Anish Acharya General partner at Andreessen Horowitz focused on consumer investing, including AI-native products.

“What I've seen from 30 years in consumer product is paternalism will kill any product. Even a hint or a whiff of paternalism will. … We talk about productivity and goals and achievement, but maybe people want the exact opposite of it, which is like, hey, what do I love? I love spending money. I love being perhaps irrationally optimistic about what my future looks like.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

Context

The panel was debating whether AI agents will make consumers more rational. Acharya warns that agents which nag users toward self-improvement will fail, because people switch to whatever meets their real preferences.

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Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 30:53 into the episode

Anish Acharya

…how will the agents actually know what product quality is? So one part of it is they'll probably have these revealed preferences. And then another is we'll need some sort of a consumer research, but for agents that will then presumably be paid per transaction to do this research. To grow their

Josh Elman

…to get to otherwise. But I think we're still going to be people with our own preferences and tastes. And if the agent's not meeting us where we are, we'll just switch to another agent. We'll import and export our stuff and be like, oh, this other agent's going to meet me on my preferences better.

Anish Acharya

It's really interesting because I think what you're speaking to is like paternalism, right? And what I've seen from 30 years in consumer product is like paternalism will kill any product. Even a hint or a whiff of paternalism will. And in a sense, the sort of the, we talk about productivity and goals sort of achievement, but maybe people want the exact opposite of it, which is like, hey, what do I love? I love spending money. I love being perhaps irrationally optimistic about what my future looks like. I love, you know, like seeing myself in a better light than perhaps I appear to the world. Like there are all of these things, which we may say are the sort of shadow of the, you know, the things that the agents are trying to get us to do that are what we actually want to do. So who's like designing with that in mind?

David Pawlan

Right. I'm

Josh Elman

curious what you're seeing on that.

David Pawlan

Yeah. So, I mean, I think you have, I kind of see it split up into two categories. You have the commodities where I think there's going to be a lot of the point where people actually don't care about preference, right? You're just ordering paper towels to your home. You're like, I don't really…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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