builder & operator. https://xitter.cf/t.co/kiMWzLLzEJ -- CalAI for grocery shopping https://xitter.cf/t.co/yTta3akYcd -- Partiful for millennials Love the outdoors ⛰️
San Francisco, CA
Joined February 2008
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Shadab Farooqui retweeted
We're about to enter a period where not reading or writing becomes as ubiquitous as smoking once was. We can hope people will eventually realize this is bad for them, as they did with smoking. But this is far from certain; the cost may not be as obvious.
Shadab Farooqui retweeted
Marc Andreessen says the gap between what AI-native startups and incumbents think AI can do is the widest he’s ever seen:
"The AI-native early stage startups have just a completely different view on what they can do with AI than the typical incumbents in almost any industry, almost without exception."
"AI is just racing ahead in capability even week by week... There are going to be a lot of industries that are really up for grabs in a fundamentally more profound way than maybe has been the case in the past."
"The founders are gonna have a level of superpowers coming from the use of these tools and these technologies that they just simply haven't had in the past... Had I had Astra and Netscape in 1994, like, oh my God. Like, Ben, what would you and I have been able to do at Netscape?"
"Those entrepreneurs are gonna color way outside the lines. We already see this. They're not gonna think of themselves as like, 'I'm just a software company,' or, 'I'm just a hardware company,' or even, 'I'm just an AI company.'"
@pmarca @bhorowitz
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
"Most execution problems are not laziness, discipline, intelligence, or even time management. They are priority dilution.”
Instagram still has the “I saw that post, how do I find it” problem.
Business challenge is that fixing that problem likely has an inverse relationship with ad revenue.
Lists UX feel off-brand and generally unmanageable.
Funny not funny that if my phone dies, I cannot access or drive my electric car.
(I don’t usually keep the card key on me)
Something about that experience feels rushed and broken.
Shadab Farooqui retweeted
On My First Million, Mark Pincus laid out the whole Zynga thesis. Find a mature market that's dead and played out, that VCs won't touch, but that still has a lot of money in it.
For him that was video games. In 2007 it was a $23b industry, barely growing, not fundable. Today it's $283b and still not fundable. His line: we're living in 2007 again, consumer isn't investable, so go do consumer.
Should the doctors be paid for their knowledge and judgement if models are trained with their input?
Surprising that FDE bootcamps haven’t popped up yet.
Every company says they have Forward-Deployed Engineers now.
ElevenLabs CEO and former Palantir Deployment Strategist @mati gives one of the best explanations of what an FDE is—and says companies are missing the key piece of what actually makes FDEs valuable:
“In our case, FDEs are part of the product team. They are not part of the go-to-market team. They are deeply embedded in understanding what the roadmap of the product is.”
“You want all the FDEs to actually solve the customer problem and stretch your product in that direction. But the second thing you want them to do is bring any of that knowledge back to the product, so the product becomes better for the next generation of companies building on top of it. I feel like the second part is frequently missed.”
“The beauty of that is—everybody benefits because you work with one customer, learn, and you bring that into the product experience. Both of those customers benefited from having their product optimized for better work.”
“The domain expertise they have is still theirs. They can win based on their domain expertise. But the product experience of how you build based on that domain expertise can be abstracted, and can be reusable.”
Impressed with FB Marketplace buyer and seller experiences.
Who’s building human-assisted seller automation? I don’t do Facebook much and could use a mediator. Might even consider to share a % of revenue.
Whipped up a simple invite and rsvp tool for a personal event which is live with users in < 24hrs.
🚀
Shadab Farooqui retweeted
you should generally optimize your career to always be working with people you admire
Shadab Farooqui retweeted
If you’re building something people will still care about five years from now, I want to see it. Drop it in the comments.
Founders and brand owners, DM me. I’m showing a few people what we’ve been building.
40% of an Uber Eats order total are in fees.
Service and convenience is worth at least 40% of the bill by this account.
Shadab Farooqui retweeted
Travis Kalanick: “I was running a $70 billion company the way somebody who thought he was going to starve next week would run it."
"Every decision I made at Uber, I defend to this day. Never had chalk on my shoe.“
“The problem was I ran too close to the line in too many situations. When you're big and important, the scrutiny and expectation is that you don't run that close to the line, even if it's correct. That is a thing I definitely did not understand.”
“It comes from what I did before Uber. First four years, no salary, ran out of money several times, super grind, lose all friends. The non-luckiest entrepreneur journey of all time.”
“It was so hard that I had to be epically precise and hardcore just to pay the bills and go to the grocery store next week. And that precision and intensity made Uber what it was.”