a16z speedrun 🧊

ONE WEEK LEFT The final day to apply for our 2026 Summer/Fall cohort is May 17th. If you have the makings of a generational founder, don't hesitate. It's time to build.

Speedrun Founder Profile: Austin, Vatsal, & Ankit Two brothers and their childhood friend Cold applied to speedrun (SR006) Left frontier labs and big tech to start Modern Industrials Three months later they closed their round and are heading back home to build. Their story:

speedrun is awesome, highly recommend it for anyone building a startup early stage! @andrewchen and the rest of the @speedrun team are super helpful :) If you're thinking of/applying - feel free to DM me! I can refer and/or write $10k scout checks 🚀

You asked, we delivered. speedrun Air arriving in a city near you full of oodles of savings.

the tipping point for mass adoption of agents will be proactive behavior - when agents can "just do things" for you we've already seen a bit of this with openclaw but we're still so early in the transition - excited to meet teams building proactive AI products!

update for a16z speedrun- It's now the FINAL week to apply for the upcoming 007 program hosted in San Francisco. Applications close officially on May 17th at 11:59 PM PST. Here's the link: speedrun.a16z.com Why apply? we'll invest up to $1m in your brand new startup. It can be pre-launch, pre-traction, and even pre-idea (for the right teams) and the a16z speedun team works with you to launch/scale If you're reading this, you might be: - hanging out at a job, waiting for your next promo/bonus/X-year mark/etc - you might have a side project, thinking it should be something bigger - you're talking with a work friend about starting something - finishing school, wondering if you should accept your job The thing i’d encourage you to think about is that most startups don’t start with certainty. they start with a feeling that something is pulling at you and won’t go away. A surprising number of the best founders we meet are very early: - no company yet - no deck - no huge insight tweet thread - sometimes not even fully committed yet Don't wait until you have the perfect idea, or feel “ready.” Or everyone around you agrees, so the opportunity cost feels lower. But by then, usually the edge is gone. These insights and windows don't last forever This is the best environment in history for small teams to build massive things. AI has compressed team sizes, timelines, distribution, and iteration speed so aggressively that the old career timing assumptions don’t fully apply anymore. anyway, if you’ve been circling the idea of starting something, this might be the sign to actually do it Official stuff below: - May 17th deadline to apply (this week!) - Official dates for SR007 are from July 27 through October 11, 2026 in San Francisco - We wire funds fast and onboard you to our network of over 250 partnered tools-providers with a total of $5M in credits. - Our stacked team of battle-tested operators who help cover your gaps, without adding headcount. Expect dedicated support and programs from experts across talent, recruiting, go-to-market, marketing, creators, capital network, HR, even visa support. - a16z speedrun is extremely selective. Join an elite community of over 600+ founders who actively support each other and serve as a powerful source of customer introductions and product feedback.

@kenanhsaleh APPLY TO SPEEDRUN

Proactive AI Agents Today’s AI products are reactive. You give the model a prompt, it responds with an answer. These are useful, but I’m excited about products that take this further and shift the paradigm from “ask → answer” to “observe → act." These agents will continuously monitor context in the background across all of your connected tools and data, predict what matters, and take action before being asked to do so – much like a human does. So instead of you prompting the model, the model will start prompting you. Examples here could include agents that remind you about tasks you forgot to complete, resolve customer issues before support tickets are filed, or debug and ship code fixes automatically. This shift represents a new paradigm where AI products behave more like humans and less like tools. We’re already starting to see this dynamic with products like OpenClaw, Poke, and more - and we’ve only scratched the surface of capabilities here. We’re accepting applications for the next cohort of @a16z @speedrun – If you’re building the next generation of AI products, apply online.

@EmlynThompsonLA the speedrun horror movie, coming to theaters soon

Welcome aboard speedrun air ✈️ (you’ll get it in 27 seconds, trust me) Final destination: $6.6M+ in savings on the speedrun marketplace! Boarding passes to speedrun 007 are still available, apply today!

@EmlynThompsonLA the speedrun horror movie coming to theaters soon

@emilybenn12 banger

Early Stage Markets Rarely Look Like Markets Everybody loves a good market map. It’s seductive to think that you can compress the world into tidy grids with logos neatly sorted into categories, each square representing a company that has raised meaningful capital. For investors, these maps are useful tools to help think through investment opportunities. They are also dangerous for founders. By the time a market is legible enough to be mapped, the most valuable entry points have already closed. The best founders are not waiting for a sector to mature enough that a VC can toss it on a 2x2 it. Generational companies are built by recognizing patterns of behavior that precede the sector map entirely. In my work at a16z speedrun, the most promising opportunities almost never arrive looking like opportunities. They arrive looking strange. Behavior Comes Before Categories Markets begin as behavioral shifts in small, overlooked communities. It may be a few hundred developers who can’t stop talking about a new tool. Or maybe there are a few thousand users engaging with an app in ways that seem totally indecipherable to outsiders. The usage numbers are modest, and if you were just glancing at the product, you would probably ignore it. What matters is the intensity of the behavior. There is a meaningful difference between an app that people open often and an app that changes how people operate. A worldchanging company has to, by its very definition, induce structural new ways of working/being/creating/existing. Consider OpenClaw. An open-source project built for developers, it required terminal knowledge and real technical fluency. It was not used by everyone. But for those who adopted it, OpenClaw became a fundamental part of their workflow. It reinvented the way they conducted work. What also made OpenClaw significant was its downstream effects. At speedrun we have already started seeing a new generation of pitches built on the conceptual foundation it propagated. Founders now have proof that agents could be held towards outcomes, not merely tasks completed. Within a week or two of OpenClaws launch, we had pitches for making these systems accessible to non-engineers. Then as the ideas permeated, we started having companies proposing agents that could autonomously run entire business functions, from legal to HR. The agentic workforce thesis now discussed at every conference accelerated across a small developer community restructuring their work around a tool most of the industry had never heard of. But as a founder, you don’t have to wait for something as popular as OpenClaw to come along. How to Spot an Early Market Working with really early-stage companies at speedrun, you start to get a gut sense for whether something is being pulled in by real demand or just pushed out, well before the usual metrics tell you much. What we try to get founders to look for is simple: are there signs that demand exists even before the product is fully there? The specifics vary, but a few patterns show up a lot. First is what happens before launch. It is not just about racking up signups. Plenty of subpar products with good marketing campaigns can do that. But is there real intent behind the interest? You can see this in everything that forms around the waitlist. People share it, talk about it, and bring others in without being asked. That energy is coming from the market. Second is early community. Sometimes people start gathering around a product before it’s even live, and the conversation keeps going on its own. No one from the company is propping it up. People show up because it connects with something they’ve been looking for. Users start creating explainers, tutorials, or threads about the product before there’s any official documentation. They’re doing the company’s marketing without being asked, because they want others to find it. Third is how intensely a small group uses it once they get access. You’ll see a handful of users spending a surprising amount of time with the product, not because they have to, but because they want to. From there, one of two things usually happens. Either it replaces tools they were already using, or they start bending it into new use cases the founders did not plan for. Enough of these happen and you know you have something primordial and powerful on your hands. Building for What You Cannot Yet See One common failure mode I see from founders is when a team gets stuck building “one more feature” before showing their app to users. The founders I have seen get this right do something that sounds limiting but is actually the opposite. They pick ten users, maybe fewer, and they go deep. They become almost unreasonably attentive to how those specific people work and what they actually need. And the insights that come out of that kind of closeness are usually generalizable. What ten power users care about tends to map, at least directionally, onto what ten thousand eventual users will care about. Narrowing your focus and shipping live features constantly It is how you earn the right to go broad. The Map and the Territory Market maps will keep getting published. They’re useful abstractions, but they’re definitionally lagging. By the time something is legible enough to map, the underlying behavior has already stabilized and the earliest forms of leverage have already been captured. The next market worth building in is forming right now in a community, or a product, or a pre-order page that no one has yet thought to categorize. Whether you see it depends entirely on whether you are paying attention to behavior or waiting for a label. For founders, that means building the habit before you need it. You have to haunt the weird corners before they’re legible, the Discord servers with no business model, the subreddits full of complaints about a workflow nobody has named yet. You’re looking for people who have already changed how they hope to work and just haven’t been handed the right product yet.

@MattPerault @andrewchen Thanks for chatting with us!

What does life actually look like for a two-person team building a startup at a kitchen table? And why are these founders almost never in the room when policy gets made? .@AndrewChen joins the AI Policy Brief to talk about the Littlest of Little Tech. Through a16z @speedrun, he backs startups on day one. Through @TechWeek_, he sees what makes startup ecosystems thrive. A conversation about founder reality, the Little Tech policy gap, and how regulation shapes what gets built.

@tuanle Let's go

Speedrun was honestly so well run

There's 1 week left to apply to Speedrun! Applications for a16z speedrun close May 17 at 11:59 PM PT. We've already been reviewing applications and making decisions, so if you've been meaning to apply, now's the time. Even if your idea is early or mid-pivot, we want to see it. Apply here: SR007 More info at speedrun.a16z.com

@custo_lejla LEJLA >>>

We’re entering a world of infinite output. AI can generate code, designs, and create even entire product roadmaps in seconds. Building is getting cheaper by the day. But judgment isn’t. It’s no longer about who can produce more. It’s about who can decide better. Taste and discernment isn’t just aesthetics. It’s: - Cutting a paragraph that sounds smart but says nothing - Knowing which slide to delete, not which one to add - Choosing the one priority that actually moves the needle And ignoring the flood of “good suggestions” that dilute focus. The hardest part of most white-collar work isn’t generating options anymore. It’s choosing well. And yet most tools optimize for speed and volume, not helping people get better at deciding. I’d love to see startups building toward products that help individuals train better judgement over time. What would it look like to create: - Tools that train people to attach real probabilities to their beliefs - and see, over time, where they tend to overestimate or underestimate - Systems that can make decision-making visible, trackable, and improvable - Tools that train you to prioritize ruthlessly, that is to pick the few things that matter - and get comfortable killing the rest In an age of infinite leverage, leverage without taste creates noise. I’m especially excited about founders building products that strengthen human discernment. In a world of abundance, discernment is the scarce asset. If you’re building here, DM me and let’s talk!

If you're a startup founder applying to @speedrun you should be in @chen's DMs asap