Growth

Cofounder and CEO of Anthropic Dario Amodei unpacks how far can scaling laws take us and how can AI be used to improve AI.

Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of insitro, discusses how an LLM for cells could revolutionize drug discovery and how to bridge the technological and cultural divide between building with atoms and building with bits.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott explains how AI copilots are keeping developers longer in a flow state and why AI copilots more broadly could be the start of an industrial revolution for knowledge work.

Noam Shazeer, Character.ai CEO and cofounder, talks to a16z's Sarah Wang about the dawn of universally accessible intelligence, the compute it will take to power it, and his pursuit of AGI's first use case: AI friends.

How Segment course-corrected its move upmarket into a successful $3.2B acquisition by Twilio.

The API economy and a Cambrian explosion of apps have transformed best-in-class tech to a stack of 20 apps working together. Partnerships have become a critical part of early go-to-market strategy that can lead to higher quality pipeline and accelerated sales.

Many SaaS startups often find their initial product market fit with small and medium businesses (SMBs) and then move up market. Because it's easier to move up market rather than down, this motion often gives SaaS startups the advantage against incumbents. But moving up market comes with its own challenges. We cover how to make (and price for) the move.

Some of the common myths and misconceptions around direct listings (and IPOs), as well as the details and nuances of true pricing, investor days, forward guidance, and more.

In any company, even the seemingly smallest behaviors will influence your culture, while the loudest proclamations won't.

How to raise a convertible note and structure economic and corporate governance terms, liquidation preferences, and independent board members.

What makes a good sales person, how to actually close that deal, and how to build a company that incentivizes your sales reps.

For B2B2C business models, Rampell and Casado discuss growth lessons, the significance of sales expansion in enterprise contexts, and the when and how of building more than one product.

Jeff Jordan, JD Moriarty, Sonal ChokshiThere are the things that you carefully plan — the who (the bankers); the what (the pricing); and the when. But then there are the things that you don’t plan: like a financial crisis.

A look at the market dynamics around the Square IPO and, more broadly, what it can teach us about private vs. public valuations (and investors).

While many entrepreneurs want a massive valuation, there are terms that come along with that number.

As interest rates remain high, many SaaS businesses are reevaluating how much they give away in their free tier. Here's how to optimize.

Pharma represents one of the biggest industries in the world. The top 10 pharma companies account for over $3.4T in aggregate market cap, and last year, the US alone spent more than $700B on pharmaceuticals and prescript...

Talkiatry addresses the acute end of the behavioral health market—psychiatric care—by offering virtual treatment covered by patients’ insurance.

Understanding how pricing fundamentals shift when you’re launching additional products can help you capture the value those products create more quickly.

The stakes are high. The opportunities are profound. From the creation of new medicines to bolstering national defense, this is our vision for the AI-enabled future.

The opportunity to build the next iconic cybersecurity platform has arrived: Wiz, a global leader in cloud-native security.

GenAI will deliver massive value to companies, but it can be difficult to account for its costs. How we're thinking about monetizing new genAI features.

In 2024, enterprise leaders are doubling down on their genAI investments. 16 developments for founders to keep in mind to capture this new opportunity.

In our conversation series AI Revolution, we ask industry leaders how they’re harnessing the power of generative AI and steering their companies through the next platform shift.

CEO of Quora Adam D’Angelo discusses how building infrastructure for creators can democratize AI, in conversation with a16z’s David George.

A menu of options across pricing, sales, product, and customer support to visit—and revisit—as you revise your pricing structures.

Build groundbreaking products. Outrun competition. Go global. 2024 is the year for companies to be Great.

1. Identify where your reps add incremental value. 2. Pick the top 2 most impactful activities. 3. Choose the right levers to incentivize those activities.

Overages penalize your customers for buying more. You could generate more revenue by instead tiering pricing for how your customers want to consume.

Smart energy grids. Voice-first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids.
We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in the coming year.

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).

If your SaaS product powers your customers’ products or internal systems, usage-based pricing could help you capture the revenue from those workloads.

Embarking on a debt raise can be a daunting task and we aim to demystify the debt-raising process at large and navigate you through it.

Insights from leaders at OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Databricks, Character.AI, Roblox, insitro, and Figma on where we are, where we're going, and the open questions for building the next wave of AI.

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.

AI is creative massive opportunities for startups by making it possible to build scalable online experiences that replicate the benefits of being in person.

Because improving your LTV:CAC from 2x to 3x can nearly triple your valuation.

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.

Refocus your customer success org on driving customer health, and you'll unlock significant—and efficient—revenue growth in your post sales org.

How 4 key AI innovations will evolve over the next 6–12 months, and how founders can integrate these new advances into their businesses.

a16z’s Ben Horowitz and Databricks’ Ali Ghodsi sit down to talk about hiring and firing executives, including the common reasons an exec fails, why micromanagement can be a good idea, and the difference between someone who has written a playbook and someone who has only run one.

Building your executive team is key to scaling your company quickly and effectively. These first principles lay the foundation for making those key hires.

From stock options to compensation benchmarking, these are some of the most important topics for late-stage CEOs to consider when putting together an executive compensation package.

a16z’s step-by-step hiring process for hiring the right executives to scale your company.

As your technical org starts “shipping its org chart,” how you structure the relationship between your product and engineering teams becomes key to scaling.

Sales leaders who operate on gut feel likely won’t scale your GTM through the growth stages—you need a process-oriented CRO to manage, coordinate, and inspect all of your revenue-generating functions.

Once you have a foothold in the market, you need to hire leaders who can scale your company to the next level of ARR. Our approach to evolving your go-to-market organization and hiring growth-stage GTM leaders.

Great SVPs of engineering understand what products your company needs to bring to market, then translates those into an org structure, reporting lines, team composition, and engineering process to get you there.

As a technical and product founder, this is likely one of the most emotional hires you’ll have to make. How to recognize when you need a CPO and what to look for in a potential candidate.

During the growth stages, you need executives who can build out processes that both work as you scale and address what breaks down as you do. Our approaches to hiring leaders who can scale with the complexity of your business.

As you generate more revenue from growing an account post-sales than from landing new logos, your CCO ensures that you’re retaining and expanding your existing customer base.

As your company evolves from product-market fit through the growth stages, the most important aspects of marketing for your company will change—and as they do, so will the type of marketing leader you need.

Hiring the right chief operating officer can be a critical step in setting you and your company up for long-term scale, but it isn’t a given that every CEO should hire a COO or that every company will be better off for hiring one.

While it can be easy to see the CFO as a “scorekeeper,” a great CFO actually puts points on the board by strategically and opportunistically growing your company.

A great general counsel will give you direct, continuous, and time-sensitive advice on key decisions before you’ve committed significant resources, thereby helping to unlock more revenue.

A great CHRO understands your company, knows where it’s headed, and builds out programs to attract, retain, develop, and motivate the talent to get you there.

Your CISO fights on the front lines against ransomware attacks, bears responsibility for data security amid tightening regulations, and serves as the key defense against some of the biggest existential threats your company faces.

How 2022 impacted growth, efficiency, and burn metrics, and how companies should view their metrics in light of these new benchmarks going forward.

How to build a credible and realistic replan when there’s a gap between your current revenue plan and what your sales team can deliver.

Product and go-to-market teams must align upfront on how to segment customers, and on which features will result in more happy customers.

Some signs your monetization strategy isn’t working—and how to approach it.

When budgets tighten, how do you ensure your product doesn’t get cut? Tailor your messaging to productivity and efficiency value drivers.

What counts as "cash," developing a plan for that cash, building an adaptable operating model, and dealing with a liquidity crisis.

Benchmarks for B2B companies, based on a16z data and investing team expertise.

When inbound starts to dry up, it's time to go outbound and build pipeline. Here's how.

Choosing the right funding structure can have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of your company, its ability to scale, and your bottom line.

Get the move right and you can unlock new users, use cases, and revenue streams. But get it wrong, and you risk losing focus, increasing burn, and stifling product innovation.

When capital becomes more expensive, how do you evaluate and decide on the best financing option for your company?

Fintech companies with pay-as-you-go pricing have more revenue volatility, but they also align cost and value for a low barrier to adoption, fast and high rates of expansion, and strong customer retention.

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...

1) reevaluate your valuation 2) understand your burn multiple 3) build scenario plans to grow back into your valuation.

Raising debt is an important financial tool for startups, especially as more and more companies become fintech companies. Learn how it works.

The advantages, drawbacks, and practical advice for IPOs, direct listings, and SPAC mergers.

The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.

How we can improve the overall state of the IPO markets, economic growth, and retail access to capital.

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...

These frameworks help map the user journey to figure out the right product tiers, how to differentiate them, and how to price them.

Industry lessons from the first generation of iconic bottom-up companies and how they layered in top-down sales to accelerate growth.

What’s really behind the IPO pop? TL;DR: it’s Economics 101. The laws of supply and demand, and marginal pricing, withstand the test of time.

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.

By adding fintech, vertical SaaS businesses can increase revenue and open up new, previously inaccessible SaaS markets.

For B2B startups, a downturn can be a boon – the trick is to survive.

We’ve been in a bull market for enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) for over 11 years, and it has been all about growth. Not only has the number of SaaS companies exploded, but companies like Slack, Zoom, and Shopif...

How you handle a layoff, how you communicate it to the people impacted, and how you manage and lead throughout the process really matters. It takes careful thought and planning, but it may be the most important planning you ever do as a leader.

Everything you need to know about 409A valuations, including how they’re calculated, when to reevaluate, and the common myths and pitfalls.

The difference between a good CEO and a great one? Trusting your gut and confronting your fears head on.

Peter Levine tracks the rise of open source software and provides a practical, end-to-end framework for turning an open source project into a successful business.

The new enterprise go-to-market combo of bottom-up growth and traditional sales is changing B2B startups and the technology that they sell.

Think of a sales contract as a system of interconnected components and levers that work together to achieve an acceptable level of risk and reward for both you and your customer.

What to make of IPO prices and the headlines hyping their rise or fall? Pricing an IPO is way more art than science.

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...

We started Andreessen Horowitz a decade ago with the goal of partnering with great founders by investing across all stages of the company lifecycle -- from seed through late stage.

We’ve been a multi-stage venture firm since our founding in 2009. And over the past nearly ten years, we’ve been lucky enough to invest in a variety of companies at different stages of development -- from seed through la...

Services are a well-established way to helping a deployment be successful and help your startup become a strategic advisor to the target customer.

If you aren't yourself, *you* won't even follow you.

Here are the facts: About two decades ago, we used to have 300 IPOs per year. Since then, that average has fallen by more than half. Why?

The route by which you distribute your product to customers—i.e., the channel—is key, as is the decision whether to partner with others.

How to identify initiatives, evaluate and validate solutions, negotiate and close deals, and successfully deploy.

Venture capital marks are highly variable based on different valuation methods. These are the main "mark" valuation methods used by venture firms.

Being in control means putting in place a strong sales, forecasting, and deal qualification process.

You can't build a weatherproof company if you don’t constantly gather challenges to your thinking, learn to listen to them, and then test those learnings out.

“A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.” --from the movie Annie Hall

A talented but explosive employee may be the most powerful human force in your company. Your challenge is to help them be a force for good.

Whenever you're raising capital, think about constructing the round in such a way that you're strongly positioned for the future.