Shangda Xu

Mar 22, 2024 | a16z.com | Sarah Wang |Tugce Erten |Alex Immerman |Shangda Xu

Effectively monetizing any new technology is a race to capture market share while still giving yourself room to grow your business. But the stakes are much higher with generative AI: though it promises to deliver unprecedented value to businesses, it can also be very expensive to serve to each incremental customer. At the growth stages in particular, founders need to be mindful of their unit economics and margins. We often hear these founders ask: how can I capture the value created by genAI?

Jun 23, 2023 | a16z.com | Sarah Wang |Shangda Xu

Large language models (LLMs) have taken the tech industry by storm, powering experiences that can only be described as magical—from writing a week’s worth of code in seconds to generating conversations that feel even more empathetic than the ones we have with humans.

Feb 15, 2023 | a16z.com | David Haber |Melissa Wasser |JJ Yu |Shangda Xu

This article is the second of four installments in our new series, How Fintech Companies Can Simplify Their Funding Strategy. Read part one on Choosing the Right Funding Structure here. In our prior installment of this series, we explored a variety of funding options for startups looking to launch a new financial product. In this article, we’ll do a deep dive into negotiating your first warehouse facility and how to think about important trade-offs when evaluating key terms in the credit agreement.