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by Justine Moore, Bryan Kim, Yoko Li, and Martin Casado
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Having an AI companion might seem niche, but it’s emerged as a predominant use case for generative AI. There are hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people who have already built and nurtured relationships with chatbots. We believe we’re on the cusp of a significant societal shift: AI companions will soon become commonplace.
In this article, we dive into the emerging behavior of AI companionship: why people are creating companions, how they’re doing it, and what features or use cases might be coming next.
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with Ali Ghodsi, Ben Horowitz, and Steph Smith
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The holy grail of company building? Finding product-market fit. But once you’ve found it, product-market fit brings its own set of challenges—particularly when it comes to scaling rapidly and hiring the right executives at the right time.
Drawing from their extensive experiences, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Databricks cofounder and CEO Ali Ghodsi sit down to talk about the hardest things about executive hiring and firing, and what is at stake.
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by Marc Andrusko and Seema Amble
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Pricing a new product or service can be confusing, and founders are often unsure how much time they should be spending on pricing strategy. This can be particularly tricky for B2B fintech companies, which have multiple paths to monetization (e.g., some combination of SaaS vs. transactional revenue, or freemium vs. subscription).
B2B fintech companies also need to earn more trust from their customers than the average B2B business—because they’re handling someone else’s money.
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by Joe Morrissey, Mark Regan, and Abbas Haider Ali
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In the late 2010s, customer success (CS) gained a lot of traction as an emerging category, and many companies created big CS teams made up of customer success managers (CSMs), renewals, support, and services. But as tougher macro climates invite more scrutiny on budgets, many companies are realizing they don’t know what unique outcomes CS should drive in the first place.
But cutting CS isn’t necessarily the answer. If you configure your CS org correctly, you’ll unlock the easy momentum of that post-sales org and continue to grow more quickly and efficiently. So, with that in mind: How do we fix CS?
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with Marc Andreessen, Vijay Pande, Kris Tatiossian, and Olivia Webb
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In his recent article, Marc Andreessen discussed how AI has the potential to save the world. This episode of the Bio Eats World podcast, featuring Marc and Vijay Pande, comes live from a16z Bio + Health’s first summit. Their discussion highlights both how AI can save the world, and where it can go wrong.
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with Saswat Panigrahi and Steph Smith
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Self-driving cars have been on the horizon for quite some time—but now, they might actually be here.
We got to ride around in one all over San Francisco with Saswat Panigrahi, Waymo’s Chief Product Officer, and discussed the five levels of autonomy, the infamous LIDAR vs. video debate, regulation, UX, the role of AI in fine-tuning these models, and more.
Plus (and maybe most importantly): If autonomy is here…now what?
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by Sarah Wang and Shangda Xu
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Large language models (LLMs) have taken the tech industry by storm, powering experiences that can only be described as magical—from writing a week’s worth of code in seconds to generating conversations that feel even more empathetic than the ones we have with humans.
To better understand the near-term technological breakthroughs for LLMs and prepare for the future, we spoke to some of the leading generative AI researchers who are actively building and training some of the largest and most cutting-edge models—and identified 4 key innovations on the horizon.
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An important cryptographic tool that opens up exciting new possibilities in system design, “SNARKs” (which stands for Succinct Non-interactive ARgument of Knowledge) have several applications in blockchains and beyond—in AI, crypto, finance, and other industries. This is because they can facilitate trust where it otherwise may not exist. And, if a SNARK satisfies the property of zero-knowledge, then it can also be useful for privacy in all sorts of applications (by allowing people to only disclose what they want to, and nothing else)—which is especially useful for privacy-preserving compliance.
But as advances in SNARKs rapidly accelerated in the past few years, it has also led to confusing terminology and errors that slow down progress. In this article, a16z crypto research partner Justin Thaler outlines 17 misconceptions about SNARKs and how developers, designers, and users can address them.
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with Rob Frohwein, Hung Lee, AJ Thomas, and Steph Smith
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Remote work is a big, divisive topic right now. Some think it’s the future, while others think it was an experiment gone wrong. But, it’s not the only way to attract top talent—a prospect that has only gotten more confusing as a myriad of trends intersect, from layoffs to emerging technologies like AI.
So, how can companies navigate this storm and truly attract the right talent?
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by Anish Acharya, Seema Amble, Marc Andrusko, David Haber, Joe Schmidt, Angela Strange, and Gabriel Vasquez
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Summer’s here, bringing long days, warm nights, and hopefully some downtime to catch up on relaxing reads or learn something new. If you’re looking for something fun, or a bit more business-minded, to read, watch, or listen to, a16z’s Fintech partners have put together a list of recommendations, which span recent hits to older hidden gems.
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by Yoko Li, Jennifer Li, and Martin Casado
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It’s hard to understand new software infrastructure technologies without using them. That’s what the a16z infrastructure team has found—and because so many of us started our careers as programmers, we’re often learning by doing. This has been especially true when it comes to generative AI—a wave that has come so fast, and so spectacularly, that good documentation often lags code by months.
So, we set out to create a very simple “getting started with AI” template for those who want to play around with the core technologies, but not have to think too much about the long tail of ancillary concerns like auth, hosting, and tool selection.
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with the Cultural Leadership Fund and guests Robin Arzón, Brandon Brown, Que Gaskins, and Nan Wang
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In the latest episode of the Zone of Genius series, we explore our cultural connection to sports. Guests Que Gaskins, president of the NBPA Think450; Robin Arzón, VP/head instructor for Peloton and founder of the Swagger Society; Brandon Brown, assistant general manager of the NY Giants; and Nan Wang, cofounder and CEO of Sleeper, sit down with the Cultural Leadership Fund to discuss what gives athletes swagger, the fantasy market, the future of NIL and athlete IP, and how technology is shaping new opportunities for athletes and teams to connect with fans.
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Captions is an all-in-one AI-powered creative studio for digital content creators.
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Apex is building satellite buses for commercial and government customers.
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by Ali Yahya and Jane Lippencott
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Sound is a suite of web3-native music and economic tools powering and empowering the next generation of artists and their communities.
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This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. (Furthermore, the content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds.) This newsletter may link to other websites or other information obtained from third-party sources—a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for additional important details.
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Software Is eating the world
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MENLO PARK OFFICE
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2865 Sand Hill Road, Suite 101
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