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Alastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisHow does an AI-native startup unseat an incumbent⁉️ 👇 Enter the Greenfield Strategy: AI-native startup bingo. The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation. One of the most powerful, and underrated, ways for startups to win distribution is to serve companies at their formation: greenfield companies. Stripe Deel Mercury Ramp Carta Brex have all done this at scale. Why does this work? Simply put, acquiring customers de novo is easier than getting customers to switch: - Many of the large software incumbents have hostages, not customers. Their customers would love to switch, but ripping and replacing existing software is risky and expensive. New companies don’t face those switching costs; they simply look for the best solution and evaluate based on merit. - New companies don’t need as many features to have a complete solution. - New companies have fewer stakeholders. You only have to convince the founders. Grow with your customers: If you attract all of the new companies at formation and grow with them, you will become a big company as your customers become big companies. Consider Stripe: many of Stripe’s customers did not yet exist when Stripe was founded. Some of those early customers later became large businesses in their own right. So when enterprises outside of Silicon Valley also needed to prepare themselves for a shift to ecommerce models, Stripe was an obvious choice, with plenty of relevant reference customers already in place. Incumbents, on the other hand, would much rather sell to existing businesses vs. companies that don’t exist now but might exist in huge numbers in a few years. They are bound by the rules of P&L (Profit & Loss) – and there’s no “P” for greenfield companies that don’t exist yet, just “L”. The startup, however, isn’t bound to a financial model – the startup doesn’t need one; it's still figuring stuff out! Graduation moments: In a similar way, software “graduation moments” (the moments when a startup begins to develop enterprise needs) also create opportunities to execute this greenfield strategy. New companies will need to migrate to more complex software systems as they scale (e.g. from Quickbooks to Netsuite). AI-native startup Bingo: There are many different categories of enterprise software. Enough to fill a 5x5 Bingo board and more! In each category of the Bingo board, there sits an incumbent that could be dethroned by an AI-native alternative. So, how does a new company win the game of Bingo? - Pick a square - Make a narrow wedge much better - Find a constant source of new customers - Rapidly iterate and add features to grow with your customers - Don’t be constrained by the division of existing categories If you’re building a category-defining company on the Bingo board - come and talk to us. New post with Alastair (Alex) Rampell Andreessen Horowitz. Link in comments.
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisThe model companies aren’t just selling the ingredients anymore — they’re opening restaurants too. When OpenAI and Anthropic launched, they positioned themselves as infrastructure for others to build on. But today, with Sora, Claude Teams, and constant whispers of potential vertical applications, the model makers are going full-stack — building business lines that compete directly with the startups they continue to power. So where do you build when the farms start running restaurants? One answer: in walled gardens of data — domains where information is proprietary, regulated, or simply too fragmented for general models to master. vLex did it in law, digitizing decades of Spanish case law. OpenEvidence did it in medicine, structuring fragmented peer-reviewed research. Both turned hard-to-access data into defensible AI products. The model companies will always command bigger models, more compute, and more distribution — those are hard games for startups to win. But there’s an opening in ecosystems where high-quality data has historically been fragmented, sensitive, or difficult to access — places where sovereignty and trust matter more than raw capability. More from me and my partner Alastair (Alex) Rampell below on the Fruits of the Walled Garden 👇
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell shared thisFor 60+ years, the history of software was primarily: “take a filing cabinet, put it in a database, give it a user interface” But the old fashioned file in filing cabinet or on-prem or cloud hosted record still needed to be acted on by a human. *This* is what’s exciting about AI. The future of work is software. https://lnkd.in/ghW27CHb
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisNew Andreessen Horowitz thesis: AI x commerce AI will change the way we shop - from where we find products to how we evaluate them, when we buy, and much more. What types of purchases will be disrupted, and where does opportunity exist in the age of AI? More from me + Alastair (Alex) Rampell: https://lnkd.in/gHq6KYRE
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell shared thisWe (Andreessen Horowitz) are excited to lead Rillet's $70M Series B and back the team building the ERP for the AI age. Most Finance systems today are brittle, clunky, and deeply manual — still stuck in the '90s. Rillet is building something entirely new. It often takes companies days or weeks to "close the books" every month (I remember at TrialPay when we had a whole project to "get to 7" days). Sprawling AR/AP teams. Tedious workflows duct-taped across Excel, internal dashboards, QuickBooks, NetSuite and other tools. Rillet is a self-driving ERP — designed from the ground up for speed, intelligence, and automation. It combines a modern ledger with AI agents that actively manage finance ops: reconciling, reporting, forecasting, and more. Existing ERPs are systems of record. Rillet is a system of action. It helps finance teams close books instantly, generate investor-ready board decks, and run real-time dashboards — all on one platform. And customers love it. Rillet has achieved rave reviews from CFOs, controllers, and staff accountants alike -- and a big chunk of our portfolio. It's ERP that just works. I’m excited to partner with Nicolas Kopp and the team!
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell shared thisOperation Chokepoint 3.0 Under the Biden administration, Operation Chokepoint 2.0 tried to debank and deplatform crypto: https://lnkd.in/gckpJHD3 That era has ended, but now the banks are about to implement their own Chokepoint 3.0 — charging insanely high fees to access data or move money to crypto and fintech apps, and more concerningly blocking crypto and fintech apps they don’t like: https://lnkd.in/gr2Y8c6i JP Morgan Chase is an $800B company. Make no mistake: this isn’t about a new revenue stream. It’s about strangling competition. And if they get away with this, every bank will follow. Dodd-Frank Section 1033 guarantees that consumers have rights to their data, and it’s the CFPB’s job to enforce. The CFPB under Biden did some bad things, but upholding 1033 preserved consumer choice and competition. The crazy thing is sometimes this “data” is just your account number and routing code. That’s right: information that’s printed on the bottom of every check, if delivered electronically, somehow should require tremendous fees paid to banks that were collectively bailed out by taxpayers a mere 17 years ago. If it suddenly costs $10 to move $100 into a Coinbase or Robinhood account — maybe fewer people will do it. Or if it costs $10 to get a cheaper loan from a fintech, maybe you’ll be forced to take a crappier one by JPM. And maybe JPM and others will just refuse to let consumers connect their own freely chosen crypto and fintech apps to their bank account. In a perfect world, consumers would vote with their wallets and leave JPM. But every bank will likely do this, and getting a new banking charter takes years. Many banks have hostages, not customers. We don’t need a new law; we just need the administration to prevent this callous and manipulative attempt to kill competition and consumer choice.Meuser: The Biden Administration's Operation Choke Point 2.0 Was Carried Out by The Prudential Regulators to Target and Debank the Digital Asset EcosystemMeuser: The Biden Administration's Operation Choke Point 2.0 Was Carried Out by The Prudential Regulators to Target and Debank the Digital Asset Ecosystem
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisNever edit a video alone again. Meet Underlord, your AI co-editor. This is vibe editing.
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell shared thisAoPS is the gold standard in mathematics. This is a great opportunity for somebody who loves math, education, and technology.Alastair (Alex) Rampell shared thisAfter 20+ years at AoPS and a decade of Beast Academy success, we're taking our biggest leap yet. We've partnered with Carina Initiatives to form Inflection Point Learning—a new company dedicated to bringing our innovative Beast Academy curriculum to elementary classrooms nationwide. Our goal is to foster mathematical talent in early grades and transform how math is taught in elementary schools. **We're hiring a founding CEO!** If you're passionate about revolutionizing math education and have experience bringing ambitious products to complex markets, we want to hear from you. Remote applicants welcome. Our pilot programs have already shown incredible results in our first three years—advanced students are being challenged to reach their full potential, students who once feared math now tackle complex problems eagerly, and teachers are rediscovering their own love for mathematics. With substantial new funding, we're developing a complete K-5 curriculum with extensive print/online materials and comprehensive teacher training. Help us turn elementary math classrooms into launching pads for future innovators! Learn more about the new company and the CEO opportunity at https://lnkd.in/gwvMZ_8i #MathEducation #EdTech #BeastAcademy
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell reposted thisAffirm is in the strongest shape it’s ever been. We once again exceeded our expectations across every metric and supported our network through a record-setting holiday shopping season. I’ll try keep it brief, but a few quick highlights from Q2 include: - Our network reached new heights, with active consumers scaling to 21 million and GMV growing 35% YoY and surpassing $10 billion in a quarter for the first time in our history. - Affirm Card reached 1.7 million active cardholders and more than doubled volume. - We are five months away from our chosen target date to turn Affirm Operating Income positive, but it should be apparent to a casual observer that we are nearly there today. Operating income as a percentage of revenue was (0%). - Affirm launched in the UK on schedule, just before the end of the calendar year, and the early results are consistent with our expectations. Congratulations to my fellow Affirmers on a job well done! If you want to learn more about this quarter, check out our shareholder letter here: https://bit.ly/4hPP3N0
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisShipbuilding is one of the defining industrial challenges of the next decade. Saronic Technologies is bringing together autonomy, AI, and modern manufacturing to design, build, and scale maritime systems with remarkable speed and precision. Excited to partner with Dino Mavrookas, Vibhav A., Rob Lehman, Doug Lambert, and the whole team. Proud to lead Saronic’s Series D. https://lnkd.in/g-kP_Xtu
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisToday we're announcing Treeline and $25M in Series A funding from Andreessen Horowitz. Every company needs to manage its digital environment: devices, security, access, compliance, support. For decades, businesses have faced the same two options: build an internal IT team, or outsource to a legacy service provider. Both are expensive, slow, and frustrating. I spent ten years investing in IT and security software. I had a front-row seat to an industry that responded to every new problem the same way - more headcount, more software. That worked for a long time, but simply doesn't anymore. Modern software and AI have crossed a threshold. The coordination, triage, and routine work that once required a team of people can now run continuously in the background. What's left for humans is the work that actually requires judgment: architecture, strategy, the decisions that matter. Treeline is built around that idea - world-class software and AI paired with experienced technicians, designed for companies that want IT to be a foundation for growth, not a drag on it. We're hiring and just getting started. If your company is tired of the status quo - or you want to help redefine this category - reach out.
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisFive years ago, on my first coffee 1:1 after joining Andreessen Horowitz, Alex Rampell and I talked about building something special for the fintech community.. a space for founders, operators, and investors to come together off the record and have real conversations away from NYC and the Bay Area. Last week, we hosted our 5th Connect Fintech in Deer Valley. What started as an idea has become one of the highlights of the year, but it doesn’t happen by accident. We began our planning right after last year’s event and the weekly zooms started back in September. It’s months of coordinating speakers, curating the room, managing travel and weather curveballs, all to create something that feels seamless once everyone arrives. Huge credit to the team behind it all, Van Le-Gray, Melanie Galang, JJ Yu and Alex Immerman - for putting in the work to make this a first-class experience with plenty of laughs along the way. And most importantly, thank you to the a16z GPs, our speakers, founders, and broader network for showing up and making it spectacular. Alastair (Alex) Rampell Angela Strange David Haber Anish Acharya David George Bob Swan Seema Amble Gabriel Vasquez Ivan Makarov James da Costa Santiago Rodriguez Lebrija Justin Kahl Giovanni Ahern Ally Rae (McCloskey) Lombard Alex Spector Alicia Barone Courtney Stein Long live fintech 🚀
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisJust came back from Andreessen Horowitz 's Fintech Connect conference in Deer Valley. I don't usually like conferences - trying to take part but juggling work, travel, questionable networking events. This was pretty epic though. Can't really go wrong with a hotel on piste, poker tables and a bunch fintech nerds. Many thanks to Andreessen Horowitz, all who helped organize and the bunch of faces I caught up with 🙏⛷️
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisThe enterprise is becoming a software program. I went on stage at a16z’s FinTech conference this week with David George, Head of Growth at a16z, to talk about the rise of the agentic enterprise. Here’s the idea that hit hardest. Every role in your company should eventually be expressible as a markdown file. A system prompt, instructions, context, tools, and judgment criteria that an agent can execute on. If you can’t write that file, you don’t fully understand what the role is doing. If you can, you’ve made that function scalable, always-on, and composable with everything else. This is not a software development problem. This is an organizational change management problem. Most companies treat the AI transition as something for the engineering team to solve. Wrong frame. No function goes untouched. Not legal, not finance, not sales, not compliance, not investing. Every team that processes information, makes decisions, or communicates with customers is part of this. Driving it or having it done to them. The hardest part isn’t the technology. The technology is largely solved. The hard part is organizational. Who genuinely gets this, not intellectually but operationally? What decisions belong to agents? What must stay human? How do you preserve accountability when work is done by something not on an org chart? Change management at a scale most organizations have never attempted. This has to be driven from the top. This is why the technical founder is the most important figure in business right now. The ability to think in systems, in composable architecture, and translate that into organizational action is the most valuable form of leadership available today. Not just for technology companies. For every company. The technical founder understands intuitively that an enterprise can be architected. Workflows are not fixed, they are logic to be rewritten. The org chart is closer to a codebase than a hierarchy. Born-agentic companies have no legacy to rewire, no immune response to overcome. That advantage is compounding right now. Software was first. Financial services is next. I believe scaled financial services companies are technology companies that move money and establish trust. What changes now is that the organizational logic underneath, many workflows, decisions, customer interactions, can be rewritten as an agentic system. The domain knowledge is deep, the data is rich. Financial services is not behind. It is positioned for what is coming. Firms and founders who recognize they are not just building a financial product but architecting an agentic organization will define this industry. The job of every company now is to get as close to the AI capability curves as possible and outperform the normal rate of new technology diffusion. Do that and you delight customers, operate efficiently, take market share, and generate alpha. Fall behind and you get disrupted. There has never been a moment like this one.
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisI turn 40 today. Many have encouraged me to write more publicly. I've been scared of putting myself out there. Here goes... 🫡 🚀 My startup rocketship ran on my fear. Until it didn’t. 🤕 Founder burnout is the greatest destroyer of enterprise value. 🧘 I wish I had enjoyed the journey more.
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisWe're excited to share our latest updates to Commerce in ChatGPT. Today, we’re launching a richer and more visual shopping experience. You can browse products visually, compare options side-by-side, and get detailed, up-to-date information—all in one place. What used to take hours of searching and tab-hopping now happens in seconds. To power this, we’re expanding the Agentic Commerce Protocol (ACP) to support product discovery—bringing more complete, relevant, and up-to-date information directly into ChatGPT. Congrats to all the teams involved - onwards! https://lnkd.in/gAvrN-QY
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Alastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisAlastair (Alex) Rampell liked thisThrilled to announce KP22, our twenty-second venture fund with $1 billion to back early stage companies, along with $2.5 billion in growth funds to back high-inflection, category-defining businesses — $3.5 billion in total. AI is reshaping every industry from the ground up, faster than anything seen before. This is the moment to build. Grateful to our team, and the founders and LPs who’ve trusted us over the years, and looking forward to partnering with the next generation of history-making companies. https://lnkd.in/grh5_dic
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