Frank Chen
Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. On 2 shows, 34 appearances, plus 8 compilation re-airs not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investoroperatorexecutiveanalysthost@withfries2 ↗LinkedIn ↗a16z.com/author/frank-chen ↗
At Andreessen Horowitz, Chen leads Early Stage Venture Programs and previously built the firm's deal and research team, becoming known for primers on emerging technologies. Prior to venture capital, he held senior product and user experience leadership roles at Netscape, Loudcloud, Opsware, and HP Software.
2shows
34appearances
272statements
51resolved
36supported
2contradicted
71%fully supported
11said about them ↓ Everything Frank Chen said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Chen: Deep learning will outperform trained radiologists within five years
“It takes five years to train a radiologist, and in five years, deep learning will get better results than a trained radiologist, so we should stop training them right now.”
Geoffrey Hinton: Backpropagation is a dead end for reaching general intelligence
“He says, I think we need a reboot. I think the path that I set everybody on, and fundamentally an algorithm called backpropagation, I think that's a dead end. I think if we want general intelligence, we're going to need to invent a new technique. We're going t…”
Chen: AI models predict suicide risk years ahead with over 80% accuracy
“Study one basically looks through electronic health records and based on the data in electronic health records is able to predict people who are likely to commit suicide. And these people might be two or three years away from that event, but they are able to p…”
Chen: Most AV Experts Require LiDAR, With Tesla as Key Outlier
“Most people that I talk to think definitely LiDAR. There's a couple of big outliers. I think Tesla is trying a system without LiDAR, but we'll see.”
Chen: Society Must Deploy Autonomous Cars Immediately Despite Temporary Accident Increases
“Morally, from a social point of view, we should try to get self-driving cars on the road as soon as possible, even if we get this small tick up in new types of accidents that we've never seen before due to the interaction, because the self-driving algorithms w…”
Chen: Urban and suburban residents will stop owning private cars
“Yeah, I think that in most urban and most suburban settings, people will stop owning their cars.”
Chen: Legacy automakers will fail to transition into fleet operators
“I actually expect most of the manufacturers to not be able to make that transition, because if you think about every bonus that has ever been paid out at a car manufacturer, it's because you designed a car that people really wanted the three series.”
Chen: Driver-assist features will be phased out for full autonomy
“So I think from a skill atrophy point of view, and from an attention point of view, we're in this transition phase where all this driver assist Is going to get phased out in favor of complete driving.”
Chen: Fintech ML found gambling apps correlate with better credit risk
“It turns out if you have gambling applications, you're a better credit risk. And I think if you had asked a million loan officers if they would have predicted that, they would have a million out of a million times said, no, of course, that makes you a worse cr…”
AI diagnosis will make empathy the primary reason patients choose doctors
“And I think as we introduce machine learning into the doctor's office, two things will happen. One, most doctors will get very good at diagnosis because we're going to use machine learning algorithms to figure out what's wrong with you. And then most doctors w…”
Having gambling apps on your phone correlates with higher loan repayment rates
“So being a gambler or using gambling apps actually makes you more likely to repay a loan, which might be counterintuitive.”
Chen: Effective crisis intervention skips rapport-building to directly address root solutions
“One of them is that the most successful counselors get right to the core issue and begin working with the person on a solution, which is a little counterintuitive. You might expect that you want to develop rapport so that they trust you. The data shows the exa…”
Chen: AlphaGo Zero proves reinforcement learning succeeds without labeled data
“Right, where there's so much momentum right now that says, basically, we're one labeled data set away from glory. Right, and this result basically shows you, wow, there's a lot of mileage that you can get out of reinforcement learning where there's no data, no…”
Chen: Automakers will shift to Boeing-style B2B fleet sales
“Well, one of the big changes, especially if we're going to switch to fleet ownership, is the car manufacturers will start being a lot more like Boeing and Airbus than they will be like Ford and BMW today.”
Chen: The introduction of ATMs actually increased total U.S. bank teller jobs
“After the introduction of the ATM for banking, the total number of bank tellers in the country increased, right? Because what we did was we built banks with ATMs in convenient places and put tellers in them. So we expanded the reach of banks so that you're, yo…”
Chen: Deep learning represents the triumph of data over algorithms
“So the big trend is the triumph of data over algorithms. Which is you try to make more and more sophisticated edge detection algorithms, feature recognition algorithms. The big advance with deep learning was, screw all that. I'm not going to try to figure out …”
Chen: Deep learning generates non-human insights that humans cannot debug
“So I think maybe this is the vector, which is these deep learning techniques, which we can't completely characterize and describe, much less debug, are leading to these flashes of insight, and they might not be human insight.”
Chen: Legacy insurance data will lose value against real-time IoT streams
“The way to think about it is the data that insurance companies had will become less and less important over time as these new data streams get unlocked.”
Chen: Autonomous vehicle ethical programming choices will affect insurance rates
“And I, one of the really interesting trends is this is going to extend to algorithms. In other words, there are going to be ethical programming that we have to do for our cars, right? So the protocol example is, look, you're building the self-driving car, and …”
Chen: Insurance sales will move to Amazon, Costco, and Facebook Messenger
“Why aren't I buying more insurance products at Costco or Amazon or through Facebook Messenger? And so, like, that will come.”
Chen: Apple's single wallet model will outperform fragmented Android payments
“And if you contrast what's happening in Apple land with what's happening in Android land, if you've tried NFC payments in Android land, you have lots of stakeholders with their own applications clamoring to be your wallet. So you have ISIS now known as soft ca…”
Chen: Apple will never make an Apple Watch compatible with Android
“So you're never, you're not going to see watch that works with an Android phone, right? Like, they're just not going to do that.”
Chen: Normal historical grid expansion rates can support an all-electric fleet
“So if you added 15 gigawatts every year for 30 years, you could get to 450 gigawatts, which is just about the forecast capacity needed. So it looks like we don't have to do anything incredibly unnatural to get to the electricity production levels that we're go…”
The other half of the tape: Frank Chen's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 11 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 3Harry Stebbings 3Stuart Butterfield 2Steven Sinofsky 1Alex Rampell 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 8
20VC 3
2026 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: a16z's Scott Kupor on The Biggest Learnings From Scaling a16z from $300m to $7Bn AUM, The Biggest Mistakes Entrepreneurs Make When Pitching VCs & Why VC Is Simply A Customer Service Business
- a16z Podcast | Capitalizing on an Autonomous Vehicle Future
- a16z Podcast | Nobody Discusses Work Software Outside of Work -- and Then There’s Slack
- a16z Podcast | Automation + Work, Human + Machine
- a16z Podcast | Crypto, Security, CS, Quantum Computing, and More with Our New Professor-in-Residence
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Frank's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Partner, Andreessen Horowitz | 33 +8 | 259 | 69% 31/45 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Partner, Andreessen Horowitz | 1 | 13 | 83% 5/6 | full record on 20VC → |