The Ben & Marc Show: China Has Scale. Can America Catch Up?

24:39Like, you know, there's a lot of basic things you can do there. The second thing that I think is pretty key is more of these, you know, kind of MP material style deals. identify the key supply chain constraints way upstream so that we even have the possibility of being able to ramp in a crisis period. But if we are looking at, you know, we've got to add a crisis, work all the way back to the raw materials that we didn't plan for. Now you're looking at five years of lag of being able to reconstitute that supply chain. So if I can start cutting that lag and working from the bottom up in terms of, you know, either allies who already have capacity that I can, you know, get them to invest and, you know, do some sort of guarantees on, or I can invest in U.S.

25:27capacity around these things and then regulatory relaxation around some of the constraints of why is it hard to build in the U.S. I think you can start to systematically reduce China's leverage, create competitive industry, and secure supply chain for national security. But it's just gonna take a degree of targeted focus and understanding of what those key bottlenecks are. And I think there's an understanding of, like, maybe the obvious five or six, but I actually suspect it's 10 or 20 things that we need to have more of a-a kind of sophisticated and holistic policy around. It uses all of our economic levers.

26:04And it's like, look, if everyone else is subsidizing and playing a different game on cost of capital and how they want strategic industries to grow, like, why is the US not doing it? I think the government's a terrible capital allocator historically, but, like, low-cost loans, sharing risk with banks. Like, there's a lot of these strategies, guaranteed offtake. Like, the U.S. has the best capital market system. We could just use, like, a lightweight of government backstopping to substantially create a different incentive structure in the U.S. and get these industries basically up to competitive very quickly.

26:37Chris, you know, Brian mentioned the kind of regulatory inhibitors. What are the regulatory inhibitors that you face now in terms of, you know, what you're doing at Hadrian? It's pretty extreme, but it's state by state. Oddly, a lot of the stuff that we would stand up in California, frankly, is just flat out banned from an environmental or permitting perspective. And our teams just frankly fight through it. But it is truly a permitting regulatory issue. I mean, mining is obviously a big one. Even the basics, like some of the exquisite stuff can only be made in a certain state to feed the defense ecosystem because all the other states banned it.

27:20Or like they're literally in facilities that got certified 50 years ago, and you could like, you literally could not build a new one today because you would never get the permit to do so. So it's stuff like that. I think the biggest unlock is certainly the government creating large offtake agreements. And I think in the last six months, I would say, I think there's two big realizations. One is like, we kind of just have to pick seven to eight entrepreneurs that we really trust who are kind of making a lot of money, but like we really, they're just patriots basically. And then the second one is creating these large offtake agreements so that the CapEx and the commercial market can come behind it, I think is the two smartest things.

27:57But the regulatory side is still heavily environmental permitting nightmare. Yeah, actually, speak about that, because there's this weird tension in politics between, so you have entrepreneurs who can do it, but if they're two, where it's Elon being the classic example, then all of a sudden the government doesn't want them to do it. And then, you know, they imagine that, like, General Motors can take Elon's place or something like that. So, I guess, how is that playing out today, and, like, how should it change? Brian and I, I think you're both on the same page about this. I think that my perspective without going to specifics is that I think there's been two realizations.

28:45Realization number one is that you're just going to have to instantiate six to eight massive companies and instantiating 100 kind of medium-sized players is just not going to have any effect because you need to get some scale, you need to get some talent aggregation, all these other things. I think alongside that, certain areas of the government where there's a lot of immature companies, they're going to spend the next year making eight bets and seeing how it plays out. And in certain other areas, I think in the next two years, what you're going to see is basically people getting pulled into rooms and saying, cool, we picked you for this category, start running.

29:19And that will come alongside with some MP Materials style deals and a lot of headbanging on that. But I think my opinion is we've reached the point and I think this will play out publicly over the next three years where I think that has started to already happen in some of these critical industries. And I think what it is going to look like is not dissimilar from, you know, let's imagine you all at Andreessen Fundix Startup and Apple, you know, they're doing a million in revenue and Apple gives them a billion dollar revenue deal and like Apple's going to take some warrants. And I think that is a perfectly, perfectly reasonable strategy.

29:57Otherwise, I don't think there is any other structure way to go this fast where the market's not playing it out and i think you're going to kind of see a macro cultural return to like hey guys there's 10 of you go figure this out you fix this you fix this you fix this with a lot of strings and public embarrassment attached if there's failures but that that's my viewpoint on what is going to have to happen to make that work um and there are going to be some real real winners and losers but you know that the spreading the capital around 100 different companies is not going to work. I think there is going to be, great, 10 of you get to experiment, and we're going to scale two.

30:34And I think that's going to happen across every program if we're serious about it. And I think it's the right thing in this type of era to do. And is there going to be, in order to make this work, will there need to be, like, some kind of federal override of the kind of state-by-state regulatory regimes? Or can you work around it with, like, enough money and whatnot? I think you can have, like, you're going to have competition between states, right? And we've seen this with, you know, running a factory search, all these things. And you can really tell the difference between states who are trying to drive growth and manufacturing, how they think about, you know, enabling companies to be successful, and the states who kind of take it for granted, to be honest, right?

31:20They're like, obviously, you want to be here, so we're not going to go out of our way to help. And you can really get that sense quite quickly. So I think you have a natural competitive function on the state side that's not overwhelming. But then I think it's like if people are trying to, you know, maybe California gets more efficient, but it's probably not going to get as efficient as Texas, right? And that's just kind of what it is. But companies are rational. They know this and they can make informed decisions about where they put their plants, trading off talent and, you know, like labor access and everything else, right?

31:49It's pretty straightforward. So I don't think you have to solve the federal override on the state level per se. then I think there are things the federal government can do with, you know, there still is federal EPA issues, right? So, like, states don't even have a lot of say in certain cases. Like, there's this one aspect of an area can be designated a non-attainment zone that is over-polluted on a certain pollutant, and so then, going forward, the EPA says that any new construction requires to remediate that pollutant by any means available, not cost-benefit, not that there is any due process, by any means attainable.

32:23Dems and Republicans alike, when they get that designation, they don't like it, right? Because it is a death knell to getting new manufacturing and new investment in that area. And so I think there's a lot of things that, you know, I have been historically a Dem, a lifelong Dem, and I believe that we need some environmental conservation pieces. But I think the balance has not gotten to this correct trade on there are ways to mitigate the harms and a practical matter of like expediting these decisions to get there quickly. So I think the time factor is often undervalued. And in business, the time factor is extremely valuable, right?

32:59like if it takes me five years to build a data center that doesn't it's irrelevant i need a one-year timeline and i think for a lot of these places the view is well i'll get you to the same outcome it just might take five years and they they don't view that as a problem so i think that on the state-by-state basis there's there's a ton of competition i think the federal government can do a lot of things to expedite uh getting to yes i think they have unique authorities especially in defense to push things on nuclear to push things push the envelope on a lot of things that there a lot of risk aversion to.

33:32And they have a huge opportunity to take the lead on showing what's possible. But I don't think we need to, like, march into every state house and say, we're taking over. Like, there's a lot of easy states and there's a lot of hard states, and that's okay. Yeah. And the talent is movable. Because, you know, you have this talent shortage in manufacturing. But if you've got the job, they'll go. I think it depends. I mean, we've seen, as we're launching Arizona, and Brian, I know you've got this perspective from Ohio as well, is the way we think about it is we will probably do most of our advanced engineering in California, because it's very hard to get the conflagration of software engineering and manufacturing in one building too.

34:16But once you've worked out how to do welding, for example, and it's now a simple system, that can go anywhere. And what we look for uniquely is kind of the technician workforce. What we're also seeing is the people at Adrian as we expand to different states, they're like, great, I get to keep my software engineering or manufacturing engineering job, but I get to buy a house because now I get to go to Arizona or another state. It's less shiftable than people think, especially for the highly skilled jobs, but everything else I think is a grand adventure for probably most of Brian and I's teams of like, hell yeah, let's go two years in Texas or two years in Arizona or wherever and follow the companies around.

34:57completely agree. And for a lot of these, particularly as you get to more hardware skill sets, manufacturing skill sets, getting them to come to California is a huge problem. How much does the house cost? Not that interested in it. And so it's actually easier when it's lower cost of living locations for a lot of these skill sets. But completely agree with Chris. A lot of the advanced software, still going to be California, is what it is. But that technology is then relocatable with relatively little difficulty. Why are we so much better at building data centers than factories? Colossus, the biggest data center in the world, was built in under five months.

35:34How do we explain this? I think it's very easy, which is the financial markets understand data center offtake agreements. Because what that enables you to do is, Brian says to me, Chris, please build data center and I'll give you this kilowatt hour of compute at X cost unless you screw it up. And then all of the big capital allocators say, great, I'm going to let you put 10 billion in CapEx in the ground and as long as you can credibly execute. This is how we build power plants as well. It's like there's a price per minute and then you put the CapEx in the ground. There's like a 30-year payoff period.

36:06Because manufacturing is high mix, low volume and defense spends money every year, you financially have a one-year agreement. You literally can't get the capital markets to underwrite it unless you're at such a sufficient scale, which is what we're doing now, where you can functionally underwrite across many different contract vehicles and then you can actually have this 10-year CapEx spread. And then you can build more data centers if you're good at it. I am fully convinced it is literally just because there's like Amazon wants data center and it's a 30-year offtake agreement and then you can put the CapEx in the ground.

36:38Whereas because defense spends contracts once a year, you can't have that long-term revenue agreement and therefore you can't have this structured finance agreement underneath it for the CapEx, which we've solved by kind of having this aggregated portfolio strategy. But my one answer is just, if the Defense Department looked, or factories created off-take agreements for capability or capacity, overnight. And data centers just have that naturally. I think the other part of this is, we've been doing data centers for 40 years, 30 years, right? Like, we've just been doing it. It's like, it's a thing.

37:13The US knows how to do it. And, like, is putting up the wall, the concrete walls and building the cold shell, the hard part for any of these factories? Like, no. That goes up really quick, right? Like, we've built the distribution centers are extremely efficient to build at this point. So like a cold shell, cold concrete building, trivial. Trivial easy, right? Those go up in like less than 12 months. You probably even get it in three or four if you want to. Once you get to manufacturing, then the question is, okay, what are you putting inside of it? Do you actually understand the process? Like, have you built the technology to go in there?

37:45So the nth copy that Chris is going to build of his plant will go up extremely fast, right? If he can finance it and he can capitalize it, like he's saying. But the first copy of that thing took quite a while. And so for a lot of these manufacturing plants, they're the first one. And you have all the unique regulatory approvals and you've got the unique chemicals that you've got to bring in, the health and safety risks, and how do you mitigate all those things. And so the... So it just ends up like, I think you're... sort of N of one on a lot of these cases. But if you're on the 10th copy, it's gonna go fast.

38:21It's just gonna go fast. When people talk about China's success, some people point to their industrial policy, their protectionism, their subsidization of certain industries. We've, you know, recently experimented with that a little bit. What can we learn or not learn about what they've done? Or how should we think about it here? Maybe, Chris, you wanna take it first? Yeah, so I think the most important thing for people to realize is that China's stuff is not cheap because they have low cost of labor. It's because they subsidize CapEx energy, which is the main cost of manufacturing. Like 95 % of the cost of aluminum is just the kilowatt hour of the power price.

38:59And then they also do export subsidies, which is kind of like a reverse tariff. So if I sell a million dollars worth of stuff to ban, I get a refund from the government. They did that for the last 30 years in part to drag the capability off the US. because they knew they're very long-term thinkers. Unlike the US, we tend to operate only when we get punched in the face. And it was a strategic subsidy. So the kind of byline is, it's not economic protectionism, it's just an unfair playing field, because right now it's companies like Brian and me versus the CCP, not versus Chinese innovated companies.

39:36And I think we're happy to go toe-to-toe on an even playing field, but it's not an even playing field and it's not by 10%. It's, you know, 70%, 80 % in some cases. So if you want to have the US as an exporter, you kind of have to do tariffs or some economic policy that just corrects for that structural imbalance. And then we'll fight over how efficient we can get in America and how many products we can produce. And I think that narrative is really wrong. Like the level of subsidies they do from the government into their national champions is crazy. And it's one of the reasons why most of the commercial manufacturing is offshore because of that price function.

40:11So if you want to compete, and we can, you have to just create an even playing field. And that's like, there are many mechanisms to do that. Tariffs are one, but you kind of have to. Otherwise, it's just the playing field is so uneven that no amount of technology can catch up to the China cost. And there was, I mean, China has a track record of laying out five-year plans, like made in China 2030. Okay, they prioritize targeted industrial areas and that aligns all the way down to the provincial level around these subsidies, around these export strategies, around the finance structure of how these things are capitalized, zero cost, you know, zero percent loans, all these different things.

40:50And so the, there's just more of a strategic framework of what are the key areas they want to control. Not everything they've succeeded on is in that category, right? They've also been commercially successful on a number of areas, but I think facilitated by a lot of things Chris was saying around, you know, lower cost of capital as well as some of these export subsidy pieces. So I think there's just a handful of these policy levers that are just effective. And it's not, you know, like, I think if we end in a world where, like, the government's like, oh, we must make X company succeed, but we all know this company's bad, it's not gonna work, right?

41:26It's not a competitive company. They're just dead. And that, I think, is where the U.S. policy has landed on, where it's like, let's give grants to these industrial giants that everyone agrees are no longer competitive and we'll try to save them." And you're like, it's obviously not gonna work. Why don't we create a scenario that allows next generation companies that can actually compete a level playing field to fight? And let's go with that. And I think that strategy has a lot more legs to it than just handouts to a couple of companies that are, like, just zombies. And how would you structure something like that, given that, um...

42:05not to say that the government has some corruption in it, but, like, you know, these kinds of things, like, if you're naming or handpicking the companies that you're gonna subsidize, um, particularly in the U.S. system, there could be some issues with that. So how would you structure the subsidy so that it would be merit-based? I think you could do, like, get the government out of the underwriting process. Say you take loans, okay? Um, I want the banks who are pretty effective underwriters to, um, actually execute the loans, but the government will backstop, uh, and help them on, like, lowering the interest rate and absorbing half the default risk.

42:46Hmm. Bank still has skin in the game. Company has skin in the game, because if they default, they default. And the government is effectively a zero cost. They're actually gonna make money off that deal. Um, so the, um, so I-I think in, like, those - you can just take advantage of what is, like the U.S. capital market structure is, it's not like it's 10 % better than anyone else. It's like several thousand times better than anyone else. Like it is just wildly better. And so if you're leaning into that and saying, hey, we actually have great capital allocators that know how to underwrite companies and like lean in on these things, like great, let's just juice the capital stack in a way that is aligned with national priorities around certain industries, certain capabilities, things like that.

43:33That's kind of like one side. And then tariffs, export subsidies are another. Export financing, a lot of these things also work, right? And so those are not winner-specific. Those are segment and kind of strategy-specific targeted policies. And you're staying at, like the grants are, in my opinion, the worst possible form of this. It's like, you know, giving Intel an outrageous amount of money to build a facility that they didn't believe they had demand for. It's like, why would they not take the money to build a facility? They didn't even skin it again. It's like, it just totally distorts their incentives to actually be an efficient, competitive company.

44:16And so, like, keeping companies accountable, using the capital markets we already have and the allocators we already have, it's like, that feels pretty good. Lean into what we're good at, and then put some of the, like, you know, counteract at kind of more of a national level, some of these unfair practices from other countries or areas where we want to incentivize growth, and we're doing some protectionism because we need it for national interest. Those seem pretty reasonable. It's ironic that we as a country sometimes get critiqued for being overly financialized or too much into financial engineering, but we've noted a number of examples on this call, on this episode, where we can actually benefit from leaning into that strength and greater kind of financial engineering in terms of aligning sort of, you know, good outcomes for the markets with strategic priorities.

45:01Well, like, where else could you finance $200 billion of data center investments with, like, basically no real revenue to show for it? Like, it's crazy. Like, a government can't even do that. Like, so it is, like, so f - Like, we have a - it is such an asset. Like, is it always right? Does it get all, like, bubbly, right? Like, is it, like, you know, whatever, right? It's, like, certainly not worse than how most governments operate on these things. But it has enabled the West to do such outrageous things, and, like, the US to do such outrageous things that are capital-intensive in a way that nobody in history has ever seen.

45:36Like, that is... that is a huge asset. Um, and so, like, yeah, does it get a little crazy with some of the, like, really exotic instruments? Sure. But, like, that's on the margin compared to, like, the massive asset we've created with this. Yeah. Ork, you guys saw Oracle earlier this week. Oracle, in one day, added more market cap based on a single AI data center build deal. They had a more market gap that day than most national stock markets in there. Right. And so we have this, you know, kind of to your point, this is actually my big takeaway from our, you know, it is astonishing how good we are at things like that.

46:09And then, you know, the pessimistic view is, you know, the fall off to the world that you guys are trying to fix. But, you know, the other view would be, wow, imagine if we could be as sophisticated at manufacturing and industrial systems and military assistance as we are in data centers. And yeah, to Eric's point, like, it's not completely clear why they're that different when it comes down to it. Guys, we brought up a couple examples, but I want to get more into what's misunderstood or not fully appreciated about our competition vis-a-vis China, whether it relates to manufacturing or security, defense, either the state of today, but also where things are going.

46:48America has a very hard challenge and has picked a... We always fight an away game, right? Like, we're always... We're not fighting wars on our homeland. You know, we're always projecting power somewhere around the globe. That is a very hard challenge. And I think in the recent history, you know, vis-a-vis Ukraine, and I think what would pragmatically happen in a Taiwan scenario, there's American support with, you know, the ally under attack being able to defend themselves. And so I think that's, you know, kind of the backdrop of how the U.S. sort of thinks about these things. Well, that presents a very hard problem, right, which is, in a Taiwan scenario, your ability to stage, your ability to resupply, your ability to get things in is the critical question.

47:40But China knew this, and so they have invested systematically in technologies that push back the U.S. and push our whole strategy way, way out, right? So they've invested in space-based sensing. They can find our ships. They can find a lot of aircraft way out, thousands of miles away. They've invested in this DF-26 missile called the carrier killer missile commonly, which is able to shoot, I want to say it's something around 1 ,200 miles out, which makes it so that carriers, warships, All these things we would use for resupply typically are massively at risk. They've got very long-range anti-air missiles, so things that can shoot down aircraft.

48:21And so they've created this impenetrable bubble, and that's what they've been investing in, knowing that if they can break the ability of the U.S. to get close, to stage, to resupply, that just cripples the entirety of the U.S. war apparatus from being able to be a real threat. And you combine that with their production capacity, where there's something like 250 times the shipbuilding capacity, you know, massively, massively, probably thousands of times on the weapon side. You know, it is just on drones, it's massive. Like, you just kind of look category by category, massively outpacing on production.

48:56So even if their stuff is half as good, but they've got so much more of it, and they have systematically built up a system that can target us at range, strike us at range, and hold everything at risk, that breaks the entire U.S. war strategy. So it makes it very, very hard. Now, the counter to this, though, is, um, you know, in a - in a Taiwan situation, the geography's very hard to sustain the, like, rate you would need to, like, actually occupy, because the goal is to defeat a Chinese occupation, not just an invasion, right? It's not just, you know, people on the sand on the beach. It's, like, actually subverting the government and taking over control.

49:36you have to sustain extensive, like, maritime campaigns, you know, and that is hard, right? And there's very few places you can land. Like, there's all these very challenging things. So I think the calculus basically boils down for G of, is he gonna be successful, right? Like, he stated his intention, he stated clearly what he wants to do, he wants to reunify, if necessary, by force, he stated that he wants to have the military ready by 27. But I think the whole game is really just making it clear that their strategy that, in many ways, broke the US war plan, there is a counteracting strategy, and that Taiwan is prepared, and that it will be too hard to be successful, and the odds are not in your favor.

50:17Because the loss there is probably the thing he fears the most. Chris Martin, anything worth adding to that? No, Brian and I talk about this every time we see each other over dinner. I think the one thing that always shocks me, and probably shocks Brian, is how uneducated the smart people in the country are about how bad this looks. And the easiest example is, I think we run out of, every war game we run, we run out of munitions, missiles, whatever, in like six to seven days. And then it takes about two to three years to refill that battery of, you know, hey, you now have more missiles to shoot.

50:55So apart from the Brian strategic layer, I just think every single war, basically, if it goes hot, you know, both sides throw everything they've got at each other over a time period. And it's basically then, if it gets protracted, how fast can you reconstitute? And Brian's correct. It's not like we're 50 % behind. It's just like, we shoot all our missiles in one week and then we have none for two years. That is how kind of terrible the situation is. And I'll make one last point to Brian's point, which is my thesis on this is because of the one-child policy is going to really drop off China's population very quickly at a certain period of time.

51:37It creates this forcing function where, in my opinion, the Taiwan scenario is more likely to happen because if they don't hit this window, they're not going to have a chance in 30 to 40 years because they just have this huge population drop-off coming really fast down the pipe. So there really is this, like, yes, the Davidson window, but over the next 10 to 15 years, it's going to be this constant, very CCP-style pressure game of like test, test, test, ball of frog, ball of frog, ball of frog. The only thing we can do is focus on, honestly, attritable systems because if you kill a carrier and they've got that range, there's nothing we can do about it.

52:12Counteracting sensing in space, a lot of attritable mass, mass producing those systems so that, you know, we basically blow everything into seven days. We've got to have the manufacturing battery to be able to refill the clip extremely fast. And it's going to be this pacing event. I think that unless it goes hot in 28, is gonna be 10 to 15 years. And as long as we can hold them off there, then their population drops off, and we're good for another 300 years. Like, that's kind of how I view the equation. 300 years is a long time. Yeah. It seems like, on one hand, there's the sort of extreme, you know, bearish view that people like Peter Zayon have about sort of, you know, demographic collapse, and combined with sort of their future challenges in energy and food.

52:55He thinks that they're gonna implode in the next few years, and then on the other hand, you have this extreme bullish approach of, hey, they make everything, they're smarter, et cetera, and it seems like there's a gap in sort of sober, you know, a sober perspective that analyzes, you know, where they're great at, but also acknowledges sort of things like, you know, how much they're overleveraged, and sort of the real estate, and sort of the state of their economy, the slowing growth, and, you know, accounts for demographic challenges as well. And I think, like, are they head of a small manufacturing, defense production?

53:25Absolutely. Like, to Brian's point, like the buildings in China, if you knock open the concrete wall, is it just cardboard? Like, yes, most likely, that is their culture. But if you're at 1 ,001 in production, it doesn't really matter. The economy's under serious stress. But again, I think all these economic stresses make it more likely that they have to do something versus like they just won't because they're starting to get weak. But yeah, you know, if we were 50 % behind on production, it would be fine because half the missiles are not gonna work because they're gonna build them like they build houses in apartment buildings.

53:57Half of them are concrete. But at 100 or 1 ,000 to 1, it's like, it doesn't matter. It's just mass, to Brian's point. Yeah, and I think these, like, it's historically, like, China's been shockingly good at overcoming a lot of these challenges if they commit the state apparatus to it, right? And so the, you know, if... I think the other part of this is, like, these actions don't... I think a lot of people apply the Western sort of view, which is, you know, prosperity for the population vis -à-vis economic growth is the only religion, right? Like, it's the only driving principle, by and large. And, you know, there's other flavors that come in and out, but basically everyone's unified around that as the primary goal.

54:38And if you were to tank the economy, you would be voted out and it wouldn't work, right? And, like, that's the dominant factor. And he's not that, right? Like, his goal is preservation of CCP and his legacy. And all his actions are commensurate with those things. And so the economy is a supporting role to that goal. The... He has demonstrated that he does not care if he harms the economy if he believes it is in the interest of national security and preservation. Um, you know, how he views allies and partners, it's always very viewed through a different lens of kind of Chinese power on these things.

55:14And so the... I don't think, like, a lot of people put the Western leader, rational, you know, growth-first decision-making against G's strategy, but there's no evidence that's how he operates. Uh, like, all the evidence is actually, it's much more a preservation strategy and a legacy strategy. Uh, and so, when things are under threat, when things are under duress, he'll choose the thing that he thinks is most aligned to that goal. If that's, you know, deal with the economy through, um, preservation, great. Zero the debt and, like, a whole bunch of things take a bath, like, uh, he'll probably be fine with that, too.

55:50It keeps him in a powerful position and preserves his legacy and preserves his CCP. So I think the calculus is just wildly different. So when people try to apply the Western rules to this, you get very incorrect conclusions that don't seem consistent with his actions or the results. You guys and your companies are on the front lines of helping fixers and improve our situation as it relates to manufacturing and national security. We're honored to be supporters. Thank you. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Thanks, guys. Thanks, guys. Thanks for listening to the A16Z podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com slash A16Z.

56:35We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. It should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com forward slash disclosures.