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There has never been an investing environment like what we’re living through right now. Normally, investors hope and pray to catch the beginning of one generational S-curve of technology adoption. Today we’re watching at least six mega-trends emerge:
Enterprises are putting AI tools to work across every part of their organizations. We believe there is no upper bound on the demand to turn compute into business outcomes.
Consumer AI is barely even a thing yet, aside from ChatGPT’s form factor beginning to replace the search engine. But we expect it will be transformational when the time is right.
American Dynamism has entered a new era. National security, industrial policy, and technological progress are converging to rebuild the physical systems that underpin the country, from defense and manufacturing to energy, infrastructure, and space.
Robotics and autonomy are poised to be the biggest distributed infrastructure deployment in our lifetime, transforming how people and products move and interact in every setting, in our factories, on our roads, and everywhere in between.
Healthcare is 18% of GDP and represents one of the biggest areas of opportunity, as our biology becomes programmable and we use AI to improve systems.
To power the above, the entire compute stack is being rebuilt for the AI-era.
In moments of opportunity like these, we keep coming back to the founder as the key to building generational businesses. Technology has become so powerful for company-builders, and yet so unevenly diffused in the economy, killer founders who understand it will always be the premier destination for investment capital. Our job as investors is to identify these founders and help them however they need.
Today, a16z Growth has closed additional capital, bringing our fifth Growth fund to a total of $8.5B. With so much opportunity in the market right now, this became the obvious thing to do for both founders and our Limited Partners.
Helping founders accelerate through the curve
Every founder who’s been through the scaling journey knows that there are inflection points where their early instincts aren’t enough anymore. Companies must become multi-product, multi-channel, multi-geography, often all at the same time. Databricks had to bank through the corner and evolve “Lakehouse” into a dominant platform. SpaceX evolved from a launch provider into a global communications, data infrastructure and AI company. Greatness isn’t easy.
The founder’s opportunity, at the growth stage of the business, is to keep growing really aggressively through each corner. In our 7+ years running a16z Growth, we’ve helped over 100 companies through these transitions.
The a16z Growth Platform: built by operators, for operators
The a16z Growth Platform includes access to a16z’s comprehensive offering of expertise, network, and infrastructure tailored to growth-stage companies. Our GTM team connects portfolio companies with new customers; Talent has built one of the world’s best executive and technical talent networks; Global efforts unlock international relationships for capital, partnerships, and customers; and New Media helps our founders and companies brand build.
And now, we’re excited to offer even more ways to help our founders grow at scale, with increased offerings across sales, marketing, and pricing. Specifically, the team will be helping with:
Sales & Marketing Leadership: Defining what “great” looks like; helping build the right team and structure for the next stage of growth.
AI-Native GTM: Helping companies compete with new playbooks for agentic operations, AI-native RevOps, demand generation, and consumption-based pricing.
GTM Strategy & Positioning: Defining ideal customer profiles, category narrative, and core messaging; aligning sales and marketing on go-to-market strategy, and ensuring budgets back the right priorities.
Scaling Sales & Marketing Motions: Moving from founder-led sales to revenue engines, with the playbooks, campaigns, and metrics that drive predictable growth.
Pricing & Packaging: Navigating pricing model transitions and packaging decisions as companies move from single-product to platform, including AI margin governance.
Revenue Operations: Designing comp plans, managing usage-based pricing transitions, and building the AI-native operations that keep pace with growth.
The a16z Growth Platform is made up of elite operators who understand the challenges of growth-stage companies and how to execute in their respective domains. They bring actual game footage to every interaction with founders and CXOs. The team upleveling our sales, marketing, and pricing efforts is no different, having spent time in-house or closely advising companies such as Lovable, Atlassian, Samsara, 1Password, Miro, PagerDuty, Segment, Workday, and others during their hypergrowth and pre-IPO years.
It’s time to grow
Top operators today are in the biggest job of their lives, in the fastest-moving, most contested market we’ve ever seen. We know it takes both capital and operational know-how to win, and we are building to meet these demands.
This newsletter is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. Furthermore, this content is not investment advice, nor is it intended for use by any investors or prospective investors in any a16z funds. This newsletter may link to other websites or contain other information obtained from third-party sources - a16z has not independently verified nor makes any representations about the current or enduring accuracy of such information. If this content includes third-party advertisements, a16z has not reviewed such advertisements and does not endorse any advertising content or related companies contained therein. Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z; visit https://a16z.com/investment-list/ for a full list of investments. Other important information can be found at a16z.com/disclosures. You’re receiving this newsletter since you opted in earlier; if you would like to opt out of future newsletters you may unsubscribe immediately.
I’m interested in becoming an operator on the Growth Platform as CPO in Residence at Insight Partners, I did many of the things you’re talking about but related to R&D teams. Who can I talk to?