🦞AI Apps investing @ A16Z; A1111; Boards of Krea, Deel, Clutch, Titan, Arc Boats, Untitled, Happy Robot + more; If you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu
For years, we assumed consumers wouldn’t pay for software.
Now people are happily paying $200+/mo for products like Claude, Grok 4 Heavy and Gemini.
Not because they’re for everyone, but because they’re 100x better for someone.
The free tier is the funnel. The real product is
Here is my 2 cents on OpenAI buying Windsurf + appointing a "CEO of applications".
There is a concept that was popularized during the big telco era called "wholesale transfer pricing" which is effectively the ability of a supplier to extract margin from everyone else in the
A surprising source of alpha is *actually using* new AI products - if you haven’t tried R1, Operator, DeepResearch, Cursor, Krea, Notebook LM etc you’re at a competitive disadvantage to builders / investors / consumers that have.
Impossible Tiny Desk🔈
Obviously this is not actually Christopher Wallace nor is it NPR
Instrumentation from the very talented The Frank White Experience via YouTube
4o / Kling via @krea_ai / @hedra_labs / demucs
An open question was answered today - "what will the AI-native distribution channel be?"
It looks like ChatGPT will be that channel with 800M active users + the Apps SDK.
This is likely as important as Steve Jobs announcing the app store in March of 2008 ...
Deel has grown from a cold start to over $800M of revenue in just five years.
But how exactly did they do it? While they may look like a typical Silicon Valley story the truth is that @Bouazizalex and @shuooo have defied many SV conventions in their approach including
Bad board member archetypes:
1 - Too rich to care (doesn't do the work)
2 - Ideas guy (also doesn't do the work)
3 - Fake friend (doesn't tell the truth)
The best board members are high truth, low anxiety
Haters hate, builders build.
Big up to all the people working on good ideas that sound like bad ideas (the story of every startup).
Also, there is a special place in hell for people that work at startups and punch down on other startups. It’s the opposite of a founder mindset.
Introducing the Abundance Agenda.
We believe AI will turn luxuries into commodities - making consumers happier, healthier, and more productive than ever before.
And a new generation of AI-native companies will lead the way.
More from @a16z consumer 👇
