Alex Rampell on Venture at Scale and Founder Incentives

I think you want to 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. 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 were buying out of the money call options and we hope they expire in the money. We don't necessarily think you can take it as a given that a small fund will outperform a large fund. Today's episode is a feed drop from our friends at twenty VC hosted by Harry Stebbings. In this conversation, Harry sits down with a sixteen d general partner, Alex Rampel, for a candid discussion on how venture really works today. From fund size and ownership, to why winning deals matters as much as picking them, to how incentives can quietly shape founder behavior over time. Alex shares his frameworks for investing, including why he looks for founders who can materialize labor, capital, and customers, why he believes the best companies have hostages rather than customers, and how venture capital is changing as markets get bigger, companies stay private longer, and competition accelerates. They also get into pricing risk, moral hazard, secondaries, labor displacement from AI, and what it actually takes to build enduring companies in an era where software and automation are moving faster than ever. Today, I'm joined by Alex Rampel, general partner at Andreessen, where he leads their 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. You have now arrived at your destination. Alex, dude, it's been eight years. I'm hoping that my question asking ability has gone up in terms of quality in those eight years. Now, listen, I was wondering, in an age of venture today, do you have to go really big or go crafts and very small and boutique to win in venture today? Yeah. I mean, I think this sounds like a bad word when I say death, but there is this kind of death of the middle that happens to a lot of asset classes in general. In venture capital, it was a tiny, tiny asset class at the beginning. Right now, it's gotten bigger, but it's really more of the end state of a lot of these companies is huge. I mean, Sequoia used to brag about I think it was, like, 20% of the market cap of the Nasdaq was Sequoia …