Why we raised $15B and how we plan to spend it

Harvard Paulson School of Engineering & Applied Sciences (SEAS) and Harvard Grid invite you to join for a fireside chat with SEAS Dean David Parkes, Alex Rampell, and Nellie Levchin on how today’s most ambitious venture firms think about scale, capital, and long-term impact. a16z recently raised capital at historic levels, and you will hear from Alex and Nellie, co-founder of SciFi VC, how such stratospheric-level resources are deployed to back transformative companies.

Drawing on deep experience across venture, technology, and science-driven startups, the discussion will unpack Alex’s provocation that “the best companies have hostages, not customers” - what it really means to build products people cannot live without, and how founders and investors identify and support those opportunities early. Expect candid insights, real examples, and a perspective shaped by operating at the frontier of venture capital.

Alex Rampell is a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, where he leads the firm’s $1.5B apps practice. A serial entrepreneur who started writing software at age 10, Alex now invests across a wide range of B2B and B2C startup sectors and stages. He currently serves on the boards of Branch, Brightside, Capitolis, Descript, Divvy Homes, Earnin, Flock Homes, FlyHomes, Loft, Point, Propel, Rocket Companies (NYSE:RKT), Sentilink, Super Evil Megacorp, VGS, and Wise (WISE:LSE). Alex additionally led the firm’s investments in Mercury, OpenDoor (NASDAQ:OPEN), OpenInvest (acquired by JP Morgan Chase), Plaid, Quantopian (acquired by Robinhood), and Rival (acquired by LiveNation).

Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Alex co-founded multiple companies including Affirm (NASDAQ:AFRM), which he co-founded with Max Levchin, FraudEliminator (acquired by McAfee in 2006), Point, TrialPay (acquired by Visa in 2015), TXN (acquired by Envestnet in 2019), and Yub (acquired by Coupons.com in 2013). He holds a BA in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Harvard University, where he also played on the squash team. He now serves on The John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Dean’s Advisory Cabinet at Harvard. Alex additionally serves on the board of the Steadman Philippon Research Institute, a leading orthopedic research center, in Vail, Colorado. Alex is a supporter of math education programs, is an avid runner and cyclist and speaks Russian and Japanese.

Nellie Levchin started at PayPal in a junior product manager role and grew into a key early employee, then served as Chief Risk Officer at Peter Thiel's global macro hedge fund Clarium Capital Management before founding SciFi VC with husband, Max Levchin. Nellie discovers and drives a large share of SciFi's deals, and she appears as a featured expert in fintech lending discussions, bringing a practitioner's depth in risk management and underwriting to early-stage investing.

SciFi VC is the personal venture fund of PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and early Paypal employee, Nellie Levchin, built by the couple on their hands-on operating history in fintech and payments to give founders a specific "PayPal/Affirm playbook" operator-turned-VC rather than a purely financial sponsor. The fund focuses on companies whose competitive advantages come from hard technical feats, network effects, and complex highly regulated industries, positioning itself at the intersection of frontier science and financial engineering rather than as a standard fintech fund.