Infrastructure to Impact

I could have very easily called it a day. But if you look at what's going on in the world, there has never been a greater time for technology to have a positive impact. AI is on the scale of the next Industrial Revolution, and I wanted to be involved in as many areas of it as possible. As the CEO of a single company, you're often focused on one particular slice of the market. Ventures gave me the opportunity to engage across a broad set of technologies and applications. And then there was the team. Venture capital is often described as an individual sport. a16z operates very differently—as a team sport. That resonated with me.

The countries that controlled foundational technologies—whether in the Industrial Age, the transistor era, or beyond—captured disproportionate economic advantage. That advantage ultimately translates into military capability and geopolitical influence. If you're not able to have a say in how AI is built or adopted in your country, it becomes a material weakness for the long-term security of the nation. And AI models reflect the data they're trained on. For countries whose culture, history, or values aren't well represented in training datasets, that becomes a real issue. They want their own models that reflect their own societal perspectives.

Some things stay the same. The current incumbents combined cutting-edge innovation with tremendous execution and a strong focus on delivery. But the nature of innovation is evolving. Companies now can take advantage of the best commercial technologies available and combine them with AI to drive down costs while increasing capability. And there's delivery—actually getting these technologies into large organizations like governments that have a lot of constraints and requirements. You must understand how those institutions work and how to translate innovation into something they can actually deploy. Execution still matters enormously. These systems are used in environments where lives are at stake.