Anish Acharya on the Consumer Tech Renaissance and a YouTube Moment for Software

Anish Acharya has had first-hand experience of more technology platform shifts than most. A programmer turned founder turned investor, he sold two consumer companies, one to Google, one to Credit Karma, before joining Andreessen Horowitz in 2019 to invest in fintech and consumer tech. In 2023 he made the move to focus entirely on AI and models. “I’m really having the most fun I’ve had in a long time,” he said at the Jefferies Private Growth Conference in Santa Monica, where he also praised the event’s atmosphere: “This year it feels like there’s something extra special in the air.”

Anish sat down to share his views on the consumer tech renaissance, what makes AI-native businesses structurally different from what came before, and why the next great creator economy might be built on code, not content.

Consumer Tech Is Back… and Structurally Different

While much of the conversation in tech investing has shifted toward enterprise AI, Acharya sees a genuine renaissance happening in consumer. “Consumer is hyper cyclical, but when it works you get maximum returns,” he said. What has changed is the business model. AI-native consumer products carry real marginal costs, which forces founders to find product-market fit and a viable price point far earlier than was possible in the previous era of free-to-use, ad-supported apps.

“You can’t add the sugar after you bake a cake,” Acharya noted. “You have to find a product that has enough market fit that you can charge your customer a real price on day one.” The market is responding. Consumers are not only flocking to new AI products, they are willing to pay $200 a month for them. ChatGPT launched its paid tier at $20 a month, a price that seemed steep at the time. It has since moved to $200, and Gemini AI Ultra is priced at $250. “So far we haven’t seen any price compression, we’ve seen price expansion,” Acharya observed.

On the concern that foundation models like ChatGPT or Claude will absorb all consumer use cases and crowd out dedicated apps, Acharya was direct. “I think that’s a failure of imagination. Every consumer interface that we use — TikTok, Instagram, YouTube — demands a dedicated interface. You’re never going to do what you do on TikTok on ChatGPT.” Models and products, in his view, are distinct and will remain so.

The YouTube Moment for Software

One of the most striking ideas Acharya has been developing is what he calls the YouTube moment for software. A decade ago, a generation of young people declared they wanted to be streamers rather than astronauts, a trend widely interpreted as a cultural problem. Acharya reads it differently. “The digital native generation wanted to be entrepreneurs,” he said. “If you weren’t a programmer, the only way to be an entrepreneur online was to be a YouTube creator.”

Coding agents have now removed that constraint. With tools like Codex, Replit, and others, anyone who wants to build software, technical or not, can build it, market it, and charge for it. The evidence is already showing up in the data. Small business formation has hit its highest level since Covid over the past 18 months, and Acharya attributes much of that directly to coding agents enabling a new wave of individual software creators.

The shape of the resulting market will look different from what venture capital has historically targeted. Many of these businesses will serve niches with a million-dollar total addressable market: too small for institutional investors, but viable and valuable for the individuals building them. “It’s just exciting that the individual in this country, in the world, now has that as an avenue for enterprise,” he said.

On the IPO Market and What Actually Drives Investment Decisions

Acharya was measured on the question of public markets. He sees a genuine desire among founders to go public, driven in part by the capital intensity of AI, where training costs and infrastructure CapEx create a real need for public market financing. “This new business model is driving a desire to be public with a level of urgency we haven’t seen in some time,” he said.

But when it comes to his own investment decisions, public market conditions are largely irrelevant. “Everything that we do is so micro,” he explained. “If a company comes to us and says we’re not growing because we’re being attenuated by public market opportunity, I say: ‘What market share do you have today? 1%, 2%, 5%? Until you’re at 90%, you’re not allowed to talk about the ceiling’.”

On the data point that seed stage deal volume was down 25% in Q1, Acharya pushed back entirely. “That doesn’t match my experience at all. There are more people trying new things than ever before because the cost of trying has gotten so low. We’re seeing more seed deals than ever before.”