Against all odds. Congrats @elonmusk and @SpaceX.

Happy birthday, USA.

Ben Horowitz says Silicon Valley is hard to recreate because it requires talent, policy, and culture: "The first is you do need the talent... is there a great technical university that graduates people who know how to build things?" "Many countries have that, that don't have a Silicon Valley. And what are they missing? They're missing the other two components." "The second is, do you have a set of laws and policies that facilitate entrepreneurship, are essentially good for business?" "The third one... is the culture such that young people, the most capable young people willing to make the biggest contribution, do they get status, social status reward?" "That's the thing that's so hard to replicate, and it's so hard to build, and it's so easy to destroy." @bhorowitz

Anne Neuberger says technology is now the arena of national power: "Technology moved from being a tool of diplomacy, of national power, to the arena of it." "The supply chain for chips was not a technology issue as much as a foundational economic and national security issue." "A software vulnerability is now not an IT issue. It can be a source of leverage, particularly if that vulnerability is in key parts of your power systems or your water systems." "Deterrence is no longer just the size of a military." "Those technologies today are not being built by governments, they're being built by the private sector, whether that's AI systems, whether that's autonomous systems, whether that's cyber defense systems." @AnneNeuberger

Technology Is the Arena of National Power. Ben Horowitz, Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram, and Jen Kha discuss a16z's expanding international strategy and the growing role technology plays in economic growth, national security, and global partnerships. They cover why America's technology leadership matters beyond Silicon Valley, how AI is reshaping relationships between governments and the private sector, why countries around the world are looking to adopt frontier technologies, and what it takes to build enduring technology ecosystems. 1:00 Why a16z's international strategy starts with America 4:48 Technology as the arena of national power 7:08 Why trusted AI infrastructure matters 9:05 How AI changes international go-to-market 11:18 ElevenLabs, TelevisaUnivision, and globalizing local content 18:33 How a16z prioritizes international markets and allies 29:05 AI, open source, and the future of cyber defense 37:00 What it takes to build a technology ecosystem @bhorowitz @AnneNeuberger @RaghuRaghuram @jkhamehl

Vacation looks very different depending on where you work. Over the course of the year, Germans hold the OOO crown. But not consistently! Swedes and Italians trade places in July and August, and in August, the French take over. Brazil breaks from the European pattern on summer break length. India books vacation days at the last minute. And birthdays are popular days off, but only the big ones. Turning 31? Not worth celebrating, apparently. We teamed up with @deel to look at how startup and tech workers around the world actually take vacation, not just how many days they're offered, but when they take them, how long, and whether they take them at all. North America is stingier than Europe. Most "vacations" are a single day off. Long weekends spike on Mondays and Fridays in summer. And no matter how hard the Europeans work to make their summer holidays count, Christmas break wins everywhere. The British are proportionately at their desks in peak summer; the Dutch over Christmas. Except Armenia, for some reason. Full piece: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-su…

Airbnb, 2008.

The a16z Editorial team’s summer reading list: open.substack.com/pub/a16z/p…

VC interest in robotics is surging Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

AI native startups consume less capital Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

AI native startups have fewer employees Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

AI native startups run lean Charts of the Week: a16z.news/p/charts-of-the-we…

New Media. a16z.com/new-media/

.@pmarca on the data center build-out and how America is holding itself back: "What's happening literally in the US right now county by county with the ability to build data centers is profoundly destructive." "And that's entirely domestic. And a large number of politicians are feeding that hysteria as much as they possibly can." "A lot of our leading public figures, and a lot of intellectuals, and a lot of the press, and a lot of the analysts, and the rest of it, it's just this kind of hyper paranoia about building data centers and the consequences of data centers." "This completely fake meme about water use, which is just factually not true, which is just running wild through the public discussion that somehow these data centers are basically destroying all the water, which is this completely insane idea. That factor is [such] a bigger factor holding us back than anything involving external trade." "External trade is the thing that's easy to talk about. It's all of our internal issues that are much, much more important." With @NGirishankar @CSISEST

On Easter morning earlier this year, Artemis II Mission Pilot Victor Glover spoke these words: "Maybe the distance we are from you makes you think what we're doing is special. But we're the same distance from you, and I'm trying to tell you—just trust me—you are special. In all of this emptiness—this is a whole bunch of nothing, this thing we call the universe—you have this oasis, this beautiful place that we get to exist together." In this piece from astronautical engineer William Whittenbury, a deep dive on the historic Artemis II mission that brought us back to the Moon, and why Glover's words ring true: a16z.news/p/nasas-artemis-ii…

Introducing our first model, Un-0! We trained an image generator powered by a backbone of coupled oscillators in place of a more traditional conventional neural network.

PS – 11x is hiring: • sales • success • growth • engineering • design jobs.a16z.com/jobs/11x.ai

One pattern we're tracking: the technical CEO. @prabhavjain led eng at @brexHQ & was @11x_official's CTO before he was CEO. A company that runs on agents is a system design problem. And that's creating a lot of horsepower for engineers in the CEO seat. Watching this space.

One thing to really like about this stack is it's simple; it's not over-engineered. Outside of the code harness, it's mostly Claude Cowork MCPs running at timed intervals. They are getting value by having good ideas of what to automate, not by having fancier tools. The framework: basic, boring tech that just works, doesn't break, and you don't have to fuss with.

Stack at a glance: • Reasoning / agent layer: @claudeai Cowork, Claude Skills • Orchestration: @LangChain Fleet @SlackHQ bots • Meetings: @meetgranola • Docs/decks: @NotionHQ • Code / Code harness: @claudeai code @cursor_ai @coderhq

5/ The agentic office of the CEO CEO @prabhavjain built a simple fleet of personal agents with intel for each day, all running on Claude Cowork scheduled jobs. The first is a customer brief, delivered via Slack DM each week. It ingests every customer call via the @meetgranola MCP. This gives him a weekly update on what matters for customers right now. The second is a meeting prep agent that reads email, Slack, Granola, conducts research and preps him for the next day's meetings. The third combs through his Slack every evening, and flags unresolved threads. Resolution isn't always explicit, it could be just an emoji reaction, or it could be in a different DM than the main discussion thread, so the agent has to reason. A fourth is a weekly market pulse. It pulls from the internet, and also from objections and competitors mentioned in that week's deals in calls and emails. This gives him a pulse on what the field is seeing.