Andreessen Horowitz Launches Horowitz Andreessen, New Models, Human Powered Agents, McLaren Rebrand
John Coogan and Jordi Hays analyze Harvey's negative gross margin turnaround and Meta's testing of human concierges for its Muse AI agent. Stratechery's Ben Thompson joins to discuss why Amazon holds the ultimate moat against agentic e-commerce and how custom internal bots transform personal productivity. The episode also features interviews with Gagan Biyani on the launch of Horowitz Andreessen Academy, Alex Ratner on Snorkel AI's $350 million valuation round, and Swarm Aero CEO Peter on autonomous defense drones.
- Snorkel AI closed a new $350 million valuation round based on a clear thesis: raw data volume no longer improves frontier AI models. Read →
- Off-the-shelf software leaves micro-gaps; custom AI bots succeed by filling narrow "software-shaped holes" that commercial products ignore. Read →
- An Effective Altruist writing as Bentham's bulldog went viral for arguing insect welfare outweighs total human welfare in the aggregate. Read →
- Gagan Biyani raised $42 million to launch Horowitz Andreessen Academy, an in-person school based in San Francisco with Marc Andreessen and Eric Schmidt on the board. Read →
- Legal tech startup Harvey watched gross margins drop from positive 50% to negative 50% in June after customer token usage jumped 20-fold. Read →
- Bloomberg reported Meta uses human contractors to handle phone calls for its Muse assistant, turning edge cases into training data. Read →