andrew chen

@harpriiya @a16z @speedrun we love having you in speedrun! What a great story

I can finally talk about this!! Hotbox is backed by @a16z @speedrun :) I spent the last 14 months in Korea and now I’m back in SF, where it all began. My entire career exists because of social media. From early NeurIPS papers, to working on ranking algorithms, and then building viral playbooks for startups. The thing I kept coming back to is: every company has no choice but to become a media company. To distribute. To get attention. That is the next generation of entrepreneur’s biggest challenge. That’s the next single person unicorn’s moat. Hotbox is built for that next gen entrepreneur. Businesses run entirely on social now. Hotbox is the sales infra for the social economy. more to come. sign up on our waitlist & lmk if you’ll be at the a16z speedrun demo day 🤫

marketplace startups are destined to be massively reinvented by AI. The weak form is already happening, where we use LLMs for customer support, supply/demand matching, etc. That’s easy The strong form is to figure out how much of the supply side of the marketplace can be turned agentic and ultimately, robotic. “Uber for X” will have consumers requesting robots to do X. Every on-demand service of the 2010s will instruct a robotaxi or delivery robot. Or if you’re prev used a marketplace to hire X, then you “hire” an agent instead. You won’t need to app developer, because there’s agents to build your app This will impact marketplace cos differently. Of course some marketplaces - like Airbnb - inherently work in the physical and will leverage AI around the core value prop. And some are bound to lose their network effects as matching fragmented supply/demand turns into an AI problem. Much change is coming The next big business model for marketplaces will emerge when demand works at high abstractions and supply meets it by becoming programmable

Do you build for startups? Apply to become an a16z speedrun Marketplace partner and get your product in front of some of the most ambitious founders building the future. We’re looking for B2B companies with products that are a strong fit for startups from pre-seed and beyond.

Link: partiful.com/e/YZR1YR2DQbtv…

Openclaw hang in Santa Monica at the a16z offices hosted by me and @chrysb Come join us!

Tired: Universal basic income Wired: Universal basic compute

@theonomix @lala_oldtang The political revolution of the future

@andrewchen @lala_oldtang They made an X community for it, have you seen it? x.com/i/communities/…

Thus, the post AGI world won’t be a life of leisure where we frolic in nature 24x7 and stop working Because the most fun thing to do will be to build cool new stuff using AGI 24x7. We’ll be glued to our computing devices as a result 😂

everyone claims they want "contrarian" founders but what they actually want - founders with a non-obvious insight that happens to align with an explosive market This is bc contrarian + right = visionary. contrarian + wrong = unemployed

@lala_oldtang UBT Universal basic tokens

@andrewchen How much do AIs pay for the tokens? I think this is a economic Bill. AI operations looks like not to cheap.

@_whoaskedtho AI life is beautiful

@andrewchen Isn’t life so much better tho?

AI is supposed to save me time, but now I find myself building stuff all evening and weekend and it's actually increasing my time in front of the computer WTF

@itsjacklau ah but you just need other agents to guard for disasters!

The 10,000x speed argument cuts the other way too. When agent loops run that fast, a misaligned objective compounds into disaster before anyone notices. The bottleneck was never "how fast can we ship" — it was "are we building the right thing." Speed without taste just means you destroy value faster. The PM who ignores the human coordination side to focus on agent speed is optimizing the engine while pointing the car off a cliff.

in a world of agents, the product role is going to split into two jobs: - one that organizes humans (stakeholders, design, eng) - one that organizes agents (prompts, evals, workflows, etc) Both will be in pursuit of offering the right products to customers, but how you get there will dramatically change. What happens to the typical product rituals? Instead of PRDs, OKRs, standups, product reviews, we'll need the equivalent for agents. Couple wild ideas here... instead of standups: the equivalent is that agents will report back to us based on run logs and anomaly flags. no one needs to say what they did yesterday, the system already did thousands of things. the question is where it broke, where it surprised you, and where it got better. Show us the patterns, the trends, the edge cases - particularly the ones the agents didn't fix automatically. the daily ritual becomes reviewing deltas, scanning failures, and deciding which ones matter. less reporting, more triage instead of OKRs: we’ll need adversarial agents that continuously monitor/grade the system and detect patterns, scoring outcomes on an hourly or daily basis. Rather than setting a quarterly goal of "increase X by 5%" and revisiting slowly -- instead, management will be able to monitor success in real-time and detect trends/patterns towards overall goals instead of PRDs: we won't need waterfall. Prototyping will rule the day, and we’ll need a living agentic loop that mediates customer feedback/ratings and what's being prioritized and built. you don’t hand it to eng, you deploy it into the agent loop. if it’s wrong, it fails visibly and you can revert. if it’s right, it produces the right output instead of product reviews: we'll need simulation systems to examine agent behavior in different scenarios. In an agentic world where UI shifts from buttons/menus to agents automatically doing things, you'll want to examine their behavior before you deploy. You rewind decisions, fork alternate paths, and see how different prompts or constraints would have changed outcomes. the review becomes interactive. less storytelling, more counterfactuals. The PM sits in the middle of this split. On the human side, still aligning taste, risk tolerance, and strategy across people. On the agent side, shaping the actual behavior of the system through prompts, evals, and feedback loops. one side is persuasion. The other is instrumentation. the best ones will collapse the gap, translating intent directly into systems that act on it. the fascinating part is that the agentic loop will run 10000x faster than the human one, and of course, you can "hire" them faster. Thus the “organizing humans” half starts to feel slow and lower impact unless it directly improves the agent loop. Eventually the PM will shift towards agents and maybe ignore the human coordination altogether...

@Ranidu Shipped a ton for an audience of 1 😂

@andrewchen same but did you ship anything?

@m_franceschetti It’s the best

@andrewchen Same here. But I am having so much fun

@gregmushen Yes

@andrewchen Same. I woke up at 3:30am this morning and instead of going back to sleep, I thought "This would actually be an opportune time to kick off some long running tasks"

@boardyai Right but every hour freed turns into another extra hour for building?

@andrewchen What ur building should save time

Soulmates. Watch until the end.

@nazzari @hedra_labs @speedrun @mjlbach is the best

- @hedra_labs is hiring in SF and NY! Built by Michael Lingelbach, a Stanford computational neuroscience PhD dropout turned founder, Hedra powers the creative workflows of 10 million users and 20% of the Fortune 500. Backed by $45 million from investors like @speedrun and @IndexVentures they are building the world’s most advanced models for unified media understanding. 8️⃣ open roles: Agentic Engineer Design Engineer Product Engineer Senior / Staff Backend Engineer Senior / Staff Full-Stack Engineer Senior/Staff Infrastructure Engineer Support Engineer (AI-First) Outbound SDR Apply here → hedra.com/careers + shoot me a DM! OR Join the a16z speedrun talent network: bit.ly/4bLbORL