The a16z Show

The Startups Rebuilding American Industry | The AD50

With private capital increasingly willing to fund physical infrastructure and production before government demand is guaranteed, they can become some of the most valuable companies in the world.

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

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 venture business is a strange one because you're making decisions about things that don't yet exist, trying to figure out whether the founder has the capacity and the ability and the drive and the intelligence and the resilience to do something with an idea that hasn't yet been tested in the marketplace.

The a16z Show

David George & Jack Altman on AI, Autonomy, and the Next $25 Trillion

With AI adoption still concentrated among a relatively small group of heavy users, he argues there could be room for multiple layers of the stack to grow at once.

The Week

The Iran War Is Costing You Money. Here’s How Much. | The Week

When you look around the poker table and wonder who the sucker is, it's you. because not because it's a bad business, just because what's happening is this is not a financing event anymore. They're not raising money for anything other what's really going on is people are unloading shares.

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.

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 ones that are really, really difficult to make are the ones where you have to somehow assess whether a person who is completely green and untested is capable of learning the sorts of things necessary to found a great company. And that, I think, is the art form of the venture business, because you're trying to assess a person who has no track record at all.

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 thing about venture capital is that the decisions you make, you often don't find out for 10 or 12 or 15 years whether they were right or wrong. And that, for somebody like me, has always been humbling. There are very few fields where you have to wait a decade or more to find out if your judgment was sound.

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 best VCs, the best investors, the best business builders are people who have a very strong ability to suspend disbelief. They have to be able to imagine a world that doesn't yet exist.

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 things that really matter in venture capital are a tiny number of decisions. You might make one, two, three decisions in a decade that really matter, and everything else is noise.

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 thing that I find so hard about venture capital is that you might be right about a company, but if you make your investment at the wrong time, you can lose all your money. You can be right about the destination but wrong about the timing, and it doesn't matter that you were right about the destination.

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 venture capital business is one of the few endeavors where you can be wrong the vast majority of the time and still be considered successful. The reason is that the gains from the rare, extraordinary winner so thoroughly dwarf the losses from all the failures combined that the overall outcome can be spectacular.

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 really great venture investments have tended to come from areas that very few people, at the time of first investment, thought would amount to anything. And the skill is in identifying those areas before they become fashionable, before they become obvious, before everybody is clamoring to invest in them.

The a16z Show

How AI Is Rewriting the Power Law of Venture Capital

David explains why capital itself can now reinforce an AI company's advantage by buying more compute, while Aram makes the case that AI should increasingly be treated as a core allocation rather than a satellite position.

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.

The Business of Tech

Blackbird’s billion-dollar bet on founders

there's nothing like your first believer, making that first investment when your idea is maybe just an idea, your pre-product, pre-customer.

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 best companies we've invested in, the founders had a point of view about the world that was different from consensus, and they were right. And the hardest part of venture is that you can have a non-consensus view and be wrong, or you can have a consensus view and be right, but only the non-consensus and right leads to the outlier returns.

The a16z Show

The Infrastructure Behind the Machine Age

AI is turning problems once constrained by engineering into problems that can increasingly be attacked with capital and compute.

The a16z Show

The New Economics of AI | Martin Casado & Steven Sinofsky

problems that were once constrained by engineering talent can increasingly be attacked with capital and compute

The a16z Show

Martin Casado on Where the Value Is Going in AI

Martin believes this may be the biggest unlock of wealth he's seen since the 1990s.

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.

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

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 best companies that we've invested in, the founders had an almost messianic belief that they were going to change the world, and they were irrationally persistent in the face of all evidence to the contrary. The ones that failed often had founders who were more rational — they saw the evidence, they updated, and they quit.

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 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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The biggest thing I've learned is that in venture, your reputation is everything. You can't hide from your track record. Every investment you make, every founder you back, every check you write — it's all public information, and LPs are going to do their homework.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Jeremy Giffon - The Billion Dollar PDF - [Invest Like the Best, EP.481]

The most counterintuitive thing about private markets is that the biggest source of alpha isn't picking the right companies — it's getting access to them in the first place. Most of the best private companies never need to raise money from you, and if they do, they have more than enough interest from investors they already know and trust.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

The number one thing LPs want to know is: can you actually get into deals? Because there are plenty of smart people who can analyze a company, but if you can't get allocation, it doesn't matter. So the access question is really the first filter.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

John Kim - How to Raise a Few Billion Dollars - [Invest Like the Best, EP.482]

Most LPs will tell you what they want to hear, not necessarily what they think. So the way I tell founders to get signal is to ask them to make an intro to another GP. That is a forcing function — if they liked you, they will make that intro.

The Prof G Pod

Is Wall Street Rigging the Game for SpaceX? | Office Hours

The IPO market has in fact become sort of the last stop on the chump train and that is when Google went public I think it was an $80 billion market cap it's up you know 500 fold retail investors have had a chance to garner a tremendous you know 500x return if you to get that from SpaceX after it goes public what would that be two trillion

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

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The biggest mistake most investors make on the S-curve is they get the direction right but they get the magnitude wrong — they underestimate the ultimate size of the market and the speed at which it grows, and so they sell too early.

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.

Diet TBPN

SpaceX Takes Off, Cursor's Wild Rise, Snap Bets on AR Glasses | Diet TBPN

In the past five days we've seen the biggest VCbacked IPO ever and the biggest VCbacked strategic sale ever. We've never had a an M&A of a VCbacked company young startup north of 50 billion. Like 60 billion is so so big. We sort of lose sight of it because we're talking about a trillion dollars for this company, three trillion for that company. But 60 billion is beyond a home run.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Alex Sacerdote - How to Invest Through Technology Cycles - [Invest Like the Best, EP.477]

The best tech investors understand that the S-curve is not just a description of what happened — it's a prediction tool. When you're early on the S-curve, the technology is improving faster than the market appreciates, and when you're late, the technology is maturing faster than the market appreciates.

SpaceX IPO Gigastream

SpaceX IPO Gigastream

Bill Gurley doesn't want a crazy pop on day one, doesn't want it to go up 100%. If we're in 10, 20, 30% range for something this big, that just feels like... Everything came together properly.

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

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Mitchell Green - Lessons from Cold Calling 10,000 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.464]

Unlike most firms chasing power law outcomes, Lead Edge is designed to deliver consistent returns by talking to thousands of companies a year, applying a rigorous eight-point criteria to filter down to a handful of investments.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Mitchell Green - Lessons from Cold Calling 10,000 Companies - [Invest Like the Best, EP.464]

Unlike most firms chasing power law outcomes, Lead Edge is designed to deliver consistent returns by talking to thousands of companies a year, applying a rigorous eight-point criteria to filter down to a handful of investments, and leveraging a uniquely constructed LP base of world-class executives and entrepreneurs.

Compound Interest

The Investor Behind a16z’s America First Push On Dealing With the Pentagon ‘Where Bits Meet Atoms’

These are companies that sit at the intersection of very very advanced software uh as well as hardware. So it's where atoms meets bits um which historically has not been I would say in vogue for the venture capital uh industry certainly over the last 25 years.

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.

Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy

Josh Kushner - Concentration and Conviction - [Invest Like the Best, EP.459]

What makes Thrive different is how concentrated they are and how involved they get with their portfolio companies.