Andreessen Horowitz

High interest rates are forcing SaaS leaders to rethink how much value they give away in the free tier. Historically, SaaS companies like Slack, Asana and Airtable grew with generous free tier offerings, but have pivoted their pricing strategies in recent years. If you're a SaaS company with low conversion rates — below 5% in a year (cohorted), check out pricing and packaging expert Tugce Erten's latest insights on addressing common freemium pitfalls. https://lnkd.in/ecPTXPga

Tech's consumer talent revolutionized social media, e-commerce, and transportation. Healthcare could be next. On the a16z Podcast, Vijay Pande, PhD and Daisy Wolf discuss: • Why the $4T healthcare industry needs tech's consumer-focused mindset • How Silicon Valley's playbook could build the next trillion-dollar company in medicine • The massive opportunity for founders to innovate at the intersection of tech and healthcare 🎧 Listen to the full episode: https://lnkd.in/guyMBTSu

We are excited to announce our investment in Pylon, whose founders Marty Kausas, Advith Chelikani and Robert Eng have impressed our team with their incredibly sharp product instincts and customer obsession. They have deeply studied the pain points of the market and gone through numerous iterations to make Pylon the omni-channel support system it is today. Pylon provides a single view for customer-facing teams to see all their customer issues, regardless of where they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails. It understands the nature of the messages and can recognize when new messages are related to an existing issue or a new issue, or are not about issues at all. It is also able to automatically tag issues based on customer tiers, support plans, and past exchanges, and to send new context to Jira or Linear. All of this wouldn’t be possible without a very powerful workflow engine that is deeply connected with existing systems. We’re excited to be partnering with Marty, Robert, Advith, and the entire Pylon team in the Series A. More from Jennifer Li, Zeya Yang and Jeff Silverstein: https://lnkd.in/dcrKKPyB

Is robotics primed for a "ChatGPT moment”? AI is advancing rapidly in modalities like text, images, video, and audio, but we haven’t seen similar breakthroughs in physical actions/robotics. Recent progress, though, suggests a shift could be coming. Scaling laws, vision-language models, and cross-embodiment methods are paving the way for a horizontal platform that could empower robotics developers with a standard set of components. A "ChatGPT moment" for robotics might not be a single product, but rather an ecosystem of tools and applications that enables many popular products. According to Oliver Hsu, the robotics field faces challenges, but with new talent, capital, and research, there are plenty of reasons for optimism. His thoughts on what a functional market structure for a new robotics will look like: https://lnkd.in/eVSjqK62

Latin America is emerging as a tech powerhouse. But it's a mistake to view the region as a one-size-fits-all market. In the latest episode of the a16z podcast, Dileep Thazhmon (CEO and founder of Jeeves), Santiago Suarez (cofounder of Addi), Gabriel Vasquez and Angela Strange discuss the separate needs and traits of these countries, and the future of fintech in LatAm. 👇

Far from dealing a deathblow to the salesforce by automating all sales jobs, genAI could actually usher in a golden era of sales—and lead to a massive boom in rep hiring. New genAI-powered sales tech will likely automate most of reps’ administrative work, which will make sales orgs significantly more efficient and productive by: * Shaving down the number of support roles managers need to hire per AE * Shortening ramp times * Most importantly, giving reps more time to focus on what genAI CAN’T automate: high-touch, consultative selling. At its core, sales helps customers learn how to evaluate and buy software. Given the genAI-powered rise of developer productivity, we’re going to see a lot of new software come to market—which means we’re going to need a lot more salespeople to help buyers understand how that software will solve their problems. The more productive ramped reps you have, the more revenue you bring in. As long as we don’t see declining marginal rates of productivity for each AE hired, we’ll likely see companies clambering to hire more reps. More productivity leads to more reps leads to more revenue. What do you think? 

Viggle is about precise control, says CEO and cofounder Hang Chu. That's extremely important, even when you're creating projects some would call "silly," he says. Hang Chu discusses some Viggle-powered "viral" moments, and how the company is redefining video creation by providing precise control over character movements and animations, at the video in our comments 👇

Ideogram uses generative AI for seamless text rendering in images, balancing accuracy and aesthetics for diverse applications — from memes to professional design. Cofounder and CEO Mohammad Norouzi discusses their journey from an early viral model to advanced features like prompt adherence, which enables detailed prompts and nuanced visual communication.

Why will healthcare be the industry that benefits the most from AI? ⚡️ the leapfrog opportunity given lack of sunk cost bias due to low adoption of enterprise SaaS tools in the last 2 decades ⚡️ the existential supply-demand mismatch crisis ⚡️ the existence of regulatory rails for clinical AI ⚡️ the opportunity to disrupt ~$trillions of services TAM vs just the ~$billions of software TAM 📺 https://lnkd.in/gvApZMwU 📑 https://lnkd.in/gefi45X8 a16z Bio + Health Andreessen Horowitz

Thanks to AI, we are witnessing potentially the greatest transmutation in history. Software becomes labor. It’s the new E=MC2, writes Alastair (Alex) Rampell. Capital buys coffee, engineers, and GPUs. Out comes code that takes the role of labor. This will both grow existing software markets and create many new software markets where “per seat” pricing never allowed for a large outcome. Historically, much of software digitized an offline form of storage, put it in a database, and then provided an accessible, permissionable front-end for the end-user who likely did not know SQL, with the speed benefits of a digitized, networked medium. And now, the big change: the “users” of the digitized filing cabinet do not have to be humans. With that said, this does not mean the end of white-collar work, Alex says, but could be the contrary – if anything, AI will likely create new “AI jobs” that just weren’t possible with human costs or intermittent demand. Alex dives into the many opportunities in the space, and the effects of software becoming labor: https://lnkd.in/etUzKi2Z