🇺🇸 a16z speedrun
Joined April 2007
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- Following15.8K
- Followers458K
- Likes66.8K
hey all - update for SR008:
It's now the FINAL weekend to apply for our next residency in San Francisco. Applications close this Sunday, Nov 1 at 11:59 PM PT.
Here's the link:
speedrun.a16z.com/apply
How it works:
- you apply
- we review, reach out to get introduced, etc
- if there's a fit, we handshake and sign
- we wire our investment right away!
- plus you get access to >$10M in credits right away
- you'll onboard + start working with us immediately, have access to working out of our SF offices, etc
The official residency starts Feb 2027 where we'll have speakers, office hours, and much more. I plan to be on site and look forward to meeting many of you
You might ask- who's the best fit for this? We want to talk to you as early as possible, and that means:
- no company yet
- no deck
- no huge insight tweet thread
- sometimes not even fully committed yet
You don't need the perfect idea. We can start working together when you're iterating and getting the idea off the ground. That's the whole point of speedrun - it's our way of backing you from Day 0.
More official stuff below:
- Deadline is this Sunday, Nov 1 at 11:59 PM PT (this weekend!)
- SR008 runs Feb 1 through April 18, 2027 in San Francisco -- twelve weeks of firesides, office hours, and sessions, closing out with Demo Day on April 13 in front of thousands of investors
- Capital: up to $1M with a two-week close target, plus $10M+ in credits from 200+ partners
- Customers: SR Insiders gets you in front of 10,000+ buyers and operators, including 150+ C-suite execs, plus a full day of live demos at AI Faire
- Talent: our Talent Network of 171,000+ engineers, designers, and product people. 230+ hires so far, $0 in fees. Plus visa, banking, and housing help if you're coming from abroad
- A team of ~40 battle-tested investors and operators who help cover your gaps without adding headcount -- GTM, marketing, brand, talent, fundraising, and more
- a16z speedrun is super selective -- fewer than 0.4% of applicants get in. You'll join a tight-knit community of founders from 20+ countries who stay involved as speakers, advisors, and often each other's first customers
- Still in school or still finding your idea/team? Check out the alpha fellowship too -- up to $250K for students, recent grads, and dropouts
andrew chen retweeted
Introducing Reality-Aware Rendering in @Simulon, a completely new way to create with the real world.
Place neural assets with your phone and act out the scene. When you stop recording, Simulon renders the take, reading everything in it (what you do, what you say and the place around you), and your assets respond to all of it.
The final is regenerated from your recording: a new performance of the scene, not a copy of the footage.
Available now on iPhone. Coming to Android soon.
should I be worried that I have 10 different agents with full access permissions to my personal email and running automations and I’m not sure who is running what
Filtering a lot of spam, though!!!!
Worth it?
touching your monitor is an abomination
other people touching your monitor even more so!
no one can convince me otherwise
fun metric:
% of what you type that goes to AI versus to humans
a few years ago it was 0/100 - dominated by email/texts
then it was 10/90 - initially stealing all my Google searches
today I feel like it’s 25/75? Maybe more?
When does it cross >50%?
New essay:
andrewchen.substack.com/p/ne…
NEW FOUNDER ARCHETYPES IN THE AI AGE
Solo founders
- Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before
- Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress. Maybe you can agentically code but someone still needs to do a million meetings with customers. Maybe coding was never the main bottleneck for startups in the first place?
Non-technical founders
- Why: There’s elite talent that comes from areas like finance, consulting, who can’t code but are passionate about business. There’s also folks in creative industries who create all day but just not in code. Now they can build
- Why not: Why not: Maybe AI makes it easier to build a prototype, but there’s still a big gap between a demo and a reliable product that can scale. If everyone can build the first version, maybe technical judgment becomes more important in deciding what to build, what’s actually possible, and how to stay ahead as the product gets more complex. (especially true for product categories like dev tools/etc)
Domain experts
- Why: A doctor who works at a hospital understands all the problems they face each day. A real estate broker really gets the subtleties of their markets, their clients. Same with a soldier, teacher, etc. What if they could use software to solve their own problems and build business along the way?
- Why not: Hoteliers didn’t create Airbnb and the finance industry didn’t create Kalshi. Sometimes you just need an outsider’s view in order to reinvent an industry, versus building incremental improvements
Kids, high schoolers, college students
- Why: Young people have already been building products early on. Start with a Minecraft mod, a Roblox game, a Discord bot, and suddenly you’ve learned how to make something that thousands of other people use. Now add AI, and a kid with an idea can build way more, way earlier
- Why not: Building something your friends love is very different from building a company. You still have to hire, raise money, manage people, and figure out how to make money. And maybe young founders have an advantage in consumer products because they understand their peers, but much less of one when it comes to enterprise software, healthcare, or other industries where experience and relationships really matter. Sometimes you just need domain expertise
Content creators
- Why: They’re already creating. So instead of creating videos, maybe the same skills can go into creating software. Plus, they have distribution. They know what their followers care about, how to get their attention, and how to reach them without paying for ads. In the past, turning that audience into a software product meant finding a technical cofounder or hiring a team. Now a creator could build and launch something themselves, and immediately put it in front of millions of potential users.
- Why not: Having followers helps with a spike of distribution, but building a sustainable growth engine is something else. The most valuable products aren’t memes - they are long-running, long-growing products that need to be endlessly tweaked and iterated on. Does the DNA work?
PS. the deadline for applying for speedrun 008 is this weekend!
More here: sr.a16z.com
what are the new types of founders that might get unlocked in the post-AI era?
- solo founders
- non-technical founders
- domain expert with no tech experience (ex: a dentist builds dental SaaS empire)
- content creator whose new content is "apps"
... who else is on this list?
ended up writing more about this:
nitter.gq/andrewchen/status/2115…
New essay:
andrewchen.substack.com/p/ne…
NEW FOUNDER ARCHETYPES IN THE AI AGE
Solo founders
- Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before
- Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress. Maybe you can agentically code but someone still needs to do a million meetings with customers. Maybe coding was never the main bottleneck for startups in the first place?
Non-technical founders
- Why: There’s elite talent that comes from areas like finance, consulting, who can’t code but are passionate about business. There’s also folks in creative industries who create all day but just not in code. Now they can build
- Why not: Why not: Maybe AI makes it easier to build a prototype, but there’s still a big gap between a demo and a reliable product that can scale. If everyone can build the first version, maybe technical judgment becomes more important in deciding what to build, what’s actually possible, and how to stay ahead as the product gets more complex. (especially true for product categories like dev tools/etc)
Domain experts
- Why: A doctor who works at a hospital understands all the problems they face each day. A real estate broker really gets the subtleties of their markets, their clients. Same with a soldier, teacher, etc. What if they could use software to solve their own problems and build business along the way?
- Why not: Hoteliers didn’t create Airbnb and the finance industry didn’t create Kalshi. Sometimes you just need an outsider’s view in order to reinvent an industry, versus building incremental improvements
Kids, high schoolers, college students
- Why: Young people have already been building products early on. Start with a Minecraft mod, a Roblox game, a Discord bot, and suddenly you’ve learned how to make something that thousands of other people use. Now add AI, and a kid with an idea can build way more, way earlier
- Why not: Building something your friends love is very different from building a company. You still have to hire, raise money, manage people, and figure out how to make money. And maybe young founders have an advantage in consumer products because they understand their peers, but much less of one when it comes to enterprise software, healthcare, or other industries where experience and relationships really matter. Sometimes you just need domain expertise
Content creators
- Why: They’re already creating. So instead of creating videos, maybe the same skills can go into creating software. Plus, they have distribution. They know what their followers care about, how to get their attention, and how to reach them without paying for ads. In the past, turning that audience into a software product meant finding a technical cofounder or hiring a team. Now a creator could build and launch something themselves, and immediately put it in front of millions of potential users.
- Why not: Having followers helps with a spike of distribution, but building a sustainable growth engine is something else. The most valuable products aren’t memes - they are long-running, long-growing products that need to be endlessly tweaked and iterated on. Does the DNA work?
andrew chen retweeted
Every company needs capital to scale and grow. To-date, @speedrun companies have raised nearly $1B.
If you want a deeply experienced team in your corner every single step of the way as you navigate early-stage venture, fundraising, and financing, drop an application!
Can't wait to work together 🚀
andrew chen retweeted
Tony Xu of @DoorDash on getting rejected by investors, competing against rivals with thousands of times more capital, and how founders can tell conviction from delusion:
"I had over 100 rejections in a span of over 1,000 days where the company almost constantly ran out of money... I couldn't raise a dime, and we were running out of capital."
"Companies like Amazon or Uber were in the space who had way more capital than we had. Hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times of capital deployed versus the amount that we raised. So then the question becomes, well, how are you gonna win this cash-burning machine?"
"This is where you as the founder have to finely tune that line between delusion and knowing that you have something that others don't understand. What are the customers telling you?"
"We the founders did deliveries for almost virtually every day the first three years of the company's life... And so we had strong points of view on each side of our marketplace that could explain what was happening in the numbers."
"When you have one set of facts, which is your customers, you have another set of facts, what are called opinions and perceptions, you gotta trust the facts. That's ultimately what kept us going."
@t_xu w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen
Bet on yourself.
Ben Horowitz's message to early-stage founders on betting on yourself, the doubts that do the most damage, and why fear means you're doing it right:
"Your job is to make your bet pay off. You believed in yourself enough to do it. There are gonna be many times when you question that bet and you question that belief, but that gets you nothing."
"The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you. It's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them."
"I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was 22 years old and he had a tremendous doubt about whether he was gonna make it."
"It's not what you feel. It's what you do. You're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing."
@bhorowitz w/ @speedrun GP @andrewchen
andrew chen retweeted
I went to TED to talk about the biggest injustice in the world nobody takes seriously.
The genetic lottery is wildly unfair. Why should a dice roll decide your life?
It robs babies of the ability to walk. To talk. To make it to her first birthday. One wrong letter out of 3 billion. And we shrug and call it bad luck.
It blinded my mother. After years of testing, the answer was: there’s nothing we can do.
She’s not alone. 400 million people live with a rare genetic disease. Half are children. 95% have no approved treatment.
I’m done pretending it’s fate. It’s a typo. And for the first time in history, we can read all 3 billion bases before a pregnancy begins.
