We were the largest wholesale funder in the world 10 years ago. There are a lot of things you want to be the largest in the world. A sale funder, not one of them. We got a lot of criticism. Like, why are you raising money now? What are you? Stupid. And it turns out that the best time to raise money is when nobody has money. Last year, the four largest company has contributed 1% to GDP growth with their $400 billion of spending. M&A and capital raising and IPOs are driven by confidence. For the last four years, whatever the question was, the answer was no. Okay, now whatever the question is, the answer is maybe. David, you've been at Goldman now over 25 years. You know, what are you focused on to position Goldman for the future? If you're in our kind of businesses, if you're attached to financial assets,

this is as sweetest spot that I've seen with AI. If you have proprietary data and you have enough

GPUs, you can solve like almost any problem. It is magic. What if the thing that made software

companies defensible for 50 years just stopped being true. In 1975, Fred Brooks published

the mythical man month, which included a simple observation. Nine women cannot have a baby in one

month. You couldn't accelerate software development by throwing more engineers at it. That insight

shaped how startups competed for decades. A small team with a head start could outrun a giant because you

can't buy your way to a breakthrough. 50 years later, something has changed. Companies are going

from zero to more than a billion dollars in revenue in less than a year. Open AI built a $10 billion

business with a seemingly insurmountable leave, and competitors are catching up anyway. The old

playbook assumed that leads compound.

The new reality suggests they might not. This raises uncomfortable questions for founders and

investors alike. If he can throw money at the problem, what happens to the advantage of being

first? And if incumbents can close gaps faster, does that change when companies should go public

or how much capital they need to stay ahead?

A16Z general partner David Haber spoke with A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Goldman and Goldman and Chairman about how AI is reshaping competitive dynamics,

while enterprise adoption is harder than it looks,

and what today's policy fights over crypto and AI actually mean for builders.

I've had the distinct pleasure of working at least indirectly for both David Solomon and Ben Horowitz

and have a lot of affection for both Goldman Sachs and A16Z.

If you haven't read, I highly recommend reading the book The Partnership, which is written by a guy

named Charles Ellis,

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