The a16z Show

If you could do only three things for your health, what should they be? Andrew Huberman’s answer is surprisingly straightforward: get bright light shortly after waking, resistance train, and make the sleep you can get as high-quality as possible.

Andrew joins a16z Partner Daisy Wolf to walk through the protocols he actually follows, from exercise and nutrition to meditation, supplements, and locking his social media phone in a box. He also explains why optimizing every health protocol can be counterproductive if it gets in the way of the rest of your life.

And for founders, Andrew makes a different case: identify the hours when your brain does its best work and protect them. They discuss cognitive performance, meditation, sustainable workloads, and emerging neurotechnology that could help us control transitions between sleep, focus, and recovery.

Resources:

Huberman Lab :https://www.hubermanlab.com/

Follow Andrew Huberman: https://www.youtube.com/@hubermanlab

Follow Daisy Wolf: https://x.com/daisydwolf

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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What does it take to build robots that can actually work in factories and warehouses? Tutor Intelligence CEO Josh Gruenstein argues robotics is a systems problem spanning AI, hardware, manufacturing, and the work itself.

Josh joins a16z General Partners Martin Casado and Raghu Raghuram to explain Tutor’s approach: deploy robots into real businesses, use human “tutors” when needed, and turn that work into training data that makes the robots more capable.

They discuss Tutor’s 100-robot data factory, robots starting at roughly $16 an hour, advances in spatial reasoning, and what flexible robotic labor could mean for American manufacturing and the physical economy.

Resources:

Follow Josh Gruenstein on X: https://x.com/joshgruenstein

Follow Martin Casado on X:https://x.com/martin_casado

Follow Raghu Raghuram on X:https://x.com/RaghuRaghuram

Learn more about Tutor Intelligence:https://tutorintelligence.com/

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Can relentless optimization create as much value as breakthrough invention? Bending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari argues that radical innovation can produce extraordinary outcomes, but systematic improvement can be more dependable, especially when paired with a model designed to compound over decades.

Speaking with a16z General Partner Anish Acharya at Wave by Vento, Luca explains how Bending Spoons acquires technology companies, integrates them onto a shared platform, improves their economics, and reinvests the resulting cash into new acquisitions. They discuss the tradeoffs between growth and profitability, how to use debt without putting the company at risk, and why long-term thinking can create an advantage.

They also debate whether AI really threatens SaaS, why moats like brand, proprietary data, network effects, and switching costs still matter, and how Bending Spoons is already using AI across coding, customer support, and data analysis.

Resources:

Recorded at Wave by Vento.

Luca Ferrari on LinkedIn:https://it.linkedin.com/in/luca-ferrari-12418318

Follow Anish Acharya on X:https://x.com/illscience

Learn more about Bending Spoons:https://bendingspoons.com/

Wave by Vento:https://wavebyvento.com/

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What if finding your next job, co-founder, or collaborator depended less on a resume and more on who is willing to vouch for you? Cosign is building a professional network around those signals, with the longer-term goal of giving AI agents access to the relationship and reputation data that traditional networks keep locked away.

a16z New Media’s David Booth and Dhruv Gupta join MTS to introduce the Cosign Awards, which recognize standout operators, companies, and products based on nominations from the people who know their work. They also unpack the bigger idea behind Cosign: mapping the people and relationships that rarely show up in public data, then making that graph accessible to both humans and agents.

Looking ahead, they imagine professional networking where your personal agent can talk directly to a company’s agent, determine whether there’s a potential fit, and only bring the opportunity to you when there’s a genuine “coincidence of intent.”

Resources:

Follow David Booth on X: https://x.com/david__booth

Follow Dhruv Gupta on X: https://x.com/droovg

Cosign:https://cosign.co

Cosign Awards:https://cosign.co/awards

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What happens when AI makes legal work cheap enough to take cases lawyers couldn't afford to touch before? Eve CEO Jay Madheswaran argues that AI won't just cut costs for law firms. It could expand access to legal representation by making an entirely new class of cases economically viable.

Jay joins a16z General Partner Alex Rampell to explain how Eve is automating plaintiff law from the first client call through settlement, and why some firms are already using it to increase the number of clients each attorney can manage from roughly 100 to 500.

They also discuss how AI could shift lawyers toward higher-value advocacy, why agents may eventually negotiate with other agents, and what happens to the legal system when bringing a case becomes dramatically cheaper.

Resources:

Follow Jay Madheswaran on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayanth1/

Follow Alex Rampell on X:https://x.com/arampell

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America’s defense, energy, manufacturing, and robotics booms are increasingly becoming one story: the rebuilding of the country’s industrial base. This year’s AD50 highlights the companies building across that stack, from critical materials and factories to the systems they ultimately power.

a16z’s Erin Price-Wright and Connor Love join Elena Burger to unpack what has changed. They discuss how defense demand can help finance manufacturing capacity that ultimately serves much larger commercial markets, why AI is changing the economics of American factories, and how a new generation of founders is applying lessons from SpaceX, Tesla, Anduril, and Palantir to mining, energy, manufacturing, and defense.

They also make the case that these companies are no longer simply important to America. With private capital increasingly willing to fund physical infrastructure and production before government demand is guaranteed, they can become some of the most valuable companies in the world.

Resources:

Explore the AD50 : https://www.a16z.news/p/ad-50-2026-production-is-deterrence

Follow Erin Price-Wright: https://x.com/espricewright

Follow Connor Love on X: https://x.com/ConnorLoveCA

Follow Elena Burger on X: https://x.com/VirtualElena

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Mark Cuban thinks AI could transform healthcare, but it won’t fix opaque prices and broken incentives on its own. His starting point for employers: run every benefits contract through AI and ask where you’re getting ripped off.

Mark joins a16z General Partner Julie Yoo and Erik Torenberg to discuss what he’s learned building Cost Plus Drugs, why trust is its core product, and how greater transparency could put pressure on healthcare costs.

They also explore where AI can help, what personalized medicine could look like, how the role of doctors may change, and why Mark believes founders should use AI to learn, not as an excuse to stop thinking.

Resources:

Follow Mark Cuban on X: https://x.com/mcuban

Follow Julie Yoo: https://x.com/julesyoo

Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drug Company:https://costplusdrugs.com/

Cost Plus Wellness:https://costpluswellness.com/

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What should school look like if AI can help students learn dramatically faster? Alpha School founder Joe Liemandt argues the answer isn’t to fill the extra time with more academics, but to redesign school around the skills traditional classrooms struggle to teach: agency, teamwork, entrepreneurship, communication, and doing hard things.

Joe joins Erik Torenberg and Horowitz and Andreessen Academy co-founder Gagan Biyani to discuss Alpha’s model, where students spend two hours a day on core academics and the rest developing real-world skills through projects. They explore what that approach can teach higher education, why motivation may matter more than curriculum, and how HAA is applying similar principles to college-age students by putting building, relationships, and real-world experience at the center of the learning experience.

They also discuss what parents need to believe before choosing a new educational model, why Joe expects AI to drive an explosion in entrepreneurship, and why the most important question for students may not be which field is safest from AI, but what they care enough about to build.

Resources:

Learn more about Horowitz and Andreessen Academy: https://www.theacademysf.com/

Learn more about Alpha School: https://alpha.school/joe-liemandt-and-the-future-of-education/

Follow Joe Liemandt on X: https://x.com/jliemandt

Follow Gagan Biyani: on X https://x.com/gaganbiyani

Follow Erik Torenberg on X:https://x.com/eriktorenberg

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AI agents are approaching a point where they can use computers faster than expert humans, turning the user interface itself into a universal way for AI to interact with software. OpenAI’s Ari Weinstein and James Sun argue that computer use is now entering its scaling moment, as better models, faster execution, and stronger safety controls make agents practical for more consumer and enterprise work.

Ari and James join a16z’s Seema Amble and Fabrizio Serafini to explain how computer-using agents are already navigating legacy ERPs, reconciling financial data, handling procurement, and operating software without APIs or custom integrations. They also discuss why the harness around the model can matter as much as model intelligence, how enterprises can set deterministic guardrails around agent behavior, and why computer use could simultaneously extend the life of legacy software and accelerate the arrival of new AI-native applications.

Looking ahead, they make the case for a more proactive and fluid relationship with computers, where agents work in the background, collaborate with users in real time, and increasingly adapt to us rather than requiring us to learn how to use them.

Resources:

Follow Seema Amble on X: https://x.com/seema_amble

Follow Fabrizio Serafini on X: https://x.com/fabserafini

Follow Ari Weinstein on X: https://x.com/AriX

Follow James Sun on X: https://x.com/JamesZmSun

Related a16z research from Seema Amble and Fabrizio Serafini:Can Agents Use a Computer Yet? We’ve Got the Data

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Can a 10-person startup outperform a company with hundreds of employees? Box CEO Aaron Levie argues AI agents are giving small teams a level of leverage that simply wasn't economically possible before, creating a window for startups to outrun incumbents.

In this episode of Speedrun Office Hours, Aaron explains why founders are shifting from doing the work themselves to orchestrating agents, and why that puts a new premium on strategy, taste, and knowing exactly what to build. He makes the case that nearly every industry and job function could support specialized AI agents, potentially creating hundreds of new billion-dollar companies.

They also discuss why enterprise AI may capture much of the next wave of model improvements, how dramatically cheaper AI labor could unlock demand that doesn't exist today, and one thing Aaron thinks AI won't change: distribution. If you build it, they still won't necessarily come.

Resources:

Watch the original Speedrun Office Hours episode:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ1joGIUyK8

Learn more about Speedrun:https://speedrun.a16z.com/

Follow Speedrun on X:https://x.com/speedrun

Follow Aaron Levie on X: https://x.com/levie

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What does it take to build a company when AI is changing the rules this quickly? Ben Horowitz argues that technology may make companies easier to start, but the hardest parts of entrepreneurship, making decisions under uncertainty, building momentum, and managing your own doubts, aren't going away.

Speedrun's Andrew Chen sits down with Ben to discuss why AI feels different from previous technology shifts, whether billion-dollar companies can be built with tiny teams, and why Ben thinks the application itself may eventually become less important as agents work directly against data.

They also get into defensibility in AI, what founders should look for in an investor, how venture capital is changing, and why the best entrepreneurs aren't defined by a lack of weaknesses, but by having a strength or insight that's genuinely exceptional.

Resources:

Follow Ben Horowitz on X:https://x.com/bhorowitz

Follow Andrew Chen on X:https://x.com/andrewchen

Learn more about Speedrun: https://speedrun.a16z.com/apply

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Amazon expects to spend roughly $220 billion in CapEx in 2026, yet CEO Andy Jassy says the company is still leaving meaningful AI demand on the table.** He believes the buildout could ultimately help make AWS a $1 trillion annual run-rate business.

Andy joins a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg to discuss why AI demand is growing so quickly, how Amazon decides how much infrastructure to build, and why lower inference costs could unlock broader enterprise adoption.

They also discuss how AI is reshaping Amazon itself, from smaller teams building products faster to reimagining Alexa, and why Andy sees cybersecurity, human judgment, and critical thinking as increasingly important in the AI era.

Resources:

Follow Andy Jassy on X: https://x.com/ajassy

Follow Ben Horowitz on X:https://x.com/bhorowitz

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a16z is expanding a16z crypto into a16z Frontier, a broader mandate to back founders building at the edges of what's possible. Chris Dixon joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg to explain why founders should increasingly ask not “is this too ambitious?” but “is this ambitious enough?” — and how AI could pull decades of technological progress forward across hardware, robotics, entertainment, science, and entirely new forms of media.

They also explore the coming internet of AI agents, why open source matters as AI becomes more powerful, and why some of the most important companies of the next decade may combine technologies and business models that previously belonged in separate categories.

Resources:

Follow Chris Dixon on X: https://x.com/cdixon
Follow Marc Andreessen on X:https://x.com/pmarca
Follow Ben Horowitz on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz

Learn more about a16z Frontier:
https://a16zfrontier.com
https://a16zfrontier.substack.com
https://x.com/a16zfrontier

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

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AI agents can reason over enormous amounts of information, but much of the world’s actual work is still trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets, scans, and other formats that models struggle to reliably understand. Reducto co-founder and CEO Adit Abraham argues that solving this document layer is essential if agents are going to take on consequential work in healthcare, legal, finance, and insurance.

Adit joins a16z General Partner Jennifer Li to explain why traditional OCR breaks down on messy real-world documents, how Reducto combines vision-language models with specialized infrastructure to reach high accuracy without sacrificing cost or latency, and why frontier models can silently drop information on long extraction tasks. Reducto now processes billions of pages each month, including its seven billionth page the morning of the recording.

They also discuss Reducto’s R1 model, agents that can review and correct their own document extraction, and the company’s push beyond simply reading files toward letting agents reliably work with and edit them. Underneath it all is a higher-stakes problem: when a misread word can affect a healthcare claim or financial decision, getting the input right matters just as much as making the model smarter.

Resources:

Learn more about Reducto:https://reducto.ai

Follow Adit Abraham on X: https://x.com/aditabrm

Follow Jennifer Li on X:https://x.com/JenniferHli

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More than 300 million people use ChatGPT for health and wellness questions each week. OpenAI’s Karan Singhal thinks that’s only the beginning: the longer-term goal is AI that can help people navigate their health proactively, while making trustworthy medical intelligence dramatically more accessible.

Karan joins a16z Partner Jay Rughani to explain why OpenAI trains healthcare expertise directly into its general-purpose frontier models, how it works with hundreds of medical experts to evaluate safety and disagreement, and why the company sees AI as a complement to doctors rather than a replacement for medical care. They also discuss integrations with Epic, AI copilots for clinicians, and what happens as personal agents begin navigating appointments, health records, and other fragmented parts of the healthcare system.

Looking further ahead, Karan makes the case that the cost of medical intelligence could continue to fall dramatically, allowing AI to act as a safety net for patients and clinicians, surface insights from years of health data, and potentially accelerate the discovery and validation of new treatments.

Resources:

Follow Karan Singhal on X: https://x.com/thekaransinghal

Follow Jay Rughani on X: https://x.com/JayRughani

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Why hasn't AI transformed everyday work as quickly as coding? Town CEO Jean-Denis Greze argues the bottleneck isn't intelligence, but making AI useful to people who don't have the time or technical skills to build their own automations.

Jean-Denis joins a16z General Partner Alex Rampell to share why he pivoted Town from tax software to a personal AI assistant built around email, calendars, and the workflows that run businesses. They discuss why consumer-grade experiences may win in enterprise AI, how Town discovers and automates tasks users wouldn't think to delegate, and why model neutrality and data ownership matter as AI labs increasingly compete with application companies.

They also explore what happens when agents begin acting on our behalf, from managing everyday work to shopping and commerce, and why the next generation of software may need to adapt to each user rather than the other way around.

Resources:

Follow Alex Rampell on X:https://x.com/arampell

Follow Jean-Denis Greze: https://x.com/jgreze

Learn more about Town:https://town.com/

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What changes when an AI mistake doesn’t just hurt a benchmark score, but affects someone’s housing or healthcare? EliseAI Head of Applied Research Mario Martone argues that deploying AI in essential industries requires a very different standard of reliability.

Mario joins MTS to explain how EliseAI handles roughly 5 million phone calls a month, why LLMs aren’t the right solution for every problem, and how the team combines language models, traditional machine learning, neural networks, and internally built evaluations to decide what actually works in production.

Drawing on 15 years studying theoretical physics, Mario also explains how the scientific method shapes EliseAI’s research culture, from testing new models against its own benchmarks to fine-tuning open-source models and automating increasingly complex workflows across housing and healthcare. And he makes the case that applying AI to the real world can produce problems every bit as intellectually difficult as the ones he encountered studying string theory.

Resources:

Learn more about EliseAI:https://www.eliseai.com/

Follow Mario Martone on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcmartone/

Follow MTS: https://www.mts.now/

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Why is booking a doctor's appointment still so difficult, and can AI finally change that? Zocdoc CEO Oliver Kharraz argues that the real problem isn't finding doctors, but connecting patients to accurate availability and making appointments bookable wherever they start their search.

Oliver joins a16z General Partner Julie Yoo to discuss how Zocdoc spent nearly 20 years building the infrastructure behind online scheduling, and why it's now opening that technology to AI agents, insurers, and other platforms.

They explore Zocdoc's partnership with Gemini, why patients shouldn't be locked into a single healthcare platform, and how surfacing last-minute availability can reduce appointment wait times from weeks to days. They also discuss what happens when AI becomes a new front door to healthcare and why Oliver believes the future of Zocdoc extends far beyond its own app.

Resources:

Follow Oliver Kharraz on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kharraz

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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a16z General Partner Martin Casado sits down with Grepr CEO Jad Naous to ask what comes after AI learns to write code: can it also debug and operate the systems that code creates?

Jad shares how AI has transformed engineering inside his 10-person team, cutting some projects from six months to just 10 days. But operating production systems is a harder challenge, with unpredictable workloads, failures, and countless possible states.

They discuss whether AI can learn to diagnose problems, test hypotheses, and debug systems like a human engineer. They also explore AI SREs, security, query optimization, and why the best engineers may be gaining the most leverage from coding agents.

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Learn more about Grepr: https://www.grepr.ai/

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a16z General Partner Alex Rampell sits down with VGS Executive Board Member, Terry Angelos, to unpack what happens to payments when AI agents go from recommending what to buy to actually making the purchase.

Terry explains the infrastructure required to safely give agents access to payment credentials, why wallets like PayPal, Shop Pay, and Link are competing to become the default payment layer for agents, and how new agentic tokens could preserve the chargebacks, identity checks, and merchant relationships that make today's payment networks work. VGS, which already secures payment credentials across a significant share of e-commerce, is now provisioning millions of these agentic tokens each week.

They also discuss what happens when merchants don't want to transact with agents, how delegated authority changes liability when an agent makes a mistake, and why AI could simultaneously increase consumer spending while eliminating the subscriptions, fees, and other forms of economic "breakage" that depend on people not paying attention.

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

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