a16z (Andreessen Horowitz)

Recent Episodes

1. What Makes a Consumer AI Product Stick? | Josh Elman

   Sep 19, 2026

   a16z Partner Josh Elman joins host Ollie Forsyth to discuss what separates consumer AI products that people try once from those that become part of everyday life. Elman argues that while getting consumer attention has become easier, achieving genuine stickiness requires products that excel at one core function and earn trust. The conversation explores emerging consumer AI categories including personal agents, interactive entertainment, AI-powered shopping, and microdramas, while examining why network effects and product differentiation remain critical in a world where ideas spread and clone rapidly.

2. Databricks CEO on AI Pacing, Cyber Risk, and the Enterprise

   Sep 18, 2026

   Ali Ghodsi, co-founder and CEO of Databricks, joins a16z partners Martin Casado and Sarah Wang to discuss AI adoption barriers, recursive self-improvement risks, and cybersecurity threats. Ghodsi argues that current AI models are capable enough for enterprise automation but lack organizational context and institutional knowledge, and that building company ontologies could unlock adoption. The conversation covers the rhetoric around pacing frontier AI, concrete criteria for recursive self-improvement, and why cyber attacks represent the immediate risk rather than existential superintelligence.

3. The Next Frontier of AI Video Is Control

   Sep 17, 2026

   a16z General Partner Jennifer Li discusses fal's H3 Max video model with co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven and Head of Engineering Batuhan Taskaya. The episode explores how post-training and systems optimization enabled 35x speedup over the base MiniMax H3 model while maintaining quality, unlocking real-time video generation and continuous streaming capabilities. The conversation covers H3 Max Director's memory and control features, emerging consumer experiences like live interactive streams, and the shift toward professional creative tools—particularly in Hollywood workflows combining AI with Blender for near-perfect camera, lighting, and character control.

4. The AI-Native CRM

   Sep 16, 2026

   Keith Peiris, CEO and co-founder of Lightfield, discusses his unconventional journey from building Tome to 25 million users to pivoting entirely to create an AI-native CRM. Lightfield raised a $47 million Series A and is building a "business world model" that consolidates fragmented customer data across emails, calls, meetings, and product usage into a unified record that AI agents can reason about. The conversation covers his decision to walk away from a successful product, how following customers led to discovering the harder problem of data unification, architectural choices around activity logs and semi-structured data, and strategies for competing in the crowded CRM space by targeting greenfield companies first.

5. The Age of Body Futurism | Ruby Justice Thelot

   Sep 15, 2026

   Elena Burger interviews Ruby Justice Thelot, an academic and cyber ethnographer, about the gap between internet culture and real-world behavior, using wellness and optimization trends as a case study. They explore "paracontent"—the phenomenon where conversation around a trend becomes larger than the trend itself—and examine peptides, GLP-1s, wearables, and the quantified self movement. The discussion traces the history of body optimization from Renaissance beauty standards through 90s supermodel culture to today's "body futurism," arguing that rather than convergence on a single ideal, future optimization will become increasingly individualized and extreme.

6. Greg Brockman on Why OpenAI Says We’re Entering the AGI Era

   Sep 14, 2026

   Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and President, discusses why OpenAI believes AI has entered the AGI era, highlighting Astra's breakthrough capabilities in computer use and agentic tasks. He explains how computer use represents a fundamental shift for AI agents, enabling models to work coherently for 24+ hours and interact with software through human interfaces. Brockman addresses critical safety and security challenges, including OpenAI's response to the Hugging Face incident, the importance of the "defender's window" for cybersecurity, and how frontier AI can help secure systems before capabilities become broadly diffused.

7. World Models, Robotics, and the Future of 3D AI

   Sep 13, 2026

   Justin Johnson, co-founder of World Labs, discusses Atlas, the company's multimodal world model that generates, reconstructs, and simulates 3D environments. Atlas can create new worlds from text or image prompts with precise camera control, reconstruct real spaces from as few as one photo, and simulate how objects and robots behave in those spaces. Johnson explains the broader thesis that world models—like language models for the physical world—will become a horizontal platform applicable across entertainment, VR, construction, robotics, and other industries.

8. Why Companies Are Becoming a Series of Loops | Anish Acharya on Lenny’s Podcast

   Sep 12, 2026

   Anish Acharya, General Partner at a16z, discusses how AI is reshaping company operations through the concept of "loops"—cascading sets of AI agents handling repetitive work across functions like engineering, sales, marketing, and support, with humans providing judgment and out-of-distribution thinking to unlock new opportunities. He argues fears of an AI-driven permanent underclass are overblown, counters that companies are becoming more ambitious rather than consolidating, and explains why the real opportunity lies in expanding human capability rather than replacing people. Acharya also explores the split between frontier and open-weight models, model sommelier insights, and advises that the fastest path to understanding AI is simply to build and ship regularly.

9. What It Takes to Build a Startup | Andrew Chen & Matt Perault

   Sep 11, 2026

   Andrew Chen, General Partner at a16z and leader of the Speedrun program, discusses what it takes to build a startup from day one—focusing on the reality of 'Little Tech,' where teams of 2-3 people work from kitchen tables with minimal resources. Chen and host Matt Perault explore how early-stage founders rarely have time or resources to engage with policymakers, how regulatory burdens accumulate for young companies, and why startups have the freedom to choose where they build. The conversation emphasizes the importance of creating ecosystems where founders can get started and the need for policymakers to hear directly from the earliest-stage builders.

10. How AI Is Rewriting the Power Law of Venture Capital

    Sep 10, 2026

    Aram Verdiyan of Accolade Partners joins a16z's Jen Kha and David George to discuss how AI is reshaping venture capital's power law, enabling capital to directly compound competitive advantages through compute spending. They explore AI's unprecedented reach across 30 trillion in GDP—labor, healthcare, transportation, services—and why the addressable market may be 10x larger than traditional software, fundamentally altering portfolio construction and asset allocation strategies for institutional investors.