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a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Horowitz, speaking to founders, explains why hesitation is what sinks companies. His example: taking LoudCloud public on $2 million in trailing revenue, because the only other option was bankruptcy.
…You know, how do you add channels? Because you have to be kind of multi-country, multi-channel, multi-product as you go. How do you do all that? And what can we as a firm do to enable that kind of thing? So we're playing with a lot of those ideas and other things that'll hopefully make us better.
Well, I think we have maybe 25 minutes to do some audience questions.
Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that I have concluded that I'm feeling pretty sure about is AI kind of video and entertainment and so forth is a new medium. So there was kind of like plays and then there was film and then there's going to be AI film. And I think it'll be as different from film as film was from plays. So in the beginning of the movie industry, they would just film plays. And, you know, they'd like fix camera, do the play, and we'll record it. And that was the idea. Andrew Chen it obviously changed dramatically over the intervening decades. And I think that's going to happen. I think that's like in the beginning, it'll just be using AI to kind of generate certain scenes and movies and this kind of thing and so forth. But I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a whole new set of creators using the new medium to do things. You know, like it's interesting, like if you think about it in the context of social media, social media is like storytelling where the main character is…
Any parting words of wisdom in many of the kind of year one projects here?
I would just say this. Congratulations on betting on yourself because that's what this is all about. You know, your job is to like make your bet pay off. So like you believed in yourself enough to do it. You got to, there are going to be many times when you question that bet and you question that…
All right. What about?