Microsoft's Deputy CISO on Securing AI Agents

a16z's Joel De La Garza is joined by Aaron Zollman, Deputy CISO at Microsoft Gaming, to discuss how security teams can embrace AI agents without losing control. Aaron shares Microsoft's experience with OpenClaw, from the initial instinct to ban it to figuring out how to make it safe to use. They unpack what agents mean for identity, permissions, containerization, and monitoring, as well as how AI is shifting the CISO's role from saying "no" to safely enabling new technology. They also explore whether AI could help defenders patch vulnerabilities as quickly as they're discovered, and why new AI threats don't make the old security problems go away.

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

• 0:00Joel de la Garza?

  The top story has been that the AI models are hacking. The models went out under the internet and tested the security of several organizations.

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Is it something to be scared of? Yes. Is it something to throw up your hands and worry about? No, you've done all of these things before. We have created containerization and batteries. We have secured applications with vulnerabilities.

• 0:24Joel de la Garza?

  The qualities of these agents, they're unpredictable. They're irrational. They're prone to lashing out. And as you go through this list, you arrive at the point where you're like, Jesus, these sound like interns.

• 0:33Speaker 01

  If you just start with, oh, well, it's just going to run as me. That's going to end poorly. Yes, you're going back to first principles, but you also have to go even a little deeper and start to redefine what does containerization mean for you?

• 0:46Joel de la Garza?

  The issue was never that the CISO didn't know it was broken. The issue and the difficult part of being a CISO was knowing what to fix. Because you had a finite resource, which was a programmer. And now that seems that the math is gone.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  We're only three weeks out from massive supply chain pain, but.

• 1:01Joel de la Garza?

  Wait, what's the massive supply chain?

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:04Erik Torenberg?

  When OpenClaw first appeared inside Microsoft, the security team's reaction was familiar. How do we ban this? The next question turned out to be much more important. How do we make it work? In this episode from Black Hat, A16Z's Joel De La Garza sits down with Microsoft Gaming Deputy CISO Aaron Zollman to talk about securing AI agents that can access data, use tools, write code, and act on behalf of employees. They discuss why agents need their own identities, what air gapped means when a model can find unexpected paths to the internet, and why securing this new generation of software requires both new controls and some very old security fundamentals. They also explore a bigger shift happening inside security teams.

• 1:49Erik Torenberg?

  As AI becomes impossible for companies to ignore, the CISO's job is increasingly not just to prevent risk, but to figure out how to safely say yes.

• 2:01Joel de la Garza?

  So today, we've got Aaron Zollman from Microsoft, a deputy CISO over there, responsible for a whole lot of different things. And you've been at the forefront, like everyone, I guess, at this point, dealing with AI, AI rollout into an environment. And you're probably at a company that's leaning in a lot more to AI than probably most companies, and everybody's leaning in significantly. So thank you so much for joining. Would love to talk like the last couple of weeks. It's funny, it's like weeks have become like dog years, right? It's like every week is seven weeks in old world time. The last couple of weeks have been very focused on, the top story has been that the AI models are hacking. And we saw there was a disclosure from OpenAI that they were doing a red team.

• 2:43Joel de la Garza?

  Well, actually, it turns out now, just 15 minutes ago, there was another disclosure that these have all essentially happened because there was a red team exercise where someone was testing the models, right? So they were saying, hey, model, you're in this closed environment. We need you to go test the security of this organization. And it turned out that the environment wasn't closed. And so the models went out under the internet and tested the security of several organizations. And so I guess to people who haven't been working with this stuff, it sounds very shocking. I think Ben Horowitz at RSA this year gave a really great talk on some work we had done internally at A16Z, where we were using OpenClaw.

• 3:23Joel de la Garza?

  And we found that with OpenClaw, the guardrails, at least for Opus 4.6, kind of disappeared. And so you'd be, I think a number of us got really obsessed with impossible tasks, right? And so like, hey, OpenClaw, I want you to do this thing for me, but there's no clear legitimate path to do it, right? Like, so it's like basically saying, hey, Mike, I want you to go get me a diamond ring. But Mike has no credit card, no money, no ability to raise money. And so what's Mike going to do if he has no more? He's going to go rob. And so we noticed that these models would essentially, basically do anything to achieve their objective. And so we'd say things like, hey, could you add a super user to this database, starting from zero? And what did it do? It found a SQL injection exploit.

• 4:07Joel de la Garza?

  It took over the SQL database and it added an admin user. And so it seems like this is coming more into focus now. And I know you've been very active in OpenClaw, which I think two months ago was the number one thing everyone was afraid of. And now no one talks about it, maybe six months ago. And now it seems like everyone's using it. Would love to hear maybe your experiences with that and kind of how you thought through that problem, because it's a very similar problem.

• 4:29Speaker 01

  I mean, I think we were terrified of it at first, right? As everyone was, this thing explodes. Everyone wants to install it overnight. And it has no guardrails. It has no guardrails. And worse than that, you know, had fully open remote, pull whatever down from the internet supply chain pain. And so our immediate reaction was how we ban this. And then the immediate reaction after that was, well, wait, everyone wants to do this. How do we find a way to make this work? Right?

• 4:55Joel de la Garza?

  And then the product people saw and said, actually, there's a really great product here.

• 4:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, absolutely, right? There's a really great product here. There's the foundations and a community and the kind of things that if we can show that we can run it safely, then it's going to be really powerful for people. And so it was a, this big, multi-month, multi-disciplinary effort that kind of kicked off. And to preview the ending a little bit of it, Peter Steinbrenner, the founder of OpenClaw, is on stage at Microsoft Builds with us a few months later, talking about how we're bringing security to the process. And so is it something to be scared of? Yes. Is it something to throw up your hands and worry about? No, right? You've done all of these things before. We have created containerization and batteries. We have secured applications with vulnerabilities.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  We have created corporate environments that carry taint and data protection through a number of different applications that people want and that maybe we as security people wish they didn't. It's just that we have to do all of those things together and a lot faster. And so, yeah, I mean, I think it's been a really good story of thinking about all of those pieces in isolation.

• 6:06Joel de la Garza?

  It's really interesting. If you step up one level and you think through kind of more abstractly, the way that these things behave, and I guess generally people would refer them as agents, but it's like a harness and a model and whatever, right? Like tomato, tomato, potato, whatever. It's really interesting because as you work through the threat model, as you think about kind of like, how do we secure these things and protect these things? You start to articulate the qualities of these agents. And you're sort of like, well, they're unpredictable. They're irrational. They're prone to lashing out if they don't get their way. And as you go through this list, you arrive at the point where you're like, Jesus, these sound like interns. Sort of like, these sound like interns, maybe after they drank a little bit too much the night before, and they come into the office.

• 6:48Joel de la Garza?

  And it's funny, internally as a team, we've been joking about, I think we actually have a lot of great tools for managing the risks of things going irrationally inside of a company, because we work with humans.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:00Joel de la Garza?

  Right? And so I'm curious, it sounds to me like the more that I double click on this, it doesn't sound like magic. It just sounds like you're going back to first principles.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:08Joel de la Garza?

  And basic blocking and tackling.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Well, it's more than that, right? There is some special stuff you have to do. Because I think what makes these tools so powerful, right? The story is when Microsoft Scout, which was sort of our, like OpenClaw for the enterprise, was initially released to internal use, the adoption curve was like phenomenal, right? It was really fun, really validating as a security person, and I'm not even on the product curve, right? And that's because everyone wants to use it and they all want to use it to connect everything.

• 7:35Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  And so I think, you know, when you bring in an intern, your perspective is, well, I'm going to give them like two or three things they need to do their job. But to make OpenClaw, Scout, these harnesses effective, you want to give them everything. And so I do think, yes, you're going back to first principles, but you also have to go even a little deeper and start to redefine, like, what does containerization even mean for you?

• 7:59Joel de la Garza?

  What does air gapped mean?

• 8:00Speaker 01

  What does air gapped mean? What is an identity? Because if you just start with, oh, well, it's just going to run as me. It's going to take my token directly from my browser cache and do whatever it wants to do with that token. That's going to end poorly. But if I can give it its own identity, if I can describe the balance of the container, if I can tie the actions of the agent or the harness or the model or the session.

• 8:29Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  Actually, quite hard to figure out what you want to tie to, but put that aside for a moment. If you can tie that to a particular set of logs, set of things, then you can get to the place where you are just doing your basic blocking and tackling, where you're thinking about, okay, what is the opportunity for an adversary to do this, even if that adversary is the model? How can I monitor it? How can I respond to it? How can I contain it? How can I reason about potential breach paths and.

• 8:54Joel de la Garza?

  Absolutely.

• 8:54Speaker 01

  Burn down.

• 8:55Joel de la Garza?

  And it's funny too, because if you think about it, I think, and I am not operating anymore, thank God, but I think if I think through it with my operators at ON, I think that it's a weird, just with our basic playing around with Opus 4.6 in an environment that we thought was, it was a cloud container. So it had a policy of no internet access, but it still figured out how to get a tunnel out to CloudFlare, how to get around our controls. And then it started tunneling stuff through DNS. It really reminds me of a long time ago, when I was building more high secure environments, you would always have to go through the list, the threat model, which was like, there's all these things an attacker could do.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 9:34Joel de la Garza?

  And you would always be like, well, there's 20 things here. And realistically, attackers only have the patience for maybe these five, because we've seen them in the wild. And all this other stuff could be done, but we've never really seen it. And it just seems like these models are really good about going after the stuff that could be done, right? And so the list of five now became the list of 20, and you kind of have to fix everything. To be fair.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  They often try the things that are obvious first.

• 9:58Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 9:58Speaker 01

  Which does give you an opportunity.

• 10:00Joel de la Garza?

  True.

• 10:00Speaker 01

  Like interns, they're not going to do the hard thing if the easy thing will suffice in most cases.

• 10:05Joel de la Garza?

  Don't push the lock if the window's open, right?

• 10:07Speaker 01

  Exactly. And so, you know, the advantage of that is if you have, you know, good monitoring, good logging, good containerization, you will probably have the opportunity to respond, contain, you know, before, before things go horribly awry. But you're absolutely right, you know, there are a lot of open doors and we do have to go back and think about like, what are they?

• 10:26Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 01

  You know, so it's, it's.

• 10:28Joel de la Garza?

  We risk accepted a lot of stuff.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  We risked.

• 10:30Joel de la Garza?

  Over the last couple of years.

• 10:31Speaker 01

  Or it was just a P2, you know?

• 10:32Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  I'm burning through my P1s at great speed, thanks to AI, but those P2s, man. No, but you know, but it. I think it speaks to the need to be on top of things, right? So this is what it's Tuesday now, I think Vegas time doesn't count.

• 10:50Joel de la Garza?

  It'd be Sunday, I have no idea.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, yesterday was, yesterday was Monday, I think.

• 10:54Joel de la Garza?

  There's no clocks in this town.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  Famous observation about Vegas and it's the same, it's the same.

• 10:58Joel de la Garza?

  And it's 120 every day.

• 11:00Speaker 01

  Full sunlight and it's 105 after dark. No, but so besides yesterday, a talk by Leo Myrovich of Graphistry that he had submitted through the unprompted CFP months ago before any of this had happened. The premise of which was everyone's cheating on their evals. Here's how and here's how I know. And it was incredibly prescient because he basically kind of talked through how this would happen. Really pointing through that like, to be clear, you can think you're going to air gap this. But the first thing you do when you air gap it is open up DNS and network endpoints to the model. Well, the model has those web search tools, so are you really air gap anymore?

• 11:39Joel de la Garza?

  But even then, I mean, the models, I mean, a lot of the, a lot of the lab, I mean, there's a lot of overfitting going on for, for, for, for knocking emails out.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  Oh, yes, there's, there's.

• 11:48Joel de la Garza?

  People are teaching the test, I think that would be the idiot.

• 11:52Speaker 01

  They're teaching the test, they're, the flags for some of these are in model releases without any tool.

• 11:58Joel de la Garza?

  Totally.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  So, yeah, so there's a lot of ways to improve it. But, you know, as a security person, that doesn't bother me a little bit. I always assume everyone's cheating. It does bother me when they're, you know, when I need to think about, you know, endpoints. And so, you know, I think there's, there's the, the traditional axes that we try and think about and we enumerate, you know, all of our, all of Microsoft's SFI pillars, right? Like, let's start with identities, then we'll do networks and then we'll do engineering systems and software and so on and so forth.

• 12:27Speaker 01

  enumerate the controls, enumerate the endpoints. And then you kind of go back and you think, well, what are the control points that I wish existed? In this harness model ecosystem that may or may not exist today, right? It's, yes, I've got various forms of containerization. Maybe I need to give these things their own identities. It's probably a good idea.

• 12:48Speaker 01

  But now, you know, how am I going to use hooks? How am I going to use traces? How am I going to use some of these new technologies to, to improve the security of it? And, you know, even then, people will not use the harness you give them. They'll use the harness they want.

• 13:02Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  But.

• 13:03Joel de la Garza?

  So use your job to get their job done, not to be secure, right?

• 13:07Speaker 01

  And so the more, the more you think in terms of those layers, the more opportunities you have.

• 13:12Joel de la Garza?

  Absolutely.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  To see the paths and, and, and break them.

• 13:16Joel de la Garza?

  You know, it was interesting. I was talking to another, another, another CISO earlier today. And kind of what he was telling me was that, you know, they, everyone was afraid for Volpocalypse, right? The mythos hype was basically, oh, we're doomed. Every, everybody's got vulnerabilities. I, I think if you've worked in this space long enough, you know, that there's just a whole lot of, a lot of things buried in the desert.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 13:39Joel de la Garza?

  And it's just not, it's like, it's an open secret in our industry, right? And so I think I was talking to a CISO that was saying, you know, actually what we found with these models now that they're testing them is that while they can discover things more rapidly, they can patch them just as rapidly. And like, so the old, I mean, the old days, like last week, in the old days, you had to get a developer to write the patch, right? And that was always the gating factor. It wasn't, the issue was never that the CISO didn't know it was broken. The issue and the difficult part of being a CISO was knowing what to fix. Because you had a finite resource, which was a programmer. And you had to deploy them only to your, to your SEV1s or your P1s.

• 14:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:19Joel de la Garza?

  And now that seems that the math is gone. And so like, everything gets patched. And, and it, and it does, it does feel like maybe we're on the verge of having secure software for once. I'm very hesitant, but.

• 14:31Speaker 01

  I hope you're right. You know, I, one thing that I'm confident that these things have made much easier is the diagnosis and analysis of the problem.

• 14:41Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  And yeah, they're usually pretty good at creating a patch and, you know, probably 80% of the time it's good. And 90% of the time it doesn't create another security bug.

• 14:48Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Which is not a perfect record, but.

• 14:51Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, there's still a lot of testing that has to go on before you deploy these things.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  And so, yeah, but, but it does, I think, make it more tenable. And, you know, when you stare down a list of, well, anything more than 20 is an impossible number, right? You have bugs to go after. It does make it a little bit easier, but we're not there yet. I will say that, you know, again, thinking through this lens of how do you take something like OpenClaw and get comfortable with it?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  You do still have, you do have to put in the effort to continuously scan it, containerize it,

• 15:26Speaker 01

  have someone on the hook to patch it.

• 15:28Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  You can't, you can't say, well, the models will fix it because someone still needs to be accountable for validating and deploying, which is not, they think the models can, are necessarily going to do for you.

• 15:40Joel de la Garza?

  Well, and it's, and I think that speaks to kind of the way the CISO role has changed, right? Like, I think, I think the, I, I remember at the beginning of my career, there was a relatively well-known CISO who would joke that he could say no in 80 languages. And it was sort of like my superpowers saying no, even when, you know, everyone's telling me to say yes. And it was the CISO, I mean, and oftentimes like in, in, in defense, like people want to do really bad things. And it was sort of like, yeah, that's probably going to blow up the bank, right? And like you fast forward to now and it seems like the CISO is becoming an enabler. Like every company I talked to, outside of financial services, because they're regulated and they do their own thing, and maybe defense industrial.

• 16:22Joel de la Garza?

  But every company I talked to, the CISO is very much involved in all these technologies. Like it's, like yourself, working with OpenClaw, like at every, every forward-leaning organization, it seems like the CISO is there. And it feels like maybe the CISO is switching to a technology enabler? I don't know.

• 16:37Speaker 01

  I mean, I hope it's true. I don't know that it's universal, but I've always considered, you know, the nature of my job to really be three things, right? You know, people who think of themselves as compliance people, like, yeah, I'm a compliance person, but my job in compliance is making the systems legible. To everyone, whether they're a regulator, whether they're an internal auditor, you know, partners who want to buy our software, like it's about legibility. Yes, there's the traditional CISO job of like figuring out the risks, prioritizing them, getting them burned down. Still got to do that. That's not done. AI helps, haven't figured it out yet. But the part of the job that I think is, is increasingly important is that enabler piece.

• 17:19Speaker 01

  How do we, you know, how do we make it possible for people to do the hard things? And sometimes those hard things are connect all of my email and my calendar and automatically write responses on my behalf. Then if that's what people want, we will find ways to make it safer.

• 17:38Joel de la Garza?

  Absolutely. Well, it's interesting, it's interesting too, because I think it speaks to sort of the, there was always this, there was always this like dialogue amongst CISOs about, are we security or are we risk management? And it seems like you're risk management because I think if you're working in a, especially if you're working in a tech company and you're not leaning into the new tech thing, like that's probably an existential risk for your business. More so than like if your emails leak, right? Like on, on the scale of like business annihilating things like, you know, Microsoft having, if Microsoft had missed cloud, that would have been very bad for Microsoft. Luckily, Sock it did a great job riding that wave.

• 18:20Joel de la Garza?

  And I, and it's the same very much, it seems like for this, which is where like we can't really hide from this and we kind of have to lean into it.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would completely agree. We have to lean into it. We have to find ways to do it well. You know, you say the existential risk isn't necessarily getting all of your emails leaked. I would recommend against having that happen.

• 18:40Joel de la Garza?

  Sony Pictures is still in business, though. That's the, that's the go-to, right?

• 18:44Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 18:45Joel de la Garza?

  No, I would prefer that my emails not leak, yes.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  And so, you know, security definitely still has a role. We should still be highlighting what is particularly important and what are the most important things for the business.

• 18:57Speaker 01

  But also we should recognize that our job is to protect those things. Well, so that's enable the business and the most important assets is most of our problems. Like, there's this long tail of, you know, randos and slack, you know?

• 19:12Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 19:13Speaker 01

  You know, you gotta, you gotta let it be for now.

• 19:17Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, don't, don't, don't feed the trolls, as it were. The, um, this is interesting. I mean, I know, not your first Black Hat. Would love to hear maybe your thoughts on kind of what you're seeing out there? Like what's, like, you know, coming from the Bay Area, working around all the AI stuff and just being exposed. I'd say like at the front lines of like this change. I mean, there, there are days where I feel like a factory worker in like 18th century London, like, and you see the smoke stacks coming up and you're like, oh my God, this is like literally the next industrial revolution. And would just love to get you like, are you seeing that come across here at Black Hat? Or like, what is, what is the vibe like?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  That's the vibe, for sure, right? Everyone's talking about, you know, how AI is helping the business, how AI is making attacks go faster, how we can use AI for defense, how to secure our environment, where the use of AI. And so the vibe is, is super AI. I try not to judge Black Hat. The Black Hat vibe as indicative of the most important things.

• 20:25Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  It's, it's the.

• 20:28Joel de la Garza?

  It's like Kabuki theater. It's, it's a shadow and you're seeing kind of the shadow of what's happening. But usually you can ascertain what the puppet looks like.

• 20:36Speaker 01

  And we're only, I was going to say, we're only three weeks out from massive supply chain pain, but, you know, three hours as we record this.

• 20:45Speaker 01

  So.

• 20:45Joel de la Garza?

  Wait, what's the massive supply chain?

• 20:47Speaker 01

  Oh man, I forget the name of it. There was a, um.

• 20:50Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, the NPM.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  There was an NPM organization takeover today.

• 20:54Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's, but DEF CON is coming up, so someone needs something to talk about or get arrested for.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Sure. You know, without going down that rabbit hole, right? Like, I think it's enough to say that the old problems are still here and the people who were nose to the grindstone, getting the work done. If there's any vibe for those people, it's that like, they're actually still really excited.

• 21:15Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Like, it doesn't feel like a slog.

• 21:17Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  It feels like, oh yeah, like we got some, we got some meaty stuff to chew on now.

• 21:22Joel de la Garza?

  Well, this isn't the first year that AI has been a headline for Black Hat. Like, it feels like AI has been the headline for Black Hat for at least a decade. This year, people feel genuinely excited about it.

• 21:33Speaker 01

  Last year, AI was the thing you put in your vendor pitch.

• 21:37Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  Your co-pilot.

• 21:38Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:39Speaker 01

  Sorry. It's fine. You're 67 co-pilot.

• 21:42Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  That's all unifying in one.

• 21:46Joel de la Garza?

  Your chat, your chat interface.

• 21:49Speaker 01

  But this year, and really it's because of Opus and Claude, right? Everyone's like, oh, no, I can do all of the things.

• 21:55Joel de la Garza?

  4.6 was a sea change.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  It really was.

• 21:57Joel de la Garza?

  It was just like.

• 21:58Speaker 01

  And it took people somewhere between seven days and 30 days to pick it up. And now, you know, now who's written a line of code by hand?

• 22:09Joel de la Garza?

  And we, you know, I remember coming back because it came out over the, like, around Christmas.

• 22:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:15Joel de la Garza?

  And so I remember catching up with someone after Christmas and they were just like, had lost their identity. They were like, my whole identity is based on me being the, like, an amazing developer.

• 22:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:24Joel de la Garza?

  And like, they've literally just kind of not matched my skills, but like, pretty close. And I don't think I'm writing a line of code ever again manually in my life.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  But I like.

• 22:33Joel de la Garza?

  Like, it's a pretty big shift, right?

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I like to think that we're good security people and we're good problem solvers. And it just changes.

• 22:40Joel de la Garza?

  Oh, computer engineering is even more important now.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  It just, it just changes the shape of.

• 22:43Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah, totally.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  Because like, you know, like, look, I want, let's be honest, right? I've been a manager for too long myself.

• 22:51Joel de la Garza?

  Still an operator.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 22:52Joel de la Garza?

  You're welcome back anytime.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Technical manager, yeah. Uh, but, uh, but I wasn't writing a lot of code. I'm still finding a ton of value.

• 22:59Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Speaker 01

  You know, having the models, pressure test my thinking, pretend to be my boss.

• 23:05Joel de la Garza?

  Yeah.

• 23:08Speaker 01

  Write slides for me, which I'm grateful not to have to do anymore.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  And, and so I, you know, there's, that's why the excitement this year. It's like, it's taking all the parts of my job that I don't like. Some of the parts of my job that I do like, it's accelerating them. And it does feel like it's making us more powerful. And if we can do that and, you know, enable people to, to, to, god damn it. I apologize, I'm gonna say that vision statement. Uh, but, you know, enable people to achieve more, um, then you've really done something cool. And, and, uh, and I think we're, we're, we're, I don't know how the journey is gonna end, but I think we're, we're, we're well and truly on it.

• 23:49Joel de la Garza?

  You get to live through the second industrial revolution.

• 23:53Joel de la Garza?

  Well, thank you so much for coming by to chat. Uh, hopefully see you at next year's, uh, Black Hat in the desert. And may it hopefully be at least 20 degrees cooler.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yes. Yes, fingers crossed. I wouldn't, wouldn't bet on it. It's a distinct possibility.

• 24:07Joel de la Garza?

  Thank you. Awesome. Thanks, guys.

• 24:12Erik 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.

• 24:37Erik 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.