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The a16z Show

Andreessen Horowitz

The a16z Show discusses tech and culture trends, news, and the future – especially as ‘software eats the world’. It features industry experts, business leaders, and other interesting thinkers and voices from around the world. This show is produced by Andreessen Horowitz (aka “a16z”), a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm. Multiple episodes are released every week; visit a16z.com for more details and to sign up for our newsletters and other content as well!

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62 episodes
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English

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#1204
Today · 57 min
Nas, Grandmaster Caz, Steve Stoute & Ben Horowitz on Paying Hip-Hop’s Pioneers Their Due
Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with Nas, Grandmaster Caz, and Steve Stoute for a conversation about the Paid in Full Foundation and its mission to recognize and support the pioneers who built hip-hop. Ben, Nas, and Steve share how the foundation began, why simply giving artists money wasn’t enough, and how the Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards became a way to pair financial support with the recognition many foundational artists never received. Caz brings the perspective of one of those pionee
#1203
Yesterday · 1 hr
What Makes a Consumer AI Product Stick? | Josh Elman
a16z Partner Josh Elman joins Ollie Forsyth on New Economies to discuss the next wave of consumer AI and what separates a product people try once from one that becomes part of their everyday lives. Josh argues that getting attention has actually become easier, but getting consumers to stick is harder than ever. He explains what he looks for in consumer products, why the best ones start with a narrow wedge and earn the right to do more, and why trust becomes increasingly important as AI agents ga
#1202
Friday · 1 hr 8 min
Databricks CEO on AI Pacing, Cyber Risk, and the Enterprise
Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi joins a16z General Partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang for a conversation about AI risk, recursive self-improvement, cybersecurity, and what’s actually holding back enterprise adoption. Ali argues that today’s models are already capable enough to automate far more work than most companies are using them for. The bigger problem is context: models haven’t been in every meeting, don’t understand how decisions actually get made, and lack the institutional k
#1201
Thursday · 39 min
The Next Frontier of AI Video Is Control
a16z General Partner Jennifer Li sits down with fal co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven and Head of Engineering Batuhan Taskaya to discuss what changes when generative video becomes fast enough to run in real time. They unpack the technical work behind H3 Max, fal’s post-trained version of MiniMax’s open-weight video model, and how combining model post-training with systems and hardware optimization significantly reduced generation time while maintaining quality. That speed has enabled experiments with
#1200
Wednesday · 52 min
The AI-Native CRM
a16z’s Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt sit down with Lightfield co-founder and CEO Keith Peiris to discuss what it takes to rethink the CRM for an AI-native world, and the unusual pivot that got him there. Keith previously built Tome to 25 million users, but eventually walked away from the product after concluding that the underlying technology couldn’t capture enough context about a presenter, their audience, and the relationship between them. Starting again, his team followed customers from AI pr
#1199
Tuesday · 42 min
The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot
Elena Burger sits down with academic and cyber ethnographer Ruby Justice Thelot to explore the increasingly blurry line between internet culture and the real world, and how to tell the difference between a trend that’s actually changing behavior and one that simply feels enormous online. They use today’s wellness and optimization culture as a case study, from peptides and GLP-1s to protein maxxing, wearables, microplastics, and the quantified self. Ruby explains her concept of “paracontent,” whe
#1198
Monday · 51 min
Greg Brockman on Why OpenAI Says We’re Entering the AGI Era
Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg sit down with OpenAI co-founder and President Greg Brockman to discuss why he believes AI has entered a new phase, what OpenAI’s latest models reveal about the path to AGI, and the safety and security challenges that come with increasingly capable systems. Greg explains why computer use represents such an important step for agents, including models that can work coherently for 24 hours and interact with software through the same interfaces humans use. He also shar
#1197
September 13 · 23 min
World Models, Robotics, and the Future of 3D AI
World Labs co-founder Justin Johnson joins MTS hosts Theo Jaffee and Sophia Puccini to discuss Atlas, World Labs’ latest world model, and the broader case for AI systems that understand and interact with the physical world. Justin explains how Atlas approaches three core tasks: generating new worlds, reconstructing real environments from images, and simulating how objects or robots might behave within them. Underlying it is a bigger thesis: just as language models became general-purpose engines
#1196
September 12 · 1 hr 18 min
Why Companies Are Becoming a Series of Loops | Anish Acharya on Lenny’s Podcast
a16z General Partner Anish Acharya joins Lenny Rachitsky on Lenny’s Podcast to discuss why fears of an AI-driven “permanent underclass” may be misplaced, how AI is changing the way companies operate, and why the opportunity may be less about replacing people and more about dramatically expanding what they can build. Anish lays out his idea that companies are becoming a series of loops, with agents increasingly handling workflows across engineering, sales, marketing, support, and other functions
#1195
September 11 · 38 min
What It Takes to Build a Startup | Andrew Chen & Matt Perault
a16z’s Matt Perault sits down with General Partner and Speedrun lead Andrew Chen on the a16z AI Policy Brief to explore what “Little Tech” actually looks like at the earliest stages, and why the realities of building a two- or three-person startup are often missing from policy debates. Andrew takes us inside Speedrun, where founders are often starting companies from kitchen tables, working with tiny teams, and trying to determine in a matter of months whether their idea can become a viable busin
#1194
September 10 · 49 min
How AI Is Rewriting the Power Law of Venture Capital
a16z’s Jen Kha and David George sit down with Accolade Partners’ Aram Verdiyan to discuss how AI is changing the power law of technology investing, why the largest companies can compound advantages in ways that weren’t possible before, and what that means for how investors construct portfolios. They explore why AI may be much bigger than traditional software, with applications reaching into labor, healthcare, transportation, services, and other major parts of the economy. David explains why capi
#1193
September 9 · 39 min
Who Grades the AI Models? | Ben Horowitz & Rayan Krishnan
a16z’s Erik Torenberg, Ben Horowitz, and Jennifer Li sit down with Vals founder and CEO Rayan Krishnan to discuss one of AI’s increasingly difficult problems: how do you actually measure whether a model is getting better? As public benchmarks saturate and models get better at optimizing for the tests themselves, Rayan makes the case for independent, continuously evolving evaluations. They unpack why self-reported model scores can be misleading, how VALS evaluates models in the hours before a rel
#1192
September 8 · 1 hr 5 min
OpenAI Researchers on the Future of Mathematical Reasoning
a16z Infra Partner Lisha Li sits down with OpenAI mathematicians Mehtaab Sawhney and Mark Sellke to discuss how quickly AI’s mathematical capabilities are advancing, what recent results reveal about model reasoning, and what happens when AI begins making progress on problems mathematicians have struggled with for decades. Mehtaab and Mark unpack several recent results from OpenAI’s models, including advances in sphere packing and the construction of a non-sofic group. They explain why the surpri
#1191
September 7 · 8 min
Can Open Source Keep AI Power From Concentrating?
MTS host Sophia Dew visits the Open Source AI Summit in San Francisco to ask researchers and founders across the AI stack a central question: can open source prevent AI power from concentrating in the hands of a few companies? Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of Attention Is All You Need, argues that today’s concentration may be a feature of the current technological paradigm rather than a permanent feature of AI. Transformers reward enormous amounts of data and compute, but future breakthroughs could m
#1190
September 6 · 27 min
Your AI Doctor Is Coming | Julie Yoo
a16z General Partner Julie Yoo joins MTS host Sophia Dew to explain why she believes healthcare could benefit more from AI than almost any other industry, and why decades of slow technology adoption may actually give healthcare an advantage in the AI era. Julie traces healthcare’s evolution from paper records and fax machines through electronic health records and telehealth, and explains why AI represents something different: an organic adoption wave driven by tools that doctors and patients act
#1189
September 5 · 31 min
Aaron Levie on Why Open AI Wins
Box co-founder and CEO Aaron Levie joins MTS hosts Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini to make the case for open-weight AI, unpack the economics of open versus closed models, and explain why he believes more openness could strengthen rather than undermine the U.S. AI ecosystem. Aaron argues that open models create more use cases, push closed labs to innovate faster, and don't fundamentally change where the economics of AI ultimately accrue. They debate model distillation, America's competition with Ch
#1188
September 4 · 44 min
Fei Fei Li: The Race to Build World Models For AI
World Labs co-founders Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Ben Mildenhall join a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss Atlas, their latest world model, and what it reveals about the pursuit of spatial intelligence. At the center of Atlas is what the team calls “new view prediction”: given images or views of a scene, the model predicts what that environment should look like from a different position in space and time. This brings generation and 3D reconstruction into the same model, and raises
#1187
September 3 · 1 hr
The $100B Niches Hiding Inside Payments
Erik Torenberg is joined by a16z General Partner Alex Rampell and Affirm Co-Founder and CEO Max Levchin for a conversation on 25 years of fintech, from the early days of digital payments to the origins of Affirm and the next generation of agentic commerce. Max and Alex revisit what surprised them most about how payments evolved, why the card interface has been so difficult to displace, and why even the smallest corners of payments can become enormous markets. They also trace the early idea maze
#1186
September 2 · 40 min
Inside Moderna’s Personalized Cancer Vaccine
a16z General Partner Jorge Conde sits down with Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel to discuss a major milestone for mRNA technology: positive Phase 3 results from Moderna and Merck’s individualized treatment for melanoma, after more than a decade of work on personalized cancer vaccines. Stéphane explains how the treatment works by sequencing an individual patient’s tumor and healthy cells, identifying the mutations most relevant to their cancer, and encoding up to 34 of them into an mRNA designed speci
#1185
September 1 · 1 hr 3 min
Daniel Litt: The Mathematician's Guide to AI
a16z’s Lisha Li sits down with Daniel Litt, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, to unpack AI's rapid progress in mathematics, what today's frontier models can actually do, and what they're still missing about the way mathematicians think. Daniel explains why some recent AI-generated results are genuinely impressive, including an autonomous solution to the Erdős unit distance problem, but argues that solving problems is only one part of mathematics. Today's models can

Showing 1–20 of 62 episodes