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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The best technology companies, they don't think product first. They think about what problem they're solving for whom, and they think about the network. If you solve a problem for a network of people, then the more people who have that problem and join your network, the more powerful your solution becomes.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Dara Khosrowshahi - Uber's Bet on AVs, AI, and Building a Super-App - [Invest Like the Best, EP.476]

The history of Uber is really the history of navigating chaos. And I think what we've learned is that the chaos is actually a feature, not a bug. Because the chaos is what creates the opportunity for a company like Uber to come in and bring order to a market that didn't have it.

The Business of Tech

From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage

whenever anyone asks, I would say that there would be no Uber today as it is without Travis and how he was. You know, when many cities, governments, regulators are saying this is a legal stop, to have such steadfast belief that this was going to be good for riders, good for drivers, good for cities, and to still push on with that belief

The a16z Show

AI Agents and the Fight for Customer Data

Fraser believes many companies are overestimating the threat AI poses to enterprise software.

The Business of Tech

From Uber to Exaba: AJ Tills takes on Big Tech storage

I would say that there would be no Uber today as it is without Travis and how he was. You know, when many cities, governments, regulators are saying this is illegal stop, to have such steadfast belief that this was going to be good for riders, good for drivers, good for cities, and to still push on with that belief

The a16z Show

Why $1B Exits are Dead

today's AI companies are scaling faster than any previous generation of startups, and why the eventual outcomes may be significantly larger than most investors currently expect

The a16z Show

Crypto Fund 5: We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.

founders are shifting toward building products that work within existing systems, rather than attempting to replace them

Prof G Markets

Reid Hoffman: The AI Optimist Makes His Case | Prof G Markets

The first year or two will look a lot like you know, kind of early.com companies, some of which were complete flame out and some of which were enduring institutions. Amazon being an example.

TBPN

Nvidia Invests in Thinking Machines, Meta Acquires Moltbook, BYD F1 | Olivia Moore, David Paffenholz, Adam Goldstein, Max Junestrand, Allan McLennan, Jagdeep Singh, Scott Hickle

You also got Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross. These guys have backed a lot of founders. They've worked with a lot of AI startups. They can understand the team that they're trying to build over there.