This episode of 16 Minutes on the news from a16z is all about the recent coronavirus outbreak -- or rather, a new type of coronavirus called 2019-nCoV for 2019 novel coronavirus. Since it's an ongoing and fast-developing news cycle, we take a quick snapshot for where we are, what we know, and what we don't know, and discuss the vantage point of where tech comes in. Topics covered include: definition of a virus, categories of coronaviruses origins and spread how this stacks up so far against SARS...
Jan 30, 2020•20 min•Ep. 517
The idea of " 1000 true fans " -- first proposed by Kevin Kelly in 2008 and later updated for Tools of Titans -- argued that to be a successful creator, you don’t need millions of customers or clients, but need only thousands of true fans. Such a true, diehard fan "will buy anything you produce", and as such, creators can make a living from them as long as they: (1) create enough each year to earn profit from each fan, plus it's easier and better to give existing fans more; (2) have a direct rel...
Jan 27, 2020•16 min•Ep. 516
We've been financing good writing with bad advertising -- and "attention monsters" (to quote Craig Mod) for way too long. So what happens when the technology for creators finally falls into place? We're finally starting to see shift in power away from publications as the sole gatekeepers of talent, towards individual writers. Especially when the best possible predictor of the value of a piece of writing is, well, the writer . The publication's brand is no longer the guarantee of quality, or the ...
Jan 27, 2020•40 min•Ep. 515
How can we evolve the web for a better future? Has the web become a mature platform — or are we still in the early days of knowing what it can do and what role it might have in our lives? Just as “social/local/mobile” once did, what are the new trends — like crypto and blockchain networks and commerce everywhere — that might converge into new products and experiences? Chris Dixon (general partner at a16z and co-lead of the a16z crypto fund) discusses all things internet with Jonah Peretti (found...
Jan 19, 2020•41 min•Ep. 514
AI can do a lot of specific tasks as well as, or even better than, humans can — for example, it can more accurately classify images, more efficiently process mail, and more logically manipulate a Go board. While we have made a lot of advances in task-specific AI, how far are we from artificial general intelligence (AGI), that is AI that matches general human intelligence and capabilities? In this podcast, a16z operating partner Frank Chen interviews Stuart Russell, the Founder of the Center for ...
Jan 16, 2020•26 min•Ep. 513
The federal agency known as the FDA, or the Food and Drug Administration, was born over 100 years ago—at the turn of the industrial revolution, in a time of enormous upheaval and change, and rapidly emerging technology. The same could be said to be just as true today. From CRISPR to synthetic biology to using artificial intelligence in medicine, our healthcare system is undergoing massive amounts of innovation and change. Covering everything from gene-editing your dog to tracking the next foodbo...
Jan 14, 2020•45 min•Ep. 512
How does the world’s largest producer of medicines in terms of volume balance the science and the business of innovation? How does an enterprise at such vast scale make decisions about what to build vs. buy, especially given the fast pace of science today? How does it balance attitudes between “not invented here” and “not invented yet”? Vas Narasimhan, CEO of Novartis, sat down with a16z bio general partners Jorge Conde and Vijay Pande, and editor in chief Sonal Chokshi, during the JP Morgan Hea...
Jan 11, 2020•59 min•Ep. 511
This is a turn of the decade (and January-themed) look backward/ look forward into personal genomics, given recent and past retrospective and prospective pieces in the media on the promise, and perils, of the ability to sequence one's DNA: What did it, and does it, mean for personalized medicine, criminal investigations, privacy, and more? General partner Jorge Conde , who has a long history in the space, covers everything from where genealogy databases and large datasets come in to fetal testin...
Jan 06, 2020•20 min•Ep. 510
Many skeptics thought the internet would never reach mass adoption, but today it’s shaping global culture, is integral to our lives -- and it's just the beginning. In this conversation from our 2019 innovation summit, Kevin Kelly (Founding Executive Editor, WIRED magazine) and Marc Andreessen sit down to discuss the evolution of technology, key trends, and why they're the most optimistic people in the room. *** The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“...
Jan 02, 2020•45 min•Ep. 509
When innovation and capital go global, so do restrictions on trade, foreign investment, and more. Over the past couple years, U.S. policymakers have expanded the scope of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. (CFIUS) through the Foreign Investment Risk Review Modernization Act (FIRRMA) of 2018 which was recently updated through proposed reforms this September 2019 . So what does this all mean for tech founders taking investments from, or doing joint ventures with, foreign entities -- o...
Dec 23, 2019•46 min•Ep. 508
A bold proposal: You go to college for free, then pay back the school after graduation—but only if you get a job in your field of study and make a high enough salary to afford it. It's called an income share agreement, and Austen Allred, the CEO and cofounder of Lambda School , thinks it's the future of education. Student debt currently stands at more than 1.5 trillion dollars, which makes it the second-highest consumer debt category behind mortgage debt. The crisis has saddled much of a generat...
Dec 19, 2019•28 min•Ep. 507
Hollywood and Silicon Valley seem so different, but are more alike than we think. What challenges do tech startup founders and other creative founders -- like showrunners and executive producers -- similarly face? Both have to deeply understand and respect their audiences; learn how to scale themselves beyond one person; and even figure out how and when to use data... or follow their intuitions. In the end, it’s all about creating a story (product!) that sticks. In this conversation with Andrees...
Dec 17, 2019•35 min•Ep. 506
As part of a new series where we will share select a16z partner appearances on other podcasts with our audience here, this episode is cross-posted from the new show Starting Greatness -- featuring interviews with startup builders before they were successful -- hosted by Mike Maples junior. In the conversation, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen shares some rare, behind-the-scenes details of his story from 0 to 1 -- from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape -- and along the journey, rea...
Dec 17, 2019•44 min•Ep. 505
We’ve covered a lot of the strategic financing milestones for startups seeking to build a sustainable and enduring business -- from mindsets for startup fundraising to when and how to build a finance function with a CFO to what it takes to do an initial public offering (IPO ) and stories from the inside out . There’s also a lot that goes on behind the scenes en route to IPO , including how they’re priced and what the "pop" means. Yet another route to the public markets is the direct listing , re...
Dec 11, 2019•44 min•Ep. 504
There are some common tropes that can kill your company culture -- whether it's that corporate values can be weaponized; "fake it til you make it"; the "reality distortion fields" of visionaries vs. liars; and so on. All of this just reveals the confusing, sometimes blurry line between the yellow zones and red zones of behavior, because the very things that are strengths can also become weaknesses (and vice versa!). The fact is, in any complex adaptive system (which is what a company is), even t...
Dec 07, 2019•59 min•Ep. 503
This podcast rerun -- first recorded over two and a half years ago, now being rerun as one of our evergreen classics on the tails of the world's largest designated shopping days (Black Friday, Singles Day in China, Prime Day online, and so on) -- is ALL about the container ship. Also known as " The Box ", with author Marc Levinson (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi and Hanne Tidnam). But this episode is really about connecting the dots between logistics, transportation, infrastructure, and much...
Dec 03, 2019•34 min•Ep. 502
"Constant attention by a good nurse may be just as important as a major operation by a surgeon”, diplomat Dag Hammarskjöld once observed -- and that may be more true today than ever before. For most of us, nurses are essentially the face of the healthcare system: the person you’ll see the most of while you’re in it, who will monitor your vitals, administer medications, hold your hand when you’re in pain or scared, answer all the questions you forgot to ask the doctor. So in this episode, we take...
Nov 28, 2019•33 min•Ep. 501
"Hi everyone, welcome to the a16z Podcast..." ... and welcome to our 500th episode, where, for the first time, we reveal behind-the-scenes details and the backstory of how we built this show, and the broader editorial operation. [You can also listen to episode 499, with head of marketing Margit Wennmachers, on building the a16z brand, here .] We've talked a lot about the podcasting industry, and even done podcasts about podcasting, so for this special episode, editor-in-chief and showrunner Sona...
Nov 27, 2019•48 min•Ep. 500
Many technical founders, academics, and other experts often believe that great products -- or great ideas! -- sell themselves , without any extra effort or marketing. But in reality, they often need PR ( public relations ). The irony is, most of the work involved in PR is actually invisible to the public -- when it works, that is -- and therefore hard for those from the outside to see let alone understand. So how does such brand-building really work? In this 10-year anniversary episode of the a1...
Nov 20, 2019•35 min•Ep. 499
The games industry is in the midst of a tectonic shift. Powered by platform convergence, games-as-a-service, and user-generated content, modern video games—what we call next-generation games —are unlike anything we've seen before. In the past decade, gaming has grown from a niche hobby into a global, culture-defining phenomenon. Not only are the games themselves becoming increasingly immersive, the way we develop and discover them has fundamentally changed. In contrast to the hits-driven busines...
Nov 02, 2019•23 min•Ep. 498
Consumer software may have adopted and incorporated AI ahead of enterprise software, where the data is more proprietary, and the market is a few thousand companies not hundreds of millions of smartphone users. But recently AI has found its way into B2B, and it is rapidly transforming how we work and the software we use, across all industries and organizational functions. In this episode, Das Rush interviews Oleg Rogynskyy, founder of People.ai , an AI platform for sales and marketers, and Peter ...
Oct 24, 2019•24 min•Ep. 497
Today, despite the critical importance of open source to software, it’s still seen by some as blasphemous to make money as an open source business. In this podcast, Armon Dadgar, Cofounder and CTO of HashiCorp; Ali Ghodsi, CEO of Databricks; and a16z General Partner Peter Levine explain why it's necessary to turn some open source projects into businesses. They also cover the most important questions for open source leaders to answer: How do you keep community engaged while building a business? W...
Oct 21, 2019•35 min•Ep. 496
This rerun podcast (first recorded in 2015, now being rerun as one of our evergreen classics/ favorites) -- is ALL about emoji. But it's really about how innovation really comes about: through the tension between open standards vs. closed/ proprietary systems; the politics of time and place; and the economics of creativity, from making to funding. So yes, this podcast is all about emoji. But it's also about where emoji fits in the taxonomy of social communication, and why that matters -- from ma...
Oct 15, 2019•39 min•Ep. 495
It used to be that the only way for humanity to grow -- and progress -- was through destroying the environment. Sure, the Industrial Revolution brought about the growth of our economies, our population, our prosperity; but it also led to our extracting more resources from the planet, more pollution, and some nightmarish human conditions as well. But is this interplay between the two -- of human growth vs. environment, of protection vs. destruction -- really a zero-sum game? Even if it were true ...
Oct 04, 2019•47 min•Ep. 494
Our news podcast, 16 Minutes -- where we quickly cover the top headlines of the week, the a16z way (why are these topics in the news; what's real, what's hype from our vantage point of tech trends) -- is now only available as its own show feed, separately from the main a16z Podcast... so be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts if you want our weekly news & tech take! This is the tenth episode of the show, and this week we cover a variety of topics with the following a16z experts: Ama...
Sep 30, 2019•23 min•Ep. 493
The combination of cloud, social, and mobile took gaming beyond a small base of just console- and PC-gamers to a massive player base. But the underlying business model -- the concept of "free-to-play", built on top of games-as-a-service -- may have been the real innovation that led us to the global gaming phenomenons we have today. Unfortunately, observes gaming veteran Kevin Chou -- who's seen it all when it comes to tech platform shifts and gaming as a longtime gamer, founding CEO of Kabam, an...
Sep 28, 2019•42 min•Ep. 492
This is episode #9 of our news show , 16 Minutes , where we quickly cover recent headlines of the week, the a16z way -- why they’re in the news; why they matter from our vantage point in tech -- and share our experts’ views on the trends involved. This week we do a short but deep dive to tease apart the FUD from the facts on all the phone hacks of late (also, arguably, one of the worst years on record for certain device manufacturers) -- given the following news: Just this week, the FBI’s Cyber ...
Sep 23, 2019•20 min•Ep. 491
What is the nature of physical pain? Why do we even experience it? Is there one type, or many? Do people experience pain differently? What is happening in our brains and our bodies when we experience pain? What is the biological link between pain and addiction? In this episode Clifford Woolf, Professor of Neurobiology at Harvard Medical School and a renowned expert on understanding pain, shares with with a16z's Hanne Tidnam all we know about the biology of pain. Technology is enabling a new, dee...
Sep 17, 2019•37 min•Ep. 490
with @benedictevans @vijaypande and @smc90 This is episode #8 of our news show, 16 Minutes, where we quickly cover recent headlines of the week, the a16z way -- why they're in the news; why they matter from our vantage point in tech -- and share our experts' views on these trends. This week we cover, with the following a16z experts: Apple's latest event announcing new products and services across mobile, TV, and gaming; where is (and isn't) innovation happening, and what's next -- with a16z's Be...
Sep 16, 2019•20 min•Ep. 489
There's been a lot of talk about the need for our healthcare system to shift away from volume and fee-for-service, where you pay by appointment, procedure, etc, to value-based care, where you pay for both quality and outcomes—essentially, good health. But there's also been a real dearth of seeing how that might work in action, or concrete models for how to implement it at scale. In this episode, CEO of Blue Cross Blue Shield North Carolina Patrick Conway dives deep into how exactly we can make t...
Sep 06, 2019•37 min•Ep. 488
