Opinion
Horowitz: European startup culture suffers from negative societal values and regulation
“They have a, like a, definitely a worse regulatory environment and EU increasingly bad regulatory environment for entrepreneurship, but there, there's a cultural challenge where You know, succeeding, doing something larger than yourself, making the world a bet…”
Assertion Contradicted
Horowitz: Biden executive order required federal approval to sell GPUs
“The last Biden administration executive order said that you could not sell a GPU without federal government approval. Like, that was a real executive order, and that got reversed, but like, we were that close. To being basically out of the global chip game.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: AI solutions will kick in massively across sectors within 24 months
“And then, you know, from our perspective, I think the bigger thing is AI is You know, it's gonna impact everything. There's almost no problem you can think of that you can't go. Well, we have a real shot at solving that with AI. It's from, you know, what were …”
Insight
Horowitz: Technology solutions work much better than government policy
“By the way, like technology solutions Work much better than policy solutions. That's it. That's the other thing. Like policy solutions, it's very hard to make anything work.”
Insight
Horowitz: Access to sufficient data and GPUs can solve almost any problem
“Now, if you have the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything.”
Insight
Horowitz: Elite AI Model Training Cannot Be Learned in Academia
“If you haven't been at like Google or Facebook or open AI or anthropic and like somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to try and build a giant model and you weren't like one of the main people, then you probably don't know how to do it because you …”
Opinion
Horowitz: AI is the greatest opportunity equalizer in human history
“So that's a big, it's an equalizer of the opportunity in a lot of ways that I don't think we've ever seen a bigger opportunity equalizer than AI in that every child can have like a super advanced, amazing tutor teacher. So like education, Great education is ac…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: US Will Lose Superpower Status Without Technological Leadership in AI
“This is the equivalent Change of the industrial revolution in terms of how everything works, governments, societies, businesses, and, you know, we're either going to be, ah, the leader of that technology, the provider of that technology, or we're not. And if w…”
Insight
Horowitz: Tier-one VCs consistently beat tier-two firms via entrepreneur selection
“The best entrepreneurs will only work with the top tier firms because that's how you're going to recruit great engineers. That's how you're going to get follow on money. Like everything comes out of that. So you'd never take money from a tier two if you could …”
Disclosure
Horowitz: a16z fires staff who publicly disparage entrepreneurs to look good
“If you try to make yourself look good by making an entrepreneur look bad, you're fired.”
Assertion Contradicted
Horowitz: Funded tech initiative reduced Las Vegas crime by over 50%
“Since we started the program, I think crime is down over 50% and then you know, shooting of suspects by police is down, like, close to 75%.”
Insight
Horowitz: AI adoption requires no new infrastructure unlike past tech waves
“The internet is here, so if you want to use AI, if you want to apply it to your business, you just do it. Like, there is no infrastructure that needs to be built to adopt the thing.”
Opinion
Horowitz: Displacing incumbents like Salesforce or SAP with AI remains extremely difficult
“If you look at existing software companies, like people think, oh, they're all dead. Some of these guys are extremely hard targets. Like it's not that easy to take out Salesforce or SAP. You would be surprised even with AI, like how much heavy lifting that is.”
Assertion Supported
Horowitz: AI coding assistant Cursor reached $1 billion in record time
“Cursor, which is ostensibly an IDE, like what's the biggest IDE before cursor? Like, I don't know, but it wasn't big. And it took probably like 12 or 15 years to get to that revenue level. And you know, they went over a billion dollars in revenue like in no ti…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: AI founders will become even richer than internet pioneers
“And then AI is another layer on top of that in that, okay, now take that same product. And make it just more valuable thing. And so whoever invents that is whatever the internet company was plus, plus, plus. And so that's going to make them even richer.”
Insight
Horowitz: Systems designed to eliminate inequality merely concentrate dictatorial power
“And the problem is if you create a system that tries to correct that, it doesn't make things more fair. It just, Transfers all the power to the person running the system. And that's what happened with Stalin. That's what happened with Ceausescu. That's what ha…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: AI will increase creative jobs and decrease creative processing jobs
“I think the, Need for, like, more creativity jobs is gonna go way up, and the kind of need for, kind of, jobs to process work for the creatives will probably go down in some ways, but I'm not even sure about that.”
Disclosure
Horowitz: a16z's Mission Is Ensuring Major Tech Companies Emerge from US and Allies
“Our role is like from a policy standpoint, from a funding standpoint, from a helping people build standpoint to make sure that that next set of great companies comes out of America or allied nations. Of course, ambition is to do our part in kind of helping tha…”
Insight
Horowitz: Leaders have better judgment than smarter subordinates due to context
“Only the leaders got the context. So even if they're smarter than you still likely can have better judgment because you have all the knowledge.”
Disclosure
Horowitz: Andreessen Horowitz was named to prove founders would not abandon fund
“The reason we named the firm after ourselves is when we try it, we raised money in 2009, which is right on the, you know, edge of the financial crisis. And the big objection from LPs was, well, like you guys are like really good entrepreneurs. You're just goin…”
Insight
Horowitz: Most CEOs Are Not Effective Investors or Founder Mentors
“Most CEOs, Aren't as interested in investing as they think they are. And then also most CEOs aren't as good at helping somebody else learn the job.”
Insight
Horowitz: Venture Investing Teams Must Stay at Four to Five People
“So you need an investing team of like four or five people, but you have to, you can't address the whole technology market with five people. So you have to have multiple teams.”
Disclosure
Horowitz: a16z fined staff $10/minute for meeting tardiness with founders
“I used to find people, 10 dollars a minute in the beginning of the firm to reinforce it.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Horowitz: AI will make movies better and lower production costs
“I think AI will help you make movies both better and at much lower cost because you can do, you know, you can shoot a scene and then have the AI do a variation of that scene.”
Ben Horowitz