Jan Leike, a leading AI researcher who earlier this month resigned from OpenAI before publicly criticizing the company’s approach to AI safety, has joined OpenAI rival Anthropic to lead a new “superalignment” team. In a post on X, Leike said that his team at Anthropic will focus on various aspects of AI safety and security, […]
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Powerhouse venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz is promoting Jennifer Li to general partner after six years at the firm. She’s being tapped to help invest the new $1.25 billion Infrastructure fund managed by longtime a16z general partner Martin Casado.
The Infrastructure fund is part of the fresh $7.2 billion that the Silicon Valley VC giant just raised. Li has been an investing partner on the Infrastructure team for a while, which means she was already writing checks and taking board seats. But her promotion puts her in rarified air: making her the 27th general partner at the firm, and she’s hit this career milestone while in her early 30s.
While that may sound like a lot of GPs, a16z currently has over 500 employees. Plus she’s one of only four GPs on the Infrastructure team. The others are Anjney Midha who joined the firm last summer; Zane Lackey, who joined two years ago; and Casado.
“Promoting Jennifer to general partner means that much more autonomy in deal making and, as importantly, that much more influence on the team’s culture, investment philosophy, and operating model,” Casado told TechCrunch over email.
In Casado’s blog post announcing her promotion, he also mentioned that she and he were the two people largely responsible for building the infrastructure investing team. He described her as “a low ego, incredibly reliable and generous partner to work with. No detail escapes her notice, and no challenge too daunting for her to tackle. As Ben Horowitz has said many times, ‘She embodies the a16z culture.’”
In her time at a16z, Li helped the firm find data connectivity startup Fivetran, valued at $5.6 billion in 2021; and data analytics developer tool startup dbt, which hit a $4.2 billion valuation in 2022 (both of those deals were led by Casado). She led the firm’s investments in developer-focused video platform Mux, a unicorn as of 2021; database startup Motherduck, valued at $400 million earlier this year; and AI voice startup Eleven Labs, a unicorn as of January, where she serves on the board.
Prior to joining a16z in 2018, she led product at AI startup Solvvy, acquired by Zoom in 2022; led self-service and analytics products at AppDynamics, acquired by Cisco for $3.7 billion; and was a Kleiner Perkins Product Fellow in 2016.
Elon Musk’s decision to green-light a robotaxi over an affordable EV might cost the company its lead.
Last week, Musk reportedly canned the effort in favor of a robotaxi, the sort of pie-in-the-sky project that defined his first decade at the helm. There’s an argument to be made that the company is where it is today by betting big, then delivering on enough of its promises to impress shareholders and generate significant positive cashflow. Problem is, in the early days, there was both everything and nothing to lose. The whole company could have gone under, but there was also less on the line.
Today, Tesla is no longer the plucky upstart. It brought in nearly $100 billion in revenue last year and earned net profits of $15 billion, the sort that would have other automakers rewarding shareholders with richer dividends. It’s a global manufacturer that cranks out hundreds of thousands of cars every quarter, the type of operation where success is measured in continuous improvement in productivity and process indicators.
Tesla was reportedly on the cusp of building a $25,000 EV. In January, Musk confirmed that the company would begin construction of a next-generation vehicle at its Texas plant in the second half of 2025. Suppliers had been asked to bid on parts contracts, Reuters reported, with weekly production volume starting at 10,000 vehicles per week. Given flagging sales of the company’s existing product line, it would have been a welcome shot in the arm.
An inexpensive EV would have significantly increased Tesla’s total addressable market by dramatically undercutting the average sales price in the U.S., which is currently at around $47,000. It also would have given the company a product to hold its ground against a predicted onslaught of inexpensive Chinese EVs.
But it also would have meant creating a production line from scratch, something the company last did at scale with the Model 3. By all accounts, that wasn’t a fun experience.
Building a robotaxi, though. Now, that sounds like fun.
Musk has long been enamored with the concept. Four years ago, he said that such a car would be able to earn its owner up to $30,000 per year as it ferried paying passengers to and fro. It would be so popular, Musk reportedly told biographer Walter Isaacson, that “there is no amount that we could possibly build that will be enough.”
Problem is, Tesla has been trying to master autonomous hardware and software for a while now, and it doesn’t appear anywhere close to delivering a vehicle capable of Level 5 driving, which would require zero human input. Despite years of work, Autopilot remains a Level 2 system, which means it requires human attention at all times. The same is true for Full Self-Driving. (Indeed, the company recently started using the term “supervised” when referring to the software suite.) And while artificial intelligence has been advancing rapidly of late, is it moving quickly enough to provide Tesla with a blockbuster product in the next few years?
Given Musk’s desire to pursue exploratory projects, the logical path would be to spin up a skunkworks inside Tesla or spin out a division that’s purely focused on bringing a robotaxi to market. The latter is unlikely to happen because much of Musk’s wealth is tied up in Tesla stock, and he probably doesn’t trust anyone else to run the company when that much money is on the line. The former has more of a chance, but Musk also likes to appear heavily involved in, well, everything at Tesla. He’d balk at the idea of “only” running a skunkworks.
It’s something that Tesla’s board should probably be weighing in on. And maybe they are. But numerous reports have also illustrated just how tightly linked that board is with Musk. They don’t appear to disagree on much, and that could cost Tesla its lead.
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