There’s something quietly seismic about the way Andreessen Horowitz (A16Z) reimagines venture capital. Listening to Ben Horowitz on the inaugural episode of Turpentine VC, you realize how different this approach is from the classic model of a few high-profile generalist investors sitting around a boardroom table, making bets based on pattern recognition and relationships. A16Z has the scale of a tech company and the modular logic of one too — specialized teams, infrastructure built like software products, and a vision that spans decades, not market cycles.
It feels less like investing and more like company-building — at the firm level.
At Dellecod, we’ve talked plenty about systems thinking, whether in building elegant backend architectures or managing our own internal workflows. It’s rare to hear that kind of thinking applied so deliberately to VC itself. But that’s the quiet thesis underpinning this podcast conversation: venture capital as an engineered platform, not just a financial instrument.
One idea we found especially compelling was how A16Z structures itself not around individual investors but around "founder-service products" in each sector — crypto, bio, games, AI. Imagine being a founder and having not just capital, but an industry-specific team, a regulatory strategy arm, hiring partners, media amplification, and access to other operators, all embedded in your investment partner. That’s a serious upgrade from Monday morning partner meetings.
Ben compares this to Y Combinator — the spirit of industrialized support, with the difference being A16Z keeps support going through later stages and adapts to new sectors like a software firm would release feature modules. Internally, the equity incentives are shared across the firm, not siloed by deal ownership, which encourages long-term perspective and collaboration instead of competitive hoarding.
There’s also something sobering in Ben’s realism about scale. VC lore has often glorified small, tight-knit shops — a few smart people in a room, ideally with Zen-like patience and winner-picking instincts. But A16Z looked at the market — realizing that over 150 startups might now reach $100 million valuations each year rather than just 15 — and concluded that scale wasn’t just feasible, it was necessary. That is, if you wanted to serve not just the kingmakers, but the entire court.
The contrast with the SoftBank or Tiger style of scaling — fast, fee-driven, and optics-heavy — was subtle but meaningful. A16Z doesn’t want to be a hedge fund. Its growth follows the contours of market opportunity but stays deeply mission-grounded.
And then there’s their bet on AI, described memorably as "non-deterministic computing." That line stuck with us. It suggests not just new tools or slightly smarter apps, but a profound reworking of how software behaves — less a machine and more a collaborator. A16Z is so convinced of this that they’ve restructured internally to support AI-native founders and researchers directly. This feels familiar to us: reorganizing workflows or team boundaries not because management books say so, but because the tech itself demands it.
Ben’s broader view of the ecosystem pulls no punches on regulation, either. Whether it’s the clumsy U.S. stance toward crypto, or the chilling implications of banning open-source AI models, you get the sense that the innovation flywheel is hitting a wall of bureaucracy. Notably, he draws an analogy between open AI models and nuclear deterrence — decentralized power as the best safeguard against monopolistic control or dangerous misuse. That imagery may feel extreme, but it forces the question: if only four large entities control world-class AI, what guardrails actually exist?
That said, this isn’t a doomsday podcast. It’s ultimately quite optimistic — even quietly idealistic. Ben emphasizes the importance of building pro-technology media, of encouraging young people to engage seriously with AI, and of surrounding founders with principled, technical, long-range-aligned investors. For him, venture isn’t casino capitalism. It’s a recursive form of optimism — betting not only on ideas, but on the idea that better ideas are yet to come, especially in the hands of the next generation.
There’s also a refreshing skepticism about VC firms going public. When incentives start drifting from investment quality to quarterly fee expectations, the nature of the business warps. It prioritizes scale for scale’s sake. That may work in private equity, where capital deployment is more linear, but VC is noisy and long-tailed — and public shareholders don’t enjoy waiting a decade to be right.
The most important through-line for us, though, is the firm’s product-centric design. It reframes VC away from personal brilliance and toward infrastructure. Almost like a SaaS company, A16Z is constantly asking: Does our user — the founder — experience a better outcome because we exist? Do they grow faster, raise smarter, go global sooner, avoid common regulatory pitfalls? If not, why are we here?
It feels like, in their world, your track record is not your moat. Your systems are.
As builders ourselves, we find this model compelling, not because it’s glossy or grand, but because it resonates with how modern organizations actually scale. Not around heroes — around platforms. Not by chasing trends — by building prepared minds and adaptive teams. And not in spite of chaos — but precisely because of it.
If there's one idea we’ll carry forward internally, it’s this: design the company you wish the industry looked like. Don’t wait for precedent. A16Z didn’t. And whether or not you agree with all their calls (we have our own questions, especially around clean energy pessimism), there’s clearly something instructive in how they’ve rewired the machinery of venture for a more volatile — but possibly more creative — future.