andrew chen
@andrewchen
🇺🇸 a16z speedrun
a16z Speedrun Alpha, for pre-idea/pre-team/pre-everything founders it's time to bet on yourself, and figure out your startup idea. 2026 is well underway, crazy stuff happening in AI, and you're building agents/apps/whatever every night+weekend. You want to start a startup but you're working or still going to school. what if you're pre-idea, pre-product, pre-launch, and even a solo founder? You need time to cook The Alpha Fellowship is for you. https://alpha.a16zspeedrun.com/ details: - $20K equity-free upfront to start building - up to $250K investment when you finalize - automatic final interview for a16z speedrun, with up to $1M investment - 8-week, in-person experience with a kickoff retreat, founder AMAs, and small-group dinners alongside the a16z speedrun community - targeted to early-career highly technical founders - deadline to apply is March 6 We ALSO have a "startup track" for the Alpha Fellowship where you can get more founder experience by working for a portfolio company if you're not quite ready to found something. The Alpha Fellowship places top early-career engineers into full-time roles at fast-growing a16z speedrun and Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies. For future founders, we provide capital before a team or idea even exists. We're looking for highly technical students and recent grads who don't want to wait to start building. Fellows take full-time roles at fast-growing portfolio companies - or, if you're ready to build now, receive capital to start your own company - kicking off with a two-month in-person fellowship. Fellows also have access to the a16z speedrun and EO Ventures communities and events. ... If this is you, want to meet you. If you have people to introduce us to, that would be amazing too. will have more to say, and lots of ideas coming up here. But excited to get this out! Excited to host y'all soon.
Final reminder - last week to apply: A16Z SPEEDRUN ALPHA is for recent grads and college students who want to start a company but are pre-idea / pre-product details: - $20K equity-free upfront to start building - up to $250K investment when you finalize - automatic final interview for a16z speedrun, with up to $1M investment - 8-week, in-person experience with a kickoff retreat, founder AMAs, and small-group dinners alongside the a16z speedrun community - targeted to early-career highly technical founders We stayed Alpha bc its a time of great change in the startup community and in the job market. And we know that most of the best founders don’t start with a perfect idea. They start with curiosity, talent, and the willingness to build things until something clicks. Some of the most important companies of the last decade started this way: - tinkering with side projects - hacking on open source - building weird prototypes with friends - exploring a space before the opportunity was obvious The goal of Speedrun Alpha is simple: find exceptional builders before the idea is fully formed. Instead of asking you to show up with a polished pitch deck, we give you: - time - community - mentorship - and just enough capital to start experimenting. Just show up with technical ambition and curiosity. You spend the summer with us on the a16z Speedrun team exploring ideas, building prototypes, and talking to users. By the end, if something interesting emerges, we help you turn it into a real company. The kinds of founders we’re looking for tend to look like this: - engineers who can ship fast - builders who have shipped side projects before - hackers who like learning new systems quickly - people who would probably start companies eventually anyway We’re intentionally targeting recent grads and college students as a bet on the future. If that sounds like you — or someone you know — this is the last call.
prediction re the end of spreadsheets AI code gen means that anything that is currently modeled as a spreadsheet is better modeled in code. You get all the advantages of software - libraries, open source, AI, all the complexity and expressiveness. think about what spreadsheets actually are: they're business logic that's trapped in a grid. Pricing models, financial forecasts, inventory trackers, marketing attribution - these are all fundamentally *programs* that we've been writing in the worst possible IDE. No version control, no testing, no modularity. Just a fragile web of cell references that breaks when someone inserts a row. The only reason spreadsheets won is that the barrier to writing real software was too high. A finance analyst could learn =VLOOKUP in an afternoon but couldn't learn Python in a month. AI code gen flips that equation completely. Now the same analyst describes what they want in plain English, and gets a real application - with a database, a UI, error handling, the works. The marginal effort to go from "spreadsheet" to "software" just collapsed to near zero. this is a massive unlock. There are ~1 billion spreadsheet users worldwide. Most of them are building janky software without realizing it. When even 10% of those use cases migrate to actual code, you get an explosion of new micro-applications that look nothing like traditional software. Internal tools that used to live in a shared Google Sheet now become real products. The "shadow IT" spreadsheet that runs half the company's operations finally gets proper infrastructure. The interesting second-order effect: the spreadsheet was the great equalizer that let non-technical people build things. AI code gen is the *next* great equalizer, but the ceiling is 100x higher. We're about to see what happens when a billion knowledge workers can build real software.
AI will make teenage billionaires a thing why? People have long argued that we'll see more 1-person unicorns from AI, as the tools allow a singular visionary to scale themselves. That's obvious. But it also follows that AI software will be created and run mostly by young people, and billions will be made in the process AI also makes coding and product building as easy as making videos or posting a photo. The data says that the time rich (rather than money rich) dominate internet usage -- after all, they have more time to consume, and more time to create. Because the time rich are mostly composed of kids and teenagers, it means that software will mostly be built and used by young people. Think social media, Roblox, chat, etc, but coded by teenagers for teenagers we're approaching a timeline where instead of going to school, getting a job, getting married, and having kids -- the linear form of life we've had for 100+ years -- we will see kids go start to building products and starting companies from a young age. This means huge disruption for universities and society, but also that we will see people build build build. A good thing IMHO. The future will be built by young people, for young people, and billions will be made as a result
Final day. https://x.com/andrewchen/status/2029978097404326057/video/1
lots of AI cos starting to experiment with paid marketing so here’s my take: Paid acquisition is a tax on your product's defensibility. the moment you can't out-spend the incumbents and competitors, you die. build channels that get cheaper as you grow or you're just renting your growth
The Turing test for AI video should be fixing the last season of Game of Thrones If we can do that, we can do anything
I wanna claude like this. Feet up on the desk, custom vibe code walkie talkie. So many style points via bharms27/reddit https://x.com/andrewchen/status/2039571728922460611/video/1
the magic of cowork and openclaw and other AI products is that they replace our giant row of infinite browser tabs And lol - no, don't feel guilty, I have too many tabs too. AI makes it so that every workflow that required 4 browser tabs and a spreadsheet is getting collapsed into one AI-native experience Just as one quick example- think about how you used to research a person or a company: LinkedIn tab, X tab, Google tab, notes doc, slack open. now one prompt does it in 10 seconds. the "tab count" of a workflow is basically a proxy for how much AI can compress it if your product eliminates 6 tabs and a copy-paste loop, users will like it. If you can create a whole series of these workflows then your users will absolutely love it. Thus the biggest opportunities are workflows where people currently alt-tab 20+ times per task. Sales, recruiting, research, compliance, procurement. Boring? yes. Massive? also yes. But this is why these agentic tools are going to crush AI doesn't need to be superintelligent to be wildly useful. it just needs to be good enough to close the tabs
i’ve learned that when you both: 1) read old books 2) and also X every day then over time you sound like a crazy person at dinner parties I’ve tested this empirically