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: Ben Thompson proved subscriptions work, but setup was too painful
“You had Ben Thompson from Stratechery really show that like, oh, there's maybe an alternate model but it was almost like, always like a curiosity and something that was like annoying to actually build.”
Chen: Selling 10,000 pre-orders makes a book a bestseller
“If you literally just get enough pre-orders that you can get 10,000 units sold, that's like a bestseller.”
Chen: User-generated gaming platforms face same regulatory scrutiny as social media
“A lot of the most interesting new platforms like you know, UEFN and Roblox, which are user generated, you know, content platforms, you know, all the metaverse work that's also happening as well. You know, all of those kind of fall into user generate, you know,…”
Chen: Gaming generates $148 billion annually, surpassing music and box office
“As David mentioned, it generates a hundred and forty eight billion dollars of revenue every year. It's bigger than music. It's bigger than the box office.”
Chen: Cloud gaming success will unlock entirely new game genres in 10 years
“I think we will sit back, you know, 10 years from now, and if the whole cloud gaming thing works, it'll be sort of this, Whole new genres that are unlocked.”
Chen: Gaming will be the primary entertainment medium for new adults
“You're gonna start getting you know, a really interesting group of adults who, ah, they, their primary form of entertainment by hours through their, the, you know, all of growing up, all of, you know, getting into their twenties is gonna be gaming, not all, al…”
Chen: Watching others play games delivers 20% of direct enjoyment
“It turns out that watching somebody enjoy something, it gives you like, I don't know, 20% of the same enjoyment as like actually getting it yourself, and then it just turns out that then watching people, you know, play you know, games you know, also kind of is…”
Chen: Talent is migrating from traditional sports into esports
“A lot of the talent is sort of moving from traditional sports into eSports in order to sort of supercharge the IQ, you know, within all of this, which is super fascinating.”
Chen: Streamable games will cause market-wide game fragmentation
“As all of the publishers all move towards building, you know, sort of this flavor of streamable game, that actually there are more and more, there's more and more fragmentation of games, right? And the overall market will be growing, but there's more fragmenta…”
Andrew Chen passed on Sandbox VR's seed round as an angel
“And so I passed on the, you know, on, on, on, on the seed round, which is a really interesting, you know, place to start, start the whole conversation.”
Andrew Chen: Pitch decks acknowledging market challenges build investor credibility
“So I think by actually going negative, it actually felt more real.”
Andrew Chen: Virtual reality is the best tech demo of recent years
“VR is the best tech demo that anyone's ever seen over the last couple years.”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR will eventually transform into a VR game publisher
“The company's gonna be a publisher one day.”
Andrew Chen: Gaming DNA is the best foundation for location-based VR
“I came into this thinking, Of, you know, if you're gonna bet on a theme park plus plus, film plus plus, arcade plus plus, or gaming plus plus, like of all those DNAs as kind of the root, that I would bet on the games piece you know, like more than anything els…”
Andrew Chen: Sandbox VR will eventually require thousands of retail employees
“This is going to be like a retail, you know, large retail like chain that is going to need to employ one day, Many, many, many thousands of people on the ground, and it was going to be extremely operationally complex.”
Chen: Horizontal enterprise products spread faster because all employees can use them
“Things like Dropbox, Asana, Slack. These are all things that everyone in your company can use. And so naturally is going to spread much faster because At every moment, each node in the network is gonna be able to have access to all 15 to 30 people around them …”
Andrew Chen: High enterprise signup proportions signal market pull to uplevel faster
“And if you find out that a large proportion of them are actually enterprises, that's actually pull demand from the market that you should actually be up leveling faster.”
Chen: B2B software is significantly less price elastic than consumer subscriptions
“When Netflix increases their monthly subscription by two dollars, everyone's, you know, screaming bloody murder. And B to B is obviously less elastic.”
Chen: Envoy achieved rare B2B virality through workplace brand experience
“Like Envoy, that is an amazing B to B viral story. It's, they're very rare, but the reason why people use that now is because offices are part of the brand experience. And then after they use the thing, then they're kind of like, oh yeah, we're using pen and p…”
Chen: Elite product retention curves eventually swing back upward
“For the good ones, They start to flatten out and they plateau, and then for the really good ones, they'll actually swing back up and, you know, people will come back to the service.”
Chen: Extra push notifications can inadvertently lower DAU/MAU ratios
“The challenging thing is actually usually sending out more notifications will actually cause more of your casual users to show up, because your hardcore users were already kind of showing up, you know, already. And what that does is that'll increase your month…”
Chen: Network effects exist on a continuous curve, not a binary state
“When you look at the data, what you really figure out is network effect is actually like a curve. And it's not like a binary yes, no kind of thing.”
Chen: Modern consumer apps must steal time from existing products
“Well, because it used to be that you were, you know, what kind of time were you competing for in the first couple of years of the smartphone? You were competing against literally, I'm going to stare at the back of this person's head Or I can, like, use some co…”
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 → |