🇺🇸 a16z speedrun
Joined April 2007
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- Followers454K
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andrew chen retweeted
speedrun founders land Customers most startups wait years for. Here’s how our GTM team gives you that unfair market advantage.
Trust me, watching this 3 min video can get you over $10M+ in credits, but you gotta apply to @speedrun too: speedrun.a16z.com/apply.
andrew chen retweeted
NEW: INVESTOR ADVICE FOR APPLYING TO SPEEDRUN (SR008 EDITION)
Every cohort we sit down with our investors to hear what’s top of mind. This time @ndrewlee got in the booth with @kenanhsaleh, @emilybenn12, @seeamshahidnoor, and @tkexpress11 to talk about:
00:00 - what’s changed in apps this cycle
04:15 - team vs. market vs. traction: how we weigh them
08:14 - hot markets vs. ones that feel inevitable
10:36 - spotting the gaps the frontier models leave
13:35 - where speedrun fits in your founder journey
22:26 - how to make your application stand out
30:05 - common mistakes (AI is not your “why now”)
38:46 - the 10-min interview + co-founder dynamics
45:41 - what you get working with speedrun
SR008 apps close Nov 1. Watch the full roundtable here 👇
p(China) is what we should be talking about, not p(doom)
What is the probability that China - with its lead in robotics, manufacturing, construction capability, and second place on AI, GPUs, innovation - will become the primary beneficiary of the technological revolution the world is experiencing, over the next decades?
If your p(China) is high, what are you doing - and what should we be doing - to advance US capabilities in the coming decades so that we can lead, not follow?
IMHO p(doom) is the sideshow
andrew chen retweeted
founders: getting up to $1M in funding via @speedrun is actually the easiest part of the journey - as you start to build your product, you'll need to build your team... and I have some bad news: recruiting sucks.
Most experienced founders will tell you that they spent at least half their time in the early days trying to woo early missionaries to join their cause.
Your options at the earliest stages aren't great:
• Agencies are expensive + generally have perverse incentives
• You could do all the recruiting... but it's often too time-intensive to do effectively
• Hiring an internal recruiter doesn't make sense yet...
• Job postings... welcome to the nightmare of AI-generated apps!
I want to give you a better option. Our goal as the Speedrunun talent team: lend you our brand and hiring prowess. Not just hollow words and advice... because advice is cheap. Sourced candidates are not.
Our team of internal recruiters spends every single day cultivating relationships with world-class talent from the most heavily in-demand functional backgrounds (AI, ML, Full Stack Eng, Design Eng, Designers, etc), and then we curate and share that talent with founders across the portfolio.
We're on track this year to directly place ~150 hires into speedrun portfolio companies.
No fee.
No perverse incentives.
Just a purely aligned desire with the founders to get them exactly what they are searching for.
One day there will be a solo-founder unicorn, and all this hiring drudgery might go away. Until then, you're going to have to build your team - so let our team (@nazzari, @thetalentcarver, @joegarciaisme ) help you build yours.
APPLY TO SPEEDRUN >>> bit.ly/3UawfBA
andrew chen retweeted
We just wrapped a record-breaking 2026 Tech Week! We started in 2022 with just LA. Coming out of the pandemic, people were moving around and finding new communities. There was a growing tech community in LA, and we wanted to bring people together in person.
The response led us to expand to New York and San Francisco, other cities where we were active. We spent the next three years growing in those cities before adding a new one (Boston) this year.
One thing that’s been interesting to watch is SF. The first time we ran it, it was our smallest Tech Week. We heard plenty of “does SF really need another tech event?” It’s now the biggest Tech Week we run. The center of gravity for tech is still firmly in SF, and we see that in the numbers.
At the same time, Tech Week has continued to grow in every city, year after year. It’s clear there’s demand for coming together in person.
And of course, a big reason we’ve been able to keep growing is the team working on Tech Week year-round. A big congrats to @roseajohnson @TracyMassaro_ @filgran_ @johnsonjanellea @andrewchen.
Excited for next year... Stay tuned for 2027 dates!
AI doomers:
“the world is gonna end in 10 years”
the same AI doomers:
“I must buy a house in presidio heights / noe / mill valley ASAP!!”
Reminds me of davos billionaire climate doomers who fly private and buy beachside
andrew chen retweeted
Mark Pincus, founder of @Zynga, on "proven, better, new," the product framework that was Zynga's religion:
1. Proven: start with what 10/10 existing users of a category already love, and don't change it.
"You do not have the right to change proven. You have not taken enough time to change proven. It is an art that we do not completely understand."
2. Better: only add what 10/10 users agree is better.
"For Zynga Poker, better was no download. That was it. Turns out you lose half your users every time you click download."
3. New: treat anything you think is better as new, and assume it fails.
"Assume all new fails. Write that on the wall... If all new worked, we'd be using new s**t all the time. But how often do you change what's on the front of your iPhone?"
"Users don't care how innovative it is. All they care about is does it feel better, and they can't even tell you why."
@markpinc w/ @JoshLu
SR008 APPS ARE OPEN. Up to $1M + $10M+ in credits. 12 weeks in SF, Feb through April. Built to help you land capital, customers and talent. Apply by Nov 1: speedrun.a16z.com/apply
andrew chen retweeted
"Network effects" may be the most abused term in business. In a true network effect, marginal cost to add users *relative to a smaller competitor* goes down. Telcos are the classic example. The value of the network grows exponentially with the number of users. So a leader has an advantage over a challenger.
Just because a company has a property that is self reinforcing (e.g. it gets data per customer) does *not* mean it has a network effect. The value of data tends to grow sublinearly over time, not exponentially. So a leader is strictly disadvantaged to a challanger. The same goes for many things people ascribe network effects to.
andrew chen retweeted
This is bullshit, Kenney. I’m the same tech tree following optimist who moved from C to C++, from 2D to 3D, and from closed source to open source. I run a company. I write code. I contribute to published papers. I’ve upped my expectations of AI. Up yours!
andrew chen retweeted
Abliteration CEO @founderengineer argues no serious hacker will give up just because Claude refuses a request, and Congress shouldn't regulate AI cyber risks without hard evidence:
"How determined is your attacker? If you get an attacker that has a billion dollars, there might be nothing you can do. For the most part, I don’t think refusals help at all for bad actors."
"I just don’t think they’re gonna say, hey, Claude refused my request, I’m done trying to hack. I don’t see that."
"Policymakers, at least in America, are pretty good at keeping their hands off unless the risk is actually real. I don’t know what would really drive them to go into Congress and make regulations if you don’t have the actual hard data to say these hacks are actually happening."
"I would hope at least they’re driven by some hard data points and not just hype."
@abliteration_ai
Today we're releasing abliterated-model-large-v2.
Based on GLM-5.3, which is #3 on Terminal-Bench 4.0 (behind only Opus 5 and Fable), with 2Ă— the cyber exploitation of 5.2.
We abliterated and hosted it so it does the offensive cyber, red teaming, and agent testing work other models refuse to do.
- US-hosted
- FP8
- 1 million context window
- Zero input/output prompt retention
Live now. 🧵
I totally understand this
Chinese bride gifts her partner a flagship GPU at wedding — he breaks down in tears
She handed him an ASUS ROG Astral RTX 5090 that costs around $12,000
andrew chen retweeted
Mathematician Terence Tao:
"we're seeing the end of the romantic era of mathematics, the age of heroes. we're moving into an industrial era where math becomes large-scale, done in big teams like the other sciences"
We're entering, rather unwillingly, a new era where exciting new things are possible, but some things are being lost
andrew chen retweeted
We spent decades putting business processes into software. But what connects those systems is still a person with 20 browser tabs open, copying and pasting.
A human API.
My request for startups: computer use agents that actually finish the job. Agents that companies can trust to do real work at scale, and that work in the software companies already use.
If you're building this, we want to hear from you!
More below.
cc @a16z @speedrun
andrew chen retweeted
Applications for @speedrun are now open! If you’re an ambitious, high agency founder - we want to meet you
We’ll bring the capital, customers, & talent - you bring yourself and your wildest ideas
Speedrun is an inception fund. We are your first believers - writing the first check and growing with you as your startup scales
Speedrun founders get up to $1M in funding and over $10M in startup credits across compute, cloud, marketing, and more
Speedrun is for founders with big ideas. We have teams creating new forms of datacenters, constructing orbital space platforms, disrupting 50yo vertical software incumbents, building novel AI doctors, and more
In a world where AI has made building easier than ever, the only cap on what a startup can achieve is the limit of their ambition. So we write the first check precisely on the ideas that sound a little crazy
apply at the link below before apps close on Nov 1st
HERE’S THE SIGN YOU’VE BEEN WAITING FOR-
for those of you with side projects, late night coding sessions, the jam sessions with friends/coworkers. Maybe already know you’re a founder- you who follow all the greats, try all the latest AI tech, and have always known you are going to start something. Here’s your chance to build faster and bigger, learn a crazy amount in a short time, and really test yourself in the real world.
Bet on yourself. Build your startup with us.
SPEEDRUN 008 IS HERE
