Kristina Shen

Mar 26, 2024 | a16z.com | Kristina Shen |Zeya Yang |Jay Rughani |Ali Yahya

An enduring promise of new technologies is to find ways to increase human productivity. Software and robotics, for example, have always presented immense potential to automate repetitive mundane tasks that humans perform, freeing them up to do more valuable work. In the last few decades, we’ve made meaningful progress toward this goal, and the first generation of robotic process automation created some massive companies, such as UiPath. Yet, we never made it past the most simple tasks.

Apr 6, 2023 | a16z.com | Joe Schmidt |Kristina Shen

When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify this complexity became some of the most valuable companies on earth. This is true for systems, and it’s also true for companies: Many of the most dominant businesses in the world have built competitive advantages from being the underlying operating systems for their customers.

Mar 30, 2023 | a16z.com | Zeya Yang |Kristina Shen |Joshua Lu |Robin Guo

We’ve watched large language models (LLMs) become mainstream over the past few years and have studied the implementations in the context of B2B applications. Despite some enormous technological advances and the presence of LLMs in the general zeitgeist, we believe we’re still only in the first wave of generative AI applications for B2B use cases.

Feb 8, 2023 | a16z.com | Kristina Shen |Zeya Yang

In recent years, we’ve seen a renaissance in productivity software. To make knowledge work seamless, internal teams have largely moved off of “hard files,” toward real-time workspaces with commenting, collaboration, and notifications. And yet, the way that organizations communicate with each other — inter-company collaboration — still largely lives in email and file attachments.