a16z, Anish Acharya: Is SaaS Dead in a World of AI? Do Margins Matter Anymore? Who Wins: Cursor or Claude Code?

Anish Acharya is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), where he leads consumer and fintech investing at Series A. He serves on the boards of standout portfolio companies including Deel, Mosaic, Clutch, Titan, and HappyRobot and has led early bets in companies like Runway and Carbonated. Before a16z, he founded and exited two startups—Snowball (acquired by Credit Karma) and SocialDeck (acquired by Google) and scaled Credit Karma's U.S. Card business to over 100 million members.

In Today's Episode We Discuss:

• Why building an AI company today requires being in San Francisco

• The "SaaS Apocalypse" myth: Why "vibe coding" everything is a lie

• How AI agents are finally breaking the lock-in of legacy software providers

• Incumbents vs. Startups: Who actually wins the AI distribution war?

• Why the developer tool market looks more like Cloud than Uber and Lyft

• The death of the Chatbox? Why browse-based interfaces are still preferable

• Why power users are 10x more valuable in the age of AI consumption

• Do margins matter in a world of AI?

• Why we are definitively not in an AI bubble right now

• Why the Legal and Customer Support industries will have dozens of winners

• Lessons from Marc Andreessen: Why the "quality of being right" supersedes process

• Is "Triple, Triple, Double, Double" dead? The new physics of growth

• The a16z Playbook: How to win 100% of the deals you chase