This Veterans Day, venture firm J2 is announcing a $250 million fund. J2 invests in companies at the intersection of consumer and defense technology. And joining us right now is J2's co-founder and managing partner, Alex Harstre.Alex happens to be a veteran himself. And Alex, on this Veterans Day, first of all, thank you for your service. I thought maybe you could just remind folks um what it is that you've done.You started actually as a healthc care consultant and then a venture capitalist, but you took a ...

In this episode, a16z's Anish Acharya joins Kevin Rose for an in-depth, fast-paced conversation on the rebirth of consumer technology, and how AI is reshaping what it means to build, invest, and create. They talk about why AI has reignited the consumer renaissance, what it means to build “weird and working” products, and how the next wave of apps will blend emotion, utility, and creativity in entirely new ways. From AI companions and “emotional interfaces” to the tools making it possible to build entire sta ...

The 15-Year Flywheel in Consumer Tech - Every 15 years, there have been significant shifts in consumer tech form factors [4] - The evolution includes punch cards, terminal commands (Unix shell), graphical user interfaces (Apple Macintosh), web native interfaces (browsers), and mobile native interfaces (smartphones) [4][5][6][7][9][11] - In 2025, the industry anticipates the emergence of living, breathing assistant interfaces [28] The Preference Principle - The core principle driving these shifts is that a higher number of revealed personal preferences leads to better collective outcomes [13] - More revealed preferences improve information quality and enable corrective wisdom of the crowd [14][15] - This principle applies to welfare distribution, auctions, hiring decisions, and trial by jury [16][17][18][19] Future of Consumer Tech - The industry predicts that interfaces will evolve into living, breathing assistants that proactively solicit personal preferences in natural language [28][29] - The success of future consumer products will depend on the ability to capitalize on the trust inherent in natural language to gather personal preferences [29][30] - The goal is to create data escrows of individual preferences to drive stable matches and amazing outcomes [30]