20VC: a16z's $15BN Fundraise with Alex Rampell | The Best Companies Have Hostages Not Customers | The Best Founders Materialise Capital, Customers and Labour | Mid-Sized Funds with Die and The Future of Venture Capital

Think you wanna invest in people that can materialize labor, capital, and customers. The way that I do it, just kinda to be pithy about it, is, like, we either wanna buy any percent, any percent of something that is absolutely working or high ownership of something that could work. Work. The best companies have hostages, not customers. So probably of the unicorn class, I would bet that maybe 5% will ever be able to go public. We are buying out of the money call options, and we hope they expire in the money. We don't necessarily think you could take it as a given that a small fund will outperform a large fund. $15,000,000,000. That is how much Andreessen Horowitz just raised. It is over 20% of the entire pool of capital raised by venture firms. Today, I'm joined by Alex Rampell, general partner at Andreessen, where he leads their $1,700,000,000 apps fund. He's also led deals in Mercury, Plaid, Opendoor, and many more, and this is one of the best shows that I've done in a long, long time. I actually think to one of Alex's statements every single day. It's taught me so much, and it's very simple. Will the startup acquire distribution before the incumbent acquires innovation? I have Alex to thank for that, and it always sticks with me. But before we dive into the show today, over 80% of Fortune 100 companies are running their businesses with Airtable. Airtable combines AI with the scale of an award winning infinitely flexible no code system, a platform where you can see all of your data in one place and use it to make really big picture decisions. Think of it like mission control for your company. Airtable goes beyond organization and automating repetitive tasks. It lets you use your data to inform strategy, monitor progress, and take action. Every cell is capable of performing hundreds of AI powered tasks like web research or localization and using those results to inform and update hundreds or w.airtable.com/20vc. Airtable, the infrastructure of of innovation. And just like Airtable organizes your workflow data, Metaview organizes your conversation insights. This episode is brought to you by Metaview. Who says hiring has to be fair? Every founder, VC, and exec I speak with knows this. Your ability to hire is the biggest constraint on your company's growth. But recruiting is slow, it's subjective, and only getting more competitive. And that's why teams like Eleven Labs, Brex, Replit, Deal, and 5,000 other organizations use MetaView, the AI company giving high performance teams a real unfair advantage in hiring. MetaView's built a suite of AI agents that behave like recruiting coworkers. They proactively find candidates. They take interview notes automatically, and they help you surface the best candidates in process. For the first time, AI handles the recruiting toil and gives you a single source of truth. That means hours saved per hire and a team focused on what matters most, winning the right …