Investing Partner, @a16z speedrun. Did some important-ish stuff at Reforge, Slack, Instacart, Runkeeper, Zynga, and Pixar.
Berkeley, CA
Joined March 2007
- Tweets19.1K
- Following1.9K
- Followers13.6K
- Likes39.6K
Pinned Tweet
Agent-native products are coming.
Every product on the internet was built for a human with eyes, a cursor, and a credit card. Agents have none of those things.
Most companies are teaching agents to pretend to be humans. That's a hack. The real opportunity is products designed for agents from scratch.
Everything inverts:
• Discovery → protocol registries, not ads and billboards
• Trust → machine-readable reputation, not brand
• Onboarding → full capabilities upfront, not a narrow slice
• Payments → spend authorization, not checkout flows
• Retention → zero. Agents switch between API calls.
30 years of human product design. Day one of agent product design.
100% the case.
One way to think about this - a career is a portfolio of 5-10 investments where you invest your most valuable resource, your time. Your returns are what you learn, the network you build, and of course, the money you make.
Choose wisely.
I sat down with our team to tell stories from Pixar, Instacart, Slack, and of course, speedrun.
After building for 20+ years with some of the greatest founders and CEOs in the world, I'm here to discover and support the next wave of world-class founders.
NEW: INVESTOR SPOTLIGHT WITH FAREED MOSAVAT
@far33d went from working on blockbuster Pixar hits to leading growth at Slack, and now backs founders at speedrun. He sat down with us to talk about:
00:55 - what a Pixar film teaches you about building a startup
04:13 - films vs. startups: why customers have to be in the loop
06:05 - Slack’s free-to-paid assumption that turned out wrong
07:46 - the app store review that changed Slack’s monetization
10:34 - why he joined speedrun
13:30 - product-market fit and “heat-seeking” founders
14:11 - why he’s bearish on cold email
SR008 apps close Nov 1. Watch the full interview here 👇
Here's the thing about agents.
There's no upper bound.
In every market there's some max # of humans in your ICP, but there's an infinite number of possible agents.
Same company, different outcome. How you tell your story is an essential part of the job as a founder. Here @tkexpress11 and @PhilippWehn talk through what changed for Nexxa to break through the noise.
how to go from a BAD @Speedrun application to a GREAT one...
I sat with @PhilippWehn (SR005) to look at his app that was rejected for SR004 w/ @Nexxa_AI & what changed when he reapplied and was accepted for SR005
- clearly identified traction
- direct founder-market fit
- no more buzzwords
- 10x better one liner
- new swagger
this was fun
apply for SR008 here!
speedrun.a16z.com/apply
so if you want to know why all the AI companies are being valued at crazy multiples, that's why. We're in completely new territory.
Was at a college admissions info session and the advice the admissions officer gave was the same one I repeatedly gave to founders
Don't be afraid to brag about yourself.
It’s that time of year - speedrun apps are open!
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
Yesterday was @speedrun Demo Day, and in the past few weeks we've had a wave of product launches and announcements.
A roundup of recent SR007 launches from teams I've worked with most closely. Satellites, fintech, hardware, robotics, consumer, enterprise AI, we got it all. 🧵
Elu
Self-healing software. Detects issues hitting real users, generates the fix, validates it, auto-merges to production. 8x ARR in two months.
lnkd.in/p/gc7MVe-F
This is less than 20% of the cohort.
If you're building something ambitious, SR008 applications are open early at speedrun.a16z.com
