The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 372 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 8 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
McCune: a16z donated to Leading the Future PAC for AI political advocacy
“And that's, you know, part of the reason that we have recently announced our donation to leading the future pack, which will have, you know, several different entities underneath it, which I think is, Is designed to sort of be that political center of gravity …”
Perault: Proposed AI regulations burden startups without actually protecting consumers
“Licensing, nuclear style regulation like flops, threshold based disclosures, really complicated transparency regimes, impact assessments, audits, which are a bunch of ideas that we think are not going to help protect people and are going to make it really hard…”
Casado: The primary sin in VC is backing the wrong company
“The only sin is picking the wrong company in a certain space because that conflict thing, because you're conflicted out of the winner, like investing in a space that doesn't work is fine. I mean, like, there's no way you can actually predict whether a space is…”
Casado: Founders get to block one direct 'mortal enemy' a16z investment
“For any company that I'm an investor in, If I'm talking to another company that looks similar, I'll ask the founder. I'm like, listen, is this your mortal enemy? You only get one. You can't, you know, you only get one, but it's just, if this is your mortal ene…”
Horowitz rejects the standard venture capital maxim to only support winning startups
“There's this kind of thing in venture capital that a lot of venture capital will say, well, spend all your time with your winners. Like we don't believe in that at all. Now, like if you look at a spreadsheet, that's the exact right thing, right? Like because t…”
Horowitz: a16z is product-first, unlike every other venture firm
“We're kind of, A product first, and then a team of investors second, whereas every other firm I think is the opposite.”
Horowitz: a16z pairs shared economics with centralized control
“We have a different structure where we're shared economics, but we've kind of centralized control and that enables us by not having shared control, we can change the structure of the firm very easily.”
Horowitz: Andreessen Horowitz will never expand into private equity
“So there, there's nothing about what they do that would make them good at what we do. And there's nothing about what we do that would make us good at what they do. So like, I think, you know, we'll never get into that realm.”
Horowitz claims a16z's larger funds have sometimes significantly outperformed smaller funds
“If you look at our funds I think our larger funds have at times, like, way outperformed our smaller funds”
Horowitz: In early AI, almost any deal works temporarily
“We're in this phase where it's such a profound change that anything you do like will work at least for a while. And so it's kind of hard to pass on any deal in, in that way.”
Casado: a16z avoids lesser-known SOTA AI model startups due to heavy subsidies
“So the state-of-the-art model market, this is like the, you know, the Anthropics and the Open AIs it's incredibly competitive, and it's very heavily subsidized, right? I mean, like with Meta and like Google, et cetera, and so kind of our view is, is you have t…”
Casado: There is no single AI market, only distinct subspaces
“We've kind of come to the opinion that there is no AI. There's like a bunch of subspaces that are totally different that all require their own strategy.”
Bornstein: AI developer tools will increase, not shrink, software engineering headcount
“I think the best way to think about this is simply that we're going to have more developers. I think it's very unlikely that like we're going to shrink development teams because we have amazing new tools. Like that's just kind of not how these markets have wor…”
Horowitz: Shared Partner Control Prevents VC Firms From Scaling
“When we started the firm we had shared economics like every firm does, but we didn't have shared control, and that gave us a giant advantage over every other VC that had shared control, Because if you share control, you can't scale, because if you share contro…”
Olivia Moore: Consumer AI startups reach $4.2M median ARR in Year 1
“What we found was actually pretty surprising, which is that the median ARR, annualized revenue run rate, is now 4.2 million dollars at month 12 for consumer startups. The bottom quartile is 2.9 million. And the top quartile is 8.7 million.”
Horowitz: Venture investing should focus on world-class strengths, not weaknesses
“Philosophically, very kind of early on in the firm, always felt that what we're looking for is great strength. And like every person has a weakness or has weaknesses. And some of them show up in like crazy ways. But that doesn't even matter because everybody's…”
Andreessen: a16z focuses on US investing because top global founders relocate
“We just, from a practical standpoint, have tended to emphasize U.S. Investing, because we figure we'll get most of the best of the global founders anyway.”
Dixon: It is better to miss a category than back second place
“It's better to miss the category than to get the steak knives in my view. Just don't, just miss it.”
Sivulka: Hebbia platform offers an effectively infinite context window
“Hebbia's got like an infinite effective context window and then when you look at a new opportunity, you could filter to a variety of other opportunities that were similar and actually begin to piece out how it's different, how it's similar and all the pieces t…”
Horowitz: Evaluating people by character makes a16z 'a lot of money'
“Look, I'll tell you why we do what we do at the firm. Because it makes me a lot of money, because I get the best talent.”
Horowitz: a16z never saw private company Wells Notices before crypto crackdown
“They've issued Wells Notices, which in our whole career we never saw a Wells Notice, which is kind of a form of a, of an SEC declaring they're investigating and going after a company for any private company, and these are all private companies.”
Horowitz: Elizabeth Warren is the only senator refusing to meet with a16z
“Elizabeth Warren, who refuses, similarly refuses to meet with us. The only senator who has refused to meet with us.”
Andreessen: a16z launched an ambitious political program to defend startups
“We've launched a sort of a really ambitious political program in the last year, because we've just had it with people basically taking free shots on goal on startups, and so we're trying to support a lot of the politicians on the right side of these issues”
Horowitz: a16z made a major donation to the Fairshake PAC
“We have a big kind of donation to something called the fair shake pack, which is kind of work on this and just identifying for kind of citizens like, okay, which politicians are on what side of these issues?”
Horowitz: a16z supports regulation in crypto, drug development, and finance
“We're, you know, in representing little tech, we're not a pure libertarian, anti-regulatory kind of You know, force here. We think we need regulation in places. We certainly need it in drug development. We certainly need regulation in crypto and financial serv…”
Horowitz: Worldcoin is unable to list on exchanges in the United States
“We have an investment in a company called world coin, which is like a very kind of topical relevant technology because it's proof of human. They can do a zero knowledge proof that proves you're a human being and not an AI bot. But the one country that they can…”
Horowitz: Market size is impossible to evaluate for market-creating startups
“When we evaluate deals, what we always find is like the most impossible thing to evaluate is the size of the market, particularly if the product is gonna create the market.”
Horowitz: a16z sees zero generative AI traction in large enterprises
“Every company that has traction is in a category like selling to developers, or selling to consumers, or maybe selling to, like, small kinds of, you know, law firms or these. Kinds of things, but we haven't seen anybody with any traction in the enterprise.”
a16z data shows traditional AI startups have lower, non-software margins
“So we've actually done studies on this, and it turns out many companies that try to do this as startups end up with, like, non-software-like margins. They're lower margins, and they're just much harder to scale.”
Andreessen: a16z is becoming directly involved in political policy and lobbying
“We are getting increasingly involved directly in politics which is not something that we would, you know, prefer to do if we didn't have to, but you know, we are doing it in this category and a few others as sort of these challenges have gotten more intense.”
a16z made zero American Dynamism investments in San Francisco in 2023
“This year we haven't made a single American dynamism investment in San Francisco.”
Yoo: Pandemic accelerates 10-year healthcare modernization trends into 2-3 years
“Now, all of those things were tailwinds that we thought would take 10 years or even longer to play out. But with the current dynamics at play during this pandemic it's more likely that those things will play out in two or three years.”
Horowitz: Operating company executives must prioritize decision speed over decision quality
“So running a company, you try to be more structured in how you do this in some ways in that speed is really important. So if you're running a company, you're kind of, your output is decisions and you rate it on quality and speed. And if you have to make the tr…”
Jordan: Portfolio companies cut spending without slowing top-line growth
“We've had a couple companies that Shifted in the current capital environments and the uncertainty there shifted from growth at all costs to, you know, kind of smart growth mode or whatever you want to call it. The amazing thing, the profitability improved dram…”
Andreessen: The single biggest advice for startups is raising prices
“The single biggest strategic piece of advice we just see across all of our companies is literally people just need to raise prices. People need to charge more for their products and services.”
Horowitz: Prioritize magnitude of founder strengths over number of weaknesses
“We're much more interested in the magnitude of the strength than the number of the weaknesses.”
Andreessen: All a16z general partners must be former founders or CEOs
“We decided that the general partners at Andreessen Horowitz would all be people who had been founders or CEOs or both of tech startups”
Andreessen: a16z invests in extreme startup strengths, not lack of weaknesses
“We say we invest in strength, not in lack of weakness.”
Andreessen: a16z aims to back startups that disrupt IBM's enterprise dominance
“And I view our company's challenge and opportunity is to prove that untrue.”
Andreessen: a16z deliberately adopts the exact opposite of Warren Buffett's investment strategy
“He's kind of somebody that, his philosophy is somebody that a lot of people index against, and we kind of index against it by trying to do the exact opposite.”
Andreessen: a16z rejects founders who quickly evaluate multiple startup ideas
“One of the ways to convince us not to fund a startup is for people to come in and basically say, I wanted to start a company, and I had 14 ideas, and I think this is the best idea, and then I did two months of work on it, and I'm ready to go. And like, we'd ra…”
Andreessen: a16z partners can approve investments even if everyone else objects
“One of the things we have in our firm is we have an ethical veto. And so the way our firm works is we actually don't need unanimity. We don't vote on investments. The person sponsoring the investment can pull the trigger, even if everybody else is opposed to t…”
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.”
Andreessen: Startups require five years of 18-hour days, six days a week
“There is no substitute. There is no substitute. The big takeaway, and this applies to everything we fund, and it's what we work on all the time, there is no substitute to the first five years of people in the office, 18 hours a day, six days a week, grinding a…”
Andreessen: Adjusted for delayed IPOs, capital flowing into tech is flat
“In our deck we basically show if you adjust for the IPOs that aren't happening and the companies are staying private, it's basically, it's almost a flat amount of money actually flowing into tech.”
McGurk: a16z advises startups against granting board seats to strategic investors
“All things that we advise our portfolio companies generally speaking against. Absolutely. And so there's a balance there. So it's not, those are not things that are automatically granted because they're asked for. And sometimes the right answer is, you know, y…”
Andreessen: Investor market opinions matter far less than founder depth
“Odds are, what we found is, odds are if you find those things, it almost doesn't matter. Like, I don't know that what we think about the market or the product or the technology actually matters that much because we're, we have the opportunity to place a bet on…”
Dixon: a16z sees as many top founders in crypto as in AI
“I think that the you know, it's to me, if you sort of compare at our firm, so at the, you know, if you compare crypto to, you know, I don't know, SaaS, or like all the other kind of, you know, or machine learning, AI startups I'd say it's at least as many, lik…”