Latin America: A Tech Powerhouse?

Elena Burger is joined by a16z’s Angela Strange and Gabriel Vasquez to discuss the rise of the "borderless founder": entrepreneurs who bring the networks and insights of their home markets together with the talent, capital, and speed of Silicon Valley to build global companies. Angela and Gabriel trace how a16z's international investing efforts grew from early work in Latin America into a broader global network, and why AI has accelerated the flow of founders and talent between Silicon Valley and startup ecosystems around the world. They explore the advantages borderless founders can bring, from differentiated talent networks and early customers to strong local brands and communities that help open doors across markets. They also discuss how founder diasporas can function like powerful alumni networks, why spending time in Silicon Valley can help founders recalibrate around speed and ambition, and how the next generation of global companies may increasingly be built across multiple countries from day one.

a16z General Partner David George is joined by Grant LaFontaine, co-founder of Whatnot, to unpack how a marketplace that started with collectibles evolved into one of the world's leading live shopping platforms. Grant traces the company's origins from selling Pokémon cards online as a kid to discovering live commerce by watching Whatnot's earliest customers hack together sales on social media. They discuss why Whatnot thinks less like a traditional e-commerce marketplace and more like a digital shopping mall, where discovery, entertainment, community, and commerce all happen at once. Today, users spend roughly 95 minutes a day on the platform, and most aren't even buying something on a given day. They also explore how Whatnot is enabling small businesses to reach global audiences, expanding from collectibles into categories like fashion, food, and golf, and using AI to make sellers more efficient without replacing the human connection at the center of the experience.

a16z's Joel De La Garza is joined by Nick Warner of Neo and Max Pollard of Cotool to discuss what happens when cybersecurity tools built to defend against humans and malware suddenly have to contend with AI agents. As frontier models become more capable of finding and exploiting vulnerabilities, many of the assumptions underlying traditional security are beginning to break. They explore why guardrails designed to stop AI-powered attackers can also prevent security teams from doing their jobs, why defenders increasingly need access to multiple models, and how agentic software creates an entirely new endpoint security problem. They also discuss why static signatures and even newer techniques like honeypots are struggling in a world where software can reason and act autonomously. Recorded around Black Hat, the conversation looks at how security teams are adapting in real time and why the same AI capabilities creating new attack surfaces could ultimately give defenders their biggest advantage yet.

a16z General Partner David George is joined by Will Gaybrick, President of Product & Business at Stripe, to discuss how AI is changing the way Stripe builds products, organizes teams, and thinks about the future of internet commerce. Stripe has evolved from a payments company into a multi-product financial infrastructure platform, while a new generation of AI companies is growing and monetizing faster than previous software cohorts. Will explains why Stripe sees AI productivity as an opportunity to build more rather than simply cut costs, including how its internal coding agents now generate thousands of pull requests each week. They discuss creating founder-like agency inside large companies, building smaller and flatter teams, and why Stripe believes dramatically more software will be created as the cost of building continues to fall. They also look ahead to agentic commerce, why checkout pages could disappear, the potential return of micropayments, stablecoins as infrastructure for a global economy, and a future where AI agents increasingly buy software and services from other machines.

Ben Horowitz, Travis Kalanick, and Erik Torenberg take the stage at Atoms' launch event for a candid fireside conversation about entrepreneurship, company building, and why Kalanick believes the next industrial revolution will be powered by AI. They revisit pivotal moments from Uber's history, including the decision not to acquire Lyft, lessons from scaling one of the world's fastest-growing companies, and how Kalanick has evolved as a founder. The conversation also explores Atoms' vision for industrial AI, why software is moving into the physical world, what it takes to build enduring company cultures, and why Kalanick believes the biggest opportunities of the next decade lie in transforming industries like food production, mining, and manufacturing.