Excited to share that I’ve joined @a16z as an investment partner! As part of the American Dynamism practice, I’ll be working alongside @davidu , @KTmBoyle, @espricewright and team to invest in visionary companies supporting our national interest. More below, but TLDR we have an extraordinary opportunity to invest in the technology that will (and must) enhance our national security, industrial productivity, and public health. And although American Dynamism has evolved into a full-blown movement, we’ve just barely scratched the surface. If you are an entrepreneur who shares our mission, please reach out! Thank you to everyone (including @amishjani, the @FirstMarkCap team, and their incredible portfolio founders) who have supported me thus far. More below and more to come 🇺🇸 ~ In recent months, I’ve had dozens of conversations about my jump to a16z. Here’s some context for those I’ve yet to get to. My journey began with a simple observation about VC: much of the “low-hanging fruit” has been picked. The power of software is well-understood, and our asset class has grown around it, increasing competition. The best investors (like @FirstMarkCap!) will successfully back the best startups building AI-native solutions and deliver attractive returns. But many others will either 1) overpay just to win, or 2) rationalize investment in underwhelming companies (what I call “SaaS incrementalism”). Both will result in tepid returns. To find transformative opportunities, VCs need to forge ahead and go where digital innovation previously hasn’t. But where to go? I stand by the cliché, “necessity is the mother of invention,” i.e., we should look where innovation urgently needs to happen. Interestingly, the sectors most critical to our national interest are also most underserved by software. So I found my answers: aerospace, defense, energy, public safety, education, housing, supply chain, and manufacturing. The problem with these domains – far from the safety and familiarity of white-collar enterprise SaaS – is that they present new challenges, most notably regulation, labor complexity, and capex intensity (the absence of which made SaaS so attractive since the advent of cloud). But they also present enormous opportunity. Our largest economic sectors have yet to realize the benefits of major technology transformation. AI (from computer vision, to robotics, to agentic automation) dramatically increases the surface area for potential disruption. I determined that success here will require a team of investors to share a mission and risk appetite, and build specialized networks for talent, GTM, and policy. I wanted to work for such a team, and feel lucky to have found one. What began as a pragmatic observation about investing, morphed into a profound desire to invest in the technologies that will define the next century for Americans. The AD team wants to empower the most daring entrepreneurs building in our most critical and overlooked sectors, so if you fit that profile, I’ll hope to connect soon.

🚨GAME CHANGER🚨 Introducing “SMART” — the new air traffic management tool that saves YOU time, cuts back DELAYS, and makes your flying experience BETTER MORE TO COME ✈️

Imagine going to school and this is who you get to learn from

Thrilled to announce our latest incubation: Horowitz Andreessen Academy. Horowitz Andreessen Academy will be a two-year residential program in San Francisco for 16 to 22 year olds. My biggest regret from my college experience is how divorced it was from the real world (both practically but also intellectually) HAA is the opposite. Students will learn from real-world practitioners and intellectuals; including founders (Sam Altman, Brian Armstrong, Jensen Huang), investors (Elad Gil, Daniel Gross), and professors (Agnes Callard, Tyler Cowen), among hundreds of others. The Academy is the educational experience I wish I had. In 1984, the educational psychologist Benjamin Bloom published a paper about how the average student who received one-on-one tutoring focused on mastery techniques performed better than 98% of the control group. For generations, this was viewed as unrealistic to implement even if it produced the best outcomes. At the Academy, we will be able to locate any tutor on any topic that a student desires. Take an aspiring filmmaker or producer. The standard path offers them film theory courses, peer workshops, and the occasional visiting filmmaker; everything past that takes meticulous networking and luck. The very entrepreneurial type will find ways to invite prominent speakers to speak and meticulous networking to reach the right people. At the Academy, they will learn the business from the people who run it and their next creative project will have notes from award-winning filmmakers. Take a young founder. Yes, there is endless content online; you can watch a video on any skill. But content is not coaching. The Academy will provide dedicated, experienced coaches and mentors who know your company and psychology. Students can workshop issues with prominent leaders in technology who host sessions on campus. Every generation of entrepreneurs has had mentors in their corner. Ours will too. Take the technical student focused on research. At the Academy, academics are focused on the frontier. Students will be taught and mentored by AI researchers at frontier labs. They’ll be conducting research and sharing progress, and presenting their work at ICML and ICLR. The goal of the Academy is to identify the right mentors, the correct bottlenecks, and the right introductions, adjusted continuously around one person and their pursuits. The education philosophy focuses on co-ops, courses, and pursuits. Co-ops are the opportunity to work during the year (not just over the summer). It's the chance to work across countless different roles and companies, including getting connected to our 10 founding partners: Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, and Stripe. Courses are taught by legendary people: people who have founded unicorns, invested in those unicorn companies, or are on the intellectual frontier. And most importantly, it's about Pursuits. It's about personal projects, quests, startup ideas, rabbit holes that define the student experience. The Academy will provide dedicated, experienced coaches and mentors who know your work and psychology. At HAA, the individual education of each student is the whole design. We want to meet you. Applications for the founding class are open. theacademysf.com

"Locking yourself into a single model is putting an enormous amount of risk into your business." We were honored to have @EnoReyes, Cofounder of @FactoryAI take the stage at FirstMark Guilds Summit to share his thoughts on agentic software development and how they're helping companies build autonomous software factories.

The company leading this work today is @method_security

SOFTWARE ENGINEERS IN AUSTIN: one of a16z’s seed-stage hardware companies in Austin needs to rapidly scale their SWE team as they build their core data infra and operating system Founders are from SpaceX + Tesla, and team is heavy mechanical / EE to date. Come help them build software! Please DM if you know anyone exceptional

great read from @AnneNeuberger paper shields won't help protect our critical infra

magazine depth affordability is a choice. we no longer need to sacrifice depth for capability...thanks to companies like @HQ_Covenant. alex oliver (@DefenseInDepth_) knows.

This is so epic by @CENTCOM @DeptofWar No one left behind. World class military execution. The world doesn’t get how incredibly difficult this is to do.

this seems timely

Joining a16z was one of the best decisions I’ve made. Thank you Erin and the whole AD team for believing in me and teaching me so much. Being an engineering fellow is easily one of the coolest jobs you can have. Highly recommend reaching out!

We're thrilled to invest in Covenant, emerging from stealth after raising $250M. The West’s long-range strike capabilities cost too much to field in quantities a real conflict can demand. @HQ_Covenant's answer is Anthem – a low-cost, long-range, heavy-payload missile designed to be manufactured at scale. Already, Anthem has flown 250+ test flights since August 2025, with government customers under contract and production lines going up in Dallas and Germany. We’re excited to partner with @KaufmanMic, Abby Denburg, and the entire Covenant team as they make long-range defense affordable.

To say we have been eager to share this is an understatement. There is no company like @HQ_Covenant - I have never seen this pace of execution. This is no longer a startup. They are building, flying, and selling their product at scale today. So far (all in stealth w/o even a website): $250M raised, 200+ flights, $150M of orders, and production on 2 continents. Orders from Army, Navy, and allies. Factory in Texas. First deliveries planned for 2027. Deep precision strike is the largest gap in our arsenal, and we are lucky Covenant realized it years ahead of everyone else. Our American Dynamism team at @a16z is so proud to be their partner. Congratulations @KaufmanMic, Abby, Mikey, and the entire Covenant team

Proud to back Covenant as they come out of stealth today. The West needs far more deep-strike capacity, built faster and at much greater scale. Covenant is doing exactly that with Anthem, manufacturing in Texas with more factories on the way. $250M raised. Hundreds of flight tests. Orders from the Army, Navy, and allies. First deliveries planned for 2027. Production is essential and @HQ_Covenant is here to meet the production need. 🇺🇸

Today, Covenant is emerging from stealth and introducing Anthem: a heavy-payload deep precision strike capability designed for mass production, with deliveries beginning in the thousands in 2027. We’ve raised $250 million, flown Anthem in more than 200 tests, and secured approximately $150 million in orders, including contracts with the U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and key international allies. We’re building Anthem at our 105,000-square-foot production facility in Dallas, alongside factories in Germany and Israel. Covenant is backed by @a16z, @foundersfund, @Lux_Capital, @lightspeedvp, @8vc, @aleph, and @AltimeterCap. Deep precision strike is the biggest gap in the arsenal of the West, and we spent the last two years building Anthem to fill it. Now we deliver at scale.

Silicon Valley-backed Covenant unveils low-cost, mass-producible cruise missile reut.rs/4r1bWCJ reut.rs/4r1bWCJ

Covenant, a defense tech startup backed by venture firm Andreessen Horowitz, is emerging from stealth with over $250 million in funding bloomberg.com/news/articles/…

Andreessen- and Thiel-backed defense startup opens U.S. missile factory as it exits stealth cnbc.com/2026/09/09/defense-…

fyi 99.99% of people in NYC don’t know this is happening right now in other US cities 98% don’t know what cybercab is 96% don’t think it’s possible source: i made it up but probably right

2027 will be a good year for electronics + electromagnetism cool new toys from @OpenAI (@0x50484244) and @arenaphysica (@_i_am_arya) today