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

“I do think that agents are going to have their own revealed preferences and their own directions of irrationality that will not be of a human mind. It will be in an alien mind. And I'll give you an example. I think agents may have an irrational preference for clean APIs with great docs.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

Context

The panel was discussing the idea that consumers become more rational once agents do the shopping. Acharya agrees only in part: agents will bring quirks of their own that businesses will have to learn to sell to.

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Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 29:30 into the episode

Josh Elman

…work here. Totally. Because, you know, if I can figure out, you know, that sweater looks great or I want that shirt and they can figure out who the actual maker is and I can go buy it direct from them. They no longer have to pay all those transaction and wholesale to retail costs in the middle.

David Pawlan

…future where consumers become a lot more rational because our agents are doing all the work on our behalf. It's really going to create a world where businesses have to put a lot more thought and value into the quality of what they're giving out. And it's going to be really interesting to see that.

Anish Acharya

So somewhat, I'm going to quibble with this point. I love Patrick's vision. And I think that broadly, that will be true, that agents will make often better choices on our behalf than we might make for ourselves. But I do think that agents are going to have their own revealed preferences and their own sort of sort of directions of irrationality that will not be of a human mind. It will be in an alien mind. And I'll give you an example. I think agents may have an irrational preference for clean APIs with great docs.

David Pawlan

Okay.

Anish Acharya

You know, and they may actually ascribe a lot of value to that as a proxy for something. And they may really dislike janky APIs with Java code behind it. Like, I don't know. So I do think it'll be really interesting to see because they too are going to need shortcuts. You know, how will the agents…

Josh Elman

ratings. I don't know. I'm also more biased and I just think people are people and people are going to make the choices that they want to make that are the most satisfactory. So the question then is, is the agent going to be very careful in curating the set of options that it presents? Because…

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

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