The a16z Show

Erik Torenberg × Alex Rampell × Max Levchin

Visa and Mastercard still impose a roughly 2.5-second transaction window, a roughly 60-year-old standard that limits room for antifraud and payment innovation even as agents could reopen the interface.Affirm shows where the economics are strongest: Beautylish installments lifted conversion 30%, merchants fund negative CAC, and products up to 3½ years require machine-learning underwriting, while whether consumers will delegate purchase choices remains unresolved.

David George × Will Gaybrick

Stripe’s first-half signups grew 50% YoY, while the median 2026 cohort generates 50% more revenue than 2025’s and its new SaaS-platform cohort is 103% larger.Stripe Minions produce 7,000 weekly one-shot PRs, KAI lifted seller productivity 20%, and Machine Payments Protocol, Link Agent Wallet, and Tempo offer potential catalysts as agentic commerce adoption and execution remain unproven.

David Haber × Marc Rowan

Apollo’s slightly-over-$1 trillion platform is 80% investment-grade credit, making origination capacity—not available capital—the binding constraint on growth.Daily estimated valuations for private investment-grade products by June 30 and all credit by the end of September could widen access as $800 billion of 2026 capex from four public companies tests financing capacity.

David Haber × Lloyd Blankfein

Finance is adopting AI aggressively, but near-zero error tolerance requires proven and experimental systems to run in parallel—sometimes 50 runs with perfection on the last 49—raising costs before efficiency gains.Opaque software executing 70,000 transactions could scale hidden errors and leverage, making testable reliability, regulation, and public legitimacy key adoption constraints for OpenAI, Anthropic, and other systemically important AI companies.

David Haber × Tony James

Tony James’s compounding playbook paired early S-curve positioning with operating discipline, from DLJ using leveraged buyouts to “buy clients we couldn’t actually win competitively” to Blackstone increasing market value about 170-fold while fund IRRs improved.Costco shows the customer moat in practice—if sourcing saves a nickel, “100% of that nickel gets lower prices”—while James sees a private-credit correction ahead and favors seasoned assets through co-investments and continuation vehicles.

David Haber × David Solomon × Ben Horowitz

David Solomon sees one of the strongest macro setups in his “40-odd years” in markets, combining fiscal expansion, rate cuts, deregulation and an unprecedented capital-investment supercycle.Confidence has shifted M&A from “no” to “maybe,” potentially producing the biggest M&A year in history, while Goldman’s $1.9 trillion balance sheet and $500 billion deposit base frame the scale-and-funding challenge; FTC uncertainty and geopolitical risk remain key variables.

David Haber × Zach Perret

Fintech is entering an early-to-mid-spring cycle where survivors are expanding from digital access into cash-flow underwriting, embedded finance, fraud controls, and full-stack products.AI’s clearest institutional opportunity is software that performs compliance, servicing, treasury, and trading work, while consumer agents still face a trust barrier around unexplained money movement.Fraud is growing 18% to 20% annually as AI accelerates adversaries, making Plaid’s cross-network Protect and Lens Score important 2026 catalysts amid unresolved defensive challenges.

Alex Rampell × Varun Krishna

Housing affordability reflects both restricted supply and asset inflation, as the median buyer age rose from 30 in 2010 to 38 today while cash wages lag appreciating equities and homes.Rocket’s Redfin and Mr. Cooper acquisitions aim to connect search, origination, servicing, and home equity into a countercyclical “lender for life,” with integration and construction capacity the key risks to monitor.

Alex Rampell × Erik Torenberg × Kaz Nejatian

Kaz Nejatian is repositioning Opendoor as a software-led housing marketplace rather than a real-estate investment business.Owning roughly 5%-10% of exclusive inventory could concentrate demand, attract third-party listings, reduce commissions toward 1%, and bundle warranties, returns, financing, and coordinated closings.The rate shock exposed long-duration inventory risk, leaving the reboot’s attack posture and hybrid principal-risk model as key execution variables.

Erik Torenberg × Mark Cuban

Cuban’s clearest business thesis pairs transparent pricing and AI-native operators with broad employee equity, arguing that ESOP workers earn dramatically more and turn over less while small firms gain immediate productivity tools.He would replace opaque insurers and PBMs with patient shopping, catastrophic reinsurance, and government-guaranteed financing, while NBA media rights and second-apron constraints make subscription growth and patient team-building the next tests.