a16z
Everything a16z personally uses, recommends, or has created — plus things they don't recommend — sourced from their own show and appearances on other podcasts.
Top picks
Ranked by repeated personal use, excluding sponsorships.
Personal use in 2 episodes
"I was having some trouble with Wells Fargo and I'm like, you know what, I've tried for four hours to do this. I'm just going to sue them. So I went to Codex, you know, ChatGPT. I was like, sue Wells Fargo. Four hours later, it had sued Wells Fargo. It actually found a process server."
▶ 33:14"I actually do this with Codex because it turned out Comcast is blocking Muse. They know the IP addresses or something, so it won't let you log in. So, I just have ChatGPT, you know, Codex, Astra, like log in on my computer, does everything."
Personal use in 1 episode
"So I had ChatGPT rewrite her dissertation that she wrote 20-something years ago, but everything is now current... She was like, 'This is amazing. What AI is this?' And I'm like, 'It's ChatGPT.'"
▶ 49:14Personal use in 1 episode
"I'm on the board of Flock Safety. I'm the recipient of constant notifications from you guys, 'Hey, we found a kidnapped child. We used the technology in this way. We were able to de-escalate a situation.'"
▶ 0:45Personal use in 1 episode
"I actually had Astra and 5.5 go head-to-head in animating some stuff for me and it was just like it knew exactly what to do."
▶ 36:12Warned against
"It was an app. It was like the ugliest thing in the history of the world. Yes, I used to use it."
"I was so adamant about not paying $85 a month for Salesforce that I used this thing called Sugar CRM, which was free. And finally I gave up. I finally started paying for Salesforce — not because of product gaps or anything, but I hired this VP of sales and he was like, 'I'm not using that.'"
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Clear filtersMentioned in 4 episodes
"You go to any SaaS company's website. This is why, you know, Claude can clone them all so readily. They all look the same."
"The leading models at the time were GPT-4o, Claude 3, and Llama 3."
"It's so easy to go replicate XYZ software. I did it on Replit or I did it on Lovable or I did it on Claude. You hear this, right, left and right all the time."
"Have you seen, with Claude, it's one thing just to make the engineer more efficient or bring more people into engineering, but then when these agents really run, you're getting into — it's just like the iPhone example of you couldn't imagine Instagram before the iPhone."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"So it's a funny story. This is a true story. I was in Blue Bottle, a little coffee shop in Los Altos, and I was explaining Eve to somebody probably nine months ago."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Most people think of AI as like, oh, you're going to fire everybody and cut costs, and it's all about cost savings, and it's like, no, actually, like, if I use Eve, I make a lot more money for my firm. And it's not because I'm cutting costs. It's like I can take on more cases. It's actually revenue expansion."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Look at a company like Zendesk, which had $2 billion of ARR when they were last a public company. They were taken private by Permira and Hellman & Friedman. And now they're like, uh-oh, how many seats do you need? Like maybe zero."
"Thank god you run Lightfield and not Zendesk, right? It's like how many seats do you need — maybe zero."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"You see this playing out a little bit with Muse and all the consumer agents, where I want a reservation at this restaurant that's impossible to get and they have a human answering the phone."
"You saw that Amazon recently blocked Muse. And there are many reasons for this. It's mainly that Amazon is an advertising company and they want you and your eyeballs going to their website."
Mentioned in 7 episodes
"So, you know, who cares if everybody uses ChatGPT or Claude behind the scenes or on their own? But maybe talk about... why is Eve better than just kind of like raw intelligence?"
"ChatGPT was a big one, you know, I think for a lot of folks in November '22 and a bit of '23. It was like, 'What is this thing that can write emails and poems, and start to have a conversation back and forth and feel like you're interacting with a synthetic person?'"
"Maybe they're just unjustifiably worried themselves, just like they were worried about GPT-2 — they were like GPT-2 is world-ending and then it wasn't, and GPT-3 and 4 came out."
"The leap between GPT-3 and GPT-6 with Astra is extraordinary."
"ChatGPT moment is I think less than 4 years ago"
"chat GPT is the fastest product to what I think is a billion users"
"ChatGPT is already an incredible doctor, probably better than an average doctor, an American can get access to."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"This is how VCs would have gotten this industry wrong before, which is like, oh well, the software market for plaintiff law is small. They all buy Microsoft Office."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Even friends who've done something like the Thiel Fellowship, which is also small application numbers in the beginning, is those people who are applying early are of the courage of their conviction. It's positive self-selection."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The Codex cursor is so cute. I love it. I know it's a small detail, but watching it use the computer gives you confidence and it makes the experience nice."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I mean, even 1Password, right? Like it used to be a single player vault, and maybe I share my credentials with my wife on a few things, but now it's multiplayer."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The first card that I ever saw that just got rid of that all together was Apple. So the Apple Card... if you get the physical Apple metal card, there's no place to sign on the back."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"I want to go pay on 1-800-Flowers right now. And if I just enter my PayPal credentials, they were a wrapper and linked to all of my credentials in my dead cow wallet."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"You can get to the Pareto frontier with these, you know, Kimi K3 or pick your favorite, like GLM, open source model."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Will people look back at Blackwell and say this was the last generation that was done before AI took over the design process?"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"The original was, you brought in Accenture to do your SAP customization, and now it's, okay, I've got a forward deployed team that's going to help build and spec it out."
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Take Salesforce: when Agentforce launched, it was very easy for customers to say, yeah, I'm going to sign up for the Salesforce agent, especially if it was offered at almost no extra cost."
"Salesforce went through three different massive platform redesigns"
Mentioned in 1 episode
"We know that companies like Harvey and Decagon are really fine-tuning models now."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"Maybe my agent comes back and says, 'Hey, I found someone awesome on Etsy that can knit you the socks from Nebraska.'"
Mentioned in 2 episodes
"Shopify embraced Muse and Amazon blocked Muse."
"You know, you've compared it in the past to like a local shop owner or a local pub owner. And if you think about what Whatnot allows that person to do compared to say Amazon, which is highly utilitarian, highly gamified, and competition among first party, third party, international sellers — it's just an entirely different experience on the sell side."
Mentioned in 1 episode
"You saw this week how Shopify embraced Muse and Amazon blocked Muse."
9 recommended · 0 sponsored · 2 warned against · 133 episodes