In a second, you're going to hear my conversation with Anish Acharya from Andreessen Horowitz. If you enjoy it, the move is simple: hit follow in Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and the next one will show up automatically. Okay, here we go.
It's hard to overstate the case. I think it's certainly more important than mobile, more important than the internet, you know, maybe on par with the wheel, fire. In many ways, it's a sort of emotional technology, a substrate to explore emotional aspects of the human existence which has never existed.
Welcome to Prompted, a podcast about AI, people, and the creative spark. I'm Cameron Adams, co-founder and chief product officer of Canva. Today I am joined by someone who spent his career betting on the next platform shift before most people realize it's happening. He's Anish Acharya, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He's a two-time founder and one of the investors helping shape the next generation of AI-native consumer products.
Long before today's AI boom, Anish was building companies through major technology transitions, from social gaming at Social Deck to mobile messaging with Snowball, before going on to help scale Credit Karma's consumer business to more than 100 million members. Now at Andreessen Horowitz, which is one of the world's most renowned venture capital investment firms, he's betting on founders building AI-native products that could fundamentally change how we work. His thesis is that AI isn't just another software upgrade. It's the foundation for a new era of experiences and ultimately a new era of abundance. Anish, welcome to Prompted.
Cameron, thank you so much for having me. What a pleasure, and I'm such a fan of your product, of the company, of the community. Everything you've done has been incredible. So, thank you.
Oh, that is so nice to hear, and it's fantastic to have you on the podcast because I'm seriously intrigued about what investment looks like nowadays and how people are building businesses in the AI-first age. But before we get into it, I would love to kick off with the prompt.
With the prompt, we get you to tell us the story of a moment that shaped you, but you have to draw it at the same time. Are you ready?
I mean, I guess so. I'm as ready as I will be. Yes.
All right. Well, let's give it a go. We'll put some time on the countdown and go.
This is not going to be one of the greats, but I'm going to work on it. So, I grew up in Ontario, Canada, in a small town called Kingston. And I think most of us probably grew up in small towns, many of us did. And in the 80s, there was typically just one way to be cool, you know, and I think we sort of lived in this global monoculture. And that was true whether you lived in Canada or America or Australia or, you know, really any place in the world. There's a single culture and a definition of what was interesting or cool.
And, you know, as you got older, you could start to find your fellow weirdos if you weren't cool in that way. So, in the 80s, it was maybe football. I wasn't a big football guy. And by the time I got to college, I was really into sort of computers and programming and games and design. I found the other people that were interested in that. So, it was a long time to kind of find your niche.
And what's so magical about the world that we live in today is that, you know, people find their fellow weirdos right away. They're all just sitting there on Reddit or X or anywhere else. I think one of the things that makes me the most optimistic about the internet-native generation, the AI-native generation, is that people can find their tribe and participate from a much younger age. So some of the social isolation stuff that we perhaps all went through growing up doesn't happen as much.
Yeah. So the thing that I got into, actually, to kind of explore my unique cultural identity, in addition to programming computers, was playing music. I loved hip-hop. And what appealed to me about hip-hop was it felt like it was maybe anti-establishment is too strong because I don't remember having strong political feelings, but it certainly felt like something that nobody else was doing. And there were four ways to participate in hip-hop: you could be an MC, you could dance, you could be a graffiti artist, or you could be a DJ. And I couldn't rap, dance, or paint, as you're about to see.
So I thought I would be a DJ. And that's how, in, you know, 1995, I got my first turntable, started buying records, and it's been an outlet for me ever since.
What was your first turntable? I'm hoping it was an MK2.
It was not a Technics 1200. No, I could not afford that, unfortunately. It was a Gemini belt drive, and I quickly learned why, you know, belt drives are less good than direct drives, but it was part of the journey.
I'm feeling really great resonance, Anish. 1979, amazing year to be born. And DJing is in my blood.
Yeah, still play. Every party, I'm the headliner. That's the main reason why I started the company.
And yeah, it's an amazing experience getting people to move on the dance floor.
Oh, well, we'll definitely have to do it together. You know, there's that TED talk where one person dancing in a field is a crazy person, but 10 is a party.
You know, our job is to take the one and make it 10. Are you still playing?
Yes, I do. Yeah, I actually do a weekly online party with DJ Sneak, if you remember him from the 90s.
We're actually playing, doing a party in SF this Saturday, which should be really good. It's a tribute to DJ Dan and a bunch of other fun things. So yeah, I definitely do play.
Awesome. So you've kind of gone beyond hip-hop now.
I did. I started playing house music in the late 90s, early 2000s, and man, I haven't looked back. It's so, so great. Well, when we're off camera, I'll have to show you the record collection that's just sitting over there.
Shall I show you my illustration here?
I would love to see it. What have you got?
Ah, perfect.
Have you got that, Brody? Brody's our designer in residence. He's going to work some magic with it.
Okay, Brody, see what you can do.
All right, so we'll send that over to Brody, our designer in residence, who's going to team up with AI to whip it into something new. And we're going to reveal Anish, Brody and AI's creation at the end of the episode. So stay tuned for that. And while Brody works, I want to go deep on AI with you, Anish.
So, you founded and sold two consumer companies to Google and Credit Karma, successfully navigating multiple technology platform shifts, and I'm really intrigued about what attracts you to building businesses.
Yeah, there's so much about it that's very exciting. You know, I mean, the world is, our founder Mark often says that the world is more malleable than you think. And I think that's absolutely true. Of course, everything that we see around us was created by somebody who had an intention to put something out into the world. And there are times at which I think the world is even more malleable than it otherwise is. So when you have these really incredible product and technology cycles, I think the whole world, all the kind of assumptions that were taken as givens, are now up for grabs. So I think one of it is how do you sort of, I don't know, adjust the world in a way that seems compelling and perhaps closer to whatever your truth is.
You know, I think building businesses is about building products. A business is kind of downstream of a product, and you know, building a product is a liberal art. Of course, there are, you know, there's spreadsheets and calculations and business models and profit margins, but all of that stuff is a sort of approximation of something that feels closer to, you know, design and generation than it does to sort of calculation and counting.
Do you figure out the product first and then the business follows?
Often, yes. I think that's often true. You know, or if there is a market demand for something, you know, figuring out how to satisfy the demand, figuring out how you want to play on a spectrum between solving it in a functional way versus an emotional way, there's just a lot of judgment, taste, and design that goes into it. So, I actually think that, you know, in a world of sort of pursuit for truth, building businesses is a way to define your own. And it's really, really exciting and personal in that way.
I love that phrase you use, that there's moments of malleability, moments where the world is kind of ripe for new opportunity. And obviously you feel like that's the moment right now, right? With AI coming. How often do you feel like these moments of malleability come around, though? Is it like a decade cycle, a century cycle?
I mean, this is the biggest one we've ever, ever seen. And you know, I don't want to overstate the case, but it's hard to overstate the case. I think it's certainly more important than mobile, more important than the internet, you know, maybe on par with the wheel, fire. Like, I really don't think I'm overstating the case, and I think it's that important. So I would be surprised if we see another change, a moment like this in a generation or a lifetime. But you know, there are important moments that happen every 10 years, every 5 years. Like you could say the big cycles were PC, internet, mobile, and then the smaller cycles in between were things like, you know, cloud, fintech, web3. So there are cycles happening all the time, but man, this is a moment that is bigger than all of them combined. So this, you know, if you ever thought about getting off the couch or, you know, the Aeron chair to go do something, this is the moment.
Has everything at Andreessen Horowitz switched over to AI, or is it folks like you that are just concentrating on it and there's other stuff that isn't AI?
Well, I think we're all thinking about what we do from a lens of this new technology. You know, we of course have efforts in biology and, you know, bioengineering. We have efforts in crypto. We have efforts in American dynamism and defense and the national interest. But all of the sort of assumptions that underpin those things are now up for being questioned as well. So I don't know that there's a single person in our building that's not thinking about this new technology and how it applies to their world in one way or another. Though admittedly, some of us are maybe living a little more in the models day-to-day.
You're obviously a very passionate builder, someone whose products are in their blood. So what first drew you from building products into investing in the people behind them?
Yeah, I wasn't sure, Cameron, honestly, if I wanted to do it, the investing bit. I wasn't sure if the work drew me, but I feel like I've made career decisions in two ways. You know, one way was trying to think very hard about what type of product I wanted to build or problem I wanted to work on or what market I wanted to go after. And I've just actually found less success with that approach than who are the people I want to do it with. Because what I found with myself, as with, I'm sure, maybe you and many of our listeners, is that you can get yourself intellectually interested in almost anything if you're working on it with great people. And for Andreessen Horowitz, the team was just so spectacular. I wasn't sure if I would love the work. But I took the leap of faith and it's turned out incredible. I'm so grateful to do what I do, especially at a moment like this.
And the magic of the new models and technology is I get to be a builder again as well. I think I've, you know, shipped more software in the last 12 months than I did in the 20 years prior.
Oh, I've shipped all kinds of things, mostly things that aren't important with a capital I, which is a topic we should touch on. You know, I think there's a lot of worthwhile discussions to have about AI and productivity, but I'm uninterested in almost all of them. I'm much more interested in how AI is what I think is the most human technology ever created, because it lets us vigorously pursue things that are utterly unimportant or not obviously important.
So, as to what I'm building, you know, we were talking about DJing. I built an entire sort of Twitch-like DJ streaming experience for my friend DJ Sneak, with event tickets and photos and, you know, an AI dance floor and all kinds of fun stuff. You know, 50 people use it a week. It's very fulfilling. I built a Silicon Valley keyboard instead of my Apple keyboard, where it knows all of the words and the jargon and the company names and model release SKUs, so it never gets you again, that autocorrect thing. So again, none of these are going to, you know, change the world, I don't think, but they all are incredibly fulfilling to work on.
You said that people are pretty much the most important thing in life. When you're building relationships, when you're building a business, it's the people at the heart of it that make it happen.
How do you approach that as you're thinking about investment? Do you worry about the idea or is it just about the people?
Oh, I think it's both. I mean, both are, you know, it's funny. It's also a sort of microcosm of the entire debate about, you know, humans and the relationship with this new technology. I mean, this technology to me is an extension of our humanity. It's sort of a mech suit for what makes us so uniquely human. In many ways, it's a sort of emotional technology. It's a substrate to explore emotional aspects of the human existence which has never existed. You know, we had this sort of technology that was very focused on a certain type of leverage, intellectual leverage. You know, so we've had spreadsheets for 40 years and the things that we can do with them are extraordinary compared to what we could do with so-called human computers. But now we have a technology that allows us to operate in the world of the subjective, the emotional, the interpersonal. So I actually think that this technology is sort of, it's the most human technology we've ever created, and it opens up this entire sphere of the human experience for us to explore.
Look, I think similarly, you can't talk about companies absent founders. You know, we're obviously very grateful to be in business with Elon Musk. And, you know, as you think, would any of those companies have existed without him? Like, you look at a company like SpaceX, it's not like, you know, space was a hot VC investment area or that, you know, Apple released a rocket ship so it inspired a bunch of people to build rocket ships. It was just completely green field. Nobody was working on it. It was absolutely insane to try, and yet this person willed it into existence. So I think there's just so many examples over and over again where, you know, if not for a person's individual, often irrational commitment to making something happen in the world, you know, the malleability point, it just won't happen. So, you know, everything that we do is downstream of founders.
Now, I think that looking at the metrics and the business is very important because it's a way for us to understand how founders' assumptions are playing out. So when we ask a team, 'Hey, show us your numbers, you know, are you at 500k or a million or 2 million or 5 million of top line?' it's not because we're trying to do some present value calculation and understand, hey, what should the business be worth, but rather, okay, is there a static data set to understand one assumption or two assumptions or three assumptions? Okay, what does the early data tell us about it? What then predictions can we make for the future? And then is this sort of something that we'd like to be a part of, and would they, of course, like for us to be a part of it as well.
Is that purely about mapping them to a growth curve?
Not at all. No, I think it's, you know, what is the sort of most ambitious version of your vision of the product, of the business, and that of course has to be articulated by them. It's like, okay, what are the assumptions that we have today and what direction are they pointing, and is there like some way, if you squint, the two can meet. So I think it's as much sort of judgment and intuition. And look, so much of it is downstream of the founders, their own energy, their own articulation of kind of what the path is.
This is why I think it's so important for founders to be authentic to the problem they're solving, because the big ideas can always be replicated. How many people have replicated the big ideas from Canva? But what I would argue really makes Canva work is the thousand small ideas that are invisible, and without the small ideas the big idea fails. And for the same reason, I think for a founder to find their way to the other side, to be a company like Canva, even close, you have to be the one who's a sort of source of ideas, which means you have to be deeply authentic to the space. So as we evaluate founders, that's another big thing that we look for.
You've argued that ambitious founders should still move to the Bay Area, and this seems somewhat anachronistic in the era of remote work and the ability for us to talk across continents. So what does being physically in the Bay Area actually unlock?
I think that there's moments at which it's advantageous to be in the Bay Area, and there's types of businesses and problems that are sort of where it is also advantageous. You know, I built my first company in Toronto, and you know, we were working in social gaming at a time where social gaming was just starting to kind of break out, and if you looked at a lot of the kind of edge of the conversation, it was just people having it in rooms and coffee shops in the Bay Area, you know, investors, small groups, events. So if you weren't in the Bay Area, you sort of got those secrets or insights three or six or nine months later, and you were at a competitive disadvantage. I think what's happening with AI right now, especially if you're close to the edge of research or infra, it's highly advantageous to be here because the same sorts of secrets are being whispered down hallways.
The big difference between then and now, though, is that, you know, one, the surface area of technology is much bigger. So, as I think about the intersection of technology and, you know, culture or financial services or global opportunities, those are things where you're probably best off to not be in the Bay Area because not that many people are working on problems of that nature. The other magic, you know, we're on this pod today. In the old days, Canva would build their business and no one would ever hear from them, and it would be, you know, the stuff of sort of legends and tales. But now you go on this pod and you share many of your best secrets as marketing, you know. So, it's like you can go read blog posts, you can go read podcasts, and I do this all the time where I'm thinking through, hey, what are my most interesting and deep insights that I can share with millions of people? So, for many sort of businesses and reasons, I don't think you have to be here.
But look, I think there's a certain style of company for which you do. And then, you know, there's also a little bit of a selection bias. You care enough to like set every other part of your life on fire. You know, you're not dating. You're not going to have a great quality of life. You're not going to be able to get dinner at 10 p.m., but you will be closest to the technology. And if you care that much, then come.
I think a lot of the people who listen to this podcast do it to get insight into how people are working with AI. And you're at the heart of it. You've already told us you're building more software now than you ever have. But how has AI radically changed the way that you work?
Gosh. Well, the volume of things I've been building has gone way up. I think the amazing thing about AI is it allows you to be a specialist in almost any domain. You know, I went to computer engineering school. I was a programmer for a long time, but I wouldn't say I'm top decile, even top quartile in terms of my technical depth. I always felt like, you know, I was a little hacky. It was a means to an end. So, my ability to do very ambitious, deeply technical work was just never that great.
You know, with one of the models I started exploring this concept of, hey, could you give a coding agent access to a debugger and would that make it more efficient? Because of course human programmers use debuggers all the time and it makes us a lot more efficient. And it was sort of this, I don't know, researchy, more technical area that I don't think I would have had the skill or patience to explore previously, and now because I've got coding agents I can be in this loop with them where we're exploring, we're learning, it's coming back, and, you know, I got to a conclusion which, it didn't change the world, but it was very satisfying to explore, that, you know, it felt like it stretched me intellectually and made me capable of things I wouldn't have been otherwise.
My mother used to always say, 'The hardest thing about getting what you want is knowing what you want.' Like, that is never more true than in this moment. And it's like, well, okay, great, you can have anything, so what do you want? You know, and that's the biggest thing I've changed: wanting more ambitious and interesting things.
Do you wake up with AI? Like, is it the first thing you reach out for, or do you try and have some sort of separation in how you're interacting with it?
