Guido Appenzeller

At a16z investing in AI & Infra. 2x founder & CEO. CTO at Intel & VMware. CPO at Yubico. Tweets are my own.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

We have raised a $1.1b fund to invest in silicon, data centers, robotics and related aspects of the physical buildout of AI.

Every major tech cycle redefines the physical infrastructure, and AI is no exception. And this presents huge opportunities for startups. LFM!

https://t.co/SqFDabZcQb

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@yashvkhaitan @united They are not a commodity, just fly frontier vs UAL PS. But their store front is gone already, they are just not wanting to admit it.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

Amazing. @united announces it plans to miss the current tech cycle and stay on the wrong side of history.

To be fair, today it is really hard for a company to do agentic commerce. But this story will age about as well as Barnes & Nobles ignoring e-commerce.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@anuragphadke @united They will do that now as well, except they have to go via computer use. This won’t stop agent, it’s just an inconvenience.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@Lafe8088 @united My bank has an agent api. If they can do it, so can an airlines

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@naman03malhotra @united What? An agent still needs an Authenticator, which is tied to a user account. See GitHub on how it is done. Or any cloud. Or @mercury. And if a bank can get this right, so can an airline’s

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@RaghuRaghuram @mavolpi It was awesome to have you!

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

New Podcast: @mavolpi in the last tech supercycle ran corpdev for the most valuable company on the planet. @RaghuRaghuram and I had a lot of fun quizzing him if this time is different.

[a16z @a16z]

At Cisco, Mike Volpi's team did 70+ acquisitions which became half of the company's revenue during the internet build-out. Now he's watching AI drive another infrastructure boom, and he thinks this cycle is even more compelling.

His view: the infrastructure being built will remain useful even if some of its owners change.

Hanabi Capital GP Mike Volpi joins a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to discuss lessons from Cisco's acquisition machine, Nvidia's dominance, the opening for custom AI chips, how AI is changing data center networking, why older GPUs are holding their value, and more.

00:00 Intro
00:53 The internet buildout vs. the AI buildout
09:29 Financing the buildout, and why GPUs are holding their value
14:31 Cisco's M&A playbook, and advice for Nvidia
22:27 Making acquisitions actually integrate
25:32 When founders should sell, and how deals really happen
31:58 Mapping today's AI infrastructure
38:02 Will we see more competitive AI silicon?
43:45 Why Cisco's boom ended
46:08 Rethinking data center networking for AI
53:46 Why this is the best time to be investing

YouTube: https://t.co/NSF0SdxlEC

@mavolpi @RaghuRaghuram @appenz

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

Agent infra is currently the most active layer in the AI ecosystem, and the most important layer above the frontier models themselves. @venturetwins break down the categories and competition.

[Justine Moore @venturetwins]

Companies spent years battling bots. Now they’re fighting for their business.

AI agents are the majority of Web traffic and generate most code pushed to production. Soon, they'll be buying most of what gets sold online.

New piece with @omooretweets on the B2A economy 👇

[Archie McKenzie @archiemckenzie_]

General Translation has raised $27m led by @martin_casado at @a16z to localize the world’s best companies.

Today, @generaltxn serves Ramp, Cursor, and Sierra by translating apps, sites, docs, slide decks, and even product videos into dozens of languages.

a16z invested alongside @upfrontvc, Peter Thiel, Fei-Fei Li, and more. 🧵

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

The latest benchmark: Proving Fermat's last Theorem.
Amazing. What a time to be alive.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@RAHULKESHR31818 In this case the agent did a push using my GitHub identity, the correct procedure was that in each case I would have had to authorize it via YubiKey.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

Well done, Opus 5.5. The model my security posture needs, not the one my security practices deserve.

[Joel de la Garza @YODELAGARZA]

Our systems are not designed to contain agents.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@RAHULKESHR31818 Agreed, although technically this was for a project with our kids that runs the Reachy Mini in our kitchen.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@nick_farina Why would it be gigantic or even large? Simulation of microscopic scale physical and chemical systems is on the order of $1b today. What are the valuable use cases?

AI always had use cases, it just didn’t work yet.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

For a broad set of tasks, the speedup of a quantum computer is polynomial at best.

Super cool result and this explains partially why we haven’t found many interesting applications of quantum computers.

https://t.co/ggga6l652y

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@hausdorff_space We shall name it Hausdorff’s uncertainty principle for AI.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@nick_farina Agreed, that is the right conversation. Quantum computers can simulate quantum physical systems and break crypto systems that rely on factoring as the hardness assumption. Market size tbd.

Assuming we can build a quantum computer with the right cost/performance metrics.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@GlobalFadi You may want to read the article. It’s about why Shor’s works, but other problems don’t.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@nick_farina That thread is pretty low on contrnt. Yes, do understand we can get exponential speed up when simulation quantum physical systems 🤷‍♂️

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@ouranoscapital I don’t understand, this result is specifically about problems with what kind of structure will see only polynomial speed up of quantum vs conventional.

[Guido Appenzeller @appenz]

@ouranoscapital They need to have a very specific type of structure. So I think "broad" is still accurate.