a16z Goes Global: Why American Tech Must Lead the World

**Ben Horowitz** (0:00)
When AI becomes the interface for everything, every tool we have, every technology we use, is going to be built on these models, and the models are not objective, they have opinions. They have strong opinions on things like history, on culture, on values, and those are very different depending where you are.

**Anne Neuberger** (0:18)
Deterrence is no longer just the size of a military, it's the pace of innovation in reacting to cheap software-built tech that adversaries may be using whether they're a country, criminal or terrorist group. And those technologies today are not being built by governments, they're being built by the private sector.

**Raghu Raghuram** (0:34)
Products and technology travel faster than companies can. So what happens is for startup companies, usually in the older days, you didn't care about going international until you had a few hundred million dollars in revenue. Now these companies have to go sooner and sooner.

**Jen Kha** (0:50)
The number one question we often get when we're visiting different countries is, how do you recreate Silicon Valley locally?

**Ben Horowitz** (0:56)
I don't think that's true, by the way. I think that's a happy talk.

**SPEAKER_5** (1:00)
Technology has become more than an industry. Today, it's a source of economic growth, national security and geopolitical influence. As AI reshapes the global economy, countries aren't just asking how to regulate it. They're asking how to build with it, adopt it and ensure they don't fall behind.
In this episode, Ben Horowitz, Anne Neuberger, Raghu Raghuram and Jen Kha discuss why international partnerships matter more than ever, how technology is changing diplomacy, and what it takes to help founders build companies that can succeed on a global stage.

**Jen Kha** (1:36)
We are here to talk international today. Lots of things going on at the firm. For a firm that used to historically be all centered in Menlo Park, and we didn't even want to open up a San Francisco office. This is a big change for us. Ben, why don't you take us through this announcement around our global ambition and how all the pieces between global affairs, international go-to-market, LP relations on the global partnership level fit in together?

**Ben Horowitz** (1:59)
Well, it really starts with America, interestingly.
It's been our belief, our strong belief that drop a person into any country in the world and they don't have the culture, and they don't have money and capital resources yet, and they just have an idea of how to make the world a better place. Their best shot is in America.
And that's just a very, very special thing. And so a big mission of our firm is kind of trying to preserve that special thing that is America. And that means America has to be a leader. It has to be a leader economically. It has to be a leader culturally. It has to be a leader militarily. And to do that, we have to be a leader technologically. We have to be a tech leader. And that's kind of really our role in the ecosystem and in the world is to help America be a leader. And then what we realized as kind of we've gotten further along with this mission is that we need to kind of bring in our partners, our allies into that mission. And it kind of started with the work that you're doing, Jen, with just people from around the world wanting to kind of participate in the kind of US technological opportunity. And that kind of meant we started getting investors from around the world. And as we went out to see those investors and we said, look, how can we be a better partner? We found some interesting things. So one is every country wants to not only kind of economically benefit from the technology, but they'd like to actually directly benefit from the technology. Can you bring it to us? Can we get a chance to use it? And then at a kind of higher level, at the kind of government policy level, people wanted to know, well, how can we be a great country for adopting technology, for innovating like you guys are, and for kind of helping push our country into the future? And as we looked at, okay, how do we kind of step up and step into that opportunity and be a good partner? We realized with our country partners, we needed relationships at the kind of government level, at the investor level, at the adoption level. And that's what these kind of three components become. So we've got global affairs, which builds our relationships led by Anne, which helps us have relationships in the right way with governments ranging from Saudi Arabia to Japan, to Mexico. And we've had just great conversations with all of them.