Exclusive: What Andreessen Horowitz’s Anish Acharya is looking for in consumer AI startups

A few minutes into our Zoom call, Andreessen Horowitz general partner Anish Acharya says something I’ll spend the next twenty-four hours thinking about.

“If it's weird and working, it's exactly where we want to invest…Weird products tend to win.”

Granted, I’m the ideal audience for this idea: I love weird things—theaters with pipe organs, Terry Gilliam, and Atlas Obscura—but the sentiment, beyond being quotable, gets at something essential about how Acharya is thinking about what it means to be a consumer investor in AI.

Acharya exclusively spoke to Term Sheet in advance of a16z’s Wednesday blog post drop outlining the firm’s strategy for investing in consumer AI.

I was intrigued. We talk about enterprise AI matter-of-factly—there's a well-defined business problem and an intended solution thanks to AI. But when it comes to AI for consumers, it feels like you’re relying on animal spirits, since getting to mass adoption is so darn tough. It’s also still early for many AI startups, and we’re coming off a frothy 2023, in which startups in (or adjacent to) AI raised nearly $50 billion, according to data from Crunchbase.

As we get into 2024, here’s what Acharya and a16z are betting on: In a world powered by AI, three things will especially flourish—creativity, productivity, and connection. It’s all rooted in the idea we’re entering an “era of abundance.” Acharya's idea is that for consumers there will be more of all sorts of things—more opportunities for consumers to produce art (he mentions Midjourney a few times), improved workflows that may ultimately trim workweeks, and increased opportunities for connection.

"My controversial take on this is that we all know there's a need for human connection, but I think the human part is overstated,” he told me. “Look at the companion apps, where people are building deep relationships and friendships, and it’s text on a screen. There’s no illusion it’s not an AI, and yet the depth of relationships and engagement is super high. It’s hard for me to take anything from that other than that there's a real connection there.”

It’s a characteristically optimistic take—predictable enough from a firm known for techno-optimism and, lately, its AI bullishness, memorable even in a hype cycle. (In his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto," Marc Andreessen even went so far as to say that “any deceleration of AI will cost lives.”) Recent AI investments by a16z include generative AI startup Luma AI in January and Mistral AI’s $415 million Series A in December, in which the firm was the lead investor.

There’s a lot of money riding on expectations that we’re at the beginning of an AI “platform shift” similar to the move from desktop PCs to mobile devices a decade ago. Does Acharya see any consistent themes in the emergence and adoption of new technology? What’s most striking this time, he says, is not what’s the same, but what’s different

“The last major platform shift was mobile, and it had a lot of impact,” Acharya says. “Incumbents underestimated it. I think you now have executives who came up in that era and have learned the lessons of paying attention to platform shifts.”

On the call, Acharya is surprisingly direct about his and a16z’s perspective. Why not just invest quietly in these ideas? He’s telling me all this, so I forward the message.

“Look, all the work that we do is oriented towards founders,” Acharya said. (Translation: founders, he’s looking for you.) “I think that's very important, but we’d love to get an optimistic message out to as many people as are willing to hear it."

See you tomorrow,

Allie Garfinkle
Twitter: @agarfinks
Email: alexandra.garfinkle@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com