The world is short software. Entire categories of software were never built, simply because of insufficient ROI, high costs, or because the preferences of ~20 million developers dictate the products we all use. But now it’s easy to prototype, build, and ship entirely novel applications, using new app-generation tools. We’re about to see what the long tail is capable of. You might liken this to what YouTube did in 2006. Before YouTube, people would’ve looked at the ~100 cable channels available and thought “this is enough.” But YouTube proved that there were entire niches of entertainment that creators could build a business around. The same thing is happening now for software. Until large models, it wasn't possible for a passionate non-technical creator to build a business around software. Even as storage, CPU, and bandwidth costs came down, software engineering costs remained high. Now we have new app-generation tooling, which dramatically collapses the cost (and the risk) involved with shipping new software. As a result, we’re beginning to see the first fully AI-native creators come to market. Welcome to the YouTube moment for software. Read more on Substack.

Raghu Raghuram: AI, Robotics, and the Rebirth of Infrastructure In this episode, a16z's newest General Partner Raghu Raghuram sits down with Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado, and David George to reflect on the early internet wars with Microsoft, how Netscape’s browser battles shaped a generation of founders, and the inside story of VMware’s $1.3B purchase of Nicira, which became one of the most successful tech acquisitions in history. They discuss how VMware scaled from tens of millions to over $13 billion in revenue, what it took to outlast the cloud revolution, and why AI is now triggering the biggest infrastructure reset since virtualization. Raghu shares his vision for the next decade, from data center robotics and energy-aware compute to how AI is reshaping both startups and giants alike. 00:00 Meeting Ben and Marc at Netscape 04:58 Good Product Manager/Bad Product Manager 09:42 Integrating Nicira and VMware’s teams 12:23 The $1.3B deal that returned billions 15:07 Scaling VMware from $40M to $13B 20:12 Joining a16z: rebuilding compute for the AI era 24:13 Robotics, data centers, and physical AI 26:07 The vertical future of robotics 28:11 Founders facing enterprise-scale problems on day one @RaghuRaghuram @bhorowitz @DavidGeorge83 @martin_casado