On October 14, 2026, Axios reported that Andreessen Horowitz had laid off most of its 34-person talent team, the group that helped portfolio companies recruit. If you were hoping a VC network would carry your resume into an a16z startup, that route just got a lot narrower. The roles haven't gone anywhere, though. The difference is that getting in front of a hiring manager is now your job.
What a16z actually cut
a16z cut most of its "Full Stack Talent" team, a 34-person central group that helped portfolio companies recruit. Axios called the service a key "value-add" for the firm. A central talent team is a recruiting function employed by the VC firm that works on behalf of the startups the fund has invested in.
Here's what is and isn't confirmed:
- Confirmed: most of a 34-person team was laid off, according to multiple Axios sources.
- Not confirmed: the exact headcount cut. Axios gives no number, and a firm spokesperson declined to comment.
- The stated plan: "let each group build its own team to meet its own needs, rather than relying on a centralized group," per Axios.
- A loose end: FourWeekMBA found a16z's own page still listing 34 names under "Full Stack Talent" on October 15, the day after the report.
So a16z isn't getting out of talent work. It's moving that work out of a shared service and into individual groups. For a candidate, the shared service that covered the whole portfolio is the part that's gone.
The matchmaker was never going to reach you
At full strength, the a16z talent team had roughly 329 open portfolio roles per person. A team that size can't hand-introduce candidates across that much volume, so most people applying to a16z companies never got an intro to begin with.
Derived from 11,192 portfolio roles on the speedrun board divided by 34 team members.
The mechanism is simple. A central team of 34 has to ration its attention across hundreds of companies and thousands of roles. A mid-level engineer or analyst sending a profile into that funnel was competing for a sliver of 34 people's week.
That's the contrarian read on the a16z recruiting team layoffs. The headline sounds like a door closing. For the average applicant, though, the door was mostly decorative. The work that got people hired at portfolio companies was always the work the candidate did directly: finding the right company, getting the resume in front of the right person, and making the fit obvious.
The matchmaker was a bottleneck most candidates never got through. A scannable resume and a direct note do the same job.
How many a16z portfolio jobs are there, really?
Somewhere between 11,186 and 18,431, depending on which board you trust. The figure in most coverage, "11,192 roles across 782 companies," blends two different counts, and the sources don't agree with each other.
| Source | Roles | Companies | Caveat |
|---|---|---|---|
| speedrun board, whole network | 21,561 | 782 | Includes non-portfolio "wider market" roles |
| speedrun board, a16z portfolio slice | 11,192 | not split out | 52% of the network total |
| speedrun a16z-portfolio collection page | 11,186 | 278 | The cleanest portfolio-only count |
| jobs.a16z.com (official) | 18,431 | 689 | Page shows no date |
The speedrun talent network splits its 21,561 live roles three ways:
- 11,192 at a16z portfolio companies
- 10,202 in the wider market
- 167 at speedrun companies
So the 782 figure covers the whole board, not just the portfolio. The portfolio collection page lists 278 companies. Note also that the speedrun site isn't on an a16z.com domain, so treat it as a16z-linked rather than the official record.
The practical point: no single VC portfolio job board is the source of truth. Three counts from two sites don't match. Use the boards to discover companies, then confirm every role on that company's own careers page before you put effort into it.
"a16z portfolio" mostly means Anduril
About 30% of a16z portfolio roles sit at just three companies: Anduril, Shield AI, and Zipline. These are big companies with their own recruiting teams, and the founder-first approach in this article doesn't fit them.
The concentration, from the speedrun collection page:
- Anduril: 2,464 open roles, about 22% of the 11,186 portfolio total
- Shield AI: 592 roles
- Zipline: 346 roles
If you want a job at Anduril, apply through Anduril's process and go after its internal recruiters. Cold-messaging a founder at a company with 2,000-plus openings is noise. The founder-first playbook is for the long tail: the rest of the 278 companies, many with fewer than 50 openings.
Two other numbers from the same page change how you should read listings:
- Remote is scarce. Only 1,997 portfolio roles are open to remote.
- Pay transparency is low. Just 19% of roles post a pay band (4,074 roles).
Founding roles, which are early hires who join before a company has a real team, are a tiny slice: 75 across the network at last count. The split:
- Engineering: 31
- Sales: 11
- Operations: 10
- Design: 9
- Marketing: 5
- Product: 4
- Research: 1
- Other: 4
Who replaced the matchmaker: 1,977 in-house talent leads
The recruiting work didn't disappear. It moved inside the companies. In Refolk's index of professional profiles, 1,977 US profiles hold startup or VC talent titles (Talent Partner, Head of Talent, Portfolio Talent, Founding Recruiter). The Head of Talent or a founder at each company now decides who gets a first call.
Against the speedrun board's 21,561 live roles, that works out to roughly one talent-titled person for every 10.9 open roles. That's a much better ratio than 329 roles per central team member, and it's why contacting the in-house person beats waiting on any fund's network.
What the index shows about who these people are:
- Most common title: "Head of Talent" (8 of a 25-profile sample), with "Talent Partner" second (6).
- Employers in the sample: Polymarket, Applied Intuition, and Canapi Ventures, a mix of startups and funds.
- Where they sit: mostly the SF Bay Area and New York.
Keep the caveat in mind: the title split comes from a sample of 25, so read it as a pattern, not a census. The pattern is still useful. Your message reaches a company's own Head of Talent in a way it never reached a fund-level team spread across hundreds of companies.
Why a direct note beats the apply button
Direct contact skips screening steps that have gotten longer every year. Referrals made up about 1.6% of applications but about 17% of hires in a 2026 cross-industry sample, so a warm path is worth roughly ten times its share of volume.
Referrals were only about 1.6% of applications in the same 2026 cross-industry sample.
The mechanism is about context. A referral or a direct note tells the hiring team who you are, why this company, and why now. A cold application has to earn that context through a resume screen first.
And the screens keep piling up. Ashby's 2026 report shows business interviews per hire up 36% since 2021, to 11.7, and technical interviews per hire up 52%, to 17.6. Every stage you skip with a direct contact saves real time. You don't have a VC partner vouching for you anymore, but a crisp note to the Head of Talent covers a lot of the same ground.
How to write a startup resume for founders
A startup resume for founders is one a busy founder can scan cold, with no recruiter summarizing it first, and come away knowing what you built and whether it maps to their stage. Founders read for evidence, not keywords.
What that resume looks like:
- The top third makes the case. One line on what you do, then your two strongest outcomes. If those don't land, the rest won't get read.
- Outcomes over duties. "Shipped the billing rewrite that cut failed payments" beats "Responsible for payments infrastructure." Then attach your real number to it.
- Match the stage. For a small company, lead with times you built something from zero or owned a problem end to end. For Anduril-scale companies, depth and process matter more.
- Cut the corporate filler. "Cross-functional alignment" and "stakeholder management" read as overhead to a founder who needs someone to ship.
- Link to the work. A repo, a portfolio, a launched product.
- Mirror the posting's actual problem. Vals AI's founding PM listing, with a posted $150k to $200k band, is a good example of a founder-scannable post. Your top bullets should answer what it asks for, point by point.
That last step is where most people stop, because rewriting a resume for every startup on your list eats days. It's the exact work Refolk takes off you: paste the posting, and you get your own resume back, rewritten from your history for that role, with a cover letter drafted alongside it.
The direct-contact playbook for a16z portfolio jobs
Treat the job boards as a discovery layer and do the matchmaking yourself. Here's the order of operations that replaces the old intro.
- Pick from the long tail. Skip the three giants for this approach. Filter the a16z portfolio collection for companies with a handful of openings in your function. Kalshi and Harvey, both hiring in New York and San Francisco on the board, are the kind of a16z-backed names worth a look.
- Verify on the careers page. Confirm the role is live on the company's own site. As the board counts above show, aggregators disagree.
- Find the decision-maker. At a small company, that's the Head of Talent or a founder. At a larger one, it's the recruiter or hiring manager for that team.
- Write a four-sentence note. Who you are, the one result most relevant to them, why this company specifically, and a clear ask (a 15-minute call, or a pointer to the right person).
- Attach a resume tailored to that posting. Not your generic one.
- Apply through the ATS too. The note gets you noticed. The application gets you into their system.
- Follow up once, about a week later, with something new: a relevant project, or a sharp take on their product.
Before you write ten of these notes, decide where they're worth it. Refolk scores how well you actually fit each posting, which helps you put your effort into roles where your history lines up rather than spreading thin across all 278 companies.
Don't drop the remaining intro channels completely. The speedrun network still says a speedrun partner reads every profile and makes intros across the portfolio. Fill out that profile. Just remember that speedrun covers 167 roles, and treat it as a bonus. Y Combinator's job board and Wellfound are worth comparing as alternatives: good for discovery, and no substitute for reaching the person who's hiring.
FAQ
Does a16z still introduce candidates to portfolio companies?
Not centrally. Per Axios, the plan is for each group to build its own recruiting team rather than rely on a central one. The speedrun talent network still says a partner reads every profile and makes intros, but speedrun accounts for only 167 roles. For most of the 11,000-plus portfolio jobs, assume no one will introduce you and plan to reach the hiring team yourself.
Which VC portfolio job board should I use: jobs.a16z.com or speedrun?
Use both for discovery and neither as the final word. The official jobs.a16z.com board lists 18,431 roles across 689 companies (the page shows no date), while the speedrun a16z-portfolio collection shows 11,186 roles across 278 companies. Since they disagree, confirm every role on the company's own careers page before you tailor a resume or write a note.
Should I message the founder directly at a large a16z company like Anduril?
No. Anduril alone has 2,464 open roles, roughly 22% of the portfolio total, and it has its own recruiting team. Apply through its process and contact the recruiter for your function. Save founder outreach for smaller companies where a founder or a single Head of Talent is the one making the call.
How do I get a job at a startup without a referral?
Build the next best thing: a short, specific note to the Head of Talent or founder, sent alongside an application through their ATS, with a resume rewritten for that posting. Referrals produce about 17% of hires from roughly 1.6% of applications because they come with context. A direct note that names the result you'd bring gives the hiring team much of that same context.