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MV Mike Volpi On a16z Podcast

“I don't think I've ever been in an industry before that I had to think about how light gets concentrated on a Zeiss mirror to figure out whether my chat bot works well. But it's this amazing interconnection of things where there's bottlenecks, and this changes with that change.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · November 2026

“I don't think I've ever been in an industry before that I had to think about how light gets concentrated on a Zeiss mirror to figure out whether my chat bot works well. But it's this amazing interconnection of things where there's bottlenecks, and this changes with that change.” — Mike Volpi, a16z Podcast

Context

Asked how this cycle compares with the ones he has seen, Volpi says today's AI stack is so interlinked that a chatbot's quality depends on the optics supply chain behind chipmaking.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 54:18 into the episode
Mike Volpi

As you probably know, I've started a new venture fund called Anabi Capital. Technically speaking, I retired in 2023 and I was supposed to get a yacht. That didn't work out

Speaker 2

very well, did it?

Mike Volpi

Why? I actually think this is the most fascinating time to be doing our job and to be in our industry. Not just because the change is big and we all know how transformative the change is, but because it requires more intellectual exertion to understand what next. It's like you don't have a crystal ball. It's not obvious what the next move is. And so you have to keep thinking and you have to think at a systems level. Like, I don't think I've ever been in an industry before that I had to think about how light gets concentrated on a Zeiss mirror to figure out whether my chat bot works well. But it's all, it's this amazing interconnection of things where there's bottlenecks and this changes and this changed with that change. So I find it just the most intellectually fascinating time. And because the end prize is so significant, by figuring out how these different Parts unlock. You can create a company here and a company there, and this one can become worth a trillion dollars, and this one can become 500 billion, and so on and so forth. And honestly, I did not…

Raghu Raghuram

This tops 99. Oh, yeah.

Guido Appenzeller

Easily.

Raghu Raghuram

Totally, totally agree. And we are all in the same business for very much the same reason. This has been a fascinating hour. Thank you so much. And we could be continuing this conversation endlessly, but perhaps we'll do it another time.

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

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