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a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Near the end of a conversation among a16z's founders about the frontier ideas they want to fund, talk turned to what young people should do in an AI world. Horowitz argued that the worry is misplaced, because kids will use AI to enter fields that were closed to them before.
Yeah. Right.
And so AI is going to be like the, you know, AI is your like secret superpower that you have to like deviously figure out how to take advantage of. And so I think kids are going to have all kinds of ideas for what they're going to do.
It's funny because adults keep saying, oh, well, what should the kids do? Like, this is so hard to be a kid. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. Like, basically, it's you that's got the problem because you're obsolete. The kids are going to be superhumans and they're going to be able to do anything. And the world is open to them. And they're going to, you know, they're going to be able to enter fields that they could never enter before. What I
see in this conversation and you're funding your work more generally is to use another television, kind of definite optimism. The future is happening. It's going to happen. A lot of what we talked about in science fiction is going to happen. It's a matter of when. And so we're going to bet early.…
And to be clear, one thing I want to clarify is that we're throwing out all these theories and everything. But in the end, I think as Ben said in the beginning, we're in the betting on great entrepreneurs' business. And so plenty of ideas that were not discussed today that are probably more…
right. The