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Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

a16z.com

11–20 of 75 posts

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#11
post #7

A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

VC is a marketing game. You want to be attractive to founders, so that the best founders/companies come to you and want to choose you.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#12
post #8

This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to…

> This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership.

what? a 12 year old with a titanic budget could put this PC together

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#13
post #8

This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to…

The technical expertise of... buying four of the fanciest Nvidia GPU and plugging them into an off-the-shelf motherboard in an off-the-shelf chassis? A serious attempt at this kind of build would use the server variant of the RTX6000 and custom air ducts to cool them efficiently, but they packed four blower coolers like sardines so it no doubt sounds like a screaming jet engine under load.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#14
post #12
post #8

This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. Love reading this kind of stuff, but the article really needs a price to put this in perspective. It would be the VC that would ignore price, lol, but roughing this out it looks like it costs 45k to build this thing. Seems, at first glance, that this is a cost efficient way to…

> This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. what? a 12 year old with a titanic budget could put this PC together

I don't want to be insulting here, but have you sat down with a partner at a VC before? You may be surprised to discover their skill is rarely deeply technical...

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#15
post #7

A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

[deleted]

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#16
post #7

A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

It's been such a mind-boggling decline in intellect, combined with really odd and intense conspiratorial behavior around crypto, that I went into a bit a few months ago.

My weak, uncited, understanding from then they're poorly positioned, i.e in our set they're still the guys who write you a big check for software, but in the VC set they're a joke: i.e. they misunderstood carpet bombing investment as something that scales, and went all in on way too many crypto firm. Now, they have embarrassed themselves with a ton of assets that need to get marked down, it's clearly behind the other bigs, but there's no forcing function to do markdowns.

So we get primal screams about politics and LLM-generated articles about how a $9K video card is the perfect blend between price and performance.

There's other comments effusively praising them on their unique technical expertise. I maintain a llama.cpp client on every platform you can think of. Nothing in this article makes any sense. If you're training, you wouldn't do it on only 4 $9K GPUs that you own. If you're inferencing, you're not getting much more out of this than you would a ~$2K Framework desktop.

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#18
post #7

A16Z is consistently the most embarrassing VC firm at any given point in time. I guess optimistically they might be doing “outrage marketing” but it feels more like one of those places where the CEO is just an idiot and tells his employees to jump on every trend. The funny part is that they still make money. It seems like once you’ve got the connections, being a VC is a very easy job these days.

VC is a marketing game. You want to be attractive to founders, so that the best founders/companies come to you and want to choose you.

But is gassing up founders something they want? Idk, maybe. But just remember these guys crypto play and it feels like they'll just yes man you off a cliff if you're a founder...

Re: Building A16Z's Personal AI Workstation

#20
post #14
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This article is a great way to showcase A16Z standinging head and shoulders above other VCs with REAL technical expertise in the partnership. what? a 12 year old with a titanic budget could put this PC together

I don't want to be insulting here, but have you sat down with a partner at a VC before? You may be surprised to discover their skill is rarely deeply technical...

yes, I worked for a VC funded micro startup for 5 years

I was not impressed by any of the partners

(but hey they were better than the PE partners I worked for immediately after)

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