Andrew Chen spends his time with the founders policymakers almost never hear from: two-and three-person teams, often before incorporation when a company is still a project. As general partner on a16z speedrun, he works at the earliest edge of Little Tech, backing founders at day one and helping them turn ambition into an actual business.
In this conversation, Andrew joins Matt Perault to talk about what life looks like for small teams working at kitchen tables, operating on short runways, and simultaneously trying to build, find customers, and survive in competitive markets.
They also discuss why so many startups are effectively absent from the policy process. Founders with no lawyers, no policy staff, and no extra time rarely have the capacity to fly to Washington or Sacramento, hire lobbyists, or otherwise make their voices heard. And the cumulative weight of compliance obligations falls hardest on the small teams least equipped to manage them.
The conversation widens to the question of what makes startup ecosystems work in the first place. In addition to leading speedrun, Andrew has helped build Tech Week into a major cross-city startup platform, now spanning Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, and, for the first time in 2026, Boston. In 2025, Tech Week hosted 3,000 events, 100,000-plus unique attendees, and more than 18,000 participating companies. Against that backdrop, Andrew shares his views on how founders decide what to build, what local markets need to foster entrepreneurship, and why supporting innovation is ultimately a choice.
a16z speedrun is now accepting applications for its summer/fall cohort. Learn more here.
Tech Week is coming up in Boston and New York. Check out the official event calendars.
Topics covered:
00:00: Intro
00:39: What is a16z speedrun?
02:08: The average profile of an early stage company
06:15: Why a16z built speedrun
08:36: A day in the life of a speedrun founder
13:22: What happens when startups do not work out
17:41: The cumulative burden of regulation for startups
21:49: Why Little Tech is absent from policy debates
25:05: How policy shapes where startups build
27:46: What makes startup ecosystems work
29:55: The idea behind Tech Week
32:52: How Tech Week surfaces future founders
33:23: Policy’s presence at Tech Week
34:38: Why policymakers should engage with Little Tech
This transcript has been edited lightly for readability.
Andrew Chen (00:00)
This is truly Little Tech. The average team is two to three people. They’re running their companies not in their office, not in a co-working space. They’re running it at the kitchen table.
For these founders, they are so mission-focused trying to survive as a business. They just don’t have time to participate. They don’t have lobbyists. They’re not really represented. It’s a choice whether or not each state or each city wants to have startups or not.
Matt Perault (00:33)
Andrew, welcome to the a16z AI Policy Brief.
Andrew Chen (00:37)
Thank you for having me.
Matt Perault (00:39)
You lead our speedrun program, so can you tell us a little bit about what speedrun is?
Andrew Chen (00:43)
Yeah, so, many folks in the audience will know that startups have to come from somewhere. And so, you know, our job is to try to find them on day one when the founders are just starting to think about their companies. And so what’s great is we, host a program, you know, based in the San Francisco office, where we will announce to the broader internet and through our marketing channels and podcasts and Substack newsletters and everything else that we will be investing up to a million dollars into brand new startups.
And the ones that we really focus on are the ones where folks are just getting going. Folks that maybe have full-time jobs and they’re starting to come up with a new idea with their best friend and they want to go start something. It could be folks that have already left their roles or they just graduated from school.
And they are coming up with something new. And so what we do is we spend 12 weeks with them. get the full force and power of the firm and all of our relationships and all of that great stuff. And then after we invest, then we share them with the broader ecosystem, host a speedrun demo day where we have over a thousand angel investors and seed funds and many others come and invest. And then, and then we go from there and kind of release them off in the world. And hopefully we have the opportunity to invest more in the future and to work with founders as kind of the beginning of a lifelong relationship with them. That’s the idea.
Matt Perault (02:08)
How do you decide what looks like a company that you want to have as part of the speedrun program?
Andrew Chen (02:13)
At its core in the earliest days, there are just so many famous examples of ideas changing all the time. Many of you guys know that a product we use every day, Slack, originally started out as a browser-based video game company and many, many other examples down the line.
And so what we try to do at its core is to really just invest in the best people. And so we’re looking for folks that have had some really unique experience in their past. And that could be anything from enormous athletic accomplishments on their way to a career in tech, or it could be that they started a GitHub repo that now has thousands of stars and it’s growing incredibly fast. Or it could be some of the traditional markers where they have gone to elite universities and had sort of learned elite, like incredible unique insights at some of our best AI companies. And then they’re ready to use that in a new company as well. I think we’re very open-minded. So we actually have mostly folks out of the Bay Area, actually all over America, a little slice from other places in the world, mostly focused on the U.S.
And it’s amazing to watch founders that are from whether it’s you know, New York or Texas or Florida or Midwest or any of these other places actually come to San Francisco get to experience kind of what it’s like to be in the Bay Area We work with them, of course and a lot of them go back to their home communities and continue to build their companies and of course quite a few of them stay in In the Bay Area as well to build the next generation of tech companies here We’re very happy when when either either of those happen.
Matt Perault (04:02)
So what is kind of interesting in the range of types of sizes of companies that might participate in speed run? It sounds like on the small side, might be a couple of people who just decided to, who just have an idea, like really the smallest of the small, how large are the companies yet?
Andrew Chen (04:18)
This is truly Little Tech. When we talk about Little Tech, this is it. I think the average team is two to three people. They’re running their companies not in their office, not in a co-working space. They’re running it at the kitchen table. It’s really sort of the source of a lot of the success that we’ve seen in the overall American industry, it really starts in these very small places.
Then, we invest up to a million dollars and then hopefully they raise more at Demo Day and hopefully they keep going and eventually they become incredible employers and pillars of the industry and we want to be with them from that journey from day one.
Matt Perault (05:08)
Can you give us a sense of organizations that would be too large to apply for speedrun? Like what’s the, what’s the upper bound?
Andrew Chen (05:15)
I mean, honestly, for us, we would say as soon as you’ve taken capital elsewhere, we would consider that maybe not disqualifying, but it would be sort of like, you’re kind of at a point where the question is, well, how many folks can you get to bootstrap the company together? So if you have a group of five friends that all went to college and they trust each other a lot and they want to spend six months on their own dime working on something. Like, of course we would love to, you know, back a team like that, especially one with that much trust, but very rarely would we see a team above, you know, three, four or five people at that point. At some point, you don’t want to divide the company’s ownership to be too small, especially because people come and go. You probably need to, you know, some people’s life situations will be such that you’ll need to actually pay them. And so, really, it’s a two or three person thing typically.
Matt Perault (06:15)
So we invest at different phases of company life cycles. We have a growth team that’s when companies tend to get larger. We have a venture team when companies are smaller. Speedrun as you’re describing it is like the littlest of the Little Tech. Why did we as a firm and why did you decide that this was an important part of the life cycle to support?
Andrew Chen (06:32)
The way I see the mission for a16z Speedrun is that we want to get as close as possible to the moment that founders are actually created, that new companies are created. In my first couple of years at the firm, I spent more in Series A, Series B, and so you’re writing checks where these are mature businesses, or there’s at least a glimmer of a business there. And so you’re investing 10, 15, $20 million. And so by that point, you know, yeah, you have customers, have, you have, you have metrics to look at, you have a team, et cetera. And that’s a wonderful place to invest. And historically, it’s been maybe the best place to invest.
For us, one of the really magical things, something that I take a lot of just personal pride and excitement in, is the idea that we are not just waiting for entrepreneurs to show up at our doorstep at a16z, but we’re actually helping create the companies in the first place. So for example, in the last speedrun batch, there were 70 companies and of the 70, there was probably a dozen where, you know, these were folks that had full-time jobs and they had to turn in the laptops and their badges and we couldn’t even wire the money over because, you know, they didn’t have a company to even incorporate.
And so we sort of helped incept these, the idea of like, hey, like let’s create the most powerful and you know best path to starting the company and and I think a lot of those founders eventually would have would have eventually started businesses, you know when you’re founders sometimes you just can’t get that bug, you know out of your ear, but I do I would like to think that we maybe you know pulled some of that activity forward and so maybe folks that maybe would have waited another for another five or ten years of work experience and financial stability, you know, maybe they would have taken that
that jump and what an amazing time in the AI era to encourage them to jump in at the right moment. ⁓
Matt Perault (08:36)
texture to what a day in the life looks like for a speed run company, like when they’re part of the program. What does their day to day look like both as part of the program? And then I assume you see, you know, again, there’s like high levels of variance, I’m sure. But like, what are the kind of the common things that you see about founders who are operating at this stage?
Andrew Chen (08:54)
Yeah, definitely. So if you can kind of picture in your head, you might have two founders that are originally, they’re based in Austin, Texas. They’re based in Chicago. We also have had teams from Utah. We’ve had teams from all over the US, quite a few from New York, quite a few from the Pacific Northwest as well.
So imagine you have two people, they get accepted to this program. They’re very excited. They they have to incorporate the company they get the money that it gets wired in they’ve never seen that much money in their life, right? They’re excited, right? So they buy plane tickets, they come to San Francisco and they typically you know, what we’ll do is we have a we literally have a welcome to SF guide that is he these are the neighborhoods we recommend. Here’s how you go on Airbnb and you know pick the right ones.
And so they do that and we try to create a community. So we have all these Slack instances and email lists and you’re meeting other founders. So back to your a day in the life of, you kind of imagine a founder waking up, they’re often for the duration of the program, they’re roommates with their co-founder. You are spending 24 seven together like truly.
You’re not living somewhere fancy, you’re somewhere typically like maybe close to the a16z office. A lot of these folks are either working together at their homes, and we also offer access to the a16z offices. So sometimes they’ll end up walking in or taking an Uber and taking a Waymo into the office, and we have a couple co-working spaces where you’ll spend time. And the only thing that they should be spending time on really is just to figure out is this business going to work? Like how do we, they got to build the product and they got to sell the product. And they got to do it in a short period of time. So typically you’ll have maybe two co-founders. One will be more of a business cofounder. One will be more of a technology and product cofounder. The technology and product cofounder is typically using a lot of AI right now, a lot of AI coding. So rather than, you know, going out and needing to, add a lot of costs and, and, know, maybe outsourcing parts of your coding or hiring a bunch of young people to do coding, you can just focus on just, hey, how effective can one or two people be right now? And let’s just make this business stable and survive. Let’s then let’s go hire a bunch of folks.
Then the business cofounders often out there interviewing customers, talking to customers, trying to make deals happen. And so there’s often this dichotomy that we see of the outwards facing business cofounder and then the inwards facing product and technology founder as well. What we do with speedrun is once per week, we end up having some formal programming. So we want to make sure the companies have as much time to work as possible, but we will call them in once per week. They come to the a16z office. We’ll typically have a speaker, we’ve had some amazing founders, the founder of Zynga or Vercell. We’ve had the C-level folks from OpenAI. We’ve had, of course, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz with us many times as well. That’s always fantastic.
And then we do these office hours where they will sit in a group of 20, 30 companies and they will talk to each other about problems they’re trying to solve. So we run these office hours, we talk about everything from hiring your first employees to signing your first customers. How do you launch on social media? What’s the difference between selling into a large enterprise versus selling into SMB? You do all the things that you do. And of course, how is everyone using AI? You know, what are all the new tools that everybody’s using? We spend a lot of time on that as well.
And then hopefully the rest of the week they are, they’re out and about working and they’re being immersed in kind of the milieu of the SF tech ecosystem. So they’re meeting a ton of people, meeting a ton of investors, learning all of that. We’re very excited about just everything that can happen in just a couple of weeks.
Matt Perault (13:22)
So I know obviously the most exciting thing to talk about is success, the success part of the ecosystem, but in venture, like there’s a lot of not success, right? It’s sort of the nature of the business. I assume the earlier you go in the life cycle, the more true it is that more companies don’t succeed. So what does that look like for speedrun participants? Like when companies come through the program and then they’re not able to launch a successful business, at least the one that we funded as part of the program, what does that pathway look like?
Andrew Chen (13:32)
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, I think historically in the venture capital business overall, the colloquial description is something like half the companies don’t work out at all, right? They just kind of outright, you know, fold, then you’ll have another, you know, if, that’s, if that’s like five and 10 companies, you’ll have another, you know, two or three where you make a little money and then all the money is made in that kind of top decile, the one out of 10 that really where you get the grand slam. And that just seems to be true magnetically, is just amazing. It’s been very consistent over many decades.
To your question on what happens to the ones that fold, a bunch of great things happen. I mean, first, we think that even though we as a firm make the money on the power law exceptional companies that break through, you know, we make our reputations with how we work with all the founders that are working hard, working a hundred hours a week. They’re completely plugged in. They’re working weekends, like the whole thing. And it just doesn’t work out, you know, and sometimes it’s to no fault of their own. Sometimes there’s just a market downturn. You know, they’re starting a pre-AI company when everybody’s going AI. It’s because they are, you know, the co-founder got sick, it’s because of, all these many, many different potential things that could happen. And so as a result, the best thing we can do for those companies is number one, should we back the founders again? You know, that’s I think a very special thing about, about that Silicon Valley mentality is like, okay, great. You’ve just spent, you know, a million bucks educating these founders about how to start a company. Hopefully they can start another company. And by the way, like whether you’re talking about Uber or Slack or you know, Microsoft or OpenAI or any of these companies. And when you look at the CEO and the founders involved very frequently, more often than not, they have been involved in many other things along the way. And so we often love the idea of, and we just did actually, just actually last week, we just funded a founder again on a better idea than first idea, even though he ended up just returning a little bit of the capital that he spent so I think that’s great.
The other version is sometimes these founders need a little bit of a recharge right and what that means is they went at it like completely just 150% and what they need is a little bit of time to you rebuild their finances. They need to you know, they probably weren’t paying themselves that well, they need some time to focus on their health. You know, we find that a lot of these founders become very hot commodities because that means that you can get somebody that works hard, you know, works on unstructured problems, is completely current on all of the newest technology and you can get them, you know, at your company. And so what we’ve been seeing is a lot of teams will end up hiring each other. You know, if one doesn’t work out, but you respect the founder, like, great, you hire them. And then maybe they spend two or three years with you. Maybe they’ll lead some new initiatives, some new products in your business. And then a few years later, they spin out and they’re ready to start a new company. And then hopefully we as a16z get another shot at them to work together. So that’s sort of all by design. And I think it’s a perfectly expected outcome. And we just want to partner up with these founders for their whole professional career.
Matt Perault (17:41)
I’d love to turn to policy now, since this is a policy podcast. This is the AI Policy Brief. And so I’d love to understand more about how the companies you work with think about policy issues. This is something that we obviously do to some extent, but you’re living and breathing the founder side of it on a daily basis. And we’ve tried to channel the concept in different ways. We recently wrote this piece called Greetings from a Garage about what it looks like from a policy perspective if a couple of people go into a garage to build the next great tech tool in California, what is the regulatory landscape that they have to deal with? And it was a really helpful exercise because often policy teams, legal teams will think about just incremental burden. Like there’s a new law that’s been proposed. What happens if we pass this new law? How onerous or not is it going to be? How helpful is it going to be? And I think the insight that the head of our state team, Kevin had in it, when we were thinking about this piece is, it’s not just the incremental burden. It’s all the things that a founder has to face from the moment they’re building with the technology. Like in California, that doesn’t just mean SB 53, which was passed last year. It means all these data provenance requirements from the session before, it means privacy law in California that was passed several years before it’s all cumulative.
And the moment that you start building the tool, you have to comply with all these things. So really the policy picture is the composite of all those things. It’s not any individual one of them. So I’m curious when you’re at the stage, like you’re literally at the, we just met in the coffee shop, we’re in the garage, we’re roommates, we’re in the shared Waymo on the way to the a16z office. At that phase, how do the people that you work with think about policy issues?
Andrew Chen (19:33)
For these founders, they are so mission focused, right? To just make their company, make their product. I mean, it’s not even a company at that point. It’s like, they might even think of that as a project or as a product. There’s no company because it’s just the two guys or gals trying to make things work. And so for them, from a policy perspective, look, I think every obstacle that is put in front of them along the way for them to just prove that their initial product can even work just adds friction, you know, for the best part. So I think most of the founders, you talk to them, they really see all that stuff as like, wow, I’ve incorporated, I’m doing this thing, I’m hiring these people. Okay, you get the stack of paperwork this big. And, you know, a lot of these laws, a lot of the paperwork is designed for companies that are much, much larger than them, right? And have the ability to comply because they have teams of lawyers and teams of experts that are in there. And of course we as a16z try to help them. But for most of these folks, all they’re trying to do is they’re just trying to get going at all and to survive as a business. And so generally their interaction on kind of the regulatory side of the world is usually negative because these are things that you know, that actually create protections often for either Big Tech or for you know other other parts of the industry that they end up trying to disrupt, so I say that that’s kind of one major part.
The other part is that you know for many of these founders they just don’t have time to participate. They don’t have lobbyists. They’re not involved in the political process. They’re not really represented in all these ways because frankly they just don’t have time. They may not even have time to shower or to have a nice dinner for themselves. They’re working that hard, much less to do things that kind of sit outside. They’re kind of just day to day of just survival at that point.
Matt Perault (21:49)
And then that’s a compounding thing. I think that’s a dynamic that we encounter all the time. Cause we, you know, we show up and we represent Little Tech, but we’re not, or I’m not a founder. And so when we show up, people are like, well, we’d rather talk to the startup. We don’t want to talk to the investor in the startup, but the challenge is the, as you’re saying, like the startups are not showering, working a hundred hour weeks, they’re not going to go and make the drive to Sacramento or the flight to Washington or to Brussels and represent what it’s like for them to try to build under the in the current regulatory environment.
Andrew Chen (22:27)
That’s right. And their timeline, a startup, a two person startups timeline, not only is it not a year, like you may not know if you have a company in a year, right? It may not even be six months. It may not even be three months. You know, you might be working on really small time schedules. And so to make the investment to, yeah, to fly to one of these places and to, you know, be involved, I do think it’s really hard to carve out time to do it, which is why I think both it’s really important to have some mechanism to represent these people, because these are the future job creators, these are the companies that are going to be employing folks and driving continuing America’s success on the technology field. But also, on top of that, the folks that maybe do show up in all these places and do advocate for tech, you get a very skewed view because you don’t hear from Little Tech, but you might hear a lot from Big Tech. You might hear a lot about a lot from the industries that are getting disrupted and very little from the 30 year olds that are spending night and day trying to make that happen.
Matt Perault (23:44)
We actually get hostile reactions from policymakers when we raise that point, like they’ll say, well, all of industry agrees on this. And when they say all of industry, what they mean is Big Tech companies, or sometimes it might be big financial services companies, like large organizations. And they say, you have a different view and we need you to get on board. And we’ll say in the policy conversation, like it’s sort of by design, we’re representing a different part of the ecosystem. So of course we don’t agree on everything.
Andrew Chen (24:16)
That’s right. That’s right. Absolutely.
Matt Perault (24:19)
One of the things about the time horizon that you’re talking about is often there’s a gap between the lobbying phase and the effective date of a piece of legislation. I was just looking this up. Colorado, which has the most comprehensive AI law at the state level, was actually passed in 2024 and is set to go into effect in June of this year. That’s a little bit unusual. It’s been delayed a couple of times for various different things, but I can imagine if you’re a startup in Colorado trying to make the calculus about whether you engage in 2024 and the law is going to go into effect a couple of years down the road. And to your point, you’re not even operating in one year time horizons, let alone multiple year time horizons, the likelihood that you’re going to prioritize negotiating the time consuming process of negotiation and making your voice heard is low.
Andrew Chen (25:05)
Absolutely.It’s just from an ROI time standpoint. It just doesn’t make any sense. I think there’s also a really unique thing because these teams are so small and they’re kind of at their inception, which is they get to pick where they start the company from. I moved to the Bay Area in, in 2007 and in 2007, the world revolved around, you know, Palo Alto and Mountain View and kind of the peninsula, what we think of as Silicon Valley. I think folks are familiar with this now that we saw a whole scale migration of the startup, the center of the startup ecosystem being from the peninsula to San Francisco proper. And then, subsequently we’ve seen it now spread where, you know, New York is one of now one of the huge startup hubs that’s emerged. And over the last couple of years, all the major venture capital firms and had opened offices in various places and in London and Europe, there’s been other major hubs that have been created.
So I think there is also an interesting thing where that almost becomes part of one of the most important choices that you can make as a startup, which is where are you going to plant roots? Where are you going to hire people from? Where are you going to do that? And if you end up working on an AI company, and you know from day one that there’s going to be a bunch of extra rules about how you can use AI, the two guys, two gals startup, they’re very mobile. They can pick and choose where they want to go. And they do. And historically, the Bay Area has benefited from that mobility. There’s some interesting stats about how nearly 50% of venture backed startups are first generation immigrants, for example, you people who relocate in order to do it. And I bet you if you were to say, okay, well, the other 50%, how many of them are actually native San Francisco versus people who, you know, move here? The answer would be, you know, it’s probably approaching 100% at that point. I think the important note there is like, the Bay Area is certainly benefited from this. You know, it’s not certain that it’ll last forever. It’s not certain that, you know, that California will always be the place to start companies. So I think it’s important for us to preserve this ecosystem because it is very, very special, it’s something that is unique, not just in the world, but even within the U.S. in order to have this fertile of an ecosystem for startups and new technology.
Matt Perault (27:46)
Do you hear founders talk about regulatory issues as one factor that they consider and where they end up citing the business?
Andrew Chen (27:53)
Yeah, I think that it is sometimes indirect. I think, for example, you know, like cost of living is a great, you know, is a really simple one. Or if you’re building a deep tech company, if you’re building the next generation of manufacturing, you have to go somewhere where people are building large scale lab and warehouse space at reasonable prices. And so I think you’re seeing these pockets like El Segundo in LA, you’re seeing folks building things in Texas for many of those reasons. I think the Bay Area has hugely benefited from just the AI wave really centered here. I think that’s really extended the life of this ecosystem in a big way. A lot of people have been coming back to the Bay Area since the COVID dispersal.
And then I do think that the ability for another indirect force is that the startups have to really move where there’s investors. Turns out it’s a lot easier to code and it’s a lot easier to get your first dollar of revenue. And it’s a lot easier to hire your first employee. You can kind of do that anywhere, but actually getting capital to really scale your business requires the ability for investors to be there. And so I think that’s why, when you look around the world, a lot of the biggest startup hubs happen to be where you have great universities co-located with customers, co-located with investors, all in one spot. And I wonder and I worry about things like the wealth tax that are currently under discussion in its ability to potentially relocate a bunch of family offices and investors that are currently contributing in a big way and moving them to other geographies as one of the potential negatives for making the Silicon Valley thing less dynamic and less powerful as a result.
Matt Perault (29:55)
We’ve been talking a lot about the one-to-one relationships that you’ve developed as part of the speedrun program, but you’ve also been really invested in trying to create ecosystems through the Tech Week program. What was the idea behind that program?
Andrew Chen (30:08)
So we started Tech Week and it’s a program that sits in our team here within the speedrun umbrella. And what Tech Week really does is it’s really a celebration of startups and technology and progress in all the major cities. And so we host it in San Francisco, we host it in LA, we host it in New York. And then for the first time this year, we’re actually hosting it in Boston as well. We have over 100,000 people going to these events throughout the year, it is just staggering.
Matt Perault (30:46)
Yeah, it sounds like that sounds like a fake number. Yeah. 100,000 people. Yeah, wow.
Andrew Chen (30:49)
Yeah, 100,000 attendees. That’s right. Almost 20,000 companies, there’s 3000 plus events. The way that we do it and the way that it’s been very powerful is we actually, as a firm, will kind of just designate a particular week as Tech Week. And so, and then what we do is then we start talking to a bunch of our partners and whether that’s other investors, whether that’s larger companies, whether that’s portfolio companies. And we asked them, hey, would you like to do events during that week in a way where we can all do stuff together? And we’ll host a couple big things. And then we end up also just partnering. And people just spring up and start doing things.
So this year’s Boston date is going to be May 26 to 31, and then New York is the next week after, so June 1 to 7. And then we just bring together just a massive number of events and people. And we’ve partnered with a bunch of folks in the ecosystem, whether that’s Fenwick and HSBC and IBM and a lot of the big companies out there, whether it’s Adobe and AWS and Google and many others, to sort of anchor the overall program in a way where then we’re able to create a very wide breadth of different types of events. So we have things like hackathons, we have things that are just like mixers, we have speaking events. People go out and do a bunch of fun stuff. Like in LA, there was a surfing event, or folks doing yoga. So it’s sort of part social, part serious. And then these days, what’s been amazing and kind of the fit with speedrun has been it’s become our way to discover brand new founders before maybe they even know that they’re founders. And it’s also a celebration of tech kind of within all these communities.
Matt Perault (32:52)
What does that mean? How do you discover a founder before they know if they’re a founder?
Andrew Chen (32:57)
Well, we just feel like if you’re a type of person with certain kinds of work experience, certain resume, and you’re finding yourself attending a bunch of events, like the probability of you starting something, you’re probably startup curious, but you’re probably gonna get there sometime in the next few years. So that’s what we found, which has been fantastic.
Matt Perault (33:23)
How is policy showing up at tech weeks? Are you seeing it in the various different local ecosystems that you’re tapping into?
Andrew Chen (33:31)
Yeah, we would love to do more. It’s definitely exciting to see more and more of an ecosystem around policy. For example, think across all of the tech weeks last year, we had 4,000 attendees attending various policy-related events. And that includes over 1,000 folks from government, over 1,000 policy professionals. And then oftentimes, we’ve had events where local government will come together. Whether that’s in the mayor’s office or folks that work on the national sphere. We also have had a bunch of the consulates involved as well because they’re all very interested in building that bridge between their countries and in particular the San Francisco system. So the British consulate’s been super involved in tons of stuff. And then many other countries as well. So it’s been great to have that as a burgeoning part of the Tech Week ecosystem.
Matt Perault (34:38)
So if you see a local policymaker or a representative from a consulate or member of Congress at a Tech Week event and you’re chatting with them on the sidelines. What would you relay to them about the realities of building a competitive company given what you know about what the early, early stage really looks like?
Andrew Chen (34:56)
Well, I’d say a couple things. I think the first is to just have them understand that it’s a choice whether or not each state or each city wants to have startups or not. If you want to have startups, you have to do things to make it conducive to having startups. And there’s a long, long list of things that might be involved there. And it’s not just for the founders, it’s for the angel investors. It’s for the employees. It’s for all, all these things that surround that whole group.
The second thing is, as we were just talking about a couple of minutes ago, I think a lot of policymakers are not having real conversations with Little Tech. You know, there’s a little bit more friction. You have to kind of put in a little bit more time into it. But again, if we decide, you know, we want to have more startups in America, we want more innovation in America, or we’re talking about that kind of at the city level, we have to figure out, what are the things that we can unblock for a lot of these companies and those things change. A software company will tell you something different than an AI native company, which will tell you something different than a hardware company or a robotics company. You know, it’s very dynamic, for example, this year we are seeing way more robotics companies than in any year past and they have very different needs, they have supply chain needs, they have real estate needs, they have a different set of investors, they have potentially different set of partners. And so, we have to actually dig into that in a real way.
And then maybe thirdly to just talk our book, I think working with folks like a16z and other venture capital firms and other ecosystem players, what we can do is we can certainly help open the door to creating those conversations. And so, an open offer to the policy folks that are listening to this, anybody that wants to come in, spend time with five or 10 really curated Little Tech startups that are two, three people and just kind of hear, what do you need to be successful? We’re very happy to arrange that. Also, a lot of these companies are very interested in, like certain sectors are particularly interested in partnering, you know, with the government. So I think that’s all great.
Matt Perault (37:34)
It’s been fun doing that in the past because like you said, you really see in those conversations, like when you talk through various different policy issues, sometimes they’re not that relevant necessarily to people in the room. And then others really are. We’ve had conversations in the past where we’re talking about various different policy issues that are moving. And then you see a panic look on someone’s face where they’re like, I’m building into a use case that might face regulatory headwinds, but I think the use case is really compelling and I don’t think policymakers understand what we’re trying to do. And so it’s interesting to see that delta and we’ve engaged with the speedrun team in the past to make sure policymakers also appreciate that delta.
Andrew Chen (38:20)
Yes, I think that’s right. And it is a wonderful thing to spend time with these teams because they’re often very much young people. You know, we have a lot of folks that are in their early twenties. I think we even have a team that’s all 18 and 19 year olds, for example, and in the current batch who decided to forego college and instead start the dream company. We also have folks that are cofounders of billion dollar companies that are now in the current batch of speedrun as well.
But because these guys are all getting started, there’s, if the conversations are so genuine, they’re just full of optimism. They’re so fun to talk to. They’re all on the cutting edge. You know, they’re not at a point where they are at the risk of hitting into a lot of laws and hitting into a lot of different things. It’s often like just a really fantastic set of conversations just based on who these guys are.
Matt Perault (39:19)
Andrew, thanks so much for joining the AI Policy Brief.
Andrew Chen (39:23)
Awesome, thank you for having me.
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