Dr Patrick Van Aarnold

Businesss enthusiast, researcher, father and sports fan

[Dr Patrick Van Aarnold @AarnoldDr]

A powerful message to live by #SundayMorning #ThinkBig #beinghuman #inspire

[a16z @a16z]

Travis Kalanick says a leader's job is to find the line between order and chaos:

"On one side is order. You have lots of rules, lots of structure, lots of process, and eventually lots of bureaucracy."

"If you go to the other side of the line, which is chaos, lack of rules, lack of process, lack of structure... you also get to a place where you're going slow and people are bummed."

"That line between order and chaos is innovation at speed and at scale, and the job of every leader is to find that line. And it's not in two dimensions. It's like in eighty dimensions."

"Go back to launch at Uber... There's a bunch of 23-year-olds launching cities... Nothing would actually launch until it got to a pricing call... It could be eight, ten hours of pricing calls before we launched London."

"I never solved the same problem twice. Once we solved it, it became part of the playbook, and eventually we get to city 20 and that pricing call takes five minutes. I stopped going to them."

"So now I've got one rule, which is that pricing call. The fewest number of rules while staying out of chaos. If you didn't have that one rule, you now have 23-year-olds running around doing crazy shit."

@travisk w/ @davidsenra

[Wayfin @WayfinCo]

The deck does not start the raise. It grades the preparation you already did.

Before you send it, check:
— Does the ask match the use of funds?
— Do the numbers match the story?
— Does every important claim have evidence?

A deck can compress a case. It cannot create one.

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

Entrepreneurship gets sold as freedom. Most days it feels like carrying uncertainty and trying not to drop it. Clarity is underrated.

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

The best founders I've worked with always ask the same thing:
"What am I getting wrong?"

They want the honest signal. The part that stings a little.
That's where the real value sits.

https://t.co/eBrCmYGIia

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

#SpaceX is not just a rocket story.
It's a cadence story.

Every launch created data, trust, learning, cost insight and capital confidence.

That is the real lesson for founders.
Build the proof loop competitors can see but cannot easily copy.

New ScaleSignals piece:
How SpaceX Built the Cadence No Rival Could Buy
@elonmusk

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

Six months ago, the only question a founder asked me was how much equity
to sell. Now the question is which capital to use at all.

I didn't just feel that shift. The market called it in real time.

THE BEFORE (late 2025):

@PeterJ_Walker (Carta) laid out the dilution ladder — seed founders selling ~19.5% a round. The whole game was how much equity to give.

@deedydas (Menlo) flagged the crack underneath: VC fundraising down ~75% from the 2022 peak. The equity tap was already tightening.

THE AFTER (now):

@andrewziperski said, "finance is now a first-class citizen in Silicon Valley."

Shaun (@shaunabe): borrowing against revenue, assets, offtakes — private
credit thriving where equity used to be the default.

WHAT I SEE FROM THE SEAT (the part the headlines miss):

The clean priced round didn't get more competitive. It concentrated — AI
took the lion's share of equity dollars, and everyone else quietly rebuilt
the stack around debt, revenue-based and blended structures.

And the part almost no one's saying: venture debt itself is now rotating
away from software toward hardware and physical, because lenders fear AI
eating the recurring revenue they underwrite against.

So I mapped it. December vs June, side by side — what rose, what fell, and
what it means for how you structure your next raise.

https://t.co/PFf97vfTVE

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

An investor taking your meeting tells you almost nothing. From the GP seat, a first meeting is nearly free — intel, optionality, a favour to a referrer. They'll sit down even when the answer was already no.
Engagement isn't intent. Here's how to tell the difference 👇
https://t.co/iDO3gDjpKJ

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

When growth slows, founders blame the market.
It's usually not the market. It's clarity decay — the slow blur of who you serve, as growth itself dissolves the focus that drove it.
Run the one-sentence test on your team. The result tells you which problem you actually have.
https://t.co/foA38s1fve

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

Revenue quality questions investors are now opening with at first meetings — not waiting for Series B.

Four specific things to have ready before the meeting.

Today's Tactical Brief for Vantage members.

[Boston Dynamics @BostonDynamics]

Everyone asks if Atlas can bring them a drink, but this robot can bring you the whole fridge. Using AI-driven behaviors, Atlas is doing hard work and coordinating its whole body to manage heavy objects, balancing complex contact points with accuracy and reliability.

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

Most founders do not need more investor names.
They need a better capital route.
ScaleSignals helps founders understand which funders fit, what evidence they need, and how to approach them without wasting months.
Start here: https://t.co/K7qEgOlq19

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

Most companies don’t slow because of people or markets. They slow because their operating systems quietly stop fitting their scale.

https://t.co/BdPJwVvkvs

[Rohan Paul @rohanpaul_ai]

Marc Andreessen's new interview, on the future of AI.

"There's like a rotation from software into hardware.

It's possible all the value accrues to the chips, and the energy, and then software is all open source."

[Dr Patrick Van Aarnold @AarnoldDr]

Fascinating to understand the underlying currents of influence.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

This conversation with @bhorowitz gets into sides of his story you don't often hear.

The people who shaped Ben tell you a lot about how he sees the world. His father grew up communist and later emerged on the right after seeing the failures of that system firsthand. He taught Ben that bad government and policy can ruin even the greatest countries, which explains why Ben believes technology is far more effective than policy at changing the world.

Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel) taught Ben that when you are the industry leader, expanding the entire market becomes your responsibility. Ben explains how he built @a16z around that idea and why he set out to build the firm at an unusually large and consequential scale. He sees its role as tied to whether America remains the technological, military, and cultural superpower, and is clear about what is at stake if it doesn't.

Ben's story also includes his work with the Las Vegas Police Department. He explains why he is personally funding new technology there, and how its deployment has led to crime falling by more than 50% while making policing safer for everyone involved.

Ben and I share a deep love of hip hop. We talk about why he thinks Nas is one of the great storytellers of all time and credits him for changing how he sees the world.

Enjoy!

Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
1:00 The US Tech Advantage
2:49 A Solution for Everything
4:21 The Fragility of Success
7:14 The New Physics of Company Building
10:48 "Alchemistic" Talent
12:57 Inequality and the Kobe Bryant Effect
17:01 Automation History & The Future of Jobs
20:06 American Leadership in the AI Era
22:42 Andy Grove & High Output Management
26:02 The Hardest Part of Being a CEO
29:56 Founding a16z
35:11 Scaling the Firm & Early Mistakes
39:19 Broken Capital Markets
41:23 Why We Don't Do Private Equity
43:29 Culture Is Action, Not Platitudes
49:54 Coding & Art
52:08 Learning from Nas
56:36 Las Vegas: The Future of Tech-Enabled Policing
1:01:03 The Kindest Thing

[Dr Patrick Van Aarnold @AarnoldDr]

So imply zoom out at times like these.

[a16z @a16z]

Product cycles run 10-15 years—and AI's cycle is still just beginning.

In this conversation with a16z's David George and Jen Kha on the state of markets, they cover:

- Why December 2024 was the inflection point for coding
- Why "there are no dark GPUs"
- How AI revenue is growing faster than 100% year-over-year
- Why OpenAI and Anthropic added nearly half the revenue of the entire public software industry in one year

...and more.

00:00 Introduction
02:25 2025 revenue data: 693% growth and why unicorns are real
04:25 Why AI companies outgrow SaaS while spending less
07:15 Adapt or die: Coding tools, org design, and electricity vs. blood
13:09 ARR per employee and what's behind the efficiency numbers
21:42 What Fortune 500 CEOs say vs. what's actually happening
28:24 CapEx, debt, and the AI infrastructure buildout
41:11 Private markets, power laws, and where value is concentrating

@DavidGeorge83 @jkhamehl

[Roelof Botha @roelofbotha]

What a fabulous conversation between @jaltma, @Alfred_Lin and @gradypb! I’m excited for @sequoia’s future.

[a16z @a16z]

Marc Andreessen: The VC business is a game of outliers.

"We have this concept—invest in strength vs. lack of weakness."

"The default way to do venture capital is to check boxes: really good founder, really good idea, really good product, really good initial customers. Check, check, check, check."

"But what you find with those checkbox deals is, they often don't have something that makes them really remarkable and special. They don't have an extreme strength that makes them an outlier."

"On the other side, the companies that have really extreme strengths often have serious flaws. So one of the cautionary lessons of venture capital is—if you don't invest on the basis of serious flaws, you don't invest in most of the big winners."

@pmarca, 2014 at @ycombinator

[Boring_Business @BoringBiz_]

This 50 minute lecture from Jeff Bezos in 2005 at Stanford GSB will teach you more about innovation and product growth than most 2 year MBA programs

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Yes

[Ben Botes @ben_botes]

Most scaling problems don’t come from moving too fast.

They come from adding process before clarity, then wondering why momentum quietly dies.