Why Will Founders Combine Software and Hardware?

Marc Andreessen says AI-native startups already see what they can do with AI differently from a typical incumbent in almost any industry, and he calls the gap as wide as any he has seen in his career. The gap is still opening, because the capability races ahead week by week. Those founders will not stay inside one category. They will not think of themselves as only a software company, only a hardware company, or only an AI company. He already sees them choosing how many areas to touch and how to combine those areas.

He sets the change against Netscape in 1994. If he and Ben Horowitz had today's tools then, he says they would have built the whole internet, gotten crypto done then, had streaming video sooner, and taken on hardware they never attempted. The product plans are more technically intensive, the business plans more ambitious, and the companies ramp faster. The conceptual side of building a company blows out once those pieces sit in one plan.