General Partner (AI Apps & Fintech) @a16z, proud Canadian, mom of 2 boys, distance runner; Previous: product leader
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2007
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There is now an *advantage* to having one foot in your home country, and one foot in Silicon Valley.
Silicon Valley has always run on the magic of paying it forward. Everyone here has been helped by someone, at a critical moment - for no reason other than just to be helpful.
There’s a special version of this pay-it-forward culture for international founders: “Borderless Founders.”
* You can get early customers from large companies at home that give you big proof points early.
* You can build an outsized brand at home that can get global attention earlier.
* You know the strongest engineers in your home country before the rest of the market catches on.
Most of the fastest growing companies have int'l founding teams.
Your background is your moat. Our job is to help you widen it. If you’re a Borderless Founder, we’d love to meet you 👇
Agents are (or will soon be) the majority of your customers. Prepare and win, block and 🤷♀️.
"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.
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."
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)
Very cool simulation use case. Nubank iterated/ released agents faster/better by testing on simulated vs. real customers. All companies will need to do this. Most won't be able to hire the talent. Expect "Simulation as a Service" demand to 🚀
This 👇While every bank is blocking agents, Mercury is building the infra to let agents safely supercharge your banking. “It’s not AI that’s your competition, it’s your competition adopting AI faster than you”. Banks that don’t do this will look antiquated quickly.
1/ Today, @Mercury is launching Agent Controls: see every agent connected to your account, what it can do, its activity, and cut it off in seconds.
Big banks are locking AI agents out. It’s bad security, and an admission they don’t understand the future.
Shopping is a killer use case for agents. But conversion rates are shit. Why? Merchants legit don't know if your purchase request is fraudulent bot, or an agent acting on behalf of a human. Now there's an easy solution (that doesn't require massive adoption to get the benefits)
For Merchants - Verify the human behind the agent, and approve legitimate orders you might otherwise decline.
When Agents arrive, fraud systems block them. Most Agentic shopping happens inside a cloud browser, from a data center IP, with user agent strings that scream BOT (and the Agent behaves like a bot!). w/ Sardine KYH (Know your human!) you can easily verify human behind agent (and know which agent!).
For Agents - Stop being blocked because you look like a bot.
Integrate Sardine KYH to pass your human’s device ID to merchants, and complete more purchases. No changes required from merchants.
Big day at @sardine - we’re launching Know Your Human, our protocol to make the human identifiers (device ID, device fingerprint, IP address, email, phone, KYC, ID verification details) available to both merchants and issuers.
Demo in the video and details in the thread below:
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Muse & Instinct personalities summarized:
Muse: I need your username & password to complete this task. Please enter in my secure vault.
Instinct: I’ve gone ahead and reset your username and password.
Delightful human experiences may be the only moat left. Companies that have internalized “unreasonable hospitality” quickly will win. You may be surprised to hear this from @united ! — “we will be the only airline that has starlink at scale for several years”.
Tomorrow on Cheeky Pint: Scott Kirby from @United breaks down the airline business for @benthompson and me: how they play the gate/slot contest, Starlink changing their competitive dynamics, and how everyone needs to stop outsourcing their thinking to surveys.
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angela strange retweeted
Congrats to @hxtweets on their acquisition by Guidewire!
Thank you to @amrit_hx, Michael, Richard, and the entire team for the privilege of being your partner.
@astrange, @santiago__rdz and I are so lucky to have been in your orbit.
It's still just the beginning! 🚀
angela strange retweeted
$2.1bn acq of @hxtweets by @Guidewire_PandC
The action is just beginning in AI x Financial services
Congratulations to @amrit_hx ! 🇬🇧
The most amazing part of this job is seeing great humans win. 🚨 Congrats to @amrit_hx & @hxtweets on their acquisition by Guidewire!
Amrit is one of the smartest, most driven, most decisive and also kindest CEOs. And a unicorn in insurance. CS + actuary + completely AI pilled before it was obvious + the ability to recruit an A++ team to join his mission to underwrite the world's risk.
@joeschmidtiv @santiago__rdz & @a16z are grateful partners and excited about what you'll build together from here 💪
The most amazing part of this job is seeing great humans win. 🚨 Congrats to @amrit_hx & @hxtweets on their acquisition by Guidewire!
Amrit is one of the smartest, most driven, most decisive and also kindest CEOs. And a unicorn in insurance. CS + actuary + completely AI pilled before it was obvious + the ability to recruit an A++ team to join his mission to underwrite the world's risk.
@joeschmidtiv @santiago__rdz & @a16z are grateful partners and excited about what you'll build together from here 💪
Read more here 👇 cc @David_Spitz
prnewswire.com/news-releases…
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angela strange retweeted
🚨 Excited to share Sardine's latest product suite on AI Token fraud: sardine.ai/token
AI Token is the new gold bar that fraudsters and nation-states steal and launder to distill their own models. Here's how Sardine helps:
1. Bank-grade "Know Your Business" (KYB) and "Know Your Consumer (KYC), so you are not onboarding shell companies set up to distill frontier models
Sardine offers KYC and KYB globally. The same bank-grade technology that protects financial institutions globally from illicit activities is what you get.
2. Signup fraud: We want you to offer free trials and Token credits without losing all those credits to fraud.
The same fraud prevention technology that helps the top fintechs, top crypto companies, top prediction markets and top social media companies, is what you get to protect your credits.
3. Account takeovers that lead to Token theft: We protect API keys to your models or to your 3rd party frontier labs with the same security posture as we protect crypto assets at top crypto exchanges.
We have a two-tiered approach. Detect if a new IP was used to query an API key. Challenge such requests by having the user do a login (where we run our device fingerprinting). We have the fastest growing fraud device consortium (6B+ devices profiled globally).
Fraud and money laundering rings have a nexus - the same rings that steal crypto, gift cards, cars, fintech wallets are the ones going after AI Tokens.
4. Card fraud: Fraudsters use stolen cards to buy AI Tokens, that they can then quickly resell.
The same technology that protects the top retailers from Card fraud is what you get!
Fraudsters method don't change, only what they steal changes:
2005-10: Smart TVs and physical goods
2010-15: Gift cards
2015-25: Crypto
2025: AI Tokens
AI Token fraud has proliferated across the AI supply chain and impacting AI inference companies, neoclouds, AI gateways. In the last weeks alone, OpenCode, Railway, LiteLLM and many others have been impacted.
We are here to protect you and to help you win back trust from your customers. Reach out. DMs open!
I used to buy on Amazon bc it was so much easier. But now that Amazon (infamously) blocks agents like Muse -- it's not. 👉 Opportunity for smaller merchants: be extra discoverable to agents +allow agents to complete the end to end purchase.
angela strange retweeted
More background on how this happened and why Silicon Valley is so magical:
-I had the privilege of working with Jean-Denis (@jgreze) at Plaid for many years
-After running in the SF Marathon in 2024, I "ran" into him at In-N-Out in Daly City and we talked about what he was doing next...
-SMB tax...!
-Meanwhile, my partner Justine Moore (@venturetwins) was off trying every single consumer and enterprise productivity agent...and Town had pivoted
-She concluded Town was the best, which caused @bhorowitz to start using Town
-I then re-heard of Town and was like...the SMB Tax tool? :)
-I reached back out to Jean-Denis and told him about his mega fan and suggested having dinner with Ben and me
This also shows why venture is a team sport. This investment would have never happened without Justine, and probably without Ben as well! And maybe without the SF Marathon! And likely not without Plaid / @zachperret!
Jean-Denis Greze was CTO of Plaid. His next startup, an AI tax product for small businesses, brought in nearly $1M in revenue its first year, and he projected $2.5 to $3M the next. He shut it down anyway.
The reason: in the age of AI, it was never going to be venture scale. Incumbents could use the same technology to automate tax prep for their existing customers faster than a startup could win market share. Tax is also sold once a year, so he had about a one-month window to pivot before the door closed.
The pivot became Town, an AI assistant that works from your email and calendar. It found product-market fit fast enough that Ben Horowitz messaged a16z's Alex Rampell to say it "changed my life."
In this conversation, Alex and Jean-Denis cover:
- How to know when to kill a business that's working on paper
- Why Town competes with OpenAI and Anthropic, the companies it buys its tokens from
- Why the "forward deployed engineer" model gets worse as AI gets better
- How a $1/month AI routine can save a restaurant thousands
- What agents mean for Amazon, advertising and the future of shopping
0:57 How Ben Horowitz discovered Town
2:20 Why Town started with AI tax prep
3:55 Why tax couldn't be venture scale
6:30 Shutting down a working business
10:24 The customer ask that became Town
13:35 Why Town built for users before IT
16:18 AI's iPhone moment at work
21:28 Jevons paradox for executive assistants
23:13 Town as a "token allocation machine"
28:00 How Town tailors itself to each job
34:03 Competing with your token suppliers
42:24 Staying off the AI labs' radar
44:42 Why AI isn't spreading evenly yet
52:32 How agents break the ad model
55:35 The friction humans actually enjoy
57:05 Why supply aggregators lose to agents
YouTube: youtu.be/o_5f4N6Nq80
@jgreze @TownAI @arampell
Soon nearly all product discovery will be through agents. Every brand across *all* categories should be doing this👇 especially those that will likely do it last (👀financial & insurance products)
If I was a brand or retailer, AI discoverability / agentic commerce would be my top priority right now.
And, there's an extremely easy and free way to get a sense of how you "show up" to agents. 👇
First, create a dummy account on all the agent platforms (Muse, Instinct, Dots, etc.) Sign up with a fresh email that does not have context on your real identity, or even use a VPN to "go" to where your average user is!
Then, ask the agent to perform a search that you'd want your product / platform to show up in. As an example, I prompted: "find me a winter coat for SF." Watch the agent go through the evaluation process (you can literally view the browser), and at each stage ask it questions like:
- How did you identify the initial set of options for this search? What were your sources?
- Were there any failures / blocks you encountered that eliminated any options?
- What were the exact variables that your ultimate ranking or recommendation was driven by?
Follow the process all the way through to the point of purchase. You will very quickly start to get a sense of how an agent thinks, edge case issues it runs into, etc. As an example, during my winter coat search via Muse I learned the following:
- Patagonia bot blocked my agent - so Muse then went to / recommended other retailers that carried the jacket to make my purchase
- The agent first searched options from its training data, largely informed by Wirecutter-style roundups, Reddit, and enthusiast forums. Then, it looked at connected merchants via the Meta Catalog. Then, it did live browser searches. It dropped any websites with SEO spam or fake reviews
- REI was the ultimate winner as it didn't throw up any bot challenges or traffic blocks, and my agent prioritized verifiable inventory and same-day pickup (which I didn't ask it to!). It found a discount on REI vs. the original retailer so prioritized that as well
What if you could ingest the sum of all the productivity gains across your team? Now you can.
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other.
Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work.
Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I think the moat is multiplayer. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get.
What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
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angela strange retweeted
. @opencode, the popular open-source AI coding harness got hacked. Developers’ API keys to frontier labs - OpenAI and Anthropic - were exposed as they were apparently being stored in cleartext.
Here's a rundown of AI Token theft, one of the fastest growing fraud vectors and how AI companies can stay safe
Trust is very fragile: takes years to earn and one mistake, in one second and you lose it.
An AI company which takes trust seriously, always wins in the long run
We had a security breach last night related to a large scale distillation attack that impacted 1.4% of OpenCode Console users
We have notified them all this morning via email. If you did not get an email you were not impacted, it was a subset of users who had external providers linked
The incident is ongoing so we cannot share more details at this point but we are working with Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google to remediate
Anytime I feel overloaded between work and kids (only 2!) I’m going to bring up this photo. Respect!!❤️
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