🔥Top 10 AI Tools Used by a16z Partner Olivia Moore
+ 20 Alternatives You Should Know
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Brought to you by Affinity - The State of AI Investing
AI is moving from concept to reality in private capital. Hear from experts at BlackRock, OpenAI, and Affinity as they explore how AI is reshaping workflows, unlocking new insights, and redefining what’s possible for deal teams.
This session is built for investors looking to understand where AI can drive real value and how to assess readiness across their portfolio and the broader ecosystem.
Tool Stacks Change at Rapid Speed
In a world where new tools pop up every day, it remains difficult to stay on top and test each and every product yourself.
My hack?
Taking my peers as proxy: I regularly ask my “tool nerd” friends about their latest discoveries and most powerful tools. While some tools like ChatGPT, Granola or SuperHuman have become common standard, the diversity of products has never been greater than today.
I learn something new from every ask.
Even more reason to establish a regular “tool discovery” muscle and keep updating your stack as you go. If you haven’t replaced or added at least 3 new tools in the past year, you’re likely missing out and will fall further behind your peers every day.
To make the tool discovery as easy as possible for our DDVC community, I’ve kept sharing the evolution of my own tech stack in this newsletter over the years. For example, I recently compared how my stack has changed from summer 2023 to today.
In the same vein, we’ve developed VCSTACK.COM for our DDVC community to access all resources, tools, templates, automations, and more in one place + VC Tool Finder (available in beta) to compare your own tool stack to 500+ other investment firms, grouped by fund characteristics such as fund size, AUM, and stage focus to keep it anonymized yet useful.
Top 10 Tools Used by a16z Partner Olivia Moore
Today, I’m happy to share with you a related post by a16z Partner Olivia Moore on how her AI investor tool stack looks like today, including a few words on how she uses it.
Here are her top 10 tools + 2 potential alternatives each that I’d recommend checking out:
#1 Comet – AI browser.
“Comet by Perplexity is my new default browser. I use it for basic search and shopping, but also for calendar and email triage. And now, for workflows with the introduction of Shortcuts! I have email and research templates set up in Shortcuts that I trigger on websites to help me write outreach messages or gather info.”
Potential alternatives:
Arc Browser: Arc’s sleek interface, built-in note-taking, and AI-powered “Browse for Me” are great for research and context-aware browsing.
Brave + Leo AI Assistant: Brave offers privacy-first browsing with a fast native AI assistant (Leo) for search and summarization.
#2 Julius – AI data analyst.
“I’m big on data analysis (spreadsheets DAU!), but often find myself frustrated by errors and slowness in trying to even analyze a basic spreadsheet in ChatGPT. Julius is good at this, and has only gotten better over time. It’s both very reliable and can generate helpful ideas for extra analysis as well as visualizations.”
Potential alternatives:
Fabi AI: Build dashboards and workflows, or simply explore your data 10X faster with the help of AI, Python, and SQL.
Equals AI: Native spreadsheet interface with built-in SQL, live database connections, and AI assistance.
#3 Happenstance – People search.
“If you work in a “network job” (it’s important to be able to track down who knows who), you understand that LinkedIn is actually a pretty poor tool for this! Happenstance connects to your email, Twitter, and LinkedIn to allow natural language search across your network – and search the networks of others who add you.”
Potential alternatives recommended by DDVC:
Clay: Powerful personal CRM with beautiful UI and deep integrations (email, calendar, Twitter, LinkedIn).
Common Room: Maps influence and activity across community, GitHub, Slack, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more.
#4 Granola – Botless AI notetaker.
“I run Granola on most all of my meetings now. It just works! Features like the mobile app, surfacing related meetings, and sorting in folders are very helpful. They also just launched a Zapier integration which allows you to trigger more complex workflows (ex. CRM, emails) based on transcripts.”
Potential alternatives:
Fireflies.ai: Transcribe, summarize, search, and analyze all your team conversations.
Otter.ai: Transcripts, automated summaries, action items, and chat with Otter to get answers from your meetings.
#5 Gamma – AI slide decks.
“Gamma allows you to go from text -> slide deck, website, or document. But I use it more for its flexible formatting (you can vary the size of slides in the same deck), easy sharing (via links or exports), and AI-enhanced editing with natural language. Most of my theses and blog posts are published on Gamma.”
Potential alternatives recommended by DDVC:
GenPPT: Describe your topic, let GenPPT create your AI slides, then customize
your presentation to perfection with our AI deck maker.Beautiful.ai: AI-assisted design that auto-adjusts layouts for consistency.
#6 Willow – AI voice dictation.
“I’m not personally a power user of voice dictation, but it can really come in handy for long emails or blogs. Accuracy of dictation has improved across the board in the last few years, but I’m a specific fan of products like Willow that allow you to dictate into any app (ex. Slack) – and tune to your personal writing style.”
Potential alternatives recommended by DDVC:
WisprFlow: Seamless speech-to-text in every application on your iPhone or computer.
Whisper Memos: Uses OpenAI Whisper to transcribe and summarize your voice memos.
#7 Superhuman – AI email.
“Superhuman has been around since before AI, but has made massive strides over the last year in incorporating AI-native features that make the product a lot more delightful. Some of my favorites: Ask AI, Instant Reply, Auto Reminders. It’s made both email management and scheduling much faster.”
Potential alternatives recommended by DDVC:
Shortwave: AI-powered Gmail client that includes summarization, smart replies, and prioritization.
Spike: Combines email, chat, and team collaboration into one platform.
#8 Overlap – AI video clipper.
“Video is king these days, but there is a time and place for long form (ex. an hour-long interview) versus short clips. I like to produce and consume both – use Overlap to ingest raw content and find the best moments. Overlap can edit and auto-caption as well as “score” clips to make it easier to publish one-off moments.”
Potential alternatives:
Opus Clips: Turns long videos into shorts, and publishes them to all social platforms in one click.
Captions AI: Makes short clips, adds automatic captions, and formats for TikTok/YouTube/IG.
#9 Krea – AI creative partner.
“Whenever I’m making content, I’m using Krea! Krea hosts all the models you’ll need (image, video, lipsync, etc) in one place – and in one subscription. I’ve trained my own LoRAs on Krea of friends, family members, teammates, and pets, which makes it extra easy to generate hyperrealistic content.”
Potential alternatives recommended by DDVC:
Black Forest Labs: New model suite for text-and-image-driven generation and editing.
Runway ML: Full suite of AI tools (video, image, audio), including Gen-2 for text-to-video.
#10 ChatGPT
“I’ve been a ChatGPT fan since day one, but have surprised myself with how my usage has increased recently. I use ChatGPT now for all the basics (Deep Research! 4o image gen!) but also find myself picking specific models for different use cases (personal advice, work drafts, etc.) I predict it will fully replace Google for me soon.”
Indeed, mostly everyone I know keeps using ChatGPT. This was also reflected in our Data Driven VC Landscape 2025.
However, few people know the strengths and weakness profiles of the respective providers, which is why I published a benchmark “Six Prompts. One AI. Who Wins?” few months ago.
Here are the key takeaways from our benchmark:
Comment below if we missed other relevant tools!
Stay driven,
Andre
PS: Check out VCSTACK.COM to access all our resources
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