Home Speakers Andrew Chen Quote In recent years, innovative AI products that didn’t build their own models were derided as low-tech “GPT wrappers.” Yet consumer products for the past few decades have been low-tech, with seemingly small moats and yet have generated huge value.
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More from Andrew Chen Blog New founder archetypes in the AI era Oct 27, 2026
The solo founder is part of a list of maybe new archetypes that I think we’ll soon see a lot more of - and I’ll make both the pro and con case for each here: Solo founders Why: Solo founders can do 100x with AI, so they can ship a v1 when previously they couldn’t have before Why not: Maybe a team of cofounders still makes more progress. Blog Can solo founders win in the AI era? Oct 27, 2026
These days at a16z I’m mostly working on Speedrun , where we write the first check into brand new startups (up to $1M), and a lot of what we focus on is founder backgrounds/profiles. What are the right ones? How will the profiles change as we enter the age of AI? Blog Will agents have network effects? Oct 6, 2026
If the content creation loop works for agentic virality, I think it means there’s a big incentive for every agent to volunteer to make visually-appealing, shareable content, do this often. Blog Will agents have network effects? Oct 6, 2026
Meanwhile, every incumbent network and a new generation of startups will have the opposite incentive: make their networks universally accessible to every agent so that no horizontal agent can recreate and capture them. Blog The coming product retention crisis Sep 8, 2026
AI is fantastic at automating tasks that have verifiable outcomes, which is why we’re seeing amazing strides from coding, mathematical proofs, and workplace productivity is an extension to that. Blog The coming product retention crisis Sep 8, 2026
That’s a fair question at the dawn of the AI age when an app might take about as much time to build as editing a Youtube video. So this means average product retention will collapse, and the days of seeing >20% D30 will feel like a dream. Blog The coming product retention crisis Sep 8, 2026
The future of marketing (and by extension, a large swath of product) is zero-sum and PvP - the abundance of apps/videos/pods/creators/experiences will mean we have infinity times more supply than demand. Blog Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions Mar 10, 2025
Code will be more of a disposable commodity, with less reuse, and instead generated on the fly for personalized use. Blog Vibe coding, some thoughts and predictions Mar 10, 2025
This will change, and it means that over time, software will become dominated by youth culture the same way that social media is. Blog Revenge of the GPT Wrappers Feb 4, 2025
The big difference is that instead of taking two decades to sort this all out, as it took between the dotcom and Web 2.0 cycles, we’re speedrunning the whole thing in just a few years.
On the same topics Essay Making Startups Powerful September 2026
The obvious AI variant is to let your users opt in to training your model on their interactions with it. Many will resist that, but if some don't, the model they get to use will outperform the vanilla one used by the others. Essay Making Startups Powerful September 2026
You own the customer relationship, and the model companies are in effect component suppliers. The question is how easy it would be for them to engulf you, or even your customers. Blog Random thoughts while gazing at the misty AI Frontier Apr 20, 2026
Founders running successful AI companies should all take a cold hard look at exiting in the next 12-18 months, which may be a value maximizing moment for outcomes. Interview Big Technology Podcast: Doubling Down on Text Models, The Superapp Plan, Codex's Potential Apr 7, 2026
The sum of random vectors is zero, but if you align your vectors, then you can go in a direction. Essay Services: The New Software Mar 5, 2026
But if you sell the work, every improvement in the model makes your service faster, cheaper, and harder to compete with. Essay Services: The New Software Mar 5, 2026
The next $1T company will be a software company masquerading as a services firm. About this quote 
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