the Biden Administration was by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime complete war with the industry are we in for a extraordinary acceleration and reimagination of crypto and Bitcoin and all one of the things that you only know if you’re deep in the crypto industry is there was nobody developing software in the space it just really really slowed down over the last four years and now it’s back uh we are in a race with China on on AI and we’re trying to control it by chips I am curious your thoughts about all this I do think we’re in a race the danger of course is everybody Peter dmis here welcome to moonshots another special episode of WTF just happened in Tech with my bestie selem Ismael and on this episode I’m joined with an incredible Tech investor perhaps one of the most dominant in the world and that’s Ben harwitz of A6 in
[00:01:00] 1999 Ben co-founded loudcloud which evolved and became an Enterprise software company sold for $ 1.6 billion to H Packard then in 2009 harwitz joined with Mark Andres to co-found andreson harwitz also known as a16z a venture capital fund with get this over $45 billion assets under management he’s the author of two best-selling books with Incredible names incredible content the hard things about hard things and what you do is who you are all right let’s jump into this episode um this is just after the inauguration after some recent conversations about breakthroughs in AI in robotics in crypto it really feels like we’re in the future and it’s the year 2025 all right what just happened in Tech this week we’re going to find out let’s jump in Ben good to see you this morning where are you today yeah I’m in Las Vegas great to see you Peter
[00:02:01] and as always and you know a lot happening in Tech this week super uh pumped to have Ben join us in this conversation because I think you’ve got a front row seat to some of most extraordinary things happening uh and uh you know I think one of the things happened this week is we’ve got a new president yeah I have to imagine uh this is pro do you think this is the most tech forward Administration we have ever had well it’s certainly the most dramatic change in uh Tech policy that we’ve ever seen just because the Biden Administration was by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime and then you know Trump at least in his first four days has been full out like aggressive Protek um so it’s just it’s it’s so night and day the contrast is absolutely shock talking it’s like a
[00:03:01] whipsaw yeah yeah like it’s it’s almost unbelievable it’s through the Looking Glass kind of thing well if there’s ever a time that we’re going to accelerate Humanity to Mars get digital super intelligence up and running extend the healthy human lifespan um I think this yeah like when Trump said we’re going to Mars I was like okay let’s go uh always we’ll talk about AI robotics crypto but I think this was interesting um you know looking at the front row seat of what was going on at the administration uh inauguration here I think was was pretty extraordinary uh did you or Mark uh get an invite to go or did you decide to sort of stay yeah well you know we we have been spending a lot of time with the administration and at Mar Lago but you know inaguration isn’t um we’re not really party people so we didn’t go we had you know many
[00:04:00] people from The Firm went to the the inauguration and they said it was great fun so you know what I thought was fascinating was Davos was going on at the same time yeah yeah quite the contrast yeah well these guys would normally be a Davos yeah they I think they aligned aligned properly s and by the way most of them were very anti-trump in 2016 2020 so it’s a it’s quite the change it it is I mean when you’re when you’re about to jump on a uh fast moving elevator or or rocket ship yeah um you got to make a choice SEL what are your thoughts about this lineup here I I feel like this is like a Game of Thrones episode where the Lord of high tower is told you better bend the knee or or the the sword is coming for you and so I think there’s it’s 50/50 excitement and defensiveness because you’ve got to play ball but look at the game that we’re now playing is amazing yeah I I I agree with that I like I
[00:05:00] think the excitement is like super real um yeah in that look everybody in Tech has been oppressed like literally I mean I know that sounds ridiculous because you know they’re like oh how can billionaires be oppressed and all that kind of thing but um they really the the Biden Administration was at complete war with the industry like every single thing you tried to do in technology I mean they tried to completely Outlaw uh fintech or or not even Outlaw destroy the fintech and crypto industries that plus the incredible blanket the incredible blanket on m&a uh it’s like ridiculous no manger m&a can happen in that kind of environment and that just solved such a huge backlog of of tech companies wanting to get an exit yeah that was we had a company within um it was called within which was a uh content company for VR that made a an exercise game called Supernatural and uh
[00:06:03] the FTC blocked the acquisition by meta on Anti-Trust grounds and like eventually it got through they lost the case because it was an absurd case but you know to it’s just harassment like there was no there there’s no antitrust meta doesn’t have a monopoly on VR VR is not like even like a market yet like what are you talking about we also saw the Meltdown of the entire biotech IND indry over the last 4 Years everybody Peter here if you’re enjoying this episode please help me get the message of abundance out to the world we’re truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history and I want to get this mindset out to everyone please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped all right back to our episode I think we’re going to see a Resurgence in all of these companies I mean I’m in I was in two uh on the board of two public
[00:07:01] biotech companies I just saw this massive you know demonetization going on as as the FDA and Regulatory restrictions were like no you can’t do that no you can’t merge there it just it took the wind out of all the sales that and people ended up leaving the United States to go overseas to get treatments because they can’t do it in the United States so uh you know super excited about Bobby Kennedy uh and seeing what he’s going to do yeah well I mean the other and the other side of that is um we actually needed a regulatory upgrade right because Hippa was designed long before you know we could use data to cure disease and create amazing Diagnostics and all these things and there was just no chance of getting to that you know I had a great conversation with Dave Ricks from Eli Lily who’s by the way like a fantastic CEO he’s like of us I mean he’s a real
[00:08:01] like product guy talented guy and you know one of the reasons why drugs are so expensive to develop is they can’t match the cure for the disease with the people who have the disease for the clinical trial like there’s no way to do that they you know it’s like a hunting for a needle on a Hy stack to find these patients who you know whose lives could be saved um because uh you know the the the current regulatory regime has kind of prevented that kind of thing so we are really hopeful that we can make great progress with uh RFK Jr and and the new team absolutely absolutely sure we can you know on this uh on this image of the tech CEO the inauguration I think I left Sam Alman off there so he wouldn’t fight with with’s image on that’s a good fight isn’t it oh my God it’s uh it’s it’s you know it’s great you know nighttime TV to see what’s going on here but it was you know listen
[00:09:00] having all of these individuals in the front row um you know Bezos and musk had just launch their Rockets the week you know or days before you know it’s nice to have the like two of the wealthiest people on the planet battling it out to get us get humed to to space and then the rest of them here I mean this you know the question is is this the tech the tech giant takeover of America and uh ultimately I don’t know about about you but I sort of think this is the way America thrives it has it’s the best it’s the best of America I mean you know like this is the thing that’s so frustrating if you’re in Tech right like we have this incredible industry where we’ve attracted literally the greatest people in the world I mean like look at that set you know the only one who’s kind I mean Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are kind of natively American Jeff uh you know his dad was a Cuban immigrant you
[00:10:01] know everybody else is like an immigrant and they’re all here and they’re all building this country and our economy and our future and they’ve just been absolutely vilified um for not anything they did but like literally for being successful there there there’s anything people are pointing to and saying oh you know Mark Zuckerberg’s a bad guy because of this and that and the third it’s like he a bad guy because he’s rich and he succeeded and he built something important um and so that has just been so devastating culturally I think and then you pile on that you know trying to outlaw all these efforts so I think and by the way all these guys donated massive amounts of money to Biden Obama like on the Democrats I and nobody complain that they were controlling the government then yeah and you know you have to wonder why and by the way
[00:11:00] much more than Biden or Obama Trump doesn’t listen to anybody I mean like nobody’s gon to tell him what to do what are you talking about yeah the one that really stuck in my crawl was the Delaware Court on elon’s 56 billion or whatever yeah that just unbelievable you look at somebody that’s taken unbelievable risks made the outcome and then you want to harm that a bad message and the board approved it and then the shareholders approved it and like so like we own the company we all think it’s a great idea he only gets paid if we get paid like a crazy amount of money and you’re going to just after the fact say like okay corporate governance like all the rules around that are fake and like we don’t there’s no rules like I can just change the law whenever I want as an activist judge it’s just unbelievable and in insane you know and the fact of the matter is these guys employ uh in some total tens of millions you know
[00:12:01] bordering on a 100 million Americans in some way shape or form yeah yep um let’s talk about this this was an announcement this week that was uh was interesting interesting in a number of different ways right this is the announcement of uh Stargate a quote $500 billion commitment on private AI infrastructure what are your thoughts about this gentlemen okay so there’s um you know it’s it’s a little clear what it is so you know that aside look I think the idea that um this Administration wants to attract investment in America um and is using kind of all of its Mojo to do that is great and uh you know so that part is is terrific you know Masa is Masa we all know him and you know he’s a
[00:13:00] he’s quite the character he’s he’s certainly brilliant and amazingly successful but you know he does things in a very specific way which I don’t want to overly comment on um but you know look building AI infrastructure Ju Just watching in the B with the Biden Administration there were so many uh kind of efforts to invest all around the world uh not in America in you know data centers and and chips and whatnot and it’s nice that like at least there is a a kind of high-profile effort to do that here I’d like to see the same effort in the energy sector of opening up more energy sources because we need energy generation so I I think that’s 100% going to happen you know we’re very close with Doug bergham the new Department the head of the Department of interior um and he’s he’s really really good on this uh topic and then uh Trump of course has you know said what he said and is extremely energy so and and
[00:14:00] they’re going to definitely I think open up nuclear which is um the key for so many things and we’re seeing great innovation in that area and and when you nuclear when you see nuclear band you’re talking about like generation for small modular nuclear reactors and so forth fishing like that you can put next to a data center that kind of thing yeah or in your backyard yeah yeah yeah I mean they’re getting safe enough that we you know they should be peppered throughout the United States absolutely well and then there’s another part of this where crypto really helps so we have this company uh daylight energy um and basically what they’re doing is they’re creating a Marketplace so if you have you know solar panels and a Tesla power wall right you’re going to have at many times more energy than you need so wouldn’t it be great to have a marketplace where like anybody who needed energy could get you know ask your power wall for your energy um but Power walls aren’t people so they don’t have credit cards so how do they do that
[00:15:01] well you know crypto is a perfect answer for machines paying machines and uh and so you know that effort can now happen like that was also illegal in the in the Biden world or not yeah I shouldn’t say illegal because there was no law it was just like the government uming yeah basically using its power no using its power to terrorize anybody in the field well it was the whole de banking thing right which was absolutely scandalous absolutely scandalous what they did oh my God kicked them out of the banking system so we had more than two dozen companies kicked out of the banking systems Elizabeth Warren’s been running around Washington telling people that’s fake it’s n it was naked aggression against crypto and that’s nak aggression yeah unbelievable looking at this photo here in the Stargate project 500 uh 500 uh billion of of capital deployment it’s interesting right so we see Elon tweeting uh that’s you know masaan only got you know at best 10
[00:16:02] billion and which wouldn’t be the first time by yeah that’s true there definitely a discrepancy between claims and actualities but uh I have to wonder what the back room conversation going on here you know with with uh with Elon and Trump on one side and Sam and then and then Larry Ellison’s on elon’s board and involved in this so there’s interesting bed fellows at work here yeah I mean I think that you know this is this just feels like a Masa idea and you know this is masa’s genius um but also I I I would say the things that people criticize him for which is you know he is the moonshot finance year of you know our time and he is like great at raising a crazy amount of money and and you know to do that sometimes you know you have to ladder up to it I guess uh so you know it’s a Masa thing the way I
[00:17:01] look at it it’s a Masa thing like will it work you know maybe it’ll work will he get the money maybe he’ll get the money but like you you can’t say he won’t get the money because it’s Masa the I think what’s interesting here the the go-to once we’ve got this level of AI capability uh you know what Larry Ellison was saying and Sam Alton were saying on top of this is we’re going to use this uh this large level of AI capability to cure disease uh cure cancer you know I’d love to add extend the healthy human lifespan by decades on this but it it is fascinating that people go to health as the first I mean you must I I listen I’m heavily invested in in longevity and health across most Investments I mean it’s the biggest disruptable Marketplace how about yourself Ben yeah so we you know we have a big uh kind of effort there with our bof fun and we just did a a really exciting partnership with Eli Lily around that um I think that
[00:18:01] so so I really believe like technologically we’re in a new place so the the way we talk about it internally is you know physics we’ve been doing for you know thousands of years but it only got really interesting when we had a language that could model it which was calculus and we now have a language that can model biology which is AI and so it feels like we’re really at the beginning of of uh kind of biological research and and that’s super exciting um I I I would just caution it a little um in terms of the rate because people expect everything to work like it does in computers because you do have to do you know inv Vivo tests you know you got test in animals and humans and um and that that AI doesn’t quite get rid of that like you know we can have certainly much more targeted much better engineered Solutions we’re not just you know see if this molecule works you know
[00:19:00] drug Discovery and all that kind of thing but uh you know it it’ll still be slower than than I think the progress that we we are used to agree although we’re able to model we’re able to model biological processes so much more thoroughly with digital Twins and so on I think we’ll be able to the time period needed for inv vitro testing will be much more limited than before I think that’s right um but you know and it would really help to have access to the data right like particularly in the US and and some countries there is you Norway’s got like amazing access to cancer data and so forth and there are places that have it but but we do need more of that to get all the way home I think yeah and uh we’ll talk about that with a recent announcement from uh from Demis a deep mind but I found this fascinating so at the beginning of the administration Trump revoked Biden’s 2023 AI executive order halting sa and
[00:20:01] transparency yeah yes good uh interesting right this is taking the gloves off and accelerating the acceleration how do you how do you think about about this you know like I think I first of all that as you know AI technology is very very nent I mean like we’re at we’re in the really early days so we don’t know yet um you know what it’s going to be uh we are in you know like by the way a fairly important race with China from a military standpoint and so forth on AI like it’s be very bad for them or in a way for us to get too far of the head of the other one like that that becomes a very kind of unstable situation um and so like the idea that the government’s going to enter the field and basically what the uh Biden AI order did you know from our point of view was basically get all of startups and
[00:21:03] Academia out of the field by imposing like big regulatory requirements um and you know to do that at this stage is just it’s wild it’s a wild idea I think um you know we’ve tried this kind of heavy regulatory approach which is why you know we’ve got a climate change issue and no nuclear power and all that kind of thing um and you know that was a kind of a much more dangerous technology I think at the time uh obviously like AI is powerful and it could do um dangerous things but the whole idea that you know that the idea of like scaring people and then giving government control you know I think was just bad bad there’s just I can’t argue that the Biden executive order was good in any way I think the executive order is both buit and ridiculous and absurd
[00:22:00] because there I’ve said this before many times I see I see no mechanism by which you can regulate AI even if you tried because the minute you those you’d have to regulate every line of code written it’s it’s completely ridiculous so undoing it uh undoes something that was so ridiculous it couldn’t happened anyway so for me it’s like a whole thing is a non but it does make it easier for people to do what they want to do without freedom of of stupid oversight right right the safety part couldn’t have happened but the the the interference was certainly happening and by the way I mean the other thing that’s so crazy is you know you have people like my friend venod kosla running around saying oh this is like the Manhattan Project we’ve got a lock like you walk into open AI you walk into Google like it’s so easy to steal their Co like what are you talking about like they they’ve got like Chinese Nationals running like all around the company like you’re not protecting the bits like we couldn’t by the way the Manhattan Project didn’t even end up protecting
[00:23:00] like the nuclear secrets like Russia got them so it’s just come on yeah uh but I do I do think this is a uh you know firing over the bow of saying uh we’re accelerating everything we’re not slowing stuff down we’re going to we’re going to uplevel our energy our investment commitments we’re going all in all out on AI cuz we need to it’s the single most strategic asset for for our country look I think I think it’s the way we solve a lot of the most dangerous problems that we have too so there’s like okay we’ve got AI safety um to stop AI from doing something bad which won’t work but what about like AI to stop all the other bad things from happening sure pandemics pandemics cancer um you know Etc it’s a climate change you name it you know uh here is one of the articles I wanted to to bring to the table here
[00:24:00] is is hassabis sees AI design drug trials this year I think this is one of the fascinating things I just remind people the way we discovered drugs for all of human history is what we like March through the Amazon and gashes and we we’ like cut plants or grab dirt off Easter Island and we’d mix it up and we’d see if there was any biological activity and uh and you know the average drug cost you 10 plus billion dollars and work 10% of the time it’s insane um and so this is a this is precision drug development and in the future and you started to say this Ben it’s Precision development for you it’s like for your genome yeah absolutely yeah yeah know it’s um it’s it’s such a a remarkable change in um you know lifespan healthc care and all these things uh and health span um that like like it’s hard to even get your head around like how Stone Age
[00:25:01] we’ve been and how advanced this is going to be where we can say oh we need protein that does this oh okay like let’s have the AI make it for us it’s just such a it’s such a different world I mean one of the things we say like drug Discovery like why do we call it drug Discovery oh it’s because like if we were making bridges that way we’d build a thousand Bridges which everyone didn’t fall down we just drive over that one my my kid my this last with toothpicks and glue to figure out which one was strongest yeah but this is yeah this is drug design versus drug Discovery for for me for me this is reminiscent of you know we the way used to frame this at Singularity was you’d say okay we have a really well understood stack for computation with chips and logic gates and operating systems software and applications and we have turns out the same stack in biology with proteins and genes forming metabolic pathways leading to cells and organal and essentially with modeling biology we’ve essentially turned the human being into a software engineering
[00:26:01] problem and we can take all the skills and understanding we know and software design and apply it now and that is really really interesting yeah one of my Ben is uh uh Alex zono’s company in silico um and they were early on with gener of AI for for creating this and they’ve gone into drug trials and I think this is the future of all drug Discovery um and it will be in silico and you’ll mod it’s like when the first the example I Ed when when Dragon first flew on a falcon 9 to the space station it worked perfectly and it wasn’t like random luck I mean they you know they knew exactly every mode they knew exactly was going to happen and when it worked because the model worked and so yeah as as Alpha fold alpha proteo alpha fold 3 all these come online I think I think Demus wants to create a full um uh model AI model of the human cell so you can actually model this drug in that because we have you we
[00:27:02] have 40 trillion cells in our body a billion chemical reactions per second per sale there’s a lot going on no yeah sells are so that that’s such a great point that we’ve just not been able to model it yeah at all you know and uh that’s right now we’re in engineering world if we can model things and then then we can build I love your analogy of a thousand bridges in whichever one you could drive that’s a CRA I don’t remember that one that’s great oh it was about 13 years ago I had my two kids my two boys and I remember at that moment in time I made a decision to double down on my health uh without question I wanted to see their kids their grandkids and really you know during this extraordinary time where the space Frontier and Ai and crypto is all exploding it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive and I made a decision to double down on my health and
[00:28:00] I’ve done that in three key areas the first is going every year for a fountain upload you know Fountain is one of the most advanced Diagnostics and Therapeutics companies I go there upload myself digitize myself about 200 gigabyt of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at Inception you know look for any cardiovascular any cancer any neurod degenerative disease any metabolic disease these these things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at Inception so super important so Fountain is one of my keys I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies my family members because you know health is in you wealth uh but beyond that uh we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells fungi V and we you know don’t understand how that impacts us and so I use a company and a product called
[00:29:00] viome and viome uh has a technology called metatranscriptomics it was actually developed uh in New Mexico at the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biod defense weapon and their technology is able to help you understand what’s going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins and as a consequence of that what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat or what food should you avoid right what’s going on in your oral microbiome so I use their testing to understand my Foods understand my medicines understand my supplements and viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what’s best for me and then finally you know feeling good being intelligent moving well is critical but looking good when you look yourself in the mirror saying you know I feel great about life is so important right and so
[00:30:01] a product I use every day twice a day is called one skin developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that’s able to zap scile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance so for me these are three Technologies I love and I use all the time uh I’ll have my team linked to those in the show notes down below please check them out anyway I hope you enjoyed that now back to the episode you know uh so this brings me to one of the questions that was the most asked question on on X um and so let’s talk about this CU you know the majority of entrepreneurs out there who see this incredible moonshot success story this person or gal does this incredible thing and they don’t realize the hundreds of failures on the way you know I call them an overnight success after 11 years of hard work yeah I mean you’ve built some
[00:31:03] amazing companies and you’ve invested in extraordinary companies yeah how do you think about this yeah so it’s a very you know particularly when like the the real the very large ideas um so first of all like it’s really important that the person building it um really have difference to how hard it is to make the product work um and so like we have people come in and there’s um you know it’s a 20 person company and eight of them are vice presidents you know because they’re going to manage this big thing that they don’t have and that never work by the way that never works it never work that’s funny yeah you need you need Engineers yeah so you need you you need to have engineers and also be just committed to um keeping the company the right size
[00:32:01] until you you actually kind of can see daylight and and see the thing work um and then uh you know the fundraising for moonshot ideas is like in order of magnitude more difficult than normal fundraising because one way more things go wrong so there’s going to be a round that you have to do when everything is a wreck and so if you look at the guys who have built the really really really really big ones Elon Musk and Sam Walman Palmer Ley these guys are unbelievable F they can raise money when there’s no reason to give them money and that’s uh that just ends up being I think very very important uh to be able to do because you’re going to hit that point is that storytelling Ben what is that well I think it’s a it’s a Comin ation of you know who they are like the depth and the
[00:33:01] color of their Vision um you know their ability to tell a narrative uh the the kind of depth of that narrative so that when you go into the company you really see it all there I mean this is a thing that and the of their the depth of their conviction right that nothing will stop them to this yeah yeah and nobody right Elon who’s the greatest moonshot entrepreneur of our era sure nobody would question whether you could stop him from reaching his goal I mean like he you know never un never bet against youone yeah yeah well that was by the way that was when I speak to my friends who are very sad about the election I just say like why did you guys pick on him like of all the people to harassed for no reason no sense the most competent person in the world going to pick on him like that’s not going to end well for you don’t do
[00:34:00] that that’s just CRA everybody in Silicon Valley knows don’t do that but if if I drill into this if I drill into this a bit Ben somebody comes in with a vision right they have to be half crazy to even have the vision so now you’re dealing with a 50% sounds crazy right and so now you have to you have limited data in which to gauge whether this person has the the aura the Charisma the chemistry the diligence the fortitude to get it through so it’s the the amount of kind of viable candidates is shrinking quickly uh how do you make that judgment call that’s the hard part I think yeah you know I you guys have done it repeatedly successfully which is amazing yeah they they really have to be um and and look we get it wrong a lot too Kanye is that kind of prototype he’s a super genius but he he there is times where he won’t do what’s logical for the business just cuz you know he’s he’s overly creative so those
[00:35:01] people show up in Tech too um and uh you know like that that that’s hard to make work because at sometimes they point they just drive everybody in the company insane uh the other one is there’re so charismatic that they end up being sloppy and I you guys have probably seen this where it’s kind of like the kid who’s so Charming that he doesn’t have to study just gives the teacher an apple and smiles at her and like Bang he’s got a like there are entrepreneurs like that that are so good at storytelling and so charismatic and they’ll and they can get the whole thing going but the detailed work you know that they don’t want to do like every CEO has that something you really don’t want to deal with but you have to um they they don’t end up dealing with and then it falls apart because these ideas are really complex and uh require like a great amount of precision at some point let me hit you on on something so my fund bold Capital
[00:36:02] recently made an investment in figure AI do you know you know bread cocken figure yes one of the yeah yeah I know yeah and and so the reason we made the investment so here’s Brett um no background in the robotics field uh but he had built Archer uh Aviation right the EV tall and uh so there’s one question about the entrepreneur coming in do they have a track record of actually having done hard hard things so that’s that’s one bucket to evaluate the second bucket which was really the most interesting evaluation criteria for me making the go to invest was the people he had pulled in over the first six months the people who had voted with their feet yeah yeah yeah no that’s that’s definitely a real sign like can they put together a team that kind of um and which is right the people working
[00:37:00] for them this is a question I ask myself by the way on these kinds of ones like would I work for this company like would I’d be excited about going to work for this company or would I go wow I could help that entrepreneur build it like if it’s the ladder then I’m like okay we should not put money in because they have to kind of be able to attract the highest level of talent to build something that hard so that’s a really really good um measure and then I would say there’s another thing about the team that’s important which is also true about how the entrepreneur picks their investor which is because it’s a moonshot there’s going to be really bad times um or they very likely there going to be very bad times yeah and so you want to have a team that you know isn’t already like a lot of times it’s a great team by resume but they’re all already
[00:38:00] rich and successful and when things go wrong they literally call in Rich they’re like oh this is too hard I’m not gonna help you get out of this hole call in Rich that’s hilarious yeah yeah and so like I I do think it’s important that the team be kind of the right kind of mission super hungry um and often like this has got like they need this to work you know they not want it to work but need it to work yeah well I this is this is Elon Circa 2008 when the third uh Falcon 1 had blown up and he’s borrowing money and everything’s on the line yeah yeah yeah and you need you need your best people to be like I you know I I will go through the trauma of you know maybe I don’t even have a job and like this is everybody thinks we’re idiots and all that kind of thing like that’s a tough it’s a very tough point to be in a company because like when you’re at a company like SpaceX or you at one of these things
[00:39:00] that’s very visible you know when it gets into trouble the Press just goes crazy on you everybody’s you know your friends your family are like should you really be working there I mean like you absolutely get those questions and uh you know if you’re it’s easy if you’re not totally committed you’re gonna go and then then then then the whole thing is a train wreck this this is why we we have this um massive transformative purpose idea that if you’re not all bought into the overall Vision then you will call in Rich or call in sick or de Deport or find another job but if you’ve got a big enough Vision that everybody’s aligned to then that provides the cohesive sticking power yeah it’s got to be cohesive even when it looks like the vision is wrong that’s the that that’s the key because when it looks like the vision is right everybody everybody say you been another criteria is um if the founding team are best friends because you’re far unlikely to ditch the company when the tough when it gets you know
[00:40:01] difficult if your best buddies are there with you right if they haven’t just met yeah a lot of times the founding team is are newly acquainted and you have to get into that yeah let me ask two questions on on this evaluation because again I want to this isn’t important for the for everybody watching who’s you wanting to build a a moonshot company how is important how important is early revenue and um you know and the the timeline and not having to insert Miracle here uh when you’re hearing this presentation well so I I think early revenue is ends up being really important as much as a discipline you know as an indicator of um you know like invest so like not so much from a okay we want to understand everything
[00:41:00] about the business model early but more of that oh we hit a real Milestone like we’ve got all these smart people we’re building this thing and you know we’re it’s not just a plat like there in Silicon Valley there have been a lot of Platforms in the sky so to speak there was a phenomenal company years ago you probably remember it micro Unity um which was you know had all the you know the the the greatest people in the field in it um and it just never you know you got to get to a product you got to get to something that somebody wants um or like if you’re in the wilderness too long you something happens to the culture of the company something you know that’s degenerative where you could be a very much on the wrong track um General magic was another one yeah I remember General magic for sure yeah phenomenal like like those two companies had Talent levels that I would say rival
[00:42:03] SpaceX Tesla open AI any of them right vision and an amazing Vision but the the revenue your Revenue point I think is that discipline that they didn’t quite have so when you get like brilliant people together they want to build a perfect product uh that can lead to a really over-engineered system yeah um moving us forward uh I’m just going to point out you know when I I look at uh the Twitter sphere then you don’t tweet very much but Mark tweets all the time yeah well I spent all my time trying to control him you see only the things that don’t get us into trouble yeah you’re in Las Vegas do you know uh some friends of mine Penn and Teller oh yeah you know I don’t I I I don’t know that of course know who they are yeah so Penn is the one talking all the time and tell is the one who’s
[00:43:01] silent so I’m teller right exactly so uh I am curious right so just to as we roll as we complete the conversations on on AI yeah um you know you said this earlier and I think you know Eric Schmidt’s been saying this very loudly uh we are in a race with China on on AI and we’re trying to control it by chips uh you know Mark said and you’re not you’re not speaking on behalf of Mark but I am curious your thoughts about all this yeah so like I I do think we’re in a race um in the sense that well we are we are and we aren’t you know what I mean so you know deep seek which is the great Chinese model right now um is open source and by the way a lot of American companies um that were involved with are benefiting greatly from that you know in the paper they wrote uh and you know like it looks like they may have um stolen some stuff from open
[00:44:02] AI uh as well uh you know which is um interesting but just shows kind of how like hard it is to win this war by protection or this competition I should say uh look the the danger of course is uh you know China is a top- down economy they uh don’t believe in um things like freedom of speech and a lot of the kind of values of Western Society they’re a surveillance state in many ways and so a lot of the things that we like they don’t have so if they get a much more powerful AI than us then you know their way of life could trump our way of life so to speak uh now if you look at okay then let’s get into the details and how’s that really playing out so first of all um what is China good at the the the advantage they have which is a very clear Advantage is their
[00:45:01] private sector and their public sector you know their government and the private fit companies there’s no line between them yeah like they’re the they’re basically in a lot of ways the same thing and as a result the AI technology in China is getting very quickly integrated into the government which is you know quite amazing for them inject one thought here incling the military by the way the way I think about it is China is a corporate is a single Corporation yeah and the companies inside China within China are apps sitting on top of that that company yeah I think that’s a good way of of thinking about it and so you can think about well what’s our advantage our advantage is we’re great at startups meaning every talented person in America can solve a really hard problem and bring us forward and that creativity um because it’s not centrally planned it’s kind of distributed Bottoms Up is has
[00:46:01] been historically our whole Advantage right like that’s why we’ve you know been a world leader in technology and so the idea that we’re going to just forfeit that advantage and have it be top down controlled like the uh Biden executive order imagined um is to me the most dangerous thing in the competition is that okay if we try and control the way we work all of our strengths so we can be more China likee China’s going to destroy they’re going to be way better at being China than we are because they have all the controls and all the mechanisms in place to do that listen communism failed um under previous systems but if you’ve got a single controlling optimizing AI um communis that would help yeah it does umel what are your thoughts here um you know I I kind of don’t see this tension as big as others the reason I don’t is uh disruptive innovation means you have
[00:47:02] to break the rules and when you have a government that won’t allow you to break any rules you can’t do disruptive innovation you basically have to copy it absorb it so they their sphere of what they can bring in is limited because of that and so I think they are the there’s a structural there’s still no Chinese student that will go will dare to argue against their professors right and I just find that a problem culturally before doing anything and whereas the US has built on that it just keeps trolling along doing that uh it’s messy and it’s ugly but it’s very Derwin but by far it’s the best way of doing it’s design versus Evolution yeah and we’ll wi I 100% agree with that so I think look our our opportunity is we’ll win we’ll get to the breakthroughs first we probably won’t stop them from stealing them but at least we’ll be even we’ll be on par um whereas if we don’t have the breakthroughs we’re in a lot of trouble we someh yeah I think you know I I find this interesting we got China creating an8
[00:48:01] billion investment fund while we’re talking about hundreds of billions of dollars I mean it’s a very different ecosystem uh of of financial but we’re investable right I mean one of the great things that that has happened um you know in the change Administration is from a technological standpoint we’re a very investable country um whereas China is going the other way on that they’re making themselves uninvestable you know I had Kaiu Lee on this on our moonshots podcast talking speaking of a guy who just moved his uh redomicile his company yeah uh but Kaiu pointed out something fascinating which is because they were so restricted on access to gpus uh this is a darwinian force that got them to be much more efficient on their algorithms well we’ve seen that we’ve seen that with deeps I mean like it is very to gp4 with way way less
[00:49:02] uh much smaller uh much smaller their cost per token is so low for for those for those yeah like 100x lower all right so uh let’s is a16z invested in humanoid robots but before then I have to ask you a question do you remember the moment in time when um you went from andreen hardwoods.com to a16z as you yeah so yeah I I I remembered very clearly because it was my idea your idea okay yeah okay so that was um so it’s a funny story so when we went to raise fund one and it was just Mark and myself in the fund uh the biggest question we got is well you guys are very like you know kind of well-known entrepreneurs why aren’t you just going to walk away from this fund and so we’re like well we should just name it after ourselves so they know we’ll be here and so we got you know that solved but then
[00:50:00] we’re like nobody in the world can spell Andre and Horowitz like we’re screwed and and so then I mean you all remember uh in the old days when we used to program um there was this you know before programming languages evolved a lot you used to have to go through a lot of work to internationalize the code and we would abbreviate that work with calling it I 18 n i 18 letters n and so I was like oh we’ll be a16 letters z and all the kind of old school Geeks will love us so that that was and I did are you investing in humanoid robots um yeah so we haven’t yet uh made an investment in a hardware company we’re definitely been looking at the space very closely and and seeing some of the work going on there um It’s tricky because the supply chain for robots is
[00:51:01] almost entirely out of China now like so there’s nobody else doing it uh you know there’s a German company but that is actually founded by Chinese Nationals um there’s not a lot of you know so we’re trying to understand that you know we uh you know have great relationships in Japan and are hoping you know we can uh kind of help them get some of that going as well but uh but it’s going to be massively important and Elon of course will do something I think with Tesla I mean I mean I I believe Optimist and figure in the US are to the leading players there’s uh there’s agility and um epon there’s you there’s a good dozen solid us players but China as this as this next article we’re putting up and if you’re listening on your favorite Download Let me just uh read this for people listening watching it says humanoid robots will help build I Phone iPhones at at foxcon factories and and
[00:52:01] the notion here is I mean China succeeded as a dominant Tech player because of its low labor rate and its massive Workforce population and one child policy and aging populations make it uncompetitive so it has to have robots to survive same with Japan if they don’t roboticize their economy they won’t survive GDP will collapse and and and Germany by the way uh and many countries um it does though kind of take away the cheap later labor advantage that they have in some ways right like because China grew in large part because um labor Arbitrage and so now they’re saying okay we’re GNA replace the labor with robots the there’s not as much robot Arbitrage yeah there’s zero think I mean I did the calculation so uh Optimus and figure are supposed to sell at $30,000 per robot I’ll take two you
[00:53:03] know and if you lease it that’s 300 bucks a month $10 a day 40 cents an hour I mean honestly how many will you have in your backyard yeah that’s a that’s a pretty good deal so and this is um this is another interesting one it’s here I’ll read it uh for our our listeners verus interviewers Shanghai rolls out China’s first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground and I think you were alluding to this uh Ben that you know China does one thing really well as a nation state it creates uh it creates um sort of nests for companies you’re a drone Chen Chen was the original one right like yeah economic what do they call it economic uh opport opportun yeah some kind of economic where there’s no regulation and you know lots of government encouragement yeah SEL what are you thinking about this um I think it’s
[00:54:02] great because you get what but a thousand by 2027 seems a little small see this seems more like PR than anything else um and I’d love to see the way in which they go about doing the testing and training uh um and that you could learn a lot from so yeah the the the training of the robots is very very interesting um also because like the robot the the AI I don’t know what you you all have seen but what we’ve seen is you know the model architectures A lot of them are you know like Transformers and diffusion models you know with different kind of data and different training um and so the the the the training of robots is a is become like a very interesting field and it and they don’t they General but from what I’ve seen the training is
[00:55:00] pretty specific so far well I mean it has to be you know if you have an AI it’s software based it doesn’t matter if it goes off the rails a bit and starts hallucinating whatever whatever you don’t want your robot going C bananas right that’s just GNA cause lot of damage I saw that movie very entertaining yeah before we jump into crypto which we’ll we’ll close out I have some questions from our audience on X I thought were pretty good um so Ben uh to you and and Saleem as yourself as well when will AI agents replace whole employees teams and departments at companies that’s from Michael 717 um and then when will we see our first uh AI CEO that a16z is willing to invest in yeah so that’s a great it’s a great question question you know the first one is one that we we talk about all the time and are trying to figure out it it’s I think so I think the one
[00:56:01] conclusion that we have is it will happen in new companies way way before like an older company transforms I mean like there are already you do have you know Bots doing customer support and like lowering the number of support reps you need and that kind of thing you know the whole jobs thing is interesting and that like some of it is what do you need done but like at a place like Google a lot of it is like how much money are we bringing in and like how many people do these managers want to manage and and that kind of thing and um you know I I don’t necessarily even think that’s bad it’s inefficient or whatever but uh you know all those processes all those things the you know the heft to go like no we’re doing it with AI now is um I think going be a lot more gradual than it would need to be if you were just optimizing to it but for new companies I think it’ll happen I wonder if there’s
[00:57:01] going to be the equivalency of a Dei type directive which is a human first directive um oh God help us well I I think I I that’s my reaction to it as well yeah I mean the challenge is going to be companies that like I employ humans because it’s good for society well they’ll be out of business in a year yeah you know well I’d like to build on what Ben said you know I think one one of the things I remember being part of a automation AI automation task force with Eric berelson and a few of those folks and they did a great job of saying that a job a typical job of today is not just a job that somebody does it’s broken down to about 25 different tasks right and you may automate like 10 of those but you still have the other 15 and therefore you’ll augment people with AI but you won’t replace them as such I think Ben’s point is really dead on about new companies because then you can Orient functions around what’s automatable and have entire verticals that are and you completely create a new type of organization uh and that’s I think will happen first we’ve talked
[00:58:01] about billion doll you know one employee startups right that’s right yeah that’s right I think and that’ll be mostly Bo yeah that’ll happen very very quickly yet have you seen anything been that I mean do you like listen I’ve got this Army of Agents I’m the CEO and we’re we we’re printing money I mean yeah so the the clar CEO is the most aggressive in talking about that um we haven’t seen a company that does that yet so we did have one uh instance of the AI CEO so to speak so you know we fund these uh AI researchers who um who kind of do things you know models without rhf and you know kind of trained on different things and so forth and uh you know one of our researchers Andy built this bot truth terminal that was trained on um you know mean and French philosophers and things like that and he gets on the internet
[00:59:00] gets obsessed with this meme the gosi meme and decides it needs uh which is a meme from 2004 you well it needed money to promote the meme um that was its first thing and you know my partner Mark gave him $50,000 something yeah yeah and Bitcoin and then somebody else created a coin the goat coin and the the bot went crazy and the coin went to like A5 00 million market cap at its peak and the the bot made $10 million so so that was that was our first instance of a of an AI making money like that in the funniest way possible one of the tokens I invested in is uh uh is skating in your awake AI 16z yeah oh yeah yeah yeah those and it’s done well it’s been to I know everybody in the firm is like Ben when are we going to launch a CO token if that one’s worth a billion dollars our token our actual token would be worth and I’m like well let’s let’s go
[01:00:02] let’s go let’s go there as we close out on our our final subject here a subject that you are not that interested in neither of you but you know so let’s let’s talk about this so uh I mean are we in for a uh extraordinary acceleration and reimagination of crypto and Bitcoin and all um you know this please yeah good yeah I I would say definitely yes um so it’s hard so one of the things that you only know if you’re deep in the crypto industry is the effect of the Biden Administration was they just forced most of the American uh developers out of crypto so there was nobody developing software in the space and so you know it just really really slowed down over the last years really three years um and now it’s back but
[01:01:00] back and there are very urgent problems that are kind of best solved by crypto that have come into play because of AI so you have you know the first one being proof of human right like how do you know you’re not a bot like that’s a crypto problem second being deep fakes you know how do you know um like I put this out you know that did you want the US government or Google or a company determining what’s true and what’s real or you know the game theoretic mathematical properties of the blockchain so it’s clearly you know the right thing for crypto to determine what’s true thirdly machino machine payments now you have intelligent machines everywhere they have to be able to you know pay each other for things that’s you know another crypto problem so with these like real important problems out there and we let the developers out of jail like literally
[01:02:02] let them out of jail like I I think this is going to be an incredible era for the field and um and it’s so important like by the way the other thing the other one that’s really important that that you all understand because look back in the days of the internet I was in charge of among other things at Netscape like client side certificates and we never got them to and we never got it to work but as a result um we have this horrible security architecture on the internet which AI is exploiting like crazy they’re breaking in you know these AI programs are breaking into everybody’s stuff so the right answer is that I keep my stuff we have a pki infrastructure I keep my stuff I have my keys if you want to know if I’m creditworthy I give you a zero knowledge proof I don’t give you my social security number and my bank account because I know it’s going to get stolen um and like we have the answer and we almost had it deployed with nfts
[01:03:01] before the bid Administration H with a wrecking ball so we can get back to that and we can make the internet secure for consumers um so I I’m more fired up about this this is the Roaring 20s how many crypto companies are you you know invested in these days at at a16 oh I mean I there’s hundreds um you know we’re the largest crypto investor in the world I think at this point and we also have a crypto startup school to kind of help people get into the field and get it going which we you know we had to start because all the you look if you were a talented developer and you could go into AI or you could go get a Wells notice from the US government at for your 10 person company like it was not a hard choice you know I think this is an absolute Boom for for crypto and it solves problems as you said that we really really need problem solving for identity amongst others and I can’t wait
[01:04:01] for some of this infrastructure to now get rolled out and the news item here for those again listening is US SEC unveils task force to start work on crypto regulations um the move is welcomed by the industry as Bitcoin hits all-time highs uh SEL you still sticking with your what was it 250k in 2025 uh uh prediction I I’ll stick with 250 to 300 for this year that’s prediction forit and Ben not for attribution of investment no I cannot I am not allowed you know we’re an raia registered investment Authority so I cannot make price predictions any longer well uh listen buddy this has been uh so much fun I want to just do a quick quick commodation here Ben what you guys did with a16z both in crypto and then moving towards being more of an investment bank I thought was just brilliant so Kudos on that it’s just awesome to watch you guys yeah apprciate that this was fun I hope you’ll come back and join us for another
[01:05:00] another conversation like this in a quarter or so yeah no I’d love to that would be great fun all right buddy well listen thank you uh all I can say is we’re on a rocket ship ride between what’s going on in the the crypto World AI World robotics World space world I mean it finally feels like the future yeah the future is coming thank you Elon yeah thank you Elon thank you thank you Brian thank you uh deep [Music]