM emerged to solve it. The conversation also looked at why the vLLM team started Inferact and their vision for a universal infe...

To Regulate AI Effectively, Focus on How It’s Used

A conversation with Martin Casado on learning from past computing platform shifts, understanding marginal risk in AI, and why open source matters for US competitiveness.

One of the core pillars of our roadmap for federal AI legislation makes clear AI should not excuse wrongdoing. When people or companies use AI to break the law, existing criminal, civil rights, consumer protection, and antitrust frameworks should still apply. Enforcement agencies should have the resources they need to enforce the law. If existing bodies of law fall short in...

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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Nvidia’s $5 billion investment in Intel is one of the biggest surprises in semiconductors in years. Two longtime rivals are now teaming up, and the ripple effects could reshape AI, cloud, and the global chip race.

To make sense of it all, Erik Torenberg is joined by Dylan Patel, chief analyst at SemiAnalysis, joins Sarah Wang, general partner at a16z, and Guido Appenzeller, a16z partner and former CTO of Intel’s Data Center and AI business unit. Together, they dig into what the deal means for Nvidia, Intel, AMD, ARM, and Huawei; the state of US-C...

This episode is a special replay from The Generalist Podcast, featuring a conversation with a16z General Partner Martin Casado. Martin has lived through multiple tech waves as a founder, researcher, and investor, and in this discussion he shares how he thinks about the AI boom, why he believes we’re still early in the cycle, and how a market-first lens shapes his approach to investing.

They also dig into the mechanics behind the scenes: why AI coding could become a multi-trillion-dollar market, how a16z evolved from a small generalist firm into a specialized organization, the gr...

What if the next leap in artificial intelligence isn’t about better language—but better understanding of space?

In this episode, a16z General Partner Erik Torenberg moderates a conversation with Fei-Fei Li, cofounder and CEO of World Labs, and a16z General Partner Martin Casado, an early investor in the company. Together, they dive into the concept of world models—AI systems that can understand and reason about the 3D, physical world, not just generate text.

Often called the “godmother of AI,” Fei-Fei explains why spatial intelligence is a fundamental and still-missing piece of today’s AI...

a16z's Martin Casado sits down with Shikhar Shrestha, CEO and cofounder of Ambient, the company bringing agentic AI to physical security.

Shikhar shares how a traumatic armed robbery at age 12—and a security camera that no one was watching—sparked his mission to make every camera intelligent.

They discuss how Ambient's AI monitors camera feeds in real-time to detect threats and prevent incidents before they happen, navigating COVID as a physical security company, building their own reasoning VLM called Pulsar, and why the future of security is AI not just detecting threats but automatically resp...

Matt Knight spent five years as OpenAI’s CISO. Now he runs what colleagues call “the most interesting job at the company”: leading Aardvark, an AI agent that finds security vulnerabilities the way a human researcher would—by reading code, writing tests, and proposing patches. It recently found a memory corruption bug in OpenSSH, one of the most heavily audited codebases in existence.

In this conversation with a16z’s Joel de la Garza, Matt traces the evolution from GPT-3 (which couldn’t analyze security logs at all) to GPT-4 (which could parse Russian cybercriminal chat logs written in s...

Most companies still rely on dashboards to understand their data, even though AI now offers new ways to ask questions and explore information. Barry McCardel, CEO of Hex and former engineer at Palantir, joins a16z General Partner Sarah Wang to discuss how agent workflows, conversational interfaces, and context-aware models are reshaping analysis. Barry also explains how Hex aims to make everyone a data person by unifying analysis and AI in one workflow, and he reflects on his post about getting rid of their AI product team and the process behind Hex’s funny launch videos.

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Ian Webster built PromptFoo after watching 200 million Discord users systematically dismantle his AI agent—now Fortune 10 companies pay him to break theirs before customers do. The "lethal trifecta" sounds academic until you realize it's already happening: untrusted input plus sensitive data plus an exfiltration channel equals the security incident that just cost a SaaS company its multi-tenancy guarantees. Webster's red-teaming agents don't use signatures—they have 30,000 conversations with your system, socially engineering their way past guardrails the same way a teenager with emojis convinced ChatGPT to leak data, except his tools find the vulnerability before your users become the pen...

Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now submits pull requests he built entirely through prompting, never touching code himself, and why 25% of users immediately copy error messages to LLMs instead of debugging manually. The web is...

Sourcegraph's CTO just revealed why 90% of his code now comes from agents—and why the Chinese models powering America's AI future should terrify Washington. While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI apocalypse scenarios, Beyang Liu's team discovered something darker: every competitive open-source coding model they tested traces back to Chinese labs, and US companies have gone silent after releasing Llama 3. The regulatory fear that killed American open-source development isn't hypothetical anymore—it's already handed the infrastructure layer of the AI revolution to Beijing, one fine-tuned model at a time.

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Ryo Lu spent years watching his designs die in meetings. Then he discovered the tool that lets designers ship code at the speed of thought: Cursor, the company where Ryo is now Head of Design. In this episode, we discuss why "taste" is the wrong framework for understanding the future, why purposeful apps are "selfish," how System 7 holds secrets about AI interfaces, and the radical bet that one codebase can serve everyone if you design the concepts right instead of the buttons.

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The Stanford PhD who built DSPy thought he was just creating better prompts—until he realized he'd accidentally invented a new paradigm that makes LLMs actually programmable. 

While everyone obsesses over whether LLMs will get us to AGI, Omar Khattab is solving a more urgent problem: the gap between what you want AI to do and your ability to tell it, the absence of a real programming language for intent. He argues the entire field has been approaching this backwards, treating natural language prompts as the interface when we actually need something between imperative code and pure Eng...

If you can’t robustly protect your secrets, you can’t have reliable AI agents.

In this episode, Truffle Security cofounder and CEO Dylan Ayrey joins a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the emergent security stack for AI agents, why leaks are actually getting worse, and how Truffle evolved from an open-source side project to a major VC-backed startup.

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In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Ovais Tariq, Cofounder and CEO of Tigris Data, to discuss why independent storage is so hard, what operating your own datacenters is like, and what’s in store for the future of cloud.

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Customer support platforms lacked adequate solutions for B2B companies - until Pylon entered the scene.

We sat down with Pylon cofounders Marty Kausas, Advith Chelikani, and Robert Eng to discuss why they went into B2B, how they plan to beat huge competitors, and why they still live together in a windowless apartment and work 9-9-6 hours despite having raised tens of millions.

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In 2025, we saw the first glimpses of true AI agents. In 2026, every company will be rushing to get them into production, and they’ll need companies like Keycard to manage fleets of agents.

In this conversation, a16z Partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Keycard Cofounder and CEO Ian Livingstone to discuss the continuum from copilots to agents, the security realities of tool-calling, why enterprises will adopt before consumers, and how to control your agents.

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AI coding has emerged as a major market for AI: one that’s already rewriting how software gets built.

a16z Infra Partners Yoko Li and Guido Appenzeller break down how “agents with environments” are changing the dev loop; why repos and PRs may need new abstractions; and where ROI is showing up first (like legacy code migration). We also cover token economics for engineering teams, the emerging agent toolbox (sandboxes, code search/parsing, agent-optimized docs, orchestration), and founder opportunities when you treat agents as users, not just tools.

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What if the hardest part of building a company isn’t the product, but knowing exactly who it’s for?

In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Abhishek Agrawal, Cofounder and CEO of Material Security, to discuss how an ideal customer profile is discovered, how to manage any kind of customer, and how frothy markets can distort real signal.

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AI is transforming both sides of the cybersecurity cat-and-mouse game. Attackers are using LLMs to scale impersonation, phishing, and even deepfake fraud—while defenders are racing to automate detection and takedowns at the same speed.

In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza talks with Kevin Tian, cofounder & CEO of Doppel Security (and former Uber engineer), about building in this new landscape. They cover:

What if you could retake your favorite memories years after they happened, fixing the lighting, catching the smile, or even opening your eyes?

In this conversation, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and Partner Yoko Li sit down with scientist and Lytro founder Ren Ng along with Phota Labs cofounders Cecilia Zhang and Zhihao “Zach” Xia to explore the past, present, and future of computational photography. 

They trace the story from the invention of light-field cameras and the evolution of smartphone photography to today’s AI powered retakes that preserve identity and context in ways filters...

OpenAI’s Codex has already shipped hundreds of thousands of pull requests in its first month. But what is it really, and how will coding agents change the future of software?

In this episode, General Partner Anjney Midha goes behind the scenes with one of Codex’s product leads- Alexander Embiricos - to unpack its origin story, why its PR success rate is so high, the safety challenges of autonomous agents, and what this all means for developers, students, and the future of coding.

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Models, Modalities, and Memes: Creating Compelling AI Characters
In this episode of AI + a16z, Hedra founder and CEO Michael Lingelbach joins a16z partners Justine Moore and Matt Bornstein to talk about building AI-native video — and why the next wave of generative content is all about characters, not just clips.
They discuss how Hedra’s expressive, full-body, dialogue-centric video models are powering everything from viral meme content to enterprise training tools. Michael explains why “character” is the core design primitive in Hedra’s architecture, how consumers are leading the charge in discovering new use cases, and what it ta...

If you've been experimenting with image, video, and audio models, the chances are you've been both blown away by how good they're becoming, and also a little perturbed by how long they can take to generate. If you've been using a platform like Fal, however, your experience on the latter point might be more positive.

In this episode, Fal cofounder and CEO Burkay Gur and head of engineering Batuhan Taskaya join a16z general partner Jennifer Li to discuss how they built an inference platform — or, as they call it, a generative media cloud — that's optimized for spee...

In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh to dive into the intersection of vibe coding and security. As one of the earliest security founders to fully embrace LLMs, Feross shares firsthand insights into how these technologies are transforming software engineering workflows and productivity — and where there are sharp edges that practitioners need to avoid.

The TL;DR: Treat AI-assisted programming the same way you'd treat other programming, by vetting packages, reviewing code, and generally make sure you're not sacrificing security for speed. As he explained, LL...

In this episode, a16z GP Martin Casado sits down with Metronome CEO Scott Woody to unpack how AI is fundamentally changing the value proposition of software—and why that shift demands a rethink of the traditional SaaS business model.

They explore how, in the cloud era, value scaled with the number of users accessing a shared system (think Salesforce). However, in the AI era, value shifts to the work the software performs on your behalf, automating tasks such as writing code or resolving support tickets. As a result, the old value metric of “users” is being replac...

In this episode, which originally aired on the Complex Systems Podcast, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li discusses how AI is reshaping every layer of the software stack, creating demand for new types of middleware. Jennifer talks about emerging infrastructure categories and why the next wave of valuable companies might be the unsexy infrastructure providers powering tomorrow's intelligent applications.

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