I had an incredible conversation with the legendary @MagicJohnson on the @a16z podcast discussing his best deals, investing where no one else is looking, and building a sports empire. Grateful for the 10+ years of building together and learning from the 🐐 on and off the court. Give it a listen 🎙️

One of the best bubble indicators from @pmarca -- where Harvard and Stanford MBAs go after graduation. If they go into tech → market’s overblown. If they go back to banking → great time to invest in startups. Social status of MBAs is a good bubble indicator. Cool trivia!

No one is going to care about the underlying AI model soon, especially for consumers. The models are already good enough for most of what people need. What consumers want is for AI to be useful, easy to access, and FREE or bundled into something they already pay for. Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor described this shift in the figure below which is in their book The Innovator’s Solution. When a product isn’t good enough, performance wins. Once it is good enough, convenience and cost start to matter more. The winning question may soon be less Whose model is best? and more Why would I pay separately for this?

Andreessen Horowitz has a message for up-and-coming tech talent: Don’t drop out of school to start a company; come do school with us instead. The venture-capital firm is investing $35 million in an unaccredited two-year alternative to traditional college. on.wsj.com/4rnuxci

A big dream is as much work as a small dream. Dream big 📈

Four years of honoring the people who built hip-hop.

In 2018, Nike let Roger Federer walk rather than pay him roughly $10M a year. He signed with a small Swiss running brand called On instead, and took an ownership stake. When On went public in 2021, that stake was worth around $300M. His career prize money from 20 Grand Slams and 24 years of tennis was $130M. The equity made him more than double what the entire playing career did. Kylian Mbappé just ran the same play. He'd worn Nike since he was 8 years old. Twelve signature Mercurials. His contract quietly expired on July 31 and he let it die, and the reporting on the On deal describes equity in the company, his own signature sub-brand, direct work with the product teams, and a term around ten years. So he's now a part-owner of an $11B company that sells its first football boot in 2027. Nike was paying him to advertise Mercurials. On has him sharing in whatever the boots earn, which for a 27-year-old with a decade-long deal is a very different bet. On also knew exactly who to send. Thierry Henry came in as Director of Football and reportedly played a big role in getting the deal done. Nike had 19 years and unlimited money and still lost him to a recruiter. Federer's version of the trade took two years to pay off. Mbappé's boot hits the market before his next World Cup.

It’s no secret that I’m bullish on Florida as a federalist project that’s attracting capital and businesses from across the country. It’s an extraordinary place to live and build. West Palm Beach is the epitome of this kind of growth—and Stephen Ross and team are building a truly dynamic city and ecosystem. It’s been an incredible story of growth in America and we’re excited to become a larger part of it. The American Dynamism team at @a16z is excited to open our West Palm Beach office. It's time to Build 🌴🇺🇸🚀

Excited to announce @a16z is leading Highstock's Series A! Highstock is an AI-powered marketplace tackling a trillion-dollar problem for consumer brands - excess inventory. They have $1B+ in product listed from 100+ major brands, who use Highstock to reach vetted buyers 👇

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Careers are long. And you never know how life re-intersects… The karmic boomerang is real. For good (and for bad). Always why you should do the right thing!

Time to mf build 😤😤😤

Regret the tone of my post on data centers yesterday. What I should have said: There were reasonable concerns about data centers 18ish months ago: water, taxes, jobs, electricity prices, the environment and what they would do to small towns. Well-structured data center projects have largely addressed these concerns today and we should be celebrating this. On balance, data centers are awesome for America in every way. On water: U.S. data centers use a fraction of what golf courses use. A lot of the numbers from 18 months ago were off by over 1000x. Newer data centers use closed-loop systems or recycled water. Should be required by every town approving a data center project. On taxes: looking only at sales-tax exemptions, as Ronan Farrow did, is the wrong way to evaluate this. Data centers pay significant property taxes. Loudoun County, which is the wealthiest county in America, now collects on the order of $1 billion a year from data centers. In Quincy, WA, data centers are more than half the property-tax roll. Over time, property taxes can go to zero while government spending increases in these towns. On jobs: this has been unambiguously awesome for blue collar Americans. Demand for electricians, plumbers, welders, HVAC techs, and contractors has gone vertical, and it is not a one-time construction job. These buildings get upgraded and expanded over time. That is why the building trades are fighting for them, and why some unions are now treating opposition to data centers as a reason not to endorse politicians. On power: the original fear was that households would pay for the incremental electricity demand in the form of higher prices. That is why the ratepayer-protection deals and the new large-load tariffs exist. The right structure is: the data center brings or pays for new generation and signs a contract long enough that existing customers are protected. Where that is happening, utilities are cutting or freezing residential rates and saying so on the record. Where it is not, people are right to object. Electricity prices are going down *today* in a number of large states because of data centers. 
On the environment: data centers overwhelming use natural gas today, which is the cleanest power source outside of nuclear, solar and wind. And the companies that are building the data centers are committed to carbon neutrality such that an equivalent amount of solar will likely be built. Maybe more importantly, the data centers need batteries to function effectively and these batteries can also sell energy back into the grid (which recently prevented blackouts in Texas). Over time, data centers will run on solar plus batteries. On the towns: Poverty in Quincy, WA fell from 29% to 6%. Data center taxes paid for a new high school, a hospital, a library, police and fire stations. This is happening in many left for dead former mill and farm towns that had no other bidder for the land. Data centers are actually reindustrializing parts of America and creating the kind of working-class jobs both parties have spent decades claiming to support. That should not be a partisan issue. Data centers can and should be awesome for America and they increasingly, overwhelmingly are. Supporting the outsourcing of data centers to China will likely age just as well as support for the outsourcing of high quality, blue collar manufacturing jobs to China has aged. When the facts change, I change my mind. I hope that reasonable people who had good faith reasons to oppose data centers at least consider updating their beliefs given the change in the facts over the last 18 months. This really matters for America. I will say I also think the idea of making data centers beautiful is a good one that has yet to be implemented. Data centers should be just as beautiful as Grand Central Station. We can learn a lot from the railroad buildout. Neoclassical revival ftw. Might write up open-weight AI tomorrow as this is equally essential to America.

AI is a world-defining category alongside the microprocessor, the steam engine, and electricity. Every one of them required an entirely new physical world to be built. We raised $1.1B to build this one.

Today, a16z is announcing the Machine Age Fund, a new $1.1 billion fund for founders rebuilding what intelligence runs on: chips, memory, networking, systems software, power, and the machines that bring AI into the physical world. Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and Raghu Raghuram see a new economic law. A thousand engineers cannot erase a two-year software lead, but a massive GPU cluster can turn capital directly into capability. Models are improving faster than the memory, interconnect, power, and cooling beneath them. The founder map is changing with it. Some of the strongest teams are moving from pure software into complex hardware because every constraint in the stack is now a company-building opportunity. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they explain what founders can build, why the opportunity reaches all the way down to the physical stack, and why a16z created a fund for it. 00:00 Intro 01:08 Why AI needs an entirely new infrastructure 02:02 The bottleneck is no longer the model 02:40 Founders saw it before investors did 06:07 Sold out through 2028 07:14 Why this time is different from 1999 08:57 The company whose idle hardware gained value 10:51 "Why didn't this fund exist five years ago?" 13:51 "Nobody likes to use AI more than AI" 17:06 The startup law that capital just broke 21:05 What Grok Bot got right 26:43 The case for a custom chip per model 28:23 Why AC power isn't good enough 32:07 Lots of new electricians 34:14 What one gigawatt can power 35:03 Why utilities can't just build faster 37:22 The data centers that give power back 38:01 Why we should never have called it AI 39:43 Why Nvidia will willingly leave money on the table 48:08 Hardware founders are older 52:36 Why America has to lead YouTube: piped.video/watch?v=Zx1Ec8LW… @bhorowitz @RaghuRaghuram @martin_casado @eriktorenberg

JUST IN: Cheesecake Factory is outperforming Nvidia by 109% year to date. $CAKE: 118% $NVDA: 9%

Introducing Source Material — the weekly series where the designers & creatives shaping culture share the references that shaped them. Our first guest is Thom Bettridge: Editor-in-Chief of @i_D and founder of Content World. 00:00 - Introducing Source Material 00:08 Joe's Magazine (First Issue) 00:49 Colors: A Book about a Magazine About the Rest of the World 01:27 Balenciaga Archetype magazine 02:00 032c 33 (Frank Ocean Cover) 02:28 All-In Nº9 03:32 Highstyle (Migos Cover) 04:23 i-D 374 (“The Unknown Issue” Enza Khoury Cover) 05:42 i-D 375 (“The Beta Issue” Born In 2025 Cover) 06:50 Outro

As @cdixon said: "The Whatsapp moment for money is here"

LFG @GEVS94 💯

.@martin_casado calls this age of venture completely different from any before: "Some of these major model efforts were done with very, very small teams. One of the most popular multimodal models many people use was built with a team of about 20 people. The cost of that was probably $2 billion plus." "This is unheard of. In the history of humanity, in the history of engineering efforts, we've never been able to have 20 people productively use $2 billion. What does that even mean, to put that much money to work with that small of a team and that small of a timeline?" "One of the major stories of this wave is the fact that we're able to apply large amounts of money productively in short amount of times to whatever problem we're trying to solve." @a16z