The a16z Show · Sunday, October 25, 2026
Box CEO Aaron Levie explains that unlike past technology waves where startups ran at the speed of their keyboard input, today's AI-first startups can deploy background agents to act as engineers, allowing small teams to produce the output of organizations many times their size.
“The startups that I'm talking to now are, It's... This is not exclusively the case, but let's say it's increasingly the case. It seems like there's now a new sense where the startup founders and the early employees, and I think this basically scales to... to every industry over time. They're more managers of work. And the work is being done by agents.”
“If you kind of have that as your mental model where this person now is the editor, orchestrator, reviewer of code, and they can go on and deploy multiple agents, so they're no longer rate limited by, again, like one terminal, one user interface that they can interact in.”