a16z Goes Global: Why American Tech Must Lead the World

Ben Horowitz is joined by Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram, and Jen Kha to discuss a16z's expanding international strategy and the growing role technology plays in economic growth, national security, and global partnerships. The conversation explores why America's technology leadership matters beyond Silicon Valley, how AI is reshaping relationships between governments and the private sector, and why countries around the world are looking to adopt frontier technologies while building stronger innovation ecosystems of their own. They discuss AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, defense technology, startup expansion, and what it takes to build enduring technology ecosystems. Along the way, they examine the role of trusted partnerships, the importance of Western technology, and why helping founders expand globally has become an increasingly important part of company building. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:01 - Why a16z Is Going Global 05:06 - Tech as the Arena of National Power 09:36 - Products Travel Faster Than Companies Can 14:01 - American Values in the Models the World Runs On 18:52 - Prioritizing Geos: Japan, Saudi, Mexico & the Indo-Pacific 24:41 - How a16z's International Strategy Differs from Other VCs 29:31 - AI, Cybersecurity & the Dual-Use Dilemma 37:00 - What It Actually Takes to Build a Silicon Valley Resources: Read more about a16z’s global mission: https://a16z.com/a16zs-global-mission/ Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz Follow Anne on X: https://x.com/AnneNeuberger Follow Raghu on X: https://x.com/RaghuRaghuram Follow Jen Kha on X: https://x.com/jkhamehl Stay Updated: If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends! Find a16z on X: https://twitter.com/a16z Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z Listen to the a16z Show on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX Listen to the a16z Show on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711 Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see http://a16z.com/disclosures.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

  When AI becomes the interface for everything, every tool we have, every technology we use is going to be built on these models. And the models are not objective. They have opinions. They have strong opinions on things like history, on culture, on values. And those are very different depending where you are.

• 0:18Speaker 01

  Deterrence is no longer just the size of a military. It's the pace of innovation in reacting to cheap, software-built tech that adversaries may be using, whether they're a country, criminal, or terrorist group. And those technologies today are not being built by governments. They're being built by the private sector.

• 0:34Speaker 02

  Products and technology travel faster than companies can. So what happens is for startup companies, usually in the olden days, you didn't care about going international until you had a few hundred million dollars in revenue. Now these companies have to go sooner and sooner internationally.

• 0:50Jen Kha?

  The number one question we often get when we're visiting different countries is, how do you recreate Silicon Valley locally, right?

• 0:56Ben Horowitz?

  I don't think that's true, by the way. I think that's a happy talk.

• 1:00Erik Torenberg?

  Technology has become more than an industry. Today, it's a source of economic growth, national security, and geopolitical influence. As AI reshapes the global economy, countries aren't just asking how to regulate it. They're asking how to build with it, adopt it, and ensure they don't fall behind. In this episode, Ben Horowitz, Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram, and Jen Ka discuss why international partnerships matter more than ever, how technology is changing diplomacy, and what it takes to help founders build companies that can succeed on a global stage.

• 1:37Jen Kha?

  We are here to talk international today. Lots of things going on at the firm for a firm that used to historically be all centered in Menlo Park, and we didn't even want to open up a San Francisco office. This is a big change for us. So Ben, why don't you take us through this announcement around our global ambition and how all the pieces between global affairs, international go-to-market, LP relations on the global partnership level kind of fit in together?

• 1:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, it really kind of starts with America, interestingly. And it's kind of been our belief, our strong belief, that drop a person into any country in the world, and they don't have the culture, and they don't have money and capital resources yet, and they just have an idea of how to make the world a better place, their best shot is in America. And that's just a very, very special thing. And so a big mission of our firm is kind of trying to preserve that special thing that is America. And that means America has to be a leader. It has to be a leader economically. It has to be a leader culturally. It has to be a leader militarily.

• 2:43Ben Horowitz?

  And to do that, we have to be a leader technologically. We have to be a tech leader. And that's kind of really our role in the ecosystem and in the world is to help America be a leader. And then what we realized as kind of we've gotten further along with this mission is that we need to kind of bring in our partners, our allies, into that mission. And it kind of started with the work that you're doing, Jen, with just people from around the world wanting to kind of participate in the kind of US technological opportunity. And that kind of meant we started getting investors from around the world. And as we went out to see those investors and we said, look, how can we be a better partner?

• 3:28Ben Horowitz?

  We found some interesting things. So one is every country wants to not only kind of economically benefit from the technology, but they'd like to actually directly benefit from the technology. Can you bring it to us? Can we get a chance to use it? And then at a kind of higher level, at the kind of government policy level, people wanted to know, well, how can we be a great country for adopting technology, for innovating like you guys are, and for kind of helping push our country into the future? And as we looked at, okay, how do we kind of step up and step into that opportunity and be a good partner? We realized with our country partners, we needed relationships

• 4:11Ben Horowitz?

  at the kind of government level, at the investor level, at the adoption level. And that's what these kind of three components become. So we've got global affairs, which builds our relationships, led by Anne, which helps us have relationships in the right way with governments ranging from Saudi Arabia to Japan to Mexico. And we've had just great conversations with all of them. Then we have people who invest. Sometimes those are the governments. Sometimes they're various companies in the government. Sometimes they're companies who actually handle government money in the form of pensions.

• 4:52Ben Horowitz?

  And then finally, both the government and the businesses want to adopt the technology. And that's where kind of Raghu's effort comes in, where we have the go-to-market component.

• 5:02Jen Kha?

  Anne, I'm going to get you involved here. How much of your decision to join A61Z was motivated by this mission? And also the sense of duty in helping other countries think about the adoption to AI and not wanting to get left behind in AI, like Ben was alluding to?

• 5:15Speaker 01

  Very much so. What I saw happen in the years in the intelligence community and then the White House is technology moved from being a tool of diplomacy of national power to the arena of it, where the supply chain for chips was not a technology issue as much as a foundational economic and national security issue. The supply chain for the components that go into drugs, when used by one country to constrain or have impact on another country, it becomes a tool of national power. A software vulnerability is now not an IT issue.

• 5:49Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  It can be a source of leverage, particularly if that vulnerability is in key parts of your power systems or your water systems.

• 5:57Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  So I saw that shift happen from tech being either an IT issue or just a tool to the central arena of both economic growth and national power. And quite frankly, the, from a deterrence perspective, which is the language we talk about between countries in terms of deterring an invasion of a country, maintaining an international system of stability. Deterrence is no longer just the size of a military. I think as we see in the Strait of Hormuz, or we saw in the Red Sea, it's the pace of innovation in reacting to cheap, software-built tech that adversaries may be using, whether they're a country, criminal, or terrorist group.

• 6:35Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  And those technologies today are not being built by governments. They're being built by the private sector. Whether that's AI systems, whether that's autonomous systems, whether that's cyber defense systems, they are being built in the private sector. So certainly from a US perspective, ensuring that we have the relationships between government and private sector to leverage that for our own economic growth and as a force for good on the world stage, but also that our allies as well. We build together. We fight together. And to ensure that together, we can both have the advantages of that and to the extent that our tech also represents our values, it's important that the world run on American, on Western tech.

• 7:16Jen Kha?

  Yeah. Actually, that's a great part on the values point. Because Ben, you've said before, no country also wants to get colonized in cyberspace, right? Particularly because AI is now just getting built in the six-block radius in San Francisco. Say a little bit more about that.

• 7:31Ben Horowitz?

  Well, when AI becomes the interface for everything, so every tool we have, every technology we use, every kind of system we have, from your car to your refrigerator to your education system, is going to be built on these models. And the models are not objective. They have opinions. And they have strong opinions on things like history, on culture, on ethics, on values. And by the way, those are very different depending where you are. The history of wars and the history of a country and laws and whether that country was a good actor, a bad actor, are all very different depending on where you're getting the information from.

• 8:13Ben Horowitz?

  And so if you believe that, you know, as I do, that for all our flaws, our fundamental values and ideas about everything from the way our economic system works to the rule of law have resulted in...

• 8:33Ben Horowitz?

  Basically, the best opportunities for humans in the world, then you want those values to be projected onto the world more so than to be the recipients of some other values, which maybe we're good at a time or maybe have some merits, but overall don't give people a real opportunity.

• 8:57Jen Kha?

  Yeah, giving people a chance. That was the premise of the original announcement we did for our fund announcement earlier this year and the importance of that. And then particularly extending that chance to the allies of America as well. Raghu, I want to get you involved on this as well because portfolio companies are increasingly going international way sooner. They're multi-country, multi-channel, multi-product way sooner in the lifecycle. How much of this is also accelerated by what's happening in AI and just the ability to push out software updates, right? Just immediately.

• 9:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the reality is that products and technology travel faster than companies can. Right? Because if you've got a great product, everybody learns about it very quickly, instantaneously. You can access it through APIs, wherever in the world you are. You can build on top of those things. So what happens is for startup companies, usually in the older days, you didn't care about going international until you had a few hundred million dollars in revenue, et cetera. Now these companies have to go sooner and sooner internationally. So while the products are being discovered internationally sooner, also to Ben's earlier point, it's easier to adapt these products for local markets

• 10:07Speaker 02

  much more easily, thanks to AI. Or as wise becomes the interface to localize and internationalize these products, it's so much more easier. But in order to capitalize on the opportunity at scale, things don't change, right? I mean, you still have to be in region. You still have to understand the market structure of the region that you want to operate in. You have to understand partnerships. You have to build relationships. Lots of other countries are very relationship-based economies, not transaction-based economies. So it's this interesting blend where you've got, the technology moves really fast, but the way you do business hasn't changed that fast.

• 10:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, actually, so a really great example of what Raghu is talking about. So when we were in Mexico recently, we were meeting with the CEO of Televisa Univision, which Alfonso Angueta, who is a great friend of the firm, so one of our global partners. And we were asking about, gee, you know, what are your struggles? And one of his challenges is, you know, he's really faces, you know, heavy competition from some of the kind of global streamers like, you know, Netflix or Disney or so forth, who have this US technology that's very powerful. But he has, you know, this unbelievable Spanish-speaking

• 11:32Ben Horowitz?

  content. But it was hard for him to get to play on a global basis because it's in Spanish. It's a Mexican Spanish accent, which is different than an Argentinian Spanish accent or Colombian Spanish accent. And, you know, he's like, you know, how should we solve this? And we're like, well, we've got this great company, Eleven Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together. In a couple of months, he was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world with this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as they normal do with their right kind of intonations, their right laugh, everything, but in different languages. And he recently, based on that

• 12:16Ben Horowitz?

  success, got a big deal with Netflix. And so here we have something where we can bring our partners who, you know, have a great product that's culturally local, but really, really interesting and make it a global product by, you know, not competing with their allies, but partnering with their allies. And I think that's a lot of what the program is about.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  And I want to tie what Ben just said back to the values point because people often ask us, you know, Chinese open source models, how do you compare and contrast? So in that case, they didn't have to worry that when the content was dubbed into different languages, that if the speaker said something sensitive about Tiananmen Square or sensitive regarding the Chinese government, that using an American model, that content would be translated and changed along the way. Right? They knew it would be true to what was said. And that's what we mean when we talk about American values of not censoring, not injecting political

• 13:23Speaker 01

  will into how these models operate in the way that one would contrast. Now, open source is something we deeply value because at the end of the day, there's all different kinds of models and all different kinds of price points, clearly.

• 13:36Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  But that's really a good example of what we mean when we say American and Western values reflected in the models that we deploy around our infrastructure.

• 13:46Jen Kha?

  For sure. The telenovelas are spicy enough. I don't know how much the introduction of Tiananmen Square needs to be introduced as the start of the storyline, but you never know, the border crossings, et cetera.

• 13:59Speaker 01

  They keep their audience well enough.

• 14:00Jen Kha?

  Exactly, exactly. But this actually is a core part, you know, when Paddy McCormick wrote the article about us earlier this year, he called us a power broker and power being part of an offering that we enable our founders to tap into. And for a lot of companies, you know, starting a Mexico office, for example, is probably not one, two, three, maybe even top 10 on their list. But if they have a deal that we're able to walk in and effectively enable them the shot at winning way earlier in the lifecycle, they might prioritize that. So maybe if you want to riff on that, Raghu and Ben, on particularly how that's changed for founders, they think about international when they have the benefit of being able to

• 14:41Jen Kha?

  go right to the buyers in a much more adept way than kind of figuring out a market from scratch.

• 14:47Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, a lot of markets are very top-heavy, right? So you take any mature business and you say, how much of your revenue comes from even companies like, I mean, countries like UK, a significant chunk is going to come from the very, very top companies in UK, right? So the reality is whichever country you look at, it's five or 10 companies that matter. And of course, the government is a big influencer and buyer. So the example that you gave in Mexico is great. I mean, there are a few global companies in Mexico, like the one that Ben talked about. And so the only way you could, it is not worthwhile setting up a whole office and serving all of the countries, right? But if you could

• 15:28Speaker 02

  get into the top five countries, sorry, companies in Mexico, that probably is worth a lot more than setting up a full operation in some other country. So it is the top-heavy nature and the relationship-heavy nature that helps in this, helps our portfolio companies.

• 15:46Ben Horowitz?

  Right. And the thing, there's a couple of other aspects that are important. One is like, you're right that Mexico probably isn't a top 10 thing that most companies go into first. And by the way, that's a terrible shame because Mexico's our neighbor. And from, you know, when we think about it from a national security standpoint, how powerful would it be to have a Western Hemisphere supply chain kind of ecosystem that was really, really well-connected? So I think it's kind of bad for the country that it is number 10. Secondly, you know, to open a country as a company is a very large expense.

• 16:30Ben Horowitz?

  You have to set up an entity. You have to hire a team. You have to like localize the product. And, you know, that's going to be, you know, depending on the country, depending on how committed you are to it. It could be like easily $5 or $10 million just to get to your first deal. And so that is going to delay in your lifecycle when you can go international. But what if, you know, what if you, before you ever put up an entity or ever kind of got started in that country, you had an opportunity, a big opportunity, a $5 million opportunity, a $10 million opportunity, that makes that investment much easier to do earlier. And so we can really enable both our companies and our

• 17:15Ben Horowitz?

  allies by kind of paving the way for that kind of thing. A great example is like, nobody's going to Saudi Arabia first. However, like Saudi Arabia is booming and there are great opportunities there and they really need our help in developing the country. They're modernizing, which is incredibly important to the security of the world, that, you know, Saudi Arabia is going from this kind of tribal, a different kind of society, I would just say, to kind of a modern, you know, like highly civilized, you know, player in the modern world and full ally of the United States. Like that transition is really important

• 17:57Ben Horowitz?

  that it succeeds. So we're able to take a company like Flow, Adam Newman's company, bring him to Saudi Arabia, introduce him to the right people in the government, introduce him to the right people in business, introduce him to the right investors. You know, it's the optimal place to live if you're an expat, you know, kind of moving to Riyadh, helping develop the economy. And it's something that just, it's not really possible without an effort like this.

• 18:23Jen Kha?

  For sure, for sure. Maybe let's talk about geos we're prioritizing because there's a handful. Japan, Korea, the Middle East, Mexico, Canada. Are there themes as we think about different countries that make more sense versus others?

• 18:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, this is, this is timely. Raghu and I have been debating this on. So I would just say, like, I think, you know, from our standpoint, It's very powerful when they're a strong ally of the US. We've got a relationship with the people in government. We've got a relationship with the people in business. We've got a relationship with the investors. Because those things are not separate. They all interact with each other. And if we have that, then we can really, really accelerate the opportunities for them and for us.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  I think what I would just say to that point, building on Ben's point, and then I'll turn it over to Raghu, is what's changed so much, as we talked about a moment ago, is that on the global stage, whether it's in the context of war, whether it's in the context of countries pressuring other countries via supply chains, there are parts of the world which we have close allies who are now in increasingly tenuous positions. So if we look at the Indo-Pacific region, China has vastly increased its military, vastly increased the number of nuclear capabilities that it has, uses various, their shipbuilding capability are orders of magnitude more than the United States.

• 20:03Speaker 01

  And our allies in the region have started responding. Japan has changed its really sacrosanct policy from the post-World War II period to say it must have a capable military.

• 20:15Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 20:16Speaker 01

  It wants to build the military to fight today's wars, not yesterday's wars. It doesn't necessarily have the military industrial base. Now, that cuts both ways, as we know from the own, kind of the halting steps the United States military's been taking. The number of defense reform policies that have been written in the last 20 years, they all say the same thing, right? Fewer, small numbers of exquisite platforms, more cheaper, larger numbers of platforms, in addition to very exquisite platforms for certain specific use cases. So as Japan thinks about building a capable military in order to deter aggression in the region, it is looking to partner with new firms, building autonomous ships, building AI for an integrated battle space. And they want to build with us.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  They don't want to just buy because they have their own capabilities they want in their own country, their own supply chains to protect. So I think a part of that is thinking about those regions of the world. I talked about one in the Indo-Pac region. That covers Australia as well, obviously. Certainly, the Middle East has been an area of American interest for a long time. Israel's an incredibly capable ally with capable military and intelligence community. The UAE is as well. Saudi Arabia is modernizing and thinking about AI infra, how it builds an innovation entrepreneurial innovation base in order to compete globally. And then certainly, when we think about Latin America, when we think about fentanyl coming into the United States, it comes in via Mexico.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  So public safety, national security, how autonomous ships can help a vast Mexican coastline are not only important to our ally and to the stability of Latin America, it's important to us as well. So I think that's at least the national security lens we bring to some of our partnerships in American dynamism or in the AI infra space.

• 22:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, the reason Ben and I have been debating is there are so many sides to this that you've got to bring it all together. Firstly, to Anne's point, it has to make a lot of sense from America's interest point of view, right? And that is abundantly existing in all these countries. These governments are very AI forward and they're putting in policies that are very modernization centric, whether it's in defense or across the economy. Thirdly, they are all top-heavy economies. I mean, you go hit the top companies, you are actually having global influence. For example, all those North Asian countries that you talked about, I think 15%, 20% of the global 2000

• 22:46Speaker 02

  are across Japan, Korea, Taiwan, right? And lastly, for our startups, the way business is done in these countries is very different than, let's say, UK or some English-speaking country, right? So the value add that we can provide to our startups and the value add that we can provide to these countries is so remarkably higher than in other places.

• 23:13Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 02

  So when you put it all up and score it out, that's why we go into these countries.

• 23:18Jen Kha?

  Yeah, and some of these countries are also leapfrogging to where they didn't have to deal with the prior

• 23:22Speaker 02

  Exactly, like Saudi.

• 23:23Jen Kha?

  Like Saudi, you go through the visa entry and it takes 30 seconds, like way, that snap wasn't good. 30 seconds to go through the visa entry, which is like unbelievable. And, you know, here you get stuck behind, unfortunately, a very long line increasingly for a number of different other reasons. But, you know, it's a different kind of approach to how you think about incorporating technology in everyday life, but it's not evenly distributed. So what are ways we can accelerate that in different avenues is also the opportunity that a lot of these countries are seeing is a huge log up. It's very different, though, when we think about international prioritization compared to maybe other VC firms. Because the typical VC firm was that, you know, Ben, you've talked about this before,

• 24:04Jen Kha?

  like the typical way that other VC firms have done international have always been investment-driven versus actually thinking about the portfolio companies and what they would like to do internationally. So maybe speak a little bit more about that contrast and quite frankly, why for the first 10 years of the firm, it was very rare we even did an international deal outside of not just the US, but even outside of the Silicon Valley.

• 24:27Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think we've always looked at investing through the lens of what do we bring to the table? So as a result, like if you think about what we try to do for a company, you know, we really try to help them network to the right talent, to the right customers, to, you know, the right expertise. And that is very hard to do in kind of multi-geographies, even like San Francisco Menlo Park in the early days. We were like, like, let's just have a really good product for this and then we'll expand from there.

• 25:06Ben Horowitz?

  Whereas I think other VCs think of the product much more as the money. And so if the product is the money, then the international strategy is, okay, we'll find a team of investors in, say, the UK and we'll help them raise money. And then we'll take a percentage of their winnings for helping get them their product. And, you know, and that makes sense in that model. I think it doesn't make sense for us because, you know, our whole thing is how do we help you build a better company? How do we, you know, how do we accelerate your opportunity or growth and so forth?

• 25:47Ben Horowitz?

  So we needed to get to kind of a certain level of size and stature for that to make sense in more regions. But now that, you know, now that we are, it starts to make a lot of sense. And I think, you know, in our role in investing, we don't look at it as how do we snatch up the opportunities in Sweden or Japan or Saudi or UAE or that kind of thing. We look at it as what is your ecosystem missing in terms of kind of capital and expertise to go global? And is there an opportunity for us to plug in? So we don't want to displace their A round and seed investors necessarily.

• 26:32Ben Horowitz?

  We want to kind of say, oh, okay, if you've got companies that are merging as real global companies, then that's where we can really step in and help. And if we're already in the country and we're already doing a lot of business and we're already kind of understanding them and their entrepreneurs and so forth, then we're in a great position to do that. But we would do that directly. We're not raising money for somebody who's not part of our firm, our culture, our mission, and having them go run a play. That's just not us.

• 27:05Jen Kha?

  And also, so much of the time, when you think about these entrepreneurial ecosystems, what they're oftentimes missing is growth capital. They actually have a great talent base on the early-stage side, but they're kind of missing that component to actually go global and they become a localized success versus actually thinking about global ambitions. Maybe that actually, drawing from your experience at VMware, Raghu, thinking about the evolution of company building, how has that kind of particularly changed in the ambition for local companies to become global over time?

• 27:35Speaker 02

  That's dramatically increased, right? Previously, like I said earlier, you would not even dream of going global until you're like really well advanced. And now because your product can be There's such a universal appeal for you. If you've got a great product, it's such a universal appeal, whether it's B to B or a B to C product. It behooves you to go earlier. What is missing is the supporting ecosystem.

• 28:01Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 28:01Speaker 02

  Right? And being a finding a way to plug into a new country. Right? And that's where our new offering really focuses on. Right? So it's really helped them get the fast start in these regions.

• 28:15Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 28:16Speaker 02

  And for that, you need to have, you need to be in the region to have the relationships, to build the trust, to build the credibility. All of those things don't happen overnight, and that's where we can provide that.

• 28:27Jen Kha?

  Yeah, yeah. And then by spending time locally as well, we get to know the local ecosystem and then see the great entrepreneurs from those regions. And then to the extent to which it makes sense, actually fund those and then help them go international leveraging our network as well.

• 28:40Speaker 02

  So businesses in these countries are so much a collective ecosystem.

• 28:44Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 28:44Speaker 02

  Rather than an individual company going in and dominating something there.

• 28:48Jen Kha?

  For sure, for sure. Maybe speak a little bit more about the prior tech cycles of of adoption and particularly with AI. And this is a great question for you. There's so many nuances around security and and even the debate between open versus closed. That there are considerations of whether that's even viable to build without upsetting the apple cart on what is allowed with open source, given the security nuances. Maybe speak a little bit more about how you've been thinking about that and advising companies on that that delicate balance.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  So it's a hot topic right now, as you know, and it's a hot topic around the world because fundamentally, as many technologies are, AI is dual use. Right? So the first step, let's use cyber as an example, right? The first step, whether you are an attacker or a defender, is finding vulnerabilities in systems. And then if you're a defender, you patch them. If you're an attacker, you exploit them.

• 29:40Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 29:40Speaker 01

  So models make the step of finding vulnerabilities in code far easier. And quite frankly, it makes the next steps, exploit or defend, easier as well. The economics of cyber defense were broken well before, you know, the latest AI models came out. I saw that in the White House where my nightmare was the ransomware attacks against, you know, rural hospitals in America. There wasn't another hospital two blocks down. So actual Americans' opportunity to access healthcare was disrupted by, in some cases, states, state harbored criminal groups halfway around the world. Right?

• 30:17Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 30:17Speaker 01

  So infrastructure is very fragile, and the reality is that the models help both. I personally believe, I'm focused on cybersecurity for a moment, that they help far more in defense because defense is far harder. You have to be, you know, defending a broad expanse and attacker has to find one way in. So as a result, I actually think we have, we are in a difficult space at this moment because there is such a broad attack surface. There's so many systems that are vulnerable, but I think we will see the opportunity for a much more secure space. To your point, you know, when I talk with governments around the world or companies around the world, all are grappling with that question of, I'll talk about the government side.

• 31:00Speaker 01

  Given we know it can both help, most countries have two missions, right? Defending the country as well as defending, you know, as well as maintaining its interest overseas. Given both, how do we ensure that these powerful capabilities don't fall into our adversary's hands? Don't fall into criminals' hands to be used for that purpose? And I think, you know, in the traditional cyber tools arena, we always grappled with this, right? When a capability is on a thumb drive, export controls are a joke. You can't actually control it in that way. And there is real power, as we talked about earlier, in the models that the world runs on being run on trusted models.

• 31:43Speaker 01

  When people are using an American model, they don't have to worry there's an intentional backdoor. As we talked about earlier, they don't have to worry that a chatbot's answers will be framed by, you know, censoring to fit a particular political story of like an authoritarian government. So the question for now is to say, how do we build in the degree of safety in model? So that they can be used in environments that need that safety? And that is somewhere where because the main models are American, we're in a particular position to think through and build that out. And I think this is not done by government, it's not done by the private sector.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  What it really needs is people who really understand the models best from the private sector at the table with folks on the government side who are thinking about how do we both promote innovation and control for these risks? And building out the right set of government policies to enable both the use as well as the understanding of how do you protect against the risks?

• 32:45Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  That come with the with the models as well.

• 32:47Jen Kha?

  Yeah, yeah. As our partner Mark often says, we, technology is the dog that caught the bus. And we've never seen before that countries are, you know, kind of feverishly demanding the latest versions of the model because they recognize how competitive it is to their economy, to their people, to their interests. And this now is unlocking all sorts of new paradigms as we think about globalization in a way that that feels categorically different than just selling product internationally. Right? And and this is hopefully then an opportunity for many of our founders as well.

• 33:14Ben Horowitz?

  No doubt, although it is complicated. Like, so for example, you'd like to, like, from a government standpoint, you'd like to say, okay, don't release your model with cyber hacking capabilities. But if you do, as Anne say, and you want to find the vulnerabilities in your own code and patch them, you can't do that without also enabling cyber attacks. Because as soon as it can find the vulnerabilities, guess what? And so you're kind of in this situation where it's like, well, if you kind of lock that up, lock that capability to understand vulnerabilities,

• 33:59Ben Horowitz?

  then the only people who will be able to understand vulnerabilities are the bad actors who jailbreak the system. And so you, we're in a very, I would say, interesting, interesting world on that.

• 34:12Jen Kha?

  No.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  And and I think to that point, we'll focus on the cyber aspect because that's gotten so much attention with Anthropic's Mythos model, et cetera. I think what AI models essentially do, to Ben's point, is you want to be the first to hack your systems. Because, you know, we often, we often use the expression of, you know, digital doorknobs. It now allows attackers to jiggle every doorknob continuously and at scale. So your hope for your network is using those models first to find where you're vulnerable and frankly, then be able to fix it. And that wasn't a tractable problem before.

• 34:46Jen Kha?

  Yep.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  And I think now the models help you, particularly for code bases that were public, particularly for if you're relying on third party code or open source code. And that's some of the biggest areas of risk or where there is dependencies on code that nobody was really maintaining. So I think we're now seeing, you know, companies coming together, taking responsibility for that because now the, I would say, the cost of not addressing insecure code has gone up and the cost of addressing it has gone down.

• 35:16Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Which is a good shift from where we were before.

• 35:20Ben Horowitz?

  We may finally build secure systems.

• 35:23Speaker 01

  Please, God.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  The process for building new code can incorporate these as well.

• 35:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And it's kind of very tricky from an industry standpoint because like originally, cyber hacking was vandalism. Right? Like, okay, I'm going to mess up your PC. Then, you know, with the internet, it became theft and now it's war. And that evolution kind of, I think, stuck up on people. And so, and we've seen, yeah, I mean, the, the great thing when it went from vandalism to theft, the vandalism company, Microsoft, is one who created all the theft opportunities by putting Windows on the internet when it wasn't ready to be on the internet because it wasn't built for that kind of idea.

• 36:10Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, with Act of X and all these kinds of technologies that let people come into the internet and get right to your machine. And I think that we're kind of in a period like that where we've got all this technology that was built in the pre-AI era. That's not nearly secure enough for the AI world and and we're going to have to make that transition.

• 36:31Speaker 02

  There's a 20 year legacy of code that has to be tackled.

• 36:38Jen Kha?

  That AI is increasingly

• 36:39Ben Horowitz?

  Many opportunities.

• 36:40Jen Kha?

  Yes.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Many opportunities, yeah.

• 36:42Speaker 01

  Many, many.

• 36:45Jen Kha?

  Awesome. Well, maybe in closing, so Ben, I know the number one question we often get when we're visiting different countries is how do you recreate Silicon Valley locally? Right? That's like, they want the ingredients to it. And there's a few components to success that have enabled Silicon Valley. But there's also the proposition, what if the internet is actually Silicon Valley? Or the actual Silicon Valley just distributed?

• 37:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Jen Kha?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Ben Horowitz?

  I don't think that's true, by the way. And like, I think that's a happy talk. If, you know, like, one thing you learn when you go to different countries is they're very different. Like, the laws are different, the policies are different, the governance are different. And that's why, you know, America has continued to be special. We've had the internet now for quite a long time. And like, that's absolutely not the case. So like, so what is going on? And by the way, I wish we could bring some of our own policymakers on those trips so they could hear people say, we want Silicon Valley before they keep trying to wreck us.

• 37:44Ben Horowitz?

  Not all of them. Many of our policymakers are outstanding, but some really don't like the fact that we have a technology industry. So I think that like, as we've traveled around, there's a kind of a combination of ingredients. And they are a little bit the combination that makes Silicon Valley special and then, you know, America itself special. So the first is, you do need the talent. And talent is kind of easily, kind of most easily seen in like, is there a great technical university that graduates people who know how to build things? That's kind of like an essential thing. And like, by the way, many countries

• 38:27Ben Horowitz?

  have that that don't have a Silicon Valley. And what are they missing? They're missing the other two components. The second is, do you have a set of laws and policies that facilitate entrepreneurship or essentially good for business? Like, can you create a company easily? Can you hire people easily? Can you fire people easily? Is there a tax incentive structure that's not onerous? Can you own, and this is a big one lately, which, you know, California is kind of moving against, but can you own an illiquid asset

• 39:11Ben Horowitz?

  that has value? Or will it get seized? And so I think Norway introduced a unrealized capital gains tax, and that that kind of effectively ended the tech ecosystem there. And I think that that, you know, so those, those kinds of policies are super important. If they're not right, nobody is going to take the extreme risk, kind of both personal and financial, of starting a company if it's not an environment that's conducive to that. And then the third one, which is, I think, kind of a combination of everything in a way, is, is the culture such that young people, the most capable young people, willing

• 39:55Ben Horowitz?

  to make the biggest contribution, is, do they get status, social status reward? Is it cool to either start or join a new company? And almost no, very few countries have that. I would say that it's really, really good in the US. It's, you know, it's clearly good in China, by the way. Although, they've done a few things to mess it up. But in most countries, you know, like, in a lot of ways, like, success is frowned upon. It's like, oh, you know, and in a lot of, you hear a lot of this in the political rhetoric, oh, the only way you could make a billion dollars is if you're a thief, which is completely absurd. You know, you just look at the people, and almost none of them are thieves. Like, you can't

• 40:38Ben Horowitz?

  steal a billion dollars, is the real truth. But like, that's just like, it's a rhetoric that works. Because if you're, you know, if you're like, how, it's a great sour grapes idea, right? Like, it's like, how, how did he get all that money? Oh, he's a thief. Okay, I go, I'm not a thief. So I feel much better about myself now. But, but that's the, that's a lot of the thing. And that's the thing that's so hard to replicate. And it's so hard to build. And it's so easy to destroy. So it's, you know, something that I think we have to just be aware of how special that is and unique in the world. And then we can try and help other people do it. But we also have to try equally hard not to wreck it ourselves.

• 41:16Jen Kha?

  Yeah, for sure. It's, it's World Cup season, and there was a great tweet where someone was like, I think America thinks they could potentially win the World Cup. And like, it's like, maybe they can, maybe they can't. But like, the fact that America thinks they can is a feature, not a bug.

• 41:32Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 41:33Ben Horowitz?

  Ambition is fantastic.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  There's a reason we all read our kids, you know, that, what is it, the little red jing? I think I can, I think I can, I think I can. That's America. You can believe you can.

• 41:43Jen Kha?

  That's right. That's right. Amazing. That's a good note to end on. Thank you all.

• 41:46Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 41:50Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z, and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 42:16Erik Torenberg?

  As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.