YouSaid · the spoken record

Anish Acharya

lines on the record: 119
first: 2026-02-12
most recent: 2026-02-12
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

“Okay, well, let me tell you something personal to myself, which is I'm a longtime transcendental meditation person. I've been meditating since I was a little kid, 25, 30 years, and it brings me this, you know, this peace and joy that maybe you see a little bit of my personality. And I think that the idea that everybody could have a little slice of that peace and joy is something that is now becoming more and more possible because I think that with the technology we have, it's going to take away a lot of the rote parts of life. It's going to give people access to more of these types of relationships that they find so fulfilling. So I think just the kind of the NPS of the human experience for lack of a better phrase is on the way up. And like, I love that for my fellow person. That's what I'm excited about, Pal.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So for me, specifically like ASH medical, I think we'll have amazing breakthroughs in treatments like multiple sclerosis, which my mama has, which has previously been like, oh, like bad luck. I think we'll have real breakthroughs there, which is super exciting for me.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, yeah. Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. The hinge thing. Yeah. Yeah, so I think that people are looking at the point and they say that we're overhyping it, but they're not looking at the slope, which is being underhyped. And I think that's correct, right? The point multiple as an individual data point is probably overhyped right now. But what it points at directionally is underhyped.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's just so damn cool. Just to talk about it, to observe it, it's shallow. And, you know, biology called it robot dogs barking at each other. And I think that there's an element of truth to that, right? Any humanity they have is just the sort of sparks of the humanity that it's taken from the context of its owners. I think though what is very interesting is the idea that we can have these digital twins, you know, these echoes of ourselves going and interacting with other people. I mean, we were talking about dating downstairs, right? And sort of how the dating apps are a mess and probably not durable in their model. Like you could imagine a world in which I train married, but if I was not, I'd train a little digital twin of myself and other people would do the same and they would go have pseudo dates and then they would come back and matchmake us and say like, hey, we had this virtual date and it went kind of well and maybe you guys should hang in person. So now we're able to kind of replicate and scale ourselves.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The last 18 months is like, hey, maybe the early leaders will just be the leaders, and over the next 12 months, I'm going to pay a lot of attention to who the early leaders are in the sort of new native categories.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Late 22, November 22 is ChatGPT. 23, a lot of the kind of obviously good ideas, and that's not to denigrate them. They were obviously good were started in some of 24. In the end of 24, reasoning models started working. So even the ideas that were obviously good but not working, suddenly many of them suddenly started working with the advent of O1 and deep seek. 25 of those companies scaled. So now we are starting to see for existing markets, which is like customer support and the evolution of that, chat, creative tools, code. We have these early leaders. Those markets are somewhat established. It's going to be very hard to be like another customer support or coding tool today. Conversely, we're going to see a set of AI native categories, I think, emerge in 2026, knowing what we all know now, what company would you build. That is the operative question. And OpenClaw and Moltbook are just the beginning of that. Like those are ideas that are inconceivable two years ago. So I think that the thing that I learned over”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the thing that surprised me about this product cycle, you know, I was building my first company in the mobile product cycle. And in the mobile product cycle, the sort of like the anointed winners in 2008, 2009 were not the eventual winners. So we had the cycle where you sort of had the friendsters and then two or three years later you had the Facebooks, right? In this product cycle, what's actually interesting is a bunch of the early leaders from 23 and 24 have maintained their lead. You know, we talked about Harvey. That's a really impressive company. Gamma is a really impressive company. Cursor is a really impressive company. Like the companies that were early have so far continued to actually be dominant. And that's something that I've sort of changed my mind on. I think in 206, we're going to see a whole new set of categories because can I share my view on where we are on the market?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, one, he's a cold blooded capitalist, you know, which is awesome. He just has great instincts. And I think the seed to me, the seed stage is the hardest stage at which to invest because it's easy to make one great seed investment, but it's hard to have a system, I think, for doing great seed investing because there is, even when the people are amazing, there just isn't anything there yet. There is no product, the true seed. There's no product and there's no go-to-market yet. Now post-product pre-traction, that gets easier. Post product post subtraction that gets a lot easier and I call that a series A. But at the true seed, it's just hard to be right a lot and he has consistently been right a lot. So when I sort of look at a seed manager, I respect.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so. I don't think we're allowed to believe in luck, Adam Dreesen. We have to see 100% of the deals in our domain. And look, I think it is acceptable to make a decision based on the information you have and have the decision be wrong, like you invest in a company. It doesn't always work. And that's okay. That's the business. But the expectation is we see 100% of the deals in our sector and that we win 100% of the deals that we go after.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I remember someone from Andreessen telling me I can't actually remember who it is, so I'm not actually being deliberately coined. Might have been Brian, it might have been DG, it might have been Alex. I really can't remember. But they said, like, sorry. And so they said, like, Ian Andrewson, it's totally unacceptable to lose a deal. Yeah. It's very acceptable to not have seen it and it'd be great. Is that fair?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're showing up, you're doing the work, you're being responsive regardless of how those companies are performing, then you're doing a great job. If your founders say anything other than that, regardless of how the companies are performing, like you're looking for a job elsewhere. And by the way, we do those. We do these GP360s every two years. It's always a little terrifying, but the incentives are all structured in the right way. And that moment and the answer to that question is, was that which I knew like, hey, this is not a VC like every other VC I've seen out there. This is like a company.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, to me, a big decision was coming into investing and not being a sort of hands-on builder anymore. I wasn't sure because I've had some incredible investors. I've had some investors that just weren't the best. And sometimes through no fault of their own, sometimes they're sort of early career. And sometimes they just were disengaged in a way that I never wanted to be. So I was uncertain about whether I wanted to move into investing. And I remember sitting down with Ben, you know, who was I to ask Ben questions? But I'm like, well, I guess like I'm not sure anyway. So let me just be direct with Ben. I'm like, well, Ben, how do you prevent bad behavior? You know, investor bad behavior. How do you prevent the sort of high anxiety? How do you prevent the person that's disengaged? And he's like, well, in the near term, we don't measure you based on returns. We measure you by going and talking to every one of your founders every two years doing a 360 on you. And if your founders say you're telling them the truth.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sort of these founder investors, we are like learning how to be investors through the lens of being a founder. DG is a pure and highly, highly seasoned investor. He has this sort of pure play investor clarity that I tend to learn a ton from. He to me is so, so interesting at the growth stage in the same way that Dixon is interesting at the early stage. So much of our best thinking is Dixon and also DG.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, they're all extraordinary. Let me tell you the strength. So, like, Mark is the guy that can just tell you, one, he'll paint a picture of the future, but two, he knows everything about everything else outside of technology. He's read every book. He's memorized them all. He's got these incredible stories. Of course, he invented the consumer internet. So he is just his storytelling ability is extraordinary. Then, like, to me, I mean, hard things was the first honest business book. Okay, and I always say about business books, like the business model of business books is selling business books. It's not making you better. Most business books are full of shit. And hard things is the first one that was like authentic. And if you've read it as a founder, you're like, oh my God, somebody finally sees me. So just his sort of stories of wartime and navigating these inflection points and his ability to contextualize that for whatever you're going through totally unmatched. The thing about DG that's so special is a lot of us are”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Are you ready for this? Okay. I mean, yeah, so it's probably the guys at Korea just because, you know, they'd been so mysterious, we'd been unable to get a hold of them for nine months. They'd been making all this noise on X with their sort of creative tools and their models. And there's so much anticipation meeting them. It was Thanksgiving week. We all sort of flew in. Mark was there. And just to see these two guys walk in, total badasses with their matching kimonos, with their Celsius drinks, and just hold the room by being these deep, authentic technologists and product people. It's just not something that I had seen before. And there was so much of a setup to the meeting that it's one I'll never forget.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's never been Not at all. No. And Mark and Ben are so special and authentic. And look what Ben has said many times is that they sort of, you know, feel like it's their responsibility to kind of extend the surface area of the entire industry. And like I see them do that every single day. So no, there's never been even a moment at which it helped me back. In fact, it's been just the opposite.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if that's what I'll tell you I think that there are moments when you win a deal and you are just the feeling is like sheer relief. And I'm sure that there are moments, I haven't experienced this, thankfully, when you win a deal and you're like, wow, I want it, you know, and you're sort of faced with uncertainty. And I think the sort of psychology of that ladder moment is very telling.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And I'd say if there was a sort of mistake I made, it was not being intellectually honest about is this actually working or do I think it will work in the near future? Now, look, I've done a bunch of seed investing and I've made the bet. And I think if you're intellectually honest and sort of clear-sighted about a belief that it will work, then that's a fine way to invest. But investing with this sort of self-deception of like, well, let's just assume it's working when it's not quite working is a mistake.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think, again, if there's a mistake that I've made, it's been being a bit too casual about product market fit, and this was more of a 2021 mistake, which is assuming something had product market fit and it perhaps it didn't, and perhaps the founder had a super credible theory, which, by the way, matched my theory for why it would get to product market fit. But as I said,”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's what I mean He's so impressive. But look, there are other founders who have specialists in their domain, like the clutch guys I mentioned, who are deep technologists and know how to apply to product. Like Crea or the Happy Robot Team. So there's just so much to learn from all these individuals. And I know it sounds trite, but I'm privileged to work with them.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Alex is just such a beast in terms of his go to market instincts, his product creativity, and just his responsiveness. The guy's nuts, you know, Alex is 100% working all the time. It's just incredible.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, the best way to talk to other founders, right? You should talk to other founders. I think the second thing is again, the VC can't distort the market, right? All they can do is make all the introductions. And I think the best thing Mark talked about this is when you're small, the VC sort of gives you power, right? That's what you want. The VC basically takes your brand, which is not big, and they lend you their brand. So you're not XYZ company, you're an Andreessen Horowitz company. Now, over time, your brand becomes much bigger than Andreessen Horowitz, and that is great, but they can help bootstrap you and create credibility in conversations, but you still have to have the best product technology go to market to go win the customer.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The best founders that I work with know how to maximally leverage their VCs. And look, I think there is a set of founders who perhaps would never need their investors. But I do think that the best founders how to know how to sort of extend their success and increase their momentum by leveraging the right investors. Like Alex does, right, dude, I mean, I basically have a sales quota with Alex, you know. And DG would say the same thing. And Ben, he's even calling Ben saying, hey, Ben, can you help make this introduction to XYZ? He knows how to get the best out of Andreessen Horowitz. And all of the, it's not just the investors, the entire team shows up for him that way. Could he do it without us? Of course he could.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One, I think an example of where there is a very positive sort of catalyst in their investor base for enterprise companies is YC, right? YC is an awesome place to start an enterprise startup that sells to other enterprise startups. And they've got these sort of like good vibes within the community that makes it easier to sell into even much bigger, more established YC companies. So I think that's a good example in which picking the right investor is actually a big benefit. You know a lot of what we do is connect companies that are small but have really important product and technology to the Fortune 500 in 2000. But we can't force them to buy that technology, right? And again, you have to assume that the buyers, especially these days, have perfect information. So I think that the right investor can be a catalyst, but I don't think that you can take a product that would not otherwise be the winner and anoint them the winner.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're including a door down, you sound like you can get on board. Discretionary. Non-discretionary spend is fixed, right?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Rent and food. But yes, dude, I think that software is going to eclipse many parts of our discretionary spend. We just talked about companionship and friendship. We talked about entertainment. We talked about potentially therapy, potentially healthcare, potentially professional, right? A lot of the spend that I do on things that help me be better at my profession, education. So there's a tremendous sort of area for software to expand into. Let's forget about taking costs out of things for now.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the general, there's so much more to be done at the frontier, and there's so many more categories and capabilities that those things unlock. It's just a better use of time. Today, again, we talked about 8 to 12 percent of enterprise spend is on SaaS. How much of consumer disposable income is spent on software today? few hundred dollars a month maybe we're going to ask some tok to 80 to 90 percent i believe for consumer spend and enterprise spend the way we do that is by pushing the frontier not by cutting”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so this is actually a fun topic, which is that the fact that these products have costs are a very good thing. But what it means is Jason's going to have to figure out his business model early. So this field of dreams investing where a company builds a free product and they're like, someday we'll figure out a business model. That's not viable. It's like, no, you have costs today the way that every small business in the history of small businesses has had pre-software. So the fact that these companies have costs actually forces a business model hygiene that I don't think existed across the board 10 years ago, and that's a good thing.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't think so because I think what we keep seeing is as the models get better, downstream players' ability to take those capabilities, productize them, and raise prices has outstripped the raising costs, right? So the incremental cost increase potentially, and in many cases not a cost increase, but it's not a cost decrease, is so far outweighed by what the new capability unlocks, like coding agents, right? What you can do with coding agents, Cloud Code came out last February, is dramatically better. Is anybody here saying, well, I should go back and use Sonnet 3.7 because it's cheaper, you know, or I should use something other than Opus 4.5 or Codex 5.2. Like, nobody is saying that because the capability is so much more powerful. It really sparks your imagination in the other direction. What more can we do rather than how do we make the existing thing cheaper?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Cutting their costs, right? So granted, closes more expensive than open in many cases, but the cost of actually a token on GPT-40 has gone down 100x since the model was released.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Open source? Yeah. That's a good question. So, I don't think we're out of point in a cycle where companies are focused primarily on cost optimization. And I think that is one of the reasons to choose Open, which is like get an open source model, host it, and then have a cost benefit as a result. I do think there has been some interesting properties of open models like Kimmy K2. I believe that they didn't post train it to sort of, you know, restrain what it could say. As a result, it was just a lot more interesting in terms of text generation in many directions. So it had this sort of interesting product characteristic that a bunch of companies built around, a bunch of companion companies in particular. So I think there are these idiosyncratic reasons we choose the open models for product quality. But in most cases, I think companies are thinking about maximizing the sort of direction of ambition and their ability to fulfill it versus taking cost out. And closed is still a bit advantage there. Now, the nice thing about closed is they too have been”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Can I ask you one thing that we haven't discussed, which I want to, is kind of open versus closed, it's a big question. A lot more use open than actually they say publicly, I find. And there's a lot more willingness than ever to use open. Open source? Yeah. How do you think about the distribution in terms of open versus closed and how that looks in the next kind of 24 months?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I knew more about UiPath. I just don't know enough about the company to comment. I mean, I think RPA is super interesting, but vision models haven't nearly kept up with the sort of, you know, the way that we've talked about them.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And sometimes the local maxima is the global maxima, but I think often it takes human intuition to break from the local to the global. And that is something I think the agent's just not going to do.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, I think that you can use a core provider via tool use. I mean, to me, the big question is just sort of ambiguity as one of the big sort of questions for how much leverage you get out of agents. So if you look at BPOs, business process outsourcing, they are the areas in which there's the least ambiguity where the job is literally a series of tasks where people in offshore call centers take a task off the queue. Those things are very well set up for sort of automation and agent replacement because you've got incredibly well-defined tasks and you've got jobs that are bundles of these well-defined tasks. I think there are many jobs in which there's just such a high degree of ambiguity. I mean, even in software development, like arguably the coding is the easy part. The tough thing is, what are we coding today? And how do we adjust and how do we sort of adapt to what the customers are saying, what the market is saying, what our own epiphanies were overnight, right? The models are incredible at getting us into these local maximas.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When we think about those best place to win an agent first game, I had Eric from the podium on the show, which is a fascinating story of like a kind of traditional SaaS provider that's now got an $100 million plus agent-led business. And he said that fundamentally, if you want to win in an Agentic world, you have to own the tools, the workflow and the data. And so you have to kind of own the full stack. of course him and sales force do you agree that you have to own the stack to really be a big player or can you be a meta layer on top of a core provider”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's both. I think that they will do tasks. They'll do the low NPS work that you don't want to do, right? Do the work that you want to do, not the work that you have to do. I think the second thing is yes, like the surface area, the sort of circumference of ambition is going to go dramatically up for us as individuals, but also for us as a species. Like, Harry, how can this be the peak expression of our ambition as a species? You know, you've read enough sci-fi books to know, even have a glimmer of what that looks like. And I think that's a world that we're going to actually live in, which is if you are ambitious in a direction, you should be able to fully chase it down and express and fulfill it. And the only question is, who are the ones that are ambitious to go do things? Because I don't think execution or expertise is any longer a constraint.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's what I think. I think that the extremist view that we are going to have autonomous agents that simply do everything over incredibly long time horizons, like maybe we'll get there someday. But I do think that at a minimum, you need humans in the loop for exception handling. And then these models are only as good as the instructions that we give them. And our instructions, I mean, think about the way you manage your team. Your instructions are often frustratingly vague. So I do think that we need people in a tight loop with the models to actually achieve our objectives. And I think that the sort of agent maximalist view, which is, you know, you just like chill out for the day and your AI does everything you need to do is probably a little bit ahead of where we actually are.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We say about kind of trying product. I mean, 90% of the companies that I get pitched say, especially on the application side, are agent-led or agent first. You said before there might be agent overhype. Can you talk to me about this? Why do you feel there's agent overhype today? And what does that mean?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think the number one thing, and here's my free advice to other investors, but also founders it's just like you have to use the products today more than ever. And I think the investing landscape of five or seven years ago when there was a ton of fintech, and I'm a fintech guy, I love fintech, but it was harder to build intuition for a small business factoring solution. Maybe I should start a small business. There's too many steps to actually try the product. But today, being native in this product cycle just means waking up every day and being like, if there's three new models today, I'm going to try three new models. I'm actually going to make something. So holding yourself to an incredibly high standard of trying everything, it just gives you so much information and intuition. I think it's non-negotiable for founders and I think it's incredibly important for investors as well, yet most don't do it.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'll give you a nuance take on this. So I think that repeat founders working in their domain of expertise are formidable. Like the clutch guys sold a company to Carvana, you know, they weren't super happy with the way that the whole thing ended up in terms of their startup achieving their ambitions. They went and then started another company out of that, also in the auto space called Klutch. It's going extraordinarily well. And they know they're taking all the shortcuts because they know the market. So I do think particularly in enterprise working in the same domain and being a repeat entrepreneur is a huge source of alpha. I actually think conversely in consumer, having a beginner's mind and a high willingness to be embarrassed is a competitive advantage because so many consumer products feel embarrassing and immediately dismissed as embarrassing or impossible or a silly non-serious thing to be working on. When you're 25 and like”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In terms of having a command of technology, and you said earlier about the challenge of shipping product and getting from zero to one. Showing that you've had a success building in the past is a great way to prove that you can do it moving forwards. Do you have an unreasonable or an unwavering leaning towards serial founders who've proven that they can do it because of their track”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, look, I don't think they all have to show up the same stylistically, this sort of like polished, you know, go-to-market oriented, whatever, like the type of founder we saw more often five years ago. I mean, the Kriya guys to me are a great example. They come into our first pitch, first meeting with everyone in the room, Thanksgiving holiday. And, you know, I think they're both wearing matching kimonos. They're both drinking Celsius. Victor's got his like long skate hair. He's just this total badass who looks exactly the opposite of every MBA founder that we'd been meeting five years ago. And you know, he's got a quiet presence and a lot of it comes from his command of the technology in the domain. It's a totally different style. It works really well for fundraising. So I think you do need to be able to fundraise and you can be very authentic in the way that you do it.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there has to be some sort of irrational direction in which they're pointed. Maybe it's pure capitalism, you know? And they're like, look, I've studied the living shit of this market, and it is a means to an end for me. But I'm going to get there or die trying. You need to see a little bit of that outlier sort of emotion and commitment. And I think it's best expressed when it's in the direction of the problem, but it doesn't have to be. I think if somebody comes in and they're like, I did a case study on it and it looks great, like not a great setup.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do you mind when someone comes in and says, listen, I don't have any particular interest in, I don't know, sales for car dealerships, but I saw it was in ripe area for innovation and where models can be transformative. Do you mind that?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think we've always had to assess how sort of authentic their connection is to the problem at hand, right? Because as it is doing these startups is a little bit irrational. And Alex said this on the pod, and I think he's exactly right, which you have to be a little bit irrationally optimistic to do it. I think you also have to be irrationally interested in the domain in which you're working because these things get hot and cold all the time, you know? And I think that that authenticity, which is not like a comment on intent, sometimes really well-intentioned people. I've been this person have a reason that they're building their company other than authentic connection to the problem. I just don't think that's a good setup. That's a setup for promiscuity.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A willing to do. Against the other VCs. That is what we should do. That is like the number one most important thing that we do when the deals by building trust with the founders, being smart on the markets, you know, being first to conviction, like all of these things. And that's why I think the Series A being hard, it's supposed to be hard. And it should be winning anyway.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Deal that actually has no other investor interest around it, that is not to say that you need investor interest, but if the team has a difficult time fundraising, no matter how good they are as sort of product and technology, they're not going to get the opportunity to sort of see their vision through. So I think taking competitive risk, can I win and pricing risk?”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, okay. So, first of all, I think as an investor, you have to decide what kind of risk you want to take. Okay. So that is what we were paid to do. So let's talk through what are the different types of risks. So the first risk is one that you mentioned. That is competitive risk. Can I win this process or not? Okay. The second risk, and this is maybe a slightly less good risk to take, but I think still a fine one is pricing risk. Did I overpay? And again, I think the way that shows up is the difficulty of the next round based on your entry price, right? Maybe the third risk is team risk. Can this team actually go the distance and try like, you know, can the company be, can they be big enough to fulfill the company's ambitions? Because I think the founder themselves can attenuate or amplify a company's destiny, right? The company can't be bigger than their ability for it to be big. The fourth one I think is a little bit of geographic risk, and maybe this is less true today, but like, is a Silicon Valley team going to do this? And the fifth is fundraising risk. This is a non-consensus.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You said you very much focus on the series A. We mentioned some of the pricing differences there. I get in trouble with my team constantly for tweeting things and like, oh, how are you making my life so much harder? And then like, it's too easy otherwise. And I say that Series A is the hardest place to be investing right now because essentially you have a million in revenue, very little signs of product market fail. I want to see it a million in revenue. I disagree. You're paying 100 to 200 X error.”
2026-02-12 · a16z Podcast · Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source