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.
investorexecutiveengineeracademichostLinkedIn ↗a16z.com/author/peter-levine ↗Wikipedia ↗
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: Mid-to-large company CEOs cannot alter current quarter outcomes
“If your company is reasonable size, there's almost nothing you can do this quarter to change the outcome of this quarter.”
Levine: Domain expert data sharing creates an open-source data model
“You take the experts who are the programmers in their field, and they then push that knowledge off to everyone else. So maybe your dad's an expert in certain parts of this, and he can participate in it. It's the open source of data, right? Everyone's manipulat…”
Levine: Data-driven digital assistants will augment workers across all professions
“I mean, in some ways it's already happening. There are companies out there who look at Salesforce productivity, looking at the most productive salespeople in an organization, learn what they do, modify that, and then go give that information to, so where every…”
Edge endpoints will process data locally instead of centralized streaming
“If you think about the new world of distributed computing, the data that gets collected in a self-driving car or some endpoint is going to be, the information will be processed at that endpoint. It won't be translated back to a central storage pool. The inform…”
Autonomous vehicles generate 10 gigabytes of data per mile driven
“Self-driving car collects 10 gigabytes of data a mile, right?”
Levine: Freemium software functions primarily as a proxy for marketing spend
“The way I think about freemium is that it's a proxy for marketing spend. You tend to have to spend quite a bit on marketing in order to get the user to see the value of a given product. What freemium does is it offsets the marketing costs.”
Levine: Mismanaging open-source communities causes contributors to fork codebases
“If you don't manage the community in a proper way, the community will say, well, they're not doing what we want. We're going to fork the code and go run off and do, we're going to just do the whole thing.”
Levine: Modern open-source communities accept that companies must generate revenue
“The open source community has matured over the years, and I do believe that the community... Is sensitive and is appreciative of companies needing to actually make revenue and kind of have a business as opposed to just being a charity where everything's given …”
Levine: Open-source startups should charge for scalability and security
“There are discrete sort of components of open source that one could argue, here's all the functionality needed for a given user, a given server, a given environment. And then the added value components may be along areas such as scalability, security, Enterpri…”
Levine: Delivering open source as SaaS bypasses traditional support model friction
“When open source is offered as a service, the pricing. Is based on the service that you actually provide, and it makes for a very nice way to work around some of the nuances of open source and the whole, what's your support model and all these other bits and p…”
Levine: Open source SaaS companies often grow by expanding on-premises
“We've seen many companies, you start with a cloud, I'll say a cloud SaaS offering based on open source. Viral adoption, great uptake. And then enterprises say, well, like we need to have that inside our firewall. We want a copy of that. So then the expansion, …”
Levine: Developers Transformed into Key Enterprise Buying Centers
“I think one of the most notable transformations over the past five years has been the pauper to prince of the developer as a buying center within a company.”
Levine: a16z Portfolio Startups Use Developer-First Wedge Strategy
“What we see are many of our startup companies now deliberately selling to developers as the first wedge point into an organization.”
Levine: Enterprise purchases naturally follow consensus among developers
“And once the developers in an organization have coalesced around a set of great tools, It becomes a foregone conclusion that the company ought to step up and go purchase those particular tools and services.”
Levine: Open Source and SaaS Are Primarily Marketing Pipeline Vehicles
“Really the whole indoctrination of open source and SaaS as a starting point is a marketing vehicle to build a pipeline for an organization.”
Levine: Viral Spread Plus Enterprise Sales Is the Winning Open-Source Formula
“Organic virality works to a certain point, but in order to be a successful organization in this new ecosystem, the notion of viral spread plus an enterprise sales organization, I think is the winning formula.”
Levine: Dell acquiring EMC creates a complete data center systems vendor
“Dell's business moving from PC to server vendor, now server vendor to systems vendor, Makes a lot of sense. I mean, that logic there does hang together. Servers and storage kind of make up, and networking make up the bulk of make up the bulk of the data center…”
Levine: Future data centers will mirror hyperscale cloud architectures, not legacy hardware
“A lot of the new data center architectures Are more going to look like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, and less like older, you know, sort of Wall, I call them Wall Street data centers.”
Levine: EMC Buying VMware Was One of Tech's Greatest Acquisitions
“EMC arguably did what I think is one of the best enterprise acquisitions probably in the history of computing when they bought VMware.”
Levine: Dell excels at commodity sales, EMC at high-margin systems
“Dell is amazingly good at selling commodity components and EMC is amazingly good at selling high margin components.”
Levine: Commercial tech innovation has shifted from corporate labs to universities
“If you look at, ah, you know, a lot of, ah, innovation Up till, well, to me, re up until recently came from, like, Bell Labs and IBM and Microsoft Research, and that's where a lot of the new, I would say the new commercial ideas came from folks leaving those a…”
Levine: Transitioning from individual contributor to manager is the hardest career pivot
“I think one of the most difficult transitions a person makes in their career, whether it's from academia or from just an individual, is from individual contributor to being a manager and leader.”
Levine: Delaying open-source business models makes future monetization significantly harder
“If you don't have that early, what starts, and you don't know what that is, then potential customers and partners don't know what you're going to charge for in the future and all that, and it makes it, the longer you go on without having a model, the harder it…”
Levine: On-premise data centers give large companies an advantage over SMBs
“Large organizations who have the expertise and budgets to go create on-prem data centers have a huge competitive advantage over the hundreds of thousands of small to mid-sized companies that are probably using Excel spreadsheets as their data analytics tool ri…”
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 → |