YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Rapel

lines on the record: 71
first: 2026-01-19
most recent: 2026-01-19
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“It's a very cultural thing, which is before you hire somebody, this is kind of happening in a lot of startups. It's not happening at GE, can you use AI for this job? In fact, Ben is the CEO of Injuries and Horvitz. Like he's asking that before we hire people here. And I think that mindset actually, if you do it correctly, like if you're Eve and you're like, oh, I'm just going to hire people that play golf with lawyers and that's my entire sales process and I'll never use AI for anything. And I'm just going to use NetSuite and I'm just going to use QuickBooks. Like that's not how these companies are actually orchestrated. Like they really understand the transformative power both on a cost side and a revenue side and they're transforming themselves internally.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we need a big strike, like what do we do? We call on the F35s. Mark's got a few of those. We'll have dinner at Mark's house. Ben will show, like, we all show up beyond just this team, but having a few other people that can kind of lead the charge on winning deals and have board gravitas is helpful. Of course, that is how we use Brian. That is how we use Andy. Like, I'm doing that too, largely. We want to get as much ownership as possible. We might need more people at a senior level not to find the deals, not to pick the deals. Of course, we don't want to just say like, hey, you're just a monkey that helps us win deals. But that is a very, very helpful thing to go do. And that's a capacity perspective.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“At my kids make fun. It's like, you just have coffee with people. How is that working? It's like you have to have a lot of coffee, you have to have a very high tolerance for coffee. And then you have to switch to alcohol like 5 p.m. It's a lot of work to do this stuff. But, you know, joking aside, you really need to be able to meet with everybody when it is a great lake vis- ⁇-vis how do we know, like, this is the eras of commission versus omission. We need to make sure there are five, this actually happened with the ERP space. If we get one of those wrong, not only do we lose our money because we were wrong, but we lose infinite money because we didn't actually invest in the right one. So we have to make sure that we are on top of all of these people and that our team is made up of experts that all of these entrepreneurs want to meet with. So I don't know if that answers your question, Jen, but I think the only thing that I would potentially add is when it's time to go win a superpower deal, like we all show up together. And by the way, like, you know, I jokingly call Mark the Air Force because like.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think the main thing that we often debate about just very candidly is what we want the most is probably more leverage as opposed to capacity. So we have the capacity to do lots and lots of deals. But if it's the best deal in the world, we need to assume that our counterparty is Roloff at Sequoia or is a top partner at Excel or Reid Hoffman at Greylock. Like all of these people are active. But if it's a great deal, the entrepreneur wants to talk to as many people as possible and will often be star struck by the person that started a multi-billion dollar company as they should. That makes a lot of sense. So I would say the one area that we might look to add to is somebody who probably has built a quasi-generational company that is still very, very hungry as an investor. This is not like you go, this is not a retirement job. This is an anti-retirement job. This will drive somebody crazy to the point where they want to retire because you have to work 20 hours a day sometimes. And the working 20 hours a day is sometimes...”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And kind of turn that second key. So it's a two key process. And again, much more conviction oriented. I know that doesn't perfectly answer the question, but we don't have a committee where everybody votes and then you have to have this many votes and then it's all this political horse trading. It's all right, especially for seeds where a lot of the younger people, we have been focused on doing seeds, where it's a little bit trickier. But for the smaller checks, which we are predominantly focused on, let's just defer to the person with high conviction, but make sure that our entire process is done end-to-end and that this is the expert. It came from the content. You know what you're talking about and so on and so forth.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we try to be highly, highly conviction oriented. And I feel like my job and David's job and Anisha's job is to make sure that the right process is followed. Because the mistake, the automatic mistake in venture capital is I'm old. I don't use social apps. Why would anybody want to send disappearing messages? That's stupid. Let's pass on that deal. And meanwhile, you have like the really, really smart not to be ageist, like 24-year-old who actually uses this tool every day, who knows the entrepreneur, and says, this is the greatest thing that I've ever seen. And then the old person, you know, I'm the old person here, you know, vetoes that deal versus the right process is, yes, we do have some out of a budget. And our investment committee is effectively like making sure that we believe very strongly that the process was followed, that you've met every competitor, that the work is top notch. And we will often defer to the individual who is in the arena. And our job is to just make sure proper.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And on the other side, you have people, as I mentioned, kind of the content generators. So, like Mark and Olivia. We want to make sure that if somebody leaves or somebody gets hit by a bus or whatever happens, we want to make sure that the entrepreneur experience is very good. If you think about the origin of the firm, the firm originally was the only people that we will have right checks or people that have run a company or started a company. And actually, I joined as part of that mandate because I, you know, for better or for worse, run a company and started the company. But then we realized that some of the best people to find deals, like Olivia is just non-parale in terms of her ability to find great deals and be an expert, as I mentioned, in voice haired. So it would be insane not to have her who's like the front of the sphere finding a lot of these great deals to be working with a lot of these entrepreneurs.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, next And this is the team that does that. So everybody, you know, again, we've got process interrupt, but we have a very, very prolific process calendar where we're publishing things, we're becoming experts in certain categories and trying to find entrepreneurs that are positive selection that are building the best things here. And we always see them. And like a good example of this is Rillet, where if you talk to Nick Kopp, who's the CEO of Rillet, Seema and Mark Andrusco just knew more about this category. We were in a very, very competitive series B process. Yeah, I mean, so if you look at this chart, so we have a bunch of people like what are the two things that a lot of companies need? They're like, okay, we need help on the accounting side because it's like, yeah, everybody wants to buy our product. I shouldn't say the accounting side, but just how do I scale a business and make sure that very important revenue is more than expenses? And also, how do I go build out a sales team?”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very hard to win these great deals. So, the best way of starting with this is to write this article, and we made a video about this as well, which has had like it's hundreds of thousands of views. It's pretty incredible. Death of a sales force, why AI will transform sales, Joe Schmidt and Mark Andrusco on our team wrote that. Everybody wants to talk to them. But ultimately, knowing what you're talking about really, really matters. Or death taxes in AI. We've covered the gamut on everything around taxes. What about companionship? What about we do something that we just came up with? What are the top 50 enterprise applications, the top 50 consumer applications? We often get somewhat of a pejorative joke. I think it's a compliment. We're a media firm that monetizes with venture capital, but there's a method to this madness. And the method is it's helping us find deals. It's helping us pick deals, and it's helping us win deals.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For my wife and children's perspective, like a weekly occurrence right now, where it's like, I got to cancel this, I have to have dinner with this entrepreneur who has discovered that the fountain, not of youth, but of perpetual emotion. Or so they think. So go meet with them. That's the interrupt part. The process part is like, you know, I'll give you a good example. Somebody is going to out Salesforce Salesforce not for the hostages that they have, but is going to build the greenfield version of Salesforce. Because how is that possible? Everybody hates using Salesforce. There is a new company that's going to do this better that's going to be AI native. How do we make sure that we are adept at finding, picking, and winning and supporting that investment? Well, we believe in adverse selection versus positive selection. So a very inexpensive deal that has been hanging around the hoop for six months, that's probably bad. We don't want to meet with them. We want to meet with the best company if it's the best company, every other venture firm also wants to meet with the best company, obviously. They're going to send out their big guns to go try to win that deal.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is why we see the aggregators winning, and it's an important trend and sort of investing principle for consumer AI. The key thing, I mean, everybody's heard this framework before, but our job is to find, pick, and win deals. And then once we win deals to help these companies actually achieve their objectives and most importantly, don't screw them up by giving them bad advice and telling them what to do. The CEO knows what to do, and we're there to advise and consent. But the way that we do this is we try to be the leader and the expert on every market. We're putting out more benchmarks. Like there's actually a really cool benchmark that we're coming out with. It's like an AI productivity benchmark. So for all these different categories, actually, this is pretty cool. So everybody on the team, and the way that I would kind of phrase this is we have a process interrupt job. So our interrupt is there's a very, very incredible deal, like incredible, incredible, incredible. Like, let's go meet with them, drop everything. This is unfortunately.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is an important slide as well and an important concept because a very fair question is well, why aren't either labs or sort of big tech who have real model efforts like Google going to win it all? Well, the reason is that in many categories being an aggregator of models is actually preferable to consuming just a single model. And the metaphor that we're all familiar with here, of course, is airlines. It's much more useful to search for a flight from SF to New York on kayak because I can look across the inventory of every airline versus just going to Delta United and looking at their inventory alone. The same thing is true in categories like vibe coding or creative tools where you really want access to all of the models. And the reason for that is the models each have their respective specialization so they're not exact substitutes. You want to work with them all. You want a single pane of glass and the labs and big tech companies can sort of definitionally only use their own first party models.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is then sold directly to consumers. Of course, OpenAI and ChatGPT are formidable, but they simply don't have the data that Slingshot has. And as a result, Slingshot's able to provide a differentiated and high-priced product, and it's working well. So each of the sort of observations Alex made is absolutely playing out in consumer AI, and we're very consistent in our approach to the three. Do you want to go back one?”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ambitious. They're a model provider, and they have both consumer and enterprise SKUs. And because they vertically integrate, they're able to really go after this opportunity, create the category in a very short period of time. Finally, proprietary data. Alex talked about proprietary data. It's actually near and dear to my heart because I worked at a large scale consumer company that was based on proprietary data, which is credit karma for many years. So I've seen this playbook and it works extraordinarily well. The area that we've actually seen it applied in one of our investments is a company called Slingshot. Slingshot is an AI therapist. How do they collect their proprietary data? Well, they actually go to existing therapists and they provide an AI scribe, a note taker, and the note taker takes notes while those therapists counsel their patients. It then uses a generated notes to train a foundation model, and the foundation model trains a consumer product called Ash.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, this is the application of all the categories that Alex outlined to consumer AI. It's the exact same pattern. So the first and very important one is traditional categories are going AI native. This is happening. So if you look at Photoshop, it's a fantastic business. Well, what do you do if you're a young designer coming up in their career? You want to use the AI native Photoshop? The AI Native Photoshop is Korea. That's over 18 months. So it's a fabulous product and it has all the AI primitives built in. And it's the one that's being chosen by people that are adopting a first design tool in our early in their career. So this sort of transformation of existing categories is definitely happening. The second is category creation. 11 Labs is a fabulous example of this, this sort of market for voice and audio models really didn't exist five years ago. There was no, I mean, perhaps people doing voice actors and voice dictation as a niche market. It just wasn't interesting. 11's done something much more.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I want to turn it over to Anish, because all of these things that we're talking about, they also apply to consumer. So maybe with that, why don't we tell why and how this applies to consumer? Great. Actually, if we're going to do that, why don't we skip ahead of slide and then we'll come back to this.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Very national. You could buy one and then that is your entry point. And it's kind of an opportunity cost, but do I hire salespeople to go sell? Or if the best companies have hostages and not customers, do I buy some company that is stagnant and even shrinking because they don't know how to respond to AI? Because by the way, all of these companies, like every debt collection company, like they'd be crazy not to look into doing AI on their own. So it is this battle between startup and incumbent. But there is an interesting opportunity. And we've done one in the MSP space managed service provider for IT because a lot of IT now is not, hey, come into my law firm office with 50 people and fix my print.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Five blue chip clients. I'll buy this company for three times EBITDA, and now I'll transform it with AI. And now I don't have to buy a second one. I don't have to buy a third one. I don't have to buy a fourth one. I can just say I have better collections rates. I have five blue chip customers that love me. And I'm cheaper. So do you want to be lazier and richer? You're like, yes. I already have the customers to back this up. And I can now onboard a thousand customers into the existing acquisition that I made. That's actually quite interesting. So the question is, which one are you doing? And I think we're going to go roll up 100 dental clinics or we're going to make it better. We're going to roll up dermatology. I have a friend that rolls up dermatology clinics. It's like, I just don't think we're good at that game. And the problem is that dermatology clinics are like just because I bought one in San Carlos, it doesn't help me like do anything in Florida. I got to go buy more there. Same with accountants versus debt collection.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have like all sorts of cost synergies. You can now onboard 10,000 more clients. The way that you would have to play that game is you buy one accounting firm, you like integrated for nine months, then you go buy another accounting firm, then you buy another accounting firm. And yes, is there value at the end? Absolutely. But you probably have to buy 200 accounting firms and then you're left with a pretty interesting business. And there's probably a big competitor called, you know, mid-market P who's done this for 500 years, not years, but has done this 500 times and they're going to do a better job of that playbook. On the other hand, there is a strategy that we think is very interesting, which is instead of having a sales scheme, you buy one. So, you know, take the example of debt collection. I could buy a publicly traded debt collector that has lots of people that doesn't do a very good job, that doesn't follow lots of laws. And I want to get started somehow. I built this great tool that I believe in. I want a dog-fooded. I don't have any customers right now. I know I'll buy a company that has declining revenue, but.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so I read an article about this two years ago. I called it Barbarians at the Gate, but where the barbarians fell with an AI and homage to the RJR and Obisco deal in the 1980s and a book that was written about that. I mean, I think it's very interesting is what we're great at is like here are two people that are going to change the world. They don't know how they're going to do it. We're buying it out of the money call option. There are a lot of private equity firms out there that are like, we're good at firing everybody and moving people to the Philippines and doing this and doing that and all of these kinds of things. This is a big thing that private equity is looking at. At the same time, we do have a couple of bets in this space. And it's very, very smart entrepreneur. But there is never a question of can I get more clients as an accountant because I can't hire more CPAs to do tax returns? It's like the hardest part is to get the clients. So you have to go to the Chamber of Commerce meetings. Like it's just very, very hard to buy one accounting firm and then by virtue.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is this LexisNexis information? But LexusNexis, like this would be kind of bullishness for an incumbent, probably can do a lot of things if they're the only ones that have that information.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It to me, and I don't have to go pay for an ancestry.com account, but it's kind of useful and easier to just do it with ancestry.com than to go fly to Utah. So sometimes just the ease of going to somebody who's already digitized and put this information in an easier to digest form, that's one of the reasons why people go to LexisNexis. That's one of the reasons why people go to a lot of these providers because sometimes they're the only game in town. Sometimes they're the best game in town. But increasingly today, they're the ones that can actually give me a finished product. And actually, it saves the end customer money as well because I don't really want to buy Lexus Nexus data. I just want to know if I should accept or reject this transaction. And there's a lot of enrichment that I do of the data. There's a lot of workflow. There are a lot of analysts. Like if I'm a financial services company, I hire a fraud analyst to go tell me what's going on. And the raw vegetable that I need to figure this out.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are now looking for sometimes it's like existing companies where it's like they don't know what's going on, they can just buy that data. Those existing companies, if they're run by an entrepreneurial CEO, like they realize, wow, I can make my business 10 times better and we're going to go invest in those. And then lastly, I'm just going to buy some antenna from Amazon and like listen to Malaysian Airlines flights or whatever and then aggregate this information that's completely free, but it's not free past tense, right? Like the number of subscribers that Mr. Beast had five years ago, like the number of subscribers today, you just go to YouTube, you see exactly what that is. If I wanted to see what that was 10 years ago, that's what is actually proprietary. So sometimes the proprietariness, if you will, everything is free. Anybody can go collect this stuff that's free. The value only accrues over time. And there are a lot of examples of this. Like, you know, I can go to the Mormon church and get my genealogical information. And they'll probably get.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is a great question. So, this is like VLEX is a good example of this, right? Like VLEX could have sold their data to Harvey. Instead, they realized this exact point. It's like they should just be in this business of selling directly to they shouldn't be selling to Wilson Cincinni anymore. Or if they are, they should dramatically change the pricing of their product. They should change their pricing strategy. And instead of saying, we're going to charge this tiny subscription fee and allow so much of the value creation to occur elsewhere, we're going like open AI, open AI charges very, very little per million tokens. We're just going to consume that and then enrich everything that we have that is proprietary to us and then go sell that directly. So it's a good question, but I think the point from an investment lens is we, a lot of entrepreneurs.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I give more credit for like, I think apparently what happened was somebody was like, you know what? You know where the money is? It's like that's like that movie that graduate. It's like plastics, right? Somebody was like took the Michael Jackson aside. You know where the money is? Back catalogs. Good point. I have a lot of money. I'm going to go buy the Beatles back catalog and then I'll make money from it because this, you know, CDs are going to come out and streaming is going to come out. And there are so many different ways of monetizing this.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's really one of these rare situations where it's good for both. Whereas I think mobile, like most people have BlackBerry was great. iPhone was stupid. That's why the incumbents didn't, you know, that's why didn't booking.com build Airbnb? Why didn't I know taxicab company build Uber? It's just most people thought this was stupid. Everybody thinks that this is a good idea. Because of course intelligence, like, you know, AGI and everybody's pocket is a very good idea. Nobody can argue against that. It's more of the existing incumbents. This is why I'm just bearish on the brownfield opportunity on the bingo board. I'm very, very bearish on, I'm sorry, I'm very bullish on the brownfield opportunity for walled gardens and for kind of software that does the job of labor.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like you have so many, like it's this infinite number of things where it's like, I find something where everybody would want this at $5, but it is currently only sold for $10, therefore nobody wants it, therefore it's not a business. Wait a minute, AI allows me to sell it for $5.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're like, cloud is stupid. Most potential customers were like, cloud is stupid. It's not safe. I don't trust it. I want to host things like you'd have your entire IT staff is like, I don't trust that stuff. So the existing incumbents did not build cloud providers. People soft did not say, let's go build PeopleSoft Cloud. They have it now. But that's where workday came from. They were like, we're going to build this. It took a while for the business for everything to catch up. I'm very, very bullish on incumbents. I hope I can say that because I don't think that I think NetSuite is going to figure out 15 different ways to monetize with AI. I think that QuickBook Intuit has this goldmine on their hands where they're just going to start charging per collections that they make to all of their existing hostages that use QuickBooks. But that still does not mean that you don't have these greenfield opportunities, you don't have these new data opportunities. Like there's so many new opportunities that have popped up, largely because of this value cost.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open evidence they didn't create new medical journal entries. They were just like, hey, let's go distribute to doctors. We know that doctors are really interested in this stuff. We know that all of the information is in these old medical journals and the back catalog is very, very, very useful. Like it turned out, like, I think of all the things that Michael Jackson did, right and wrong, probably the most ripe from an economics perspective was buying the back catalog of the Beatles. Or like he bought a big chunk of that. That ended up being worth a lot because until the copyright runs out, like Beatles catalog, a lot of people like listening to Beatles, that's going to become more valuable. So you can buy existing stuff that is already out there that already has a business. And that's like open evidence, or you can try to create something net new, which is kind of more of the Ask Leo. So I don't know if that perfectly answers your question. But my view on everything that's happening in AI right now is it's one of these weird situations where it's very different than cloud, where most on-prem software providers.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dollar business like VLEX after struggling for 26 years. Why is it now $100 million business? It's because you can deliver the finished product. And of course, like there are, I would argue like a lot of the old things that were out there, like ancestry.com is a valuable company. They digitized LDS data and a lot of people want to figure out where they came from and there's an NBC show that says, you know, what are your roots and people like watching that and all these kinds of things? You know, it's a valuable company. That would be one where it's like I would be hard pressed to say, how do you make that dramatically better with AI? Maybe it's like I want to say, hey, please, I'm about to die. I want to figure out which one of my errors to leave all of my money to. Please email them and set up dates with me so I can figure that out. And like that's the value add that you do with this proprietary data. This is why I'm an investor, not an entrepreneur anymore. I'm out of good ideas. But that would be something where there is an existing data store. Maybe I license that.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think there are two ways of thinking about this. Number one is in the case of the used blenders on eBay or the manuals, like there just wasn't a company before charging for access to the subscription of like, I'm going to sell you per data article that I've digitized or I'm going to charge you $20 a month, like probably not that interesting. But now if you have this finished product that you can charge $1,000 for versus like the raw material that you charge a dollar for, maybe now the business is tenable. So one category is you just find a new data source and there's a reason why like in venture capital school we learned to always ask why now. Like if this is such a great idea, why didn't this exist 10 years ago? Great answer for Uber when it came out. There was no iPhone and no GPS transponder in every device. Once you have that, now you can have Uber. The why now for some of these more esoteric things is it's kind of like a little bit of a why now like why isn't this a 20 million”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“County recorder's office, and you can see who owns what property record. But you have to go to the county recorder's office to find that. It's all free, but you can digitize that, make that available, and then add AI to that. And this sounds like, oh, just add AI, it's much more valuable. The reason why is because you're saying I have something that nobody else has. There's a reason why people are buying this before, because they're trying to create something that is of higher value at the end, and you can now do this. So go to every museum. Actually, I just talked to an entrepreneur who found every old manual. This is a great example. Found every old manual for like blender is made in the 1980s, 1990s. You can buy this stuff for pretty much nothing on eBay. Where would you find a manual for an old blender in 1999? I have no idea, but apparently eBay is where you find it, but it just shows these walled gardens that you can build with data. You could have built this before. You could build a 10 or 100.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's hard to say where we're going to find these things, but the most compelling of the ones that we found are it's like all the information is free, just like ADSB flight transponder data, that's free. But you find something that just like it wasn't worth that much before because like what do you do with flight data? What do you do with who is record data on the internet? I actually talked to an entrepreneur recently. He was like, oh yeah, you know what? I like to figure out historical subscriber data of YouTubers. It's like YouTube doesn't publish like how many subscribers Mr. Beast had on August 4th, 2017. Like where would you find that? There's some company that collates that, collects that, and that's just they're just selling the data. It's not available anywhere else. And these are some, we just published a post. I would encourage people to read it on like, you know, the Waldgardener, we called it Fruits of the Walled Garden. All of these things, like creative archives, logistics, like you go to some.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Company kind of hates their procurement department because, on the one hand, the procurement department is supposed to save the company money by making sure that some rogue employee doesn't buy expensive widgets at an overpriced price from an unapproved vendor. But on the other hand, they introduce all sorts of complexity into the process. So imagine that I've got a contract from Deloitte to give me AI and somehow revitalize my company. Who has 50 other contracts from Deloitte where I can understand what I push back on? Like that is actually very, very useful proprietary information.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To know Spanish case law and case Andreessen Horowitz goes and invest in the company and needs to figure something out. So VLAX would aggregate and digitize this information, sell it to law firms and other people that need legal information, pretty high gross margin, but very, very low scale and predominantly European in Spain. Then they were like, you know what? We should add AI to this. And apparently a quintuple their revenue. And why would it quintuple their revenue? I might love Harvey. I pay for Harvey. Amazing product. But if I want to have a finished memo for my client at 7 a.m., I can't get a paralegal to go do this. And I know that it needs to incorporate some element of Spanish legal data. Like VLX is my only solution. And instead of charging $2 a month or $2 an article or $200 a month or whatever they can charge for the raw material and what Aspleo does is it's a procurement product. So if I'm a company and every company, every employee at every”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Two-thirds of doctors in America use this thing pretty much every week. Open evidence is exactly like ChatGPT. The interface looks exactly like ChatGPT, except you know who has exclusive license to the New England Journal of Medicine and every other medical journal out there, open evidence. So if I tore my Achilles, if I want to read about what I should do, all of the evidence-based care out there, I can go to ChatGPT. It's moderately useful. There's no reason not to do that. Open evidence is so much better because they're the only ones that actually have. They've built In this case they found all the data they found all the unique vegetables out there. They convinced the vegetable seller not to sell it to any other restaurant and they have a restaurant that delivers the whole thing where there's a 26 year old company called VLEX, incredible company that just got bought. The CEO was telling me that the origin story of this company, he's from Spain. He bought up every single legal record in Spain. And why would you want to buy up legal records? Because I don't know. Wilson Cincinnati wants to.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They should probably charge $2,000 for that, which might mean, I mean, maybe this makes you nervous. We might need one less analyst because now we have a finished product because what we don't want is we don't just want a subscription to pitchbook data. We actually want to do something with it. We want to somehow take that vegetable if you follow my metaphor and turn it into a finished meal. One of my favorite examples here is domain tools. Domain tools does, they have one thing which is very interesting. They run a who is query, which says who owns a particular domain name. This company has been around for a very, very long time. If I want to figure out who owned a domain in 1998, there's one place to go, and that's domain tools. So like this model has been around for a very, very long time before AI. Very, very large companies exist in this space. When you add AI, it makes a tremendously more valuable. So I'll give you three examples that hopefully kind of hammerson's point home. So there's a company called Open Evidence, which if you use it, apparently.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pitchbook somehow has that, or Alexis Nexus knows this, CoStar knows this for real estate data. Bloomberg knows this for all sorts of exotic financial stuff. In many cases, it's all free. Ancestry.com built their entire data mode by buying genealogical records from the Mormon church. All of this stuff is not available on ChatGPT. It's not available on Anthropic. Of course, they can license it. But the reason why I mention this is what do you do with flight aware data or what do you do with Bloomberg data? Or what do you, like, I'll tell you what I do with pitchbook data. I hire an analyst and I say analyst, go write me a memo about this company called Eve and compare it to every other company in the legal space that had ever done something before. And Pitchbook just sells us a subscription for here's every single series B of legal tech companies since 1992. Okay, that's valuable. They can charge $20 or $200 or whatever they charge per month for that. What would be more valuable is saying because they're the only ones that actually have that piece of information.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'll pick an example on this little bingo board here of Flight Aware. I'm not sure how many people have heard of Flight Aware. How do they get their data? And their data, by the way, what is their data? There's nothing proprietary about it. It's all public. You can buy an antenna on Amazon to receive. It's called ADSB transponder data. So every single airplane after that Malaysian plane went missing has a little transponder on it that shows its height, its speed, all of these different attributes on it, beams it down to planet Earth. Antennas can pick this up and figure out this tail number is at this place. I can buy one. It's free. Flight aware, I think they have something like 100 antennas around the world. They pick up all this information and they can chart. That's a piece of data. Like I can ask ChatGPT that. They don't know that. Only flight aware knows that. Or pitchbook does this for funding rounds. Like who knew what the series B price of a company in 1992 was?”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Farm and we're farming tokens. And we're going to sell tokens. We're going to charge for tokens to all these people out there that are building applications. So it plays out exactly as I talked about, like OpenAI is an infrastructure company. We invest in all these application companies. But then OpenAI is like, you know what? We should put some restaurants on our farm. These a lot of people come to our farm. Let's just have restaurants here. And then all these restaurant turns are like, wait a minute, like, you're selling me vegetables. Now you're competing with me. Like, that's not good. The reason why I bring this up as an example is because it actually is happening and it's a blueprint for how to potentially deal with a world where the source of the raw material is actually what is rare. So let's go to the next slide and I'll show you like I'll make this a little bit clearer. But as I mentioned, this is kind of like the world's second oldest profession. There are lots of cases where I kind of construct some physical property. I build a wall around it and I charge you for access to my property. You can do this in the data world as well.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The financial services, we're going to do lending to restaurants, we're going to do payment processing for restaurants, and we make it very, very sticky because it's an entire software platform, and there's no way for first data or global payments or any of these companies that traditionally do software to go append, sorry, that traditionally do payment processing to append some kind of software solution. So that's why Toast, you know, people got Toast wrong. It's a very valuable company in a public company today. I think the same thing applies for adding in labor. Like, it's not just I do labor and then somebody does labor for a penny cheaper. I need to build some kind of system of record for you, some kind of vertical operating system for you so that you can't just go switch out for the cheaper player. And maybe this is a good way to kind of go into theme three here, which I'm very excited about. And I call this the walled garden. And this is really important today because if you look at, like, take a metaphor here where this amazing company called OpenAI shows up and they're like, hey, we're a vegetable.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, this is the thing that we don't know. I mean, like, we obviously have many examples of vertical software companies that have become very big. So Service Titan is a vertical software company. Mind Body is a vertical software company. Toast, that's a very large vertical software company. Toast is designed for restaurateurs to run their business, to integrate with DoorDash, to pay their wait staff, to do like everything around operating a business.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is not, I mean, this was my number one question. When Ari came in, I was like, well, how are imagine there's a company called Talient and a company called Zalient. Why is it that Salient is going to be Talient and Zalient? And Ari actually had, Ari, the CEO, had a very, very good answer to this, not to like, you know, he looked up on ChatGPT. How do I answer this difficult question from a VC? But again, modes matter. We know exactly what script to say. This is an example of kind of a data mode. It's like because we've done millions of phone calls, we know exactly what to say. We have lower latency on every single statue that comes out from, like, they actually have a very, very good product that ingests every single law, like as it is even proposed as a statute in all 50 states. Sometimes it's at the county level. Like they're doing all of these things that make it so much harder to compete so that they will not lose a deal. You know, most matter more than ever because you're able to create software so much more readily.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Churn rate per employee. So it's just not because they're firing people. It's just like nobody wants this job. So they now say, I will do it for you with software. I will give you a system of record. I will make sure that we're scraping every single new federal and state statute because what you say in Missouri is very, very different than what you have to say in California is very different than what you say in Iowa. We're going to do all of these things. No human can keep that in their head at the same time. It's like, all right, I'm talking to David. Shoot. What do I say? He's from Santa, he's somewhere in California. Oh, wait, but actually he's traveling to Kansas. I don't know what to say. Like Salient knows exactly what to say and it knows how to say it in 21 languages. And that's why the collection's rate is 50% higher. So like this whole category of like we are going to make you more money and it's going to cost you less. It's a very, very hard thing to move away from. The key question for us, which I think is a very good question, is how do we make sure that we're backing the right one and how do we make sure that salient”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do this, or you can't hire humans for this. The key thing with Salient is not that they're saving you money. The key thing with Salient is that they collect 50% more. This is the key thing because ARIA, the CEO, he kept pitching, like, I'm going to save you money. I'm going to save you money. I'm going to save you money. People like saving money. But if you go to somebody and say, I will collect 50% more revenue for you every single month, and I will make sure that you don't go to jail because none of these people that you hire that aren't very well trained that have to listen to this horrible music for four hours a day, they don't say something that they're not supposed to say. I can make sure that AI doesn't do any of these things. Like that's why that company is growing so explosively. It really is, it's much more about the value generation. I mean, yes, the cost is much lower. And this is one of the questions around like, how do they figure out how to charge for the product? They went to their first client had a $50 million a year call center with, I think, a 40 to 70% annual.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me at 2 a.m. I would hire somebody at 4 p.m., but not at 2 a.m. It's just the value to cost equation is inverted. Any kind of a great example of this is like the salient, yes, they are going to people that collect, it's called auto loan servicing. So you go to an auto lender, they have to go make sure that they're collecting on their bills or if the person's in a car accident and the insurance carriers that are supposed to pay you, how do I make sure that that insurance carrier is paying me on time and writing the check to the right person in this case because I have the lease, like the need to write it to me and not the actual in their actual name, how do I do all of that kind of stuff? I would hire lots of people. I would train lots of people. A lot of these people hate their jobs because it turns out people yell at them all day and say, I'm not paying you back for this car or the insurance carrier keeps you on hold for four hours and that whole music is just terrible and you're going to want to kill yourself. You have to listen to that 12 hours a day. Like all these reasons why humans don't want to.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Than their cost. It just does not make sense. But if you can now hire AI effectively, you can hire AI where the amount of value that like the cost has just gone down, the value has stayed the same, you're going to hire a lot of AI, you're not going to get rid of a lot of humans. And if anything, we never notice this is so hard to predict, but what will humans do? I mean, like there was no job of product manager 75 years ago at a software company or designer. All of these jobs that exist today, they wouldn't have made any sense to somebody in 1800. So it's hard to kind of pontificate on that, but a lot of the things that we're seeing, they're not displacing people per se. I mean, I know it sounds pithy to say software is eating labor, but really software is augmenting labor or it's like all of these people that I can't hire, whether there's a job shortage or a skills shortage or whatever, I can now deploy people that will answer a phone. I would just never hire somebody to go answer the phone.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It has to be very, very sticky. It has to have some unique competitive advantage, and data is often one of those. So if I work with every plaintiff law firm or actually why don't I go to the next slide here and I'll just talk about the salient a little bit. Sorry. So salient is in the eve mold. And I know we also had a question about what is the societal impact of everybody losing their job. I don't think that's actually going to happen very quickly. 98% of Americans were farmers in 1789. And obviously the tractor made some of them unemployed and made them do other things. But most of what we're seeing candidly is not about eliminating work. I mean, I do think that the three and a half million people that drive trucks at some point in time, like we have a better solution than the truck driving human. You have AI doing that. It's like you have cost here. You have value here. You would never hire a human where they are producing less value.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Why don't we come back to that one at the end? Because I think hopefully what you'll get from it's not like we're just investing in companies that do labor and then The end. Modes matter, in fact, more than ever. Because the one thing that's happened in software is once upon a time there was a company called WordPerfect. And WordPerfect kind of like kept growing for a very, very long time or once upon a time there was a company called Visikelk. And then whoever had the most distribution said, I should do that, copies it. And obviously, you know, WordPerfect is toast, VisiCalc is toast, Lotus 123, which was the one that beat VisiCalc. That became toast. But it would normally take five years for the bread to become toast. And there was a very, very high level of prolific speed. I mean, now, you know, Anish, David and I, and Jen can go build a software product. We can vibe code if you've heard that term. We can go build software very, very quickly. What makes it actually increases the peril for anybody who's built a software product that has an enormous margin pool? Your margin is my opportunity. Well, I can vibe code against your opportunity.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clients, you know, the smarter that the product becomes, and it actually kind of reinforces that loop. It becomes sort of, you know, you're showing up to a knife fight with a gun, right? And so soon it's going to become an essential tool for any plaintiff attorney to operate with. And that just becomes very difficult to displace. So it's not so much the AI-ness in the voice or the ability to summarize documents. It's actually in becoming kind of the system record, this end-end workflow.”
2026-01-19 · a16z Podcast · The AI Opportunity That Goes Beyond Models · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source