Latest Interviews

Ben Horowitz on the Global Race for Tech, Power, and Influence

Ben Horowitz, Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram, Jen Kha

Andreessen Horowitz is formally launching a global strategy that expands its operations beyond Silicon Valley to secure American technological leadership through dedicated offices in San Francisco and strategic partnerships in key allied regions like Japan, Mexico, and the Middle East. The firm leverages its unique government relations and industry networks to help portfolio companies navigate complex, non-transactional international markets, explicitly aiming to embed democratic values into global AI infrastructure while countering authoritarian tech models. By integrating capital with diplomatic and commercial alliances, the strategy focuses on accelerating the global expansion of U.S. startups and strengthening national security through private-sector innovation in defense and cybersecurity.

Mid-year review

Ralf Preusser, Mark Cabana, Adarsh Sinha

US economic resilience and Federal Reserve Chair Walsh's recent confirmation of a 2026 rate hiking cycle have triggered a broad revision of forecasts, shifting expectations from cuts to three hikes and pushing the US dollar to its strongest level in years. While major central banks like the ECB and BoE maintain unchanged or lower projections, analysts project the dollar to rally into Q3 2026 before facing a reversal in 2027 driven by fading US growth drivers and a global oil surplus. Concurrently, Bank of America Global Research has adopted a neutral-to-bullish stance on the Japanese yen due to improved balance-of-payments dynamics, even as volatility risks rise for the British pound ahead of upcoming UK fiscal events.

Signals & Noise: Why small & mid-caps are leading the 2026 market rally – and what’s next

Jill Hall

Bank of America economists project that U.S. small and mid-cap equities will outperform mega-caps in 2026 as earnings growth from manufacturing recovery and capital expenditure cycles drives returns, aided by a significant valuation gap where the Russell 2000 trades at 17 times forward earnings compared to the Russell 1000's 21 times. While these smaller indices face heightened sensitivity to Federal Reserve rate decisions due to greater leverage and refinancing risks, the firm anticipates steady rates through 2026 followed by cuts that could boost operating earnings by approximately 2% per quarter. Consequently, the investment strategy prioritizes less levered small-cap financials and energy stocks alongside maturing healthcare biotechs, focusing on companies positioned to benefit from reshoring trends and AI-driven efficiency gains.

We just launched Paxel!

Paxil is a locally executed tool that generates a five-dimensional builder profile analyzing how developers utilize AI coding agents like Cursor within their own Docker environments. Y Combinator encourages Startup School applicants to integrate this data into their submissions to identify high-potential "no-resume" talent by shifting evaluation focus from final outputs to specific building methodologies. Developed to aggregate global patterns on AI-assisted software creation, the service remains free for developers seeking actionable insights into their engineering workflows.

Must Read Research: Size of the Market, World Cup & Paper Goods, Energy Contingencies, and LatAm ...

Candace Browning

Market analysis highlights record U.S. equity holdings and a 40% S&P 500 concentration in Big AI firms, while the North American World Cup is projected to drive beverage demand and aluminum packaging premiums. Simultaneously, investors await oil price shocks below $65 per barrel despite robust long-term supply from the Permian and Canada, and Latin American macro stability hinges on the 2026 election cycle, particularly Brazil's ability to meet its fiscal surplus targets.

OpenAI: $2M in tokens to every YC company in the spring and summer batches.

OpenAI and Y Combinator have announced a coordinated initiative offering $2 million in non-cash token equity to startups in the Spring and Summer batches via an uncapped SAFE. This investment targets companies engaged in high-volume software factory patterns, aiming to compress eighteen months of engineering work into a fraction of the time by eliminating early-stage API costs. Recipients must apply by Memorial Day weekend to receive notifications by June 5th, with the credit fungible for any OpenAI usage including code execution and API consumption.

A changing Federal Reserve

Sphia Salim, Aditya Bhave, Mark Cabana, Alex Cohen, Kevin Warsh, Zviya Salim

Kevin Walsh's Senate confirmation hearing strategy prioritizes securing a mandate for steady rates by emphasizing AI-driven productivity gains and full employment while avoiding direct calls for rate cuts. Concurrently, market analysts anticipate a prolonged pause in monetary policy, with a baseline forecast of potential cuts in September and October contingent on softer labor data and fading tariff effects. Despite Walsh's intentions to unilaterally alter communication protocols and shorten the duration of the Fed's balance sheet, these structural shifts face significant hurdles in convincing FOMC colleagues or fundamentally altering the central bank's current trajectory toward a flat rate path.

Is Defense the Next Trillion-Dollar Category? | a16z American Dynamism Summit

Erin Price-Wright, Michael Duffey, Dino Mavrookas

Saronix is reshaping maritime defense by pivoting to software-driven autonomy that slashes labor requirements from millions to mere fractions while deploying an "IKEA" manufacturing model at its new Louisiana Port Alpha facility. This industrial strategy integrates commercial vessel production to ensure economic sustainability and rapid scaling, directly addressing Pentagon constraints on manufacturing capacity through private capital investment and streamlined acquisition policies. By fostering a robust public-private partnership, the initiative aims to establish a century-long national industrial base capable of supporting both defense needs and global energy dominance.

Innovation and Inflation: Twin Forces Reshaping Portfolios

Christian Mueller-Glissmann, Alexandra Wilson-Elizondo, Alison Nathan

Recorded on May 7, 2026, this market analysis addresses the 2026 stagflationary dynamic where traditional 60/40 portfolios fail to buffer against rising rates while the S&P 500 rallies on heavy technology concentration. Experts identify tactical opportunities in infrastructure and commodity carry strategies to mitigate momentum risks, though they warn that a potential labor market feedback loop or 30-year yield breakout could impose severe constraints on equity valuations. The discussion concludes by evaluating the low-probability risk of an AI positioning unwind alongside structural shifts in private credit leverage.

The $100 Billion Promise: How NASA is Returning to The Moon | Jared Isaacman on The a16z Show

Jared Isaacman, Morgan Brennan

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has outlined an aggressive strategy to secure a permanent lunar base by the end of the current presidential term, aiming to compress launch cycles from years to months through budget reallocation and workforce restructuring. The plan prioritizes in-housing core competencies like Mission Control while leveraging commercial partners SpaceX and Blue Origin for iterative risk reduction ahead of 2028 crewed missions. This approach reframes lunar exploration as a national security imperative that serves as a critical proving ground for future nuclear-powered operations on Mars and Europa.

Inference Chips for Agent Workflows

Current AI inference hardware fails to support agentic workflows, which rely on complex loops and tool calling, resulting in low GPU utilization and a critical market gap for specialized silicon. Strategic acquisitions by NVIDIA and innovations like Google's TPU v7 highlight the industry's urgent recognition that successful agentic AI requires native features for fast context switching, speculative decoding, and persistent memory caching across execution graphs. To address this, the speaker is actively seeking collaborators with deep expertise in both chip architecture and agent execution flows to develop the necessary compiler and hardware optimizations for this emerging paradigm.

Software for Agents

Projections indicate that the next trillion internet users will be AI agents rather than humans, yet current human-centric infrastructure creates slow and brittle interactions due to its reliance on visual interfaces. To address this, the market requires a new software foundation built on machine-readable protocols like APIs and CLIs, with successful startups emerging by designing "agent-first" architectures instead of retrofitting legacy systems. This shift creates a primary investment opportunity in building the foundational software infrastructure that enables autonomous agent discovery and usage, inviting founders to initiate contact if they are developing solutions for this specific need.

Counter-Swarm Defense

An incident involving Iranian drone swarms exposing the cost asymmetry and fragmentation of current defense systems has prompted Y Combinator to solicit counter-swarm stack solutions. These new initiatives aim to replace traditional interceptor models with software-driven, non-kinetic technologies capable of neutralizing thousands of coordinated units through sensor fusion and autonomy targeting. The resulting infrastructure is expected to function more like scalable cloud networks than conventional weaponry, fundamentally shifting the defense paradigm from weapon operation to distributed system management.

Company Brain

Enterprise AI automation is currently bottlenecked by the fragmentation of proprietary domain knowledge siloed within human memory and legacy systems, creating an urgent need for a "company brain" that extracts, structures, and converts this data into executable skills files. This dynamic infrastructure serves as a critical intermediate layer between raw enterprise data and reliable AI agents, moving beyond simple document chatbots to map specific operational workflows like refund handling and incident response. The speaker predicts universal global adoption of this technology for safe, efficient automation and invites startups to apply to Y Combinator to build this essential primitive.

Big Tech Opportunity

Lee Coppersmith, Mike Washington

Following a two-week ceasefire that triggered a rapid 2.5–3% market rally, institutional investors are shifting from defensive shorting strategies to re-entering secular winners, particularly within the artificial intelligence theme. While broad index volatility has reset, significant dislocation remains in mega-cap tech, where low valuations and suppressed positioning mirror conditions seen during the March 2020 crash, creating a specific opportunity for call option exposure. With earnings reports serving as the upcoming catalyst, client sentiment is pivoting toward resilience and upside potential as geopolitical risks recede into the background.