The a16z Show

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...

Theo Jaffee speaks with Steven Sinofsky about the next generation of personal computing and the growing role of AI-native hardware.

The conversation covers NVIDIA’s entry into the PC market, Microsoft’s strategy for AI-powered devices, Apple’s hardware roadmap, and the long-running tension between backward compatibility and platform reinvention. Sinofsky explains why AI may fundamentally change how personal comput...

Anish Acharya and Olivia Moore speak with Pablo Palafox and Luis Paarup about the challenges of deploying AI agents in operationally complex industries.

The conversation covers the evolution of voice AI, enterprise workflows, and why logistics became an early proving ground for agent-based systems. They discuss context, coordination, and execution inside large organizations, as well as the role of forward-deployed engineering, ente...

David George, General Partner at a16z, and David Clark, CIO at VenCap, discuss how AI is reshaping venture capital and the technology industry itself. They examine why 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 conversation covers frontier AI models, coding agents, open source competition,...

Angela Strange speaks with Dileep Thazhmon, founder and CEO of Jeeves, about building a global financial operating system for enterprises across Latin America using stablecoins and AI.

The conversation covers the challenges of building localized financial infrastructure across 25 countries, from regulation and payments to underwriting and compliance. They also discuss why stablecoin adoption is accelerating in Latin America, and ho...

In 1990, Marc Rowan walked out of Drexel with his belongings in a cardboard box. Within a year, Apollo was managing $6 billion.

David Haber speaks with Marc Rowan, Cofounder, CEO, and Chair of Apollo Global Management, about building Apollo into one of the world’s largest alternative asset managers and how private capital is reshaping the global economy.

The conversation covers the rise of private credit, and why Rowan believ...

Theo Jaffee and Sophia Puccini speak with economist Robin Hanson about prediction markets, gambling, and why he believes speculative markets are one of the most powerful tools humans have for aggregating information and forecasting outcomes.

The conversation begins with Minnesota’s recent law criminalizing prediction markets before expanding into the broader backlash surrounding platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket. Hanson ex...

Originally aired on MTS segment, Monetary Matters, Jack Farley and Max Wiethe speak with Ara Kharazian, Lead Economist at Ramp, about what real business spending data says about AI adoption, why the “SaaSpocalypse” narrative is overblown, and how companies are actually buying and deploying AI tools. They also discuss Anthropic overtaking OpenAI in Ramp’s AI Index, token-based pricing, AI productivity gains, and wh...

Clem Delangue joins MTS to discuss the global open-source AI landscape, the current large language model bubble, and the future of consumer robotics.

Originally aired on MTS, Theo Jaffee and Sofia Puccini speak with Clément Delangue, CEO at Hugging Face, about the global open-source AI race, why he believes the real bubble is in API-based large language models, and how robotics could become the next major interface for AI. They als...

Rahul Vohra is the founder and CEO of Superhuman, the premium email client for power users. He previously built the Gmail plug-in Reportive and sold it to LinkedIn. He began somewhere unexpected though, as a game designer on RuneScape. In this conversation, Rahul breaks down why most founders misunderstand product market fit, why premium can actually hurt your business, and how deliberate constraint can become your biggest advantag...

Marc Andreessen joins Joe Rogan for a conversation on AI, politics, technology, and the future of American society. They discuss how artificial intelligence is rapidly moving from novelty to infrastructure, and why Andreessen believes its long-term impact will be overwhelmingly positive despite growing public fear around automation and surveillance.

The conversation covers the explosion of AI coding tools, the emergence of “A...