Folks, I am closing the books on—gasp—15 years at Andreessen Horowitz.
I am still in awe of what we’ve built and do not take for granted these past 15 years, which have felt like 15 minutes in some respects. When the inimitable @wennmachers invited me onboard (I think I was employee number 20-something and thought we were already a sizable firm!), it was to build the brand of a16z and to raise the profile of one @bhorowitz. (Fun fact: One of my first announcements was how the firm had raised a combined $2.7B in our first three years, and one of my last was the $15B we’d closed in January, with now over $100B under management across multiple funds.) While Ben has been a key throughline in my journey, along the way I also had the tremendous privilege and responsibility of leading marketing—first, for our enterprise investing team and portfolio, and later, for our growth fund and portfolio. Both of my boys, now 11 and 7, also came into the world during this time, so a16z is interwoven into the fabric of our lives.
I remain beyond proud of the work that we, the marketing team, did over the years, so much of it unsung and behind the scenes. Maybe this time around, I should write the book and Ben, as he once jokingly told me, would do the marketing for it. To know that the brand of a16z is now part of my legacy is remarkable.
What makes a place is the people and I take with me some of my deepest friendships. You know who you are and I cannot imagine these past many years without you. ❤️ And to Margit, who made this journey possible, so much love and respect for you. 🙏
As for what’s ahead, I’m fully embracing what I believe to be the true ethos of the firm, which is to expect the unexpected. After a tenure like mine, I really have to close this door before I can even think about opening another, so the only plan I have is to take a well-earned break this summer with my family. 🙌
In the words of my own TeamG, more TK!
Looking back at our notes on SpaceX diligence call notes, two things stand out:
1) Almost nobody could see the economics working
2) Everyone was terrified of betting against Elon
They have since:
- Completed hundreds of launches
- Put >10,000 Starlink satellites in space
- Learned to catch rockets out of the sky
- Equipped thousands of planes with Starlink
Congrats @elonmusk@SpaceX.
Today, SpaceX begins trading publicly on Nasdaq under the ticker $SPCX. Congratulations to @elonmusk and the entire @SpaceX team from @a16z! Ad Astra 🇺🇸
Agents will search the web more than humans this year. Soon it will be orders of magnitudes more.
Nearly every meaningful AI workflow, from coding agents to research systems to enterprise copilots, depends on external information as a core input. For accurate and fast web search, leading AI companies and enterprises rely on @ExaAILabs.
@WilliamBryk and @jeffzwang started building search from the ground up in their Harvard dorm. 5 years later they're becoming the default for developers (and agents) in the AI era.
Thrilled to be leading Exa's Series C and to back Will and Jeff as they build perfect web search for the age of intelligent agents.
More on why @JenniferHli@steph_zhang@JasonSCui and I invested in the comment link.
Congrats @RattrayAlex , @StainlessAPI and @AnthropicAI! The mission of making APIs effortless for developers (and agents) is more important than ever
And big congrats to my amazing partner @JenniferHli who is on what I believe will be a generational run 🐐
.@RJScaringe's work at Rivian puts him in the exclusive class of founders who have vertically integrated hardware at scale, and he's running it back at Mind. Congrats to @Mind_Robotics, they are cooking with gas.
Very few founders have built and scaled a vertically integrated hardware company in the modern era. @RJScaringe is one of them.
At Mind, he’s building the robotics partner @Rivian wanted but couldn’t find.
We believe robotics is just starting to enter its compounding phase. The teams that integrate intelligence, hardware, and deployment into a coherent industrial platform will define the next generation of enduring companies.
Real world deployment is not the final step; it forces clarity in every step, from research to reliability.
Mind is setting out to build that platform. We are incredibly excited to partner with RJ and the entire Mind team.
@DavidGeorge83@RaghuRaghuram@jamiedsully@espricewright@JacobZietek@appenz
Anshul Sadana helped build Arista into the defining networking company of the last era.
Now he and the @nexthopai team, which is one of the strongest hardware and software teams in the industry, are building the networking company for the AI era.
Building a networking company that can serve hyperscalers at this scale requires getting everything right: the hardware, the software, the relationships, and the pace of execution. It’s why companies like this almost never get started. It’s also why, when they do, they can become generational.
Excited to invest in Nexthop’s Series B.
More on why we invested here: https://t.co/RO1N6bHwpm
Congrats to @arielcoco, @itwig, and the entire @Navan team.
Navan survived a global travel shutdown when COVID hit in 2020. Their resilience speaks for itself.
We @a16z are incredibly proud of them, and their IPO today is a well-deserved milestone. Onward!
The next computing shift is already underway — and it’s happening faster than even the people building it expected.
@Meta CTO @boztank joins @DavidGeorge83 to talk about how the team is rooted in solving real-world problems — and how this new wave of AI is unlike any before, ushering us towards a future beyond the smartphone.
Boz says AI isn’t just making things faster or cheaper, it’s making everything better. From interfaces to interaction design, AI is transforming how we build — and how we compute.
For more on the future of computing, wearables, and AI-native UX, watch the full conversation with Boz and David: https://t.co/z5OCFUC1KS
“What happens to the billion other websites if they aren’t getting traffic?”
@cdixon raises a topic few are talking about: AI isn’t just disrupting search—it's changing the internet's economic model.
For decades, websites provided platforms with content in exchange for traffic. AI flips this—content fuels its model, but traffic doesn’t always flow back.
As users turn to AI for answers instead of the traditional search, control is becoming increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few dominant systems.
He’s worried about the future of the internet, and what this shift means for creators. To address this, he asks: What new incentive structures or architectures should we be thinking about?
It’s imperative that the US sets the standard for defense innovation, & @anduriltech CEO @SchimpfBrian is leading. We discuss how AI+autonomy are reshaping modern warfare, navigating complex procurement, & evolving natl security priorities.🇺🇸
Link to full video below 👇🏻
2 legends–@AMD CEO Dr. @LisaSu and former CEO of @intel / @a16z operating partner @BobSwan reminisce about competing and innovation in a fast-evolving and competitive landscape. Awesome convo on leveraging M&A effectively and what’s at play in AI https://t.co/Fql9diUqyO
LLMs are quickly commoditizing, and most use cases are fault tolerant. Hallucinations can be a feature.
Autonomous driving has not commoditized. Many players reach 99%, but the final frontier is literally life or death. @Waymo drives alone today.
Inspiring talk @dmitri_dolgov.
@Waymo is paving the way towards a safer and more sustainable future! Awesome convo between co-CEO @dmitri_dolgov and @DavidGeorge83 on bringing AI into the real world 🚗
Mistakes and uncertainty on the road can cause serious consequences. But @Waymo is pushing towards a safer future, by building models that reflect an ideal human driver, who is driving attentively.
Waymo Co-CEO @dmitri_dolgov tells @DavidGeorge83 in the latest episode of AI Revolution how they set the bar high when evaluating their models.
Even in a field as dynamic as AI, we were shocked by how quickly enterprise attitudes toward genAI have changed
1⃣Mostly OAI➡️multimodel/OSS
2⃣ Innovation budget➡️3xing recurring spend
3⃣ Experimental➡️production use cases
🔑findings from 70 AI leaders:
https://t.co/ooffF4aR0w
2024 is the year for AI in the enterprise.
Leaders are nearly tripling budgets, optimizing workloads across models, and pushing new use cases to prod. What founders need to know to capture this new wave of investment.👇@sarahdingwang@shangdaxu https://t.co/EImiEMCD6W
Ten years ago, entrepreneur and VC @bhorowitz published what has become the go-to book for founders, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. Find out the books that shaped Ben's own journey--and why he recommends them--in this list he created for Goodreads. https://t.co/tOpfP6Jlwj