The Business of Tech

Meet the government’s new tech boss

The challenge is choosing where New Zealand has a genuine edge, then backing it without confusing commercial discipline with impatience.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]

I think one thing that's counterintuitive about compliance is that it's actually a sales tool. If you are compliant, you can sell to bigger companies, you can sell to more regulated industries, and you can charge more.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Christina Cacioppo - Building an Enduring Software Company in the Age of AI - [Invest Like the Best, EP.496]

I do think that, in the long run, there's something like: the companies that are doing the most important work, on the most important problems, with the best people, tend to win. And I think AI is actually making that more true, not less true, because AI is a great equalizer on the execution side — it's getting cheaper and easier to build software. What's not getting cheaper and easier is knowing what to build.

TBPN

50 Gigawatts To The Face, 17% GDP Growth Please, Road to COD 4, Bing Gordon Joins

Put aside the fraud. Like it just seems like like total slop in terms of the execution of that business and gives me absolutely no faith in a Therronos 2.0.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks were making so much money that they didn't need to innovate. They were the Goliath, and we were the David. But what we understood is that in the age of the internet, David actually wins.

Diet TBPN

Inflation Heats Up, Anthropic Investor Day, Tesla Roadster Mania| Diet TBPN

It's crazy that you can be growing at 45% quarter on quarter and still not meet expectations but when people have had in their minds 10x every year 10x revenue growth every year and Anthropic goes to their investor day and says that Q3 revenue was 16.8 8 billion which annualizes to 67 billion

The a16z Show

AI Can Write the Code. Can It Run the System? | Grepr CEO Jad Naous

AI has transformed engineering inside his 10-person team, cutting some projects from six months to just 10 days.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

David Vélez - Building Nubank and the Future of Global Banking - [Invest Like the Best, EP.495]

The banks were making so much money and were so profitable and had so much political power that nobody was able to change them. And the reason we were able to disrupt them is that we came from the outside, we had no legacy, we had no branches, we had no mainframes, we had no employees that were used to a certain way of doing things.

The a16z Show

Building the Cloud for an Agentic World | AWS CEO Matt Garman

Matt explains how AWS is adapting as agents write code and manage infrastructure, why it's reserving scarce GPU capacity for startups, and where custom chips like Trainium and Graviton fit into the AI stack.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Michael Moritz - Lessons From 40 Years of Investing and Writing - [Invest Like the Best, EP.491]

The great companies that we've been associated with at Sequoia, the people who have built them didn't really think about the financial outcome. They were absolutely obsessed with the products and the services they were creating, and the financial outcomes were a byproduct of that obsession.

Diet TBPN

Harvey’s Margins, Are Insects Worth More Than Humans?, Meta Tests Human Help for Muse | Diet TBPN

The hardest thing about building Harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy. The easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins. We believe the most important part of building a company is earning and keeping your customers trust. You do that by doing the hard thing for them even when it costs you.

The a16z Show

Amjad Masad on Rethinking College for the AI Era

one of the most valuable things young people bring to society is their willingness to question deeply held assumptions

TBPN

Andreessen Horowitz Launches Horowitz Andreessen, New Models, Human Powered Agents, McLaren Rebrand

The hardest thing about building harvey is doing what's best for our customers despite immense pressure to do what's easy the easy thing would have been to force our customers into consumption pricing before they were ready and serve them worse models to protect our margins We chose to help our customers transition on a timeline that works for them and give them the best models in the meantime, even though it hurt our margins.

The a16z Show

Why a16z is Building a New School for the AI Era | Ben Horowitz

why failure can be valuable when it produces real learning, and what it takes to develop the judgment and people skills that can't simply be learned from a textbook.

The a16z Show

What It Takes to Build a Startup | Andrew Chen & Matt Perault

these founders rarely have the time or resources to engage with policymakers, even as regulation can have an outsized impact on whether and where they build

The Business of Tech

Blackbird’s billion-dollar bet on founders

New Zealand is like a "Galápagos island of ideas", where founders often start companies not because startup status is fashionable, but because they have encountered a problem they feel compelled to solve.

It's Been a Minute

Hitting the open road can lead to new beginnings | It's Been a Minute

I watched so many things, great ideas die on the vine and I didn't really want that to keep happening. So this was after like, you know, five or six years of just trying to get something off the ground.

The a16z Show

The State of AI: Macro, Apps, and Consumer

the biggest risk for today's founders may no longer be thinking too big, but thinking too small

The a16z Show

How Global Networks Are Reshaping Startup Success

founder diasporas can function like powerful alumni networks, why spending time in Silicon Valley can help founders recalibrate around speed and ambition, and how the next generation of global companies may increasingly be built across multiple countries from day one.

The a16z Show

Stripe’s AI Strategy: Build More, Not Less

Stripe sees AI productivity as an opportunity to build more rather than simply cut costs, including how its internal coding agents now generate thousands of pull requests each week.

Diet TBPN

North Korea’s Secret US Workforce, Canceling the SaaSpocalypse, MSL’s Latest Exits | Diet TBPN

There were a lot of companies that were getting thrown in the SAS bucket as just like a pure pile of code. You could vibe code it. Uh and while that thesis might play out over a few years, it's it was a little bit too soon. it seemed a little bit too aggressive

The a16z Show

The Two Ways to Sell AI: Lighthouse or Landgrab?

the current rush to adopt AI has created a rare window for startups to sell big software again

The a16z Show

Garry Tan on Taste, Agents and Founder Ambition

why the best ideas tend to begin with people pursuing strange, earnest obsessions outside the mainstream

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Eric Vishria - A Decade of Lessons Investing in Software & Hardware - [Invest Like the Best, EP.486]

The companies that really win are not just solving a problem that exists today, but they're creating a new category or they're redefining a category. And the ones that try to do it incrementally — 'I'm going to be 10% better or 20% better' — almost never work. It has to be a fundamentally different approach.

The Business of Tech

Factor’s electrifying, $35 million exit

I think Factor is in many ways a playbook for what happens when people with deep domain knowledge stopped just complaining about the pain points in their industry and decide to fix them.

The Business of Tech

Factor’s electrifying, $35 million exit

I don't think you can kind of underestimate the value of that experience going into a new venture. We went into factor with this very very good understanding of the customer their operating environment, and then we were able to identify this problem that needed solving.

The Business of Tech

Factor’s electrifying, $35 million exit

I think Factor is in many ways a playbook for what happens when people with deep domain knowledge stopped just complaining about the pain points in their industry and decide to fix them. If you can see the gap so clearly, why not be the one to close it.

Diet TBPN

Bending Spoons Buys Airtable, OpenAI Hits Back at Apple, Spider-Man Ads in BMWs | Diet TBPN

Really uh sort of exemplifies the current moment where a company can sell for over a billion dollars and everyone's like, "Wow, that's unfortunate."

The Business of Tech

Factor’s electrifying, $35 million exit

I don't think you can kind of underestimate the value of that experience going into a new venture. So we in our first business, we were part of the team at Flick Electric, which was a cool Wellington energy retail startup, and we built our own retail business, so we got to know what it took to actually be a retailer. We've done it ourselves.

The Business of Tech

Dom Pym’s playbook for building and backing winners

Instead of trying to go around the incumbents, Dom's partnership with one of them was the unlikely secret to getting breakthrough fintech products into market.

Diet TBPN

Big Companies Hiring Again, Anthropic's Open-Weight Position, Zuck Backs AI for All | Diet TBPN

Just because you have coding agents doesn't mean you're not hiring engineers, she said, adding that Lattice is seeing renewed hiring among many of its customers, including for junior roles.

The Week

The Week: China Is Undercutting America’s AI Boom

The pricing of these AI models is clearly becoming front of mind for enterprises, and it is very quickly becoming a race to the bottom. Open AI and Anthropic can only play that game for so long because where are they getting their money from? They're not getting it from profits. They're getting it from venture capital.

Decoder with Nilay Patel

What Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit is really about

This legal battle could also affect OpenAI's hardware plans, its forthcoming IPO, and its already-damaged reputation.

Diet TBPN

Stripe’s $53B PayPal Offer, OpenAI’s First Device, TBPN’s New Business Ideas | Diet TBPN

PayPal is a quote sprawling legacy fintech with 25,000 employees. That's a huge company. Decades of technical debt. Neither Stripe nor Apple would want to absorb that.

The Prof G Pod

The AI IPO Wave Is Coming — Here's What It Does to Your Portfolio | Office Hours

You're going to see that open AI uh lacks I wouldn't call it business discipline, but it's just a drunk spender and their numbers will reflect that.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

The thing that I find most interesting about Etched is that they're making a bet that transformers are not going away. And the reason that's a interesting bet is that every other chip company has to hedge. Nvidia has to build a chip that runs all possible AI models, because they don't know what's going to win. Etched is saying transformers have won, and we're going to build a chip that only runs transformers, and by doing that, we can be so much faster and cheaper that it doesn't matter if we don't run other things.

The a16z Show

Outsmarting Uber: Why Bolt Wins in Europe

competing against much better-funded rivals, and why culture and ambition matter more than regulation.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Etched - Building AI Hardware to Make Inference Faster and Cheaper - [Invest Like the Best, EP.480]

A few years ago, when they set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world, almost everyone I called told me it could not be done. They have since done it, taping out a working chip on their first attempt and becoming the first hardware company founded after ChatGPT to do so.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about company building as: I have this idea, I'm going to go raise money, I'm going to go hire people, and I'm going to go build this thing. What I've learned is that the most important thing is to find the truth first — to find what is actually true about the world, what is actually true about what customers need, what is actually true about what you're capable of building.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

The best companies are almost never built on the thing that the founder thought they were building at the beginning. What actually matters is that you have a team that is so committed to the problem, so deeply in love with the customer's pain, that they will pivot and evolve and change their approach as many times as necessary until they find the thing that actually works.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about building a company as, 'I have a product, now I need to go get customers.' Kareem inverts this. He thinks about it as, 'I need to understand a customer so deeply that the product becomes obvious.' The rarest companies are built by people who develop such a profound understanding of a specific human problem that they can't help but solve it.

Diet TBPN

Snap SPECS, Taste Labs Timeline Turmoil, AI Execs at G7 | Diet TBPN

If a startup launched this product and was able to do the demos that they can do, that startup would be able to raise at I would say easily a billion just based on current market conditions. But they're a startup is evaluated a lot differently of course than a you know public company that has spent somewhere in the range of three half billion dollars building this product.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

The thing that I found, that was quite surprising, is that the best founders are almost never the ones who can articulate most clearly what they do. The best founders are the ones who can articulate most clearly why they do it, and the ones who have a deep emotional connection to the problem they're solving.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

The best companies are almost never built by people who set out to build a company. They're built by people who set out to solve a problem so important to them that they couldn't not work on it. The company is almost an afterthought — it's the vehicle, not the destination.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about company building as: you get a great idea, you find product market fit, and then you scale. But the most durable companies are built by people who are obsessed with a problem, not a solution — because the solution will change many times, but the problem stays constant.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about a company as a product and a business model and a go-to-market. But I think the most important thing is actually the culture and the team, because the product and the business model will change, but the culture and the team are what allow you to navigate that change.

Diet TBPN

Snap SPECS, Taste Labs Timeline Turmoil, AI Execs at G7 | Diet TBPN

If a startup launched this product and was able to do the demos that they can do, that startup would be able to raise at I would say easily a billion just based on current market conditions. But a startup is evaluated a lot differently of course than a you know public company that has spent somewhere in the range of three half billion dollars building this product.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Kareem Amin - The Unusual Approach to Company Building - [Invest Like the Best, EP.478]

Most people think about company building as: I have an idea, I'll go raise money, I'll hire a team, I'll build a product, I'll go get customers. Kareem's approach is almost the inverse of that. He starts with the customer, lives with the customer, and lets the product and company emerge from that deep customer intimacy.

Book of the Day

Theo Baker delves into power and corruption at Stanford in 'How to Rule the World'

There is a sort of Stanford inside Stanford where the most elite students who are going to found the trillion-dollar companies are dragged into this alternate reality and and foisted with excess and access and learn how to cut corners.