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BarbAIrians at the Gate: The Financial Opportunity of AI | Andreessen Horowitz

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Leveraged Buyouts became “a thing” in the 1980s thanks to a form of financial engineering called junk debt. Popularized by Michael Milken at Drexel Burnham Lambert, the invention wasn’t all that complicated: issue bonds with very high interest rates and correspondingly high risk, and use that capital to finance the wholesale acquisition of mismanaged, inefficient, and sclerotic companies. (For those that don’t know, the title of this post is a play on the book Barbarians at the Gate, by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar, which chronicles the battle to buy RJR Nabisco in 1988.) In the background, there was also a profoundly impactful technological revolution called the spreadsheet. Released in 1979, VisiCalc was the first “killer app” of finance (on the Apple IIe!), and one of the things that allowed KKR and other early firms to model outcomes and make so much money. With this faster method of calculating, what might have taken weeks could now take seconds. Milken himself is said to have c

BarbAIrians at the Gate: The Financial Opportunity of AI | Andreessen Horowitz Fintech BarbAIrians at the Gate: The Financial Opportunity of AI Alex Rampell Posted August 30, 2023 Subscribe Share Share Email X LinkedIn Facebook Hacker News WhatsApp Flipboard Reddit See more: Banking on AI See more: Banking on AI BarbAIrians at the Gate: The Financial Opportunity of AI Table of Contents Share Share Email X LinkedIn Facebook Hacker News WhatsApp Flipboard Reddit Teldar Paper, Mr. Cromwell, Teldar Paper has 33 different vice presidents, each earning over 200 thousand dollars a year. Now, I have s

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