A16Z

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• neutral assessment Ben Horowitz

  There's a whole category of experts that we've had in a firm that that expertise is no longer relevant.

• neutral assessment Ben Horowitz

  The whole way we did marketing originally, you know, that doesn't really work well for most companies. And it definitely can't work for us because we're too big, you know.

• neutral fact_claim Ben Horowitz

  Nobody's writing a puff piece about Andreessen Horowitz. They're, you know, like, where Rupert Murdoch could be easier to get a puff piece than we could.

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  With AI, you know, you can have characters that aren't you and be telling stories. So, it's a new storytelling medium is the way I would think about it.

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a whole new set of creators using the new medium to do things.

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  AI kind of video and entertainment and so forth is a new medium. So, there was kind of, like, plays, and then there was film, and then there's going to be AI film, and I think it'll be as different from film as film was from plays.

• neutral assessment Ben Horowitz

  the kind of thing that we've run into now is, like, companies are getting very big as private companies, and there's a whole other layer of stuff that they need how to do. How do you go international, like, efficiently? ... how do you add channels? ... what can we as a firm do to enable that kind of thing?

• neutral assessment Unattributed

  So, we're like, 'well, can we build, like, a firm that's better than Andreessen Horowitz original in infra, in apps, in crypto, in bio, and, you know, in games, and, you know, in kind of defense and public safety and that kind of thing.' You know, that was kind of like, I would say, quite the major change in the firm.

• neutral prediction Ben Horowitz

  software is going to eat the world. Our takeaway from that was, okay, if that's going to happen, then kind of VC up until that point was this idea that there were 15 companies in a given year that would ever get to $100 million in revenue. ... if software is going to eat the world, that's not going to be 15, that's going to be 150. And so, how do you actually scale a VC firm, you know, kind of without losing all the things that make it a VC firm, like, very, very personal but can scale up? And s

• bullish assessment Ben Horowitz

  when we started, like, the idea, the idea was very simple, which was, you know, the VC product, we thought, was very good for investors, but not nearly as good for entrepreneurs in that. The kind of model was, okay, you get, like, a very smart person on your board, not much more than that. ... we built, like, a whole team to make it easy to do that. ... we built a team to kind of help with that. ... skill you up so you knew how to do the job?

• bullish prediction Ben Horowitz

  I think that the leading edge entrepreneurs now are going to have like capabilities, which means they're going to have business plans that are like a lot more, you know, they're going to have product plans that are a lot more technically intensive and complex. They're going to have business plans that are more ambitious and complex. They're going to be building companies that just like ramp much, much faster.

• bullish endorsement Marc Andreessen

  By the way, we would have gotten crypto done then. Oh, 100%. Yeah, yeah. Like, by the way, in like two weeks, like we'd have streaming video a lot sooner.

• bullish prediction Ben Horowitz

  if that's what happens, um, then there's just, there are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally, you know, kind of more, more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past.

• bullish assessment Chris Dixon

  this is the biggest delta between, I would say what the early adopters understand is possible now, uh, versus what kind of everybody, kind of normal people understand. Um, and I, I think that's, you know, true at the individual level, but it's especially true at the company level. Um, and the early, the AI native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the, than the, than sort of, you know, typical incumbents in almost any industry, uh, almost

• bullish prediction Marc Andreessen

  I think there's a scenario and I, I believe this and I kind of want to invest behind it where we're, we may be pulling forward 20 years of things that, you know, our whole mindset of how we think about technical risk and that, oh, that's a science project, not an engineering project. I think we have to reevaluate that whole frame right now.

• neutral fact_claim Marc Andreessen

  we sold off Oculus, got bought, but the reality is like, it's now 13 years later. I still believe very strongly in VR. Um, we'd love to make VR investments, but it's 13 years later and it's not, you know, it hasn't got as mainstream as we would have liked.

• bullish assessment Marc Andreessen

  I think generally at the firm, I would say specifically in the frontier fund, we want to err on the side of being too early. We understand that sometimes things will be too early and we're, we're okay with kind of quote category risk.

• neutral assessment Balaji Srinivasan

  we're right at that peak right now

• neutral assessment Balaji Srinivasan

  one of the theses that we have at a 16z which we've talked about publicly is a whole Carlota Perez Gartner hype cycle kind of thesis

• bullish endorsement Balaji Srinivasan

  I think the firm has done pretty well and you know it's something where early and slack and early and Airbnb and all this other great stuff so ultimately you know the price you pay is market determined

• bullish assessment Balaji Srinivasan

  I think it's vodka just sour grapes by the other VC firms who weren't willing to pay the price that you were ... now I think we're really kind of in the club

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  you guys were paying really high prices for the series B's and you became known for overpaying or paying a lot

• neutral fact_claim Balaji Srinivasan

  when in dreesen Horowitz came into the space I said hey we're going to disrupt things a little bit we're gonna hire a huge staff and we have a bunch of support services that other VCS don't have

• neutral fact_claim Balaji Srinivasan

  the investment so general partners can you know invest on their own if they have conviction and in fact not just us but many other firms have found that the best deals are often the most polarizing deals as well as the worst deals right

• bullish assessment Balaji Srinivasan

  the kind of stuff that really got me excited was stuff that was hard technology and especially stuff in regulated industries

• bullish assessment Balaji Srinivasan

  I you know invest in all the stuff which was the crazy stuff pushing the future but especially genomics digital currency and you know like reinventing government that type of stuff

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  my pal the investor put a little bit of money in and in recent just backed up the Brinks truck as they are apt to do

• bullish endorsement Alyssa Ravasio

  we get to first benchmark and add recent like these are credible VCs with incredibly high expectations and yes and I love that but I balance it with founder control

• mixed assessment Jason Calacanis

  I know they had quirky and zenefits and a couple other companies go off the rail because they were pushing too hard and I think they've corrected my understanding Jason Horowitz had an internal discussion about pushing to go too fast

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  they jump the fence every time oh my god those guys just know how to spend money

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  because if you raise that high valuations for them to make money if they pay double the valuation than anybody else is willing to pay which is their reputation yeah they just pay a high price

• bearish criticism Jason Calacanis

  the reputation of injuries and Horowitz now is they give too much money to founders and then push them to grow unnaturally fast

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  we take ten percent from whatever the landowner sets up as their price

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  my guest today has a really good idea and she's executing at an extremely high level because I love design and man your website's designed really well

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I do think over time it's really important to us that you as a writer own that relationship with the thing and so you know if you if you bring your list of sub-second that we like spam them you just wouldn't come that'd be bad behavior

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  I think if you give such an amazing amount of value and you have goodwill the chances of people leaving or low yeah if the whole thing is working especially I think the number one thing especially if we're bringing people audience and subscribers like marginal subscribers if there are people that are finding out about and learning like falling in love and subscribing to your thing that otherwise wouldn't have that's worth it

• mixed fact_claim Chris Best

  they're buying 20 30 percent of the company so it would value the company act if it was 20 percent 5 times 15 you know it's big number 75 million dollar valuation 50 million minimum like there's a lot of that's a big valuation for a three-person company the way that I think about this is impressive

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  those are you know they're kind of big bet kind of players there

• bullish endorsement Turner Novak

  i love a16z they're awesome i think they're the strategy that they're trying to execute on like there's all these different if you think about venture firms and you pick a strategy it's just like companies like the one that they're executing on it's working like i think they're really good at what they do and there's other lanes to compete on and so yeah i have a ton of respect for them i think they've done a really good job

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  we also know about, uh, the grifting and bag holding, um, and the back dealing that occurs in crypto. Now I'm not accusing Andreessen of that, but other people have, um, like I think Jack, um, Dorsey was very clear on Twitter saying like, Oh yeah, you are buying the coins before everybody else has to them. You're the opposite of building a democracy, you know, democratizing investing, you're getting an early on these coins for a penny. The bag holders wind up being the, um, you know, the, the re

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Math is a harsh mistress, even harsher than the moon. I mean, right. When you put it in those terms, it's like, what are these LPs thinking? 10 coin bases?

• bearish prediction Unattributed

  this seems obscene and insane. You would have to return, uh, in order this to be considered a success basically three times. So three times 4.5 is 13.5. So you gotta return 13.5 billion. It seems very hard to do.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  Like they're just a crypto fund now. Wow. That is bonkers.

• bearish criticism Unattributed

  And during this same time period, 2018 to 2022, A16Z's original fund, which invests in ho-hum tech startups that don't pay them twice with tokens has only raised $4.6 billion.

• bearish assessment Unattributed

  Cause A16Z transition to borrow some parlance is all in on crypto.

• bullish endorsement Mark Andreessen

  okay shelter is one of our most basic needs in a world where limited access to home ownership continues to be a driving force behind inequality and anxiety giving renters a sense of security community and genuine ownership has transformative power for our society when you care for people at their home and provide them with a sense of physical and financial security you empower them to do more and build things solving this problem is key to increasing opportunity for everyone he says that we have

• bullish endorsement Marc Andreessen

  and so we are excited to partner with adam newman and his colleagues on flow which is a direct strike on precisely this problem the residential real estate problem he says adam is a visionary leader who revolutionized the second largest asset class in the world commercial real estate by bringing community and brand to an industry in which neither existed before adam and the story of we work have been exhaustively exhaustively chronicled analyzed and fictionalized sometimes accurately oh uh-huh f

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  at a valuation over for a billion dollars they're not launched they're not launched

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  the 350 million dollar check that a16z wrote is the largest single check this firm has ever written into a startup wow

• neutral fact_claim Molly

  news that a16z has written its largest single check ever to Adam Newman for his new residential real estate startup Flow not to be confused with his other crypto project Flow carbon

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  a16z has been super firm i mean it might happen but you know i've seen them on stage multiple times at various events being like where this is a long-term play we're committed to the long-term like we're not gonna you know and so it's possible that they'll keep

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  at the high end of the market, you've got like, Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia raising multi multi billion dollar multi stage generalist funds, and they have, you know, amazing brands and really talented people. And they're, you know, getting bigger and bigger and bigger as investors.

• bearish prediction Bill Clerico

  they might be taking a lot of risk in crypto, obviously, they have, we'll see if ultimately pays off, I think it will not

• neutral assessment Bill Clerico

  Andreessen Horowitz is going for average returns or slightly better than average, but putting large amounts of money to work like most large firms, they're not trying to do 100x. Now an angel is trying to do 100x, a big firm is trying to just do a three x.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  he raised 350 50 million dollars from a16z for flow

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Who does invest? Y Combinator, Techstars, Antler, A16Z, Pear, has a great summer program. Sequoia has ARC. I have Founder University, Launch Accelerator. Go to those programs first.

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  a16z's head of crypto investing chris dixon is number one on the forbes midas list that came out earlier this week

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  brand value for the entrepreneurs that have had failed startups or issues with their first startup imploding and knowing that there's still a second bite at the apple ... and so as an entrepreneur i look to andreessen horowitz after this investment and think you know these guys will still back you know great entrepreneurs even if

• bullish assessment Unattributed

  andresen wins by showing that adam newman goes and picks him and dreesen wins because they have the ability to write a 350 million dollar check and dreesen wins because they have 350 million dollars less that they have to actually put into the hands of other entrepreneurs now they can do it with just one check so it's a multi-faceted win for them and it's a multi-faceted win for newman

• neutral assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  only want to run this fund over three years instead of two they're not thinking that they're like i want to keep going out because i think their business model works by taking as much oxygen in the room as possible which means to be actively fundraising always that's it's tied it's true of blackstone it's true of apollo it's true of carlisle it's true of kkr any of these publicly traded investment managers they live and die by their ability to constantly be raising funds which implicitly means y

• neutral fact_claim Chamath Palihapitiya

  while every other fund has a five-year investment cycle too including ahs

• mixed assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  you have to understand the Andreessen business model and recent horowitz business model is to become blackstone but for technology you have like 30 billion aum now right which is still you know a drop in the bucket and something like that so if you look at blackstone right trillion blackstone is a hundred plus billion dollar market cap company right built on three pillars credit private equity and real estate you can make the argument that technology is near is as important as those three catego

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  so i think it's uh i i would say the bet makes sense to me

1. 2028-04-22 I think there's a scenario and I, I believe this and I kind of want to invest behind it where we're, we may be pulling forward 20 years of things that, you know, our whole mindset of how we think about technical risk and that, oh, that's a science project, not an engineering project. I think we have to reevaluate that whole frame right now. · Prediction · pending
2. 2028-04-22 if that's what happens, um, then there's just, there are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally, you know, kind of more, more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past. · Prediction · pending
3. 2028-04-22 I think that the leading edge entrepreneurs now are going to have like capabilities, which means they're going to have business plans that are like a lot more, you know, they're going to have product plans that are a lot more technically intensive and complex. They're going to have business plans that are more ambitious and complex. They're going to be building companies that just like ramp much, much faster. · Prediction · pending
4. 2028-02-10 they might be taking a lot of risk in crypto, obviously, they have, we'll see if ultimately pays off, I think it will not · Prediction · confirmed

VentureSignalScore 79/100 for a16z, composed from 1 of 4 components (emerging formula), discounted ×0.79 for 30% signal coverage