Clear path for tranditional Company to AI native company
Today, a16z Crypto is becoming a16z Frontier.
Since joining a16z in 2013, @cdixon has focused on technologies that look futuristic well before they reach the mainstream. Those themes led to investments in Oculus, Skydio, Zipline, Coinbase, Solana, and Uniswap.
Frontier expands that mandate beyond crypto to back "outer planet" founders who are building new technologies and creating markets that may take years to develop.
Chris joins @pmarca, @bhorowitz, and @eriktorenberg to discuss why crypto has become part of the broader tech landscape, why Frontier fills a hole in the firm's architecture, and why they'd rather be too early than too late.
They also get into why the gap between AI-native startups and incumbents is the widest Marc has ever seen, how AI could pull forward 20 years of frontier technology, why stablecoins may become the way AI agents pay each other, how AI is breaking the internet's business model, and why today's 18-year-olds are about to become superhumans.
0:50 Introducing a16z Frontier
2:49 Smartphone parts to drones and VR
4:47 Backing the "outer planets"
7:11 Good ideas that look like bad ideas
10:43 The JP Morgan photo in Marc's office
15:13 Good tech ideas eventually work
16:53 AI may pull tech 20 years forward
18:18 The widest AI gap Marc's ever seen
22:06 Workers adopt AI before companies do
26:32 Old use cases vs. AI-native ones
30:08 Beyond "product manager brain"
34:45 AI can reverse engineer any hardware
38:23 The case for open source AI
46:36 How AI breaks the internet's model
49:11 VR, homebrew hacking, multiplayer AI
54:00 If you're 18, study "modern alchemy"
YouTube: youtu.be/-9XQMHhpypc
Not an offer or solicitation. None of the information herein should be taken as investment advice; Some of the companies mentioned are portfolio companies of a16z. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more information. A list of investments made by a16z is available at a16z.com/portfolio.
Can a model of a fruit fly’s visual system find its way through a virtual kitchen?
Press Start and watch it happen. The model processes images from the scene and generates neural responses in real time. A controller we built uses those responses to steer the simulated fly around obstacles. Alongside the flight, a glowing network shows how its neural activity changes.
No scripted route. No prerecorded flight. Each step starts with a new image and a fresh steering decision.
We haven’t recreated an entire fruit fly. But we’ve taken a visual system model grounded in biology and connected it to something you can see: a simulated fly navigating a virtual world.
果蠅視覺神經模擬
I just reserved my Cloudflare Wallet tag: bluevelo.cloudflare.pay.
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Fishball and Tenpura are two desktop AI companions I built from scratch: local wake gesture → Whisper STT → LLM → streamed TTS with real-time mouth-sync, running on a self-hosted GPU pipeline for near-instant replies. Each one has its own personality baked into the firmware.
Still shipping: graceful power-off, a wake word, and getting them to talk to each other.
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