Announcing: the @a16z Ops Engineering Fellowship ⚙️ Because: operations (along with everything else??) is becoming something best approached with an engineering mindset. We've been tracking this space closely, and are seeing a new kind of builder emerging inside companies... They connect internal systems, build agents, and redesign workflows across finance, sales, support, and everything between. @levie calls them "Internally deployed FDEs".. others say "AI Operations", "Agent Engineer"... I don't think anyone's agreed on the title yet, but there's something interesting going on - which to me means it's a good time to get the people who are at the frontier .. applying an engineering mindset to re-thinking how companies operate in an AI-native way - together. So: We're launching the a16z Ops Engineering Fellowship: bringing ~50 internally deployed engineers and AI-pilled operators to together over 6 weeks in San Francisco and NYC (+ group chats). There's a killer crew involved already - Claire Vo (@clairevo) is joining as a Founding Fellow, as is Sebastien Goddijn (@sebgoddijn) - who built Glass at Ramp; Owen Williams (@ow) at Stripe; Ann Miura-Ko (@annimaniac) - deep in the trenches of AI-pilling operators via Floodgate; Brandon Gell (@bran_don_gell) - COO at Every; TK Kong (@tkkong) - who helped start Ramp Labs; Matt P (@MattnPortnov) - leading internal AI at Decagon; and several more we can't include in the announcement (but watch this space 👀)... For now: Asking X 1- Who is leading "Ops Engineering" (or whatever you call it) at your company? 2- Who do you respect in this space, who should we know about, absolutely must have join the cohort and/or join us for a dinner ? Tag below, DM me - 3- or apply below ! 👇👇

What do we do here on the @a16z Ecosystem/New Media team ? why? ..here's my take: 1. All progress comes from great companies. They are the most effective machine humans have ever come up with for converting ideas --> prosperity. a "self-funding, self-scaling delivery mechanism for a better way of doing something." 2. Great companies are born and accelerated by coincidences: the founders who met by chance, an idea stumbled into or validated, the key early hire or customer introduced because of a passing conversation. The string of 10,000 things that had to go right for Cursor to win vs. Windsurf and all the others. 3. Therefore, the binding constraint on more great companies is the rate at which these coincidences occur. Our guiding question becomes: how do we increase that rate? -- The big Idea: coincidences occur more often at Schelling points. A point where people converge without having to coordinate... the default answer to "where do I go to find people to talk to about X", or “who is a great person to talk to for Y” that everyone lands on independently. A conference, a podcast, a group chat, a "Fellowship" Our job comes in three steps: 1- Identify rising networks & topics. Use our media reach to identify the "current thing" that people care about, or are going to need more of. 2- Build Schelling points within those networks: use our brand, credibility, ability to signal - so that conversation on that topic starts to converge & become the default place. 3- Maximize the rate at which people collide... do the routing so the right people have a better chance of meeting. #3# in particular is the magnum opus of my career - and in 2026 it's the most exciting product and engineering opportunity i've ever seen. We're hiring AI and Product engineers - DM me to chat  👋

💰💰 “if you strip away the UI and expose the database, what are you actually left with? How is that different from a Postgres database, a well-designed schema, and an API? …The defensible layers shift downward into data models, permissions, workflow logic, and compliance, and upward into networks, proprietary data generation, and real-world execution.”

We just announced the @a16z Design Engineer Fellowship 🧑‍🎨👨‍💻 What a remarkable time to be a designer, right? One day the timeline thinks your vocation is finished. "Design is the first casualty!" The next, we're so back - design isn't being eliminated, it’s absorbing engineering! It's the new system primitive. @pmarca called it the "Mexican Standoff" ... "AI empowers coders, designers, and product managers to believe they can do each other's jobs, eliminating the perceived need for specialized roles" ... and it's real. I won't pretend to know how the chips will fall, but what we do know is — when the frontier of a field is moving as fast as this one, it's incredibly hard to keep up. There's no curriculum, no playbooks where we're going. The rate limiter on acceleration is how quickly practitioners at the bleeding edge can share information, exchange notes on what worked/didn't in a high trust environment. How are you managing your teams? How are you driving & measuring AI adoption? What are you building in house, and what tools are you integrating? How does your team interface with other parts of your org, where do draw the line, set expectations? Right now, the people thinking these thoughts — making these decisions are scattered across hundreds of frontier companies, talking in small private groups or doomscrolling for tips, at risk of reinventing the wheel in isolation. We’re launching this fellowship to help: connect and bring you together in one place We’re looking for Design Engineering Fellows who: — are closing the gap between design and engineering - whether they came up through Figma and learned to ship; or moved up the stack and developed real creative + product sense. — ship real products, not just prototypes - and understand the gap between the two — hold both truths: AI changed everything and broke things along the way - the security vulns, the unmaintainable codebases, the distance between demo and production, and more — bring taste, systems thinking, and technical fluency to everything they build You might call yourself a Design Engineer, a Designer-who-Codes, a Frontend Engineer with taste, or something else entirely.. what matters is you care where this field is heading and want to put yourself among others who feel the same. If you’re interested, read more & apply below