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It's time to build.
Joined August 2009
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Introducing Cosign.
cosign.co
Excited to introduce @Cosign: the curated professional network for the startup community: cosign.co
Our goal is to create the following:
- A comprehensive startup directory of investors, companies, and operators, including what they worked on and who they worked on it with.
- Cosign graph: Who shaped your career? Who were you actually in the trenches with? Who would work with you again? Who thinks you’re someone to watch?
- Durable reputation: Great endorsements happen every day on X and disappear into the feed. Cosign attaches those signals permanently to people and companies.
- Discovery: Who are the best fintech angels? Which AI companies should I watch? Who are the best designers?
- Intent network: Privately signal “I’d invest in them,” “I’d hire them,” “I’d work with them,” or eventually even “I’d acquire this company.” Match people when interest exists on both sides.
Imagine if Wikipedia, LinkedIn, and OG AngelList had a baby. Though Cosign is a community, not a business.
In order to join, you need to be cosigned. Or you can apply directly.
David Booth and I started this idea 7 years ago but didn’t have the firepower to make it work. Now we do.
No one has really touched LinkedIn in 20 years. Excited to take a swing.
cosign.co
The primary users of the Internet are no longer human. They’re AI agents.
As agents move from answering questions to completing tasks, they’ll increasingly decide which products to use, which services to subscribe to, and where to spend money on our behalf.
a16z's Olivia Moore and Justine Moore on the B2A economy: a16z.news/p/welcome-to-the-b…
Move over, B2B and B2C - the B2A economy is here
Agents are the primary users of the Internet, and soon will be the primary customers for every product
Our thesis @a16z on the massive opportunity here 👇 (cc @venturetwins)
Former Cisco M&A head Mike Volpi on why he’s more optimistic about AI than the dot-com era: the internet built communication, AI is building intelligence.
Guido Appenzeller: “Is there one other big difference from how it was back then, which is that everything is now much, much larger? Back then we were investing a small fraction of a percent in infrastructure for the internet. Today we’re investing 2% or so of our GDP in AI infrastructure.”
Mike: “It is much bigger, but in the 100,000 feet abstraction, what is it that is being built? Back then it was communication that was being built. Today we’re building intelligence. And the economic value of intelligence is probably higher than the economic value of communication.”
“I also think that, believe it or not, it’s been nearly 30 years, the markets are more efficient now, which is why so much more risk capital is willing to make its way into AI.”
“So net is, I’m actually more optimistic about this cycle, but I also believe that there will be some correction and some cleaning up of the industry structure.”
@appenz @mavolpi
At Cisco, Mike Volpi's team did 70+ acquisitions which became half of the company's revenue during the internet build-out. Now he's watching AI drive another infrastructure boom, and he thinks this cycle is even more compelling.
His view: the infrastructure being built will remain useful even if some of its owners change.
Hanabi Capital GP Mike Volpi joins a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to discuss lessons from Cisco's acquisition machine, Nvidia's dominance, the opening for custom AI chips, how AI is changing data center networking, why older GPUs are holding their value, and more.
00:00 Intro
00:53 The internet buildout vs. the AI buildout
09:29 Financing the buildout, and why GPUs are holding their value
14:31 Cisco's M&A playbook, and advice for Nvidia
22:27 Making acquisitions actually integrate
25:32 When founders should sell, and how deals really happen
31:58 Mapping today's AI infrastructure
38:02 Will we see more competitive AI silicon?
43:45 Why Cisco's boom ended
46:08 Rethinking data center networking for AI
53:46 Why this is the best time to be investing
YouTube: youtu.be/LI3lxzHfRrU
@mavolpi @RaghuRaghuram @appenz
HUMAN Security saw AI agent web traffic grow 8x from August to October.
Consumer agents are exploding, and we're in the early innings of the B2A economy.
Businesses that treat agents as first-class customers have a shot at a wave of growth. Those that don't may find themselves under threat. For years, retailers and platforms built walls to keep bots out – now, they will have to fight for bots' business.
Full piece from a16z's Olivia Moore and Justine Moore: a16z.news/p/welcome-to-the-b…
Move over, B2B and B2C - the B2A economy is here
Agents are the primary users of the Internet, and soon will be the primary customers for every product
Our thesis @a16z on the massive opportunity here 👇 (cc @venturetwins)
GPU rental rates aren't depreciating on schedule.
As of October 19, rental rates were above a six-year straight-line depreciation path from their first observed rent:
- A100s by 9%
- H100s by 54%
@mavolpi: "The demand is so high that even if the watt-to-dollar conversion is low, you're going to still use the asset"
Mike Volpi explains why older GPUs are holding their value:
"We thought this asset had a five-year life ... If you're in the business of financing an asset and that asset ends up having a longer useful life, then you're the beneficiary of that."
" In theory, at some point when you have sufficient Vera Rubins, it doesn't really make sense to run H100s anymore because it's just a worse way of converting electricity into dollars."
"The problem is right now that the demand is so high that even if the watt-to-dollar conversion is low, you're going to still use the asset."
"Ultimately the scarcity is in the manufacturing of the semiconductor itself... And so then scarcity persists, then the life of the asset continues to be long."
@mavolpi @RaghuRaghuram @appenz
Mike Volpi explains why older GPUs are holding their value:
"We thought this asset had a five-year life ... If you're in the business of financing an asset and that asset ends up having a longer useful life, then you're the beneficiary of that."
" In theory, at some point when you have sufficient Vera Rubins, it doesn't really make sense to run H100s anymore because it's just a worse way of converting electricity into dollars."
"The problem is right now that the demand is so high that even if the watt-to-dollar conversion is low, you're going to still use the asset."
"Ultimately the scarcity is in the manufacturing of the semiconductor itself... And so then scarcity persists, then the life of the asset continues to be long."
@mavolpi @RaghuRaghuram @appenz
At Cisco, Mike Volpi's team did 70+ acquisitions which became half of the company's revenue during the internet build-out. Now he's watching AI drive another infrastructure boom, and he thinks this cycle is even more compelling.
His view: the infrastructure being built will remain useful even if some of its owners change.
Hanabi Capital GP Mike Volpi joins a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to discuss lessons from Cisco's acquisition machine, Nvidia's dominance, the opening for custom AI chips, how AI is changing data center networking, why older GPUs are holding their value, and more.
00:00 Intro
00:53 The internet buildout vs. the AI buildout
09:29 Financing the buildout, and why GPUs are holding their value
14:31 Cisco's M&A playbook, and advice for Nvidia
22:27 Making acquisitions actually integrate
25:32 When founders should sell, and how deals really happen
31:58 Mapping today's AI infrastructure
38:02 Will we see more competitive AI silicon?
43:45 Why Cisco's boom ended
46:08 Rethinking data center networking for AI
53:46 Why this is the best time to be investing
YouTube: youtu.be/LI3lxzHfRrU
@mavolpi @RaghuRaghuram @appenz
Agents now make up the majority of web traffic, write more than half of new articles published online, and generate most of the code pushed to production.
This is what the early stage of a platform shift looks like: adoption is measurable, but the business models it enables mostly aren’t visible yet.
Welcome to the agent economy.
a16z.news/p/welcome-to-the-b…
Move over, B2B and B2C - the B2A economy is here
Agents are the primary users of the Internet, and soon will be the primary customers for every product
Our thesis @a16z on the massive opportunity here 👇 (cc @venturetwins)
At Cisco, Mike Volpi's team did 70+ acquisitions which became half of the company's revenue during the internet build-out. Now he's watching AI drive another infrastructure boom, and he thinks this cycle is even more compelling.
His view: the infrastructure being built will remain useful even if some of its owners change.
Hanabi Capital GP Mike Volpi joins a16z's Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to discuss lessons from Cisco's acquisition machine, Nvidia's dominance, the opening for custom AI chips, how AI is changing data center networking, why older GPUs are holding their value, and more.
00:00 Intro
00:53 The internet buildout vs. the AI buildout
09:29 Financing the buildout, and why GPUs are holding their value
14:31 Cisco's M&A playbook, and advice for Nvidia
22:27 Making acquisitions actually integrate
25:32 When founders should sell, and how deals really happen
31:58 Mapping today's AI infrastructure
38:02 Will we see more competitive AI silicon?
43:45 Why Cisco's boom ended
46:08 Rethinking data center networking for AI
53:46 Why this is the best time to be investing
YouTube: youtu.be/LI3lxzHfRrU
@mavolpi @RaghuRaghuram @appenz
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah says it's less scary to build an AI startup now than in 2023, as long as you stay off the Yellow Brick Road the frontier labs are following:
"The frontier model companies have invested hundreds of billions of dollars building, doing the pre-training. And so their whole business effectively now is taking the capex that they've spent and the money they're continuing to spend and saying, 'How do we sell inference? How do we sell tokens? How do we monetize the thing that we've built?'"
"There are SaaS companies and startups that know their particular domain, know their market, have some distribution, or have something that allows them to sell tokens and be a reseller of inference."
"Think of AI as infrastructure in the same way we thought of AWS and cloud infrastructure 15 years ago... I think it's less scary now to build in and around the AI arena than it was in 2023."
"We have open source. We have lots of great commercial products. So as long as you stay off the Yellow Brick Road, it is completely possible now that you're not gonna get margined out, because you have options."
@dharmesh
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.
Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round
YouTube: youtu.be/s4lXP9IuHjk
@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh
a16z's first employee Scott Kupor on how Michael Ovitz's CAA playbook became the model for a16z:
"When you would go show up for a pitch at CAA in 1990 where I think they had like 90% market share, they would sit around a table, and Michael would introduce you as Robert Redford and say, 'Look, meet my colleague who does nothing other than radio deals. Here's my expert in radio deals. Here's my expert in international. Here's my expert in books.'"
"And we basically took the same model to the VC world. The VC world was a lot like that. You had a one-to-one relationship with John Doerr, who was fantastic at what he did."
"As the domains grew, the expertise needed just continued to grow."
"Let's hire GPs who are functional domain experts in the particular areas of investing they want, and then let's surround them with this phalanx of somebody who all they do all day long is manage CFO relationships, or CEO relationships, or VPs of engineering, somebody who all they do is government relations, or business development."
@skupor @davidsenra
Martin Casado on how AI breaks The Mythical Man-Month:
"I really think the big disruption of AI is the fact that you can throw capital at problems. In the history of tech, you haven't been able to do that because it was always an engineering problem, which just doesn't scale. The Mythical Man-Month is the Mythical Man-Month for a reason."
"Ten years ago, if I had five founders show up and they asked for a billion dollars and I gave it to them, what would happen?"
"They would detonate, right? They would hire a bunch of engineers, and then you're really fucked, right? You can't throw capital in it."
"To me, the biggest shift, industrial-revolution-level shift with AI, is I can take 20 people and I can give them a billion dollars, and they can use that. Now, do they make $500 million from that billion or two billion? I have no idea. But the fact that you can productively use that money is so new and is so interesting."
@martin_casado with @patrick_oshag on @InvestLikeBest
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah says ChatGPT and Claude are the new browsers, and like browsers, they won't own the whole software stack:
"Everything kind of comes back around again. When we saw the original SaaS development moving to the web-based application world, we had the same kind of thing. We had client-server apps running on our desktops. And then we had this browser thing come along, Internet Explorer and later Mozilla."
"But as it turns out, Google did not own the entire application stack. There were lots and lots of software companies that got built. The interface became the browser because that was a convenient way to get to the actual product that you needed to get to."
"We have a similar thing now. And it's different, because the AI is doing cognition work, it's doing actual smart things. But if you just look at the ChatGPT and Claude Cowork thing, they're effectively the new OS. They are the new browsers. And there will be companies like HubSpot that sort of plug in."
@dharmesh
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.
Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round
YouTube: youtu.be/s4lXP9IuHjk
@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh
We’re thrilled to lead General Translation’s Series A.
The best companies today deliberately build their product and services for a global audience. As a result, their products need to be in every language and localized to meet their customers where they’re at.
@generaltxn’s unique approach is full-stack localization. Rather than having designers and engineers rip out translatable text from design and logic, teams can now use General Translation’s developer primitives to integrate directly into their React apps, documentation, and more.
Cursor, Cognition, Ramp, and Clickhouse already use General Translation to scale their products to every language.
@archiemckenzie_ understands both the messiness of language and how to build software that scales, and the result is a product with a laser focus on craft.
By @JenniferHli, @martin_casado, and @JasonSCui
General Translation has raised $27m led by @martin_casado at @a16z to localize the world’s best companies.
Today, @generaltxn serves Ramp, Cursor, and Sierra by translating apps, sites, docs, slide decks, and even product videos into dozens of languages.
a16z invested alongside @upfrontvc, Peter Thiel, Fei-Fei Li, and more. 🧵
HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah has built software for over 30 years and has never had a direct report. His latest project is uSpot, a CRM for one-person businesses. It charged money from day one and has been his most successful launch at HubSpot.
Dharmesh joins a16z's Joe Schmidt to discuss why startups should avoid the "Yellow Brick Road" the labs are racing down, "yet" test for avoiding ideas the AI labs will flatten, and why it's never been a better time to start a software company.
0:00 Intro
0:47 The best time ever to be a builder
6:46 How to actually pick a startup idea
10:32 From LegalSpot to HubSpot: the SMB bet
14:40 The 60% that weren’t using a CRM
20:29 Building an ecosystem developers trust
23:33 Staying off the yellow brick road
27:23 Why models are becoming infrastructure
31:49 ChatGPT is the new OS
37:04 Rethinking HubSpot’s primitives for AI
40:44 Replaying 20 years of code with AI
43:47 HubSpot Next and the birth of uSpot
46:38 A startup within a startup
49:43 The rise of the one-person company
53:07 AI is still just software
56:06 Lightning round
YouTube: youtu.be/s4lXP9IuHjk
@joeschmidtiv @dharmesh
a16z's Alex Danco and Moses Sternstein on how Roblox is unlocking AI game development:
"We're seeing this explosion of app development with AI, but in a lot of the cases, the apps don't really have any users. They seem to be, creating a lot of vibecoding stuff, but to what end?"
"But a big outlier here for this has been gaming, and the standout within the outlier has been Roblox."
"Across the board people are clearly using the various AI game development tools across the ecosystem."
"Maybe it's just, again, another indication that it's very early. You saw a year of people vibecoding stuff and without much effect, but maybe people are getting better at it, or maybe the tools are getting better at it."
AI game development is exploding on Roblox:
- An growing share of top games were launched in the last 90 days
- Roblox MCP daily users are exploding
- An increasing fraction of game development time is spent using AI
- Asset uploads are shooting up
In other words, people are using AI to make games, and other people are actually playing them.
More charts: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
AI game development is exploding on Roblox:
- An growing share of top games were launched in the last 90 days
- Roblox MCP daily users are exploding
- An increasing fraction of game development time is spent using AI
- Asset uploads are shooting up
In other words, people are using AI to make games, and other people are actually playing them.
More charts: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…
In 1937, San Francisco finished the Golden Gate Bridge, initially derided as "the bridge that couldn't be built," ahead of schedule and under budget.
Nearly a century later, the same city couldn't build a single public toilet without exorbidant costs and years of delay.
Across America, communities face the same dysfunction: stalled factories, delayed energy projects, and crumbling infrastructure. We should be building faster and more safely than ever before. Instead, we struggle to deliver the basics.
The problem: our system rewards process over results. A growing bipartisan consensus offers a chance to change that.
a16z's Matt Cronin on the 5 priorities bipartisan legislation must address to get America building again: a16z.news/p/america-can-buil…
“Founded by Ben and Felicia Horowitz, the Paid in Full Foundation honors the hip-hop immortals whose artistic contributions far outweigh the financial remuneration they received in return.”
“As Ben described Eric B. & Rakim’s debut masterpiece, the foundation’s namesake Paid in Full: ‘I bought it for $10 and got at least $5 million worth of value out of it. It needed to be paid back.’”
“Each honoree receives a five-year grant with no strings attached. Inspired by Quincy Jones’ work with the Jazz Foundation, the grants have allowed past recipients, among them Rakim, Scarface, George Clinton, Roxanne Shanté, Grandmaster Caz, Kool Moe Dee, Grand Puba, and Kool G Rap, to purchase homes, pay off medical bills, and finish long-delayed creative projects.”
“Of course, a few grants a year can’t repay an entire generation, but they’re a start. Paid in Full refuses to let these cultural giants languish in our midst, and its grants have fundamentally changed the artists’ lives, though still not as much as the artists changed ours.”
Full piece from acclaimed music journalist Jeff Weiss on the Paid in Full Foundation’s 2026 Hip Hop Grandmaster Awards: a16z.news/p/hip-hop-has-no-s…
@Passionweiss
Some of the biggest openings in security have nothing to do with patching
How breaches began, per a 2026 report:
- 31% exploited a vulnerability
- 35% used phishing, stolen logins or impersonation scams
And nearly half now involve a vendor or partner, up 3x since 2024
Full piece from a16z's Asaf Ezra and Steph Zhang on six cybersecurity companies worth building: a16z.news/p/defense-in-depth…
John Somorjai of Salesforce on the exit math behind today's startup valuations, and a16z's Alex Immerman on the much bigger outcomes that now drive returns:
John: "I think there's a lot of irresponsibility going on. The valuations are of course way too high."
"When you think about investing, you want to think about, what are my exit opportunities? And not every company is going to go public. In fact, very, very few companies go public, probably 1% or less."
"Once you get above $10 billion, for example, the buyer universe is so small, and yet you're seeing so many of these enormous multi-billion dollar valued companies out there, and there will be a reckoning that happens."
"A lot of these companies have valuations that are not sustainable, that they won't be able to grow into, and are also, I think, going to be bad for their employees."
Alex: "Part of my optimism comes from what a top one percent outcome was 10 years ago is very different from what a top one percent outcome is today... There have been these larger outcomes that drive the returns for the ecosystem at large."
John: "I'm an optimist. I could not do my job if I wasn't an optimist. But just know that I see the thousands of companies every year that don't make it. Because they all come to us to try to be acquired."
@jsomorjai @aleximm
Salesforce's John Somorjai has spent more than 20 years doing deals for Marc Benioff, from Slack to six rounds of Anthropic, and runs a venture arm that has backed more than 750 companies.
His playbook is finding great technology that's starved for distribution and plugging it into 15,000 sales reps. Salesforce piloted Fin on its own help site, where it went live in 14 days and now handles over 40% of the traffic, resolving 65% without a human.
John joins a16z's Alex Immerman to discuss why Slack revenue is up almost 3x since the acquisition, how strong revenue can hide the churn that kills deals, the pen test that got into a CEO's laptop, and why robotics is where he's most excited to invest.
0:58 How Marc Benioff spots what to buy
3:48 The 3 tests for every acquisition
5:17 Salesforce's model as AI cuts seats
8:23 Fin resolves 65% with no human
10:32 The power of 15,000 sales reps
14:22 Founders who became product chiefs
17:34 Build vs buy when code is cheap
20:27 Why Salesforce bought Fin
22:58 Why Slack is perfect for AI agents
28:19 Salesforce Ventures' robotics bets
35:46 Why he's wary of new CRM startups
37:53 Why $10B+ startups have few buyers
39:32 Why he backed Anthropic six times
41:50 Red flags that kill acquisitions
44:27 The pen test that sank a deal
46:01 Growing up with a scientist father
YouTube: youtu.be/y4BdOtm40SA
@jsomorjai @salesforce @aleximm