The a16z Show

The a16z Show is Andreessen Horowitz's conversation series, and AI runs through talks as different as driverless cars, coding tools and homeschooling. Sometimes the firm's own people sit on both sides of the table. General partner Alex Rampell questions co-founder Ben Horowitz at the Fintech Connect conference in Deer Valley. Another a16z general partner joins a talk with signüll, an online commentator who writes under a Shakespeare avatar. Catherine Boyle and Sarah Wang interview a former YC founder about running a busy household with AI agents. Outside guests widen the frame. Waymo's Dmitri Dolgov describes the company's work as building a driver: a model that understands the physical world and the social side of the road. He says Waymo has moved past core research into accelerated global scaling, and he is clear that the engineering is not finished. The talk gets specific, down to debris falling off freeways and snowy conditions. Replit's CEO tells of growing up in Jordan, unable to afford a computer, and of refusing a billion-dollar offer for his company. His reason: he thinks he can build a trillion-dollar one. Many episodes begin with a short narrated essay before any guest speaks. One recalls Fred Brooks' mythical man-month and says the rule no longer holds now that GPUs and data can compress years of development into weeks. Another goes back to the 1950s, when labor-saving appliances made laundry daily and meals more elaborate without cutting the hours. That framing gives each conversation a thesis to test. The questions lean toward an investor's concerns. If customer lock-in, proprietary data and switching costs are all eroding at once, what makes a company worth building, funding or keeping? Would a builder skip a movie or a bottle of wine to spend the money on tokens? Some of the answers are surprisingly domestic. The homeschooling founder's agents now spin up other agents without her touching the machine, and she leaves her children bored on purpose because she believes boredom is a skill worth teaching. The signüll conversation turns to how models develop personality and why agents still feel primitive to many people. The cold open of the Ben Horowitz episode runs through shortages of rare earth minerals, electricity, manufacturing capacity and memory. For a first listen, 'From Models to Mobility: Building Waymo with Dmitri Dolgov' shows the show at its most concrete, and 'Building Agents at Home: Parenting, Work, and Benevolent Neglect' shows how far past the office its curiosity goes.