Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
Anish Acharya, a16z partner and former founder, joins Lenny Rachitsky to discuss how companies can use AI-powered loops to unlock productivity and why moats are discovered rather than designed.
The gist
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Structure work as loops at every level, from individual contributors to business units, with humans handling strategy and AI handling execution.
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Use frontier models for high-upside functions like sales and engineering, and cheaper open-weight models for bounded functions like finance and legal.
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Consumer AI's biggest opportunity is happiness loops, designing around feeling connected and making progress, not just saving time.
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Moats are discovered, not designed, so ship early with momentum, listen to customers, and let defensibility emerge naturally over time.
Anish Acharya uses it
"ChatGPT Work — it's kind of buried in the UI, but it's really really good. It's one of the best products they've released. It runs in the cloud, it does a good job of caching browser credentials, and the remote feature has the full deep duplex voice mode. So you can actually j..."
▶ Play at 45:03145 creators recommend it, including John Coogan, Riley Brown, and Peter Yang.
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Anish Acharya uses it
"When I was playing around with Codex, I had it build a slide deck for Mother's Day for my wife that pulled from my text messages. It looked at my photo gallery, set some music to it, created like a 20-slide deck of our relationship and pulled some cool old texts from when I fi..."
▶ Play at 1:10:5288 creators recommend it, including Riley Brown, Claire Vo, and Dan Shipper.
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Anish Acharya uses it
"It generates all the video using the MiniMax model via file."
▶ Play at 27:294 creators recommend it, including Alex Finn, Ankit Gupta, and Farbood Nivi.
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Anish Acharya uses it
"GLM 5.3 just came out, which I used for a bunch of product work. It doesn't have a vision component, and it's sort of like this neurotic PhD you put in the corner. And they both have their role."
▶ Play at 27:479 creators recommend it, including Jason Calacanis, Riley Brown, and Claire Vo.
See all on the GLM page
Anish Acharya uses it
"In the last few weeks, I've been obsessed with Qwen 3 8B. It's very good at long horizon tasks, and it's actually really creative. It's a great storyteller. So, I've been using it to create these impossible documentaries, mostly of planets in the Star Wars universe. I did Tato..."
▶ Play at 27:034 creators recommend it, including Greg Isenberg, Alex Finn, and Sebastian Raschka.
See all on the Qwen page
Anish Acharya uses it
"Grok Bot totally nailed it. And also the model underneath it is awesome — they came out right out of left field. The three big products that I love here: Grok Bot totally nailed it, ChatGPT Work is kind of buried in the UI but it's really really good — it's one of the best pro..."
▶ Play at 44:5434 creators recommend it, including This Week in Startups, Jason Calacanis, and Claire Vo.
See all on the Grok pageWhat they recommend · 12 picks
AI tools
6 picks · Anish Acharya ·Anish's AI tools →
"In the last few weeks, I've been obsessed with Qwen 3 8B. It's very good at long horizon tasks, and it's actually really creative. It's a great storyteller. So, I've been using ..."
"Grok Bot totally nailed it. And also the model underneath it is awesome — they came out right out of left field. The three big products that I love here: Grok Bot totally nailed..."
Books
5 picks · Anish Acharya ·Anish's books →
"Ben's book — Hard Things — it was the first emotionally honest book about business that was ever written. And that's why founders love it. That's why I love it. Cuz you read it ..."
"Conquests and Cultures is my very favorite book. It's Thomas Sowell, and it just talks about how conquests have led to culture change in different societies around the world. So..."
Other picks
1 pick · Anish Acharya
"We watched House of the Dragon, which is pretty cool. It's not highbrow, it's not important with a capital I, but it was awesome. We loved that."
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