For the last decade, the largest companies in the world have been technology companies.

Now, something strange is happening.

The most important technology companies may never go public at all.

For most of modern financial history, innovation followed a similar path.

Companies were bored small, raised capital privately, and eventually crossed the threshold where public markets took over.

That structure shaped how growth was financed, how risk was priced, and where value ultimately

accrued.

Over the last 15 years, that Taiwan has quietly broken.

Software companies stayed private longer, market capitalization concentrated.

Today, the most valuable companies in the world are U.S. technology firms built on infrastructure

that barely existed a generation ago.

Now, AI has accelerated that shift.

In the last two years, the cost of accessing frontier models has fallen by more than 99%

all model capabilities have doubled roughly every seven months.

At the same time, the largest technology companies are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to build the infrastructure underneath it all.

This creates a paradox. The buildout is larger than anything we've seen before,

its demand is arriving faster than any previous technology cycle. The question is not whether AI is transformative.

The question is whether markets, capital, and companies can absorb something

this quickly without repeating the mistakes of the past. Today, A16Z's Jen Ka, head of investor

relations, sits down to David George, general partner to examine how lake stage markets are

evolving, how AI is changing scale and timing, and what this moment means for returns,

durability, and value creation

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