The a16z Show

Rick Rubin joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Anjney Midha, and Erik Torenberg to discuss creativity, artificial intelligence, and his book The Way of Code, which reimagines the Tao Te Ching for the age of AI.

The conversation explores vibe coding, remix culture, artistic process, entrepreneurship, and what AI changes, and doesn't change, about creativity. Rubin argues that AI is best understood not as a replacement for artists, ...

Yoko Li speaks with Luma's Head of Applied Research Matt Tancik and Phota Labs cofounder and CTO Zach Xia about how AI is changing creativity, photography, and the tools people use to make art.

The conversation explores the evolving relationship between artists and AI, from image generation and personalization to creative workflows, controllability, and agentic design tools. 

They discuss personalization, photography, creative...

Marc Andreessen joins CSIS's Navin Girishankar for a wide-ranging conversation on artificial intelligence, productivity growth, industrial policy, and America's technological future.

Andreessen argues that while AI has already begun reshaping the economy, the largest impacts are still ahead. He explores how AI could dramatically expand access to expertise, improve productivity, and transform industries ranging from healthcare and e...

Kevin Weil, the previous CPO & Vice President of Science at OpenAI, joins Speedrun to discuss the future of AI, scientific discovery, and startup building.

After helping build products at Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook, Weil is now focused on one of AI's most ambitious applications: accelerating science itself. He explains why modern AI models are beginning to solve problems that sit beyond the frontier of existing human know...

Michael Malice sits down with Marc Andreessen to discuss artificial intelligence, technological progress, economic growth, and the future of human flourishing.

Drawing on decades of experience spanning the birth of the commercial internet through today’s AI boom, Andreessen argues that many of the most common fears about technology are rooted in a misunderstanding of how innovation creates opportunity. He explains how modern ...

Anish Acharya speaks with Microsoft VP of Design John Maeda and Impeccable founder and CEO Paul Bakaus about how AI is changing the practice of design.

The conversation explores the relationship between design and technology, the rise of AI-powered creative tools, and whether automation raises the floor, the ceiling, or both. Maeda and Bakaus discuss software craftsmanship, taste, creative judgment, and why some aspects of design m...

Anish Acharya sits down with Josh Elman to discuss the future of consumer technology and Josh's decision to join a16z.

Over the past two decades, Elman has helped shape some of the most important consumer technology products and companies, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Robinhood, Discord, Musical.ly, TikTok, and Apple. Drawing on those experiences, he reflects on how technology has evolved from a niche industry into a cent...

Jake Paul and Geoff Woo join the podcast to announce Anti Fund’s new $100 million growth fund and discuss the evolution of their investment strategy.

The conversation covers the fund’s portfolio, including investments in companies such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic, Anduril, Cognition, Etched, and Modal, as well as the lessons they’ve learned backing founders and identifying emerging technologies. They discuss foun...

Recorded live at the New Media Summit, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Erik Torenberg, and Gaby Goldberg discuss how media, communication, and influence are changing in the internet era.

The conversation explores the shift from legacy media to creator-led platforms, why authenticity has become a competitive advantage, and how founders can build audiences by communicating directly with customers, employees, and the public. They discu...

Angela Strange and Gabriel Vásquez speak with Addi founder and CEO Santiago Suárez about building one of Latin America's largest financial platforms.

What began as a buy now, pay later product has evolved into a broader ecosystem spanning payments, commerce, logistics, and now banking. Serving millions of consumers and tens of thousands of merchants, Addi sits at the intersection of financial services and commerce in Colombia.

The ...

Jack Altman joins Speedrun to discuss product-market fit, customer feedback, hiring, fundraising, and the realities of building an enduring company.

Drawing on his experience building Lattice from startup to multi-billion-dollar company, Altman explains how founders should think about customer requests, when to pivot, and why some of the hardest decisions come from balancing conviction with market feedback. He shares lessons from t...

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, custom...

Theo Jaffee speaks with Samo Burja, founder of Bismarck Analysis, about AI, industrial capacity, economic growth, and the institutions that shape civilization.

The conversation explores how AI’s demand for compute, energy, and infrastructure could trigger a new wave of industrial expansion, benefiting sectors far beyond technology. Burja argues that AI is not just a software story but a demand shock that will ripple through e...

Erin Price-Wright speaks with Alex Modon, cofounder and CEO at Unlimited Industries, and Davide Asnaghi, CEO at Diode Computers, about how AI is moving from software into the physical world. They discuss automating construction and electronics design, using code and simulation to model real-world systems, and how incentives and manufacturing constraints shape adoption. They also examine what it takes to scale infrastructure, reduce...

Wyatt Thomson of OpenAI speaks with economists Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok about AI, labor markets, and the future of economic growth.

The conversation explores one of the most common fears surrounding AI: that increasingly capable systems will eliminate jobs. Cowen and Tabarrok argue instead that economic growth remains the key variable. Throughout history, productivity-enhancing technologies have transformed work, created new i...

Erik Torenberg speaks with tech analyst Benedict Evans about the current state of AI, what has changed over the past year, and which questions remain unanswered.

The conversation covers coding agents, foundation models, AI infrastructure spending, software economics, and the tension between today's AI excitement and the long-term realities of technology adoption. Evans discusses why coding has emerged as AI's first breakout use cas...

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 a...

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 businesse...

Theo Jaffee and Sophia Puccini speak with Balaji Srinivasan and Steven Glinert about the shifting balance of power between nations, networks, and technology.

The conversation covers China’s industrial rise, America’s manufacturing challenges, the role of alliances in a multipolar world, and whether the internet is becoming a political force independent of traditional nation states. They discuss supply chains, technologi...