The long-standing (and chart-topping) a16z Podcast returns to cover the most important topics within the world of technology. Brought to you by the minds at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and hosted by Steph Smith, each episode goes beyond headlines, giving listeners insider access to the edge of innovation. Subscribe to be the first to receive upcoming episodes featuring industry leaders like Steve Wozniak, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, and Neal Stephenson, and covering a range of topics, fro...
Nov 07, 2022•3 min
In this special episode from a16z’s Bio Eats World podcast, general partners Vijay Pande and Jon Lai join bio editorial lead Olivia Webb to discuss the intersection of games and health, including: what constitutes a game, the “healthy dessert” problem, and the challenge of building a game that’s both fun and therapeutic. You can subscribe to Bio Eats World wherever you get your podcasts. Stay Updated: Find a16z on X Find a16z on LinkedIn Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify Listen to the a16z P...
Oct 28, 2022•34 min•Ep. 680
This week, we have a special episode for you, from our newest podcast, " web3 with a16z " . This episode features Chris Dixon – founding general partner of a16z crypto and former entrepreneur himself – and Kevin Rose – the co-founder of Proof Collective, as well as co-founder of Digg, former investor at GV, and longtime entrepreneur and podcaster. In this wide-ranging hallway-style conversation from web3 with a16z, these two veterans of both web2 and web3 movements go long on tech trends both in...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr 7 min•Ep. 679
Audio is no longer just audio anymore -- podcasts now pull from new video platforms like TikTok and older ones like radio, user experience is growing and changing, and it's easier than ever to create audio content. Where do all these mediums converge and where do they diverge -- when it comes to user experience, product design, recommendations, discovery, and more? In this episode from October 2020, a16z general partner Connie Chan and Spotify’s chief R&D officer Gustav Söderström join host ...
Oct 14, 2022•57 min•Ep. 678
While building and shaping culture is as relevant as ever for startups and companies today, leaders have sought the answers to these questions for hundreds of years – and there is practical advice to be had by examining different cultures across time and around the globe. In this episode from December 2019, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz sits down with host Sonal Choksi to talk about what actually makes up culture, whether in a company or any organization or team, as based on Ben’s best-selling bo...
Oct 06, 2022•1 hr•Ep. 677
Behind many great leaders, you’ll usually find a great mentor. The mentor-mentee relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have, in both their careers and in their lives. So how do you find a mentor? What are different kinds of mentorship? And how can it help you break into an industry – or help others break in themselves? In this episode from July 2018, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz discusses mentorship with his mentor, Silicon Valley pioneer Ken Co...
Sep 28, 2022•34 min•Ep. 676
In this episode from October 2021, Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies and one of the longest serving founder-CEOs in the technology industry, joins a16z general partner Martin Casado, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, and host Sonal Choksi on the occasion of Michael’s book, Play Nice to Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader. There are lots of challenges in being public while trying to innovate, and limits to being a private company as well; but it's rare to see a company go ...
Sep 07, 2022•54 min•Ep. 675
In this episode from February 2019, Jyoti Bansal, founding CEO of AppDynamics and co-founder of Unusual Ventures, joins a16z general partner Peter Levine, a16z partner Sateesh Talluri, and host Sonal Choksi to discuss how product and sales evolve together for enterprise go-to-market, including key milestones for both product development and marketing, frameworks for how to think about pre- to post-product market fit, the role of additional levers like services or pricing, and more. For the show ...
Sep 03, 2022•52 min•Ep. 674
This week, student loans are back in the news, with the administration's announcement of a plan to forgive student loan debt for certain kinds of borrowers. Outside of the specific policies, though, student loans are often the first of many big financial decisions that young people make as they begin to build credit history and join the labor force. So what role can technology play in serving this demographic's particular needs, now and into the future? In this episode from October 2020, Amira Y...
Aug 26, 2022•31 min•Ep. 673
Can you get better at decision-making with practice? Many founders, investors, and builders must make many critical decisions, big and small, every day, and improving the quality of your decision-making process can become a big competitive advantage. In this episode from October 2020, expert decision strategist, author and professional poker player, Annie Duke, joins a16z managing partner Jeff Jordan, to discuss some of the frameworks, strategies, and tactics for better decision-making by both i...
Aug 19, 2022•45 min•Ep. 672
What can we learn from the evolution of open source communities and how might they be applied to online communities and the creator economy today? Author Nadia Asparouhova joins host Sonal Choksi to talk about Asparouhova's book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software , from Stripe Press. They start with a a taxonomy for communities, and then dig into how open source has changed over time, which learnings from open source do and don’t apply to new communities onlin...
Aug 11, 2022•48 min•Ep. 671
Whether it’s moderating a live panel discussion, managing your (virtual) All Hands meeting, or even guiding a cross-functional team to a decision in an important meeting, mastering the art of helping a group communicate is a critical skill for many of us. In this episode from November 2020, expert communications and presentations coach Matt Abrahams , who is also a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, sits down with Sonal Choksi to share frameworks, strategies and many concrete ti...
Aug 04, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 670
What does the success of TikTok's algorithmically-driven product tell us about the future of creators and the creator economy, product design, and innovation within video? In this cross-over archive episode from our tech news podcast, 16 Minutes on the News, we go deep into the what, why, and how of TikTok's algorithm, which lies at the heart of the product and drives its "creativity network effects." The conversation features Eugene Wei (former head of product at Hulu, Flipboard, and video at O...
Jul 27, 2022•38 min•Ep. 669
In this episode from December 2018, Hennessy, currently the chairman of Alphabet as well as Turing Award-winning computer scientist, joins a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, a16z general partner Martin Casado, and host Sonal Choksi for a wide-ranging conversation about moving from academia to startups, the history of Silicon Valley, the “Stanford model”, how to build enduring organizations, and more. Hennessy also co-founded startups, including one based on pioneering microprocessor architecture u...
Jul 21, 2022•56 min•Ep. 668
In this hallway-style conversation with a16z's Margit Wennmachers, longtime operating partner for Marketing, and Kim Milosevich, CMO for a16z crypto, open up the black box of crisis communications with Sonal Choksi and explore the process and mindsets before, during, and after a crisis. They discuss common FAQs like: What constitutes a crisis? Can someone inside a company "call it" early and prevent a crisis from becoming a bigger deal? How do you respond when there's a lag or too much time betw...
Jul 13, 2022•34 min•Ep. 667
Over the last 20 years, the idea of “designing biology” has gone from science fiction to just science, as the field of synthetic biology has exploded, with applications from therapeutics to manufacturing and more. In this episode from January 2019, one of the pioneers in the field, professor James J. Collins of MIT, joins a16z general partner on the Bio + Health fund, Vijay Pande, and editorial partner Hanne Winarsky, to discuss the origins of synthetic biology or "synbio", to what "engineering ...
Jul 06, 2022•36 min•Ep. 666
In this episode from July 2019, Kurt House, CEO and co-founder of Kobold Metals, John Thompson, professor of earth and geosciences at Cornell; and Connie Chan, a16z general partner for consumer, talk with editorial partner Hanne Winarsky about the way technology is transforming how we find cobalt, and the mining industry as a whole, as well as the science behind why cobalt is so critical for batteries, the data and knowledge behind mining today vs the past, and more. Stay Updated: Find a16z on X...
Jun 29, 2022•33 min•Ep. 665
In this episode from October 2019, People.AI founder and CEO Oleg Rogynskyy and a16z partner Peter Lauten discuss with Das Rush about what the rise of AI in B2B means for enterprises, workers, and startups. They explain why AI provides a strong first mover advantage to enterprises that adopt it early; how it can automate lower level tasks, maximize our focus, and, ultimately, make our work more meaningful; and for startups, they provide a playbook for seizing the next AI opportunity. To learn mo...
Jun 23, 2022•25 min•Ep. 664
In this episode from October 2019, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen and former a16z podcast showrunner Sonal Choksi bring on MIT economist and bestselling author Andrew McAfee to discuss why the lessons of human growth in times past, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, might not apply to our future. It used to be that the only way for humanity to grow — and progress — was through destroying the environment. But is this interplay between human growth vs. environment really a zero-sum game? Eve...
Jun 15, 2022•48 min•Ep. 663
Blockchain, crypto, web3 – these terms get thrown around a lot and sometimes interchangeably, but what are the actual connections between them? And what are some mental models and analogies for thinking about this blossoming area of computer science? To dig in on these topics and more, we have another crossover episode this week, part of our occasional series where we share curated episodes from other shows that we think you’ll enjoy. This time, we’re featuring one of the first episodes from " w...
Jun 08, 2022•37 min•Ep. 662
In this special “innovation overview” episode from April 2021, the a16z crypto team and other experts take you from the ground up of crypto and web3 — from the basics, to more recent developments, and beyond – through the lens of an oral essay with brief segments on what crypto is, how it really works, and where it’s going. We chose this particular archive episode this week in honor of a new show that just launched: web3 with a16z . Hosted by Sonal Choksi, the previous showrunner of the a16z pod...
Jun 02, 2022•40 min•Ep. 661
In this episode from February 2017, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO (now Vice President, Subscription Services, at Google) share stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them, and more. From their days together at LoudCloud to Jason’s expe...
May 26, 2022•33 min•Ep. 660
In this episode from February 2021, early Amazon execs Colin Bryar and Bill Carr -- in conversation with a16z's Sonal Chokshi -- go beyond the well-known artifacts of Amazon innovation, like the memo and the press release, and share the leadership principles, decision making practices, and operational processes that helped Amazon continue to innovate, invent new products and learn from its mistakes, as it scaled. It’s all based on their book, Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets fro...
May 18, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 659
Gross margins–which are essentially a company’s revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers–are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup and growing business. And yet, figuring out what goes into the “cost” for delivering products and services is not as simple as it may sound, particularly for high-growth software businesses that might use emerging business models or be leveraging new technology. In this episode from J...
May 11, 2022•36 min•Ep. 658
This week, we have a special crossover episode from June 2021: Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO podcast, interviews a16z general partner David Ulevitch about David’s journey from working at an ISP and Dot Com company mp3.com in high school; to starting, running, and selling his own enterprise security company, OpenDNS; to becoming an investor at a16z. They also discuss the value of product marketing for enterprise, David’s philosophy around pricing enterprise products how to survive and lead...
May 04, 2022•50 min•Ep. 657
In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection. They discuss Ken’s unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch and features like Autocorrect, what it was like to demo new products for Steve...
Apr 28, 2022•1 hr 37 min•Ep. 656
In this re-run from September 2018, Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky talk all about Tesla — and more broadly, the nature of disruption overall. How disruptive is Tesla really, and what exactly are they disrupting — from the dashboard to car makers to vendors to energy source to autonomy overall? The tech industry is littered with leading innovators... who nonetheless failed to be the dominant leader in the end. So the question should be, is this new thing fundamentally difficult for the incumb...
Apr 21, 2022•45 min•Ep. 655
In this episode from September 2020, originally recorded for the Commonwealth Club of California, Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hasting talks about his new book "No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention" with a16z co-founder and fellow author Ben Horowitz, who also wrote a bestselling book about culture in 2019. During the conversation, Reed tells the story of Netflix's evolution and his management philosophy, including the hard lesson he learned about what happens when you optim...
Apr 14, 2022•44 min•Ep. 654
After achieving product-market fit and starting to gain users, how do startups then avoid the "leaky bucket" problem of losing users as quickly as they gained them? By focusing on user engagement and retention, startups can not only keep their hard-won customers but also ensure that each new cohort of users gets more and more value out of their product. This episode is part two in a two-part series on the basics of growth. Featuring a16z general partners Andrew Chen (formerly of Uber and author ...
Apr 06, 2022•34 min•Ep. 653
Once known as “growth hacking”, the concept of Growth has now evolved into an entire discipline that spans marketing, product management, user experience, and more. Why? After achieving product-market fit, startups need to capitalize quickly on that initial traction to capture and retain more users and market share before the competition does, and building an efficient and resilient growth strategy is a critical component. This episode -- one of two in a series -- focuses on the user acquisition...
Mar 30, 2022•22 min•Ep. 652
