August 06, 2025

Marc Andreessen on M&A, AI Ads & His Advice for Young VCs, Shopify's Harley Post-Earnings, Google's Genie 3 Potential & More | Marc Andreessen, Harley Finkelstein, Anton Osika, Thomas Dohmke, Alex Jacobson, Nicolas Kopp

3 hours 23 minutes

(01:41) - Timeline

(04:28) - How Serious is Google's Genie 3 Model?

(22:42) - The 5-Level Framework for Robotics

(40:35) - Cerebras Proves it Can Actually Work

(48:36) - Timeline

(01:26:53) - Marc Andreessen is an American entrepreneur, software engineer, and venture capitalist. He is best known as the co-creator of Mosaic, the first widely used web browser, and co-founder of Netscape Communications. Andreessen later co-founded the influential venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), which has backed companies like Facebook, Airbnb, Coinbase, and OpenAI. A prominent voice in Silicon Valley, he's known for his essays on technology, including the viral "Software is Eating the World."

(02:02:28) - Harley Finkelstein, an entrepreneur and lawyer, is the President of Shopify, a leading global commerce company. In the conversation, he discusses Shopify's strong Q2 performance, highlighting an 87 billion GMV and 2.7 billion in revenue, and emphasizes the benefits of going public, noting that it has enhanced the company's transparency and operational discipline. He also touches on the integration of AI in commerce, introducing tools like catalog search APIs and universal cart features to enhance shopping experiences.

(02:33:55) - Anton Osika, co-founder and CEO of Lovable, discusses the platform's rapid growth, achieving $10 million in annual recurring revenue within two months with a 15-person team. He highlights Lovable's mission to empower users to transform ideas into production-ready applications swiftly, emphasizing its appeal to both entrepreneurs and larger companies. Osika also touches on the future of web development, suggesting that websites will become more personalized and optimized through advanced algorithms, while acknowledging a countertrend towards minimalistic design.

(02:42:50) - Thomas Dohmke, CEO of GitHub, has been leading the company since 2021, following his tenure as Chief Product Officer. In the conversation, he discusses GitHub's significant growth, including surpassing 150 million developers and over a billion repositories, the widespread adoption of GitHub Copilot, and the company's commitment to offering developers a choice of AI models to enhance their coding experience.

(02:52:14) - Alex Jacobson, co-founder and managing partner of 137 Ventures, discusses the advantages of private companies offering structured liquidity to employees, highlighting SpaceX's model of regular tenders at controlled prices to provide predictable equity value growth. He contrasts this with public markets, where stock prices are more volatile and less predictable, emphasizing that private companies can offer employees greater certainty regarding their equity's future worth. Jacobson also expresses skepticism about initiatives aiming to provide retail investors access to private company shares, noting that such efforts may undermine the benefits of being private, such as controlling shareholder composition and pricing.

(03:10:55) - Nicolas Kopp is the founder and CEO of Rillet, an accounting platform for software businesses, and previously served as the U.S. CEO of N26. In the transcript, he announces Rillet's $70 million Series B funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Iconic, discusses the company's growth and customer base, and highlights Rillet's AI-driven integrations and reporting capabilities that distinguish it from legacy ERP systems. He also emphasizes the importance of human oversight in AI processes and outlines plans to enhance product features and customer success initiatives to meet increasing demand.

(03:19:41) - Timeline

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