The a16z Show
Episodes
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...