Andrew Chen

More info
- Newsletter: http://andrewchen.substack.com
- Book: http://coldstart.com

General Partner, GAMES FUND ONE

a16z Speedrun Alpha, for pre-idea/pre-team/pre-everything founders

it's time to bet on yourself, and figure out your startup idea. 2026 is well underway, crazy stuff happening in AI, and you're building agents/apps/whatever every night+weekend. You want to start a startup but you're working or still going to school.

what if you're pre-idea, pre-product, pre-launch, and even a solo founder? You need time to cook

The Alpha Fellowship is for you.
https://lnkd.in/g6eG4jKA

details:
- $20K equity-free upfront to start building
- up to $250K investment when you finalize
- automatic final interview for a16z speedrun, with up to $1M investment
- 8-week, in-person experience with a kickoff retreat, founder AMAs, and small-group dinners alongside the a16z speedrun community
- targeted to early-career highly technical founders 
- deadline to apply is March 6

We ALSO have a "startup track" for the Alpha Fellowship where you can get more founder experience by working for a portfolio company if you're not quite ready to found something.

The Alpha Fellowship places top early-career engineers into full-time roles at fast-growing a16z speedrun and Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies. For future founders, we provide capital before a team or idea even exists.

We're looking for highly technical students and recent grads who don't want to wait to start building. Fellows take full-time roles at fast-growing portfolio companies - or, if you're ready to build now, receive capital to start your own company - kicking off with a two-month in-person fellowship. Fellows also have access to the a16z speedrun and EO Ventures communities and events.

...

If this is you, want to meet you. If you have people to introduce us to, that would be amazing too.

will have more to say, and lots of ideas coming up here. But excited to get this out! Excited to host y'all soon.

Open article: Alpha by a16z speedrun by alpha.a16zspeedrun.com

SF feels designed in a lab to make startups:

- nothing really to do (except code)
- dinner convos become pitch practice
- more dogs than kids
- social status determined by funding amounts
- bars close at 10pm (but GitHub is 24x7)
- “what are you working on?” instead of “how’s the family?”
- nice weather but not too nice
- gender ratio imbalance (odds are good but..)
- only city in the world where it’s a flex to have a mattress on the ground
- pro tizz anti rizz

what's the current best approach on an AI that can help me handle my email inbox?

seems like a big opportunity for folks playing with openclaw. For all of us who are drowning in email, this seems like a tier one problem that would be amazing to solve. (And I think I would pay $150k/year to have this product? I bet I'm not the only one)

what I want is:
- watch my inbox and process emails as they come in
- score each message to see if it seems important (look at the sender, the topic/body, if its addressed to me or a big list, if I've ever replied to the sender before, etc etc)
- read the email and reference a vast DB of knowledge that's been assembled already (based on my work, meeting notes, what I've replied on, etc), and decide what to do
- reply with a draft note. For now, don't send, so that I can review the email -- but in the future maybe there's a YOLO option (but it would probably disclose that it's my assistant writing)
- if less important, label it and file away. Eventually gather summaries for all of these less important emails and send me a summary of all of them with links to get back to it
- or archive if it seems unimportant
- or unsubscribe / mark spam / block if random marketing
- if critical send me a notification right away so I can take a look

I've played around with a bunch of the current AI tools and nothing quite works like this. There's a lot of blockers:
- first, it needs 1000x more context about each problem, which it could get by crawling all my projects/notes/emails/slides/meetings/etc
- This system should be designed to take action rather than simply just prioritizing messages. We've had prioritized inboxes for a long time but they're fine, not great
- then someone has to put this entire UX together to be cohesive. In the future, we may not even really have an email inbox, but instead an interaction that feels more like I'm talking to an assistant who has a few questions for me. But otherwise just wants to provide a few quick updates and get some yes/nos. And otherwise filter all the noise -- just give me the most important messages

It seems like with the excitement of OpenClaw we have the architecture to integrate a lot of different data sources and to take actions across multiple different channels. And it's built with one sort of monolithic memory and context, so that you're able to interact with it in such a way where it feels like it can try to replicate your actions more closely than the relatively stateless and memoryless LLM chats that we've gotten accustomed to. 

If someone is working on this -- I would be both a customer and an investor!

AI will make teenage billionaires a thing

why? People have long argued that we'll see more 1-person unicorns from AI, as the tools allow a singular visionary to scale themselves. That's obvious.

But it also follows that AI software will be created and run mostly by young people, and billions will be made in the process

AI also makes coding and product building as easy as making videos or posting a photo. The data says that the time rich (rather than money rich) dominate internet usage -- after all, they have more time to consume, and more time to create. Because the time rich are mostly composed of kids and teenagers, it means that software will mostly be built and used by young people. Think social media, Roblox, chat, etc, but coded by teenagers for teenagers

we're approaching a timeline where instead of going to school, getting a job, getting married, and having kids -- the linear form of life we've had for 100+ years -- we will see kids go start to building products and starting companies from a young age. This means huge disruption for universities and society, but also that we will see people build build build. A good thing IMHO.

The future will be built by young people, for young people, and billions will be made as a result

Nothing beats writing nice code that works. Now trying to package going on adventures with friends into a game. 

prev. product @ Discord. prev prev. founder @ Blitz (YC S15)

Played Kartrider professionally at some point.

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