a16z Podcast - Ben Horowitz on AI Infrastructure, Economics and The New Laws of Software

Episode Date: April 14, 2026

Recorded live at the a16z Fintech Connect conference in Deer Valley, Alex Rampell speaks with Ben Horowitz, cofounder and general partner at a16z, about how AI has rewritten the fundamental rules of software competition, why crypto infrastructure will become essential in an AI-dominated world, and what the future holds for venture capital.   Resources: Follow Alex Rampell on X: https://twitter.com/arampell Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

America's got to rebuild its entire infrastructure like right now. We don't have enough rare earth minerals. We don't have enough electricity. We don't have enough manufacturing capacity. Invidia will make enough chips, but then we won't have enough memory. Almost everything is the bottleneck. The China graph is like this, and the US graph is like that. How do we make this seem less scary?

The history of technology is things have always gotten better. Humans are kind of unbelievable in their ability to come up with new things that they need. Now, 8 billion people that might have an idea in their head can get it out of their head. I do think what's going to happen is... For 50 years, one rule in technology was almost sacred. You cannot buy your way out of a software problem. Hire a thousand engineers, and you still won't catch a faster competitor.

Fred Brooks called it the mythical man month, and every engineering leader believed it. That rule no longer holds. With enough GPUs and the right data, companies can now compress years of development into weeks. But the disruption cuts both ways. The same forces that let startups move faster are dissolving the moats that protected incumbents. Customer lock-in, proprietary data, switching costs, all eroding at once. So in a world where the old defenses no longer work, what actually makes a company worth building, funding, or keeping? Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at A16Z, speaks with A16Z general partner Alex Rampe.

at FinTech Connect Conference in Deer Valley. So you've been doing this for a long time, and I thought maybe I'd start off. It's funny, we actually didn't rehearse this at all, because I thought that way would be more real, right? More unique. But let's talk about, you have this book where you talked about how hard it is to be a CEO

and everything that you went through at LoudCloud and Opsware. That was a giant shift where it's like the market kind of collapsed, the financial market collapsed. And you had to really pivot and just change the company. and there are new age companies that are popping up right now, AI first. It's like they hopefully have their shit together. They're off to the race is building something new. But like a legacy company or five or ten years ago

where there's this great opportunity but also great challenge, what does a five or ten-year-old CEO do? Where it's like they're pre-AI. They've got to figure out what they do. So the financial markets hate them. Yes. Yes. So there's the financial markets hate them.

Yes. So I don't know. Maybe a riff on that. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah. Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize in a kind of huge dislocation like this is some very basic axiomatic like laws of physics are different. And the two that are really different with AI compared to how companies have been built in kind of technology forever is, one, it used to be very well known that you cannot throw money at the problem.

So, for example, if I had a product and I was two years behind, I could not hire a thousand engineers and catch my competitor. Like, it's a mythical man month. Nine women can't have a baby in a month. Everybody knows that. It never works. No problem. That's no longer true.

You can throw money at the problem. If you have enough money and some good data, you can buy enough GPUs and solve basically anything in software. So that's gone. The second thing that we knew for sure is like in software, possession is nine-tenths of the law. So if you have the customer, you have multiple lock-ins. You have the migration pane lock-in.

You've got the data lock-in. You've got the user interface lock-in. Those are pretty much gone, right? So it's very easy to replicate the code. It's very easy to move the data. And then it's not even going to be a human talking to your software. software, it's going to be an AI, and, you know, AIs are really flexible on how they use user interfaces. So that mode is gone. So I think that's just like the first thing you have to recognize as a CEO that,

like, okay, that's going away. So then what is it? Where is your value? What are you delivering? And it turns out there are many things that are of value. But if you're trying to get good pricing through any of those things, you're going to be under tremendous pressure. Your price has to be a function of some other value that's much more distinct that you provide. Got it.

And the other thing that we've talked about this a lot internally as a firm is that once upon a time, like, if you have a good product, you might have 10 years to run with that product, maybe five years, and now it might be like five weeks. Well, we also talk about this,

like in terms of going public, so companies are staying private a lot longer, which probably is good. If you're going through an existential crisis, you'd much rather do that as a private company than a public company. But also, the reason why the SaaSpocalypse is happening is because there are doubts on terminal value.

Yeah. Right? So everybody who starts a company, they're doing it because they want to create economic value. They're capitalists. They're trying to actually benefit from this equation financially. But if you wait too long, maybe your company is worth zero.

That's kind of scary. And that was always a risk, but it would play out over decades. Yeah, it's not as fast a risk. So I guess if you were, I mean, loud clouds around today, you're the CEO. And again, bad example. Sorry to give you. I know, I know.

Although actually, Cloud would be awesome. Yeah, exactly. You would be very well positioned. But I guess what is it that a CEO should do potentially differently? I mean, obviously move faster, cut faster, be more efficient, throw money at the, like all of these things that we've talked about. But it's like, shit, if I go public and I get disrupted, then I have this terrible life of I'm going to be a penny stock.

If I just wait, there's this chance that. to get eviscerated. And this kind of like road killer success equation is kind of scary, right? I mean, it's always scary, but you would have a time. And now it feels like you don't. Yeah, I think you do have to be honest with yourself on like what it is you have really. And like there are companies that get thrown under the bus correctly and once that don't. And then if you take a lot of these ideas to their logical conclusion, then, you know,

nothing is worth anything because there are no people at companies. and if there are no people who's going to buy your shitty software, so da-da-da-da. But like it is more like subtle, and it just tends to take much longer than we think for some of these things to play out. So then the question is, are you getting stronger in that meanwhile, or are you degenerating? So is what's happening nobody's buying, like the money just shifted, the customers are buying other stuff. They're not buying yours. In that case, you have a huge problem. You probably have to cut deeply and pivot.

But on the other hand, look, there's companies that have been slaughtered in the valuation game, but are pretty strong. So I'm on the board of this company, Navon, right? Like, they're travel. So obviously the SaaSpocalypse, like, they're dead. No way you're doing travel. But then you look under the covers and you go, well, it actually is a little more complicated than that because on travel, like you actually need explicit relationships to find providing your travel. and you're any kind of company that's important at all, you need to travel globally.

So now I need a relationship with every single airline in the world, every single hotel in the world, every train, everything, you've got to deal with that, you've got to kind of connect back to their budgeting systems and all these things. And then the second thing that's like nobody wants to do, including OpenAI or Anthropic, is sell to the damn travel manager.

Like nobody has a channel to the travel manager. It's not something. And you can't even imagine that being a good idea. You want to keep advancing. You want to kind of do the things that Intuit is doing where, like, okay, like turn ourselves into more of an AI company and then kind of hold the customer. And by the way, like the Agenic travel experience

turns out to be much more complicated than one would think. And I don't know if it stays that way, but that's the way it is today. So I think it's very company dependent. Like I don't think it's all one thing. But I do think Brave New World, and if you keep, Looking at it like the old world and it's got completely different laws of physics, you are definitely going to die. Yeah.

Well, maybe let's talk about venture capital. There's a lot of cope going on now, too. So you've got to be careful with that. Well, that's the thing. It's like there are some things that really are features. And before it would take a long time to build a feature, so you might as well, you know, it's comparative advantage. David Ricardo.

I could weld my own steel. I could grow my own food, but I'm just going to not do that because I can do things that actually produce more economic value. for me, but now it's just becoming not that hard to go create features, but features are not products or not companies. And we've always had this distinction. There's feature product company, but it's a little bit confusing figuring out which one is which right now just because the ability to create a feature and create a product and even get all of the data. My favorite saying the best companies have hostages, not customers, like even get some of the data out

of the hostage company. Yeah. So it's a very, very confusing world in terms of figuring out which one is, which is kind of maybe a good segue to venture capital land, of how do you think, I mean, when you started this firm in 2009, big financial crisis, well, actually, very, very big financial crisis, global financial crisis going on, the biggest. The world has changed a lot since then. I mean, how much of what's happening today kind of fits within the mental model of back then and how much is kind of brave new world, maybe riff on that a little bit? Yeah, so it's really different. So our first fund was $300 million, and we raised it from all. the traditional kind of LPs, endowments, you know, charitable foundations, et cetera,

fund of funds. We just raised $15 billion, four of the seven funds, four of the seven funds, so like not even the whole complex. And, you know, we raised it from very, very different kinds of investors. So we, you know, like basically none of our LP base was international when we started, and we're at like 35% international money, and it's from all kinds of places. And just tech has gotten more, like tech has gotten so much more important. I think that, you know, we have to think in terms of the world in a way that we just didn't before us.

So, for example, like with the, you know, why did you raise so much money? Which, by the way, I'm kind of mad at myself because I don't even think I articulated it internally well enough because we could have raised even more money. Next time, don't worry. Yeah, we had more money on the table. But the way I was thinking about it is, look, America's got to rebuild its entire infrastructure like right now because we don't have enough, you know, we don't have enough rare earth minerals.

We don't have enough electricity. We don't have enough manufacturing capacity. We don't have, we have the wrong chips. Like they take way too much to empower. They were built for games. You know, we don't have the, we don't have. enough anything kind of to be in this future world, and somebody's got to fund it.

And, you know, so clearly that's going to take a lot of money. So all that is brand new. And I would say it's, like, fairly overwhelming in a sense, but, like, it is really, really important. Like, we're pretty much out of electricity down. And I'd say it's like not 12 months from now, like right now. The China graph is like this, and the U.S. graph is like that. Yeah, and the demand for these tokens is straight vertical,

but the ability to kind of build that capacity is absolutely not vertical. So we need new everywhere. I mean, like we invested in a transformer company, not like an AI transformer, like an actual power transformer company, because you need kind of better, easier to manufacture, more efficient transformers. And the transformer hasn't changed since, Really, we invent electricity.

So like these kinds of things. So there's an old saying, the cure for high prices is high prices. But the problem is there's a lot of latency involved. So right now, there are computers that show up with no RAM. Like if you buy, you go buy a server from Dell. They're like, sorry if you don't have any RAM to sell you because all of that has been gobbled up.

Because, yeah, they could build a new factory or you and I could decide to go build a DRAM factory. That would take us five years. So how do you, I mean, And we don't believe it's... Got to start now. You got to start now. But this is actually, if you remember,

which you obviously do, in 1999, it's like, well, we have to build more fiber, right? We have to build more capacity. But it's obviously very different because all the GPUs are hot. They're all lit right now. And back then, most of the fiber was dark. Yes.

But how do you get... Yeah, well, there were bottlenecks. When we were building fiber, the bottlenecks were kind of in different places. So, you know, know, we, like, the servers weren't capable of putting, like, bits out even fast enough to do video, right? And, like, this software was really, we didn't have load balancers. We didn't have application servers.

We didn't have anything. And so you had all this fiber and all this bandwidth, but, like, you can actually build the applications. And then most of the end users weren't, it's a network, too. So, you know, people weren't connected on the other end. So it just didn't work. And then we had the dot-com crash and all these things. So now we're in a little different place because almost everything is the bottleneck.

I do think what's going to happen is, we'll probably have enough chips long before we have enough electricity. So Nvidia will make enough chips, but then we won't have enough memory and we won't have enough electricity. So we're in that kind of situation now. So I think you really have to study where we are at each point in the supply chain and figure out how to alleviate those bottlenecks. And by the way, you know, God bless Elon, the tariffab, you know, that's the idea.

He's going to just go deal with all the bottlenecks himself, which is how he does things, which is why we need him. Indeed. So I feel like you're an expert in three things. Hip-hop, AI, and crypto. And I don't know anything about hip-hop, but I've found your – I've heard a lot from you, but let's talk about the other two. Yeah.

In particular, crypto and AI. So I actually just wrote about this. I mean, you remember the origins of crypto was hash-cash. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And the scariest thing right now from my perspective is that everybody with Claude or with chat GPT can actually, like, go super deep and personalize a phone call and email. Like, it seems like all communication is going to be completely unusable. Yep.

I don't know if you agree with me. I 100%. Because it's like normally I can just delete, delete. I get some email yesterday, Dear Allen at Index Ventures, it's like, well, I'm not Alan. I don't work in Index Ventures, delete. And I'm very grateful that this person messed up my name because I can just delete that. Whereas if I get a thousand emails,

like the best way of thinking about an email inbox is it's a to-do list that has right access for the public. It's like anybody can get in and now anybody can personalize. Same thing for phone calls. Like, what do we do? And then it seems like there's a lot behind crypto. That's why I mentioned hash cash,

because it was originally intended to stop spam. Yeah. So do you think there's overlap between AI and crypto? I know you do. So tell us about that. Yeah, so I do think it starts with the problems that AI causes. And actually one of the first thing I woke up in the middle of the night one day and I was like, oh my God, somebody's going to go on a Zoom.

It's going to be AI me and they're going to tell my finance team to wire like, you know, $500 million to Nigeria. And that's going to be a problem. So, you know, and then we're like, okay, everything's hardware, route of access. I don't believe anything from me unless it's got my cryptographic key on it, all that kind of thing. So I knew these problems were coming. They're coming so fast now. So I think there's kind of several categories of things.

First is just, are you a human or are you a bot? Like I think everybody is going to really, really want to know that, be it social media, a dating app, a Zoom call, like anything you want to know. am I talking to an actual human? Like, okay, can I prove that I'm a human being? And then, you know, can I prove that I'm me? And then can I sign content? Like, how do I know what's true? Like, there needs to be a distinction between,

I get so many AI videos sent to me from my family that they think are not AI videos. They're like, did this really happen? I'm like, no, you could actually ask Grock, and it's pretty good at that right now. But I think, you know, like, GROC's getting to the point where it can barely figure it out. And I think at some point it won't be able to figure it out. Or AI will not be able to tell what's an AI.

So the only way is you're going to have to have, you know, something, some cryptographically strong indication assigned piece of content that says, okay, yeah, I made this, or this is like really a video of me, Marco Rubio, you know, giving a speech. This isn't something that somebody faked. And then there needs to be a source of that truth. And who are you going to trust for the truth? Are you going to trust Google?

Are you going to trust meta? Are you going to trust the U.S. government? I think you want to trust the kind of mathematical game theory, theoretic properties of the blockchain. So I think that's going to be just a very, very important part of the infrastructure. And then you, you know, you get into, like, fraud. And, like, what is, how do you know somebody's a system? citizen to get them money.

Everybody's talking about, well, let's do UBI. Well, great. But when we did the stimulus program, we found out that the government is very bad at getting money to people. I don't know if it's like depending on the numbers you read, it's somewhere around $450 billion got stolen. So what you really need is everybody needs an address where you can send them money.

And so I think that's a crypto problem. And then finally, how does an AI become an economic actor? Like, how do I make money as an AI? How does somebody send me money? Like, can I be a merchant, a credit card merchant? If I'm not a human, I don't think so. Like, I think that's actually kind of hard. And, you know, and it's probably not the kind of right infrastructure anyway.

And so you need a bearer instrument on the Internet. You need Internet money for these AIs to be economic actors. And I think that's very likely to be crypto. So I think it's a, there are many opportunities in the crypto space that have been generated by AI. Yeah, because it feels like it's this old Yogi Berra saying it's so crowded, nobody goes here anymore. Like we're kind of entering that era of because number one is,

are you a real person? But the problem is that, you know, co-work is so good right now that, or, you know, open claw, I just say, you are a real person, you were a real person, but now your addresses are being used by a machine. Yeah, right? So CAPTCHAs don't make any sense. Captcha's in an apricism.

Like, what is it captia, right? So it feels like the solution lies in kind of economics somehow and game theory. Yes, yeah, and that too, right, right, right. Like, are you going to just have to, oh, maybe, like, I think hash cash cash is kind of a relevant idea again. Yeah, no, totally. So maybe why don't we talk about where you think venture capital is going? And I mentioned this because Mark got some crap for saying, you know, all the jobs. will go away except for one job of venture capital,

which was seen as a self-serving comment. But in his defense, I will say it's partially because it's a non-deterministic problem. Yeah. Right? It's like, all right, you're betting on an entrepreneur first and foremost, and you want to know that this entrepreneur, as I like to say, can materialize labor capital and customers.

And you can't just like, you know, run an algorithm on it. I mean, maybe you can, but there's just not a lot of data out there. It's very, very hard to do. So that's the logic by which, and also just personal relationships in general will probably survive AI. But if there's a venture capitalist, then that kind of assumes there's an entrepreneur job, no? Yes, yes, that is true. It takes, it's kind of hard to be a venture capitalist without somebody on the other in the

transaction. Yeah, if you're very bad, you could just raise money and never allocated, I guess. But I guess what do you think the world of venture capital looks like today? We've obviously done a lot of things internally as a firm to try to embrace AI, like very, very fully. but now five years, ten years from now, just given what's potentially going to happen to white collar work. Yeah, it's really tricky because, you know, you kind of go back to the last transition like this,

which was kind of the transition to the Industrial Revolution. So, you know, kind of the venture capitalists of the railroads and the automobiles and so forth, you know, ended up becoming J.P. Morgan's. Goldman Sachs, et cetera. So they ended up becoming banks.

And some of the reason for that was just how fast that materialized. So I think in the 30s, like 20% of American workers worked for the auto industry, which is like spectacular compared to what it is today.

And so things in the Industrial Revolution kind of started it out very much like we are today in venture capital, where there were whatever, 300 auto companies and so forth. And then it consolidated very hard into, you know, in the U.S., a big three and so forth. And then the kind of venture capitalists went upstream with the companies.

I think that's one scenario where, like, okay, there's going to be a small number of very gigantic companies and they're going on everything and so forth. There's another kind of future where it's like, okay, they got really big, and then we've kind of we've kind of finally hit the asymptote on this intelligence idea and like they're smart

is they're going to be or whatever and we're either going to like nationalize the big labs and like their utilities, their electricity plus plus like FU if you're going to think you're going to collect all the money and then everybody's just going to build on this utility set of things

and then that's a very different venture capital world so I would say you know as I'll quote Yogi Berra like the problem with the future, you know, the problem with predictions, they're very hard, especially about the future. And I think this future is particularly hard because it's so dynamic.

And it's really hard. And then, like, how does the electricity shortage play into? Does it make the big companies all powerful because they suck up all the electricity and nobody else can get it and nobody else can get any GPUs? Or does, like, that push all the computing out to the edge, and then the models just get really good and small,

and everybody's like, well, I have enough in my phone, and what they're going to charge me for their mega-GPU farm is just outrageous, and I'm just going to do that. So there's many ways it could go, and I don't know. I guess I don't know, but I could see venture capital being much bigger and much more exciting because everybody in the world is an entrepreneur, or I could see it being more like what happened in the Industrial Revolution and like new companies are just harder.

Yeah, well, it's kind of a good, it's a good follow-up or a good parallel question, which is like, how do we make this seem less scary? Because I don't know if you saw it. It's a lot of change, you know. Well, but yes and no, I mean, 98% of Americans were farmers in 1789. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they're not farmers right now. I mean, you made this interesting point where if you go to like a third, or fourth world, if there is a such thing in country,

everybody's an entrepreneur. 100%. Like the guy, like I sell bananas by buying them here and selling them there, everybody's an entrepreneur. There are no organized companies. And the cool thing is that now 8 billion people that might have an idea in their head can get it out of their head and maybe it's a bad idea. It probably is

a bad idea. But there is no longer a gate for them. There's no capital gate. There's no idea. It's just like boom. And it's not just for code. It's like, you know, I can write music. I can make a movie. I can make a movie. Like this is super exciting. So that feels like a very, you know,

if you're trying to make this not look dystopian, I don't know if you saw Bernie Sanders interviewing Claude. Like this is literally old man yells at cloud. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Like, you know, metaphor, no metaphor, right? It's just like, he's yelling at the cloud. And, like, that's the dystopian view, and it's wrong. I feel very passionate that that's wrong,

but we need a better narrative. So the history kind of of, I would say if you look at a macro standpoint, right, the history of technology is things have always gotten better. Like, would you like to live in the world before electricity? You know, probably not. It doesn't sound that. You can if you want.

But, like, nobody seems to opt into that. And I think we're very much in kind of a period like that, but it is the transition is always scary because it's a different world. Like the jobs, everybody was a farmer. Like, everybody was a farmer. in like 1750, I think it was like 93 or 94% of America was farmers. And then like almost all those jobs are gone. Just like the jobs that we think are jobs that they would have thought were ridiculous.

Like ridiculous. If you were a farmer, you would think, what I do is the dumbest thing in the world or a product marketing manager or any of this stuff. It's like, that's not a job. You're not making any food. Like you're not building a house. Like how could that be a job? So, like, I do think it's very hard to see to the other side of that,

but I think it's very, very likely to be, like, way, way, way better for everybody. Just like electricity ended up being way better for everybody. And to me, like, the biggest kind of the most salient, like, wrong idea was from John Maynard Keen. So he wrote a paper that wasn't that famous, but, you know, the great economist of the of the depression, where he said, look, things are going to be so abundant, and everybody's needs are going to be met. Everybody's going to have a house or like a shelter, and everybody's going to have enough food to eat. And then once you have your needs met, like, you're going to work way less, like 15 hours a week, max, because your needs are met. But like what he didn't realize was, well,

we're not just going to need one car. We're going to need a car for every person. We're going to need, you know, computers and television sets and this and that the other and and awesome vacations and like food that takes you know like a chef 10 hours to prep and all this kind of thing which did not exist then like there was no like whatever foodies and tasting menus and all that bullshit that we have now but like that's all a need like that that want goes to a need very fast and you know humans are kind of unbelievable in their ability to come up with new things that they need and you know and then you have to make those and so forth. And I think it's going to be, you know, look,

I think in 15 years the truth is everybody is going to, in America and probably around the world, is going to live better than, you know, the very best life, you know, from just luxury access to information, et cetera, et cetera, than anybody did in 1980. So, like, that's a, you know, that's the world that we almost certainly are going to get to. So you shouldn't be. so mad about it. But it is

disconcerting. Especially if you're trying to teach little kids, you know. They're like, what should I do? I don't know. That's a hard one. Well, on that note, Horowitz at Andrews and Horowitz, thank you very much. I appreciate this. All right. Thank you. Thanks.

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