.@pmarca on the paradox of venture: "You're a backseat driver. You're not the person doing all the work who gets to take all the credit." You don't run the company. But you get a front-row seat to the future. That's the strange privilege of VC.

.@pmarca on the real cost of saying no: "If I don't make an investment and it goes up 1000x, then I have to read about it every day for the next 30 years." In VC, you don’t lose sleep over failed bets. You lose it over the ones that got away.

.@dwarkesh_sp says people will get used to choosing convenience over human interaction faster than we think. If an AI gives medical advice as good as a doctor and saves you three hours in a waiting room, most people won’t hesitate. When the experience is better, the transition feels obvious.

New episode with @dwarkesh_sp and @Noahpinion on AGI and the economy. This is perhaps my favorite podcast conversation since joining a16z.

.@noahpinion says people have always made two predictions: 1. "Here’s a thing tech will never be able to do." 2. "Human labor will be made obsolete." Neither has ever come true. In 2015, we said self-driving trucks would replace truckers. Ten years later, there’s a trucker shortage. We keep misunderstanding how labor and tech evolve by underestimating their interdependencies.

.@dwarkesh_sp says AGI is more like the industrial revolution than nuclear power. "There’s not this one machine that is the industrial revolution. It is this broader process of growth and automation." That means you won’t see a single moment of arrival. Just the world quietly rearranging itself around intelligence.

.@balajis says every startup now needs a founding creator. Someone who speaks for the product before it ships. "The founding engineer is the how... The founding creator is the why." If you're outsourcing content, you're outsourcing your edge.

The 20th century was widescreen. The 21st feels like portrait mode. Media used to be panoramic: big institutions speaking to the masses. Now it’s a single face, full-frame, on your phone. @balajis says even the screen reflects the shift from institution to individual.

In light of the hit piece on Luke Farritor, @balajis returned to the podcast to give a love letter to legacy media in only the way he can—and to provide a new path forward for tech.

Congratulations to @zoink, Praveer and the @figma team on going public. When we originally invested, we said we were entering the decade of design. Amazing how much that has happened. Thanks for letting us at @a16z be part of the journey.