Alex Rampell

Yeah, we love Town.

I mean, we, uh, my partner Alex Rampell sits on the board.

We led the, the Series A, so shout out John Denis.

[laughs]

Um, and so I think that sort of sense of humble confidence is something I look for.

Um, and then Alex always...

Uh, my partner, Alex Rampell, always describes, uh, this notion of, you know, can, can they materialize, um, you know, capital, labor, and customers, you know? Um, kind of like can they sell.

Yeah.

If you look back at all the best businesses, at the early stages, they were-

If the incumbent already owns the customer, the data, and the system of record, where does an AI-native startup have an advantage? In this episode, Elena Burger sits down with a16z partner Seema Amble and Leo co-founder and CEO Vlad Keil to answer that question through one of the most complex parts of the enterprise, procurement.

They get into why so much of the actual work happens outside the system of record across emails, spreadsheets, contracts, engineering data, and conversations with suppliers.

And Vlad explains how Leo is building agents that can coordinate that context and increasingly take on the job end to end.

They also discuss how you earn enough trust to let an agent negotiate on your behalf, why building an internal AI tool can be deceptively easy until you hit the exceptions, and what changes when agents eventually sit on both sides of a transaction.

Welcome back to the a16z Podcast.

I'm Elena Burger, and today I'm joined by Seema Amble, a partner at a16z, and Vlad Keil, co-founder and CEO of Leo, which builds AI agents for enterprise procurement.

Seema, you recently wrote a piece called "The Incumbents Are Coming," and it asks a question facing almost every AI application company, if an established software vendor already has the customer and the data and the model can work across its tools, where does a startup have an advantage? And we have Vlad here, and Vlad can really help us understand where a startup has an advantage.

23-year-old sort of analyst or whatever.

But all that is to say, one of the people I ended up speaking with was Alex Rimpel.

And Alex basically was like, David, you're amazing.

I think you've built the best team or the best product in this space.

They want to be lazier and richer.

My guest is Alex Rampell.

Alex is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the apps fund, and he's driven a lot of the firm's fintech investing, like Plaid, Mercury, Opendoor.

Hey, do

It's like, I think I'd rather go home at 5 o'clock.

Yeah, would you rather make double the amount of money or half as much money? Right? You just got to choose, right? It's like, I think I'm gonna make double as much money.

Hello fellow data nerds, my guest is Alex Rampell.

Alex is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he leads the apps fund and he has driven a lot of the firm's fintech investing like Plaid, Mercury, Opendoor.

Then he decided to start over.

In this episode, a16z's Alex Rampell and Joe Schmidt sit down with the Lightfield co-founder and CEO to unpack why he walked away from a fast-growing AI product and what he learned from the pivot.

That journey led Keith to a problem inside the CRM.

Companies have huge amounts of customer data spread across emails, meetings, product usage and databases, but no single system that understands the full relationship.

Welcome back to the a16z podcast.

I'm Joe Schmidt.

I'm joined by my partner, Alex Rampell, and Keith Paris.

Keith is the CEO at Lightfield.