Since Netflix started in the late 90s as a DVD-by-mail rental service competing with Blockbuster, it has completely reinvented itself... twice first, when it went from DVD rental to video streaming platform, and then again when it went from licensing to producing original content. But what does it take to create an organization capable of reinventing itself? In this episode, originally recorded for the Commonwealth Club of California, Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hasting talks about his new b...
Sep 15, 2020•43 min•Ep 594•Transcript available on Metacast "I'm in a movie, but it's the wrong movie." For better or for worse, we tell the story of entrepreneurs as one of the mythical hero's journey: that's there's a call, a test (multiple tests!), a destination... But nothing truly follows such a clean, linear, storytelling arc. Stories of success and resilience are messy and full of "sleepless nights, anxiety-ridden fears, moments of real despair and failure", observes Guy Raz -- who is the host, co-creator, and editorial director of three NPR progr...
Sep 12, 2020•39 min•Ep 593•Transcript available on Metacast Monopoly, oligopoly, cartel. All three of those words can describe the (not so) modern education system today, given the cost structures, economics, and accreditation capture -- in everything from who can and can't start a new university (when was the last time a significant change happened there anyway?!) to where government funding really goes to the student loan and debt crisis. Yet degrees do matter, just not for the reasons we think. So what are the tradeoffs -- when it comes to the "right"...
Sep 11, 2020•59 min•Ep 592•Transcript available on Metacast This episode examines the potential for misuse and fraud among those applying for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)and how fintech and software provide overlooked tools to stop it. On March 27th, the government enacted a $2.2 trillion dollar stimulus package called the CARES Act, the largest aid measure in history. The act provides more than $500 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program, or PPP, a low-interest, forgivable loan program designed to help small businesses and self-employed in...
Sep 04, 2020•40 min•Ep 591•Transcript available on Metacast Okay, so we know community is important -- whether for developer relations for your product or other types of communities -- but how do we measure the success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or schwag), given how indirect and long-cycle so much of it is? How do we know we're even measuring the right things, and is there one key metric or KPI for measuring the health of a community? Where do "meta communities" or where does engaging key community leaders come in? And when...
Aug 30, 2020•34 min•Ep 590•Transcript available on Metacast There is no spoon. Or rather, There is no such thing as data, theres just frozen models, argues Peter Wang , the co-founder and CEO of Anaconda who also created the PyData conferences and grew the early data science community there, while on the frontlines of trying to make Python useful for business analytics. He views both models and data as fluid , more like metaphysics than typical data management Or perhaps its that when it comes to data, those with a physics background just better apprecia...
Aug 21, 2020•45 min•Ep 589•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is all about education and technology, a topic thats especially top of mind this week as students in much of the country return to schoolvirtually. The intersection of learning and technology has been accelerated by the pandemic, but the debate around education's "disruption," and what that means for educators doing the hands-on work of teaching, has been swirling for years. In this episode, a16z general partner Connie Chan and host Lauren Murrow are joined by educators and experts ...
Aug 17, 2020•49 min•Ep 588•Transcript available on Metacast WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from (whats been traditionally been up to) 12 years or so of vaccine development compressed into 12 months or so? What will and wont be compromised here, and where do new technologies -- like mRNA or messenger RNA vaccines -- come in? Where will vaccines likely be distributed first, who will and won't get them initially, both across populations... and nations? Rajeev Venkayya , president of the Global Vaccine Business Un...
Aug 14, 2020•57 min•Ep 587•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode, we continue our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. Todays topic: How do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends about? One that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user? In this discussion, which was recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April 2020, a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talked about building communities specifically, communities of open-source de...
Aug 10, 2020•46 min•Ep 586•Transcript available on Metacast CAR T therapy is a groundbreaking medicine that uses engineered T cells to attack cancer. But CAR T cells (that is, chimeric antigen receptor T cells) can be programmed to recognize a huge range of target proteins and cell types. So what other types of cells should we train CAR Ts to recognize and destroy to improve human health? On this episode of the a16z Journal Club, a16z General Partner Jorge Conde, bio deal team partner Andy Tran, and Lauren Richardson discuss new research published in Nat...
Aug 09, 2020•18 min•Ep 585•Transcript available on Metacast We're living in an unprecedented era of online collaboration, coordination, and creation. All kinds of people are coming together -- whether in an open source project or company , an R&D initiative, a department in a company, a club or special interest group, even a group of friends and family -- around some shared interest or activity. But the word "members" is faceless, and doesn't help us really understand, support (and better design for) these communities. So in this special book launch epis...
Aug 02, 2020•47 min•Ep 584•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode -- cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenAI thats optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks. Its a commercial product, built on research; so what does this mean for both startups AND incumbents and the future of AI as a service? And given that were seeing all kinds of (cherrypicked!) examples of output from OpenAIs beta API being shared how do we know how good it reall...
Jul 30, 2020•33 min•Ep 583•Transcript available on Metacast Many dont realize we even need to think about the possibility of security hacks when it comes to things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and more. But when bits and bytes meet flesh and blood, security becomes literally a life or death concern. So what are the issues and risks we need to be aware of in exposing security vulnerabilities in connected biomedical devices? This conversationwith Beau Woods, Cyber Safety Innovation Fellow with the Atlantic Council, part of the I Am The Cavalry grassroot...
Jul 22, 2020•23 min•Ep 582•Transcript available on Metacast Ever since the discovery of antibiotics, microbiologists have worried about and studied how bacteria acquire resistance to these drugs. Adding to the complexity of this problem is the fact that it is not always clear whether the conditions that drive the evolution of resistance in the lab occur in patients suffering from bacterial infections. This is where the work of Nathalie Balaban -- Professor at the Hebrew University, and our guest on this episode -- comes in. The article we discuss is base...
Jul 19, 2020•17 min•Ep 581•Transcript available on Metacast A dive into the sociological, operational, and tactical realities of this murky underworld, Lusthaus and de la Garza discuss who the players are, what they are motivated by, and specialize inas well as how basic ideas like trust and anonymity function in a world where no one wants to get caught. How do criminal nicknames function as brand? Which countries tend to specialize in what kinds of crime, and why? And most of all, what changes when you begin to think of the business of cybercrime as an ...
Jul 18, 2020•36 min•Ep 580•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Marty Makarysurgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and health policy and innovation experthas long been a passionate advocate for transparent pricing in the healthcare system. We dont talk enough (or really at all) about price in healthcare, says Makary (instead, we talk about cost). But shedding a light on prices in healthcarefrom not just what those prices are but how prices are set and the value we all receive as consumers of the system overallcan help us meas...
Jul 15, 2020•30 min•Ep 579•Transcript available on Metacast More than 98% of the information on the web is lost within 20 years, and huge gaps exist in our digital and cultural history. Zoran Basich and Alex Pruden of a16z talk to Brewster Kahle and Sam Williams, who are using different approaches to attack this problem. Brewster cofounded the Internet Archive, which is well known for creating the Wayback Machine that crawls a billion URLs every day. Sam cofounded Arweave, a company that uses decentralized crypto networks to store information forever. Fo...
Jul 13, 2020•48 min•Ep 578•Transcript available on Metacast In part 1 of our series on human performance, we looked at the limits of human potential in climbing and other sports and how we push those limits through technology and training. In this episode, recorded at our a16z innovation summit last year, Alex talks with a16z general partner and fellow avid climber Peter Levine about the risk, fear, and preparation for his free solo of El Capitan on Yosemite. While climbing is the topic, the conversation holds many lessons for entrepreneurs, and anyone e...
Jul 11, 2020•18 min•Ep 577•Transcript available on Metacast Is there a limit to what humans can do? And if so, how do you know when you've reached it? Welcome to part one of a two-part series on human performance with professional rock climber Alex Honnold. Alex redefined the limits of what is possible by free soloing that is climbing with no ropes or safety gear a 2000-foot granite rock face in Yosemite, known as El Capitan. That feat was documented in the award-winning film Free Solo. In this podcast, Alex, a16z general partner Peter Levine (who at age...
Jul 11, 2020•23 min•Ep 576•Transcript available on Metacast "Why We Shouldnt Fear the Black Box of AI (in Healthcare and Everywhere)" by Vijay Pande. First published in the New York Times, January 2018. You can also find and share this article at a16z.com/aidoctor
Jul 07, 2020•6 min•Ep 575•Transcript available on Metacast "When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China" by Connie Chan. First published August 2015. You can also find and share this essay at a16z.com/mobilefirstchina
Jul 07, 2020•20 min•Ep 574•Transcript available on Metacast "Why Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company -- The Next Era of Financial Services and the 'AWS Phase' for Fintech" by Angela Strange. You can also find and share this essay at a16z.com/fintecheverywhere
Jul 07, 2020•15 min•Ep 573•Transcript available on Metacast Today we're continuing a series we started a while ago of read-alouds (for more context on the why and why now check out episode #500 on how we podcast!). The first was episode #544 in April, It's Time to Build, read out loud by Marc Andreessen; what follows are three more pieces read out loud by their authors: "Why Every Company Will Become a Fintech Company: The Next Era of Financial Services and the 'AWS Phase' for Fintech" by Angela Strange "When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat an...
Jul 07, 2020•51 sec•Ep 572•Transcript available on Metacast Erooms Law is Moores Law spelled backwards. Its a term that was coined in a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article by researchers at Sanford Bernstein and describes the exponential decrease in biopharma research and development efficiency between the 1950s and 2010. Whereas Moores describes technologies becoming exponentially faster and cheaper over time, Erooms Law describes the trend of drug development becoming exponentially more expensive over time. The article describing Erooms Law was publi...
Jul 05, 2020•10 min•Ep 571•Transcript available on Metacast The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the visibility of scientists and the scientific process to the broader public; suddenly, scientists working on virology and infectious disease dynamics have seen their public profiles rapidly expand. One such scientist is the special guest in this episode, Trevor Bedford, Associate Professor at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. An expert in genomic epidemiology, he and his collaborators built Nextstrain , which shares real-time, interactive data visu...
Jun 30, 2020•35 min•Ep 570•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the a16z bio journal club, we cover one of the key clinical trials that supported the recent FDA approval of the first prescription video game. The game was developed by Akili Interactive, is called EndeavorRx , and is now a clinically-validated therapy for improving attention in children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). But how does a game improve attention? How does a clinical trial evaluate the efficacy of a game? And what are the pros and cons of a vid...
Jun 28, 2020•17 min•Ep 569•Transcript available on Metacast Gross margins are essentially a company's revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers, and it's one of the most important financial metrics a startup can track. 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. Why do gross margins matter? When do th...
Jun 27, 2020•36 min•Ep 568•Transcript available on Metacast As more digital natives have entered the workplace, they have brought with them the expectation that their software should both be a joy to use and allow them to be power users. That is, users who configure and control it to better serves their needs. And often, these digital natives aren't just aspiring power users, they are also prosumers, who can and will pay for a premium experience. But first generation SaaS products have often struggled to deliver the experience these users crave. For toda...
Jun 24, 2020•23 min•Ep 567•Transcript available on Metacast In this episode of the a16z bio Journal Club, bio deal team partner Judy Savitskaya and Lauren Richardson discuss research that aims to enhance the efficiency of photosynthesis and carbon fixation. These two processes are used by plants and other phototrophs (like algae) to convert light energy and carbon dioxide from the air into organic matter. The pathways took millions of years to evolve, but can scientists use advances in biochemistry and synthetic biology to increase their efficiency? The ...
Jun 21, 2020•21 min•Ep 566•Transcript available on Metacast This episode is the second in a two-part series that examines the pandemics impact on real estate. Part 1 focused on prospective home buyers, sellers, and existing homeowners. This episode, Part 2, addresses renters and landlords. The conversation with host Lauren Murrow features a16z general partner Connie Chan , whose experience as a landlord herself has fueled her interest in residential real estate and technology; Richard Green , the director of USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, and Adena H...
Jun 17, 2020•31 min•Ep 565•Transcript available on Metacast 
