About
David George is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s Growth investing team and has led many of the firm’s growth investments.
Prior to joining a16z, David spent seven years at General Atlantic leading and partnering on numerous consumer internet and enterprise software growth investments, including Airbnb, AppDynamics, Opendoor, Slack, and Uber. Previously, he was an investment associate at FFL Partners and an investment banking analyst for William Blair & Company.
David graduated summa cum laude from the University of Notre Dame and earned his MBA from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He is a member of the Board of Trustees and Investment Committee of Sacred Heart Schools-Atherton and the Advisory Council of the IDEA Center at the University of Notre Dame, and sits on the board of the Foundation for Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford. David is a proud native of Kentucky, where he developed his love of basketball, bourbon, and horse racing.
Latest Content
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David's mental models for growth-stage investing, what it really takes to go public, where AI is today and where it’s headed, and more.
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It feels like software is shrinking while everyone is scrambling to buy generative AI. What’s changed, and how can you get a leg up?
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Scale AI founder and CEO Alexandr Wang discusses the three pillars of AI—models, compute, and data—and how abundant data is core to the evolution of gen AI.
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Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov discusses how Waymo is using genAI to help them build safer, sustainable, and more accessible transportation.
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a16z General Partner David George interviews Capital Group's Mark Casey on his investment philosophy and what sends him into what he calls "barnacle mode."
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CEO of Quora Adam D’Angelo discusses how building infrastructure for creators can democratize AI, in conversation with a16z’s David George.
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Build groundbreaking products. Outrun competition. Go global. 2024 is the year for companies to be Great.
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What will it take for AI to go mainstream with consumers? Effective model aggregation, a better UI, and a powerful platform for creators. Enter Poe.
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Most growth-stage CEOs know how to tell if they’re efficiently allocating capital in every part of their budget with one glaring exception: research and development (R&D).
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Will AI take all the design jobs? Dylan Field, founder and CEO of Figma, looks at the relationship between designers, developers, and AI.
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When you go public, your company’s performance suddenly has a real-time scoreboard: your stock price. And that price has a huge impact on your business.
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When a platform shift reshapes the technology landscape, who wins? We unpack the market dynamics between startups and incumbents from the SaaS and cloud era that are likely to play out in the AI era.
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Tracking metrics and benchmarking is a critical part of scaling a growth-stage company, but there are a lot of common failure modes. For instance, it’s easy to fall prey to confirmation bias and manipulate your numbers t...
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Benchmarks for B2B companies, based on a16z data and investing team expertise.
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When capital becomes more expensive, how do you evaluate and decide on the best financing option for your company?
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On behalf of a16z, I am thrilled to welcome Joe Morrissey as a General Partner to the a16z Growth team. Joe will focus on investing in enterprise companies—from the moment they’ve found product-market fit, all the way th...
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1) reevaluate your valuation 2) understand your burn multiple 3) build scenario plans to grow back into your valuation.
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Gross margins–which are essentially a company’s revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers–are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup and growing business. And yet, figuring out what goes into the “cost” for delivering products and services is not as simple as it may sound, particularly for high-growth software businesses that might use emerging business models or be leveraging new technology. In this episode from June 2020, a16z general partners Martin Casado, David George, and Sarah Wang talk all things gross margins, from early to late stage. Why do gross margins matter? When do they matter during a company’s growth? And how do you use them to plan for the future? The conversation ranges from the nuances of and strategy for calculating margins with things like cloud costs, freemium users, or implementation costs, to the impact margins can have on valuations.
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The fintech revolution, in which every company becomes a fintech company, is one of the most significant technology trends this decade. We are big believers in this vision and expect that in the next 10+ years, the $2 tr...
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Until 18 months ago, few of us thought much about the global supply chain. The couch we purchased showed up two weeks after we ordered it, and that was that - an elaborate system behind the scenes “just worked” to transp...
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I am excited to announce that we have promoted Sarah Wang to General Partner on the Growth investing team. When we started the Growth Fund in 2019, we set out to back founders executing on unusually big visions for emerg...
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In venture capital, conventional wisdom and decades of startup history tell us that founding companies in crowded spaces is extremely hard. Starting any business already takes an exceptional dose of courage, but intense...
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Since we raised the first a16z Growth Fund in 2019, our aim remains to partner with founders of companies in large markets, with ambitions to become global leaders, and arm them with resources and access to a16z networks...
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Two decades into the cloud computing era of software eating the world, some corners of the economy are still far behind. Unfortunately law enforcement is one of them, which not only leaves around 800,000 law enforcement...
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Small businesses are the lifeblood of our economy. There are 32 million small businesses and over 400,000 independently owned restaurants in the United States serving nearly all Americans in some way. U.S. consumers spen...
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Many of the fastest growing and largest consumer internet platforms are video oriented: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Netflix, Snapchat, and TikTok. U.S. consumers watch 100 minutes of online video per day, and most of t...
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Online share of commerce is growing rapidly, especially with children and teens. In the U.S., the average age of cell phone adoption is now just 10 years old, and 95% of teens have access to a smartphone. Increasingly, s...
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The traditional banking system in the U.S. is broken, especially for the third of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. Many of the 130 million U.S. adults who earn $75k or less are unserved or underserved by their exis...
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Today Dapper Labs is announcing a $305 million financing round, with strong participation from our crypto and growth funds. We first invested in Dapper over three years ago when they were working on CryptoKitties. Crypto...
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The last 12 months have fundamentally changed how we work together. In a few short months, many businesses had to adapt to a world where bringing people together in person was no longer possible. Conferences, training, c...
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The data infrastructure market has grown massively as data and data systems are contributing directly to business results -- not only in Silicon Valley -- but also in traditional industry. But we are still in the early i...
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Industry lessons from the first generation of iconic bottom-up companies and how they layered in top-down sales to accelerate growth.
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What makes NBA player (and back-to-back MVP) Giannis Antetokounmpo a bona fide superstar? And what would you look for in the numbers to spot the next Giannis? In fact, just as in tech companies, many sports franchises ar...
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When tech investors talk about valuation as "multiples" on revenue, what does that really mean? We demystify the role of entry multiples and share the two factors that matter most in tech growth investing.
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Gross margins are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup, but figuring out what does and doesn't go into them as a company grows is not as simple as it sounds. In this episode, we discuss why and when margins matter, and how they evolve along the way.
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In 2019, long before the outbreak of COVID-19, many lower gross margin tech companies were not being well-received by the public markets, and an excessive spotlight was cast by many on company gross margins. In the prese...
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What financial statements and KPIs do (and don’t) tell you and how you can use them to chart a course through tough times.
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Gaming has gone from a niche hobby to a massive global industry across all demographics and well beyond outdated, narrow stereotypes of “gamers”. In fact, games are not even just “games” any longer, but a form of enterta...
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Editor’s note: RigUp has rebranded as Workrise.
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In May, a16z announced our inaugural Late Stage Venture (LSV) fund. Today, I am thrilled to announce our newest LSV investment, leading the Series D funding for TripActions, a travel platform for enterprises. We led the...