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
Casado: Open-Source Enterprise Startups Need Direct Sales to Pass $100M
“In general, when we have seen companies come in that have open source strategies that create large top of funnels with developers, you get nice, super linear, Revenue ramps to a hundred million plus once they build direct sales.”
Becoming a CEO is more learnable than developing product genius
“Product genius is kind of binary, you have it or you don't, right? And it's more, becoming a CEO is more learnable than developing product genius.”
Horowitz: a16z refuses to invest in young founders with obvious ideas
“Like, if two young people just, like, start a company with a good but obvious idea, I would never invest in that because, like, I'd rather invest in, like, the experienced people with the same good and obvious idea.”
a16z Thesis: Every Moving Object Will Eventually Become Autonomous
“Our thesis is actually that everything that moves will eventually go autonomous. So if there's a reason for a plane or a truck or a toy or a shopping cart to move by itself and get from destination A to B, it will because the cost will collapse and It'll be us…”
George: a16z's best-performing early-stage venture funds have a 60% loss rate
“And so, you know, if you look at our best performing venture funds, Over time, I think the loss rate is 60% or so.”
Top a16z AI Startups Spend 10% of Human Compensation on Tokens
“Across the A-sixteen Z portfolio... Best companies spending on tokens per month relative to human compensation... High single digits, some at 10%, like some of the very AI native ones, like 10% plus. And so, you know, and then old economy companies are spendin…”
Casado: Top founder hardware pitches jumped from 5% to over 30%
“I don't know the actual numbers, but I was trying to estimate it over the weekend. So I think we'd get, you know, maybe five percent of the deals from top founders would come in, would be harder before. Now it's the north of 20% or 30% right now.”
Cursor reached 50% of the Fortune 500 faster than any a16z startup
“I mean, they got to over 50% of the Fortune 500 and I think faster than anyone we've ever seen.”
Acharya: Pitching a Startup Without a Live Product Is Now Disqualifying
“Like, it's disqualifying to not be showing a live product in a pitch at any stage these days because it's so trivial to build stuff.”
Horowitz: a16z lost Uber's Series B deal to Shervin Pishevar
“Ok, but, like, I just assumed we were doing the deal, and then the next thing I knew Shervin had the deal, and I was like, jeez.”
Ben Horowitz: a16z will not back third-party regional affiliate funds
“We're not raising money for somebody who's not part of our firm, our culture, our mission, and having them go run a play. That, that, that's just not us.”
Horowitz: Ben Horowitz is a16z CEO, but Marc Andreessen is the brand
“Like, us as a firm, like, technically, I'm really the CEO, but, like, Mark is more the brand, I would say, in terms of he just does way more media than I do. And that works, but it works because it's Andreessen Horowitz, and nobody knows the fucking difference…”
Horowitz: Much of a16z's brand was built by responding to public attacks
“A reasonable portion of the brand that we built was just responding to people attacking us”
George: Backing the wrong founder in a winning category is VC's worst mistake
“If the space happens to not work out and we have the leader, no harm, no foul. Actually, that's part of our business. That's what we should be doing. The bad box of what I described is the space works out and we pick the wrong one.”
George: a16z prioritizes AI startups sitting directly in the token path
“First of all, like right now, you have to be in the token path. Like that is the number one thing that we're looking to for our companies.”
Haber: Funds maximize short-term carry while firms build compounding competitive advantages
“The objective function of a fund is how do I generate the most carry with the fewest people in the shortest amount of time possible? And a firm, you know, you have to deliver exceptional returns, which is sort of a prerequisite for doing that well. But I think…”
Casado: Infrastructure companies are surging due to AI-generated code volume
“Sitting on the board of a bunch of infrastructure companies, some that have been flat for a while. They're all doing fantastic because there's so much software.”
Andreessen: a16z attempts to outpace venture competitors via speed
“You know, this is what Elon does, you know, to his competitors, like in the defense, you know, in the aerospace industry. This is what Andrel's now doing in companies in the defense industry. You know, this, quite frankly, is what we try to do, you know, to ou…”
Moore: Singapore Ranks #1 in Per-Capita AI Adoption, US Ranks #20
“So Singapore is number one. Then Hong Kong, then the UAE, then South Korea. The US is down at number 20, so not super low, not incredibly high. Russia and China are, like, very far down the list, like, sub 50.”
George: Aggregate unicorn market cap reached $3.5 trillion, growing 7x in a decade
“If you take the market cap of, you know, the private markets valued above a billion dollars, you know, we could argue are some of them overvalued, undervalued but that whole value in aggregate Is like three and a half trillion dollars, and that's like 11%, thr…”
George: Only 5% of public software companies forecast over 25% growth
“Something like five percent of software and internet public companies are forecasting 25% plus next 12 months growth. So, 95% of the public market universe in software and internet is growing less than 25%.”
Rampell: Andreessen Horowitz operates as a media firm to win deals
“We're a media firm that monetizes with venture capital, but there's a method to this madness, and the method is, it's helping us find deals, it's helping us pick deals, and it's helping us win deals.”
Andreessen: Venture brand equity serves as a slingshot for portfolio startups
“The purpose of building the dominant venture brand was precisely to be able to have the companies be able to borrow that at the most critical points in their development so that the companies can kind of use our force in the world as a slingshot to basically b…”
Marc Andreessen: a16z's biggest failures come from rejecting visionary founders
“Whenever we really screw up, it's because there's a founder who can see the future and they come and they sit in our office, they tell us what the future is. And we say, yeah, I don't really buy it. Right. And then for the next 30 years, you know, we have to r…”
a16z Does Not Hire Group Leaders From Outside the Firm
“First of all, in order to lead one of those groups, you just have to have been here and performed for a long time. So that, that, that's kind of the first thing. So we just know you extremely well. We're not interviewing people for that job from the outside. L…”
Marc Andreessen: a16z never invests purely for social or political reasons
“We never make investments for just purely kind of social and political reasons. Like, so the, you know, the goal obviously always as sort of fiduciaries is to generate returns.”
a16z Funds AI Startups Founded by Sutskever, Murati, and Fei-Fei Li
“We funded you know, we funded Ilyas Eskiver out of OpenAI to do a new foundation model company. We funded Mira Mirati also out of OpenAI. We funded Fei Fei Li out of Stanford to do a world model, foundation model company.”
Haber: a16z has slowed its consumer fintech investments in recent years
“I mean, I would say from our vantage point, we haven't made as many consumer fintech investments in recent years as we have historically.”
a16z strategically targeted all marketing communications at founders instead of LPs
“The thing that we all decided is like, we're just going to aim all of our communications at the entrepreneurs versus the LPs. Because we have their numbers, we, we're not a column, and you guys got great introductions to people, but it all needs to be very ent…”
a16z LPs complained about a Bio/Health blog post titled 'fuck cancer'
“We got one, we did one incredibly controversial block, it turns out. Like, a few LPs really hated the headline, and it was it was in the BioNHealth team, and it said, fuck cancer”
Horowitz: Openly discussing VC and startup building was a key differentiator
“VC was like a big secret. And then actually building companies was a big secret. And so just kind of talking about it was a big differentiator.”
a16z built partner brands so founders wouldn't only demand Marc Andreessen
“I do think we needed to even out the brand a little bit because like, otherwise any entrepreneur with leverage was going to go like, well, I want him to be on my board. Right. And that was just going to get success. It'll be worse with every other GP. So that …”
Ben Horowitz caused antagonism with established VC firms early on
“I caused a lot of antagonism between us and the other firms in those days.”
Ulevitch: a16z Will Shift Defense Investments Into Mining and Supply Chains
“I think as you look to the future, I mean, everyone has their own view of what the future will look like for American dynamism, but I think we, you'll see us increasingly shift left. That's why we look at minerals and we look at critical, critical minerals and…”
Casado: Cursor is one of the fastest-growing companies a16z has ever seen
“It's one of the, ah, fastest growing companies, certainly, we've ever seen.”
McCune: No D.C. group specifically represented early-stage tech startups before a16z
“There wasn't anyone specific who was actually advocating on behalf of what I think, what we call little tech, which I think in my mind are the startups and entrepreneurs, the smaller builders in the space.”
Casado: Only around 30 teams globally have trained large AI models
“It's another thing to have actually trained a very large model, you know, like maybe what, there's 30 teams that have ever done it.”
Google Gemini reaches half of ChatGPT's mobile app traffic
“Gemini was number two. It was right behind ChatGPT. It has just about 10% of ChatGPT's traffic on web, but it's much closer on mobile. It's like half of ChatGPT's traffic on the mobile app, which is interesting. It's mostly Android users, which I think you wou…”
Wang: Most a16z AI founders work in office 6-7 days weekly
“Most of the founders that we work with are in the office six to seven days a week.”
Wang: a16z portfolio CTOs reported 10% to 15% AI productivity gains
“Last year, it was notable that when we asked, hey, CTOs across 24 portfolio companies how much is AI actually impacting your productivity? And the answer across the board was pretty much 10 to 15%. We're all using GitHub Copilot.”
Wang: AI companies are growing faster than a16z expected
“AI companies are growing faster and are larger than even we expected.”
Casado: Ilya Sutskever is the Oppenheimer of artificial intelligence
“So, you know, we invested in Ilya. I mean, the guy's Oppenheimer. He's been close to every major advancement in the last 15 years in AI.”
Casado: Software development will have formal AI engineering methods in five years
“And I truly believe in five years, we'll look back, we'll come up with a whole new, you know, set of formal ways to build software and they will have strong guarantees and we'll understand them and, you know, there'll be all the tools for it, et cetera.”
Torenberg: a16z regrets not investing even more aggressively in AI
“Because when we look back at the last few years of our sort of growth investing in this category, we, We've been very aggressive, but we regret not being even more aggressive.”
Moore: Veo 3 is currently the best text-to-video AI model
“So we're going to dive into my current AI video stack for consumer creators like me, starting with VO three, which I think is currently the best text to video model.”
Andreessen: Only a16z and Khosla Ventures raised funds in 2009
“There were only two venture capital funds raised in all of 2009. It was us and a new couple of ventures fund, and Benoad, of course, was one of the legends of venture capital, so he was able to do that, but we were the only other literally venture fund raised …”
Horowitz: a16z founders took zero management pay from $300M Fund 1
“We rather than paying the partners a lot of money or in our case, we didn't pay ourselves any money. What if we took all that money? Cause it was a lot of money. Cause, you know, we're like, even on a three hundred million dollar fund, it was a really a lot of…”
Horowitz: Andreessen Horowitz was the first venture firm to market itself
“We actually were the first ones to market a firm in venture capital and, you know, market wet markets did like an amazing job of, you know, creating a brand for a firm that, You know, popped up out of nowhere. And that had never happened before”