Ian Webster built PromptFoo after watching 200 million Discord users systematically dismantle his AI agent—now Fortune 10 companies pay him to break theirs before customers do. The "lethal trifecta" sounds academic until you realize it's already happening: untrusted input plus sensitive data plus an exfiltration channel equals the security incident that just cost a SaaS company its multi-tenancy guarantees. Webster's red-teaming agents don't use signatures—they have 30,000 conversations with you...
Dec 02, 2025•25 min•Ep. 69
Netlify's CEO, Matt Biilmann, reveals a seismic shift nobody saw coming: 16,000 daily signups—five times last year's rate—and 96% aren't coming from AI coding tools. They're everyday people accidentally building React apps through ChatGPT, then discovering they need somewhere to deploy them. The addressable market for developer tools just exploded from 17 million JavaScript developers to 3 billion spreadsheet users, but only if your product speaks fluent AI—which is why Netlify's founder now sub...
Nov 28, 2025•58 min•Ep. 68
Sourcegraph's CTO just revealed why 90% of his code now comes from agents—and why the Chinese models powering America's AI future should terrify Washington. While Silicon Valley obsesses over AGI apocalypse scenarios, Beyang Liu's team discovered something darker: every competitive open-source coding model they tested traces back to Chinese labs, and US companies have gone silent after releasing Llama 3. The regulatory fear that killed American open-source development isn't hypothetical anymore—...
Nov 25, 2025•47 min•Ep. 67
Ryo Lu spent years watching his designs die in meetings. Then he discovered the tool that lets designers ship code at the speed of thought: Cursor, the company where Ryo is now Head of Design. In this episode, we discuss why "taste" is the wrong framework for understanding the future, why purposeful apps are "selfish," how System 7 holds secrets about AI interfaces, and the radical bet that one codebase can serve everyone if you design the concepts right instead of the buttons. Follow Ryo Lu on ...
Nov 21, 2025•52 min•Ep. 66
The Stanford PhD who built DSPy thought he was just creating better prompts—until he realized he'd accidentally invented a new paradigm that makes LLMs actually programmable. While everyone obsesses over whether LLMs will get us to AGI, Omar Khattab is solving a more urgent problem: the gap between what you want AI to do and your ability to tell it, the absence of a real programming language for intent. He argues the entire field has been approaching this backwards, treating natural language pro...
Nov 18, 2025•57 min•Ep. 65
If you can’t robustly protect your secrets, you can’t have reliable AI agents. In this episode, Truffle Security cofounder and CEO Dylan Ayrey joins a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the emergent security stack for AI agents, why leaks are actually getting worse, and how Truffle evolved from an open-source side project to a major VC-backed startup. Follow Dylan here: https://x.com/InsecureNature Follow Joel here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/3448827723723234/ Check out everything a16z is d...
Nov 11, 2025•29 min•Ep. 64
In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Ovais Tariq, Cofounder and CEO of Tigris Data, to discuss why independent storage is so hard, what operating your own datacenters is like, and what’s in store for the future of cloud. Resources Follow Ovais on X: https://x.com/ovaistariq Follow Tigris Data on X: https://x.com/tigrisdata Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado Check out everything a16z is doing with artificial intelligence here , including articles, projec...
Nov 07, 2025•39 min•Ep. 63
Customer support platforms lacked adequate solutions for B2B companies - until Pylon entered the scene. We sat down with Pylon cofounders Marty Kausas, Advith Chelikani, and Robert Eng to discuss why they went into B2B, how they plan to beat huge competitors, and why they still live together in a windowless apartment and work 9-9-6 hours despite having raised tens of millions. Follow Pylon on X: https://x.com/usepylon Follow Marty on X: https://x.com/marty_kausas Follow Advith on X: https://x.co...
Oct 31, 2025•48 min•Ep. 62
In 2025, we saw the first glimpses of true AI agents. In 2026, every company will be rushing to get them into production, and they’ll need companies like Keycard to manage fleets of agents. In this conversation, a16z Partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Keycard Cofounder and CEO Ian Livingstone to discuss the continuum from copilots to agents, the security realities of tool-calling, why enterprises will adopt before consumers, and how to control your agents. Follow Joel on LinkedIn: https://w...
Oct 22, 2025•33 min•Ep. 61
AI coding has emerged as a major market for AI: one that’s already rewriting how software gets built. a16z Infra Partners Yoko Li and Guido Appenzeller break down how “agents with environments” are changing the dev loop; why repos and PRs may need new abstractions; and where ROI is showing up first (like legacy code migration). We also cover token economics for engineering teams, the emerging agent toolbox (sandboxes, code search/parsing, agent-optimized docs, orchestration), and founder opportu...
Oct 10, 2025•38 min•Ep. 60
What if the hardest part of building a company isn’t the product, but knowing exactly who it’s for? In this episode, a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Abhishek Agrawal, Cofounder and CEO of Material Security, to discuss how an ideal customer profile is discovered, how to manage any kind of customer, and how frothy markets can distort real signal. Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado Follow Material Security on X: https://x.com/material_sec Follow Abhishek on LinkedIn: ...
Oct 06, 2025•34 min•Ep. 59
AI is transforming both sides of the cybersecurity cat-and-mouse game. Attackers are using LLMs to scale impersonation, phishing, and even deepfake fraud—while defenders are racing to automate detection and takedowns at the same speed. In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza talks with Kevin Tian, cofounder & CEO of Doppel Security (and former Uber engineer), about building in this new landscape. They cover: Why outsider founders sometimes build the most effective security companies T...
Sep 26, 2025•22 min•Ep. 58
What if you could retake your favorite memories years after they happened, fixing the lighting, catching the smile, or even opening your eyes? In this conversation, a16z General Partner Martin Casado and Partner Yoko Li sit down with scientist and Lytro founder Ren Ng along with Phota Labs cofounders Cecilia Zhang and Zhihao “Zach” Xia to explore the past, present, and future of computational photography. They trace the story from the invention of light-field cameras and the evolution of smartph...
Sep 17, 2025•52 min•Ep. 57
OpenAI’s Codex has already shipped hundreds of thousands of pull requests in its first month. But what is it really, and how will coding agents change the future of software? In this episode, General Partner Anjney Midha goes behind the scenes with one of Codex’s product leads- Alexander Embiricos - to unpack its origin story, why its PR success rate is so high, the safety challenges of autonomous agents, and what this all means for developers, students, and the future of coding. Resources: Find...
Aug 29, 2025•1 hr 20 min•Ep. 55
Models, Modalities, and Memes: Creating Compelling AI Characters In this episode of AI + a16z , Hedra founder and CEO Michael Lingelbach joins a16z partners Justine Moore and Matt Bornstein to talk about building AI-native video — and why the next wave of generative content is all about characters, not just clips. They discuss how Hedra’s expressive, full-body, dialogue-centric video models are powering everything from viral meme content to enterprise training tools. Michael explains why “charac...
Aug 14, 2025•47 min•Ep. 54
If you've been experimenting with image, video, and audio models, the chances are you've been both blown away by how good they're becoming, and also a little perturbed by how long they can take to generate. If you've been using a platform like Fal , however, your experience on the latter point might be more positive. In this episode, Fal cofounder and CEO Burkay Gur and head of engineering Batuhan Taskaya join a16z general partner Jennifer Li to discuss how they built an inference platform — or,...
Aug 01, 2025•40 min•Ep. 53
In this episode, a16z partner Joel de la Garza sits down with Socket founder and CEO Feross Aboukhadijeh to dive into the intersection of vibe coding and security. As one of the earliest security founders to fully embrace LLMs, Feross shares firsthand insights into how these technologies are transforming software engineering workflows and productivity — and where there are sharp edges that practitioners need to avoid. The TL;DR: Treat AI-assisted programming the same way you'd treat other progra...
Jul 25, 2025•27 min•Ep. 52
In this episode, a16z GP Martin Casado sits down with Metronome CEO Scott Woody to unpack how AI is fundamentally changing the value proposition of software—and why that shift demands a rethink of the traditional SaaS business model. They explore how, in the cloud era, value scaled with the number of users accessing a shared system (think Salesforce). However, in the AI era, value shifts to the work the software performs on your behalf, automating tasks such as writing code or resolving support ...
Jul 18, 2025•43 min•Ep. 51
In this episode, which originally aired on the Complex Systems Podcast , a16z General Partner Jennifer Li discusses how AI is reshaping every layer of the software stack, creating demand for new types of middleware. Jennifer talks about emerging infrastructure categories and why the next wave of valuable companies might be the unsexy infrastructure providers powering tomorrow's intelligent applications. Subscribe to Complex Systems: Spotify Apple Check out everything a16z is doing with artificia...
Jul 11, 2025•46 min•Ep. 50
Labelbox CEO Manu Sharma joins a16z Infra partner Matt Bornstein to explore the evolution of data labeling and evaluation in AI — from early supervised learning to today’s sophisticated reinforcement learning loops. Manu recounts Labelbox’s origins in computer vision, and then how the shift to foundation models and generative AI changed the game. The value moved from pre-training to post-training and, today, models are trained not just to answer questions, but to assess the quality of their own ...
Jun 27, 2025•47 min•Ep. 49
In this episode of AI + a16z, dbt Labs founder and CEO Tristan Handy sits down with a16z's Jennifer Li and Matt Bornstein to explore the next chapter of data engineering — from the rise (and plateau) of the modern data stack to the growing role of AI in analytics and data engineering. As they sum up the impact of AI on data workflows: The interesting question here is human-in-the-loop versus human-not-in-the-loop. AI isn’t about replacing analysts — it’s about enabling self-service across the co...
Jun 20, 2025•35 min•Ep. 48
Arcjet CEO David Mytton sits down with a16z partner Joel de la Garza to discuss the increasing complexity of managing who can access websites, and other web apps, and what they can do there. A primary challenge is determining whether automated traffic is coming from bad actors and troublesome bots, or perhaps AI agents trying to buy a product on behalf of a real customer.Joel and David dive into the challenge of analyzing every request without adding latency, and how faster inference at the edge...
Jun 13, 2025•26 min•Ep. 47
Instabase founder and CEO Anant Bhardwaj joins a16z Infra partner Guido Appenzeller to discuss the revolutionary impact of LLMs on analyzing unstructured data and documents (like letting banks verify identity and approve loans via WhatsApp) and shares his vision for how AI agents could take things even further (by automating actions based on those documents). In more detail, they discuss: Why legacy robotic process automation (RPA) struggles with unstructured inputs. How Instabase developed layo...
Jun 06, 2025•36 min•Ep. 46
LMArena cofounders Anastasios N. Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, and Ion Stoica sit down with a16z general partner Anjney Midha to talk about the future of AI evaluation. As benchmarks struggle to keep up with the pace of real-world deployment, LMArena is reframing the problem: what if the best way to test AI models is to put them in front of millions of users and let them vote? The team discusses how Arena evolved from a research side project into a key part of the AI stack, why fresh and subject...
May 30, 2025•1 hr 42 min•Ep. 45
In this episode of AI + a16z, Distributional cofounder and CEO Scott Clark, and a16z partner Matt Bornstein, explore why building trust in AI systems matters more than just optimizing performance metrics. From understanding the hidden complexities of generative AI behavior to addressing the challenges of reliability and consistency, they discuss how to confidently deploy AI in production. Why is trust becoming a critical factor in enterprise AI adoption? How do traditional performance metrics fa...
May 23, 2025•48 min•Ep. 44
In this episode of the a16z AI podcast, a16z Infra partners Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Yoko Li explore how generative AI is reshaping software development. From its potential as a new high-level programming abstraction to its current practical impacts, they discuss whether AI coding tools will redefine what it means to be a developer. Why has coding emerged as one of AI's most powerful use cases? How much can AI truly boost developer productivity, and will it fundamentally change tra...
May 16, 2025•45 min•Ep. 43
In this episode of AI + a16z, Anthropic's David Soria Parra — who created MCP (Model Context Protocol) along with Justin Spahr-Summers — sits down with a16z's Yoko Li to discuss the project's inception, exciting use cases for connecting LLMs to external sources, and what's coming next for the project. If you're unfamiliar with the wildly popular MCP project, this edited passage from their discussion is a great starting point to learn: David: "MCP tries to enable building AI applications in such ...
May 02, 2025•54 min•Ep. 42
In this episode of AI + a16z, a16z Infra partners Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Yoko Li discuss and debate one of the tech industry's buzziest words right now: AI agents. The trio digs into the topic from a number of angles, including: Whether a uniform definition of agent actually exists How to distinguish between agents, LLMs, and functions How to think about pricing agents Whether agents can actually replace humans, and The effects of data siloes on agents that can access the web. Th...
Apr 28, 2025•36 min•Ep. 41
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
