a few tips for @speedrun applicants: 1) brag about your team. what's the most impressive thing you've done? we look for a history of excellence - professional, academic, personal achievements, side hustles, weekend projects etc 2) founder market fit. what's your earned insight into your problem space? what gives you an unfair advantage? why will your team win vs the competition / frontier labs? 3) product validation. what have you already built? there are so many ways to quickly prototype these days. what tests have you run to validate that people want what you've built - revenue, users, waitlists etc? 4) network your way to a warm referral. this bumps you for priority review. we have >600 Speedrun founders and many more in the broader a16z network. the networking you do here reflects the work you do every day as a founder - recruiting, sales, fundraising, etc you may have noticed >50% of these tips are about the team. the most common mistake we see in apps / interviews is that founders spend most of their time talking about the product idea and not enough time on the team. whereas we base our investment process primarily on the team

congrats to Han, Angela, and team Fearn on closing their $5.5m seed round led by our friends at Kindred, Designer Fund, & Essence VC! @fearn_ai is the AI-native patent platform built for a fast-moving IP world where being first-to-file is the difference between making money off your idea or not. Fearn has developed purpose-built models with custom workflows to take inventions from disclosure to filing-ready draft in minutes, all at a flat $2k per patent. Fearn is already used by leading startups and public companies, including Unity, Dandelion Energy, Serova Bio, Capsule, Syncere, Sans Strings, Taya etc we’re proud to have been investors since the preseed thru a16z @speedrun where we saw the team in action up close. This team has amazing founder-market-fit: Han was a former patent prosecutor at Morrison Foerster and Angela is a Caltech PhD and AI researcher at Google @ndrewlee @samshank and I have been so impressed by their vision and sheer velocity, and we couldn’t be more excited to support Fearn on the next phase of their journey! Let’s build!

I think it's safe to say Excel is solved. The sign of an Excel rookie used to be manually using your mouse... now it's doing ANYTHING at all without AI. If you use Excel do yourself a favor and watch all 3 mins. It's a new world. Solving tasks in 20 mins that take teams days.

AI Faire by a16z @speedrun is kicking off with a blast at NY tech week! 23 ambitious AI builders sharing a sneak preview of the future

Full house at the Future of Entertainment event at NY Tech Week! Film screening and panel with Adobe, Runway, NBC, and a16z at the gorgeous Angelika Film Center in soho

Congrats @lucky_z2 and Sekai team on closing a $26m Series A from our friends at Khosla, Connect, Mayfield, and A*! Sekai has become the home for a new generation of AI-native personalized apps. In a short period of time, users have built >15m mini apps across personal utility, productivity, entertainment, & more We’ve had the pleasure of working with Lucky, a 3x repeat founder, since the preseed thru a16z @speedrun, and have been impressed by their vision, velocity, and pragmatic leadership. We couldn’t be more excited to invest further to support the team on the next phase of growth! 🚀

AI is changing the nature of entertainment & who gets to make it - come discuss the AI creative opportunity at our NY Tech Week event with leaders from Adobe, Runway, Comcast, & a16z! Featuring @c_valenzuelab of @runwayml, Greg Reed of @NBCUniversal, Hannah Elsakar | Justin Wang of @Adobe, & myself Tues 6/2 in NYC - register below! if you’re on the waitlist, reply here and I’ll see what i can do partiful.com/e/xq9XJglFbgTig…

huge thank you to Hubspot cofounders @bhalligan @dharmesh for a riveting chat on why there’s never been a better time to build a startup at Boston tech week! A few of my favorite takeaways: - Hubspot created a new category in marketing SaaS, there are similar opps for new category creation in AI today - Most founders should aspire to be more ambitious - ex. Hubspot wanted to be the biggest company in Boston, let’s be the biggest in the world - Finding distribution still remains hard - AI makes it easier to build but also increased noise. Hubspot was built around a distribution insight, and startups today need to find one too - The nature of AI-native teams is changing - but hiring for strengths rather than lack of weakness still works

I was a surprise last-minute guest at an event at @HubSpot HQ in Cambridge this evening. Fun fireside chat with my friend and co-founder @bhalligan, moderated by @Tocelot from @a16z. Loved the entrepreneurial energy for building in Boston. Thanks to all of you that joined. Was a sold-out event and the room was packed!

Huge thank you to Boston Mayor Michelle Wu for supporting Boston Tech Week @MayorWu! the support from the Boston community has been staggering: >660 events launching this week and growing. Boston 💪💪

It's not #BosTechWeek unless @a16z is there - thank you @Tocelot for making it official! "Coming back to Boston reminded me of everything that makes the city great: world-class universities, deep technical talent, entrepreneurial hubs across software, robotics, bio hardware..."

Good morning Boston! Excited to kick off @Techweek_ in this great American city

hah love this comic Wil Catlin made for Boston @Techweek_! so excited to kick this off next Tuesday!

the best startup ideas / pitches are like splinters in the brain. you just can't stop thinking about them all my worst passes have been splinters - i continued to think about them for months afterward if you're lucky enough to find a splinter, cherish it and go all-in!

final day to apply for a16z @speedrun! there's never been a better time to build. every app, dev tool, infra layer, and vertical is being reinvented. users and companies are more open to trying new products than ever if you've thought about taking the leap to start a company or raise $, here's what's on the other side: - the a16z network - an operating team that gives you unfair advantages in recruiting, GTM, marketing, and fundraising - partners who've all been builders, in it with you for the long term - a community of 400 fellow founders, many of whom are repeat founders of billion$ companies, olympiad medalists, PhDs at the top of their field etc if you're bold enough to build a generational company, we want to partner with you apps close tonight at midnight 👇 speedrun.a16z.com/apply?utm_…

NEW: INVESTOR ADVICE FOR APPLYING TO SPEEDRUN We got in the booth with @kenanhsaleh, @emilybenn12, @far33d, and @tkexpress11 from the a16z speedrun investing team to talk about: 00:00 - patterns we're seeing in apps for SR007 04:50 - our process for reviewing apps 08:20 - traction signals we look for 09:10 - on teams that are a little too early for speedrun 14:26 - surprising things we've seen in interviews 20:46 - why you SHOULD NOT take vc funds 25:16 - why should founders pick speedrun? Watch the full roundtable here:👇

noone enjoys waiting at the doctor's office or wading through a sea of insurance paperwork we love to meet talented teams building toward modernizing an AI-native healthcare stack

In the AI era, the next great software distribution company won’t look like an app store For the last decade-plus, building a strong software business was mostly a game of scarcity. The hard part was assembling the capital, taste, engineering, and distribution to build one enduring app. The discovery systems we built matched that world: app stores, SEO, search bars, rankings, reviews, ads, marketplaces AI has blown up these constraints Soon, anyone will be able to generate software for anything: a workout injury, a work project, a personal workflow, a one-off analysis, a weird niche need only they have, maybe only in a single moment Some apps will last forever, but most won’t. Many will exist for minutes or hours, and be created even faster But just because software can be created at the speed of thought doesn’t mean everyone will become a developer. Most people won’t want to prompt, build, debug, deploy, or manage software. They’ll just want to be matched with the right tool for the job in front of them The same technological wave enabling software creation at scale is also breaking software distribution at scale. Search assumes the best answer already exists somewhere. App stores assume software is something you browse, compare, install, and keep In a world of personal software, the real question becomes: Who understands enough about me, or has earned enough trust from me, to know what software should exist for me right now? The next great app distribution companies may look less like search engines and more like trusted relationships Some will win by importing and processing personal context: your goals, constraints, calendar, body, files, workflows, history, collaborators, and intent. Others will win by exporting taste and trust: experts, creators, communities, agents, and brands that people rely on to decide what is worth using Either way, the new gateway won’t be a search box or an app store shelf. It will be the layer that recommends, assembles, routes, and personalizes software at the moment of need This is the new frontier: context, recommendation, trust, and distribution in the age of infinite software If you’re building platforms or experiences for this future, we want to meet you. Apply to @speedrun. Applications for SR007 close this weekend Application link below

attracting great talent is insanely hard today, we give you an unfair advantage @speedrun with our amazing talent team

space is now a warfighting domain - we're excited to meet teams with the technical chops and bold ambition to build for the future of space and defense 🚀

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: