Clare Capital

a16z: The Power Brokers There is this story about Marc Andreessen that I think perfectly captures a16z. in 2015, when New Yorker writer Tad Friend sat down to breakfast with Marc Andreessen while writing Tomorrow’s Advance Man. Friend had just heard from a rival VC who wanted to get a word in: that a16z’s funds were so large, and ownership percentages so small1, that to get 5-10x aggregate returns across its first four funds, they’d need their aggregate portfolio to be worth $240-480 billion. “When I started to check the math with Andreessen,” Friend writes, “He made a jerking-off motion and said ‘Blah-blah-blah. We have all the models—we’re elephant hunting, going after big game!’” The aggregate portfolio did not end up being worth $240-480 billion. a16z Funds 1-4 had a total enterprise value of $853 billion at distribution or latest post-money valuation. Since distribution, Facebook alone has added $1.5 trillion in market cap. Some form of this pattern keeps playing out: a16z makes a crazy bet on the future. Those in the know say it’s stupid. Wait some years. Turns out it’s not stupid! Which is why, as a16z announces $15 billion in fresh funds, it is probably a mistake to dismiss them as greedy or stupid. It's probably worth understanding just exactly what IT'S TRYING TO BUILD. That's what I do in today's not boring deep dive: a16z: The Power Brokers

A pretty much constant paradox is that we expect outlier outcomes from people that we demand act in normal, average ways. We love geniuses after they do the great thing, but we basically loath and harass them if they act in uncouth ways before hand.

🧵 The wild story of NFDG: How two Silicon Valley legends built a $1.1B fund, 4X'd it in 2 years, then abandoned it all for Meta this week. Nat Friedman (ex-GitHub CEO) + Daniel Gross (ex-YC partner) launched NFDG in 2023 with $1.1B focused on AI investments. Their crown jewel? Safe Superintelligence (co-founded by Gross himself) - went from $5B to $30B valuation. Portfolio also included ElevenLabs, Granola, and Basis. With only ~50% deployed, they hit 4X returns (~$550M → $2.2B portfolio value). Advisory board: Stripe's John Collison + Paradigm's Matt Huang. Then everything changed in ONE WEEK: • June 29: Gross leaves Safe Superintelligence
• This week: Zuckerberg announces Friedman leading Meta AI • Thursday: Friedman confirms he's started at Meta • Sunday: Meta offers tender for up to 49% of fund • Today: NFDG website is down The twist? LPs can cash out at FULL NAV (not the typical discount). Meta gets the talent + deal flow without governance headaches. This mirrors Garry Tan leaving Initialized for Y Combinator. The lesson: In the Age of AI, even quadrupling $1B in 2 years may be less lucrative than being an operator in the revolution itself. When the smartest VCs become operators, you know we're living through the most important tech transition of our lifetimes. 🚀

Today is the 30-year anniversary of my venture capital career. My younger self would have found that hard to fathom. Reflecting back, there was a simple algorithm embedded in my investment strategy that has made it all the more exciting and engaging over time — I look for startups that are unlike anything I have seen before, yet adjacent. This novelty-seeking algorithm leads me and my partner Maryanna to explore numerous expanding frontiers of technology advancement and coincides with the innervation of ever more industries. The software-centric transformation we saw in automotive and aerospace is underway in manufacturing, construction, energy and agriculture. I know that I will be investing in new sectors five years from now that I could not name today, just as I would never imagined investing in Tesla or SpaceX twenty years ago. It’s a perpetual driver for lifelong learning. But it arose from a simple boredom. At DFJ, we were the most active VC firm in Internet startups in 1995-1996, but by 1999, all of the B2C and B2B businesses were looking like variants on the same idea, sometimes to absurd extremes. I transitioned to deep tech semiconductor and materials science startups out of some instinct to seek less competitive domains and try something completely different. I had not lost faith in the economic transformation that the Internet would still bring — far from it — but I exited the sector as all the companies I saw in 1999 looked the same. Interestingly, this had me exiting the Internet sector for new investments prior to the dot com crash. The same thing happened with cleantech investing, where we were one of the most active investors in the early years, but we stopped before the 2008 downturn. In both cases, the rush of fast followers and arbitrage-seeking opportunists preceded the crash. We did not predict the crash; we naturally moved on from when the novelty was gone. From our simple rule, various emergent properties become evident on different time scales. In the near term, we gained portfolio diversification (obviously). In the medium term, we exited sectors when it was emotionally least likely (peak boom times) but prior to a major correction. It also lets us become early leaders in new sectors (Internet in 1995, then cleantech and syn bio, then AI in 2014) since we don’t have fixed sectors of focus, but we try to follow a thread of predicate technologies opening new opportunities. But the most rewarding result has been the lesson learned over decades — that this investment strategy affords a lifetime of learning and dynamic adjustment to new areas of growth. Colleagues who have a fixed sector focus, in contrast, have a short-term competency dynamo (being the most experienced in a sector or niche), but ultimately, they seem unhappy 20 years later, retiring from venture regardless of their level of business success. Looking back over the past 30 years, my most important decision was to leave the competency trap of sticking with a single sector of focus.

Kalshi hired me to make the most unhinged NBA Finals commercial possible. Network TV actually approved this GTA-style madness 🤣 High-dopamine Veo 3 videos will be the ad trend of 2025. Here’s how I made it in just TWO DAYS 👇🏼 (Prompt included)

Some notes on Negotiations 1/ When you finish any complex deal you will feel fatigued and worn out. It sometimes feels hard to celebrate. The best deals feel this way. Complex negotiations require compromises. When both (or all) parties make concessions nobody feels great. Everybody felt like they gave more than they wanted. And all wish the other party would have folded easier. That’s the definition of a good negotiation

This NYU paper basically says: retail investors spend 6 minutes researching a trade - mostly just looking at charts What most people actually want is an entertainment platform. Not a finance app The best intimately recognize this and are building entertainment super-apps dressed up as brokerages

60% of general admission ticket buyers at Coachella used Buy-Now-Pay-Later to finance their tickets, per Billboard.

DoorDash and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in interest-free installments or deferred options aligned with payday schedules.

Weirdly underreported...USV raised a new fund! Here's their net performance data from their latest deck. One of the greatest of all time.