The a16z Show
Episodes
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...
a16z Podcast: The Two Big Problems With Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century”
15 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
“At a moment of great concern about inequality, now comes a learned tome proclaiming the gravity of the inequality problem,” says Larry Summers in...
a16z Podcast: Demystifying Venture Capital
02 May 2014
Contributed by Lukas
What do venture capitalists actually do all day? And what is the path that leads to a career investing in startups? Hummer Winblad’s Ann Winblad, Co...
a16z Podcast: When Your PC Expires, What's Next?
30 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Computing is in the midst of a transformation that puts your future device purchases up for grabs. It’s a safe bet that everyone will have a phone, ...
a16z Podcast: Apple and the Fate of Tablets
25 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Apple’s recent earnings sent the stock soaring. What drove that investor exuberance had everything to do with iPhone sales (and the China market), a...
a16z Podcast: The Future Of Television
18 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Can technology companies show up and disrupt television with an onslaught of new gizmos and services, or is content still the controlling factor? What...
a16z Podcast: Engineering a Revolution at Work
10 Apr 2014
Contributed by Lukas
From file cabinets to typewriters, spreadsheets and word processing the tools we use for work change not only what we do, but the culture of our workp...
a16z Podcast: China and Tech
30 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
China has been a tough market to crack for U.S. internet companies. One of the key reasons is China has its own crop of hugely successful and highly i...
a16z Podcast: Oculus and the (Mind-Blowing) Reality of Virtual Reality
28 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Up until now virtual reality has been a disappointment for all those people pining for their own personal holodeck. But advances in the components req...
a16z Podcast: The Rise of Full Stack Startups
27 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Suppose you develop a new technology that is valuable to some industry. The old approach was to sell or license your technology to the existing compan...
a16z Podcast: Searching for Mobile’s Own PageRank
24 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
The mobile experience is still in its 1995 Yahoo phase, a sea of apps and websites without an easy way to find what you want and need on your smartpho...
a16z Podcast: Where is the Technology That "Matters?" Right Here
21 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
There is a recurring theme that the tech industry is busy cranking out fluffy social apps rather than hardcore technology. Not the case, say Chris Dix...
a16z Podcast: The State of the Bitcoin Ecosystem, and a Theory on Satoshi
20 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Andreessen Horowitz's Chris Dixon and Balaji Srinivasan discuss the state of the Bitcoin ecosystem now that the Mt. Gox dust has settled. What's next ...
a16z Podcast: Apple and Google Won the Mobile OS War, But a New War Has Already Begun
13 Mar 2014
Contributed by Lukas
Apple and Google won the mobile OS war, but the next war – to build big businesses on top of Android and iOS – is just beginning. Andreessen Horow...