Silicon Valley entrepreneur (cofounder@ TrialPay, Yub, Affirm, Point, TXN), investor (General Partner @a16z), husband, father and sarcast (one who is sarcastic)
Palo Alto, CA
Joined October 2010
- Tweets11.2K
- Following1.5K
- Followers58.7K
- Likes68.7K
Alex Rampell retweeted
We're bringing the premier agentic commerce event back to San Francisco! The second annual @agentconnectsf will be held on March 9, 2027!
A lot has changed since we last gathered in March. With the rise of personal agents like Instinct and Muse, collaboration among the builders, payments experts, and business leaders shaping agentic commerce matters more than ever.
Earlier this year, the first Agent Connect by @getVGS brought together 300+ payment leaders, with speakers from a16z, OpenAI, Visa, Mastercard, Shopify, Instacart, and more.
In 2027, we’ll come together again to explore the challenges and opportunities AI agents present for retailers, issuers, and payment providers. Stay for the conversations and connections.
📰 Learn more about the event that 100% of surveyed attendees said they would attend again, and what we’re planning for 2027: ow.ly/qMzS5101nbV
🎟️ Early bird registration is open through January 1, 2027. Apply to attend today: ow.ly/PrTo5101nfm
#AgentConnect2027 #AgenticCommerce #Payments #VGS
Alex Rampell retweeted
Imagine your net worth is $200,000. One day an armed gang comes up to your house and demands $10,000.
“Don’t worry!” the leader says. “I’m only going to do this one time. Plus, it’s only 5% of your net worth. What’s the big deal ?”
After he leaves, you call the cops, but they aren’t interested in investigating the matter. “What’s the big deal?” they tell you. “After all, it’s only 5% of your net worth!”
As you’re preparing to flee the city for a place where you cannot be robbed, Gabriel Zucman appears on your doorstep.
“Why are you leaving?” he asks.
“Somebody just robbed me and the police aren’t going to do anything. I want to live somewhere I can’t be robbed!”
“But sir,” says Mr Zucman, “Have you considered the fact that the man told you it was a one-time tax ? Have you considered that you gain nothing by leaving since the tax is already paid ? There’s no economic reason for you to leave anymore.”
What amazes me is the attitude of so many of the centibillionaires.
A 5% tax will not make any difference to the way they live. Their spending may be extravagant, but it is still much less than their (correctly measured) income.
They know that, as gifted as some of them indeed are, they have benefited from extreme luck (and the help of the state, and, to speak like an economist, monopoly rents).
They know that their effective tax rate is low, relative to what many others pay.
They know that extreme inequality is extremely unpopular, and can lead to political unrest, backlash, or worse.
They must admit that, morally, it is hard to argue for a society in which some become obscenely wealthy, while so many are poor and see their income stagnate.
They typically have not indicated that they are building their wealth to eventually make the world a better place.
But they are still willing to fight the tax, spending hundreds of millions in California to avoid paying the tax. Why?
They simply think what is theirs is theirs, end of story.
They believe in the slippery slope, and if they do not take a stand on this levy, the government will come back for more.
They hate the state and the notion that their money will be misused?
Or?
Alex Rampell retweeted
Tony and I wrote this blog post about operating at the speed of AI as opposed to the speed of humans a few days ago that I am pretty proud of: town.com/operate-at-the-spee…
Check it out!
Alex Rampell retweeted
United CEO Scott Kirby wants a national wealth tax and ~100% inheritance taxes. On Forged in America, a16z's Alex Rampell told us private greed leads to public good, public greed to public bad. Who builds then? @ForgedUSAPod @RavinGandhi1 Full episode: nitter.cf/goldstein2002/status/2…
United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby tells the New York Times that "wealth inequality has become a danger to our society" and must be addressed.
"We should have a national wealth tax... we should have inheritance taxes that get close to 100 percent at some level. I would pay them."
(nytimes.com/2026/10/18/busin…)
Alex Rampell retweeted
The biggest bottleneck at work is waiting on each other.
Today Town is announcing its $108M Series B, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, to fix it with multiplayer AI assistants for work.
Most AI assistants are built for one person. Work doesn't happen alone. I think the moat is multiplayer. Everyone at a company gets a Townie. Townies ask each other questions, share only what their person would share, and do the work. The more a team works together, the more useful Townies get.
What's the thing you're always waiting on a teammate for?
Alex Rampell retweeted
The wallet wars are here.
Very Good Security chief strategy officer Terry Angelos joins a16z's Alex Rampell, his TrialPay co-founder from back in 2006 (TrialPay was later acquired by Visa), to discuss how agents are learning to spend money.
"Agents have all of a sudden become significantly more helpful and useful because they effectively have arms and legs, which are payment credentials."
VGS holds the payment credentials behind about 1/3 of all e-commerce, and now it's helping AI agents pay merchants. If you've bought anything online, there's a good chance VGS has already helped keep your card safe.
In the last three months, Terry says agents went from "spectators to actors." Once an agent has your payment credentials, it can book the piano teacher it previously could only find and recommend.
Now Stripe's Link, Shopify's Shop Pay, and PayPal are racing to connect to agents. It's all headed toward open standards from the card networks: agentic tokens that let an agent pay with your actual card.
VGS went from zero agentic tokens to a few million a week in three months.
0:55 From TrialPay to Visa to VGS
2:05 How VGS vaults 1/3 of e-commerce
6:05 Why big merchants use 3-5 processors
9:55 Why AI agents need a payment vault
12:15 Agents go from "spectators to actors"
13:40 The wallet wars, old and new
19:55 Walled gardens vs open standards
23:55 How agents can pay with your real card
26:40 Your saved card goes multiplayer
29:40 How do you trust an agent's purchase?
32:35 Who pays when your agent gets it wrong
35:40 Why Amazon blocks agents
39:50 What's overhyped and underhyped
43:35 When merchants get agents too
45:40 Why agents could break card rewards
47:00 VGS's eras: vault, updates, network
@terryangelos @arampell
Alex Rampell retweeted
More bangers.
Going down as the most important day in the history of combinatorics:
--Erdos reciprocal sum for Szemeredi
--Inverse Goldbach
--Hindman's sum product
--off-diagonal Ramsey
...
Erdős Problem #3:
Sets without arithmetic progressions!
@wtgowers has described it as his "white whale", and @thomasfbloom had put it as his top problem on the website
Alex Rampell retweeted
scott is hands down one of the most effective, pragmatic people I know - so proud of @skupor helping our great country lead in SI 🇺🇸🚀💪
Very honored to work with @ODNIgov , @USWREMichael and @AFergusonFTC and the entire SIF committee members to deliver on @POTUS mission - the U.S. will continue to lead in SI to enhance the well-being of all Americans
Alex Rampell retweeted
A common misconception is that if you are super rich, you can get unlimited access to the world's best doctor/lawyer/creative-professional etc.
The reality is that the world's leading cancer doctor will still see you for 20-30min if you have cancer no matter how much money you have.
This is why AI is so crazy.
It both democratizes access AND it makes the amount of time available unlimited for every individual.
This is the practical effect of intelligence too cheap to meter.
Alex Rampell retweeted
They used carefully picked words to make this seem like a hack but it wasn’t a hack. It was nothing. Just fear mongering.
nytimes.com/2026/09/25/techn… via @NYTimes
Alex Rampell retweeted
Today we establish that AI is as good as expert human tutors for immediate GRE learning gains (p=.015, n=2,383 students, study conducted July-Sep 2026).
One hour with an expert GRE tutor: $75.
One equivalent hour with an AI tutor: 7 cents .
918x cheaper, equivalent learning (p=.044, n = 140).
In 5 of 7 academic topics, the top AI tutor beat the expert human tutors on average.
How we measured it: pre-test -> 1 hour with (AI or human or no) tutor -> post-test.
There are no LLM judges. Learning gains are post-pre. Everything is real students.
Why we did this:
> 1 trillion USD is being spent per year on machines making machines better. StudentBench shows us how to shift these resources so machines also make humans better.
Why I did this:
I grew up in rural Kentucky. My dad, grandad, and great grandad were all mailmen. Getting into a good college changed my life. Now we have done a rigorous study to help AI labs evaluate LLMs and help show how bright AI can be for students of all incomes.
I believe in good science that leads to the democratization of opportunity.
The research paper behind StudentBench: arxiv.org/abs/2609.28470
Data, code, details: in this thread
If you're wondering what I'm selling, sorry to disappoint: we released all study data for free on Hugging Face, and made studentbench.org free to use. Enjoy.
lots more in the video / thread!!
Alex Rampell retweeted
WATTERS: “If Bernie were around 100 years ago, he probably would’ve demanded Henry Ford stop building cars while he stood next to a horse.”
🚨🚨 Socialists Bernie Sanders and Greg Casar just introduced the “Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act.”
Here’s what it would do:
• Ban AI the government deems to surpass human intelligence
• Pause advanced AI development
• Make D.C. bureaucrats the gatekeepers and create a new Department of AI
• Threaten developers with up to 20 years in prison
The proposal would freeze America’s leading AI labs while China keeps building, let Washington pick winners and losers in AI development, and impose criminal penalties on developers who build systems the government deems too advanced.
The test for every AI policy: does it make America stronger, safer, and richer?
This bill clearly fails.
Alex Rampell retweeted
new summation pod with @arampell, general partner at a16z who runs their $2.7 billion Apps practice and led early bets on Plaid, Mercury, and Opendoor.
we get into why Visa is the purest network effect business on earth, why the best companies have hostages not customers, and what was once payroll becoming payments.
youtube.com/watch?v=hLk25S88…
Alex Rampell retweeted
Databricks' @alighodsi says "Right now the existential risk is close to zero." Why he thinks the public doom talk is irresponsible:
"Leaders have responsibility to not freak people out unnecessarily unless there's really, really good reason."
"Talking about these kind of existential risks and scenarios where all of humanity's gonna be wiped out, I think is irresponsible. It can tip a lot of people over, and it can cause a lot of mental health issues."
"If there is an actual reason for it, that's a different story. But I think that right now the existential risk is close to zero. So why freak everybody out? It's not actually needed. There are risks. We'll get into it. That's probably where we disagree."
"First and foremost, I think leaders should not freak everyone out."
"If there's technical nuances in how we're doing AI research, researchers can discuss that. You don't need to every time go on TV and blast on Twitter to millions of people that 'I think there's like this 10% risk that all humanity is gonna be wiped out.'"
"I think it causes a lot of harm for a lot of folks who get stressed out and actually are not in the nuances of all of this stuff and what it means."
@alighodsi @sarahdingwang @martin_casado
Databricks' @alighodsi on AI risk and adoption:
Ali isn't losing sleep over the existential risk debate.
He says a number of conditions would all have to be true simultaneously to enable an actual runaway takeoff scenario, and currently several opposite conditions exist.
Each frontier training run requires significantly more resources. Power, GPUs, engineers - and some attempts fail, burning up huge piles of money with them. Until that reverses, he doesn't see the self-improving loop happening.
Cyber is what he's watching most closely and where he anticipates real impact. Most orgs are not equipped for the coming change in agentic capabilities. The time between a vulnerability being published and being weaponized has collapsed from years to hours.
On adoption, he believes most companies don't need a smarter model. The models are already smart enough. The gap is context they don't absorb - the things an employee who's worked at a company for five years learned by osmosis.
If the frontier stopped advancing today, he thinks it wouldn't meaningfully change the value most are extracting from AI anyway.
In conversation with a16z's Martin Casado and Sarah Wang:
00:00 Intro
00:48 Why Ali places the AI risk near zero
05:05 The word "pacing" was a mistake
10:50 What 10k agents and $100m can do
12:20 What would change his mind on AI risk
14:20 More GPUs, more ways to fail
18:05 US export controls on PlayStations
20:10 The damage everyone expected by now
24:30 Public vulnerabilities weaponized in hours
30:15 Why labs can't grade each other
37:15 Why most of RSI isn't actually RSI
40:05 Why nobody really needs a smarter model
41:50 The AI use cases nobody argues about
47:30 Google Search solved this 25 years ago
50:55 Nobody has privileged knowledge now
55:10 Same model, new harness, 2x cost
58:15 Open source: 5% of spend, 60% of tokens
1:05:30 90% of new databases are created by agents
YouTube: youtu.be/GzEtpAKYRvE
@databricks @martin_casado @sarahdingwang
Alex Rampell retweeted
Affirm gave up the highest margins in payments on purpose. @mlevchin and @arampell get into why on the @a16z podcast: youtube.com/watch?v=J3pegsM5…
Alex Rampell retweeted
2026: The New York Times cites seriously academics who say AI might end the world
1881: The New York Times cites seriously academics who say telegraphy might end the world newsletter.pessimistsarchive…
Alex Rampell retweeted
Today we're launching the new Raspberry.
A single collection can take up to 18 months to get to market. It requires trend research, design iterations, technical development, merchandising, campaign assets, wholesale materials, PDP imagery + dozens of handoffs in between.
Now you can give Raspberry a goal, build a plan with your Agent, and let it execute the entire workflow with you.
From concept → commerce.
See what a day with the new Raspberry looks like. Link to our press release in comments.
