Erin Price-Wright
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz investing in American Dynamism companies, with a focus on AI applied to the physical world.
“A manufacturing technician is now able to use these tools to reprogram and reconfigure their manufacturing lines on the fly… Instead of calling a system integrator, and it takes three months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to reconfigure a line for a new setup, you can have a manufacturing engineer use Claude and do that in 20 minutes.”
a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Context
Erin was explaining how AI changes the economics of low-volume, high-mix manufacturing, which has been expensive to automate because the line keeps changing. The technicians don't need software degrees; they know the process and now have tools to act on it.
Transcript
end-to-end process of how you plan, operate, mine, and refine materials. And, you know, what's cool is once you own that process end-to-end and are using software at every stage of that journey, you actually capture that data and then it feeds back. And
…world is not about just putting a silver bullet forward, like I said, that some shiny AI product. It's deep understanding of what a process looks like, physically, how to manipulate the process or how to change something that's happening in the world. It's just going to look different and stuff.
Well, maybe like a specific example to talk through is like low mix, high volume versus high mix, low volume, and how AI can kind of change the game there. So historically, if you're spending a lot and setting up a line with a lot of automation, you really need to be producing a lot of one single thing. And that's how you get the cost down. And that's how you justify the cost of investing in a pretty bespoke manufacturing line. In the U.S., we do a lot of low. Mix high volume manufacturing, which is very hard to automate because it's very expensive when you have to change the line all the time. But what we're seeing across our portfolio is that manufacturing technicians themselves have the intuition and now have the software tools to be able to change the economics of what it looks like to produce low volume, high mix on the line. So you can have a manufacturing technician. This is not someone with a college degree. This is not someone, maybe they are, but like not necessarily, who's like studied software engineering, is now able to use these tools to reprogram and reconfigure their manufacturing lines on the fly using the…
And why that's important is, you know, when you look back at how we've articulated AD50 this year, you know, it's kind of three categories. And a lot of times what we focus on, at least, you know, I have and many people in the sector are focused on is just the systems companies. And look, there's a…
you're designing for, you're designing for manufacturer on the outset.
Exactly, exactly. And that is, again, I keep going back to learnings from Tesla and SpaceX. In a lot of ways, they had to make those choices because they didn't have any other opportunity. But in the end, it's actually just that mantra of design for manufacturing that now exists within all these…
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