This content first appeared in the May 2024 Fintech newsletter. If you’d like more commentary and analysis about news and trends from the a16z Fintech team, you can subscribe here. It didn’t take much to convince Varun Krishna, the Chief Executive Officer of Rocket Companies and Chief Executive Officer of …...Read More

Then, they need to figure out a way to project that brand up above the venture community, like a Bat signal calling for the best founders to come and pitch them. Articulation of a focus area accomplishes a few critical things for an investor: Inbound content marketing for deal flow—because …...Read More

The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources …...Read More

As former developers and product managers, we’ve lived the grueling dance between designers and developers, where questions such as “Is this design technically feasible?” and “Can you add another screen for this step?” take place in every meeting. All too often, this aspiring creative exchange resulted in a Jira-filled, time-consuming …...Read More

Here’s a math puzzle: A good salesperson can sell 50 widgets a year, earns $100,000 a year, and will not take a pay cut. A company has an amazing new widget that needs to be sold (people will not find it on their own/aren’t looking for it). Prospective customers of …...Read More

“Layer 2” rollups are computer networks that are designed to help scale “layer 1” blockchains such as Ethereum — and they’ve been bustling with activity recently, especially since Ethereum implemented its scaling-related EIP-4844 (“Dencun”) upgrade in March. Jesse Pollak, who is Coinbase’s head of protocols and who founded and leads …...Read More

For consumer products, the rubber hits the road at retention. It’s the lifeblood of an app and the hardest metric to move, as I learned viscerally during my time running the growth team at Snap. To attract repeat users, companies can’t just fill a product with the latest and greatest …...Read More

The Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) team is often asked by portfolio founders how exactly cultural leaders can be a game-changing asset for their companies. On the flip side, athletes, entertainers, and C-level executives also ask what they should expect when investing in technology startups and working with founders looking to …...Read More

In the year and a half since ChatGPT launched a new AI wave, a crucial shortfall has dominated headlines: the insatiable demand for GPU computing resources. But when we talk to cloud leaders and data center operators to understand why there’s a compute crunch, it’s clear that access to power …...Read More

Justin Thaler is Research Partner at a16z and an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Georgetown University....Read More