Explore every episode of the podcast AI + a16z

Yoko Li and Justine Moore speak with Ideogram founder and CEO Mohammad Norouzi about image generation models, design workflows, and the evolving relationship between AI and creative work.

The conversation covers Ideogram's decision to release an open-weight model, the challenges of generating text and layouts within images, and why controllability has become an increasingly important area of research. They discuss prompting, customization, editing, and the tradeoffs between general-purpose models and systems optimized for specific creative tasks.

Along the way, Norouzi shares his views on open-source AI, design tools, agentic workflows, and how image generation models may evolve as creators and enterprises seek greater control over their outputs.

Resources:

Follow Mohammad Norouzi on X: https://x.com/mo_norouzi

Follow Yoko Li on X: https://x.com/stuffyokodraws

Follow Justine Moore on X: https://x.com/venturetwins

Stay Updated:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!

Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z](https://x.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details, please see http://a16z.com/disclosures. 

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sarah Wang speaks with Exa cofounder and CEO Will Bryk about building search infrastructure for the AI era.

The conversation covers Exa’s origins, why traditional search engines were not designed for AI agents, and how search changes when the user is no longer a human but an autonomous system. They discuss retrieval, agent workflows, coding agents, data access, and why search may become a foundational layer for the emerging agent economy.

Along the way, Bryk shares his views on AI-native products, the future of information discovery, and why some of the most important problems in technology can ultimately be framed as search problems.

Resources:

Find Will on X: https://x.com/WilliamBryk

Find Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Martin Casado speaks with George Fraser, cofounder and CEO of Fivetran, about the future of data infrastructure in the age of AI.

The conversation covers Fivetran’s merger with dbt, the changing role of data platforms, and why Fraser believes many companies are overestimating the threat AI poses to enterprise software. They discuss open data access, the backlash against AI agents accessing systems of record, and why businesses still need centralized data foundations even as agent-based workflows become more common.

Along the way, Fraser shares his views on data gravity, coding agents, enterprise AI adoption, and how AI is changing the way software companies build and operate products.

Resources

Follow George Fraser on X: https://x.com/frasergeorgew

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Recorded live at the a16z Fintech Connect conference in Deer Valley, Alex Rampell speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at a16z, about how AI has rewritten the fundamental rules of software competition, why crypto infrastructure will become essential in an AI-dominated world, and what the future holds for venture capital.

Follow Alex Rampell on X: https://twitter.com/arampell

Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Sophie Buonassisi speaks with Jennifer Li, general partner at a16z, about why infrastructure is becoming one of the most important areas in AI. They discuss how the shift to AI-native systems is reshaping everything from storage and compute to developer tooling and orchestration.

The conversation explores early insights from companies like ElevenLabs, why distribution has become the defining advantage in AI, and how founders can think about product, research, and go-to-market in a rapidly evolving landscape. Jennifer also shares her perspective on creative tools, the role of AI in storytelling, and what the next phase of the ecosystem may look like.

This episode originally aired on the GTMnow Podcast.

Resources:

Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://x.com/JenniferHli

Listen to more episodes of the GTMnow Podcast: https://gtmnow.com/podcast/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Peter Levine speaks with Ash Ashutosh, CEO of Pinecone, about the launch of Nexus and the shift from vector databases to knowledge engines. As agents become the primary users of software, they discuss why traditional retrieval systems break down and how AI systems need to evolve to support machine-to-machine interactions.

The conversation explores how agents currently spend most of their time retrieving and reasoning over data, why that approach is inefficient, and how moving reasoning closer to the data can dramatically improve performance, accuracy, and cost. Ash also explains how Pinecone is rethinking the stack for agentic applications, introducing new abstractions, query languages, and developer workflows.

Resources:

Follow Ash Ashutosh on X: https://x.com/ashashutosh

Follow Peter Levine on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peter-levine-681386172/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Elena Burger speaks with Malika Aubakirova, partner on the AI infrastructure team at a16z, about why today’s AI systems struggle to learn over time. They discuss the limits of in-context learning, the case for continual learning, and how models may need to evolve from static systems into ones that learn from experience.

Resources:

Follow Malika on X: https://x.com/MaikaThoughts

Follow Elena on X: https://x.com/VirtualElena

Read more on Why We Need Continual Learning: https://a16z.com/why-we-need-continual-learning/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Erik Torenberg, Steve Sinofsky, and Martin Casado speak to Aaron Levie, CEO at Box, about what happens to enterprise software when agents become the primary users. They discuss why coding agents succeed where other knowledge work agents struggle, what abstraction layers mean for the workforce, and how data access and systems of record must change in an agent-first world.

Follow Aaron Levie on X: https://twitter.com/levie

Follow Steve Sinofsky on X: https://twitter.com/stevesi

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Matt Bornstein speaks with Scott Chacon, cofounder of GitHub and CEO of GitButler, about why Git's user interface has barely changed since 2005, how GitButler is rethinking version control for both humans and AI agents, and what the "next GitHub" might actually look like. They cover parallel branches, agent-optimized CLI design, the future of code review, and why the best engineers of the future will be the best writers.

Resources:

Follow Scott Chacon on X: https://twitter.com/chacon

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Joe Schmidt speaks with Peter Doyle, CEO of Treeline, about why the $100B managed service provider market is a decade behind modern technology and how Treeline is building a new model that combines human technicians with AI and automation. They discuss the company's growth strategy, why pure play software struggles in services categories, and what the forward deployed engineer trend tells us about AI adoption.

Resources:

Follow Peter Doyle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/peterwdoyle/  

Follow Joe Schmidt on X: https://twitter.com/joeschmidtiv

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Patrick Collison on X:   https://twitter.com/patrickc

Follow Michael Truell on X: https://twitter.com/mntruell

Follow Cursor: https://www.youtube.com/@cursor_ai

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources:

Follow Yoko Li on X:  https://twitter.com/stuffyokodraws

Follow Guido Appenzeller on X:  https://twitter.com/appenz

Follow Joel de la Garza on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources:

Follow Vishal Misra on X: https://x.com/vishalmisra 
Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources:

Follow Amjad Masad on X: https://twitter.com/amasad 

Follow Jack Neel on X: https://twitter.com/jackhneel

Listen to Jack Neel: https://www.youtube.com/jackneel

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 AI

30:48 The Future of Coding

34:58 Significance of Open Source

39:48 Marc Andreessen’s Leadership

44:02 The Only Sin in VC

48:37 Scaling a Lot of Board Seats

Resources: 

Listen to more from Uncapped: https://linktr.ee/uncappedpod

Find Jack on X: https://x.com/jaltma

Find Uncapped on X: https://x.com/uncapped_pod

Find Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Stay Updated: 

Let us know what you think: https://ratethispodcast.com/a16z

Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Alessio Fanelli on X: https://x.com/FanaHOVA

Follow Swyx (Shawn Wang) on X: https://twitter.com/FanaHOVA

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Sarah Wang on X: https://twitter.com/sarahdingwang  

Listen to more from Latent Space: https://www.youtube.com/@LatentSpacePod

Stay Updated:

Find a16z on YouTube: YouTube

Find a16z on X

Find a16z on LinkedIn

Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify

Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts

Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources: 

Follow Samar Abbas: https://x.com/SamarAtTemporal

Follow Sarah Wang: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

Follow Raghu Raghuram: https://x.com/RaghuRaghuram

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Ankur Goyal on X: https://twitter.com/ankrgyl

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Sam on X: https://x.com/sama

Follow OpenAI on X: https://x.com/openai

Learn more about OpenAI: https://openai.com/

Try Sora: https://sora.com/

Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Follow Christopher Mims on X: https://twitter.com/mims

Follow Tim Higgins on X:  https://twitter.com/timkhiggins

Check out WSJ’s Bold Names: https://www.wsj.com/podcasts/wsj-the-future-of-everything

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado  

Follow Patrick Moorhead on X:  https://twitter.com/PatrickMoorhead

Follow Daniel Newman on X: https://twitter.com/danielnewmanUV

Watch more from Six Five Media: https://www.youtube.com/@SixFiveMedia

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 conversation also covers why docs go out of date, what “self-healing” documentation requires to actually work, and how serving fast-moving customers has shaped both their product priorities and their pace.

• Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://twitter.com/JenniferHli
• Follow Yoko Li on X: https://twitter.com/stuffyokodraws
• Follow Han Wang on X: https://twitter.com/handotdev
• Follow Hahnbee Lee on X: https://twitter.com/hahnbeelee

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 inference layer that can run any model, on any chip, efficiently.

Follow Matt Bornstein on X: https://twitter.com/BornsteinMatt

Follow Simon Mo on X: https://twitter.com/simon_mo_

Follow Woosuk Kwon on X: https://twitter.com/woosuk_k

Follow vLLM on X: https://twitter.com/vllm_project

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 accounting for certain AI use cases, any new laws should be evidence-based, clearly defining marginal risks and the optimal approach to target harms directly. 

In this conversation, we go deeper on what that principle means in practice with Martin Casado, general partner at a16z where he leads the firm’s infrastructure practice and invests in advanced AI systems and foundational compute. Martin has lived through multiple platform shifts–as a researcher where he worked on large-scale simulations for the Department of Defense before working with the intelligence community on networking and cybersecurity, a pioneer of software-defined networking at Stanford, and the cofounder and CTO of Nicira, which was acquired by VMware–giving him a rare perspective on how breakthrough technologies are governed as they develop and scale. 

Martin joins Jai Ramaswamy and Matt Perault to discuss how decades of technology policy can inform addressing harmful uses of AI, defining marginal risk in AI, the importance of open source for long-term competitiveness, and more. 

Follow Jai Ramaswamy on X: https://twitter.com/jai_ramaswamy

Follow Matt Perault on X: https://twitter.com/MattPerault

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://twitter.com/martin_casado

Read the a16z AI Policy Brief here: https://a16zpolicy.substack.com/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Michael on X: https://x.com/mntruell 

Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! 

Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z 

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z 

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX 

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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-China tech bans; Nvidia’s moat and Jensen Huang’s leadership; and the future of GPUs, mega data centers, and AI infrastructure.

Resources: 

Find Dylan on X: https://x.com/dylan522p

Find Sarah on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

Find Guido on X: https://x.com/appenz

Learn more about SemiAnalysis: https://semianalysis.com/dylan-patel/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 growing role of open-source models, and why Martin believes AGI debates often obscure more meaningful questions about how technology actually creates value.

Follow Mario Gabriele

X: https://x.com/mariogabriele

https://www.generalist.com/

Follow Martin Casado:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martincasado/

X: https://x.com/martin_casado

The Generalist Substack: https://www.generalist.com/

The Generalist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TheGeneralistPodcast

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/6mHuHe0Tj6XVxpgaw4WsJV

Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-generalist/id1805868710

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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—and why she’s building an entire company to solve it. Martin shares how he and Fei-Fei aligned on this vision long before it became fashionable, and why it could reshape the future of robotics, creativity, and computational interfaces.

From the limits of LLMs to the promise of embodied intelligence, this conversation blends personal stories with deep technical insights—exploring what it really means to build AI that understands the real (and virtual) world. 

Follow Fei-Fei Li:

https://x.com/drfeifei

Follow Martin Casado:

https://x.com/martin_casado

Stay Updated: 

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!

Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 responding to them.

If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends.

Follow Shikhar on X: https://x.com/shikharshrestha

Follow Martin on X: x.com/martin_casado

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 slang) to today’s models that discover bugs humans have missed for decades. They also discussed the XZ Utils backdoor that nearly compromised half the internet and why 3.5 million unfilled security jobs might finally get some relief, and how Aardvark could give open source maintainers a fighting chance against nation-state attackers.

If you enjoyed this episode, please be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends.

Follow Matt Knight on X: https://x.com/embeddedsec

Follow Joel de la Garza on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Timecodes: 

0:00 – The problem with dashboards
1:20 – The evolution of data teams and AI’s role
2:05 – Democratizing data: challenges and opportunities
3:45 – The rise of agentive workflows
9:48 – Threads and the changing UI of data analysis
13:16 – Building AI agents: lessons from the notebook agent
16:12 – Model capabilities and the future of AI in data
19:10 – The importance of context and trust in data analysis
24:34 – Semantic models and context engineering
29:27 – Data team roles in the age of AI
31:52 – Accuracy, trust, and evaluating AI systems
37:43 – Building Hex: embracing AI as core, not an add-on
48:48 – Pricing, value capture, and the future of SaaS
55:55 – The modern data stack and industry consolidation
1:04:26 – Acquisitions and owning the data insight layer
1:06:46 – Lessons from Palantir: forward-deployed engineering
1:13:11 – Commitment engineering and customer collaboration
1:17:25 – Brand, launch videos, and having fun in SaaS

Resources:

Follow Barry McCardel on X:  https://x.com/barrald
Follow Sarah Wang on X: https://x.com/sarahdingwang

Stay Updated:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!

Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details, please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 testers.

Follow Ian Webster on X: https://x.com/iwebst

Follow Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 isn't dying to agents; it's being reborn by them, with CEOs coding again and non-developers shipping production apps while the entire economics of software—from perpetual licenses to subscriptions to pure usage—gets rewritten in real-time.

Follow Matt Biilmann on X: https://x.com/biilmann

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources:

Follow Beyang Liu on X: https://x.com/beyang

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Follow Guido Appenzeller on X: https://x.com/appenz

Stay Updated:

If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!

Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX

Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Ryo Lu on X: https://x.com/ryolu_

Check Out Ryo’s Website: https://os.ryo.lu/

Follow Jennifer Li on X: https://x.com/JenniferHli

Follow Erik Torenberg on X: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 English, and the implications could determine whether AI systems remain unpredictable black boxes or become the reliable infrastructure layer everyone's betting on.

Follow Omar Khattab on X: https://x.com/lateinteraction

Follow Martin Casado on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Dylan here: https://x.com/InsecureNature

Follow Joel here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources

Follow Ovais on X: https://x.com/ovaistariq

Follow Tigris Data on X: https://x.com/tigrisdata

Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Pylon on X: https://x.com/usepylon

Follow Marty on X: https://x.com/marty_kausas

Follow Advith on X: https://x.com/advith_c

Follow Robert on X: https://x.com/rengrenghello

Follow Jennifer on X: https://x.com/JenniferHli

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Joel on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/

Follow Ian on X: https://x.com/ianlivingstone

Follow Keycard on X: https://x.com/keycardlabs

Learn more about Keycard: https://www.keycard.sh/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Read the blog post here.

Find Yoko here: https://x.com/stuffyokodraws

Find Guido here: https://x.com/appenz

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Follow Material Security on X: https://x.com/material_sec

Follow Abhishek on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abhishek--agrawal/

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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:

• Why outsider founders sometimes build the most effective security companies
• The “3 V’s” framework for today’s social engineering attacks: volume, velocity, variety
• How Doppel uses reasoning models and reinforcement fine-tuning to cut false positives and improve precision
• Simulation tools like “vibe phishing” to train employees on real attacker tactics
• The shift from manual cyber-intelligence services to AI-driven, software-margin businesses
• Why the biggest bottleneck now isn’t model cost—but engineering time to deliver the right context

If you’re building security products or exploring how AI can automate tough edge cases, this is a ground-level look at what’s working—and what comes next.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 never could. Together they reflect on how AI is changing what it means to capture a moment, why authenticity matters as much as aesthetics, and how the future of photography may no longer depend on a lens at all but on models that know you.

Resources: 

Find Cecilia on GitHub: https://ceciliavision.github.io/

Find Zach on GitHub: https://likesum.github.io/

Find Ren on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/renng

Find Yoko on X: https://x.com/stuffyokodraws

Find Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado

Timecodes:

00:00 The Decisive Moment in Photography

00:33 Introduction to Computational Photography

01:05 Personal Histories and Connections

02:27 Evolution of Computational Photography

04:15 The Birth of Light Field Photography

07:28 From Hardware to Software Innovations

08:52 Founding of Photo Labs

11:10 Generative AI in Photography

13:54 The Future of Photography

14:47 Personalized Visual Gen AI

16:27 User Reactions and Real-World Applications

17:44 Technical Innovations and Challenges

24:11 New Use Cases and Exciting Prospects

25:34 The Essence of Slide Photography

26:16 The Future of Photography: Generative AI

28:58 Authenticity in Photography

32:11 Generative AI and User Behavior

34:39 The Impact of Generative AI on Photography

37:02 The Evolution of Photography Styles

46:20 The Future of Computational Photography

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Resources: 

Find Alex on X: https://x.com/embirico

Find Anjney on X: https://twitter.com/AnjneyMidha

Stay Updated: 

Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16z

Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z

Subscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/

Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg

Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 takes to productionize those behaviors for real-world applications.
Along the way, they explore what makes multi-modal generation uniquely hard, the role of user control in shaping believable AI performances, and why being a founder sometimes means responding to thousands of support emails — at 6 a.m.

Key takeaways:

• How Hedra’s real-time video model blends audio, image, and character control
• Why generative content is shifting from static avatars to programmable personas
• The surprising crossover between consumer creativity and enterprise adoption
• Where existing LLMs fall short in generating emotionally authentic characters
• What vibe coding, hands-on design, and founder obsession look like in practice

For anyone curious about building AI characters, scaling creative workflows, or the future of human-computer interaction — this one’s not to be missed.

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 speed, performance, and user experience. These are core features for a great product, yes, and also ones borne of necessity as the early team obsessively engineered around its meager GPU capacity at the height of the AI infrastructure crunch.

But this is more than a story about infrastructure. As you'll hear, they also delve into sales and hiring strategy; the team's overall excitement over these emerging modalities; and the trends they're seeing as competition in the world of video models, especially, heats up. 

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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, LLMs can make developers more productive and even make their software more secure, but only if developers do their part by maintaining a safe supply chain.

Follow everyone on social media: 

Feross Aboukhadijeh

Joel de la Garza

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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 replaced by “output,” and it’s upending how companies monetize.

This conversation goes deep on:

• What new pricing models will emerge in an AI-native world
   
• Why usage-based billing is gaining ground—and where it breaks
   
• How to align GTM teams and customer success orgs with evolving value metrics
   
• Strategic advice for SaaS founders navigating hybrid business models and incentive design

If you’re selling software today, you don’t want to miss this discussion.

Follow everyone on social media:

Scott Woody 

Martin Casado 

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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.

Subscribe to Complex Systems:
Spotify
Apple

Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here, including articles, projects, and more podcasts.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.