AI Abundance: a16z Partners Justine Moore and Anish Acharya Forecast a New Era for Consumers

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Anish Acharya** (0:45)
Our philosophy is like for creativity, everybody is born creative, and everyone has this sort of latent desire to be creative. But as we get older, what happens is one, our sort of taste improves.
So like the kind of work that we would want to create gets more sophisticated. For most of us, that muscle atrophies. So our creative skill tends to diverge from our creative taste. So what does that mean? It's like hard to compose the kind of music you want to hear. It's hard to paint the kind of pictures you want to see. So one of the cool things about the new technology is it feels like if you have good taste, you can make good art.
So that sort of lowers the floor for participation in being creative.

**Justine Moore** (1:22)
And then some of the more, I guess, niche subreddits are really good for us. Specific sorts of topics, I think local llama and AI video, and then Cup the UI are probably my favorite three right now, because they tend to be curated group of folks who are really like pushing the forefront of language models or video or kind of image generation.

**Anish Acharya** (1:42)
Our hot take is that maybe the human part of human connection is overstated. And actually people just need connection. And look, I think there's an opportunity for these companion experiences to, you know, be tailored to people in a way that really helps them flourish.

**Nathan Labenz** (1:57)
Hello and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today's episode is a fun one, as we'll be exploring the frontier of AI-powered consumer products. My guests are Anish Acharya and Justine Moore, partners at A16Z Consumer, the division of venture capital mega-fund Andreessen Horowitz that invests in consumer product companies. They have recently published an investment thesis called The Abundance Agenda, which outlines how they see the market for AI-native consumer applications developing, and what they're looking for in new investment opportunities. If that sounds a bit academic or vague, I assure you that this is not armchair theorizing. To develop their investment thesis, the A16Z Consumer team has spent countless hours trying a huge number of different AI applications hands-on. Justine, in particular, shares many of her experiments and findings on Twitter, and is a true must-follow for anyone who wants to keep up with this fast-moving space. Between her feed and The Abundance Agenda presentation itself, and I must say it was created with AI-native presentation app Gamma itself, the subject of a Cognitive Revolution episode back in August of last year, I was inspired to try at least 10 new AI-native applications just while preparing for this episode. For what it's worth, of those, music generator Suno AI impressed me most relative to what I had experienced previously. I was able to generate remarkably high-quality music in minutes, including the revolutionary Reggae track, complete with lyrics about AI, that we used as intro music for today's episode. It's really a great, tangible example of how empowering and how fun AI products can be, and I definitely look forward to making more music with it in the future. In this conversation, we cover A16Z consumers' investment approach, including their foundational belief that AI represents one of, if not the, biggest platform shifts of our lifetimes, their view that consumer trends can't really be predicted in advance and must instead be spotted in the wild, and their preference for products that are, quote, weird but working, even if the use cases seem unserious or potentially even black mirror at first.
We also discuss how they are thinking about the retention challenges that many AI application developers are facing, the prospects for an AI product bundle and or a personal AI procurement department, the reasons so many applications are still missing APIs, and the potential for entrepreneurs to disrupt regulated industries with unapologetic direct-to-consumer approaches.