a16z
@a16z
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HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah says it's less scary to build an AI startup now than in 2023, as long as you stay off the Yellow Brick Road the frontier labs are following:
"The frontier model companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars building, doing the pre-training. And so their whole business effectively now is taking the capex that they've spent and the money they're continuing to spend and saying, 'How do we sell inference? How do we sell tokens? How do we monetize the thing that we've built?'"
"There are SaaS companies and startups that know their particular domain, know their market, have some distribution, or have something that allows them to sell tokens and be a reseller of inference."
"Think of AI as infrastructure in the same way we thought of AWS and cloud infrastructure 15 years ago... I think it's less scary now to build in and around the AI arena than it was in 2023."
"We have open source. We have lots of great commercial products. So as long as you stay off the Yellow Brick Road, it is completely possible now that you're not gonna get margined out, because you have options."
@dharmesh
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HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.
Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round
YouTube:
@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh
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The Method E1: Inside Zipline with Keller Cliffton
It was illegal to fly autonomously in US airspace when Keller Cliffton started Zipline, and most investors "weren't willing to invest in illegal things." Zipline launched in Rwanda instead, flying blood to 21 hospitals. It's now valued at $21.5 billion.
@Keller, co-founder and CEO of Zipline, sat down with @sophiadew at Zipline's South San Francisco factory to break down why they started in Rwanda, why each 10x jump in scale breaks everything, and the case for 50 billion US instant deliveries:
00:00 the closest thing to teleportation
01:38 why Zipline launched in Rwanda first
03:14 the UPenn study and a 51% drop in maternal mortality
04:17 why tech keeps solving "rich people problems"
06:00 bringing Zipline to the US and going back to square one
07:28 why every 10x breaks the company
09:16 running teams like special forces
10:42 people patting the droid to say thank you
11:19 the case for 50 billion US instant deliveries
13:30 from pro rock climber to "happy to fail"
@zipline
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a16z's first employee Scott Kupor on how Michael Ovitz's CAA playbook became the model for a16z:
"When you would go show up for a pitch at CAA in 1990 where I think they had like 90% market share, they would sit around a table, and Michael would introduce you as Robert Redford and say, 'Look, meet my colleague who does nothing other than radio deals. Here's my expert in radio deals. Here's my expert in international. Here's my expert in books.'"
"And we basically took the same model to the VC world. The VC world was a lot like that. You had a one-to-one relationship with John Doerr, who was fantastic at what he did."
"As the domains grew, the expertise needed just continued to grow."
"Let's hire GPs who are functional domain experts in the particular areas of investing they want, and then let's surround them with this phalanx of somebody who all they do all day long is manage CFO relationships, or CEO relationships, or VPs of engineering, somebody who all they do is government relations, or business development."
@skupor @davidsenra
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Martin Casado on how AI breaks The Mythical Man-Month:
"I really think the big disruption of AI is the fact that you can throw capital at problems. In the history of tech, you haven't been able to do that because it was always an engineering problem, which just doesn't scale. The Mythical Man-Month is the Mythical Man-Month for a reason."
"Ten years ago, if I had five founders show up and they asked for a billion dollars and I gave it to them, what would happen?"
"They would detonate, right? They would hire a bunch of engineers, and then you're really fucked, right? You can't throw capital in it."
"To me, the biggest shift, industrial-revolution-level shift with AI, is I can take 20 people and I can give them a billion dollars, and they can use that. Now, do they make $500 million from that billion or two billion? I have no idea. But the fact that you can productively use that money is so new and is so interesting."
@martin_casado with @patrick_oshag on @InvestLikeBest
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The industrial revolution turned worked automation into an engineering problem. AI is turning it into a capital problem.
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah says ChatGPT and Claude are the new browsers, and like browsers, they won't own the whole software stack:
"Everything kind of comes back around again. When we saw the original SaaS development moving to the web-based application world, we had the same kind of thing. We had client-server apps running on our desktops. And then we had this browser thing come along, Internet Explorer and later Mozilla."
"But as it turns out, Google did not own the entire application stack. There were lots and lots of software companies that got built. The interface became the browser because that was a convenient way to get to the actual product that you needed to get to."
"We have a similar thing now. And it's different, because the AI is doing cognition work, it's doing actual smart things. But if you just look at the ChatGPT and Claude Cowork thing, they're effectively the new OS. They are the new browsers. And there will be companies like HubSpot that sort of plug in."
@dharmesh
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HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.
Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round
YouTube:
@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh
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We’re thrilled to lead General Translation’s Series A.
The best companies today deliberately build their product and services for a global audience. As a result, their products need to be in every language and localized to meet their customers where they’re at.
@generaltxn’s unique approach is full-stack localization. Rather than having designers and engineers rip out translatable text from design and logic, teams can now use General Translation’s developer primitives to integrate directly into their React apps, documentation, and more.
Cursor, Cognition, Ramp, and Clickhouse already use General Translation to scale their products to every language.
@archiemckenzie_ understands both the messiness of language and how to build software that scales, and the result is a product with a laser focus on craft.
By @JenniferHli, @martin_casado, and @JasonSCui
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General Translation has raised $27m led by @martin_casado at @a16z to localize the world’s best companies.
Today, @generaltxn serves Ramp, Cursor, and Sierra by translating apps, sites, docs, slide decks, and even product videos into dozens of languages.
a16z invested alongside @upfrontvc, Peter Thiel, Fei-Fei Li, and more. 🧵
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HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.
Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round
YouTube:
@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh
Show more
a16z's Alex Danco and Moses Sternstein on how Roblox is unlocking AI game development:
"We're seeing this explosion of app development with AI, but in a lot of the cases, the apps don't really have any users. They seem to be, creating a lot of vibecoding stuff, but to what end?"
"But a big outlier here for this has been gaming, and the standout within the outlier has been Roblox."
"Across the board people are clearly using the various AI game development tools across the ecosystem."
"Maybe it's just, again, another indication that it's very early. You saw a year of people vibecoding stuff and without much effect, but maybe people are getting better at it, or maybe the tools are getting better at it."
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AI game development is exploding on Roblox:
- An growing share of top games were launched in the last 90 days
- Roblox MCP daily users are exploding
- An increasing fraction of game development time is spent using AI
- Asset uploads are shooting up
In other words, people are using AI to make games, and other people are actually playing them.
More charts:
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AI game development is exploding on Roblox:
- An growing share of top games were launched in the last 90 days
- Roblox MCP daily users are exploding
- An increasing fraction of game development time is spent using AI
- Asset uploads are shooting up
In other words, people are using AI to make games, and other people are actually playing them.
More charts:
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In 1937, San Francisco finished the Golden Gate Bridge, initially derided as "the bridge that couldn't be built," ahead of schedule and under budget.
Nearly a century later, the same city couldn't build a single public toilet without exorbidant costs and years of delay.
Across America, communities face the same dysfunction: stalled factories, delayed energy projects, and crumbling infrastructure. We should be building faster and more safely than ever before. Instead, we struggle to deliver the basics.
The problem: our system rewards process over results. A growing bipartisan consensus offers a chance to change that.
a16z's Matt Cronin on the 5 priorities bipartisan legislation must address to get America building again:
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“Founded by Ben and Felicia Horowitz, the Paid in Full Foundation honors the hip-hop immortals whose artistic contributions far outweigh the financial remuneration they received in return.”
“As Ben described Eric B. & Rakim’s debut masterpiece, the foundation’s namesake Paid in Full: ‘I bought it for $10 and got at least $5 million worth of value out of it. It needed to be paid back.’”
“Each honoree receives a five-year grant with no strings attached. Inspired by Quincy Jones’ work with the Jazz Foundation, the grants have allowed past recipients, among them Rakim, Scarface, George Clinton, Roxanne Shanté, Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee, Grand Puba, and Kool G Rap, to purchase homes, pay off medical bills, and finish long-delayed creative projects.”
“Of course, a few grants a year can’t repay an entire generation, but they’re a start. Paid in Full refuses to let these cultural giants languish in our midst, and its grants have fundamentally changed the artists’ lives, though still not as much as the artists changed ours.”
Full piece from acclaimed music journalist Jeff Weiss on the Paid in Full Foundation’s 2026 Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards:
@Passionweiss
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Some of the biggest openings in security have nothing to do with patching
How breaches began, per a 2026 report:
- 31% exploited a vulnerability
- 35% used phishing, stolen logins or impersonation scams
And nearly half now involve a vendor or partner, up 3x since 2024
Full piece from a16z's Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang on six cybersecurity companies worth building:
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John Somorjai of Salesforce on the exit math behind today's startup valuations, and a16z's Alex Immerman on the much bigger outcomes that now drive returns:
John: "I think there's a lot of irresponsibility going on. The valuations are of course way too high."
"When you think about investing, you want to think about, what are my exit opportunities? And not every company is going to go public. In fact, very, very few companies go public, probably 1% or less."
"Once you get above $10 billion, for example, the buyer universe is so small, and yet you're seeing so many of these enormous multi-billion dollar valued companies out there, and there will be a reckoning that happens."
"A lot of these companies have valuations that are not sustainable, that they won't be able to grow into, and are also, I think, going to be bad for their employees."
Alex: "Part of my optimism comes from what a top one percent outcome was 10 years ago is very different from what a top one percent outcome is today... There have been these larger outcomes that drive the returns for the ecosystem at large."
John: "I'm an optimist. I could not do my job if I wasn't an optimist. But just know that I see the thousands of companies every year that don't make it. Because they all come to us to try to be acquired."
@jsomorjai @aleximm
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Salesforce's John Somorjai has spent more than 20 years doing deals for Marc Benioff, from Slack to six rounds of Anthropic, and runs a venture arm that has backed more than 750 companies.
His playbook is finding great technology that's starved for distribution and plugging it into 15,000 sales reps. Salesforce piloted Fin on its own help site, where it went live in 14 days and now handles over 40% of the traffic, resolving 65% without a human.
John joins a16z's Alex Immerman to discuss why Slack revenue is up almost 3x since the acquisition, how strong revenue can hide the churn that kills deals, the pen test that got into a CEO's laptop, and why robotics is where he's most excited to invest.
0:58 How Marc Benioff spots what to buy
3:48 The 3 tests for every acquisition
5:17 Salesforce's model as AI cuts seats
8:23 Fin resolves 65% with no human
10:32 The power of 15,000 sales reps
14:22 Founders who became product chiefs
17:34 Build vs buy when code is cheap
20:27 Why Salesforce bought Fin
22:58 Why Slack is perfect for AI agents
28:19 Salesforce Ventures' robotics bets
35:46 Why he's wary of new CRM startups
37:53 Why $10B+ startups have few buyers
39:32 Why he backed Anthropic six times
41:50 Red flags that kill acquisitions
44:27 The pen test that sank a deal
46:01 Growing up with a scientist father
YouTube:
@jsomorjai @salesforce @aleximm
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Companies are more confident in their backups than they perhaps should be
90% of leaders say they can recover from a cyberattack, but only 28% of victims actually got all their data back
Median recovery cost:
- Backups survived: $375K
- Backups hit: $3M
Full piece from a16z's Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang on six cybersecurity companies worth building:
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Think different, CapEx edition:
Since Q1 2023, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta have increased CapEx 5-8x
Meanwhile, Apple now spends 20% less than it did before the AI boom
Charts of the Week:
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AI can now help turn a published fix into a working exploit in hours. Patching still takes weeks, and for many old routers, cameras, and supermarket fridges, a fix never arrives.
"So the question isn't how to patch faster. It's how to stop needing to."
Six openings for new cybersecurity companies today, each one making patching "unnecessary, or someone else's job":
1. Live fixes: blocks an exploit on running systems within hours, then has AI write and ship the real code fix
2. An AI first responder: spots attacks without hand-written rules and contains them as they unfold
3. Per-request access: checks every request from a person or their AI agents, with credentials that expire in minutes
4. Proven recovery: keeps restoring your backups in a sealed-off test environment to prove they work, with records insurers will accept
5. An install gateway: holds and sandboxes every package, extension and AI agent tool before it can run
6. Security for the long tail: one managed service for water utilities, clinics and others that will never have a security team
Full piece from a16z's Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang:
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John Somorjai of Salesforce on what kills company acquisition deals, from attrition hiding behind ARR to a veto from the security team:
"It's really important that you're ready and you're organized so that the data is flowing and it doesn't look like you're having trouble getting access to data."
"One of the mistakes that a lot of founders are making these days is they focus on one metric alone, which is ARR. And ARR is a wonderful metric, but it masks attrition."
"When you meet with a company that has very high attrition, that usually means that there are a lot of not just unhappy customers, but there might be some product quality issues as well."
"We have 14 functions that we work with on all of our diligence processes, and security is the one function that can hold up the red flag and say, 'I'm killing this deal.'"
"You definitely want to identify the vulnerabilities before we do."
"Nothing goes better in a process when a company is totally buttoned up... But when they don't, that's when, you know, deals can die."
@jsomorjai @aleximm
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Salesforce's John Somorjai has spent more than 20 years doing deals for Marc Benioff, from Slack to six rounds of Anthropic, and runs a venture arm that has backed more than 750 companies.
His playbook is finding great technology that's starved for distribution and plugging it into 15,000 sales reps. Salesforce piloted Fin on its own help site, where it went live in 14 days and now handles over 40% of the traffic, resolving 65% without a human.
John joins a16z's Alex Immerman to discuss why Slack revenue is up almost 3x since the acquisition, how strong revenue can hide the churn that kills deals, the pen test that got into a CEO's laptop, and why robotics is where he's most excited to invest.
0:58 How Marc Benioff spots what to buy
3:48 The 3 tests for every acquisition
5:17 Salesforce's model as AI cuts seats
8:23 Fin resolves 65% with no human
10:32 The power of 15,000 sales reps
14:22 Founders who became product chiefs
17:34 Build vs buy when code is cheap
20:27 Why Salesforce bought Fin
22:58 Why Slack is perfect for AI agents
28:19 Salesforce Ventures' robotics bets
35:46 Why he's wary of new CRM startups
37:53 Why $10B+ startups have few buyers
39:32 Why he backed Anthropic six times
41:50 Red flags that kill acquisitions
44:27 The pen test that sank a deal
46:01 Growing up with a scientist father
YouTube:
@jsomorjai @salesforce @aleximm
Show more
Salesforce's John Somorjai has spent more than 20 years doing deals for Marc Benioff, from Slack to six rounds of Anthropic, and runs a venture arm that has backed more than 750 companies.
His playbook is finding great technology that's starved for distribution and plugging it into 15,000 sales reps. Salesforce piloted Fin on its own help site, where it went live in 14 days and now handles over 40% of the traffic, resolving 65% without a human.
John joins a16z's Alex Immerman to discuss why Slack revenue is up almost 3x since the acquisition, how strong revenue can hide the churn that kills deals, the pen test that got into a CEO's laptop, and why robotics is where he's most excited to invest.
0:58 How Marc Benioff spots what to buy
3:48 The 3 tests for every acquisition
5:17 Salesforce's model as AI cuts seats
8:23 Fin resolves 65% with no human
10:32 The power of 15,000 sales reps
14:22 Founders who became product chiefs
17:34 Build vs buy when code is cheap
20:27 Why Salesforce bought Fin
22:58 Why Slack is perfect for AI agents
28:19 Salesforce Ventures' robotics bets
35:46 Why he's wary of new CRM startups
37:53 Why $10B+ startups have few buyers
39:32 Why he backed Anthropic six times
41:50 Red flags that kill acquisitions
44:27 The pen test that sank a deal
46:01 Growing up with a scientist father
YouTube:
@jsomorjai @salesforce @aleximm
Show more
Confirmed ransomware attacks on healthcare providers grew about 6x from 2018 to 2024
Average days a US provider was down per attack:
- 2018: 4
- 2021: 17
- 2024: 18
Full piece from a16z's Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang on AI and the patch gap:
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For two decades, writing the exploit was the bottleneck in a cyberattack. AI made that step cheap, and patching hasn't gotten faster:
- On average, attacks went from landing 63 days after disclosure in 2018-19 to 7 days before it in 2025
- A working exploit went from a skilled person's month to a few hours of machine time
- The median time to fully fix a known-exploited bug rose to 43 days
a16z's @asaf_ez and @steph_zhang expect a long, expensive worm era, hitting hardest where systems can't update fast: hospitals, schools, small water systems.
"When attacking is nearly free, attackers no longer need to want a target."
Full piece from Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang:
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