Patrick O'Shaughnessy

My guest today is David George.

David is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm's growth investing business.

His team has backed many of the defining companies of this era, including Databricks, Figma, Stripe, SpaceX, Andral, and OpenAI, and is now investing behind a new generation of AI startups like Cursor, Harvey, and Abridge.

This conversation is a detailed look at how David built and runs the A16Z growth practice.

He shares how he recruits and builds a Yankees-level culture, how his team makes investment decisions without traditional committees, and how they work with founders years before investing to win the most competitive deals.

Much of our conversation centers on AI and how his team is investing across the stack from foundational models to applications.

David draws parallels to past platform shifts from SaaS to mobile and explains why he believes this period will produce some of the largest companies ever built.

David also outlines the models that guide his approach, why markets often misprice consistent growth, what makes pull businesses so powerful, and why most great tech markets end up winner-take-all.

David reflects on what he's learned from studying exceptional founders and why he's drawn to a particular type, the technical terminator.

Please enjoy my conversation with David George.

I think early stage investors can often give you an interesting opinion about what the distant future looks like.

Probably great growth stage investors like you can give a really interesting view on what the near to medium term future looks like.

The companies that you've backed are a who's who of leaders across different technology sectors.

If you had to think three to five years out, what are some of the most interesting ways you think the future will be different than the present based on your experience with the companies that you've backed?

In that specific area of the world, this pure AI part of the world, where do you feel the most different than your peers in what you think matters, what you think is exciting or not exciting, worries you have?

Where do you feel most divergent from your friends?

When I last ran into you a couple of years ago in person in San Francisco, we were talking about Waymo and you were in the mode of intensely studying that company and thinking about it, which makes me very interested in this class of companies where you've heard about Waymo and self-driving as a service for a really, really long time with nothing happening.

And then all of a sudden, the last time I was in San Francisco a couple of weeks ago, it's just every other car.

And the explosive nature of Waymo as an example is really cool to watch.

There's all these other technologies.