Peter Levine
General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz. On 1 show, 24 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Peter Levine is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz focusing on enterprise software and open-source business models. He previously served as CEO of XenSource, an executive at Veritas Software, and is a lecturer at Stanford GSB.
1shows
24appearances
124statements
5resolved
4supported
1contradicted
80%fully supported
13said about them ↓ Everything Peter Levine said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Levine: Big data performance issues only occur in hybrid cloud setups
“And like Pratt said before, the performance issue is only an issue when we're going back and forth from the cloud to on prem.”
Levine: Open source as a service is the superior business model
“And my belief is that there's really a very, ah, beneficial model by having open source as a service, open and proprietary source as a service, Again, as a way to really drive economic value out of open source”
Levine: Facebook and Google Outpace Cisco in Networking Sophistication
“Yeah it's very fair to say. I think they, Facebook and Google, have absolutely pushed the needle on back-end data center infrastructure”
Levine: Cumulus Networks matches Cisco and Juniper performance on commodity hardware
“What they are doing is taking commodity hardware, putting a layer of Open source and closed source software on top of commodity servers and turning that into a new switch that is as fast as is, you know, as capable as some of the most proprietary systems that …”
Levine: Open-Source Renaissance Required Business Model Innovation
“And I would argue without business innovation, such as pay for support, open core, and of course, SAS, open source as a service, there really wouldn't be an open source renaissance.”
Levine: Open-Source Businesses Evolve Through Three Distinct Pillars
“Open source is built on three pillars. They are one, project community fit, two, product market fit, and three, value market fit. Each of these have measurable objectives, and these pillars sort of unfold over time.”
Levine: Open-Source Project Leaders Typically Become Startup CEOs
“What's most important is that open source has a project leader to drive the effort, and typically that project leader becomes the CEO of companies.”
Levine: a16z Strongly Prefers Funding Open-Source Project Leaders
“As investors, we are strongly biased towards funding project leaders since they own the project, they know the product roadmap and can lead the product roadmap and know the code base inside and out.”
Levine: Open-Source Product-Market Fit Is Measured by Organic Downloads
“The next is product market fit, and this is all about organic adoption as measured by the number of downloads.”
Levine: Value-Market Fit Centers on Enterprise Revenue, Not Users
“While product market fit often accrues to individual users, value market fit typically centers on departmental and enterprise buyers and is measured by revenue.”
Levine: Support and Services Open-Source Models Are Hard to Scale
“And I would say that the downside or potential area to be aware of is this model is very hard to scale and hard to scale operationally.”
Levine: Raw Downloads Fail to Reflect True Open-Source User Traction
“Measuring downloads turned out to be interesting, but not sufficient in terms of a metric that could credibly be used to indicate the user traction and what was happening.”
Levine: Open-Source Companies Need Separate Roadmaps for Free and Paid Features
“Typically, in an open source company, there's going to be two roadmaps. One for open source for core functionality, and one closed source for paid features.”
Levine: Open-Source Product-Market Fit Does Not Guarantee Enterprise Buyers
“One is your open source user doesn't lead to a buyer, and this is an example of where product market fit might be really great, but there's not value market fit to tie into it. So you have a lot of open source users, but there's no buyers.”
Levine: Aggressive Proprietary Monetization Destroys Developer Trust
“Your commercial offering kills your developer's street cred. This, again, is an example of where you may just be putting too many features into your proprietary product and almost abandoning your open source roots.”
Levine: The Open-Source Market Is Far Bigger Than Currently Realized
“And if we think of open source that way, the renaissance is really only beginning, and the market is far bigger than we have yet created or yet realized.”
Levine: Product features must inherit elements of the target sales motion
“The product, the features of the product need to inherit part of the sales motion itself, right? And that if you're going after a certain Motion or certain customer, the product needs to be reflective of that, and I think we often miss there.”
Levine: Professional Services Boost Blended Margins by Unlocking Enterprise Deals
“While services from a unit economic standpoint may be, you know, a little more expensive from a margin standpoint, if it drives very large deals with software margins, you come out way ahead.”
Levine: Novel enterprise pricing models create unnecessary sales friction
“You have to come up with pricing that the customers used to actually paying for. If you start to create something that's totally new, it creates friction in the system.”
Peter Levine: Startups that survive deep crises emerge much stronger
“Every company goes through some cathartic event, right, where it's the pit of despair, right, like nothing can go well, and the companies that pull out of that actually come out much stronger as a result. It is not A straight line up and to the right by any st…”
Levine: Bottom-up enterprise startups need hundreds of thousands of users for PMF
“That's sort of a new phenomena are enterprise companies that do have a bottoms up model whereby they do start with the consumer, which is typically a employee in a company where the product, you know, in some ways sells itself. And so that's another way of thi…”
Levine: Startup growth stalls when technical founders try to directly run sales
“In my experience, the growth kind of stops when they try to run sales too much and kind of get involved in an area where They have not a lot of experience, right?”
Peter Levine: New products or international expansion reset go-to-market fit
“Now, let me point out that if I enter into a new geography or I build another product as part of the company, you start over again. Let's say a U S geography and I want to expand internationally. Maybe my go to market model is actually different. It very well …”
The other half of the tape: Peter Levine's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 13 times in 10 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Sonal Chokshi 4Michael Copeland 4Martin Casado 1Frank Chen 1David George 1Ben Horowitz 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 13
2025 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 8 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce
- a16z Podcast | A Copernican Update ... In Tech, the Smartphone is the Center
- a16z Podcast | Monetizing Open Source (Or, All Enterprise Software)
- a16z Podcast | Infrastructure... Is Everything
- a16z Podcast | Finding and Hiring for (Expectations) Fit on Both Sides
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 1 mention in 1 episode
2017 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Peter'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 | 24 +1 | 124 | 80% 4/5 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |