Things Aaron Levie Has Said on Podcasts

“If you build it, they will not come. So if you think that because you built this amazing agent, that now you've solved your problem, like that is like totally, you're going to fail. … I think we might have a little bit of an over-orientation toward the, hey, I made this really viral video and everybody saw it and I got all the likes. And that's not distribution. That's like a cool one-time marketing stunt.” — Aaron Levie, a16z Podcast

Asked whether AI changes how startups get distribution, Levie says he doesn't think it does much. In his view founders still have to own an audience and grind out go-to-market, or they'll be drowned out by thousands of other startups.

a16z Podcast · 2026-10-25 Permalink → Listen →

a16z Podcast Around 30:53 into the episode

Aaron Levie

…on out, it's an enterprise kind of industry, with, again, plenty of opportunity for starting consumer companies, to be clear, but it's not because we needed the PhD thing. It's because we needed new packaging in a consumer app that sort of brought this experience together in a better or new way.

Erik Torenberg

…But I'm curious how you think that might evolve. Is it because like, you know, we're just waiting for things to platform and then we'll have distribution insights in that regard? Or do you think that actually it's a whole new ballgame? We're thinking about it like radio and television right now.

Aaron Levie

…by AI startups. If you build it, they will not come. So if you think that because you built this amazing agent, that now you've solved your problem, like that is like totally, you're going to fail. Like, like you, you are going to be drowned out by 10,000 other startups and priorities that companies deal with all day long. So if you do not think about distribution, then it just won't work. And I think we might have a little bit of an over-orientation toward the, hey, I made this really viral video and everybody saw it and I got all the likes. And that's not distribution. That's like a cool one-time marketing stunt. Like distribution is just the grinding of like, you know, the way I kind of think about it, and I think AI affords this quite effectively, you have to own an audience. There has to be a universe of people that are just so passionate about the thing that you're building. You need to figure out how to just continue to keep access to that relationship. So you better own your community via LinkedIn…

Erik Torenberg

I look forward to every founder basically requiring every employee to have worked in that industry as a global blah person and then being like, oh, I worked in that industry for five, three, four months. Just like when people say, like, you know, you have to have worked in customer service to know…

Aaron Levie

Exactly.

Speaker 4

All right. Aaron, thanks so much for doing this. That's a great one to end on. So we really appreciate you for joining us. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you like this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it…

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

“Traditionally legal review costs $2,000 per hour or $1,000 per hour for high-end work. Now the agent can do that for $5 or $10 an hour. And it just turns out that we didn't actually have as many lawyers as the world needed. It was just that they were so expensive. So nobody could actually afford them.” — Aaron Levie, a16z Podcast

Levie argues that hundreds of startups will each build an AI agent for one job function. His bet is that cutting the price of some kinds of labor to a tenth will reveal far more demand than anyone saw, with legal review as the example.

a16z Podcast · 2026-10-25 Permalink → Listen →

a16z Podcast Around 18:15 into the episode

Aaron Levie

…equilibrium in the economy is actually not sort of as sort of kind of perfect as we would have imagined. Where if somebody could have introduced labor at a tenth of the cost that it previously was priced at, that there would be actually 50x the demand for that particular form of labor.

Erik Torenberg

That's right.

Aaron Levie

And so like you'll all of a sudden be like, okay, I'm a legal review agent. And it turns out that like traditionally legal review costs, you know, $2,000 per hour or $1,000 per hour for high-end work. Now the agent can do that for $5 or $10 an hour. And it just turns out that we didn't actually have as many lawyers as the world needed. It was just that they were so expensive. So nobody could actually afford them. And then boom, there's an explosion of this new category of

Erik Torenberg

everybody's filing patents now. Everybody is going to be an investor of some sort. Yeah.

Aaron Levie

Like I can name a bunch of use cases even internally. I'm not going to give too many startup ideas out there, but I can name a bunch of ideas internally where if the cost of the particular function was a tenth of the price, we would spend, we would have many more kind of full-time people equivalent…

Erik Torenberg

ceiling. There's no ceiling to the ROI potentially, right?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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