Jonathan Swanson has built two rare successes: Thumbtack, the home-services marketplace, and Athena, the fast-growing platform that pairs ambitious people with world-class personal assistants. Today he runs a 4,000-person company, invests on the side, and raises four kids — all by designing his life around leverage. a16z General Partner, Erik Torenberg, sits down with Jonathan to unpack what that actually looks like. They discuss how elite assistant culture shaped his philosophy, why delegation is a skill m ...

I think AI is the next evolution of humanity. I think it takes us to a new level. Allows us to collaborate and understand the world in much deeper ways. >> Naveen Ralph is here expert in AI. >> Naveen Ralph probably one of the smartest guys in this domain. He sees things well before anybody else sees them. >> You had a lot of success doing Nirvana Mosaic and data bricks. Why start a new chip company now? >> First off, it's not a chip company per se. Most of what we're doing is really kind of looking at firs ...

An ideal founding team is usually two people and the two people are of two different types. So one you need an inventor and it's the inventor's job to build the product that's 10 times better than any other product available to solve that problem and then you need an entrepreneur and the entrepreneur's [music] job is to take the market. And so the best thing to do is have two people who know how to do both, but at least one person who's world class in each. ...

The great founders almost always feel like you're too late and you're almost always too early. [music] For you, it's become obvious. As far as you're concerned, the world should already work this way, which is why you're pursuing it.The reality is you're almost always too early. We almost never see a qualified founder fail cuz they're too late to market. It's almost always cuz they're too early to market.The iPad is like this breakthrough product in 2009 and every, you know, Apple, oh my god, they invent al ...

The thing that is fundamentally different about this product cycle is that the software itself can actually do the work and therefore the market opportunity for software today is no longer just IT spend. It's largely labor. It's not like all the jobs will go away.I actually think that's not going to happen at all. There are a lot of things where if I could hire somebody for a dollar to do this task, I would 100% do that. I've never been able to hire somebody for a dollar. Now I can hire software for a dolla ...

Russ Fradin sold his first company for $300M. He’s back in the arena with Larridin, helping companies measure just how successful their AI actually is. In this episode, Russ sits down with a16z General Partner Alex Rampell to reveal why the measurement infrastructure that unlocked internet advertising's trillion-dollar boom is exactly what's missing from AI, why your most productive employees are hiding their AI usage from management, and the uncomfortable truth that companies desperately buying AI tools ha ...

I cause a lot of antagonism between us and the other firms in those days. >> Your filter is like you're going to get the deal or I'm going to get the deal. You die or I die. >> And they're not exactly shrinking ballots themselves. >> They hated that cover story. Look at him on the cover of the magazine. That's not supposed to be him. Not supposed to be the entrepreneur. What the hell? D. I mean, they just like we didn't have any entrepreneurs at the time. >> VC was like a big secret. And then actually build ...

Content Consumption Trends - Clips are the primary method for content consumption [1] - Sports games generate approximately 5 to 8 clips that often go viral [1] - Clips commonly achieve distribution that is 1000 times greater than the original content [1]

Cuz videos are expensive to me. For people that are doing that like hundreds of times a day, the traditional naive thing that it's like 1% of users create content, 10% leave comments, and 100% view. Maybe a lot more want to create content, but it's just been harder to do.I think that's a very cool. ...

Industry Challenges & Opportunities - Biotech industry faces record lows and structural challenges [1] - Technology progress is disconnected from market reality [1] - Drug development costs are exploding, reaching $25 亿 (2.5 billion) per approval [1] - The industry needs to invent medicines impossible to make with current tools [1] Competitive Landscape - China's investigator-initiated trials offer speed and cost advantages [1] - Geographic arbitrage in China is rewriting the competitive playbook [1] - The industry is exploring how to compete with China by inventing new technologies [1] Innovation & Future Trends - AI in drug development aims to reduce the cost of a $25 亿 (2.5 billion) drug to $5 亿 (500 million) [1] - The industry is focusing on treating aging before fully understanding it [1] - The next iconic biotechs will likely rebundle the stack [1]