angela strange
781 posts
@astrange
General Partner (AI Apps & Fintech) @a16z, proud Canadian, mom of 2 boys, distance runner; Previous: product leader
Part 2 of Big Ideas 2026, with takes from our American Dynamism and Apps teams on what next year holds for tech: a16z.news/p/big-ideas-20…
Today, we're launching Ramp Agent Cards. There's been no safe way for agents to spend money, until now. Ramp Agent Cards give agents the ability to spend, governed with real spend limits, merchant controls, and full visibility into every transaction.
Founders should know the sobering reality for enterprise SaaS venture funding today. Here’s the math. Say you’re a $1M ARR company raising a Series A with a classic 33222 growth expectation. That gets you to $72M in 5yrs and say $250M in 8yrs. By then you’re usually growing <<50% and the public markets might give you a 7x or $1.75B, if you can even go public. If you get $10M at $100M post-money for the A, that’s a 17.5x and maybe 10x after dilution. That would be ~33% IRR and $10M invested becomes $100M. In the venture model, you have to outperform the SP500 which is 15% and a Google which is 25%. Here, with perfect execution, a lot of work, time and risk, you get 33% in a near optimal (95 percentile) case. And usually, you expect 7/10 things to not work out: execution risk, market size, competition. Plus, this math is for a Series A. You need investors to underwrite even more growth at the B / C / D. It’s really hard to see this sort of deal driving fund returns. Now, of course, there’s tons of caveats. You could pay less than $100M post, try to grow faster, do pro rata to avoid dilution, stay private longer etc, but the point remains. There might be exceptional growth stories like Databricks, Snowflake and Applied Intuition, but most deals look like what I described. In a previous time, SaaS multiples were higher in public (20x), entry valuations were lower ($30M) and the money you needed to hire talent was lower ($150k). You could get 100% IRR before. Now, it’s harder than ever to justify investing here, unless they are true outliers.
Major life hack: Be optimistic. The way you choose to perceive the world impacts every single area of your life. Choose wisely.
Only @davidsenra could get me to be on the other side of the mic. Because I don't plan on being interviewed often, I wanted to share this conversation, which I so enjoyed, with our audience. It went in a very different direction than I expected. We barely talk about investing or interviewing. Instead, we talk about finding an organizing principle for life, undiscovered talent, and the idea that "the reward for good work is more work." We also discuss the principles that guide how I think about building Invest Like the Best, Colossus, and Positive Sum. This conversation was originally recorded and released on @davidsenra, and I wanted to share it on the @InvestLikeBest feed as well. Please go follow what he's doing, there's no one like David. Enjoy! Timestamps: 0:00 Championing Undiscovered Talent 5:07 The Upanishads Passage 8:34 Growth Without Goals Philosophy 10:40 Why Media and Investing Are the Same Thing 31:04 The Daniel Ek Dinner 39:11 The Privilege of a Lifetime Is Being Who You Are 53:21 Clean Fuel vs Dirty Fuel 57:03 Professional Learners: The Unfair Advantage of Podcasting 1:00:18 Relationships Run the World 1:06:30 The Origin Story of Invest Like the Best 1:08:05 Building Colossus 1:23:40 Learn, Build, Share, Repeat 1:30:07 How Reading Books Led to Everything 1:37:13 Finding Your Superpower 1:46:02 Life's Work 1:49:51 What Matters Most 1:59:48 The Kindest Thing
Autonomous agents are an entirely new category of users to build for, and, increasingly, to sell to. Today, we’re launching (a preview) of machine payments on @stripe—a way for developers to directly charge agents, with a few lines of code. 🤖💸 $ Let’s start tinkering… ⤵️
