Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, California, investing in bold founders, innovators, and entrepreneurs building the future through technology.
Visit a16z.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Mar 2014 – Jun 2025
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Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it. Many of us would like to pin the cause on one…
Amazon has a tendency to polarize people. On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that’s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almost 20 years after it was launched, it has yet to report a meaningful profit. This chart captures…
As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partner Peter Levine is constantly asked “Why sales?” by entrepreneurs and technical founders. He…
A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.
What’s going on in the public markets? What are all these so-called “unicorns”? What’s going on in venture capital? “This time is different.” It is different. Because it’s always different… And one big reason is mobile.
To help data teams stay on top of the changes happening in the industry, this article reviews an updated set of data infrastructure architectures.
We don’t invest in themes; we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas. Which means we don’t make investments based on a pre-existing thesis about a category. That said, here are a few of the things we’ve been observing or thinking about; we’re especially grateful to our founders/companies, and the…
a16z announces its Open Source AI Grant program, which will support a small group of open source developers through grant funding.
#1 “If everyone loves your idea, I might be worried that it’s not forward thinking enough.” Anyone thinking about starting a business should be searching for mispriced opportunities. While markets are mostly efficient in eliminating opportunities for extraordinary profit, there are always areas of an economy in which…
There is no point in drawing a distinction between the future of technology and the future of mobile. They are the same. In other words, technology is now outgrowing the tech industry.
A lot of people have been asking me what my upcoming book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, will be like. Here’s a piece that I wrote for the book that did not make the cut. I still think it’s a pretty good story and gives you a flavor. I just tell the truth so...
[vimeo 130722577 w=720 h=404] watch time: 25 minutes We’ve shared a lot of data about whether and why ‘this time is different’. But beyond that, why is the tech market opportunity larger than any time in history (no, really!)? One word: mobile. In this update of his past presentation on Mobile Eating the World …
watch time: 45 minutes “One person, in a literal garage, building a self-driving car.” That happened in 2015. Now to put that fact in context, compare this to 2004, when DARPA sponsored the very first driverless car Grand Challenge. Of the 20 entries they received then, the winning entry went 7.2 miles; in 2007, in...
How you handle a layoff, how you communicate it to the people impacted, and how you manage and lead throughout the process really matters. It takes careful thought and planning, but it may be the most important planning you ever do as a leader.
“I’d be a billionaire if I could get a dollar for all the bullshit I hear today” –Big Sean, The One I felt a little odd writing that title. It’s a little like asking “Why should you give engineers big monitors?” If you have to ask the question, then you probably won’t understand the answer....
Introducing the a16z START program, which fuels founders at the earliest stages with 1:1 support, network introductions, and up to $1M in funding.
We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.
A reference architecture for the LLM app stack. It shows the most common systems, tools, and design patterns used by AI startups and tech companies.
One of the things that struck me most during our recent pieces on startup employee option plans is how things that impact the value of those options aren’t well understood, even if communicated or known at the onset. Many people reported feelings of a sort of “sticker shock” (or reverse!) on leaving their first…
We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually…
I have never fired anyone too early. How many founders have been in the position of hiring a senior executive — having gone through all the interviews, reference checks, board approvals, and negotiations — only to have doubts creep in all too soon after they start? Your hire doesn’t seem to be delivering on the...
AI has enormous potential to disrupt markets that have traditionally been out of reach for software. These markets – which have relied on humans to navigate natural language, images, and physical space – represent a huge opportunity, potentially worth trillions of dollars globally. However, as we discussed in our…
China’s mobile payment ecosystem, the largest in the world, is built upon QR codes. But that technology extends far beyond shopping to ease friction throughout daily life. On a recent trip to China, I personally interacted with QR codes 42 times in a single day—to ride the train, to book a workout, to charge my...
Andy Grove, former Chairman and CEO of Intel, came to the United States as a refugee from Hungary. With a relentless energy and exceptional mind, he helped build the iconic tech company Intel — and in the process, Silicon Valley itself. Ben Horowitz offers a tribute to this legendary leader (and his own inspiration)…
The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.
The difference between a good CEO and a great one? Trusting your gut and confronting your fears head on.