"Anybody who is interested in China, who's developing things in China, who's doing business with China needs to be thinking about the instinct towards politics over pragmatism", argues New Yorker staff writer (and former Beijing resident) Evan Osnos. "It will affect your operations there. It's not the kind of thing where you can be, 'Well, look, we're not interested in politics.'" Osnos, who also wrote the award-winning book The Age of Ambition: Chasing Fortune, Truth, and Fa...
Jun 02, 2016•43 min•Ep. 220
Everything old is new again when it comes to startup ideas and how technology innovation happens. But practically, how does that apply to starting and/or working at startups — especially since the default state of every company is “dying in obscurity”? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Marc Andreessen and 21 co-founder Balaji Srinivasan cover everything from deciding what ideas to work on and the optimal type of startups to work at, to the funding environment and pendulum swings of deciding w...
May 30, 2016•54 min•Ep. 219
"We really want Apple here... Would you please call Tim Cook?" That's just one of the things Penny Pritzker, the 38th Secretary of Commerce has heard as she and the U.S. Department of Commerce engage in "commercial diplomacy" around the world. Their job is to help overcome trade barriers, represent the interests of entrepreneurs and drive administrative policy change as it relates to technology, and be on the frontline of helping small and medium-sized businesses in markets a...
May 27, 2016•30 min•Ep. 218
In many ways, managing startups is about managing uncertainty: in product, market, and... people. So what happens when changes in the business require changes -- and sometimes reductions -- in the workforce? In this episode of the podcast, a16z partners Shannon Schiltz and Alex Rampell share both their professional and personal experiences with layoffs -- from why they happen to what to do (and what not to do).
May 26, 2016•30 min•Ep. 217
There's no question automation is taking over more and more aspects of work and some jobs altogether. But we're now entering a "third era" of automation, one which went from taking over dangerous work to dull work and now decision-making work, too. So what will it take to deal with a world -- and a workplace -- where machines could be thought of as colleagues? The key lies in distinguishing between automation vs. augmentation, argue the guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast, IT ma...
May 23, 2016•27 min•Ep. 216
Innovation or invention? Platform or app? Vertical or horizontal? Strategy or tactic? Does the smartphone eat VR? And (not to get all existential about it or anything but), what is an app, really? a16z partners Benedict Evans, Connie Chan, Kyle Russell, and board partner Steven Sinofsky explore these tensions in this episode of the podcast as they share some quick reactions to Google I/O, Google's annual developer conference, where the company announced a number of new platform products -- for V...
May 20, 2016•26 min•Ep. 215
One of the most important lessons of the internet age is what happens when we give people -- including companies, developers, engineers, hobbyists, and yes, even a few bad (or dumb) actors -- a new platform, along with the freedom to innovate on top of it. For example, who could have predicted how profoundly the internet would change our economy, given how it started off as a research project -- one where commercial applications were actually frowned upon in the early days? Now, the U.S. is on t...
May 18, 2016•40 min•Ep. 214
It almost seems like gospel -- or at least a given -- today for startups to embrace the cloud. Services like AWS have powered an entire generation of startups that can now spin up new applications, new businesses, and new experiments with very little investment in new infrastructure. But what about governments -- both in the U.S. and around the world -- trying to adopt the cloud? How do they approach this widely known (yet still nebulous) concept of THE CLOUD? Especially given sometimes competin...
May 17, 2016•30 min•Ep. 213
If the next 20 years of startup-led tech innovation are going to be about addressing massive problems -- like health, energy, transportation, cities, education, and more -- it will mean more directly confronting (instead of stealthily bypassing) regulatory barriers and incumbent-driven regulatory capture challenges. So how can startups "growth hack" in a highly regulated sector? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- the second of our podcasts from our most recent on-the-road trip in W...
May 17, 2016•34 min•Ep. 212
Sometimes, our career paths are accidental not intentional... but then it all fits together and makes perfect sense in hindsight. This was especially true for Ezra Klein, who went from writing for his college's alternative paper The Fish Wrap Weekly in the early days, to blogging, and then went to The American Prospect; Washington Post (where he started the very popular policy blog Wonkblog); and now, Vox, where he is the editor-in-chief. All without quite knowing, until after the fact, that he ...
May 12, 2016•40 min•Ep. 211
Every big technological shift (per Carlota Perez) brings with a structural shift too — an “institutional adjustment” in how companies innovated and build new products, according to Steve Blank and Evangelos Simoudis. Large organizations used to (and continue to) set up remote R&D labs in places like Silicon Valley. But now, those companies are also investing more energy and resources in setting up corporate venturing arms and/or “innovation outposts” in such startup ecosystems — especially a...
May 11, 2016•32 min•Ep. 210
Whether you think of it as a distributed ledger, decentralized database, computing infrastructure, open source/ software development platform, cryptocurrency, transaction platform, or financial services marketplace, the bitcoin blockchain is driven by two key features: that it is a peer-to-peer network, and that it unbundles trust. Imagine moving from Googling for things to offering proof-as-a-service instead (which itself begins with rethinking identity). In fact, there's a lot of parallels -- ...
May 10, 2016•40 min•Ep. 209
So many modern e-commerce sites and marketplaces are really digital forms of their physical counterparts, which makes it easier to figure out how to present and sell products online. But in India, where many small towns do not have "organized" retail -- and have fewer big (let alone well-known) brands -- mobile and web retail is essentially "leapfrogging" over the physical department store phase to online. So how do these new companies connect people to products when the logi...
May 05, 2016•37 min•Ep. 208
When the iPad first came out in 2010 there was chatter that went in two directions: It’s just a big iPhone I’ll never carry a laptop again Both were wrong. The big iPhone comment was quickly dispelled as people (and their kids) fell under the consumption thrall of iPads. But iPads never could meet the needs of most laptop users –- until now. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky offer their reasons why the iPad Pro hits the mark as a machine for all kinds of things, and why it may have shoved their...
Apr 28, 2016•28 min•Ep. 207
Our first instinct as technologists or users of technology is to think of 'connectivity' as digital connectivity -- the internet, our smartphone. But the internet is just the latest in a long line of connectivity that spans centuries, not just decades: transportation, energy, communication. The internet, in fact, is the newest kind of supply chain -- a "data supply chain" -- with technology, goods, capital, people (human capital), and ideas moving across it. We're moving towards a worl...
Apr 22, 2016•32 min•Ep. 206
So... about those bots. Bots bots bots. Bots! In this episode of the botcast, a16z partners Benedict Evans and Connie Chan -- along with Chris Messina, longtime advocate of the open web and more -- pull apart various threads related to the topic of bots, mobile, and beyond: the (evolution?) from web to apps to messaging to bots; chat as an interface; “conversational commerce”; and so on. They also discuss why framing messaging through the lens of WeChat both reveals useful things (what works/ mi...
Apr 19, 2016•48 min•Ep. 205
Developers are more than just influencers inside the enterprise -- they're now buyers, too. That's a huge shift from before, when only IT and other departments had that kind of purchasing power. (It's not just a Silicon Valley thing, either, as every company becomes a software company.) So what's different then about selling and marketing to developers? One key is open source. But offering products and services built on top of open source brings up a whole slew of other questions: What are viabl...
Apr 14, 2016•25 min•Ep. 204
The hallmark of many great technical founder/CEOs is that they envision a better way of doing things, and that's why they're building a company that delivers on that better way, often disrupting the way things have always been done before. But this very mindset can backfire when it comes to sales. Why shouldn't they reinvent the sales process?? On this episode of the a16z Podcast -- with a16z's Mark Cranney (head of our sales and market development team), Lars Dalgaard, and Ben Horowitz -- we co...
Apr 08, 2016•40 min•Ep. 203
Some of the best management books are actually military books, argues Ben Horowitz. There's just a certain mental toughness and focus that that experience gives you, adds Dick Costolo based on his observations. So how then do you build trust on a team in a company, when it's not (literally) life or death as it is in the military? When giving someone a public "object lesson" -- the equivalent of Sun Tzu's chopping someone's head off -- could mean losing talent ... or being more tyrant t...
Apr 02, 2016•28 min•Ep. 202
Most investors try to invest in things that don't change and last forever -- Warren Buffett for example loves Heinz ketchup! But VC is about investing in things that do change... a lot. How does this basic mindset challenge much of what people learn in business school or classic leadership training? Do software-led businesses require different mindsets? What are some of the most common things first-time vs. serial entrepreneurs do? This Q&A -- with Marc Andreessen interviewed by Don Faul (fo...
Mar 25, 2016•28 min•Ep. 201
In this episode of the a16z Podcast sharing more founder stories, Ben Horowitz interviews a16z partner Lars Dalgaard about SuccessFactors, one of the earlier software-as-a-service companies. (It was founded on 2001, IPO'd in 2008, and was acquired by SAP in 2012). SuccessFactors focused on software for "human capital management" in the enterprise. But what are the success factors in talent, scaling companies, and most importantly, scaling culture? Lars and Ben cover everything from wha...
Mar 17, 2016•26 min•Ep. 200
How do you get into tech when you don’t have a tech background? And what special expertise can leaders from other fields -- like the military -- bring to tech startups? This Q&A -- with Lars Dalgaard interviewed by Bethany Coates (assistant dean at Stanford Graduate School of Business who runs global education and social mission programs that primarily focus on entrepreneurship, innovation, and leadership) -- covers these topics. As well as what it means to what to bring one’s raw, real self...
Mar 16, 2016•15 min•Ep. 199
Why are people so fired up about a computer winning yet another game? Whether it's checkers, chess, Jeopardy, or the ancient Chinese game of Go, we get excited about the potential for more when we see computers beat humans. But then nothing "big" -- in terms of generalized artificial intelligence -- seems to happen after that burst of excitement. Now, with the excitement (and other emotions) around Google DeepMind's "AlphaGo" using machine learning and other techniques to bea...
Mar 11, 2016•29 min•Ep. 198
Men and women who have spent decades in prison are being released into an iPhone-enabled world that they hardly recognize. Shaka Senghor is one of those people, imprisoned at age 19 for second-degree murder and released almost two decades later in 2010. “It was like Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of the Jetsons,” he tells Ben Horowitz in a conversation about his book, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison. Today, Senghor is an activist, advocate, and mento...
Mar 11, 2016•56 min•Ep. 197
YouTube star Casey Neistat rejects the term “viral video,” which is strange because he’s had more than his share of internet monsters. To say I want to make a viral movie, is like a musician saying I want to make a hit song -- it’s just not a good place to start, Neistat says, paraphrasing a point made on Twitter. So how does Neistat start? How does he both attract an audience of millions, and keep them coming back on a daily basis? Neistat is joined on this segment of the pod by Bailey Richards...
Mar 11, 2016•31 min•Ep. 196
If network effects are one of the most important concepts for software-based businesses, then that may be especially true of data network effects -- a network effect that results from data. Particularly given the prevalence of machine learning and deep learning in startups today. But simply having a huge corpus of data does not a network effect make! So how can startups ensure they don't get a lot of data exhaust but get insight out of and add value to that data and the network? How can they mak...
Mar 08, 2016•32 min•Ep. 195
It's not incompetence, but competence, that causes companies to be disrupted. That applies to big companies and small, as well as people too. Or so argue Clayton Christensen and Marc Andreessen in this podcast, based on a conversation at Startup Grind (moderated by Derek Anderson) between the a16z co-founder and Harvard Business School professor Christensen -- aka the "father of disruption theory" (also known to his wife as "the Jewish mother of business"). This podcast share...
Mar 02, 2016•33 min•Ep. 194
The mobile world has fallen hard for VR, says Benedict Evans. But will virtual reality mean real profit for hardware makers? Evans offers his observations on VR and more gleaned from the largest gathering of the mobile industry, Mobile World Congress. The value in mobile keeps shifting, Evans says, from hardware to software, and the platforms on which that software runs. But the players and the business models are far from set when practically anyone can get into handset business. The forces sha...
Mar 02, 2016•24 min•Ep. 193
Virtual reality is coming fast, and everyone seems to assume that it will be gamers who get to have all the fun first. But there are other applications for VR that could also bring it into the mainstream. “It could very well be business users,” says 16z’s Chris Dixon. “It’s anything where you would want time travel or teleportation.” Dixon is joined on this segment of the podcast by Saku Panditharatne and Kyle Russell, both on the firm’s deal team, to offer their perspective on how virtual reali...
Feb 26, 2016•39 min•Ep. 192
Infrastructure. It powers everything from cities to computing, yet is sometimes considered "boring" because it is so invisible to so many of us. But as software continues to eat the world, infrastructure has come to the forefront. And some of the most exciting technology innovations are now happening at the infrastructure level: It's changing everything, observes a16z's newest general partner Martin Casado -- from how new tech is created to how new tech is sold. Casado -- one of the pi...
Feb 24, 2016•37 min•Ep. 191
