More About Anish
Anish Acharya is an entrepreneur and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. At a16z, he focuses on consumer investing, including AI-native products and companies that will help usher in a new era of abundance. Anish first joined the firm in 2019 with a focus on fintech, often investing in B2C technologies. He currently serves on the boards of Clutch, Deel, Mosaic, Method, Payall, Silo, The Coterie, and Titan.
Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Anish founded and sold two consumer companies, successfully navigating multiple technology platform shifts.
In 2014, Anish founded Snowball, a universal inbox for Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, SMS, and other mobile messaging clients to help consumers rethink how they communicate online. After Snowball was acquired by Credit Karma in 2015, he served as GM of Core Consumer and GM of Cards. He helped scale the U.S. Card to over 100 million members and nearly $1 billion in 2019 revenue.
In 2008, Anish co-founded SocialDeck. As an “anywhere, anytime, anyone” social gaming company, SocialDeck enabled simultaneous game play across multiple mobile devices and social networks. The company was acquired by Google in 2010. At Google, Anish led various mobile product efforts and invested for Google Ventures.
Anish graduated from the University of Waterloo and lives in the Bay Area with his family. He has a passion for music and mixes tracks in his spare time.
Latest Content
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Now is the time to reinvent the phone call. Thanks to gen AI, humans will spend time on the phone only when a call has value to them.
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We predict an Era of Abundance — lives will be enriched through new channels for creativity, along with new paths to self discovery and belonging.
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Generative AI offers founders an opportunity to completely reinvent workflows — and will spawn a new cohort of fully AI-native companies.
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Voice-First Apps, AI Moats, Never-Ending Games, and Anime. We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in 2024. Here in our 3-part series, you’ll hear directly from partners across all our verticals, as we dive even more deeply into these ideas. What’s the why now? Who is already building in these spaces? What opportunities and challenges are on the horizon? And how can you get involved?
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In April, the first viral AI cover dropped. More innovation in music and generative AI is coming, and here's what it might look like.
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Thanks to generative AI, the much-discussed topic of “self-driving money” finally has a chance to achieve its potential.
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If you’re looking for something fun, or a bit more business-minded, to read, watch, or listen to, a16z’s Fintech partners have you covered.
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Those who complain about hallucinations miss the point. A dispersion of outputs (including hallucinations) will unlock a whole new category of product design: probabilistic products.
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At this early stage in generative AI, technologists and product pickers will likely have the biggest impact on which companies emerge as winners.
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The emergence of generative AI could yield the largest transformation the financial services market has seen in decades.
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At the end of 2022, our team at a16z asked dozens of partners across the firm to spotlight one big idea that startups in their fields could tackle in 2023. Emerging from this exercise came 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for the year, ranging from entertainment franchise games to precision delivery of medicine to small modular reactors, and of course loads of AI applications. In our 2-part series, we’ll be covering 12 of these big ideas with the partners that shared them. Here in part 2, we’ll cover Fintech, American Dynamism, and Bio & Health. Listen in as we chat with Anish Acharya, Angela Strange, Michelle Volz, Ryan McEntush, Vijay Pande, and Julie Yoo. And for the full list of 40+ ideas, check out the full article: https://a16z.com/2022/12/15/big-ideas-in-tech-2023/
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Debt is daunting—its labyrinth of complex rules, opaque governing bodies, and unique vernacular makes it difficult for the average consumer to understand. Concepts like credit scores, APRs, retroactive interest, and coll...
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Historically, wealth managers offered consumers a choice: either put their money on autopilot (through an offering like Vanguard’s low-fee ETFs) or — if wealthy enough — be actively managed by an advisor at somewhere lik...
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In this episode of a16z Live, we are joined by Titan co-founder and co-CEO Clayton Gardner; a16z General Partner Anish Acharya; and a16z growth partner, Alex Immerman. The trio starts their conversation by diving into th...
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As we write in our piece It’s All About The Money (Movement), moving money internationally is an opaque, fee-intensive process that requires two things: actually “moving” the money and leveraging onboarding and complianc...
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The way businesses move money internationally has not changed in decades. Why do cross-border transactions take so long and cost so much to complete? The distributed global ledger is to blame. Here are the three key wedges to create other types of business payments.
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When the U.S. government pursued its huge Covid stimulus package in 2020, they likely had little idea their actions would have such an impact on consumer fintech.
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Com empresas do futuro bem-sucedidas iniciando suas atividades em diversos países ao mesmo tempo, inúmeras oportunidades se abrem para startups ambiciosas que querem desenvolver os sistemas internos de software de que essas organizações precisarão para crescer.
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Much opportunity exists to build a modern software stack that supports the next generation of default global companies, from local employment law and talent sourcing to multi-country incorporation and expense management.
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A medida que los exitosos negocios del mañana se lanzan en varios países a la vez, abundan las oportunidades para las empresas emergentes ambiciosas que buscan construir los sistemas de software internos que estas empresas necesitarán para crecer.
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At its core, wealth management is fairly straightforward: an advisor helps a customer optimize their tax and investment strategies to maximize wealth creation and preservation. But while this premise may seem simple, its...
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This first appeared in the monthly a16z fintech newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest fintech news.
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Do SaaS para sistemas operacionais freemium: um novo diferencial para serviços financeiros.
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Plus, envisioning a new consumer banking stack, Apple & contactless payments, and building to reduce medical debt.
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In 2021, financial services continued to have its moment, with fintech fundraising surpassing all years prior. What's in store for 2022?
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We are in the early days of consumer fintech -- today, only 15% of Americans bank exclusively through fintechs, and Wall Street real estate remains dominated by legacy players. But that is poised to change, and we are se...
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This first appeared in the monthly a16z fintech newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest fintech news.
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In the August fintech newsletter from a16z: Why every company may spin out a fintech company, what goes into an index, and the case for credit unions
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In the last 10 years, as neobanks emerged and consumer financial services came online, the prevailing assumption was that credit unions and community banks would slowly die off. How would a locally-focused, relationship-...
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Over the last decade, consumer investing strategies have generally fallen into one of two buckets: either passive investing through ETFs and robos (e.g. Wealthfront, Betterment) or active DIY investing platforms (e.g. Ro...
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Plus, will neobanks be winner take many? How to choose the right partner bank? News and analysis from the a16z fintech team in our monthly newsletter.
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This first appeared in the monthly a16z fintech newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest fintech news.
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Conventional wisdom holds that passive trading is the rational investing strategy. Active traders are often portrayed as gambling rubes or lucky opportunists who will (eventually) be handily beaten by index funds. But th...
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This first appeared in the monthly a16z fintech newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest fintech news.
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This year, as “every company becomes a fintech company,” fintech surged into mainstream consciousness. The fallout from COVID-19 crippled the economy, depressed small businesses, and scrambled many people’s financial out...
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Democratizing investing, embracing social+, embedding insurance, revamping distribution, empowering community, and disintermediating the banking system.
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The intersection of social networks and finance—as well as shifting attitudes around what we share about money online—have given way to an ambitious new wave of financial products. Fintech partner Anish Acharya, formerly a product manager at Credit Karma, consumer partner D’Arcy Coolican (who himself is a former founder in this space), and host Lauren Murrow discuss why the “holy grail” of social plus finance is both so challenging and, potentially, so rewarding. This episode is part of Social Strikes Back, a new series exploring the next generation of social networks and how they’re shaping the future of consumer tech. See more at a16z.com/social-strikes-back.
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This first appeared in the monthly a16z fintech newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest fintech news.
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Recent news, commentary, and analysis from the a16z fintech team. Subscribe to get this newsletter in your inbox.
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One of the most important catalysts for the recent growth in financial services has been fintech enablers and infrastructure. Companies like Plaid wrap otherwise byanztine legacy infrastructure in modern APIs, allowing e...
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Millennials and Gen Z have been hard-hit by the one-two punch of the 2008 and 2020 financial crises. That experience has radically shaped their approach to finances and their mindset around credit and debt. This episode explores how fintech founders are now designing products tailored to the financial challenges of younger consumers, from managing and avoiding student loans to building credit to saving and budgeting apps.
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Recent news, commentary, and analysis from the a16z fintech team.
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Since Marc Andreessen declared it 10 years ago software has eaten so much of the world — transportation, real estate, communication, banking, and more. Yet the agriculture industry (the stuff we actually eat!) has largel...
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Hemingway famously wrote that there are two ways to go bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. In many ways, the impact of technology on our day-to-day financial choices has followed a similar trajectory. Fintech has been a...
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One of the linchpins of the American dream is a path to home ownership—home ownership has been a path to financial progress for millions of individuals and holds an outsized cultural significance in our society as the fo...
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Recent news, commentary, and analysis from the a16z fintech team.
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Banking for kids and teens, why the Rocket Mortgage IPO matters, and how the big banks are guarding against an extended recession.
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The financial world has been quietly upended over the past decade. Banks are being disintermediated from their customers by fintech companies, new infrastructure technologies are lowering the barrier to entry for non-fin...
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Recent news and analysis from the a16z fintech team.
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We are very excited to announce our Series A investment in Brightside, a company focused on financial health, distributed through employers. Not only does Brightside improve financial wellness and literacy—helping both e...
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Partner banks, chartered institutions that provide fintech companies access to banking products, have exploded in recent years—by our count, their ranks have grown more than five times over the past decade. Today, there...
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The a16z fintech team on COVID's impact on the housing market, the wave of new investors on online brokerages, and the near-term outlook for banks.
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Over the past few decades, we’ve seen significant changes in how employers think about their workforce. The historical model was to focus hiring on individuals in your geographic backyard, then provide those individuals...
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The a16z fintech team on direct cash transfers, the finance apps seeing an uptick, and how dozens of fintech companies are assisting in coronavirus relief.
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The a16z fintech team on plummeting mortgage rates, policies for small business relief, why Apple is waiving credit card payments, and more.