Longtime New York Times technology and science writer John Markoff joins the a16z Podcast to discuss our changing relationship with technology and machines ... as well as the changing nature of Silicon Valley itself (where Markoff grew up). Jumping off from the themes of Markoff’s new book, Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots, we explore the future of human and robot work; hear about chatbots that keep kids enthralled during "toilet time;" an...
Aug 28, 2015•41 min•Ep. 130
Messaging app WeChat tells us a lot about mobile and business in China. In a recent deep-dive primer on the WeChat phenomenon, a16z partner Connie Chan analyzed WeChat and the notion of app-within-apps, payments as a gateway drug, platforms vs portals, and what happens when utility is more important than being "social". Wired senior writer David Pierce also describes the power of conversational messaging as the main interface, further arguing that “A great messaging app could be to the...
Aug 28, 2015•44 min•Ep. 129
After the smartphone, what business has the global scale (in terms of people and profits) that make it attractive for tech companies to turn their attention and capital towards? The answer, argues a16z’s Benedict Evans, is the automotive industry. Sure, cars are mobile -- but what do our smartphones have to do with our rides? More than we might expect. Evans offers his vision of the future of cars, and perhaps the future of today’s biggest technology companies. Who will build these cars, who wil...
Aug 25, 2015•27 min•Ep. 128
Google, eBay, even the Web itself, in the beginning all of these things appeared as point products, interesting in their way, but small. Of course, they weren’t. “There is this swallow-the-red-pill moment that happens,” Marc Andreessen says, “Where you realize something really, really big is going to happen.” Optimization -- the relentless improvement of everything -- is another one of those ideas. In this segment of the pod, Andreessen joins Optimizely CEO Dan Siroker during the company’s annua...
Aug 20, 2015•49 min•Ep. 127
How do you face down cancer? Get told you can’t get life-saving organ transplants, and go about getting them anyway? And in the middle of that mental and physical storm, how do you find the thing that you and only you were meant to do -- and start building it? One person with answers is Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, because that is what he had to do -- all of it. It’s given Gilliam a clear philosophy on life, and on being a leader. And what he’s learned along the way, he says, is so...
Aug 18, 2015•23 min•Ep. 126
As more and more of what we do for fun and work- happens online, establishing identity becomes ever more critical. Whether it’s for dating or sending money, you want to trust that not only are you interacting with the person you think you are, but that your messages (or money) are in fact reaching the right person -- and only them. Sounds simple, but with an internet and computers in between, a lot can go wrong -- whether by accident or malicious design. A16z’s Chris Dixon, and Max Krohn, co-fou...
Aug 17, 2015•21 min•Ep. 125
This special episode of the a16z Podcast is based on a Q&A from an early screening we hosted of Universal Pictures’ Straight Outta Compton, the story of the group N.W.A. that revolutionized music and pop culture. The Q&A features Ice Cube, producer, rapper, and one of the original members of N.W.A.; director F. Gary Gray; and Corey Hawkins, Jason Mitchell, and O’Shea Jackson Jr., who play Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, and Ice Cube, respectively. Their wide-ranging conversation -- as interviewed by a1...
Aug 15, 2015•47 min•Ep. 124
When you're going for a board interview -- especially when it's your first board seat -- you're actually not supposed to go into it advocating for yourself and trying to convince people that you're a good operator, as you might in a job interview. So what does the board interview involve then? Is all the common advice we hear about getting on boards (e.g., "don't talk about strategy") really true? TaskRabbit COO Stacy Brown-Philpot, who was just announced to the HP Inc board (in Hewlet...
Aug 13, 2015•20 min•Ep. 123
There's been a lot of activity lately around trying to improve equity compensation (for example, by removing tax liabilities that handcuff them). Or by making equity more equitable in other ways; as former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason observed, "When startups grow into unicorns, the distribution of employee earnings follows a common pattern: the founders make more money than they could spend in infinite lifetimes, a handful of early folks achieve financial independence, and everyone else gets a...
Aug 07, 2015•24 min•Ep. 122
The key to any great company is the people. Of course, part of attracting and keeping the best people is compensation. It seems straightforward, but if you don’t develop a philosophy early around how you are going to compensate all those great employees you’re going to be in a world of hurt later, says Shannon Schiltz, who heads up a16z’s People Practice. Compensation, from salary to different forms of equity, is the topic of this segment of the a16z Podcast. For the founders of many fast-growin...
Aug 07, 2015•32 min•Ep. 121
There are few things as old as financial catastrophe, except maybe finance. But in the latest fiscal meltdown in Greece, people started asking questions about whether newer technology -- bitcoin and the underlying blockchain -- could help. One of those was Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims. In this episode of the pod, Mims and Coinbase CEO and co-founder Brian Armstrong talk about the current state and future possibility of bitcoin and the bitcoin blockchain. When it comes to Greece...
Aug 07, 2015•35 min•Ep. 120
Given the endless time we all spend with our noses in our phones, it may not be too surprising to hear that the smartphone has taken over the tech world. But the smartphone’s dominance is so complete, says a16z’s Benedict Evans, that it’s useful to think of it as the sun, the object around which everything else in the (technology) planetary system revolves. Technology meets astronomy, plus Android’s Stagefright bug, and why three German carmakers are getting into the software business in this se...
Aug 05, 2015•22 min•Ep. 119
Why do so many-government led efforts to build the next "Silicon Valley" in one geography or another fail? Is it misguided to even try? But then what does make such innovation clusters work? In this segment of the pod a trio of expert guests -- AnnaLee Saxenian, Dean of the UC Berkeley School of Information and a longtime researcher/observer of regional competitive advantage; VC Brad Feld and writer on startup communities; and entrepreneur and investor Christopher Schroeder, who covers...
Aug 01, 2015•35 min•Ep. 118
We sat down with four jet-lagged high school hackers from Nigeria, Brazil, and India -- representing some of the finalists in this year’s Technovation coding competition in San Francisco -- to hear about the mobile apps they created, the culture of coding in their home countries, and what’s coming next for their nascent software empires.
Jul 30, 2015•7 min•Ep. 117
It’s not just the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon that lean on a massive and growing corpus of data, today every company is a data-driven company. In this world, access to data -- and how you manage it -- is what matters, says Ash Ashutosh, founder and CEO of Actifio. In this segment of the pod, we get in the weeds with Ashutosh and a16z’s Peter Levine on how this data-driven world is changing the technology infrastructure that is the engine behind it, and the companies that use it. Ashuto...
Jul 28, 2015•23 min•Ep. 116
Biology startups have been around for a long time. But the world has changed since that first wave of bio startups, and especially more recently, due to the "peace dividends of the smartphone wars". So what happens when you combine those cheap sensors and compute power -- and apply it to bio? Cheaper costs and Moore's Law-like effects may mean lower barriers to entry, the ability to experiment more often and more easily, and other AWS-like effects for a new wave of bio company founders...
Jul 26, 2015•42 min•Ep. 115
Big Data is evolving. It’s moving from the sole domain of the high priests of data science, to something that practically every organization -- big and small -- and every group within that organization can get its hands on. So what happens now? The implications of the democratization of Big Data are bigger than just big, says Prat Moghe, CEO and Founder of Cazena. And it’s not just the corporate world that will benefit, he adds, having access to Big Data tools will change how all kinds of organi...
Jul 24, 2015•27 min•Ep. 114
Regulation always lags behind technology, but by 80-plus years?! U.S. Representatives Fred Upton and Greg Walden -- of the Energy and Commerce Committee including the subcommittee on Communications and Technology that oversees almost every technology -- join this segment of the a16z podcast to discuss what government can do to help (or hurt) innovation. We discuss the Telecommunications Act, originally passed in 1934 and revised in 1996 (before the internet, computing, and especially mobile beca...
Jul 22, 2015•17 min•Ep. 113
When most people think of big data they think of numbers, but it turns out that a lot of big data -- a lot of the output of our work and activity as humans in fact -- is in the form of words. So what can we learn when we apply machine learning and natural language processing techniques to text? The findings may surprise you. For example, did you know that you can predict whether a Kickstarter project will be funded or not based on textual elements alone ... before it's even published? Other find...
Jul 16, 2015•34 min•Ep. 112
Bitcoin has had more than its share of drama. There is, of course, the mystery surrounding its anonymous founder (or perhaps, founders) Satoshi Nakamoto. More recently, there's been a battle over whether the size of blocks need to grow to account for more capacity -- especially since there isn’t much time left to make changes before blockchain capacity runs out, says core bitcoin developer Mike Hearn. Hearn joins a16z’s Chris Dixon on this segment of the a16z Podcast to discuss the current state...
Jul 10, 2015•21 min•Ep. 111
Just a few years ago if you were mayor of Washington D.C. –- or any other city -- you didn’t have to wrap your head around the likes of Airbnb, Lyft, and other companies in the fast-growing 'sharing economy'. They didn’t exist. Now, you have no choice says Washington D.C.’s current Mayor Muriel Bowser ... because the citizens in your city certainly already have. Bowser joins the a16z Podcast, along with former D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty (who is currently a special advisor to a16z), to discuss how t...
Jul 10, 2015•17 min•Ep. 110
There is a gap between the technology industry and the fastest growing portion of today’s workforce and the workforce of the future: Latinos -- argue U.S. Representatives Loretta Sanchez (California) and Ruben Gallego (Arizona), both members of Congress. How can we bring more Latinos -- and other underrepresented populations -- into the tech industry, and what roles do both government and fast-moving tech companies have to play? Especially if tech entrepreneurs and government have a hard time wo...
Jul 09, 2015•24 min•Ep. 109
In this special international edition of the a16z Podcast, Mohsen Malayeri, co-founder of Avatech -- one of the more prominent startup accelerators in Iran among many (much like Y Combinator in the U.S.) -- talks to guest interviewer Christopher Schroeder (former entrepreneur, D.C. investor, and author of Startup Rising) about startups in Iran. What happens when you have a "mobile-first" startup ecosystem? Is this about trying to be yet another Silicon Valley (and if so, are we just su...
Jul 01, 2015•42 min•Ep. 108
In this special international edition of the a16z Podcast, Nazanin Daneshvar, co-founder and CEO of Takhfifan, the "Groupon of Iran", shares her experiences and broader observations about the startup ecosystem and tech infrastructure in Iran with guest interviewer Christopher Schroeder (former entrepreneur, D.C. investor, and author of Startup Rising). How did she do it? (Hint: With a bit of subterfuge and clever cloaking.)What are the attitudes toward failure in a time and place where...
Jun 30, 2015•20 min•Ep. 107
One of the most active and fastest growing open source big data cluster computing projects is Apache Spark, which was originally developed at U.C. Berkeley's AMPLab and is now used by internet giants and other companies around the world. Including, as announced most recently, IBM. In this Q&A with Spark inventor Matei Zaharia -- also the CTO and co-founder of Databricks (and a professor at MIT) -- on the heels of the recent Spark Summit, we cover the difference between Hadoop MapReduce and S...
Jun 24, 2015•19 min•Ep. 106
Investing to make a return both financial AND societal isn't new, but the opportunities to reach and build businesses in communities that have been underserved by tech are larger than ever. One example is the business opportunity presented by hairstylist platform Mayvenn, which a16z recently backed. In this segment of the a16z Podcast, Kesha Cash (founder and general partner of the Impact America Fund, also an investor in Mayvenn) discusses how she puts her fund’s money to work in markets that t...
Jun 22, 2015•25 min•Ep. 105
"This time is different." But it's always different! So what's going on now in the public markets? Why does this even matter? For one thing, tech markets have grown significantly. And one big reason is internet and mobile. It's like a multiplier for the market size and opportunity. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Andreessen Horowitz managing partner Scott Kupor, mobile analyst Benedict Evans, and corp dev research partner Morgan Bender break down a slide deck we recently shared, i...
Jun 17, 2015•30 min•Ep. 104
Pick your metaphor: Smartphones are "remote controls" for the physical world, or perhaps, as Steve Cheney argues, they're "cursors for the physical world". Either way, it's clear that the age of mobile is here, GPS is not enough, and with sensors all around us -- both outdoors and in indoor locations -- it's finally time for truly context-aware computing. But what will that take, both content- and design-wise -- is it all just about eliminating friction? And how are players l...
Jun 11, 2015•22 min•Ep. 103
Every meeting a busy founder takes is time away from building the company. So it’s understandable why engaging corporate development groups is believed to be a waste of time, unless you’re selling your company. But... there ARE good reasons to engage corporate development. You just have to know when, and how. And what to avoid! On this episode of the a16z Podcast, operating partner Jamie McGurk, and Tyson Clark and James Loftus (veterans of corporate development from companies like Google, Oracl...
Jun 10, 2015•22 min•Ep. 102
Apple’s annual developer conference is cranking away in San Francisco, and a16z’s Benedict Evans examines the latest from the world’s most valuable company in this segment of the pod. Software is the star of WWDC and Apple highlighted updates to iOS and OS X, but the big news was in part Apple News -- a curation and aggregation app for periodicals. Newsstand, Apple’s earlier attempt to tackle news outlets on your Apple device didn’t catch on, but Evans gives Apple News a better chance. And Apple...
Jun 10, 2015•26 min•Ep. 101
