Built the brand of Andreessen Horowitz (@a16z)
California, USA
Joined December 2008
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Folks, I am closing the books on—gasp—15 years at Andreessen Horowitz.
I am still in awe of what we’ve built and do not take for granted these past 15 years, which have felt like 15 minutes in some respects. When the inimitable @wennmachers invited me onboard (I think I was employee number 20-something and thought we were already a sizable firm!), it was to build the brand of a16z and to raise the profile of one @bhorowitz. (Fun fact: One of my first announcements was how the firm had raised a combined $2.7B in our first three years, and one of my last was the $15B we’d closed in January, with now over $100B under management across multiple funds.) While Ben has been a key throughline in my journey, along the way I also had the tremendous privilege and responsibility of leading marketing—first, for our enterprise investing team and portfolio, and later, for our growth fund and portfolio. Both of my boys, now 11 and 7, also came into the world during this time, so a16z is interwoven into the fabric of our lives.
I remain beyond proud of the work that we, the marketing team, did over the years, so much of it unsung and behind the scenes. Maybe this time around, I should write the book and Ben, as he once jokingly told me, would do the marketing for it. To know that the brand of a16z is now part of my legacy is remarkable.
What makes a place is the people and I take with me some of my deepest friendships. You know who you are and I cannot imagine these past many years without you. ❤️ And to Margit, who made this journey possible, so much love and respect for you. 🙏
As for what’s ahead, I’m fully embracing what I believe to be the true ethos of the firm, which is to expect the unexpected. After a tenure like mine, I really have to close this door before I can even think about opening another, so the only plan I have is to take a well-earned break this summer with my family. 🙌
In the words of my own TeamG, more TK!
🙌
.@assaf_rappaport, Yinon Costica, Ami Luttwak, and Roy Reznik are in a league of their own. The way they care for their customers, team, and investors is unparalleled.
(and I still think they’re underrated)
It’s no surprise this team built a platform people genuinely love, even in one of the most skeptical industries in tech. One CISO told us they’d quit if Wiz were removed.
Generational run. And it’s just the beginning as they join @GoogleCloud to combine powerful environmental context, frontier AI research, and multi-cloud DNA to secure AI end to end.
Congrats on this exciting new era. @a16z is honored to have been a part of the last one.
@justin_kahl @zanelackey
The infrastructure behind @a16z Infra 💪
Thank you @business for this great profile on the team.
8 years in, it still feels like day 1 walking into the office.
Working with Martin, Raghu, and this team is humbling. We are forever optimistic about what’s ahead.
Every shift starts from infrastructure. Every startup battle is thrilling. That's why we are here.
🫡
We started the @16z Growth Fund 7 years ago to invest in market-leading companies with ambitious visions in technology. I'm incredibly proud of what the team has built and the amazing founders we've had the opportunity to partner with.
We now have $22b in committed capital across 5 Growth funds, 120+ companies in our portfolio, and we look forward to continuing to back generational companies.
My children and I were talking about what didn’t quite seem possible — or very much in the distant future — when I was their age, and self driving cars were high on my list. And yet, here we are. It’s exhilarating and magical to bear witness to the realization of autonomous vehicles today. Thank you, @Waymo, for paving the way.
Grace Ellis retweeted
I'm incredibly proud that Flock Safety played a key role in working with first responders to find the suspect in the Brown and MIT murders.
America cannot tolerate tragedies like what we saw at Brown and MIT this past week. The single best way to curb crime is to make sure would-be criminals know they'll be caught. Excellent intelligence is the only way to make that a reality, and we intend to continue using technology to make sure our law enforcement are empowered to do their jobs.
Grace Ellis retweeted
I had a great time chatting with @patrick_oshag on @InvestLikeBest. I've known Patrick since college, and this is the first time we've talked markets and investing at this much depth.
The fundamentals of company building haven’t changed: people, products, and markets matter.
But obviously, private markets have evolved substantially over my career: there are now ~6x more private unicorns than public companies with a $1b+ market cap. And at the end of 2010, just 2 public technology companies were among the top 10 in market cap; today it’s 8 of 10.
AI (alongside software eating everything more generally) is clearly driving a lot of this. But it’s instructive to look at everything from the steam engine, to the early days of Facebook and Google user monetization, to real-time success stories like Databricks, Anduril, OpenAI and Waymo, to get a clear picture of where the opportunities lie.
It was a pleasure to go deep on all this and more!
.@DavidGeorge83 leads @a16z Growth, which has backed some of the most successful technology companies including Stripe, SpaceX, Waymo, Databricks, Figma, OpenAI, and Cursor.
This conversation is a detailed look at how David built and runs the growth business. He shares how they win the most competitive deals, the principles behind its culture, and the framework he uses to evaluate companies.
We discuss how a16z is investing across the AI stack -- from model providers to applications -- and why this platform shift creates a real window for startups to displace incumbents.
Throughout the episode, David shares the models that guide his investing: why markets misprice consistent growth, what makes "pull" businesses so powerful, and why he likes to back a certain kind of founder he calls the "technical terminator."
It’s fun to talk with students of the game, and David is certainly one of them. He's spent his career studying great companies, markets, and founders, and you can feel that depth in how clearly he connects patterns across cycles.
Enjoy!
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
6:54 Enterprise AI
10:23 Lessons from Waymo
16:17 Technical Terminators
22:34 The "Glengarry Glen Ross" Rule
31:23 Winning Competitive Deals
42:24 The "Yankees" Mindset
46:13 Decision Making
51:12 Model Busters
53:42 Push vs. Pull Markets
1:10:23 How Startups Beat Incumbents
1:13:38 The Kindest Thing
Virtual honking over this bit of @Waymo news!! 🙌 “We're goin' up, up, up, it's our moment / You know together we're glowin' / Gonna be, gonna be golden” (Song stuck in your head now? You’re welcome.)
Grace Ellis retweeted
For decades, making slides has felt like a design ritual disguised as work.
In my first consulting job, I spent years in PowerPoint nudging text boxes pixel by pixel, haunted by clients asking to “make this chart pop.”
When I tried @GammaApp, I knew something fundamental had finally changed.
Today, as shared by The New York Times, we’re announcing two things:
>Our Series B at a $2.1B valuation led by @sarahdingwang at @a16z.
>Reaching $100M ARR, profitably, with a team of just 50 people. That's $2M ARR per employee.
PowerPoint was invented before the first website, before the Game Boy, before the Berlin Wall fell.
But Gamma, and our 70 million users, are proof that an AI-native company can disrupt a category everyone assumed was won.
30 million gammas are created every single month, as we fight hard to become a new standard for communication.
But we’re not stopping. We’re expanding our plans for businesses. We’re building out a full visual storytelling platform. And today, we’re releasing our API to the general public. So you can plug Gamma into wherever work happens.
And to celebrate, we’re also sharing our first ever prompt guide backed by research into how our most successful users use Gamma to automate presentations, websites, and content in minutes.
Grace Ellis retweeted
Congrats to @arielcoco, @itwig, and the entire @Navan team.
Navan survived a global travel shutdown when COVID hit in 2020. Their resilience speaks for itself.
We @a16z are incredibly proud of them, and their IPO today is a well-deserved milestone. Onward!
Today, Navan is officially listed on @Nasdaq as $NAVN.
From day one, our focus has been on making travel easy for every frequent traveler. This mission, and our fierce belief in the importance of in-person connections, has driven our efforts to upgrade the travel and expense industry.
Thank you to our users, customers and suppliers. You have inspired and supported us every step of the way. We could not have done this without you!
#NAVN #NavanIPO #Nasdaqlisted
Grace Ellis retweeted
🔥🔥 @deel
We’re doubling down on @deel and co-leading their Series E at a $17.3B valuation.
Deel is powering global work + achieving exceptional growth and profitability.
We're thrilled to continue the journey with @Bouazizalex, @shuooo, and team.
Let's GO!!!
Grace Ellis retweeted
When two titans join force:
🎉 Today marks a huge moment for Fivetran: we’ve signed an agreement to merge with @dbt_labs.
This combination will help teams move faster, eliminate complexity, and unlock more value from their data – while preserving interoperability and choice: 5tran.co/4ob7EpI
Grace Ellis retweeted
Today we are announcing that a16z is co-leading the Series D in @Kalshi, a regulated exchange for trading on prediction markets. Prediction markets are a modern implementation of a classic economic idea, one most clearly articulated by Friedrich Hayek.
Hayek and the knowledge problem
Hayek argued that no central planner could ever access the dispersed knowledge held by millions of people across an economy, a fundamental challenge that has come to be known as the “knowledge problem.” Much of this knowledge is tacit and unspoken, embedded in people’s experiences, circumstances, and preferences.
Hayek wasn’t just pointing out the limits of central planning. He was offering a solution. In his 1945 essay The Use of Knowledge in Society, Hayek argued that the solution lies in looking outward, not inward: “We need decentralization,” as he put it.
Markets, in Hayek’s view, are not just allocation mechanisms but information systems. Prices act as signals, compressing vast amounts of local knowledge into actionable information. Moreover, prices create incentives: they encourage people to make decisions and act in ways that drive information back into the system. This creates an iterative feedback loop, an engine that drives better performance.
Today we might say that the answer to the knowledge problem is not to give central planners more sophisticated computers. The answer is that markets themselves are the computers. Prediction markets make this idea concrete, applying it to questions about the future and turning collective knowledge into prices that reflect probabilities.
Why we’re investing in Kalshi
This is why we’re excited about prediction markets, and why we’re investing in Kalshi. Kalshi is bringing prediction markets into the mainstream with a compliant, scalable platform for event contracts covering everything from elections and economics to sports and culture. It has already seen billions in trading volume and continues to grow quickly. Kalshi also plans deep crypto integrations, work we’re excited to collaborate on, and today announced they’re expanding globally to 140 countries.
We’re not the only ones excited about the potential of prediction markets. For businesses and investors, event contracts can hedge risk, such as exposure to economic or policy changes. For policymakers and analysts, market prices offer real-time forecasts that can outperform polls and expert predictions. And for society at large, prediction markets create an open, transparent, and incentive-driven way to aggregate beliefs about the future.
This is the right moment for prediction markets. As trust in established institutions reaches historic lows — at least according to the polls — we need new systems that can earn trust in different ways. We believe the answer lies in open, decentralized systems. DeFi provides an alternative to traditional finance, stablecoins to conventional payment providers, and prediction markets to expert forecasts. Where people once trusted banks or pundits, they can now trust protocols and markets.
Hayek’s insight was that knowledge is too widely distributed for any one authority to possess. Instead, we need systems that harness the intelligence of the many. Kalshi puts this idea into action, transforming dispersed information into concrete, market-based forecasts. We’re excited to support their work as they bring prediction markets into the mainstream.
Grace Ellis retweeted
When I met @mansourtarek_ @luanalopeslara, prediction markets would've leaned "no" on almost everything they've accomplished, from regulatory to liquidity to market leadership
But these two don't take no
@Kalshi has gone mainstream & @a16z is thrilled to co-lead their Series D
