The a16z Show

a16z Podcast: Dell + EMC -- Why the Python Just Ate the Cow

16 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

We just witnessed the largest acquisition in tech history, and before Dell made it happen, it would have been hard to imagine. Not so much that the tw...

a16z Podcast: AMPLab, the Power of Open Source, and the Future of Systems Software

14 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The place where Apache Spark was born, UC Berkeley’s AMPLab has not just created a major open source software platform, it’s spun out more than it...

a16z Podcast: The Role of Academia in the Startup World

13 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Getting denied another round of NSF funding in the early days of Mosaic turned out to be a huge catalyst to start a company around the fledgling web b...

a16z Podcast: How Big Companies Can Get the Most From Silicon Valley

09 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

There is a stream of the world's largest companies coming to Silicon Valley looking for innovation. But how do they find it, and then, how do they bri...

a16z Podcast: Wall Street's Most Hated Man -- A Conversation With Overstock.com's Patrick Byrne

06 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Mention Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, and you’ll elicit a strong opinion. In 2004, one hedge fund manager labeled Byrne the m...

a16z Podcast: A Podcast about Podcasts

04 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Podcasts and podcasting have been around a while, but seem to be going through a renaissance of sorts -- partly enabled by connected cars and other te...

a16z Podcast: Money, Risk, and Software

02 Oct 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Financial services are overdue for an overhaul. With a16z's newest general partner, Alex Rampell (who just officially started), this segment of the po...

a16z Podcast: Advertising vs. Micropayments in the Age of Ad Blockers

25 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Apple included support for ad blocking in its recent iOS 9 update, and for many that prompted discussions around an age-old question: Is traditional a...

a16z Podcast: Building the Right Technical Advisory Board

21 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

There is increasing interest among companies -- small and large -- in putting together technical advisory boards. It sounds pretty straightforward: ge...

a16z Podcast: Making the Case for Permissionless Innovation

17 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The internet as it has evolved in the United States is perhaps the best example of “permissionless innovation” -- the idea that you can innovate w...

a16z Podcast: The Best Way To Be Smart ... Is To Not Be Stupid

11 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Legendary investor Charlie Munger (Warren Buffett's financial partner and vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway) invokes a set of interdisciplinary &quo...

a16z Podcast: Apple Has Lock on Luxury Smartphones, But Not Business of TV

10 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Apple has once again shown it absolutely dominates the high-end for smartphones, and no other company is likely to knock it from its perch in the near...

a16z Podcast: Code and Culture in South Central Los Angeles

07 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

South Central Los Angeles -- which includes Watts and Compton -- in many ways still hasn’t recovered from the Rodney King riots of 1992. In South Ce...

a16z Podcast: Crypto, Security, CS, Quantum Computing, and More with Our New Professor-in-Residence

05 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Many of the most successful companies have their foundations in university labs -- from data science to the web browser itself. Yet the process of mov...

a16z Podcast: Hard Forks, Hard Choices for Bitcoin

02 Sep 2015

Contributed by Lukas

a16z’s Chris Dixon and Mike Hearn talked about all things bitcoin on the a16z Podcast a couple months ago, including an issue that has bitcoin devel...

a16z Podcast: Connecting People with Digital Work, the Gig Economy, and More

31 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Can digital work fight poverty? Can companies be profitable and also do social good -- especially in a society where the proxy for value is capital an...

a16z Podcast: Talking Humans and Machines with NYT’s John Markoff

28 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Longtime New York Times technology and science writer John Markoff joins the a16z Podcast to discuss our changing relationship with technology and mac...

a16z Podcast: Messaging As the Interface to Everything

28 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Messaging app WeChat tells us a lot about mobile and business in China. In a recent deep-dive primer on the WeChat phenomenon, a16z partner Connie Cha...

a16z Podcast: When Software Eats Cars

25 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

After the smartphone, what business has the global scale (in terms of people and profits) that make it attractive for tech companies to turn their att...

a16z Podcast: Tech's Biggest Ideas and How They Take Hold -- With Marc Andreessen and Dan Siroker

20 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Google, eBay, even the Web itself, in the beginning all of these things appeared as point products, interesting in their way, but small. Of course, t...

a16z Podcast: The Internet is His Religion

18 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

How do you face down cancer? Get told you can’t get life-saving organ transplants, and go about getting them anyway? And in the middle of that menta...

a16z Podcast: Establishing Online Identity is Hard -- It Shouldn't Be

17 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

As more and more of what we do for fun and work- happens online, establishing identity becomes ever more critical. Whether it’s for dating or sendin...

a16z Podcast: Straight Outta Compton, The Interview (including Ice Cube and Ben Horowitz)

15 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

This special episode of the a16z Podcast is based on a Q&A from an early screening we hosted of Universal Pictures’ Straight Outta Compton, the ...

a16z Podcast: Getting That First Board Seat

13 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

When you're going for a board interview -- especially when it's your first board seat -- you're actually not supposed to go into it advocating for you...

a16z Podcast: Is It Possible to Achieve Equitable Equity for Startup Employees?

07 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

There's been a lot of activity lately around trying to improve equity compensation (for example, by removing tax liabilities that handcuff them). Or b...

a16z Podcast: Compensation Isn’t About Paying the Most, It’s About Being Consistent

07 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

The key to any great company is the people. Of course, part of attracting and keeping the best people is compensation. It seems straightforward, but i...

a16z Podcast: Bitcoin, Greece, and What’s Next for Cryptocurrency

07 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

There are few things as old as financial catastrophe, except maybe finance. But in the latest fiscal meltdown in Greece, people started asking questio...

a16z Podcast: A Copernican Update ... In Tech, the Smartphone is the Center

05 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Given the endless time we all spend with our noses in our phones, it may not be too surprising to hear that the smartphone has taken over the tech wor...

a16z Podcast: How Innovation Ecosystems Grow Around the Globe

01 Aug 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Why do so many-government led efforts to build the next "Silicon Valley" in one geography or another fail? Is it misguided to even try? But ...

a16z Podcast: These Girls Code

30 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

We sat down with four jet-lagged high school hackers from Nigeria, Brazil, and India -- representing some of the finalists in this year’s Technovati...

a16z Podcast: Why Every Business is in the Data Business

28 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

It’s not just the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon that lean on a massive and growing corpus of data, today every company is a data-driven comp...

a16z Podcast: When Bio Meets Computer Science

26 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Biology startups have been around for a long time. But the world has changed since that first wave of bio startups, and especially more recently, due ...

a16z Podcast: Big Data Goes Really Big

24 Jul 2015

Contributed by Lukas

Big Data is evolving. It’s moving from the sole domain of the high priests of data science, to something that practically every organization -- big ...

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 ...