The a16z Show

a16z Podcast: Innovation and Regulation -- What Happens When Policy Lags Behind Technology?

22 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Regulation always lags behind technology, but by 80-plus years?! U.S. Representatives Fred Upton and Greg Walden -- of the Energy and Commerce Committ...

a16z Podcast: It's Not What You Say, It's How You Say It -- When Language Meets Big Data

16 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

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 h...

a16z Podcast: Bitcoin's Growing Pains -- and Possibilities

10 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Bitcoin has had more than its share of drama. There is, of course, the mystery surrounding its anonymous founder (or perhaps, founders) Satoshi Nakamo...

a16z Podcast: The Changing Relationship Between Tech and Government

10 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

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, Ly...

a16z Podcast: Latinos and the Tech Economy -- U.S. Reps. Sanchez and Gallego Talk Bridging the Gaps

09 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

There is a gap between the technology industry and the fastest growing portion of today’s workforce and the workforce of the future: Latinos -- argu...

a16z Podcast: Is Entrepreneurship a Universal Language?

01 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

In this special international edition of the a16z Podcast, Mohsen Malayeri, co-founder of Avatech -- one of the more prominent startup accelerators in...

a16z Podcast: Layering Tech and Culture in Iran

30 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

In this special international edition of the a16z Podcast, Nazanin Daneshvar, co-founder and CEO of Takhfifan, the "Groupon of Iran", shares...

a16z Podcast: A Conversation With the Inventor of Spark

24 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

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. Ber...

a16z Podcast: Investing in Communities

22 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

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 un...

a16z Podcast: The Rise of the Quasi-IPO

17 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

"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,...

a16z Podcast: Location, Location, Location -- and Mobile

11 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Pick your metaphor: Smartphones are "remote controls" for the physical world, or perhaps, as Steve Cheney argues, they're "cursors for ...

a16z Podcast: Dealing with Corporate Dealmakers -- When to Talk to Corp Dev

10 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Every meeting a busy founder takes is time away from building the company. So it’s understandable why engaging corporate development groups is belie...

a16z Podcast: Apple Gets Its Music Streaming and Gives News Another Try

10 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Apple’s annual developer conference is cranking away in San Francisco, and a16z’s Benedict Evans examines the latest from the world’s most valua...

a16z Podcast: Apple Watch -- Looking for New Things Done in New Ways

05 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Is the Apple Watch breaking new technological ground, or just another accessory for your iPhone? a16z’s Benedict Evans and Board Partner Steven Sino...

The Cool Stuff Only Happens at Scale

05 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Distributed computing frameworks like Hadoop and Spark have enabled processing of "big data" sets -- but that's not enough for modeling surp...

a16z Podcast: Tech Trends Changing Gaming

04 Jun 2015

Contributed by Lukas

with Justin Bailey (@justinbailey12d), Herman Narula (@hermannarula), Tim Schafer (@timoflegend) and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90) We know that the gaming in...

a16z Podcast: For Google, Android is a Tactic and Cloud is a Strategy

30 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Google is a vast machine learning company. If you think about it in those terms, says Benedict Evans, every product and feature Google builds is an ex...

a16z Podcast: The Future of Entertainment and What David Petraeus and the Olsen Twins Can Teach Us

25 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

If there’s one business on planet earth that makes Silicon Valley look sober and level-headed it’s Hollywood, says Marc Andreessen. Hollywood and ...

a16z Podcast: Finding and Hiring for (Expectations) Fit on Both Sides

22 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

"Fit" is this squishy idea that a person, role, and company are a perfect match. But how do you tease out expectations and motivations from ...

a16z Podcast: Hiring is Hard -- Here’s How to Do it Right

21 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

LinkedIn may seem like a gift both for job seekers and hirers, but it's not enough. When (and how) should your company develop a process to attract --...

a16z Podcast: Which Bitcoin Players Matter?

19 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Users, entrepreneurs, and investors are harnessing bitcoin’s "workaday utility" in Argentina, a place where bitcoin is arguably more wides...

a16z Podcast: Why SaaS Revenue is Worth More Than Traditional Software Sales

16 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Andreessen Horowitz Managing Partner Scott Kupor and NetSuite CFO Ron Gill get into the weeds on SaaS valuations, and how public and private SaaS comp...

a16z Podcast: Verizon Plus AOL -- Why? -- The Short Answer is Mobile

12 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The battle of the pipes has shifted to mobile. Verizon caught plenty of people by surprise when it announced it was buying AOL for $4.4 billion in cas...

a16z Podcast: Good Bubbles, Bad Bubbles -- and Where Unicorns Come from

11 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Venture capital and investing in startups is the (modern) classic case of decision making under uncertainty. As new players and sources of capital ent...

a16z Podcast: Making Security More Useable

08 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The days of cramming security down employees’ throats or sending out best-practices advice emails are over. “You have to make security more useabl...

a16z Podcast: Barbarians at the Gate -- How to Think About Enterprise Security Today

07 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Enterprises large and small run their applications and infrastructure at a whole new level of agility and speed. But unfortunately, security doesn’t...

a16z Podcast: Making Sense of Big Data, Machine Learning, and Deep Learning

01 May 2015

Contributed by Lukas

"Machine learning is to big data as human learning is to life experience," says Christopher Nguyen, the co-founder and CEO of big data intel...

a16z Podcast: Software and Overcoming the Randomness of Birthplace

30 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

If your income can flow from any place on the globe, and you can earn your money on the Internet, the question for individuals and startup teams alike...

a16z Podcast: Getting Security Right Isn’t as Hard as You Think (But the Effort Never Ends)

29 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The paradox of security is we pretty much know what we are supposed to do most of the time -- but we don’t do it. If you examine all the recent h...

a16z Podcast: Government, Startups, & Innovation -- with U.S. Secretary of Defense Ash Carter

25 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Silicon Valley and the U.S. Department of Defense have had a long history of partnership -- including the government funding R&D that was commerci...

a16z Podcast: How One Startup Went from Being Banned by Regulators to Being Open for Business

24 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

When (now) two-year-old startup Zenefits was banned in Utah because it offered its HR management software for free, CEO and co-founder Parker Conrad f...

a16z Podcast: The Five Stages of Bitcoin -- Disdain, Dismissal, Curiosity, Oh F**k!, and Acceptance

23 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Bitcoin has not been easy for Wall Street and other traditional financial centers to wrap their collective heads around, let alone take seriously. But...

a16z Podcast: How Hacks Happen (Let’s Just Say Mistakes Have Been Made)

18 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

It seems like we hear about corporate (not to mention consumer) hacks in the news every week. Is this something new, or just a continuation of old pat...

a16z Podcast: Tackling Senior Care with Help from Technology

10 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

It is something we all face -- the prospect of taking care of a parent (or two) when they can't quite take care of themselves. For Seth Sternberg, par...

a16z Podcast: Messaging is the Medium

03 Apr 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The potential to turn messaging into a platform is driving much of the excitement in mobile, says a16z’s Benedict Evans. It's a platform through whi...

a16z Podcast: Security's Painful Prominence and Why There is No Turning Back -- with Marc Andreessen

31 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Cyber attacks are growing in number and impact, and the reason is simple: there's more of value (and more vectors to) steal in our increasingly virtua...

a16z Podcast: How to Lead, Not Manage Your Board

26 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

As the CEO of a startup your board is a critical tool in helping your company grow; the board is there to make you a better CEO. (Or at least it shoul...

a16z Podcast: Public or Private? Finding the Right Board Seat

25 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Getting a board seat isn't just about adding value, but also about what value you take from it for your career. But why do it? When? How? And should y...

a16z Podcast: The Truth about Serving on Boards (with Diane Greene and Marc Andreessen)

20 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Diane Greene -- who is on the boards of Google and Intuit -- has some golden rules when it comes to serving on boards. No 1: “You don’t want to te...

a16z Podcast: Building a Better Board

16 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Of the 371 board seats that opened up last year (within Fortune 500 companies that is), 39% ended up going to first-time board members. So how did the...

a16z Podcast: What the Apple Watch Is -- and Isn't

11 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

As technology outgrows the tech industry, it moves from selling utilitarian products to selling things that fulfill other desires or pleasures. The Ap...

a16z Podcast: Embracing Sales

05 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Companies founded by a group of engineers often have a deep-seated mistrust of sales -- or more precisely, salespeople. That was the case at GitHub, s...

a16z Podcast: Getting Sales Right

04 Mar 2015

Contributed by Lukas

It may seem like good apps or services sell themselves. That's what the whole viral thing is all about, right? Wrong, says Daniel Shapero, who helped ...

a16z Podcast: The Marketplace Rules

18 Feb 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Online marketplaces are growing much faster than e-commerce overall. Why is that? And what new kinds of marketplaces powered by the internet and mobil...

a16z Podcast: Tools for How We Work Today

11 Feb 2015

Contributed by Lukas

You've heard the story: Slack began as a game. But almost exactly 1 year ago today, the internal tool the team built for its own use became a team com...

a16z Podcast: Searching for Mobile's Third OS

07 Feb 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Consumers seem content with the mobile duopoly we currently have. So what can be gained from a third mobile operating system? If it's an open computin...

a16z Podcast: Crisis Time -- What to Do When Things Go Sideways

03 Feb 2015

Contributed by Lukas

A crisis can be an opportunity to change your culture. But you have to get through the crisis first, and that starts with getting to the truth of what...

a16z Podcast: Mobile is Eating the World (and Apple is Gobbling Fastest)

30 Jan 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Apple absolutely crushed its most recent quarter, and unquestionably owns the high-end of the smartphone market, says a16z’s Benedict Evans. So wher...

a16z Podcast: Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next

27 Jan 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Virtual reality (VR) -- and augmented reality (AR) -- seem to be everywhere these days, showing up in demos and offerings from the world's biggest gad...

a16z Podcast: Coding as Literacy

19 Jan 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Tracy Chou from Pinterest, and Chris Granger and Jamie Brandon from Eve, discuss whether coding is a literacy (or as Granger puts it, a "superpow...

a16z Podcast: The Technology is Ready, So Where is the Internet of Things?

09 Jan 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Does your burglar alarm need to speak to your thermostat? What about your lighting system? And if all those things need to interoperate, how does that...

a16z Podcast: Dumb Storage Gets Smart

19 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Storage as a set of technologies in the datacenter has a conservative reputation when it comes to innovation. Reliability, capacity, speed, and cost -...

a16z Podcast: Why the Datacenter Needs an Operating System

18 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

What does an operating system for today's datacenter look like? Why do we even need one, and how does it function? Mesosphere's Benjamin Hindman, the ...

a16z Podcast: Enough with the Old Stuff -- Time for New Questions in Mobile

17 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

It's been a long and (at times) interesting battle pitching iOS vs. Android. It's time to let it go, says a16z's Benedict Evans. It's time to move on ...

a16z Podcast: Gateway Gadgets to the Internet of Things

13 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The Internet of Things puts intelligence into all kinds of things -- especially in the home, from appliances to light bulbs and door locks. But we sti...

a16z Podcast: Technology and the Opening of Myanmar

08 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

After years of being shut off to the world -- Myanmar is opening itself up. Not just across physical borders, but also the digital. What happens when ...

a16z Podcast: If Coding is the New Literacy, How Can More People Code?

08 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Technology can be an equalizer, especially as new tools democratize the expertise that was previously held only by a limited few. But is coding really...

a16z Podcast: Where the Growth in Cloud and Enterprise Software Really Is (with Marc Benioff)

05 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

VCs wouldn't fund Salesforce ("that obviously won't work") when Marc Benioff began. With the cloud a growing part of practically every compa...

a16z Podcast: Security’s Wakeup Call

03 Dec 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The security landscape is changing. Can companies fight back against an increasingly well-armed and sophisticated set of bad players? “I think it is...

a16z Podcast: Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs

28 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

It might seem that culture at a startup is something that is just intuitive. And in the first days, with the first handful of people, that might be tr...

a16z Podcast: Ecommerce and the Holiday Shopping Collision

21 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

How can ecommerce companies deal with the conflicting expectations of consumers and logistics realities of an on-demand economy? How can they compete ...

a16z Podcast: Where's My Stuff? -- The Lowdown on Logistics and Ops

21 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The ease with which we can order anything online masks the tremendous complexity of getting that item to your door in a day or two (or less). Andreess...

a16z Podcast: The Next Phase of 3D Printing

19 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

In this wide-ranging discussion about the latest and next consumer and industrial applications for 3D printing, we examine (with Shapeway's Carine Car...

a16z Podcast: The End of Ownership

17 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

What happens when the importance of access to things trumps the value of owning those same things? The end of ownership. From computer hardware, to ho...

a16z Podcast: Sports, Tech, and What We Can All Learn from the Latest Performance Science

14 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The modern, average 12-year-old Madden NFL videogame player has actually visualized more plays than ‪any past real-life NFL Hall-of-Famer. And now, ...

a16z Podcast: When Fantasy Football and Crowdfunding Collide

12 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

With 15 million fantasy football players angling for the win in thousands of fantasy leagues, ESPN joined Tilt.com for a discussion about how crowdfun...

a16z Podcast: What Makes the Valley Work

11 Nov 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Don Faul, head of operations at Pinterest and a former U.S. Marine Corps Platoon Commander, grills Marc Andreessen in front of a crowd of veterans at ...

a16z Podcast: Selling Tech to Everyone -- Changes Everything

31 Oct 2014

Contributed by Lukas

It’s always hard to predict how a generational shift in technology will impact the wider world, especially when you are in the trenches building tha...

a16z Podcast: Beyond Bitcoin -- The Blockchain

24 Oct 2014

Contributed by Lukas

It’s well understood that bitcoin can be used to buy and sell things/services, and the ecosystem of people accepting the cryptocurrency as payment i...

a16z Podcast: The (Definite) Optimism of Peter Thiel

17 Oct 2014

Contributed by Lukas

What is Silicon Valley’s greatest reigning monopoly? How did PayPal manage to emerge from the dotcom implosion? Can you build a great tech company a...

a16z Podcast: Startups as Science Experiments -- Can VC Disrupt Academia?

02 Oct 2014

Contributed by Lukas

It's a myth that startups happen in isolation. Those legendary two people in a garage are often building on the deep and basic research -- long funded...

a16z Podcast: For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters

18 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Jonah Peretti is building BuzzFeed to “inform, inspire and entertain” in a world where news and entertainment is increasingly passed around on soc...

a16z Podcast: Reinventing Media

17 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Software, and the billions of transistors that power it, has brought about massive change to all kinds of industries, but none more so than the news b...

a16z Podcast: Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment -- Four Steps for Habit-Forming Products

15 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Nir Eyal and Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover, the authors of "Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products," discuss the theory and practice of th...

a16z Podcast: Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”

12 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Have we as a culture become expert at globalizing industries, but are we failing when it comes to truly world-changing technological breakthroughs? Is...

a16z Podcast: Apple Takes on Payments and Your Wrist

10 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

NFC (near field communication) technology has been around for about a decade, and with the exception of transit cards mostly outside the United States...

a16z Podcast: Raising Money and Valuing Startups -- What Happens When Things Don't Go As Planned?

08 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

It’s a problem most entrepreneurs would love to face, a massive valuation offer from investors for the startup they’ve been killing themselves ove...

a16z Podcast: Everything You Need to Know About Amazon

05 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Profitless Ponzi scheme, or the greatest company in the world led by an absolute genius? Amazon is a polarizing company. Quarter after quarter, as it ...

a16z Podcast: Building Brands and Running Retail -- Ron Johnson and Tristan Walker Break It Down

03 Sep 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Given that physical retail is expensive, what’s the right distribution mix for startups? In this podcast with Tristan Walker (who is building health...

a16z Podcast: Three Kids, One App, One Love -- The Five-O Story

28 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Teenage siblings Ima, Asha and Caleb Christian from Atlanta, Georgia join Ben Horowitz for a discussion about the motivation and origins of their new ...

a16z Podcast: Ben and Marc Explain (Practically) Everything – Part 2

26 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The five-year anniversary segment with a16z founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen picks up with a discussion of Clayton Christensen's theories aro...

a16z Podcast: Ben and Marc Explain (Practically) Everything – Part 1

25 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Around the firm we use “software eats the world” as a guide for how technology will impact every industry and every person – from education to h...

a16z Podcast: The Topic That's Lasted the Entire History of Computing -- Bundling and Unbundling

15 Aug 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Jim Barksdale in the run-up to the Netscape IPO told potential investors that you can make money in software in two ways: bundling and unbundling. Ben...

a16z Podcast: The Consumerization of IT

31 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Peter Levine goes deeper into the changing nature of the data center with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta, and Florian Leibert, CEO of Mesosphere. Does ARM...

a16z Podcast: Mobile Invades the Data Center

31 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

There is a shift in enterprise hardware from expensive, proprietary hardware to cheap components plucked directly from the consumer hardware supply ch...

a16z Podcast: An Open Source Business Model That Works

31 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Open source software has permeated practically every nook of the software world. The biggest companies and largest-scale systems all lean heavily on o...

a16z Podcast: The Wearables Session

31 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Fashion, function or just a fad? Wearable technology is getting huge amounts of attention from companies of every size and stripe. Consumers are slapp...

a16z Podcast: Building Marketplaces with the Power of Community

31 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

There are great examples of communities helping to grow and solidify online marketplaces. eBay in its early days certainly leveraged the power of comm...

a16z Podcast: The Micro and Macro of Mobile

25 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Apple during its most recent quarter reported growing app store sales and flat iPad sales. Where do tablets go from here, especially in light of the A...

a16z Podcast: Government Transparency Powered by Software

10 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

What if we could tap into our government with the same speed and ease as our smartphones and search? Can technology make a difference in how governmen...

a16z Podcast: Protecting Your Company from Itself: Why You Need HR

08 Jul 2014

Contributed by Lukas

One of the ways to damage a fast-growing startup is to not have an HR person. But when is the right time to bring someone on? What qualities should yo...

a16z Podcast: When Large Scale Gets Really Massive -- Managing Today’s Enterprise Networks

27 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Managing enterprise networks with thousands of users and endpoints has been hard enough. Now that large enterprise networks routinely include hundreds...

a16z Podcast: Google I/O -- A Three-Hour Tour (in 30 minutes)

26 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The Google I/O keynote was epic in at least one respect, length. For three hours Google laid out the near horizon for all things Google. This included...

a16z Podcast: Datacenter of the Future

18 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The datacenter has long been -- there's no nice way to put this -- a bit of a snoozer. Expensive boxes running expensive software. No more, says a16z ...

a16zPodcast: People Marketplaces Take On One of the Last Great E-Commerce Opportunities -- Groceries

16 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

People Marketplaces are a lot like eBay -- connecting buyer and seller -- but for services, says a16z General Partner Jeff Jordan. These two-sided ma...

a16z Podcast: Mapping the Information Economy -- Where’s the Cloud Going Next?

13 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

a16z Board Partner Steven Sinofsky and Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie discuss findings from a study of the information economy that has been built...

a16z Podcast: The Promise (and Nightmare) of Cross-Platform Software

06 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

The announcement by Apple of its new programming language Swift is prompting developers to consider yet again how to tailor their efforts in the battl...

a16z Podcast: The Apple WWDC 2014 Deep Dive

03 Jun 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Benedict Evans is a veteran of Apple’s big events and puts all the announcements and demos into one of three categories: 1) all the cool incremental...

a16z Podcast: You Just Thought You Were Building a Software Company. It's a Community.

30 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

For Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, community is everything. When he needed a double lung transplant, Gilliam turned to the Internet and to...

a16z Podcast: Bending Every Pixel to Your Will -- Optimizely and the Next Wave of Internet Tools

20 May 2014

Contributed by Lukas

Optimizely is a superb example of the democratization of software development. You don't need an engineering degree to fire up Optimizely and start te...