What I'm up to at a16z and in life: New LA office, Speedrun 4, Tech Week, and more

been a busy few weeks!

dear readers,

Been a while since I did a quick roundup of projects I’m working on at a16z, infused with a few personal items. Here’s the quick list.

• new LA office for a16z. Last month, we opened up our first office in Los Angeles just off the Promenade in Santa Monica. This adds to our flagship locations in SF, NYC, and London. We have ample co-working space for a16z startups, plus hosting events on the roof deck (with a bar, and ocean views!), and it’s just been fantastic. Please stop by and say hello!

• a16z speedrun 4. Many of you know we’ve recently built an accelerator for seed-stage startups, where we invest ~$750k into very early teams (some are even quitting their jobs to join!). We are investing ~$30M in the next 30 days — well, technically, there’s just 2 weeks remaining, so it’s $23M in 14 days which is not nearly as catchy). But I spend 1:1 time with **every** startup and am personally involved with quite a few, so if you’re interested to work together, there’s more info here and you can apply here. We’re investing in an expansive set of stuff, everything from 3D, AI, XR, plus gamified apps (“duolingo for X”), etc. Happy to talk more about it

• a16z’s tech week in SF and LA. In Oct, we are running SF and LA tech week back to back, and there will be 1000+ tech events with 10,000s+ of people attending. a16z is hosting over a dozen events and we are partnering with all the major AI companies, hollywood folks, gaming startups, etc., to put together a very busy week. You can register here.

• games fund 2. I’ll have more to say on this later but we ended up raising our second games fund, also $600M+, earlier this year and we’ve tweaked our strategy a bit to have a lot more focus on going early (SPEEDRUN) and then doubling down later. We’ve also expanded our charter to invest not just in game studios, but also AI, web3 gaming, tech, XR, etc, with a wider focus. Going early helps too. We will start deploying the fund at the end of the year, and otherwise am glad to be wrapping up our investing in the first Games Fund which has been my main work project over the past few years.

• riyadh visit. Recently I stopped by Saudi Arabia for my second visit there, for a conference focused on sports/esports. It was great to catch up with a wide variety of folks, including at NEOM, PIF, Savvy, and so on — all very optimistic and with an orientation that it’s “time to build.” The country is really going through a major transformation, having added movie theaters less than 5 years ago, and now hosting major esports events, F1, etc. I mentioned this before but I recently read a biography of Ibn Saud (the founder of Saudi Arabia) by Barbara Bray and Michael Darlow which added a ton of background.

OK, so that’s the official work stuff!

And how about personal?

• splitting time between SF/LA. I’ve had many people ask how things are going for me in LA — I have to say we love it. But also I’m cheating since we have a place in SF still and we go back and forth (in fact, heading to SF twice, over the next two weeks). SF beckons when it comes to everything AI and tech, and I miss my friends. My sister/her husband/niece live in Menlo Park as well. When we go to SF the good news is that we can hit all the faves (Souvla, Rich Table, etc) and try to see as many people as we can

• health. Just like everyone else, I’ve been reading Peter Attia and Huberman and all that stuff. My lesson here is that I should try to do cardio dailyish and eat better. The first part is going better than the latter. I’ve been getting up early, and originally started with the peloton bike, but found that I get a better workout on the tread, so now I mostly do that (but cross-train). I am doing 4x4 intervals which has seemed to move the needle on cardio health, and then lift 2x/week. Hard to fit it all in, but have been doing audiobooks so it doesn’t feel like dead time. Having a home gym is def a good hack.

• one year anniversary. Last but not least, my lovely wife Emma and I celebrated our 1 year anniversary! We kept it chill — went to a nice meal at Vespertine in Culver City, spend a few days together, and generally enjoyed. Time has flown. And also when you spend as much time together as we did during lockdown, it feels like we’ve been married for 10! Lots happening on the home front so will keep everyone updated on that as well

Anyway, thanks for reading and hope everyone is well!

Andrew
Venice, CA - Sep 2024