Smayan Mehra

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.

We just raised $42M to build the unified creative environment for the generative era.