The a16z Show - What It Takes to Build a Startup | Andrew Chen & Matt Perault

Episode Date: September 11, 2026

a16z’s Matt Perault sits down with General Partner and Speedrun lead Andrew Chen on the a16z AI Policy Brief to explore what “Little Tech” actually looks like at the earliest stages, and why the realities of building a two- or three-person startup are often missing from policy debates.Andrew takes us inside Speedrun, where founders are often starting companies from kitchen tables, working with tiny teams, and trying to determine in a matter of months whether their idea can become a viable business. He explains why these founders rarely have the time or resources to engage with policymakers, even as regulation can have an outsized impact on whether and where they build.Matt and Andrew also discuss how regulatory burdens accumulate for young companies, why startups can choose where to put down roots, the role of ecosystems like Tech Week, and what policymakers can do to hear directly from the founders who may otherwise be absent from the conversation.This episode originally appeared on the a16z AI Policy Brief. Resources:Follow Andrew Chen on X: https://x.com/andrewchenFollow Matt Perault on X: https://x.com/MattPeraultLearn more about a16z Speedrun: https://speedrun.a16z.comListen to more from the a16z AI Policy Brief: https://a16zpolicy.substack.com/  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.

This is truly little tech. The average team is two to three people. They're running their companies, not in their office, not in a co-working space. They're running it at the kitchen table. For these founders, they are so mission-focused trying to survive as a business. They just don't have time to participate. They don't have lobbyists. They're not really represented. It's a choice whether or not each state or each city wants to have startups or not. What does it actually look like to build a startup from day one? In this episode, Matt Peralt sits down with A16Z general partner and Speed Run lead, Andrew Chen, to talk about Little Tech, the tiny teams at the very beginning of building a company. Andrew shares what life looks like for founders who are often just two or three people building from a kitchen table, focused on getting a product to work and finding their first customers. They rarely have lobbyists, policy teams, or even the time to participate in debates about rules that could directly affect them. Matt and Andrew discuss how regulation can influence where startups choose to build, what policymakers can learn by hearing directly from Bounders, and what it takes to create an environment where the next generation of companies can get started. Andrew, welcome to the A16-Z AI Policy Brief.

Thank you for having me. So you lead our Speed Run program. So can you tell us a little bit about what Speed Run is? Yeah, so, you know, many folks in the audience will know that startups have to come from somewhere. And so, you know, our job is to try to find them on day one when the founders are just starting to think about their companies. And so what's great is we, we host a program, you know, based in the San Francisco office where we will announce to the broader internet and through our marketing channels and podcasts and substack D's letters and everything else.

So that will be investing up to a million dollars into brand new startups. And the ones that we really focus on are the ones that where folks are just getting going. You know, folks that maybe have full-time jobs and they're starting to come up with, you know, with a new idea with their best friend and they want to go start something. It could

be folks that are, have already left their roles or they just graduated from school and they are coming up with something new. And so what we do is we spend 12 weeks with them. They get the full force and power of the firm and all of our relationships and all of that great stuff. And then

after we invest, then we share them with the broader ecosystem. We host a speed run demo day where we have over a thousand angel investors and seed funds and many others come and invest. And then we go from there and kind of release them off in the world. And hopefully we have the opportunity to invest more in the future and to work with founders as kind of the beginning of a lifelong relationship with them. That's the idea. How do you decide what looks like a company that you want to have as part of the Speed Run program? At its core in the earliest days, there are just so many famous examples of the ideas of ideas changing all the time. You know, many of you guys know that a product we use every day, Slack originally started

out as a browser-based, you know, video game company or, you know, and many, many other examples, you know, down the line. And so what we try to do at its core is to really just invest in the best people. And so we're looking for folks. that have had some really unique experience in their past. And that could be anything from enormous athletic accomplishments on their way to a career in tech, or it could be that they started a GitHub repo that has now thousands of stars and it's grown incredibly fast.

Or it could be some of the traditional markers where they have gone to elite universities and had sort of learned elite, like incredible, unique insights at some of our best AI companies, and then they're ready to use that in a new company as well. I think we're very open-minded, and so we actually have mostly folks out of the Bay Area, actually all over America,

a little slice from other places in the world, mostly focused on the U.S., and it's amazing to watch founders that are from, whether it's New York or Texas or Florida or Midwest or any of these other places actually come to San Francisco, get to experience kind of what it's like to be in the Bay Area. We work with them, of course, and a lot of them go back to their home communities and continue to build their companies. And of course, quite a few of them stay in the Bay Area as well to build the

next generation of tech companies here. We're very happy when either of those happen. So what is kind of interested in the range of types of sizes of companies that might participate in Speed Run? It sounds like on the small side, it might be a couple of people who just decided to, who just have an idea, like really the smallest of the small, how large are the companies get? Yeah. This is truly little tech. You know, when we, when we talk about little tech, this is that.

This is, you know, I think the average, the average team is two to three people. You know, they are, they're running their companies, not, not in their office, you know, not in a co-working space. They're, they're running it, you know, at the kitchen table. It's really sort of the, the source of a lot of the success that we've seen in it, they'll overall, you know, American industry has been, you know, really starts in these very small places. And, you know, and then, and then, yeah, we invest up to a million dollars. And then hopefully, hopefully they raise more a demo day and hopefully they keep going. And eventually they become

incredible employers and, you know, pillars of the industry. And we're, we want to be with them from that journey from day one. And what are, what are organizations that would be too large to apply for the speed run. Like, what's the upper bound? Yeah, the upper bound. I mean, honestly, for us, we would say, as soon as you've taken capital elsewhere, you know, we would consider that. Not maybe not disqualifying, but it would be sort of like, you know, maybe. So you're kind of at a point where the question is, well, how many folks can you get to bootstract the company together? So if you have a group of five friends that all, you know, went to, went to college and, and they trust each other a lot and they want to spend six months like on their own dime working on something.

Like, of course, we would love to, you know, back a team like that, especially one with that much trust. But very rarely would we see a team above, you know, three, four, five people at that point. At some point, you know, you kind of don't want to, you don't want to divide the company's ownership to be too small, especially because people come and go. You probably need to, you know, some people's life situations will be such that you'll need to actually pay them. And so, yeah, So we, again, really, it's like a two or three person thing, typically. So we invest at different phases of company life cycles. We have a growth team that's when companies tend to get larger.

We have a venture team when companies are smaller. Speed run, as you're describing it, as like the littlest of the little tech. Why did we as a firm and why did you decide that this was an important part of the life cycle to support? Yeah, I think that the way I see the mission for A16C speed run is. is that we're in the, you know, we want to get as close as possible to the moment that founders are actually created and new companies are created.

My first couple of years at the firm, I spent more in series A, series B, and so you're writing checks there where these are, you know, mature businesses, or there's at least a glimmer of a business there. And so you're investing 10, 15, 20 million dollars. And so by that point, you know, yeah, you have customers,

you have you have metrics to look at, you have a team, et cetera. And that's a wonderful place to invest. And historically, it's been maybe the best place to invest. For us, one of the really magical things, something that I take a lot of just personal pride and excitement in, is the idea that we are not just waiting for entrepreneurs to show up at our doorstep at A16Z,

but we're actually helping create the companies in the first place. So, for example, in the last Speed Run bash, there were 70 companies. And of the 70, there was probably a dozen where, you know, these were folks that had full-time jobs and they had to turn in the laptops and their badges. And we couldn't even wire the money over because, you know, they didn't have a company to even incorporate. And so we sort of, you know, helped intercept these, the idea of like, hey, like, let's create the most powerful and, you know, best path to starting the company. And I think a lot of those founders eventually would have

would have eventually started businesses. You know, when you're a founder, sometimes you just can't get that bug, you know, out of your ear. But I do, I would like to think that we maybe, you know, hold some of that activity forward. And so many folks that maybe would have waited another, for another five or 10 years of work experience and financial stability. You know, maybe they would have taken that jump.

And what an amazing time in the AI era, you know, to encourage it on to, you know, jump in at the right moment. Can you give a little texture to what a day in the life looks like for a speed run company, like when they're part of the program? What does their day to day look like, both as part of the program? And then I assume you see, you know, again, there's like high levels of variance, I'm sure. But like what are the kind of the common things that you see about founders who are operating

at this stage? Yeah, yeah, definitely. So, you know, if you can kind of picture in your head, you might have, you know, two founders that are originally, you know, they're based in Austin, Texas, they're based in Chicago, they're based in, you know, pick your city. We also have had teams, teams from, you know,

from Utah. We've had teams from all of the U.S., quite a few from New York, quite a few from Pacific Northwest as well. So kind of imagine you have, you have two people, they get accepted to this program, they're very excited, they have to incorporate the company,

they get the money, it gets wired in. They've never seen that much money in their life, right? Like, they're excited, right? So they buy plane tickets. They come to San Francisco. And they typically, you know, what we'll do is we literally have a welcome to SF guide that is these are the neighborhoods we recommend. Here's how you go on Airbnb and, you know, pick the right ones.

And so they do that. And we try to create a community. And so we have all these Slack instances and email lists. and you're meeting other founders. And so, you know, back to your, you're kind of a day in the life of you. You can kind of imagine a founder, you know, waking up. They're often, you know, for the duration of program,

they're roommates with their, with their co-founder. So you're, you are spending 24-7 together, like truly. You know, you're not, you're not living some more fancy. You're somewhere, you know, typically like 80 close to the 1816s the office. A lot of these folks are either working together at their homes. And we also offer access to the A16Z offices.

So sometimes they'll, you know, end up walking in or taking an Uber and taking a Waymo into the office. And then they end up in, we have a couple of co-working spaces where they'll spend time. And the only thing that they should be spending time on

really is just to figure out is this business going to work. Like how do we, they got to build the product and they got to sell the product. And they got it. And they got to do it in a short period of time. And so typically you'll have maybe two co-founders.

One will be more of a business co-founder. One will be more of a, you know, technology and product co-founder. The technology and product co-founder is typically using a lot of AI right now, a lot of AI coding. So rather than, you know, going out and needing to add a lot of cost and, you know, maybe outsourcing, you know, parts of your coding or hiring a bunch of, you know, young people to do coding, you can just focus on just, how effective can one or two people be right now?

And like, let's just make this business stable and survive. Then let's go hire a bunch of folks. Then the business co-founder is often out there interviewing customers, talking to customers, trying to make deals happen. And so there's often this dichotomy that we see of kind of like the outward-facing business co-founder and then the inwards-facing product and technology founder as well. What we do with Speed Run is once per week, we end up having some formal programming. So we want to make sure the companies have as much time to work.

as possible. But we will call them in once per week. They come to the AC Steensi office. We'll typically have a speaker who is, you know, we've had some amazing, amazing founders, you know, the founder of, you know, Zinga or, you know, Versel. We've had the, you know, sea level folks from Open AI. We've had, you know, we've had, of course, Mark Kendriessen and Ben Horowitz with us many times as well. You know, that's always fantastic. And then we do these office hours where they will sit in a group of 20, 30 companies, and, you know, they will talk to each other about problems they're trying to solve.

So we round these office hours, we talk about everything from hiring your first, you know, your first employees to signing your first customers. How do you launch on social media? How do you, what's the difference between selling into a large enterprise versus selling into SMB? And all the things that you do. And of course, how is everyone using AI, you know,

what are all the new tools that everybody using, we spend a lot of time on that as well. And then, yeah, and then hopefully the rest of the week, they are, they're out and about working and they're being immersed in kind of the milieu of the SF tech ecosystem. So they're meeting a ton of people, meeting a ton of investors, learning all of that. And so, yeah, so we're very excited about just everything that can happen in just in just a couple weeks. So I know, like, obviously, the most exciting thing to talk about is success, the success part

the ecosystem. But in venture, like, there's a lot of not success, right? It's like sort of the nature of the business. And I assume the majority of the business will be. And the earlier you go in the life cycle, the more true that is, the more companies don't succeed. So what does that look like for speed run for suspense? Like, when companies come through the program and then they're not able to launch a successful business, at least the one that that we funded as part of the program. What does that pathway look like? Yeah, that's right. Yeah, I think historically in the venture capital business overall, you often, you know, the colloquial description

is something like half the companies don't work out at all, right? They just kind of outright, you know, fold. Then you'll have another, you know, if that's like five and ten companies, you'll have another, you know, two or three where you make a little money. And then all the money is made in that kind of top,

top decile, you know, the one out of ten. that really where you get the grand slam. And that just seems to be true mathematically, which is, which is, you know, just amazing. It's been very consistent over many decades. So, you know, to your question that on, you know, what happens to the ones that fold? Well, a bunch of great things happen, right?

I mean, first, like, we think that even though we as a firm make the money on the, you know, on the power law, kind of exceptional companies that break through, you know, we make our reputations with how we work with all the founders that are you know, working hard, working 100 hours a week.

They're, you know, they're completely plugged in. They're working weekends, like the whole thing. And it just doesn't work out. You know, and sometimes it's to no fault of their own. Sometimes there's just a market downturn. You know, they're starting a pre-AI company when everybody's going AI.

It's because they are, you know, their co-founder got sick. you know, it's because of all these kind of, you know, like many, many different potential things that could happen. And so as a result, the best thing we can do for those companies is, number one, should we back the founders again? You know, that's like one, I think, very special thing about kind of that Silicon Valley mentality is like, okay, great, you've already, you've just spent, you know,

a million bucks educating these founders about how to start a company. Hopefully they can start another company. And by the way, like, whether you're talking about Uber or Slack or, you know, Microsoft or OpenAI or any of these companies, and when you look at the CEO and the founders involved, very frequently, more than more often than not, they have been involved in many other things along the way. And so we often love the idea of, and we just did actually. Just actually last week, we just funded a founder again on a better idea than his first idea. even though he ended up just returning a little bit of the capital that he spent. So I think that's great. The other version is sometimes, you know, these founders, they need a little bit of a recharge, right? And what that means is they are, they went at it like completely just 150%.

And what they need is they need a little bit of time to, you know, rebuild their finances. They need to, you know, they probably weren't paying themselves that well. they probably weren't, they need some time to focus on their health. You know, we find that a lot of these founders become very hot commodities because that means that you can get somebody that works hard,

you know, works on unstructured problems, is completely current on all of the newest technology, and you can get them, you know, at your company. And so what we've been seeing is a lot of teams will end up hiring each other. You know, if one doesn't work out, you kind of like, may you respect the founder? Like, great, you hire them.

And then maybe they spend, you know, two or three years with you. Maybe they'll lead some new initiatives and new products in your, in your business. And then a few years later, they spin out and they're ready to start a new company. And then hopefully we as A16Z get another shot at them, you know, to work together. So, yeah, so that's sort of all by design. And I think it's perfectly expected, you know, as outcomes. And we just want to partner up with these founders for their whole professional career. So I've loved to turn to policy now since we're,

This is a policy substack. This is a policy. Yeah. Yeah. It's a policy brief. And so I'd love to like understand more about how the companies you work with think about policy issues. This is something that we obviously do to some extent, but you're like living and breathing the founder

side of it on a daily basis. And we've tried to kind of channel the concept in different ways. Like we recently wrote this piece called Greens from a garage about what it looks like from a policy perspective if a couple of people go into a garage to build the next. great tech tool in California, what is the regulatory landscape that they have to deal with? And it was a really helpful exercise because often policy teams, legal teams will think about just incremental burden. Like, if we pass, there's a new law that's been proposed. What happens if we pass this new law? How on the risk or not is it going to be? How helpful is it going to be?

And I think the insight that the head of our state team, Kevin had when we were thinking about this piece is like it's not just the it's not just the incremental burden it's all the things that a founder has to face from the moment they're building with the technology so like in california that doesn't just mean SB 53 which was past last year it means all these data provenance requirements from the session before it means privacy law in california that was past several years before it's all cumulative and the moment that you start building the tool you have to comply with all these things and so really the the policy picture is the composite of all those things it's not any individual one of them. So I'm curious what you, like, you know, when you're at the

stage, like you're literally at, though, like we just met in the coffee shop where, you know, we're in the garage, we're roommates. We're, you know, we're in the shared waymo on the way to the A16CZ office. At that phase, how do the people that you work with think about policy issues? For these founders, they are so mission-focused, right, at, to just make their, make their company, make their product. I mean, it's not even a company at that point. It's like they might even think of that as a project or as a product. You know, there's no, there's no company because it's just the two, guys or gals like trying to, trying to make things work. And so for them from a policy perspective, look, I think every, every obstacle that is put in front of them along the way for them to

just prove that their initial product can even work, just adds friction, you know, for the best part. So I think, I think most of the founders, when you, when you talk to them, they really see all that stuff as like, oh, wow, I've incorporated, I'm doing this thing, I'm hiring these people, okay, you get the stack of paperwork this big. And, you know, a lot of these laws, a lot of the paperwork is designed for companies that are much, much larger than them, right? And have the ability to comply because they have teams of lawyers and teams of, you know, people, experts, you know, that are in there. And of course, we, we as a 16-Z try to, try to help them. But for most of these folks, all they're trying to do is they're just trying

to get going at all and to survive as a business. And so generally, their interaction on kind of the regulatory side of the world is usually negative

because these are things that are, that actually create protections often for either big tech or for other parts of the industry that they end up and end up trying to disrupt. So I'd say that's kind of one major part. The other part is

is that, you know, for many of these founders, they, they just don't have time to participate, right? They don't, like, these guys, like, don't have, you know, they don't, they don't have lobbyists. They don't have, you know, they're not, they're not involved in the political process. They're not really represented in, in, in all these ways, because, frankly, they just don't have time.

You know, they're, they may not even have time to shower or to, you know, like, have, have a nice dinner for themselves. they're working, you know, that hard, much less to do things that are kind of sit, sit outside, you know, they're kind of just day to day of just survival, you know, at that point. And that's a compounding thing. I mean, I think that's a dynamic that we encounter all the time because we, you know, we show up who we represent little tech, but we're not, or I'm not a founder. And so when when we show up, people are like, well, we'd rather talk to the startup.

We don't want to talk to the investor in the startup. But the challenge is the, like as you're saying, like the startups are not showering, working 100 hour weeks, like doing, they're, they're not going to go and like make the drive to Sacramento or the flight to Washington or flight to Brussels and represent what it's like for them to try to build under the, in the current regulatory environment. That's right. Yeah.

Well, and, and their timeline, a startup, a two-person startup's startup's timeline, not only is it not a year. Like, you may not know if you have a company in a year, right? it may not even be six months. It may not even be three months. You might be working on really small time schedules. And so to make the investment to fly to one of these places and to kind of be involved,

I do think it's really hard to carve out time and do it, which is why I think both it's really important to have some mechanism to represent these people because these are the future job creators, like these are the companies that are going to be employing folks and driving, you know, continuing America's, you know, success on the technology, you know, field. But also, you know, on top of that, you know, the folks that maybe do show up and, you know, in all these places and do advocate for tech, you get a very skewed view because you don't hear from little tech, but you might hear a lot from big tech. You know, you might hear a lot about, a lot from, you know, the industries that are getting disrupted.

and very little from the, you know, the 30-year-olds that are, you know, that are spending night and day trying to make that happen. So sometimes we actually get hostile reactions from policymakers when we raise that point. Like they'll say, well, all of industry agrees on this. And when they say all of industry, what they means is big tech companies or sometimes it might be big financial services companies, like large organizations. And they say, you have a different view and we need you to get on board. And we'll say in the policy conversation, like, it's sort of.

by design, at least some percent of the time. Like, there's lots of time where we agree with big tech companies, but we'll, like, when we disagree, we'll say, like, it's by design. We're representing the different part of the ecosystem. So, of course, we don't agree on everything. That's right. That's right. Absolutely.

Absolutely. Yeah, it's just from an ROI time ROI standpoint. It just doesn't make any sense. I think there's also a really unique thing because these teams are so small and they're kind of at their inception, which is they get to pick where they start the company from, right? And, you know, I was, you know, I moved to the Bay Area in 2007. And in 2007, the world revolved around, you know, Palo Alto and Mountain View and kind of the peninsula. You know, what we think of as Silicon Valley.

But, you know, I think folks I think are familiar with us now that we saw a, you know, whole-scale migration of the startup, the center of the startup ecosystem being from the peninsula to San Francisco proper. And then, you know, subsequently, we've seen it now spread where, you know, New York is one of now, one of the, a huge, you know, startup hubs that's emerged. And, you know, all the, over the last couple years, all the major venture capital firms and had opened offices in, you know, in various places in London and in Europe, there's been, there's been other kind of, you know, major hubs that have created. And so I think, I think there is also an interesting thing where that almost becomes part of one of the most important. choices that you can make as a startup, which is where are you going to plant roots, where are you going to hire people from, where are you going to do that? And if you end up working on an AI company and you know from day one that there's going to be a bunch of extra rules about how you can use AI, you know, the two guys, two gals, you know, startup, you know, they're very mobile, you know, they can, they can, they can, they can, they can choose where they want to go, and they do. And so, and historically, the Bay Area has benefited from, from that

mobility. I think, I think, uh, there's some interesting stats about how, um, nearly 50% of, uh, venture back startups are first generation immigrants, for example, you know, people who, who relocate in order to do it. Um, and I bet you if you were to say, okay, well, the other 50%, how many of them are actually native San Francisco versus people who, you know, move here? Um, the answer would be, you know, it's probably, probably approaching 100% at that point. I think the important note there is like the Bay Area is certainly benefited from this. You know, it's not, it's not certain that it'll last forever. It's not certain that, you know, that California will always be the best place to start companies. And so I think it's important for us to preserve this

ecosystem because it is, it is very, very special. It is something that is like unique, not just in the world, but even within the U.S., you know, in order to have this, this fertile of an ecosystem for startups and new technology. Are you hearing founders talk about regulatory issues as one factor that they consider and where they end up citing the business? Yeah, I think that it is sometimes indirect. I think, for example, just, you know, like cost of living is a great, you know, is a really simple one.

Or if you're building a deep tech company, if you're building the next generation of manufacturing, you have to go somewhere where people are building, you know, building large, that there's large scale lab and warehouse space at reasonable, prices. And so I think you're seeing these pockets like El Segundo in L.A. You're seeing

folks building things in Texas for many of those reasons. I think the Bay Area has hugely benefited from just the AI wave, you know, really centered here. So I think that's really extended the life of the CETO system in a big way. A lot of people

have been coming back to the Bay Area since the sort of COVID dispersal. And then And then I do think that, you know, the ability for, again, another indirect kind of, you know, force is that the startups have to really move where there's investors. It turns out it's a lot easier to code and it's a lot easier to get your first dollar of revenue and it's a lot easier to hire your first employee. You can kind of do that anywhere.

But actually getting capital to really scale your business requires the ability for investors to be there. And so when you, so, you know, I think that's why when you look around the world, a lot of the biggest startup hubs happen to be kind of where you have great universities co-located with customers, co-located with investors, kind of all in one spot. And I wonder, and I worry about things like, you know, the wealth tax that are currently under discussion

in its ability to potentially relocate a bunch of family offices and investors that are currently contributing in a big way and moving them to other geographies as one of the potential, you know, negatives for sort of making the Silicon Valley thing like less dynamic and less powerful as a result. We've been talking a lot about the one-to-one relationships that you've developed as part of the Speed Run program, but you've also been really invested in trying to create ecosystems through the Techweek program. What was the idea behind that program? So we started Tech Week and it's a program that that sits in our team here within the Speed Run umbrella.

And what Tech Week really does is it's really a celebration of startups and technology and progress in all the major cities. And so we host it in San Francisco. We hosted in L.A. We hosted in New York. And for the first time this year, we're actually hosting it in Boston as well. How do you discover a founder before they know they're a founder? Well, we just feel like if you are, if you're a, if you're a, if you're a, type of person with certain kinds of work experience, certain resume, and you're finding

yourself attending a bunch of startup events, you know, like the probability of you starting something, like, you're probably startup curious, but you're probably going to get there, like, sometime in the next few years. So that's what we found, which has been, which has been fantastic. Our policy, is policy showing up at Tech Weeks, like are you seeing it in the various different local ecosystems that you're tapping into? Yeah, so we would love to do more. It's definitely exciting to see more and more of an ecosystem around policy. So, for example, I think across all of the tech weeks last year, we had 4,000 attendees attending various policy-related events, and that includes over 1,000 folks from government, over 1,000 policy professionals.

And then oftentimes, we've had events where, you know, local government will come together. So I know whether that's in the mayor's office or folks that work on the national sphere. We also have had a bunch of the consulates involved as well because they're all very interested in kind of building that bridge between their countries and particularly the San Francisco system. So the British consulate's been super involved on tons of stuff and then many other countries as well. So it's been, it's been great to how that is a burgeoning part of the tech week ecosystem. So if you see a local policymaker or a representative from a consulate or member of Congress at a tech week event and you're chatting with them on the sidelines, what would you relate to them about the realities of building a competitive company, given what you know about what the early, early stage really looks like. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think, I'd say a couple things.

I think the first is to just have them, you know, understand that it's a choice whether or not each state or each city wants to have startups or not. You know, if you want to have startups, you have to do things to make it conducive to having startups. And there's a long list of things that, you know, might be involved in there. And it's not just for the founders, it's for the angel investors, it's for the, it's for the employees, it's for all these things that kind of surround that, you know, whole group.

The second thing is, is, you know, as we were just talking about a couple of minutes ago, I think a lot of policymakers are not having real conversations with little tech. You know, it takes a little, there's a little bit more friction.

You have to kind of put in a little bit more time into it. But again, you know, if we want to have, if we decide, you know, hey, we want to have more startups in America. We want more innovation in America. Or we're talking about that kind of at the city level. You know, we have to figure out like,

what are the things that we can unblock for a lot of these companies? And those things change. You know, software company will tell you something different than a AI native company, which will tell you something different than a hardware company and a robotics company. You know, it's very dynamic. You know, one year, you know, for example, this year,

we are seeing way more robotics company. than in any year past. And they have very different needs compared to, you know, they have supply chain needs. They have, you know, real estate needs. They have a different set of investors. They have potentially a different set of partners. And so, you know, we have to actually, you know,

dig into that in a real way. And then maybe, you know, thirdly to just maybe talk our book, I think working with folks like A16Z and other venture capital firms and other ecosystem kind of players, you know, what we can do is we can certainly help open the door to creating those conversations. And so, you know, like open offer to the policy folks that are listening to this,

anybody that wants to come and, you know, spend time with five or ten really curated, you know, little tech startups that are, you know, two, three people and just kind of hear like, okay, what do you need to be successful? Like, we're very happy to arrange that. Also, a lot of these companies are very interested to, you know, like certain sectors are particularly interested in partnering, you know, with government. So I think, I think that's all great.

I'm a policy person who's interested in doing that. I'm actually coming up to talk to the speed run. Talk to the speed run hell hard next week. So I'm looking forward to it. It's been fun doing that in the past because, like you said, you really see in those conversations, like when you talk through various different policy issues, sometimes they're not that relevant necessarily to people in the room. And then others really are. We've had conversations in the past where we're talking about various different policy initiatives that are moving. And then you see like a panic look on someone's face with her like, I'm building.

I'm building in a way that I think I'm building into a use case that might face regulatory headwinds. But I think use case is really compelling. And I don't think policymakers understand what we're trying to do. And so it's like interesting to see that delta. And we've engaged with the speed run team in the past to make sure policymakers also appreciate that delta. Yes, I think that's right. And I think it's, you know, it's such, it is a wonderful thing to spend time with these teams because they're often, you know, very much young people. You know, we have a lot of folks that are in the early 20s.

I think we even have a team that's all 18 and 19 year olds, for example, and like in the current batch, you decided to forego college and instead start the dream company. We also have folks that are co-founders of billion dollar companies that have, you know, that are now in the current batch of speed run as well. But because these guys are all getting started, like there's, the conversations are so genuine. They're just full of optimism. They're so fun to talk. They're all on the cutting edge. You know, they're not at a point where, you know, they are at the risk of, you know, hitting into a lot of laws and hitting into a lot of, you know, different things. Like, it's often like just a really fantastic, you know, set of conversation.

just based on where these guys are. Andrew, thanks so much for joining the AI Policy Brief. Awesome. Thank you for having me. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcast, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.com.

Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, 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. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com forward slash disclosures.