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 journey

00:02:30 - 00:06:28 : Why 2008 and today are the most exciting times for founders

00:06:28 - 00:11:38 : The AI model competition and Google's comeback

00:11:38 - 00:14:50 : Why the "LLM wrapper" fear is no longer relevant

00:14:50 - 00:20:07 : Multi-model approach and the future of AI applications

00:20:07 - 00:24:01 : Learning from Credit Karma and the importance of winning

00:24:01 - 00:29:14 : Why paternalism kills products and going with human nature

00:29:14 - 00:35:28 : AI's human impact and why it's different from social media

00:35:28 - 00:42:45 : The future of coding, jobs, and why SaaS isn't dead

00:42:45 - 00:55:21 : Investing in Deel, AI companionship, and what it costs to win

REFERENCES

Qwen

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