Rebuilding America's Industrial Backbone

AI isn’t just helping defenders find vulnerabilities. It’s giving attackers the speed and expertise to exploit them faster than many companies can respond. Wiz co-founder and CTO Ami Luttwak joins a16z General Partners Zane Lackey and Sarah Wang to unpack what he calls “Black October,” a wave of vulnerabilities and agentic attacks that he believes marks a turning point for cybersecurity. They break down PHP2Shell, why AI is collapsing the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, and what happens when open-source models put increasingly sophisticated offensive capabilities in more hands. Ami explains why startups are becoming attractive targets, particularly when they hold valuable AI credentials, and why yesterday’s secure architecture may no longer be secure as models improve. The conversation then turns to defense. Ami argues that companies need to continuously attack their own systems, automate investigation and patching wherever possible, design infrastructure assuming sophisticated attackers will get in, and rethink security stacks built for a slower era. His warning is simple: if attackers can move in minutes, defenders can no longer operate on human timelines.

AI is collapsing the distance between an idea and a playable game. What happens when almost anyone can build one? In this episode, a16z General Partners Anish Acharya and Jonathan Lai discuss how AI is changing game development, from generating art and code to operating tools like Blender and game engines directly. They explain why cheaper development could let studios take more creative risks while opening game creation to people without traditional coding or design skills. They also explore modding, remixing existing games, and the emergence of AI-native experiences that generate characters, abilities, and storylines on the fly, potentially creating games that never really end.

The internet boom built bandwidth. The AI boom is building intelligence. Mike Volpi, who helped shape Cisco’s strategy during the internet buildout, asks what that era can teach us about this one. Mike joins a16z’s Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to compare today’s investment in GPUs, data centers, and power with the fiber boom of the late 1990s, and explain why the infrastructure could prove valuable even if the market corrects. They also discuss NVIDIA, custom silicon, networking, and the changing economics of GPUs, plus lessons from Cisco’s acquisition machine. And Mike explains why he thinks this technology cycle could be even more consequential than the last.

As frontier AI labs expand into applications, where should startups build? a16z Partner Joe Schmidt joins HubSpot co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah to explore why the software opportunity is growing, and how founders can stay off the “Yellow Brick Road” the labs are racing down. Drawing on HubSpot’s evolution, Dharmesh explains why founders should start with a narrow market, learn quickly, and solve the whole customer problem. They discuss where application companies can build lasting value as models become infrastructure: workflows, customer context, and the systems where work happens. They also explore HubSpot’s AI experiments, the rise of one-person businesses, and why cheaper software creation could unlock markets that previously couldn’t support a software company.

Scott Kupor helped build a16z from three people into a firm with hundreds of employees. Now, as Director of the U.S. Office of Personnel Management, he’s applying some of the same lessons about talent, incentives, and organizational design to a workforce of roughly two million federal employees. Scott joins Founders host David Senra to tell the story of a16z’s earliest days, from joining Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz during the 2008 financial crisis to borrowing Michael Ovitz’s CAA model to build a venture firm around specialized networks and services for founders. He explains why a16z chose to market itself when venture firms traditionally didn’t, how early wins like Skype accelerated the firm’s growth, and why it eventually reorganized around specialized investing teams. Then they turn to Scott’s move into government. He lays out his effort to build a more merit-based federal workforce, attract younger technical talent, and create what he calls “permissioned risk” so government employees can actually try new things. That includes everything from changing how performance and promotions work to replacing a retirement process that still relied on hundreds of millions of pieces of paper stored in an underground Pennsylvania mine.