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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•2 hr 37 min•Ep 656•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast 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•Transcript available on Metacast Over a decade after the idea of “big data'' was first born, data has become the central nervous system for decision-making in organizations of all sizes. But the modern data stack is evolving and which infrastructure trends and technologies will ultimately win out remains to be decided. In this podcast, originally recorded as part of Fivetran's Modern Data Stack conference, five leaders in data infrastructure debate that question: a16z general partner and pioneer of software defined networking M...
Mar 24, 2022•28 min•Ep 651•Transcript available on Metacast In the face of great uncertainty, how do you make decisions? Can you really apply the lessons of the past to the present and the future, to navigate seemingly new situations and get what you want out of business and life? By deeply understanding cause-effect relationships -- clearly expressed, shared with others, overlaid with data, back-tested, modified -- you can build a set of principles for dealing with the realities of whatever situation you're in, observes Ray Dalio, in this episode from 2...
Mar 16, 2022•50 min•Ep 650•Transcript available on Metacast In his book (and podcast), Brian McCullough chronicles the history and evolution of the internet -- from college kids in a basement and the dot-com boom, to the applications built on top of it and the entrepreneurs behind them. General partner Chris Dixon chats with McCullough about How the Internet Happened -- and more broadly, about how tech adoption and innovation happens. They discuss lessons learned, how innovation doesn’t happen in a straight line, and what the past can tell us about the n...
Mar 10, 2022•47 min•Ep 649•Transcript available on Metacast original episode notes and transcript here: https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/textiles-technology-science-math-cultures-civilization/ Longtime podcast showrunner (2014-2022), primary host, and editor Sonal Chokshi shares three best-of episodes as she shifts gears and the show goes on hiatus until relaunched with a new host. The third of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place in October 2020, in the midst of the pandemic – and perfectly captures the signatu...
Feb 21, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Ep 648•Transcript available on Metacast original episode notes and transcript here: https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/innovating-in-bets/ Longtime podcast showrunner (2014-2022), primary host, and editor Sonal Chokshi shares three best-of episodes as she shifts gears and the show goes on hiatus until relaunched with a new host. The second of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place spring/summer 2019, pre-pandemic (ah, that we could remember that time!) – between a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen an...
Feb 20, 2022•48 min•Ep 647•Transcript available on Metacast original episode notes and transcript here: https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/pleistocenepark-geoengineering-iceagebiome/ Longtime podcast showrunner (2014-2022), primary host, and editor Sonal Chokshi shares three best-of episodes as she shifts gears and the show goes on hiatus until relaunched with a new host. The first of these three special rerun episodes is a conversation that originally took place in summer 2017, but both the work discussed in here – on making a really wild (quite literally...
Feb 19, 2022•32 min•Ep 646•Transcript available on Metacast Welcome to the a16z podcast. Today we’re talking about the mindsets and frameworks founders should know about when navigating the mergers and acquisitions or M&A process, both before and after – including how to think about the pricing dynamics, factors that go into the decision-making process, and what to expect from the integration once the deal is done. A16z editorial partner Zoran Basich recently talked to two a16z experts here to give us their big-picture view of the most important things t...
Jan 26, 2022•26 min•Ep 645•Transcript available on Metacast Innovation in the data center has been constrained by the traditional model of suppliers providing fixed-function chips that limit how much the biggest data center operators can differentiate. But programmable chips have emerged that allow these companies to not only increase performance, but innovate throughout the pipeline, from operating system to networking interface to user application. This is a major trend among "hyperscalers," which are some of the world’s most well known companies runni...
Dec 10, 2021•25 min•Ep 644•Transcript available on Metacast What are network effects? [1:32] How do you cold start and get your first users? [2:33] Atomic networks and why minimum viable community is more important than minimum viable product [6:36] How do you curate your network and set norms? [8:42] Faking users: good idea, bad idea? [13:13] What is flintstoning? [14:26] How does the relationship to creators change as you scale? [17:07] Building for the professional creator class [22:52] How is web3 changing incentives? [25:12]...
Dec 06, 2021•32 min•Ep 643•Transcript available on Metacast Given all the activity and interest recently around crypto and web3, as well as in upcoming holidays and art events, we’re re-running our episode all about NFTs (from March 2021) -- where we covered everything you need or want to know about NFTs. You can also find a curated list of resources to learn all about NFTs at future.com/nftcanon. That list, and this episode, has something for everyone -- from artists and creators and other builders to big companies and institutions or just anyone seekin...
Nov 25, 2021•56 min•Ep 642•Transcript available on Metacast In today's episode we’re talking about an emerging model of gaming called play to earn, in which players can make actual money based on how much time and effort they put into a game. Play to earn is also part of broader trends — the changing relationship between players and platforms, new incentives for participants in blockchain-based networks, and the new internet era that is coming to be known as a web3. The top play-to-earn game is called Axie Infinity, operated by a Vietnam-based company ca...
Nov 11, 2021•23 min•Ep 641•Transcript available on Metacast "Beyond the Meme: Ever Given, Supply Chains, and the Physical World" -- by Ryan Petersen (June 2021). Bio + essay details/ originally appeared at: https://future.a16z.com/beyond-the-meme-ever-given-supply-chains-and-the-physical-world/ More read-alouds at: https://a16z.com/tag/read-alouds/
Nov 02, 2021•16 min•Ep 640•Transcript available on Metacast Today’s episode is all about crypto security — that is, the new mindsets and the new strategies for storing crypto assets safely while also allowing holders control and access. As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment advice, please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information. We’ve covered security trends more broadly a ton in our content, which you can find at a16z.com/security, as well as crypto-related trends including NFTs, and the creator and ownership...
Oct 15, 2021•31 min•Ep 639•Transcript available on Metacast 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 public then private then back to public again. As is the case with Dell Technologies, one of the largest tech companies -- which went private 2012-2013 and then also pulled off one of the most epic mergers of all time with Dell + EMC + VMWare 2015-2016 (and which we wrote about here at the time). Is there a method to the madness? How does one not...
Oct 02, 2021•53 min•Ep 638•Transcript available on Metacast There's no question technology played a huge role in the recent/current pandemic, including especially in the plug-and-play engineering and incredibly fast development behind the mRNA vaccines... But is there an even bigger role for the private sector, not just government, to play (and partner) when it comes to key infrastructure for future such emergencies, and even beyond? Especially given how faulty the translation of institutional science to policy and public health measures turned out to be...
Sep 20, 2021•56 min•Ep 637•Transcript available on Metacast There's been a false dichotomy in technology and management lore over the past decade, between "brain" and "brawn", digital and physical, independence and interdependence, software culture versus industrial culture… or so observes Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer, former big-company executive, and startup founder Robert Siegel in his new book , The Brains and Brawn Company: How leading organizations blend the best of digital and physical. Whether you're an early startup or a Fortune...
Jul 24, 2021•48 min•Ep 636•Transcript available on Metacast Recently, a16z and the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research hosted the NFT Virtual Summit, which brought together leading thinkers and builders on the topic of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens — these tokens are enabling new creator and ownership economies to emerge. We’ve covered NFTs in other podcasts and articles , including a curated list of reading resources, and you can watch all the videos from the summit. Today we’re sharing one of the discussions from that virtual summit (all of which we...
May 19, 2021•19 min•Ep 635•Transcript available on Metacast Playing out against the backdrop of a global pandemic (including recent massive surges in regions around the world) is the news that came out a week ago that a candidate "malaria vaccine becomes first to achieve WHO-specified 75% efficacy goal”. While the findings are still in preprint with The Lancet , the resulting buzz and phrases quoted included everything from “unprecedented”, “groundbreaking work”, and “very exciting” to “high expectations”, “highly effective”, and “a hugely significant ex...
May 02, 2021•36 min•Ep 634•Transcript available on Metacast This is a special episode of the a16z podcast — it's an audio history, told through the voices of the a16z crypto team, about what crypto is, how it really works, and why it matters. This "innovation overview" is meant as a resource, and it features hallway-style conversations with the a16z team as well as outside experts. In brief segments, we’ll take you from the ground up — from the basics, to the most current developments, and beyond that to a look at what we might see in the future. Here ar...
Apr 17, 2021•39 min•Ep 633•Transcript available on Metacast 
