Andrew Chen
General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. On 1 show, 11 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorauthoroperatorhost@andrewchen ↗LinkedIn ↗andrewchen.com ↗
Before joining a16z in 2018, Chen led Rider Growth at Uber and became widely known for writing essays on startup metrics and network effects. He is the author of The Cold Start Problem and oversees a16z's games investments and SPEEDRUN accelerator.
1shows
11appearances
71statements
11resolved
6supported
2contradicted
55%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything Andrew Chen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Chen: Only one physical book printer remains in the United States
“There's literally, I think, like one book printer left in the U.S.”
Chen: Game developers must design for streamability, not just playability
“Now that this has, is very clearly a you know, major sort of like growth hack to be able to generate to make things that are streamable, now I think you have to, you know, almost work backwards, right? If you're working on a new you know, if you're working on …”
Andrew Chen: The VR industry rushed to consumer homes too early
“As an industry what we sort of seem to want to do with VR was basically invent the technology and then immediately bring it home. Right. Into homes. Right. And that's certainly not what happened in the, in, in, in the, you know in the film industry because the…”
Andrew Chen: Location-based entertainment requires interactive gaming mechanics for replayability
“I'll bet on something interactive, ah, any day, because that's how you get the frequency, that's how you get, you know, in, in terms of all of our, you know, interest in everything from, you know, e-sports and streaming and so on, that you sort of need to actu…”
Andrew Chen: Declining retail malls create attractive real estate opportunities for VR
“On retail, it's not a bet towards the success of the future of malls and the future of these retail spaces. It's actually kind of a bet against it. It's actually saying, like, look, there's actually really attractive retail opportunities because of the fact th…”
Chen: Viral software products inevitably shift toward enterprise sales
“Virally spreading products end up going, tilting towards enterprise over time for a really simple reason, which is that With larger companies, your cohorts will look better because there's revenue expansion.”
Chen: SMB software products struggle to get below 5% monthly churn
“No matter what, when you're working with SMBs, I find it very hard to get better than let's say a five percent per month churn rate.”
Chen: Incumbent enterprise B2B software companies cannot compete with freemium models
“Eventually free tends to go away or become, you know, pretty crippled as the whole business evolves. But freemium can be so disruptive in these industries because if you're a large enterprise B to B software company, you're not going to be able to do this kind…”
Chen: Cutting ride-share wait times below five minutes does not boost conversion
“So for example, in Rideshare, if you are going to get a car called 15 minutes versus 10 minutes, that's very meaningful. But if it's, you know, five minutes versus two minutes, your conversion rate doesn't actually go up.”
Chen: Substack saved the dying blogging ecosystem
“This was also an era where, like, the blogging ecosystem was sort of dying. A really important moment to actually save blogging, really, and sort of, like, writing on the internet.”
Chen: Social platforms are replacing follower graphs with algorithmic feeds
“It turns out then the algorithms are so good that maybe that should be their entire feed is just suggested content. But then what does it mean as a creator to even build a following on one of these platforms? If, you know, even if you have, you know, a 100,000…”
Chen: Esports talent and team owners will gain power over publishers
“And so, I think over time, if that, if you get to that level, you'll get to a point where you know, the talent ends up holding, you know, the cards in the whole thing.”
Chen: Game studios build network effects via competition, streaming, and UGC
“E-sports and sort of this tournament play and, you know, the competitive aspect, that's one version of this. Being able to create a streamable thing, which then, you know, has a community around you know, your whole product, that's another version of this. And…”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR's gaming DNA drove a16z's investment thesis
“The fact that both of you guys have you know, games DNA as opposed to Hollywood DNA was actually a really part, key part of the investment thesis.”
Andrew Chen: Video-generating products have an automatic customer acquisition advantage
“Any product that then generates video as part of the usage automatically has a leg up in, you know, in, in, in customer acquisition.”
Chen: Product engagement is the primary leading indicator for enterprise growth
“That is why one of the really interesting things that Martin and you and I end up talking about with these bottoms up companies is evaluating the engagement on the products using consumer metrics, because often it's the engagement. That's really the leading in…”
Chen: Bottom-up software should monetize by gating IT admin features
“And so what you end up wanting to do is you're gating these features that, you know, the IT admins want, and those are the things that end up being how you differentiate the enterprise customers from purely the consumer ones.”
Chen: Uber employees secretly used Slack despite official HipChat mandate
“One of the funny anecdotes at Uber was that for a long time we were officially on HipChat, but there were so many teams across the company that would have their little secret Slack, you know, team chat going because they just didn't want to deal with it. I fee…”
Chen: Daily-use consumer products with DAU/MAU under 15% will likely fail
“If you think that your product is a daily use product, and you're going to monetize using, you know, a little bit of money that you're making over a long period of time, but your DaoMao is low, is like sub 15%, then like, it's probably not going to work.”
Chen: Products must excel in retention, frequency, or monetization
“That's retention versus frequency versus monetization. And I think you gotta to be like really good at least on one of those axes.”
Chen: Modern Games Must Include Built-In Twitch Sharing Features
“Like, there's no point these days in building a new game that doesn't have built-in recording and publishing to Twitch and built-in tournament systems and all the community features and all that stuff that you need.”
Chen: Amazon Has No Incentive to Stop Echo Accidental Triggers
“They have no incentive to fix that. Because, like, it reminds you that it's there and reminds you to talk to it.”
Andrew Chen's Three-Part Framework for Breakthrough Consumer Startups
“One of the easy ways to think about the intersection of all the things that I'm looking for are ultimately these three things, which is a new platform, a new technology that's hitting scale, right? Maybe it's providing a product experience that maybe has never…”
League of Legends Championship Viewership Dwarfed Wimbledon's Live Audience
“League of Legends, you know, had a championship in 2017, and you had over a hundred million concurrent viewers you know, watching it, right? And Dota you know, has had fifteen million. And when you compare that to something like Wimbledon, which is under ten m…”
The other half of the tape: Andrew Chen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Marc Andreessen 2Margit Wennmachers 1Erik Torenberg 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 4
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Andrew's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz | 11 | 71 | 55% 6/11 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |