Acharya: Corporate promo structures give startup founders an innovation advantage
Anish Acharya · Where does consumer AI stand at the end of 2025? · Dec 29, 2025 · at 33:45
Anish Acharya, general partner at a16z, explains how career incentives inside big tech companies prevent PMs from taking risk on opinionated consumer products.
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“For labs certainly for big tech, and perhaps increasingly for labs, the priorities get set in their promo committee, always. And if you're a PM, and it's always the sort of mid-career PMs, and I've been one of these, and you, like, the incentives are always to get promoted, and the way to get promoted is to build something safe that extends a core metric and a core feature. So building opinionated products is a very risky way to manage your career, you know, because they're probably not going to work. You're probably going to have a bunch of implications for legal and compliance, and the CEO might yell at you. So I just think that they are so structured to do incremental things. The more founders do opinionated things, the more advantaged they are.”
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