The Missing Power Layer of Modern Warfare

Bridgit Mendler, Co-founder and CEO of Northwood, joins a16z’s Erik Torenberg to discuss the critical but overlooked bottleneck in space: ground infrastructure. Northwood is building the systems that connect satellites back to Earth, enabling faster, more scalable space missions. They cover Bridgit’s unconventional path to founding a space company, why vertical integration matters in hard tech, and how modern ground networks could unlock the next wave of innovation in the space economy, from national security to new commercial applications.

In this conversation, Shyam Sankar, chief technology officer at Palantir Technologies, discusses his new book Mobilize, his commission in the U.S. Army, and why he believes the most important thing America can do right now is inspire its latent heretics to step forward. He also breaks down how he thinks about the SaaS market under AI pressure, what the "alpha versus beta software" distinction means for which companies survive, and why he started a film production company.

A new paper, “Some Simple Economics of AGI,” is making the rounds—Web3 with a16z we sat down with author Christian Catalini (MIT Crypto Economics Lab) and Eddy Lazzarin (CTO of a16z crypto), in conversation with Robert Hackett, to unpack what AGI could mean for work and markets.

Erik Torenberg sits down with Jacob Helberg to discuss AI, manufacturing, supply chains, and the new geopolitics of technology. Drawing on themes from Helberg’s book The Wires of War, they explore why hardware, industrial capacity, and secure supply chains have become central to both economic strength and national security. They also unpack what it means to “win the AI race” — from model leadership and global adoption to energy, compute, tariffs, and reindustrialization in the U.S.

Vishal Misra returns to explain his latest research on how LLMs actually work under the hood. He walks through experiments showing that transformers update their predictions in a precise, mathematically predictable way as they process new information, explains why this still doesn't mean they're conscious, and describes what's actually required for AGI: the ability to keep learning after training and the move from pattern matching to understanding cause and effect.