This summer, I joined Speedrun, a16z’s accelerator. They opened an office on Sansome Street for our cohort.
During our first week there, security politely started ushering founders out around 10pm. Apparently founders are supposed to sleep. On the way out, I counted about ten people from the Speedrun team still at their desks.
When I tell friends I’ve been spending most of my days in the office, I get the sympathetic look. “It’ll be over soon. You’ve got this.” I smile and nod, but deep down I’m thinking: you don’t get it. I love this.
I love trying to pull off things that look a little unreasonable. Building a company feels like trying to manufacture a string of mini miracles. Cracking a distribution channel. Hiring someone I’d be ecstatic to work for. Convincing a large company to take a bet on a tiny one. Delivering so much value that our price starts to look silly.
Most of our attempts go nowhere. Versions one through five get crickets. I work late, pace around the office, and try again. Then things finally click. The adrenaline rush that comes next… nothing comes close.
Since joining Speedrun, a few of those mini miracles have started landing:
We’ve hit $1M ARR.
We’ve cracked AEO reaching over 100k+ page visits/mo
Figured out some novel growth hacks for agent led growth ( our partner Josh wrote about it here)
I’m proud of that. I’ve also been trying to understand why things started clicking during this program.
I can point to plenty of things. Our partners, Josh Lu and Jon Lai. Operating partners helping with GTM, content production, hiring & putting us in front of the right people...those folks are as hungry as the founders. Access to more than $10 million in cloud, AI, and software credits (specifically the generous credits from OAI, Anthropic and Amazon Bedrock). And the chance to ask people who have built extraordinary companies how they did it and get their unfiltered, honest take.
All of that helps. But the more I sit with the question, the more I come back to an almost disappointingly simple answer: I spend my days in a room full of spiky people, each wrestling with a hard problem of their own.
The a16z Speedrun office opened on August 17. For forty days, I’ve had a place where I can work from 9am to 10pm alongside other founders, the investing partners, and the operating team.
The space is fancy. We’re spoiled with snacks and the occasional catered meals. I am not above appreciating either. But what’s mattered most is being able to look up from my own problems and see how someone else is working through theirs.
The room on September 1. Photo: Myleen Hollero / a16z Speedrun archive.
Online, I see V6: the launch that broke X, the deal that closed, the chart racing from $0 to $100M in revenue.
Here, I’ve been a few desks away from mini miracles happening almost every day. I’ve seen the earlier attempts too, the failures, the anxiety, and what finally made things click. And if I miss something, I can just tap someone on the shoulder.
The beautiful thing about having 80+ companies working alongside one another, with partners, investors, and mentors floating around, is how many unknown unknowns I’ve stumbled into. Some expensive gaps in my understanding that I wouldn’t have thought to look for.
Most of my experience is in consumer products. I came into Speedrun knowing very little about the world of B2B: figuring out which problems businesses actually need solved, how to run discovery, and how to sell into big orgs. I’ve learned enough since to realize how much nuance I was missing.
A conversation over laptops, August 17.
Almost a decade ago, when I lived in Dubai and got my first job in VC (thank you Beco Capital), I read Why Startup Hubs Work by Paul Graham for the first time. In it he wrote “chance meetings produce miracles to compensate for the disasters that characteristically befall startups.” During Speedrun, when I reread this essay I figured that this is exactly what Speederun did but on a smaller yet higher density scale.
Bell Labs, AT&T’s research lab, offers an example of the value of a high talent density community attacking different ambitious problems: the first practical silicon solar cell came out of researchers finding that one person’s work held the answer to another person’s problem.
Daryl Chapin was trying to power telephone equipment in the tropics, where ordinary batteries failed too quickly. His early solar cells produced too little electricity. Meanwhile, Gerald Pearson and chemist Calvin Fuller were working on semiconductors. When one of their silicon devices responded strongly to light, Pearson knew whose problem it might solve. He went to Chapin’s office and told him to try silicon. Chapin tested it and changed direction.
Pearson knew enough about Chapin’s problem to recognize the relevance of something Chapin wasn’t working on. That is a very specific kind of luck: someone else understands what I’m stuck on and has seen something I haven’t.
That is what I’ll miss about Speedrun. I’ve had enough time alongside these founders to get interested in their problems, and to let them in on mine. A few desks away, someone is working through something that might change how I think about my own company.
A few desks away. From my camera.
Joining Speedrun is the best decisions I’ve made building Lazyweb thus far.
I came in hoping to learn faster. I hadn’t expected how much of that learning would come from being curious about someone else’s problems, and having them be curious about mine.
Now on to Demo Day 🫡,
Ali Abouelatta