From selling startups to Google to backing multibillion‑dollar AI winners - Anish Acharya [a16Z]

Today on BILLIONS, I'm sitting down with Anish Acharya.He sold his first company to Google. His second to Credit Karma — then stayed and helped scale their U.S. Card business to nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue.In 2019, Andreessen Horowitz made him a General Partner. Since then, he's led the Series A in Deel, which just hit a $17.3 billion valuation in October 2025.Most VCs have never operated anything. Anish built, scaled, sold, and then learned how to pick.Anish, thanks a lot for being here !TIMELINE : 00:00:00 - 00:02:30 : Anish Acharya’s entrepreneurial journey00:02:30 - 00:06:28 : Why 2008 and today are the most exciting times for founders00:06:28 - 00:11:38 : The AI model competition and Google's comeback00:11:38 - 00:14:50 : Why the "LLM wrapper" fear is no longer relevant00:14:50 - 00:20:07 : Multi-model approach and the future of AI applications00:20:07 - 00:24:01 : Learning from Credit Karma and the importance of winning00:24:01 - 00:29:14 : Why paternalism kills products and going with human nature00:29:14 - 00:35:28 : AI's human impact and why it's different from social media00:35:28 - 00:42:45 : The future of coding, jobs, and why SaaS isn't dead00:42:45 - 00:55:21 : Investing in Deel, AI companionship, and what it costs to winREFERENCESMark Zuckerberg Sam Altman Sergey Brin Nicolas Dessaigne - Billions EP2Andrej Karpathy Alex Bouaziz Shuo Wang Harry Stebbings - Billions EP4Eugenia Kuyda Credit KarmaDeel ChatGPT Gemini Claude GrokCursor Lovable HarveyReplikaWabiLife360 PapayaQwen