Ben Horowitz and David Solomon: The Sweetest Macro Spot in 40 Years

Summary

• Solomon sees one of the strongest macro setups in his “40-odd years” in markets for financial and investable assets. Significant and continuing fiscal expansion—including the Big Beautiful Bill that started in 2026—meets a rate-cutting cycle, deregulation and a capital-investment supercycle he describes as like something never seen before; the 4 largest companies contributed 1% to GDP growth with their $400 billion of spending last year. This “cocktail of stimulus” is hard to slow, although prices remain 25% to 30% higher and geopolitical risk has risen.
• Confidence has moved strategic transactions from an automatic “no” to “maybe,” setting up what Solomon predicts could be “the biggest M&A year in history.” He also expects a bigger IPO year as substantial private companies finally enter the pipeline. Horowitz agrees on activity but flags unresolved FTC uncertainty, especially toward tech, which might redirect deals into IP transactions.
• Goldman’s strategic problem is simultaneously scale and stable funding. Its $1.9 trillion balance sheet compares with JPMorgan’s $4.5 trillion; Solomon’s shorthand is that “when JPMorgan’s six, we’re gonna have to be at least three and a half.” Goldman now has about $500 billion of deposits—including over $200 billion through its digital platform—funding about 40% of the firm after having none 15 years ago.
• a16z’s rise rests on treating venture as a product for founders and then designing that product to scale. Horowitz recalls that “the best time to raise money is when nobody has money,” then describes a venture market that might expand from approximately 15 technology companies reaching $100 million in revenue annually toward 150. In 2025, about 18.3% of all U.S. venture capital raised was raised by a16z.
• AI is turning technological leads into capital-intensive races rather than durable software moats. The old “Mythical Man-Month” meant a company like Google could not simply use 1,000 engineers to wipe out a startup that had figured out a product with 7 or 8 people, but Horowitz argues that proprietary data plus enough GPUs can now solve “almost any problem. It is magic.” Companies reaching over $100 million—and in some cases $1 billion—in under a year may need public capital simply to keep competing.
• Enterprise AI’s largest payoff may be wholesale process redesign, not incremental assistance. Goldman spent $6 billion on technology last year but wanted to spend $8 billion; Solomon says finding $2 billion of efficiency would finance that additional investment without lowering returns. Its One GS 3.0 program begins with 6 processes, but success requires top-down pressure because employees are being asked to “take away their empire and do their empire differently.”
• Horowitz frames crypto and AI regulation as long-horizon U.S. competitiveness questions. After the GENIUS Act/stablecoin bill became law, a16z’s more important remaining crypto priority is the Clarity Act establishing market structure; on AI, its principle is “don’t regulate math,” regulate harmful applications. It also opposes 50 separate state regimes and restrictions on statistical training over copyrighted work when the training does not reproduce the work.

Deep dive

Not yet available upstream; scheduled sync will retry.