In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Sujay Jayakar, co-founder and Chief Scientist at Convex , to talk about his team’s latest work benchmarking AI agents on full-stack coding tasks. From designing Fullstack Bench to the quirks of agent behavior, the two dig into what’s actually hard about autonomous software development, and why robust evals—and guardrails like type safety—matter more than ever. They also get tactical: which models perform best for real-world app b...
Mar 28, 2025•33 min•Ep. 40
In this episode of AI + a16z, Resend founder and CEO Zeno Rocha sits down with a16z partner Yoko Li to discuss: How generative AI — powered by agents and, now, MCP — is reshaping the email experience for developers, as well as the overall world of programming. Zeno's obsession with developer experience has evolved into designing for "agent experience" — a new frontier where LLM-powered agents are not only building products but also operating within them. How email, one of the most ubiquitous too...
Mar 21, 2025•45 min•Ep. 39
In this episode of AI + a16z , a16z Partner Joe Schmidt sits down with 11x CTO Prabhav Jain for an inside look at how AI-powered digital workers are reshaping sales and revenue operations. They discuss the evolution of agentic AI, the trade-offs between orchestration and autonomy, and the technical innovations driving 11x’s products, Alice and Mike. Prabhav breaks down the challenges of real-time voice AI, the complexities of multimodal agent interactions, and why the future of enterprise AI is ...
Mar 20, 2025•27 min•Ep. 38
In this episode of AI + a16z, Sesame Cofounder and CTO Ankit Kumar joins a16z general partner Anjney Midha for a deep dive into the research and engineering behind their voice technology. They discuss the technical challenges of real-time speech generation, the trade-offs in balancing personality with efficiency, and why the team is open-sourcing key components of their model. Ankit breaks down the complexities of multimodal AI, full-duplex conversation modeling, and the computational optimizati...
Mar 14, 2025•2 hr 42 min•Ep. 37
In this episode of AI + a16z, Netlify CEO and Cofounder Matt Biilmann joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to explore how AI is reshaping web development — not just through faster code generation, but by fundamentally shifting how we think about building for the web. At the center of this shift is Agent Experience (AX) , a new paradigm where AI agents aren’t just tools, but active participants in development, shaping both the creative process and the underlying infrastructure. Matt shares ho...
Mar 07, 2025•41 min•Ep. 36
In this episode of AI + a16z, a trio of security experts join a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the security implications of the DeepSeek reasoning model that made waves recently. It's three separate discussions, focusing on different aspects of DeepSeek and the fast-moving world of generative AI. The first segment, with Ian Webster of Promptfoo , focuses on vulnerabilities within DeepSeek itself, and how users can protect themselves against backdoors, jailbreaks, and censorship. The seco...
Feb 28, 2025•52 min•Ep. 35
In this episode of AI + a16z, Aatish Nayak, head of product at Harvey , sits down with a16z partner Kimberly Tan to share his experience building AI products for enterprises — including the legal profession — and how to address areas like UX, trust, and customer engagement. Importantly, Aatish explains, industries like law don't need AGI or even the latest and greatest models; they need products that augment their existing workflows so they can better serve clients and still make it home for din...
Feb 21, 2025•40 min•Ep. 34
In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z partner Alex Immerman sits down with Hebbia founder and CEO George Sivulka to discuss the potential for reasoning models and AI agents to supercharge knowledge-worker productivity — and the global economy along with it. As George explains, his customers are already saving significant time and and effort on important, but monotonous, tasks, and improved models paired with savvy users will continue to reshape how industries including finance, law, and other profe...
Feb 14, 2025•38 min•Ep. 33
In this episode of AI + a16z, Fivetran cofounder and CEO George Fraser and a16z partner Guido Appenzeller discuss how LLMs fit into the data management picture within large enterprises. In order to take advantage of a potentially revolutionary technology, organizations don't need to rip out their existing infrastructure, but they do need to rethink their data hygiene so language models can understand it. Follow everyone on X: George Fraser Guido Appenzeller Derrick Harris Check out everything a1...
Feb 07, 2025•38 min•Ep. 32
In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and Rasa cofounder and CEO Alan Nichol discuss the past, present, and future of AI agents and chatbots. Alan shares his history working to solve this problem with traditional natural language processing (NLP), expounds on how large language models (LLMs) are helping to dull the many sharp corners of natural-language interactions, and explains how pairing them with inflexible business logic is a great combination. Learn more: Task-O...
Jan 10, 2025•38 min•Ep. 31
A 2024 highlight reel, featuring founders sharing their insights, advice, and experiences building AI companies — from foundation-model labs to vertical applications. Topics include: Building AI tools for developers Getting into AI as a systems expert The researcher-to-founder journey Founding AI companies in specific industries Early lessons from selling AI agents And more Companies include: Ambience Anyscale Black Forest Labs CommandZero Databricks Decagon Ideogram Inngest Replicate Socket Che...
Dec 27, 2024•46 min•Ep. 30
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Decagon cofounder/CEO Jesse Zhang and a16z partner Kimberly Tan discuss how LLMs are reshaping customer support, the strong market demand for AI agents, and how AI agents give startups a a new pricing model to help disrupt incumbents. Here's an excerpt of Jesse explaining how conversation-based pricing can win over customers who are used to traditional seat-based pricing: "Our view on this is that, in the past, software is based per seat because it's rou...
Dec 18, 2024•44 min•Ep. 29
This is a replay of our first episode from April 12, featuring Databricks VP of AI Naveen Rao and a16z partner Matt Bornstein discussing enterprise LLM adoption, hardware platforms, and what it means for AI to be mainstream. If you're unfamiliar with Naveen, he has been in the AI space for more than decade working on everything from custom hardware to LLMs, and has founded two successful startups — Nervana Systems and MosaicML. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here...
Nov 30, 2024•43 min•Ep. 28
In this episode of AI + a16z, Replicate cofounder and CEO Ben Firshman, and a16z partner Matt Bornstein, discuss the art of building products and companies that appeal to software developers. Ben was the creator of Docker Compose, and Replicate has a thriving community of developers hosting and fine-tuning their own models to power AI-based applications. Here's an excerpt of Ben and Matt discussing the difference in the variety of applications built using multimedia models compared with language...
Nov 15, 2024•42 min•Ep. 27
Longtime machine-learning researcher, and University of Washington Professor Emeritus, Pedro Domingos joins a16z General Partner Martin Casado to discuss the state of artificial intelligence, whether we're really on a path toward AGI, and the value of expressing unpopular opinions. It's a very insightful discussion as we head into an era of mainstream AI adoption, and ask big questions about how to ramp up progress and diversify research directions. Here's an excerpt of Pedro sharing his thought...
Nov 04, 2024•38 min•Ep. 26
In this episode of AI + a16z, General Partner Anjney Midha shares his perspective on the recent collection of Nobel Prizes awarded to AI researchers in both Physics and Chemistry. He talks through how early work on neural networks in the 1980s spurred continuous advancement in the field — even through the "AI winter" — which resulted in today's extremely useful AI technologies. Here's a sample of the discussion, in response to a question about whether we will see more high-quality research emerg...
Oct 25, 2024•40 min•Ep. 25
In this episode of AI + a16z, General Partner Anjney Midha explains the forces that lead to GPU shortages and price spikes, and how the firm mitigates these concerns for portfolio companies by supplying them with the GPUs they need through a program called Oxygen. The TL;DR version of the problem is that competition for GPU access favors large incumbents who can afford to outbid startups and commit to long contracts; when startups do buy or rent in bulk, they can be stuck with lots of GPUs and —...
Oct 23, 2024•39 min•Ep. 24
In this episode of AI + a16z, Bowen Peng and Jeffrey Quesnelle of Nous Research join a16z General Partner Anjney Midha to discuss their mission to keep open source AI research alive and activate the community of independent builders. The focus is on a recent project called DisTrO, which demonstrates it's possible to train AI models across the public internet much faster than previously thought possible. However, Nous is behind a number of other successful open source AI projects, including the p...
Sep 27, 2024•1 hr 13 min•Ep. 23
In this episode of AI + a16z, Ambience cofounder and chief scientist Nikhil Buduma joins Derrick Harris to discuss the nuances of using AI models to build vertical applications (including in his space, health care), and why industry acumen is at least as important as technical expertise. Nikhil also shares his experience of having a first-row seat to key advances in AI — including the transformer architecture — which not only allowed his company to be an early adopter, but also gave him insight ...
Sep 13, 2024•43 min•Ep. 22
In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z General Partner Jennifer Li joins MotherDuck Cofounder and CEO Jordan Tigani to discuss DuckDB's spiking popularity as the era of big data wanes, as well as the applicability of SQL-based systems for AI workloads and the prospect of text-to-SQL for analyzing data. Here's an excerpt of Jordan discussing an early win when it comes to applying generative AI to data analysis: "Everybody forgets syntax for various SQL calls. And it's just like in coding. So there's ...
Aug 30, 2024•33 min•Ep. 21
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Black Forest Labs founders Robin Rombach, Andreas Blattmann, and Patrick Esser sit down with a16z general partner Anjney Midha to discuss their journey from PhD researchers to Stability AI, and now to launching their own company building state-of-the-art image and video models. They also delve into the topic of openness in AI, explaining the benefits of releasing open models and sharing research findings with the field. Learn more: Flux Keep the code to ...
Aug 16, 2024•37 min•Ep. 20
In this episode, a16z General Partner Vijay Pande walks us through the past two decades of applying software engineering to the life sciences — from the Folding@Home project that he launched, through AlphaFold and more. He also discusses the major opportunities for AI to transform medicine and health care, as well as some pitfalls that founders in that space need to watch out for. Here's an excerpt of Vijay discussing how AlphaFold and other projects revolutionized biology research not just beca...
Aug 09, 2024•47 min•Ep. 19
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z General Partner Anjney Midha speaks with PromptFoo founder and CEO Ian Webster about the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and how bringing those capabilities to more organizations will lead to safer, more predictable generative AI applications. They also delve into lessons they learned about this during their time together as early large language model adopters at Discord, and why attempts to regulate AI should focus on applicat...
Aug 02, 2024•45 min•Ep. 18
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Command Zero cofounder and CTO Dean de Beer joins a16z's Joel de la Garza and Derrick Harris to discuss the benefits of training large language models on security data, as well as the myriad factors product teams need to consider when building on LLMs. Here's an excerpt of Dean discussing the challenges and concerns around scaling up LLMs: "Scaling out infrastructure has a lot of limitations: the APIs you're using, tokens, inbound and outbound, the cost ...
Jul 26, 2024•40 min•Ep. 17
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Anyscale cofounder and CEO Robert Nishihara joins a16z's Jennifer Li and Derrick Harris to discuss the challenges of training and running AI models at scale; how a focus on video models — and the huge amount of data involved — will change generative AI models and infrastructure; and the unique experience of launching a company out of the UC-Berkeley Sky Computing Lab (the successor to RISElab and AMPLab). Here's a sample of the discussion, where Robert e...
Jul 19, 2024•38 min•Ep. 16
In this archive episode from 2015, a16z's Sonal Chokshi, Frank Chen, and Steven Sinofsky discuss DeepMind's breakthrough AlphaGo system, which mastered the ancient Chinese game Go and introduced the public to reinforcement learning. Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here , including articles, projects, and more podcasts.
Jul 05, 2024•33 min•Ep. 15
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Luma Chief Scientist Jiaming Song joins a16z General Partner Anjney MIdha to discuss Jiaming's esteemed career in video models, culminating thus far in Luma's recently released Dream Machine 3D model that shows abilities to reason about the world across a variety of aspects. Jiaming covers the history of image and video models, shares his vision for the future of multimodal models, and explains why he thinks Dream Machine demonstrates its emergent reason...
Jul 03, 2024•1 hr 5 min•Ep. 14
In this episode, design engineer Alasdair Monk joins a16z's Yoko Li and Derrick Harris to discuss how generative AI is changing how developers — and the those building for developers — interact with the tools of their trade. Alasdair’s journey includes stints at dev-centric companies such as Heroku/Salesforce, and he's presently designing the user experience for Poolside, an AI programming startup. Here's a sample of Alasdair discussing the future of the prompt bar in generative coding tools: "W...
Jun 21, 2024•38 min•Ep. 13
In this episode, Inngest cofounder and CEO Tony Holdstock-Brown joins a16z partner Yoko Li, as well as Derrick Harris, to discuss the reality and complexity of running AI agents and other multistep AI workflows in production. Tony also why developer tools for generative AI — and their founders — might look very similar to previous generations of these products, and where there are opportunities for improvement. Here's a sample of the discussion, where Tony shares some advice for engineers lookin...
Jun 14, 2024•44 min•Ep. 12
In this episode, Ideogram CEO Mohammad Norouzi joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li, as well as Derrick Harris, to share his story of growing up in Iran, helping build influential text-to-image models at Google, and ultimately cofounding and running Ideogram. He also breaks down the differences between transformer models and diffusion models, as well as the transition from researcher to startup CEO. Here's an excerpt where Mohammad discusses the reaction to the original transformer architectur...
Jun 07, 2024•37 min•Ep. 11
