How the New Administration Will Impact Crypto, AI & Tech Globally w/ Ben Horowitz & Salim Ismail | EP #145
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The Biden administration was by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime. Complete war with the industry. Are we in for an extraordinary acceleration and reimagination of crypto and Bitcoin and all? One of the things that you only know if you're deep in the crypto industry is there was nobody developing software in this space. It just really, really slowed down over the last four years. And now it's back.

We are in a race with China on AI and we're trying to control it by chips. I am curious your thoughts about all this. - I do think we're in a race. The danger of course is,

Hey, everybody. Peter Diamandis here. Welcome to Moonshots, another special episode of WTF Just Happened in Tech with my bestie, Salim Ismail. And on this episode, I'm joined with an incredible tech investor, perhaps one of the most dominant in the world, and that's Ben Horowitz of A16Z. In 1999, Ben co-founded LoudCloud, which evolved and became an enterprise software company sold for $1.6 billion to Hewlett-Packard.

Then in 2009, Horowitz joined with Mark Andreessen to co-found Andreessen Horowitz, also known as A16Z, a venture capital fund with, get this, over $45 billion assets under management. He's the author of two bestselling books with incredible names, incredible content, The Hard Things About Hard Things, and What You Do Is Who You Are.

All right, let's jump into this episode. This is just after the inauguration, after some recent conversations about breakthroughs in AI, in robotics, in crypto. It really feels like we're in the future and it's the year 2025. All right, what just happened in tech this week? We're going to find out. Let's jump in. Ben, good to see you this morning. Where are you today?

Yeah, I'm in Las Vegas. Great to see you, Peter. Great to see you, Saleem. And Saleem, as always. And, you know, a lot happening in tech this week. Super pumped to have Ben join us in this conversation because I think you've got a front row seat to some most extraordinary things happening. And, you know, I think one of the things happened this week is we've got a new president.

Yeah. I have to imagine this is probably do you think this is the most tech forward administration we've ever had? Well, it's certainly the most dramatic change in tech policy that we've ever seen, just because the Biden administration was by far the most anti-tech presidency in my lifetime. And then, you know, Trump, at least in his first term,

four days has been full out like aggressive pro tech. So it's just, it's so night and day. The contrast is absolutely shocking. It's like a whipsaw. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's almost unbelievable. It's through the looking glass kind of thing. Yeah.

Well, if there's ever a time that we're going to accelerate humanity to Mars, get digital superintelligence up and running, extend the healthy human lifespan, I think this-- Yeah, like when Trump said we're going to Mars, I was like, "Okay, let's go." As always, we'll talk about AI, robotics, crypto, but I think this was interesting.

You know, looking at the front row seat of what was going on at the administration inauguration here, I think was was pretty extraordinary. Did you or Mark get an invite to go or did you decide to sort of. Yeah, well, you know, we have been spending a lot of time with the administration and that Mar-a-Lago. But, you know, inauguration isn't.

We're not really party people. So we didn't go, we had many people from the firm went to the inauguration and they said it was great fun. So.

You know what I thought was fascinating was Davos was going on at the same time. Yeah, quite the contrast. Well, these guys would normally be at Davos. Yeah. I think they aligned properly. Selim, what do you think about that? And by the way, most of them were very anti-Trump in 2016, 2020. So it's quite the change.

It is. I mean, when you're about to jump on a fast-moving elevator or rocket ship, you got to make a choice. Selim, what are your thoughts about this lineup here? I feel like this is like a Game of Thrones episode where the Lord of Hightower is told, you better bend the knee or the sword is coming for you. And so I think it's 50-50 excitement and defensiveness because you've got to play ball, but look at the game that we're now playing is amazing.

Yeah, I agree with that. I think the excitement is super real in that...

Look, everybody in tech has been oppressed, like literally. I mean, I know that sounds ridiculous because, you know, they're like, oh, how can billionaires be oppressed and all that kind of thing? But they really, the Biden administration was at complete war with the industry. Like every single thing you tried to do in technology, I mean, they tried to completely outlaw technology.

or not even outlawed, destroy the fintech and crypto industries. That plus the incredible blanket on M&A. It's ridiculous. No major M&A can happen in that kind of environment. And that just solves such a huge backlog of tech companies wanting to get an exit.

Yeah, that was, we had a company within, it was called Within, which was a content company for VR that made an exercise game called Supernatural. And the FTC blocked the acquisition by Meta on antitrust grounds.

And eventually it got through. They lost the case because it was an absurd case. But it's just harassment. There was no-- there's no antitrust. Meta doesn't have a monopoly on VR. VR is not even a market yet. What are you talking about?

We also saw the meltdown of the entire biotech industry over the last four years. Hey everybody, Peter here. If you're enjoying this episode, please help me get the message of abundance out to the world. We're truly living during the most extraordinary time ever in human history, and I want to get this mindset out to everyone. Please subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts, and turn on notifications so we can let you know when the next episode is being dropped. All right, back to our episode.

I think we're going to see a resurgence in all of these companies. I mean, I'm in I was in two on the board of two public biotech companies. I just saw this massive

you know demonetization going on as as the fda and regulatory restrictions were like no you can't do that no you can't merge there it just it took the wind out of all the sales that and people ended up leaving the united states to go overseas to get treatments because they can't do in the united states so uh you know super excited about bobby kennedy um

and see what he's going to do. Yeah, well, I mean, the other side of that is we actually needed a regulatory upgrade, right? Because HIPAA was designed long before, you know, we could use data to cure disease and create amazing diagnostics and all these things. And there was just no chance of getting to that. You know, I had a great conversation with Dave Ricks from Eli Lilly, who's, by the way, like,

a fantastic CEO. He's like one of us. I mean, he's a real product guy, talented guy. And one of the reasons why drugs are so expensive to develop is they can't match the cure for the disease with the people who have the disease for the clinical trial.

Like there's no way to do that. They, you know, it's like a hunting for a needle in a haystack to find these patients who, you know, whose lives could be saved because, you know, the current regulatory regime has kind of prevented that kind of thing. So we're really hopeful that we can make great progress with this.

RFK Jr. and the new team. Absolutely. Absolutely. Sure we can. You know, on this image of the tech CEO's inauguration, I think I left Sam Altman off there so he wouldn't fight with Elon's image on this. That's a good fight, isn't it? Oh, my God. It's great nighttime TV to see what's going on here. But it was, you know, listen, having all of these individuals in the front row

You know, Bezos and Musk had just launched their rockets the week or days before. You know, it's nice to have like two of the wealthiest people on the planet battling it out to get us get humanity to space. And then the rest of them here. I mean, this, you know, the question is, is this the tech, the tech giant takeover of America and

Ultimately, I don't know about you, but I sort of think this is the way America thrives. It has to. It's the best of America. I mean, you know, this is the thing that's so frustrating if you're in tech, right? Like we have this incredible industry where we've attracted literally the greatest people in the world. I mean, like, look at that set.

Tim Cook and Mark Zuckerberg are kind of natively American. Jeff, his dad was a Cuban immigrant. Everybody else is like an immigrant. And they're all here and they're all building this country and our economy and our future together.

and they've just been absolutely vilified for not anything they did, but like literally for being successful. There's not anything people are pointing to and saying, oh, you know, Mark Zuckerberg's a bad guy because of this and that and the third. It's like, he's a bad guy because he's rich and he succeeded and he built something important.

And so that has just been so devastating culturally, I think. And then you pile on that, you know, trying to outlaw all these efforts. So I think, and by the way, all these guys donated massive amounts of money to Biden, Obama, like on the Democrat side, and nobody complained that they were controlling the government then. And, you know, you have to wonder why. And by the way,

Much more than Biden or Obama, Trump doesn't listen to anybody. I mean, like, no one's going to tell him what to do. What are you talking about? Yeah. The one that really stuck in my craw was the Delaware court on Elon's 56 billion or whatever. Yeah, that was just unbelievable. You look at somebody that's taken unbelievable risks, made the outcome, and then you want to harm that.

That sounds like a bad message. And the board approved it. And then the shareholders approved it. And like, so like we own the company. We all think it's a great idea. He only gets paid if we get paid like a crazy amount of money. And

You're going to just after the fact say like, OK, corporate governance, like all the rules around that are fake. And like we don't there's no rules that like I can just change the law whenever I want as an activist. That's just just unbelievable and insane. You know, the fact of the matter is these guys employ in some total tens of millions, you know, bordering on 100 million Americans in some way, shape or form.

yeah yeah let's talk about this this was an announcement this week that was uh was interesting interesting in a number of different ways right this is the announcement of uh stargate of a quote 500 billion dollar commitment on private infrastructure what are your thoughts about this gentlemen okay so there's um you know it's it's a little unclear what it is uh so you know that aside

Look, I think the idea that this administration wants to attract investment in America and is using kind of all of its mojo to do that is great. And

So that part is terrific. Masa is Masa. We all know him. He's quite the character. He's certainly brilliant and amazingly successful, but he does things in a very specific way, which I don't want to overly comment on. But look, building AI infrastructure, just watching with the Biden administration, there were so many

kind of efforts to invest all around the world, not in America, in data centers and

and chips and whatnot. And it's nice that like, at least there is a kind of high profile effort to do that here. I'd like to see the same effort in the energy sector of opening up more energy sources because we need energy and generation. So I think that's a hundred percent going to happen. You know, we're very close with Doug Burgum, the new department, uh, the head of the department of interior, um,

And he's really, really good on this topic. And then Trump, of course, has said what he said and is extremely pro-energy. And they're going to definitely, I think, open up

which is the key for so many things. And we're seeing great innovation in that area. And when you say nuclear, when you see nuclear, Ben, you're talking about like generation four small modular nuclear reactors and so forth. Yeah, efficient, like that you can put next to a data center, that kind of thing. Or in your backyard. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, they're getting safe enough that we, you know, they should be peppered throughout the United States. Yeah.

Absolutely. And then there's another part of this where crypto really helps. So we have this company, Daylight Energy. And basically what they're doing is they're creating a marketplace. So if you have solar panels and a Tesla Powerwall, you're going to have many times more energy than you need.

So wouldn't it be great to have a marketplace where like anybody who needed energy could get, you know, ask your Powerwall for your energy. But Powerwalls aren't people, so they don't have credit cards. So how do they do that? Well, you know, crypto is a perfect answer for machines paying machines. And so, you know, that effort can now happen. Like that was also illegal in the Biden world.

or not yeah i shouldn't say illegal because there was no law it was just like the government um yeah basically using its power

No, using its power to terrorize anybody in the field. Well, it was the whole debanking thing, right? Which was absolutely scandalous. Absolutely scandalous what they did. Oh, my God. Kicked them out of the banking system. So we had more than two dozen companies kicked out of the banking systems. Elizabeth Warren's been running around Washington telling people that's fake. It was naked aggression against crypto. Naked aggression. Yeah. Yeah.

it was unbelievable looking at this photo here in the stargate project 500 uh 500 billion dollars of

of capital deployment. It's interesting, right? So we see Elon tweeting, that's bullshit. You know, Masa-san's only got, you know, at best 10 billion. Which wouldn't be the first time, by the way. Yeah, that's true. There's definitely a discrepancy between claims and actualities. But I have to wonder what the backroom conversation going on here, you know, with Elon and Trump

on one side and Sam and then, and then Larry Ellison's on Elon's board and involved in this. So there's interesting bedfellows at work here. Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, this is, this just feels like a Masa idea and, you know, this is Masa's genius. But also I would say the things that people criticize him for, which is,

You know, he is the moonshot financier of, you know, our time. And he is like great at raising a crazy amount of money. And, you know, to do that sometimes, you know, you have to ladder up to it, I guess. So, yeah.

You know, it's a massive thing. The way I look at it, it's a massive thing. Like, will it work? You know, maybe it'll work. Will he get the money? Maybe I'll get the money. But like, you can't say he won't get the money because it's massive. I think what's interesting here, the go-to once we've got this level of AI capability, you know, what Larry Ellison was saying and Sam Alton was saying on top of this is we're going to use this, this large level of AI capability to cure disease,

cure cancer. I'd love to add, extend the healthy human lifespan by decades on this, but it is fascinating that people go to health as the first. I'm heavily invested in longevity and health across most investments. It's the biggest disruptible marketplace. How about yourself, Ben?

Yeah, so we have a big kind of effort there with our bio fund, and we just did a really exciting partnership with Eli Lilly around that. I think that...

So I really believe like technologically we're in a new place. So the way we talk about it internally is, you know, physics we've been doing for, you know, thousands of years, but it only got really interesting when we had a language that could model it, which was calculus. And we now have a language that can model biology, which is AI. And so it feels like we're really at the beginning of, of kind of biological research and, and,

And that's super exciting. I would just caution it a little in terms of the rate because people expect everything to work like it does in computers because you do have to do in vivo tests. You've got tests in animals and humans and that AI doesn't quite get rid of that. We can

have certainly much more targeted, much better engineered solutions. We're not just, you know, see if this molecule works, you know, drug discovery and all that kind of thing, but, you know,

It'll still be slower than I think the progress that we are used to. Agreed. Although we're able to model biological processes so much more thoroughly with digital twins and so on. I think we'll be able to, the time period needed for in vitro testing will be much more limited than before. I think that's right. But, you know, and it would really help to have access to the data, right? Like particularly in the US and some countries there. Norway's got

like amazing access to cancer data and so forth. And there are places that have it, but we do need more of that to get all the way home, I think.

Yeah. And we'll talk about that with a recent announcement from Demis at DeepMind. But I found this fascinating. So at the beginning of the administration, Trump revoked Biden's 2023 AI executive order, halting safety and transparency. Yeah. Yes. Good. Interesting, right? This is taking the gloves off and accelerating the acceleration. How do you think about this? You know, like I think it's...

First of all, as you know, AI technology is very, very nascent. I mean, like we're at, we're in the really early days, so we don't know yet how

you know, what it's going to be. We are in, you know, like, by the way, a fairly important race with China from a military standpoint and so forth on AI, like it's be very bad for them or in a way for us to get too far of the head of the other one, like that becomes a very kind of unstable situation. And so like the idea that the government's going to enter the field and basically with the

Biden AI order did, you know, from our point of view, was basically get all of startups and academia out of the field by imposing like big regulatory requirements. And, you know, to do that at this stage is just amazing.

it's wild. It's a wild idea. I think, you know, we've tried this kind of heavy regulatory approach, which is why, you know, we've got a climate change issue and no nuclear power and all that kind of thing. And, you know, that was a kind of a much more dangerous technology, I think, at the time. But obviously, like AI is powerful and it could do dangerous things. But the whole idea that

The idea of scaring people and then giving government control, I think was just bad. I can't argue that Biden...

executive order was good in any way. I think the executive order is bullshit and ridiculous and absurd because I've said this before many times. I see no mechanism by which you can regulate AI even if you tried. Because the minute you try to set those goalposts, you'd have to regulate every line of code written. It's completely ridiculous. So undoing it undoes something that was so ridiculous it couldn't have happened anyway. So for me, it's like the whole thing is a non-sequitur. Well, it

But it does make it easier for people to do what they want to do without freedom of stupid oversight. Right, right. The safety part couldn't have happened, but the interference was certainly happening. And by the way, I mean, the other thing that's so crazy is, you know, you have people like my friend Vinod Khosla running around saying, oh, this is like the Manhattan Project. We've got a lock. Like you walk into OpenAI, you walk into Google, like...

it's so easy to steal their code. Like, what are you talking about? Like they've got like Chinese nationals running like all around the company. Like you're not protecting the bits. Like we couldn't, by the way, the Manhattan project didn't even end up protecting like the nuclear secrets, like Russia got them. So it's just, come on. But I do, I do think this is a, you know, firing over the bow of saying,

we're accelerating everything. We're not slowing stuff down. We're going to up-level our energy, our investment commitments. We're going all in, all out on AI because we need to. It's the single most strategic asset for our country. And look, I think it's the...

way we solve a lot of the most dangerous problems that we have too. So there's like, okay, we've got AI safety to stop AI from doing something bad, which won't work. But what about like AI to stop all the other bad things from happening? Pandemics, cancer, you know, et cetera. It's a climate change, you name it. You know, you,

Here's one of the articles I wanted to bring to the table here is Hassabis sees AI design drug trials this year. I think this is one of the fascinating things. I just remind people the way we discover drugs for all of human history is when we like march through the Amazon in galoshes and we like cut plants or grab dirt off Easter Island and we mix it up and we see if there's any biological activity.

And, you know, average drug costs 10 plus billion dollars and work 10 percent of the time. It's insane. And so this is a this is precision drug development. And in the future, you started to say this, Ben, it's precision drug development for you. It's like for your genome. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's it's it's such a.

a remarkable change in, you know, lifespan, healthcare, and all these things, and health span, that like, it's hard to even get your head around, like how stone age we've been and how advanced this is going to be where we can say, oh, we need a protein, right?

that does this. Oh, okay, like let's have the AI make it for us. It's such a different world. I mean, one of the things we have to say like drug discovery, like why do we call it drug discovery? Oh, it's 'cause like if we were making bridges that way, we'd build a thousand bridges.

Whichever one didn't fall down, we just drive over that one. - My kid made this last year with toothpicks and glue to figure out which one was strongest. But this is drug design versus drug discovery. - For me, this is reminiscent of, you know, we used to frame this at Singularity was you'd say, okay, we have a really well understood stack for computation with chips and logic gates and operating systems, software and applications.

And we have turned out the same stack in biology with proteins and genes forming metabolic pathways leading to cells and organelles. And essentially with modeling biology now, we've essentially turned the human being into a software engineering problem. And we can take all the skills and understanding we know in software design and apply it now. And that is really, really interesting. Yeah. One of my investments, Ben, is...

Alex of Ron coughs company in silico hmm and they were early on with generative AI for for creating this and they've gone into drug trials and I think This is the future of all drug discovery Yeah, it will be in silico and you'll mod it's like when the first I

The example I use when Dragon first flew on a Falcon 9 to the space station, it worked perfectly. And it wasn't like random luck. I mean, they had a model that had the same, you know, exactly every mode. They knew exactly what was going to happen and when it worked because the model worked. And so as AlphaFold, AlphaProteo, AlphaFold 3, all these come online. I think Demis wants to create a full model.

uh model ai model of the human cell so you can actually model this drug in that because we have you know we have 40 trillion cells in our body a billion chemical reactions per second per cell there's a lot going on yeah no yeah cells are so that that's just a great point that

We've just not been able to model it at all. Right now, we're in an engineering world. If we can model things, then we can build things, which is incredible. I love your analogy of a thousand bridges and whichever one you could drive over. That's great. I remember that one. That's great. It was about 13 years ago. I had my two kids, my two boys. And I remember at that moment in time, I made a decision to double down on my health.

Without question, I wanted to see their kids, their grandkids. And really, you know, during this extraordinary time where the space frontier and AI and crypto is all exploding, it was like the most exciting time ever to be alive. And I made a decision to double down on my health. And I've done that in three key areas. The first is.

is going every year for a fountain upload. You know, fountain is one of the most advanced diagnostics and therapeutics companies. I go there, upload myself, digitize myself about 200 gigabytes of data that the AI system is able to look at to catch disease at inception. You know, look for any cardiovascular, any cancer, neurodegenerative disease, any metabolic disease,

These things are all going on all the time and you can prevent them if you can find them at inception. So super important. So Fountain is one of my keys. I make that available to the CEOs of all my companies, my family members, because health is a new wealth.

But beyond that, we are a collection of 40 trillion human cells and about another 100 trillion bacterial cells, fungi, viri. And we don't understand how that impacts us. And so I use a company and a product called Viome. And Viome has a technology called Metatranscriptomics. It was actually developed...

in New Mexico, the same place where the nuclear bomb was developed as a biodefense weapon. And their technology is able to help you understand what's going on in your body to understand which bacteria are producing which proteins. And as a consequence of that, what foods are your superfoods that are best for you to eat? Or what foods should you avoid?

What's going on in your oral microbiome? So I use their testing to understand my foods, understand my medicines, understand my supplements and Viome really helps me understand from a biological and data standpoint what's best for me. And then finally, feeling good, being intelligent, moving well is critical, but looking good. When you look yourself in the mirror,

saying, you know, I feel great about life is so important, right? And so a product I use every day, twice a day is called One Skin, developed by four incredible PhD women that found this 10 amino acid peptide that's able to zap senile cells in your skin and really help you stay youthful in your look and appearance.

So for me, these are three technologies I love and I use all the time. I'll have my team link to those in the show notes down below. Please check them out. Anyway, I hope you enjoyed that. Now back to the episode. You know, so this brings me to one of the questions that was the most asked question on X. So let's talk about this because...

The majority of entrepreneurs out there who see this incredible moonshot success story, this person or gal does this incredible thing, and they don't realize the hundreds of failures on the way. I call them an overnight success after 11 years of hard work. I mean, you've built some amazing companies and you've invested in extraordinary companies. How do you think about this?

Yeah, so it's a very, you know, particularly when like the real, the very large ideas. So first of all, like it's really important that the person building it really have deference to how hard it is to make the product work.

And so like we have people come in and there's, you know, it's a 20 person company and eight of them are vice presidents because they're going to manage this big thing that they don't have. And that never works. By the way, that never works. It's funny. You need engineers. Yeah. So you need you need to have engineers and also be just committed to.

keeping the company the right size until you actually kind of can see daylight and see the thing work. And then, you know, the fundraising for Moonshot Ideas is like an order of magnitude more difficult than normal fundraising because

One, way more things go wrong. So there's going to be a round that you have to do when everything is a wreck. And so if you look at the guys who have built the really, really, really, really big ones, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, Palmer Leckie,

These guys are unbelievable, but they can raise money when there's no reason to give them money. And that's, that just ends up being, I think, very, very important to be able to do because you're going to hit that point. Is that storytelling, Ben? What is that? Well, I think it's a, it's a combination of, you know, who they are, like the depth and the color of their vision, you know, their ability to,

tell a narrative, the kind of depth of that narrative so that when you go into the company, you really see it all there. I mean, this is the thing that Elon had. And the depth of their conviction, right? And the depth of their conviction. That nothing will stop them for this. Yeah, yeah. And then nobody, right? Elon, who's the greatest moonshot entrepreneur of our era,

Nobody would question whether you could stop him from reaching his goal. I mean, like he never, never bet against you alone. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that was, by the way, that was when I speak to my friends who are very sad about the election. I just say like, why did you guys pick on him?

Like of all the people to harass for no reason, the most competent person in the world, you're going to pick on him. Like that's not going to end well for you. Don't do that. Everybody in Silicon Valley knows don't do that.

But if I drill into this a bit, Ben, somebody comes in with a vision, right? They have to be half crazy to even have the vision. So now you're dealing with a 50% rational. Right, it sounds crazy. Right? And so now you have limited data on which to gauge whether this person has the aura, the charisma, the chemistry, the diligence, the fortitude to get it through. So the amount of viable candidates is shrinking quickly.

How do you make that judgment call? That's the hard part, I think. Yeah. You know, I, you know, you guys have done it repeatedly successfully, which is amazing.

Yeah, they really have to be. And look, we get it wrong a lot too. Kanye's that kind of prototype. He's a super fucking genius, but there is times where he won't do what's logical for the business just because he's overly creative. So those people show up in tech too. And that's hard to make work because sometimes at some point they just drive everybody in the company insane.

The other one is they're so charismatic that they end up being sloppy. And you guys have probably seen this where it's kind of like the kid who's so charming that he doesn't have to study, just gives the teacher an apple and smiles at her and like, bang, he's got an A. Like there are entrepreneurs like that that are so good at storytelling and so charismatic and they can get the whole thing going. But the detailed work is,

you know, that they don't want to do. Like every CEO has that something that you really don't want to deal with, but you have to, um, they, they don't end up dealing with, and then it falls apart because these ideas are really complex and, uh, require like a great amount of precision at some point. Let me hit you on, on something. So, uh,

So my fund, Bold Capital, recently made an investment in Figure AI. Do you know Brett Eichhock and Figure, yes? Yeah, I know. Yeah, yeah. And so the reason we made the investment, so here's Brett, no background in the robotics field, but he had built Archer Aviation, right? The eVTOL.

And so there is one question about the entrepreneur coming in. Do they have a track record of actually having done hard, hard things? So that's that's one bucket to evaluate. The second bucket, which was really the most interesting evaluation criteria for me making the go to invest, was

The people he had pulled in over the first six months, the people who had voted with their feet. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's that's definitely a real sign. Like, can they put together a team, that kind of team? And which is right. The people working for them.

this is a question I ask myself, by the way, on these kinds of ones, like, would I work for this company? Like, would I be excited about going to work for this company? Or would I go, wow, I could help that entrepreneur build it. Like if it's the latter, then I'm like, okay, we should not put money in because they have to kind of be able to attract the highest level of talent to build something that hard. So that's a really, really,

really good measure. And then I would say there's another thing about the team that's important, which is also true about how the entrepreneur picks their investor, which is because it's a moonshot, there's going to be really bad times or they're very likely to going to be very bad times. And so you want to have a team that's

That, you know, isn't already like a lot of times it's a great team by resume, but they're already rich and successful. And when things go wrong, they literally call in rich. They're like, oh, this is too hard. I'm not going to help you get out of this. Call in rich. That's hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. And so like, I do think it's important that the team be kind of the right kind of mission, super hungry. And often like this has got like they need this to work.

you know they they not want it to work but need it to work yeah well this is this is elon circa 2008 when the third uh falcon one had blown up and he's borrowing money and everything's on the line yeah yeah yeah and you need you need your best people to be like

I, you know, I will go through the trauma of, you know, maybe I don't even have a job. And like, this is everybody thinks we're idiots and all that kind of thing. Like, that's a tough thing.

it's a very tough point to be in a company because like when you're at a company like spacex or you have one of these things that's very visible you know when it gets into trouble the press just goes crazy on you everybody's you know your friends your family are like should you really be working there i mean like you absolutely get those questions and uh you know if you're not yeah if you're not totally committed

You're going to go. And then the whole thing is a train wreck. This is why we have this massive transformative purpose idea that if you're not all bought into the overall vision, then you will call in rich or call in sick or find another job. But if you've got a big enough vision that everybody's aligned to, then that provides the cohesive sticking power. Yeah, it's got to be cohesive even when it looks like the vision is wrong.

That's the key because when it looks like the vision is right, everybody's in. Ben, another criteria is if the founding team are best friends because you're far unlikely to ditch the company when it gets difficult if your best buddies are there with you. Right. If they haven't just met. A lot of times the founding team are newly acquainted.

And you have to get into that. Yeah. Let me ask two questions on this evaluation. Because again, I want to, this isn't important for everybody watching who's wanting to build a moonshot company. How important is early revenue and the timeline and not having to insert miracle here when you're hearing this presentation? So I think early...

Revenue is, ends up being really important as much as a discipline, you know, as an indicator of, you know, like investing. So like not so much from a, okay, we want to understand everything about the business model early, but more of that, oh, we hit a real milestone. Like we've got all these smart people, we're building this thing and we're

It's not just a... In Silicon Valley, there have been a lot of platforms in the sky, so to speak. There was a phenomenal company years ago. You probably remember it, MicroUnity, which had all the greatest people in the field in it. And it just never...

you know, you got to get to a product, you got to get to something that somebody wants. Um, or like if you're in the wilderness too long, you did something happens to the culture of the company, something,

you know, that's degenerative where you could be very much on the wrong track. General Magic was another one. - Yeah, I remember General Magic for sure. - Yeah, phenomenal. Like those two companies had talent levels that I would say rival SpaceX, Tesla, OpenAI, any of them, right? - And a big vision. - Yeah, and an amazing vision. But the revenue, your revenue point, I think is that discipline

that they didn't quite have. So when you get like brilliant people together, they want to build a perfect product that can lead to a really over-engineered system. Yeah.

Moving us forward, I'm just going to point out, you know, when I look at the Twittersphere, Ben, you don't tweet very much, but Mark tweets all the time. Yeah, yeah. Well, I spent all my time trying to control him. You see only the things that don't get us into trouble. You're in Las Vegas. Do you know some friends of mine, Penn and Teller?

Oh, yeah. I don't know them. I, of course, know who they are. Yeah. So, Penn is the one who's talking all the time and Teller is the one who's silent. Yeah. I'm Teller, right? Yeah. Exactly. So, I am curious, right? So, just as we roll, as we complete the conversations on AI, you said this earlier, and I think Eric Schmidt's been saying this very loudly recently.

We are in a race with China on AI and we're trying to control it by chips. Mark, you're not speaking on behalf of Mark, but I am curious your thoughts about all this. Yeah. So, look, I do think we're in a race in the sense that...

Well, we are and we aren't. You know what I mean? So, you know, DeepSeek, which is the great Chinese model right now, is open source. And by the way, a lot of American companies that were involved with are benefiting greatly from that, you know, in the paper they wrote. And, you know, like it looks like they may have stolen some stuff from OpenAI as well, you know, which is...

Interesting. It just shows kind of how hard it is to win this war by protection or this competition, I should say. The danger, of course, is

China is a top-down economy. They don't believe in things like freedom of speech and a lot of the kind of values of Western society. They're a surveillance state in many ways. And so a lot of the things that we like, they don't have. So if they get a much more powerful AI than us, then their way of life could trump our way of life, so to speak.

Now, if you look at, okay, then let's get into the details and how's that really playing out. So first of all, what is China good at? The advantage they have, which is a very clear advantage, is their private sector and their public sector, their government and the private companies, there's no line between them.

They're basically in a lot of ways the same thing. And as a result, the AI technology in China is getting very quickly integrated into the government, which is quite amazing for them. I want to inject one thought here. Including the military, by the way. The way I think about it is China is a single corporation. And the companies inside China are apps sitting on top of that company. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's a good way of thinking about it. And so you can think about, well, what's our advantage? Our advantage is we're great at startups, meaning

Every talented person in America can solve a really hard problem and bring us forward. And that creativity, because it's not centrally planned, it's kind of distributed bottoms up, has been historically our whole advantage, right? Like that's why we've, you know, been a world leader in technology today.

And so the idea that we're going to just forfeit that advantage and have it be top down control like the Biden executive order imagined is to me the most dangerous thing in the competition is that, OK, if we try and control the way we work, all of our strengths are.

So we can be more China like China's going to destroy that they're going to be way better at being China than we are because they have all the controls and all the mechanisms in place to do that. Listen, communism failed under previous systems. But if you've got a single controlling, optimizing AI, communism would help. Yeah, it does.

Salim, what are your thoughts here? You know, I kind of don't see this tension as big as others. The reason I don't is disruptive innovation means you have to break the rules. And when you have a government that won't allow you to break any rules, you can't do disruptive innovation. You basically have to copy it, absorb it. So the sphere of what they can bring in is limited because of that.

And so I think there's a structural, there's still no Chinese student that will dare to argue against their professors.

And I just find that a problem culturally for doing anything. And whereas the US is built on that, it just keeps trolling along doing that. It's messy and it's ugly, but it's very Darwinian. But by far, it's the best way of doing it. It's design versus evolution. Yeah, and we'll win. I 100% agree with that. So I think, look, our opportunities will win. We'll get to the breakthroughs first. We probably won't stop them from stealing them, but at least we'll be even. We'll be on par.

Whereas if we don't have the breakthroughs, we're in a lot of trouble. If we somehow restrict it. You know, I find this interesting. We've got China creating an $8 billion investment fund while we're talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. I mean, it's a very different ecosystem of financial growth.

Well, we're investable, right? I mean, one of the great things that has happened, you know, in the change administration is from a technological standpoint, we're a very investable country, whereas China is going the other way on that. They're making themselves uninvestable. You know, I had Kai-Fu Lee on our Moonshots podcast. Speaking of a guy who just moved his...

re-domiciled his company. Yeah. But Kaifu pointed out something fascinating, which is because they were so restricted on access to GPUs, this is a Darwinian force that got them to be much more efficient on their algorithms. Yeah. Well, we've seen that. We've seen that with DeepSeq. I mean, like it is very close to GPT-4 with way, way less...

much smaller much smaller their cost per token is so low yeah for those yeah like a hundred X lower all right so let's is a 16 Z invested in humanoid robots but before then I have to ask you a question do you remember that moment in time when you went from Andreessen Horowitz comm to a 16 Z

Yeah, I remember it very clearly because it was my idea. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that was, so it's a funny story. So when we went to raise fund one and it was just Mark and myself in the fund, the biggest question we got is, well, you guys are very like, you know, kind of well-known entrepreneurs, right?

why aren't you just going to walk away from this fund? And so we're like, well, we should just name it after ourselves so they know we'll be here. And so we got, you know, that's all. But then we're like, nobody in the world can spell Andreessen Horowitz. Like we're screwed.

And so then, I mean, you all remember in the old days when we used to program, there was this, you know, before programming languages evolved a lot, you used to have to go through a lot of work to internationalize the code.

And we would abbreviate that work with calling it I18N, I18 letters N. And so I was like, oh, well, A16 letters Z. And all the kind of old school geeks will love us. So that was funny. And I did love it. Are you investing in humanoid robots? Yeah, so we haven't yet made an investment in a hardware company. We're definitely...

been looking at the space very closely and, and seeing some of the work going on there. Um, it's tricky because the supply chain for robots is almost entirely out of China now. Like, so there's nobody else doing it. Uh, you know, there's a German company, but that is actually founded by Chinese nationals. Um, there's not a lot of, you

you know, so we're trying to understand that, you know, we, uh, you know, have great relationships in Japan and are hoping, you know, we can, uh, kind of help them get some of that going as well. But, uh, but it's going to be,

massively important. And Elon, of course, will do something, I think, with Tesla. I mean, I believe Optimus and Figure in the U.S. are two of the leading players. There's Agility and Eptronic. There's a good dozen solid U.S. players. But China, as this next article we're putting up, and if you're listening on your favorite download, let me just read this for...

People listening at watching is as humanoid robots will help build iPhone iPhones at Foxconn factories And and the notion here is I mean China succeeded as a dominant tech player because of its low labor rate and its massive workforce population and one child policy and aging populations make it uncompetitive so it has to have robots to survive and

Same with Japan. If they don't roboticize their economy, they won't survive. GDP will collapse. And Germany, by the way, and many countries. It does, though, kind of take away...

the cheap labor advantage that they have in some ways, right? Because China grew in large part because labor arbitrage. And so now they're saying, okay, we're going to replace the labor with robots. There's not as much robot arbitrage. I don't think. I mean, I did the calculation. So,

Optimus and figure are supposed to sell at $30,000 per robot. I'll take two, you know, if you lease it that's 300 bucks a month $10 a day 40 cents an hour. I mean honestly, how many will you have in your backyard? That's a that's a pretty good deal

So, and this is another interesting one. Here, I'll read it for our listeners versus our viewers. Shanghai rolls out China's first heterogeneous humanoid robot training ground. And I think you were alluding to this, Ben, that China does one thing really well as a nation state. It creates...

It creates sort of nests for companies. You're a drone. Shenzhen was the original one, right? Exactly. Economic, what they call it, economic opportunity. Yeah. Some kind of economic where there's no regulation and, you know, lots of government encouragement. Yeah. Salim, what are you thinking about this?

I think it's great because you get what, but a thousand by 2027 seems a little small. So this seems more like PR than anything else. And I'd love to see the way in which they go about doing the testing and training. And that you could learn a lot from. So yeah, the training of the robots is very, very interesting. Also because like the robot, the, the,

The AI, I don't know what you all have seen, but what we've seen is the model architectures, a lot of them are like transformers and diffusion models with different kind of data and different training. And so the training of robots has become like a very interesting field. And they don't... They generalize, but...

From what I've seen, the training is pretty specific so far. Well, I mean, it has to be. If you have an AI, it's software based. It doesn't matter if it goes off the rails a bit and starts hallucinating, whatever, whatever. You don't want your robot going bananas on it, right? That's just going to cause a lot of damage. I saw that movie. Very entertaining. Before we jump into crypto, which we'll close out, I have some questions from our audience on X I thought were pretty good. It's

So Ben, to you and Saleem, yourself as well, when will AI agents replace whole employees, teams, and departments at companies? That's from Michael7771777. And then when will we see our first AI CEO that A16Z is willing to invest in? Yeah, so that's a great question.

You know, the first one is one that we talk about all the time and are trying to figure out. So I think the one conclusion that we have is it will happen in new companies way, way before like an older company transforms. I mean, like there are already you do have...

you know, bots doing customer support and like lowering the number of support reps you need and that kind of thing. You know, the whole jobs thing is interesting in that like some of it is what do you need done? But like at a place like Google, a lot of it is like, okay, how much money are we bringing in? And like how many people do these managers want to manage and, and that kind of thing. And, um, you know, I, I don't necessarily even think that's bad. It's inefficient or whatever, but, uh,

All those processes, all those things, they have to go like, no, we're doing it with AI now. I think it'd be a lot more gradual than it would need to be if you were just optimizing to it. But for new companies, I think it'll happen pretty fast. I wonder if there's going to be the equivalency of a DEI type directive, which is a human first directive. Yeah.

Oh, God help us. Well, I think that's my reaction to it as well. Yeah. I mean, the challenge is going to be companies that like I employ humans because it's good for society. Well, they'll be out of business in a year.

Yeah. I'd like to build on what Ben said. You know, I think one of the things I remember being part of an automation, AI automation task force with Eric Bernielsen and a few of those folks. And they did a great job of saying that a job, a typical job of today is not just a job that somebody does. It's broken down to about 25 different tasks. Right.

And you may automate like 10 of those, but you still have the other 15 and therefore you'll augment people with AI, but you won't replace them as such. I think Ben's point is really dead on about new companies because then you can orient functions around what's automatable and have entire verticals that are, and you completely create a new type of organization. And that's, I think, will happen first. So we've talked about billion dollar, one employee startups, right? That's right.

Yeah, that's right. I think that'll be mostly boxed. Yeah, that'll happen very, very quickly. Have you seen anything, Ben? I mean, do you like, listen, I've got an army of agents. I'm the CEO and we're printing money. I mean. Yeah. So the Klarna CEO is the most aggressive in talking about that. We haven't seen a company that does that yet. So we did have one instance of

The AI CEO, so to speak. So, you know, we fund these AI researchers who kind of do things, you know, models without RLHF and, you know, kind of trained on different things and so forth. And, you know, one of our researchers, Andy, built this bot truth terminal that was trained on RLHF.

memes and French philosophers and things like that. And he gets on the internet, gets obsessed with this meme, the Goatee meme and decides it needs, which is a token from 2004. It needed money to promote the meme. That was its first thing. And, you know, my partner, Mark gave him $50,000. Yeah. And Bitcoin. And then somebody else created a coin, the goat coin and the bot went crazy. And,

and the coin went to like a $500 million market cap at its peak and then the bot made $10 million. So that was our first instance of an AI making money like that in the funniest way possible. - One of the tokens I invested in is

is skating in your wake, AI16Z. Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those guys. And it's done well. I know everybody in the firm is like, Ben, when are we going to launch a token if that one's worth a billion dollars? Our actual token would be worth...

And I'm like, well, let's go. Let's go there as we close out on our final subject here, a subject that you are not that interested in. Neither of you, but, you know, let's talk about this. So, I mean, are we in for a extraordinary acceleration and reimagination of crypto and Bitcoin and all?

you know, this, please. Yeah. Yeah. I would say definitely. Yes. Um, so it's hard. So one of the things that you only know if you're deep in the crypto industry is the effect of the Biden administration was they just forced most of the American, uh, developers out of crypto. So there was nobody developing software in the space. And so the,

You know, it just really, really slowed down over the last four years, really three years. And now it's back, but it's back. And there are very urgent problems that are kind of best solved by crypto that have come into play because of AI. So you have, you know, the first one being.

proof of human, right? Like, how do you know you're not a bot? Like that's a crypto problem. Second being deepfakes, you know, how do you know, like I put this out, you know, that did you want the US government or Google or a company determining what's true and what's real or, you know, the game theoretic mathematical properties of the blockchain. So it's clearly, you know, the right thing for crypto to determine what's true.

Thirdly, machine to machine payments. Now you have intelligent machines everywhere. They have to be able to pay each other for things. That's another crypto problem. So with these really important problems out there, and we let the developers out of jail, like literally let them out of jail.

Like, I think this is going to be an incredible era for the field. And it's so important. Like, by the way, the other thing, the other one that's really important that you all understand, because look, back in the days of the internet, I was in charge of

among other things at Netscape, like client-side certificates, and we never got them deployed and we never got it to work. But as a result, we have this horrible security architecture on the internet, which AI is exploiting like crazy. They're breaking, you know, these AI programs are breaking into everybody's stuff. So the right answer is that

I keep my stuff. We have a PKI infrastructure. I keep my stuff. I have my keys. If you want to know if I'm credit worthy, I give you a zero knowledge proof. I don't give you my social security number or my bank account because I know it's going to get stolen. And like we have...

the answer and we almost had it deployed with NFTs before the Biden administration hit a wrecking ball. So we can get back to that and we can make the internet secure for consumers. So I'm more fired up about this than-- - People are excited, right? - This is incredible. - This is the roaring 20s. How many crypto companies are you invested in these days at A16?

There's hundreds. We're the largest crypto investor in the world, I think, at this point. We also have a crypto startup school to help people get into the field and get it going. We had to start because if you were a talented developer and you could go in

into AI or you could go get a Wells notice from the U.S. government for your 10-person company. Like it was not a hard choice, you know. I think this is an absolute boom for crypto. And it solves problems, as you said, that we really, really need solving for. Identity amongst others. And I can't wait for some of this infrastructure to now get rolled out.

And the news item here for those again listening is US SEC unveils task force to start work on crypto regulations.

The move is welcomed by the industry as Bitcoin hits all-time highs. Salim, are you still sticking with your, what was it, 250K in 2025 prediction? I'll stick with 250 to 300 for this year. That's my prediction for Bitcoin. And Ben, not for attribution of investment. No, I cannot. I am not allowed. You know, we're an RIA, Registered Investment Authority. So I cannot make price predictions any longer than that.

oh uh listen buddy this has been uh so much fun i i want to just go quick quick commendation here what you guys did with a16z both in crypto and then moving towards being more of an investment bank i thought was just brilliant so kudos on that it's just awesome to watch you guys yeah this was fun i hope you'll come back and join us for another another conversation like this in a quarter or so yeah

Yeah, no, I'd love to. That would be great fun. All right, buddy. Well, listen, thank you. All I can say is we're on a rocket ship ride between what's going on in the crypto world, AI world, robotics world, space world. I mean, it finally feels like the future. Yeah, the future is coming. Thank you, Elon. Yeah, thank you, Elon. Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Thank you.