a16z

We’ve raised $1.1B for a16z’s newest fund: the Machine Age Fund. It’s time to open the throttle and accelerate the physical buildout of AI: the strongest tool ever developed for solving problems and bestowing abundance. It is our social and national imperative. For anyone paying attention, this shouldn’t be a surprise. We’re seeing an upward inflection point in utility and variety of work that AI can do, just over the past year.

Silicon Valley has always run on the magic of paying it forward. Everyone here has been helped by someone, at a critical moment – for no reason other than just to be helpful. There’s a special version of this pay-it-forward culture for international founders. When you are from another country and you make it here, you find a community of people who have done the same. They, too, left behind their friends, family and primary language to pursue an idea they couldn’t quit.

Last week, a 19-year-old, curly haired redhead named Janie went through sorority rush at the University of Alabama. Like many of the 2,500 prospective new members (PNMs), she posted outfit-of-the-day videos (OOTDs), breathless recaps of her house visits, and clips fumbling trending dances. Janie created a TikTok account specifically for college – she’d never posted before – but within a week, she had 1,300 followers and was averaging tens of thousands of views per video.

Go-Direct as a Service To win, you must go direct, and to go direct, you must be interesting. The New Media team helps you do both: we have an in-house creative team composed of legends of the craft, owned channels with the best distribution in venture, and a dedicated team that takes you from pitch to launch and beyond.

Is Software Losing Its Head? Table of Contents Share Last month Salesforce announced it would open its APIs and launch a headless product, essentially betting that in an agentic world, its value lies in the data layer, not the UI. It’s a smart repositioning. (Although it’s worth noting that not much appears to have changed technically: the APIs Salesforce is now marketing as a “headless product” have largely existed for years.

“No Man Left Behind”: American Technology Ships with Our Values Table of Contents Share When DUDE44, an American F-15, was downed over Iranian territory, the United States expended considerable resources—logistics, risk, cost—to recover the stranded Americans. Not because the math favored it in any narrow operational sense, but because as Americans we believe in “no man left behind” as tenet.

Antarctica, and the Extreme Logistics of Human Exploration Table of Contents Share Yesterday, four astronauts ventured farther from Earth than any humans have gone before. Their extraterrestrial home is Orion, a 330-cubic-foot capsule, which, for the last six days, has provided them with water, food, air, and a fair bit of luxury: the astronauts have iPhones, exercise equipment, five kinds of hot sauce, and a view of the cosmos never before seen by human eyes.

The internet is a miracle of universal access to opportunity, inquiry and connection. And ads pay for that miracle. As Marc has long argued, “if you take a principle stand against ads, you’re also taking a stand against broad access.” Ads are why we have nice things. So, the announcement last month that OpenAI plans to launch ads for free users is probably the biggest piece of news-that-isn’t-actually-news of 2026 (so far).

Et Tu, Agent? Did You Install the Backdoor? Table of Contents Share This week, someone hijacked one of the most popular packages on the internet and used it to install a backdoor on every machine that ran npm install. The package was Axios, which is the HTTP library that powers network requests in millions of applications. It gets downloaded over 100 million times a week.

There are only two paths left for software Table of Contents Share To software CEOs, founders, boards, and the investor community: the comfortable middle is over. Public markets have already repriced the sector, and for good reason. They are telling us software terminal value is not what it used to be. I do not know what moves every stock in the next quarter, but over the medium and long term I think there are only two credible paths to durable equity value creation.