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Peter Levine

General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz · 24 appearances on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorexecutiveengineeracademichostLinkedIn ↗a16z.com/author/peter-levine ↗Wikipedia ↗

Peter Levine is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz focusing on enterprise software and open-source business models. He previously served as CEO of XenSource, an executive at Veritas Software, and is a lecturer at Stanford GSB.

124statements → 53claims → 5claims resolved → 80%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 2.31/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 13said about them ↓

4 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 3 not yet assessed 38 not checkable as stated how the 53 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

33 predictions · 20 assertions · 11 opinions · 55 insights · 3 disclosures · 2 what ifs · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 53 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 12 are resolved, 3 are not yet assessed, and 38 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Peter argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Levine: No Open-Source Company Has Been Fully Displaced by Cloud Providers
“Can you name a single example of a company that's been fully displaced by a cloud provider? And the answer is no. And so I think that our concerns around large cloud vendors coming in and just co-opting an open source project and putting you out of business, t…”
Peter Levine Oct 21, 2019 ▶ 8:52 How to Build an Open Source Business

Their most notable contradicted claim

Prediction Didn’t hold up
Levine: Total connected computing devices will expand into the trillions
“I can imagine a world where there will be trillions of devices out there. So if you think about the challenges of management, security, data, all of the issues of distributed computing, that's now going to, it's the opportunity and the challenge of what we're …”
Peter Levine Jul 15, 2017 ▶ 9:30 The End of Cloud Computing

Expressed certainty vs assessment result

none yet certainty 1
none yet certainty 2
50% certainty 3
100% certainty 4
25% certainty 5

weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet

How they sound: speaking style how? →

223 words/min while actually speaking · 18 um and uh per 1k words · 8 false starts per 1k · 33.3% of pauses land inside a clause

No argument clarity score for Peter Levine: only 3 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 11 exchanges across raw tape and the produced feed is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 23,028 words across 15 episodes of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Peter Levine said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Supported
Levine: No Open-Source Company Has Been Fully Displaced by Cloud Providers
“Can you name a single example of a company that's been fully displaced by a cloud provider? And the answer is no. And so I think that our concerns around large cloud vendors coming in and just co-opting an open source project and putting you out of business, t…”
Peter Levine Oct 21, 2019 ▶ 8:52 How to Build an Open Source Business
Opinion
Levine: Traditional imperative logic programming is reaching the end of its lifecycle
“I believe that programming is sort of in the life cycle of Programming is sort of at the end. Like, you can only write so many if-then-else statements. You're kind of done with logic, right, in that sense.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:41 a16z Podcast | A New Lab Rises
Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2022
Disk drives, tape drives, and SSDs will all go away
“We will have much more in-memory data, systems that literally live in real memory, and the notion of disk drives and tape drives and even SSDs will all go away.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:35 a16z Podcast | The Storage Renaissance
Opinion
Levine: Google and Facebook infrastructure is more advanced than AWS
“I think that the Google and Facebook infrastructure is now moving in my opinion, more advanced than what Amazon is. Amazon was created several, many, sort of, already generations ago, relative to this commoditization curve.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:56 a16z Podcast | Datacenter of the Future
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: The replacement of cloud computing is already underway
“About six months ago, I started to think, well, what happens when cloud computing goes away? You know, of course, to myself, I'm like, well, it's so popular, and now how could it go away? I think it's actually happening right under our nose, and let me show yo…”
Peter Levine Jul 15, 2017 ▶ 1:55 The End of Cloud Computing
Prediction Partly held up
Levine: Machine learning applications will execute at edge endpoints, not the cloud
“So the only way that we can look into an image or look into the massive amounts of data is with machine learning, and that machine learning, the algorithms and the applications employing machine learning will run at the end point. It's not going to be machine …”
Peter Levine Jul 15, 2017 ▶ 10:25 The End of Cloud Computing
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: The explosion of sensor data will kill the cloud
“Sensor data explosion will kill the cloud. Sensors are going to produce massive amounts of data. The existing infrastructure will not be able to handle the data volumes or the rates, and data is going to be stuck at the edge, and computing is going to move alo…”
Peter Levine Jul 15, 2017 ▶ 19:15 The End of Cloud Computing
Insight
Levine: Delay sales team expansion until strong customer demand emerges
“We're not going to in, we're not going to expand the sales organization till we see the whites of their eyes... When the customer starts demanding this, then we're going to go build a sales organization, right? Or add the reproducibility.”
Peter Levine Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 11:39 a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Insight
Levine: GTM fit requires 70% of sales reps generating 3x loaded cost
“What I like to look at is that a sales person is generating greater than three times their loaded cost, meaning Base plus commission. Let's say a salesperson cost 500,000 dollars a year or 200,000 dollars a year. They need to generate a three X multiple on tha…”
Peter Levine Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 18:54 a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Insight
Levine: Startups need 4x pipeline coverage to hit quarterly sales numbers
“One of the metrics to be used in the industry is at the beginning of the quarter, you want to have between three and five times the pipeline to close the quarter. Ok? If you don't have four times the pipeline At the beginning of the quarter, you're not gonna m…”
Peter Levine Feb 26, 2019 ▶ 21:55 a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Non-technical domain experts manipulating data will be the next programmers
“By using data, and having folks optimize the data, they actually become the next generation of programmers. They're not trained as programmers. They won't even know what a program really is. They're all manipulating data in the context by which they are famili…”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 7:06 a16z Podcast | The End (and Beginning) of Programming
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Data science will replace traditional coding as computer science foundation
“You know, I think that data science will become the new academic approach in computer science. There'll be less coding and more about data science. New algorithms for data science, new Approaches to understand the world around us. So, you know, we can call thi…”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:37 a16z Podcast | The End (and Beginning) of Programming
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levine: Pure open-source support business models are not viable beyond Red Hat
“The whole support model really not being very viable outside of what Red Hat has done.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:15 a16z Podcast | Pricing Free
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levine: The Red Hat Open-Source Support Model Has Only Worked Once
“And that model has worked, in my opinion, exactly one time. That's worked for Red Hat and not so great for everyone else.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:29 a16z Podcast | Selling to Developers & Open Source Business Models
What-if
Levine: Activist Investors Would Have Blocked EMC From Buying VMware
“Because activists were involved with current EMC, if EMC were now, it was 15 years ago, and EMC were faced with buying VMware, and they had activist pressure on their board, they would not be allowed to buy VMware”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:13 a16z Podcast | Dell + EMC -- Why the Python Just Ate the Cow
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Levine: Dell Bought EMC Because EMC Had Activists and Dell Didn't
“Dell was able to do this deal because they had no active. They were a private company and had no activists. EMC could only do this deal because they had activists”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:50 a16z Podcast | Dell + EMC -- Why the Python Just Ate the Cow
Insight
Levine: Code authorship matters more than IP ownership in open source
“IP ownership is, to me, less important than who actually wrote the code”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 11:57 a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software
Insight
Levine: Commercial software forks will never rival original code inventors
“The fork company is never going to be as strong as the one, ah, who has invented it.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 13:05 a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Computing and analytics will shift from the cloud to edge devices
“And I think the Internet of Things and drones and however you want to define these, this sort of range of computers that exist not so much in our pocket but out there in the world, I believe that there's going to be computing that will be fundamental to how we…”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:41 a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software
Insight
Levine: a16z targets investments in projects that consensus views as crazy
“When more people disagree, that's the project we want to go invest in. Because, like, you know, it's too crazy for, you know, hell, that'll never work.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 29:09 a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Mobile hardware supply chains will replace PC architectures in data centers
“What I'm specifically talking about with respect to the consumerization of IT is the idea that the components of mobile devices will become the basis for hardware in the data center of the future. And so, not unlike we saw the PC revolution replace mainframes …”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:36 a16z Podcast | The Consumerization of IT
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Mobile phone components will form the basis of future data centers
“Mobile, the components of mobile phones will become the basis of the next generation data center. Really, really inexpensive, sort of, you know, cheap components that require a lot less power, floor space, cooling, But all of that stuff being sort of connected…”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:38 a16z Podcast | Mobile Invades the Data Center
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: On-premise datacenters will disappear in favor of cloud models
“I think that the economics and the way that data centers are going to be built is going to drive everyone to private or public clouds, and the notion of the on-prem data center starts to disappear.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 12:35 a16z Podcast | Datacenter of the Future
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Levine: Cloud service models will dominate all open-source software segments
“So that model is exactly what I believe is going to happen at every segment of the open source market will be around.”
Peter Levine Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:31 a16z Podcast | Datacenter of the Future

Show 24statements(100 left)

The other half of the tape: Peter Levine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 10 episodes on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 4Michael Copeland 4Martin Casado 1Frank Chen 1David George 1Ben Horowitz 1

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
004385201720182019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions
035201720182019202020212022202320242025episodes it came up in
0012.525201720182019202020212022202320242025episodesmentions per episode
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode

Appearances (24)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
The Risk, Fear, and Preparation Behind Free Solo Feb 3, 2020 7m
How to Build an Open Source Business Oct 21, 2019 22m
a16z Podcast | Product-Market SALES Fit (What Comes First?) Feb 26, 2019 12m
a16z Podcast | Stories and Lessons in Enterprise Sales Feb 26, 2019 4m
a16z Podcast | Finding Go-to-Market Fit in the Enterprise Feb 26, 2019 14m
a16z Podcast | The End (and Beginning) of Programming Jan 2, 2019 11m
a16z Podcast | Improv'ing Leadership Jan 2, 2019 3m
a16z Podcast | A New Lab Rises Jan 2, 2019 5m
a16z Podcast | The Storage Renaissance Jan 2, 2019 7m
a16z Podcast | Pricing Free Jan 2, 2019 11m
a16z Podcast | Selling to Developers & Open Source Business Models Jan 2, 2019 13m
a16z Podcast | What Software Developers (and Therefore Every Company) Need Jan 2, 2019 6m
a16z Podcast | Dell + EMC -- Why the Python Just Ate the Cow Jan 2, 2019 13m
a16z Podcast | AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software Jan 2, 2019 15m
a16z Podcast | Building the Right Technical Advisory Board Jan 2, 2019 6m
a16z Podcast | Why Every Business is in the Data Business Jan 2, 2019 6m
a16z Podcast | Big Data Goes Really Big Jan 2, 2019 9m
a16z Podcast | Embracing Sales Jan 2, 2019 9m
a16z Podcast | Getting Sales Right Jan 2, 2019 8m
a16z Podcast | Dumb Storage Gets Smart Jan 2, 2019 6m
a16z Podcast | The Consumerization of IT Jan 2, 2019 5m
a16z Podcast | Mobile Invades the Data Center Jan 2, 2019 5m
a16z Podcast | An Open Source Business Model That Works Jan 2, 2019 5m
a16z Podcast | Datacenter of the Future Jan 2, 2019 17m

Played on the show (1)

Episodes where a recording of Peter Levine was played rather than Peter taking part, or where the tape carries an address with nobody putting questions to them. Listed because the words are on the record, kept out of every score on this page because they were not said on this show. We read this off the tape: who was spoken to, who was asked something, who answered whom.

EpisodeDateOn tapeWhat it is
The End of Cloud Computing Jul 15, 2017 22m aired address
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