The a16z Show
Episodes
Geo-engineering and the Power of Narrative
19 Feb 2022
Contributed by Lukas
original episode notes and transcript here: https://future.a16z.com/podcasts/pleistocenepark-geoengineering-iceagebiome/Longtime podcast showrunner (...
M&A, Before and After: What Founders Need to Know
26 Jan 2022
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the a16z podcast. Today we’re talking about the mindsets and frameworks founders should know about when navigating the mergers and acquis...
How 'Hyperscalers' are Innovating — and Competing — in the Data Center
10 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Innovation in the data center has been constrained by the traditional model of suppliers providing fixed-function chips that limit how much the bigges...
Kickstarting Network Effects
06 Dec 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 importa...
NFTs, Explained
25 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 al...
Play-to-Earn Gaming and How Work is Evolving in Web3
11 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 tim...
On container ships, supply chains, and the physical world
02 Nov 2021
Contributed by Lukas
"Beyond the Meme: Ever Given, Supply Chains, and the Physical World" -- by Ryan Petersen (June 2021). Bio + essay details/ originally appeared at: htt...
Crypto Security and the New Web3 Mindsets for Users
15 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s episode is all about crypto security — that is, the new mindsets and the new strategies for storing crypto assets safely while also allowi...
Cloud Wars and Company Wars: Play Nice But Win
02 Oct 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 g...
Uncontrolled Spread: Science, Policy, Institutions, Infrastructure
20 Sep 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There's no question technology played a huge role in the recent/current pandemic, including especially in the plug-and-play engineering and incredibly...
Systems Leadership for Disruptors and Incumbents
24 Jul 2021
Contributed by Lukas
There's been a false dichotomy in technology and management lore over the past decade, between "brain" and "brawn", digital and physical, independence...
NFT Use Cases, Today and Tomorrow
19 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Recently, a16z and the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research hosted the NFT Virtual Summit, which brought together leading thinkers and builders on ...
Man, Mosquito, Malaria Vaccine
02 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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 a...
Crypto, an Oral Essay
17 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
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...
On Monetizing Community with Patreon Cofounder Sam Yam
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It's clear from the growth of Patreon, Substack, TikTok, Clubhouse and many more that the power of the Creator Economy continues to build. These platf...
The Creator Economy: NFTs and Beyond
03 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In today’s episode of the a16z Podcast, we’re talking about the Creator Economy, and how NFTs (but not just NFTS!) are making it possible for arti...
All about NFTs
28 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is all about NFTs. It seems like nothing has caught on and spread into mainstream interest like NFTs, where one hears everything from "I'...
The Next Wave of Marketplace Startups
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the tech world, marketplaces are a hot topic. That term—marketplace—encompasses a huge swath of services we use every day, from grocery deliver...
The Third Vaccine, and Vaccine Choice
18 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
https://a16z.com/2021/03/15/16-minutes-58-the-johnson-johnson-vaccine-and-covid-efficacy-rates/ Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen...
Companies & Culture: What You Do Is Who You Are
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast -- which was recorded at the Computer History Museum in a live event, before the pandemic (first published in December 2019) is all about...
Boss Talk with Ben Horowitz
28 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Boss Talk is a weekly live show on Clubhouse, where a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi discuss CEO stuff, leadership stuff, m...
All About Ransomware
25 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In just the last couple years, ransomware has grown into a multibillion dollar industry. It has evolved from taking systems and servers hostage to ste...
One on One with Marc and Ben
17 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On social audio app Clubhouse, Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are hosting a new live show called "One on One with A and Z", where they go deep on qu...
Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More
08 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When you hear stories about Amazon's "invention machine" -- which led to a company with not just one or two products but several successful diverse li...
Anatomy of the SolarWinds Hack: Who What Where When How
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In this special “3x”-long episode of our (otherwise shortform) news analysis show 16 Minutes -- past such 2-3X explainer episodes have covered sec...
Psychedelics: Striking a Balance Between Benefits and Side Effects
23 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In recent years, there’s been a shift in how we think about psychedelics – from drugs of abuse and recreation, to powerful drugs for treating neur...
Developers as Creatives
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The rise of developers -- as buyers, as influencers, as a creative class -- is a direct result of "software eating the world", and of key shifts in IT...
Section 230: Everything You Need to Know -- Tweets, Free Speech, Beyond
09 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
All about section 230 of the Communications Decency Act -- in what Wired senior writer (and host of the Get Wired podcast) described as "one of the cl...
Baumol's Cost Disease, in Healthcare... and Where We Go Next
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
If software’s eating the world -- and more specifically, bringing costs down and increasing productivity through entire industries -- why have some ...
Words of 2020! (and Metaphors, and Interfaces of the Year)
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"In a year that left us speechless, 2020 has been filled with new words unlike any other”... so it's unprecedented that for the first time, the Oxfo...
The Machine That Made the Vaccine: Company, Platform, Innovation
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this special episode of Bio Eats World -- which aired right after the FDA authorized Moderna's mRNA vaccine for emergency use -- Moderna CEO Stepha...
The PPP Omnibus: Eminent Domain, Fraud, and Fintech
14 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features two relevant but previously recorded episodes, discussing the relevance of the Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) from the Sma...
The Holy Grail of Social + Fintech
07 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The intersection of social and finance—as well as shifting attitudes around what we share about money online—have given way to an ambitious new wa...
On Fear and Leadership: Product to Sales CTOs & CEOs
04 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There's a few ontologies for describing the phases leaders -- and their startups -- go through, whether it's product-sales-etc. or pioneer to settler....
On Food As Medicine (A Holiday Snack)
26 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
What happens if we treat food as a medicine in the healthcare system: How, where, and who (pays)? What role can technology play in increasing access, ...
Crypto Creators: On Art Galleries to 'Tokenized' Collectibles
22 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode features Q&As with two artists who are exploring crypto-powered auction sites and marketplaces – this is part of our ongoing series on ...
What to Know about Those Vaccines
20 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A vaccine for COVID seems to be (almost) here… or is it? What’s hype/ what’s real beyond the headlines (and beyond the press release), when it c...
The Social Serendipity of Cloud Gaming
16 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
True cloud-native games—those exclusive to and solely playable within the cloud—are poised to revolutionize gameplay and unlock new avenues of hyp...
The Great Data Debate
13 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Lakes v. warehouses, analytics v. AI/ML, SQL v. everything else... As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the s...
How to Moderate Talks, Panels, Meetings, More (Virtual and Beyond!)
05 Nov 2020
Contributed by Lukas
How to moderate good, productive discussions and navigate tricky conversations is top of mind -- whether doing a panel, conducting a live event, prese...
Textiles as Tech, Science, Math, Culture... or Civilization
24 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they're indistinguishable from ...
Data Alone Is Not Enough: The Evolution of Data Architectures
23 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Data, data, data – it’s long been a buzzword in the industry, whether big data, streaming data, data analytics, data science, even AI & machine le...
Designing for, Marketing to, and Partnering With Gen Z
19 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Gen Z—those born between 1995 and 2010—now makes up 35 percent of the population and represent $143 billion dollars in spending power. This episod...
The Present Future of Audio: Talk, Music, Video, Interactivity
14 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We've already talked a lot about podcasting, both evolution of the industry as well as the form, but where are we going with the future of audio, more...
Tracking the Trends: AI, WebRTC, Crypto, and Full Stack Startups
11 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Stay Updated:Find a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Podcast on SpotifyListen to the a16z Podcast on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: http...
How to Decide, Convey vs. Convince, & More
08 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
It seems like investors are especially obsessed with the psychology of decision making -- high stakes, after all -- but all kinds of decisions, whethe...
Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials
01 Oct 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Millennials and Gen Z have been hard-hit by the one-two punch of the 2008 and 2020 financial crises. That experience has radically shaped their approa...
Degrading Drugs for Problem Proteins: Journal Club now on Bio Eats World (ep 2)
27 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the second episode of Bio Eats World, a brand new podcast all about how biology is technology. Bio is breaking out of the lab and clinic an...
The Biology of Aging: Introducing Bio Eats World (ep 1)
23 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Welcome to the first episode of Bio Eats World, a brand new podcast all about how biology is technology. Bio is breaking out of the lab and clinic and...
TikTok & Beyond: The Algorithm Question, The Future of Product
20 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
With the U.S. tech partnership for TikTok being finalized, what happens if source code is excluded (and more specifically, the For You Page algorithm)...
The New Fan Club: Creators, Fans, and the Power of Markets (& Crypto)
18 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s episode, part two in our two-part series on the Creator Economy, focuses on the new potential revenue streams and fan-engagement models open...
So You Want to Launch a Newsletter: Tips From Substack Writers
17 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode, part one in a two-part series on the Creator Economy, explores the process and economics behind creating an independent newsletter. In t...
Designing a Culture of Reinvention
15 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Since Netflix started in the late 90s as a DVD-by-mail rental service competing with Blockbuster, it has completely reinvented itself... twice – fir...
Heroes & Myths in Entrepreneurship -- Guy Raz
12 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"I'm in a movie, but it's the wrong movie."For better or for worse, we tell the story of entrepreneurs as one of the mythical hero's journey: that's t...
The Question of Education
11 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Monopoly, oligopoly, cartel. All three of those words can describe the (not so) modern education system today, given the cost structures, economics, a...
Pandemic Relief and Fraud: Willful Deceit or Design Defect?
04 Sep 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode examines the potential for misuse and fraud among those applying for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)—and how fintech and software...
Measuring & Managing Community Orgs, Developer Relations and Beyond
30 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Okay, so we know community is important -- whether for developer relations for your product or other types of communities -- but how do we measure the...
Reining in Complexity: Data Science & Future of AI/ML Businesses
21 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
There is no spoon. Or rather, “There is no such thing as ‘data’, there’s just frozen models”, argues Peter Wang, the co-founder and CEO of A...
Online Learning and the Ed Tech Debate
17 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is all about education and technology, a topic that’s especially top of mind this week as students in much of the country return to sch...
On Vaccines and Vaccinology, in COVID and Beyond
14 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from (what’s been traditionally been up to) 12 years or so of vaccine de...
Turning Open Source Developers Into Superfans
10 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode, we continue our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. Today’s topic: How do y...
Journal Club: Slaying the Sleeper Cells of Aging with CAR T
09 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
CAR T therapy is a groundbreaking medicine that uses engineered T cells to attack cancer. But CAR T cells (that is, chimeric antigen receptor T cells)...
Working, Making, Creating in Public... and Private
02 Aug 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We're living in an unprecedented era of online collaboration, coordination, and creation. All kinds of people are coming together -- whether in an ope...
GPT-3: What's Hype, What's Real on the Latest in AI
30 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode -- cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenA...
Taking the Pulse on Medical Device Security
22 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Many don’t realize we even need to think about the possibility of security hacks when it comes to things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and more. B...
Journal Club: A New Path to Antibiotic Resistance
19 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Ever since the discovery of antibiotics, microbiologists have worried about and studied how bacteria acquire resistance to these drugs. Adding to the ...
Cybercrime, Incorporated
18 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
A dive into the sociological, operational, and tactical realities of this murky underworld, Lusthaus and de la Garza discuss who the players are, what...
How Transparent Pricing Drives Healthcare Change
15 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Dr. Marty Makary—surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and health policy and innovation expert—has long been a passi...
Preserving Digital History: How to Close the Web's 'Memory Hole'
13 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
More than 98% of the information on the web is lost within 20 years, and huge gaps exist in our digital and cultural history. Zoran Basich and Alex Pr...
Alex Honnold on Human Performance (part 2) – Climbing and Entrepreneurship
11 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In part 1 of our series on human performance, we looked at the limits of human potential in climbing and other sports – and how we push those limits...
Alex Honnold on Human Performance (part 1) – Where's the Limit?
11 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Is there a limit to what humans can do? And if so, how do you know when you've reached it? Welcome to part one of a two-part series on human performan...
Why We Shouldn’t Fear AI in Healthcare
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"Why We Shouldn’t Fear the ‘Black Box’ of AI (in Healthcare and Everywhere)" by Vijay Pande. First published in the New York Times, January 2018...
When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"When One App Rules Them All: The Case of WeChat and Mobile in China" by Connie Chan. First published August 2015. You can also find and share this e...
Every Company Is a Fintech Company
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
"Why Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company -- The Next Era of Financial Services and the 'AWS Phase' for Fintech" by Angela Strange.You can also fin...
Read-Alouds, Continued
07 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today we're continuing a series we started a while ago of read-alouds (for more context on the why and why now check out episode #500 on how we podcas...
Journal Club: Revisiting Eroom's Law
05 Jul 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Eroom’s Law is Moore’s Law spelled backwards. It’s a term that was coined in a Nature Reviews Drug Discovery article by researchers at Sanford B...
Preventing Pandemics with Genomic Epidemiology
30 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the visibility of scientists and the scientific process to the broader public; suddenly, scientists working on vir...
Journal Club: Therapeutic Video Game on Trial
28 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the a16z bio journal club, we cover one of the key clinical trials that supported the recent FDA approval of the first prescription...
Gross Margins, Early to Late: What They Do (and Don't) Tell You
27 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Gross margins are essentially a company's revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers, and ...
Building Products for Power Users
24 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
As more digital natives have entered the workplace, they have brought with them the expectation that their software should both be a joy to use and al...
Journal Club: Building a Better Chloroplast
21 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the a16z bio Journal Club, bio deal team partner Judy Savitskaya and Lauren Richardson discuss research that aims to enhance the ef...
Real Estate in a Pandemic: Renters and Landlords (Part 2)
17 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is the second in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. Part 1 focused on prospective home buyers, selle...
Real Estate in a Pandemic: Homeowners and Buyers (Part 1)
16 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode is the first in a two-part series that examines the pandemic’s impact on real estate. Part 1 focuses on prospective home buyers, seller...
World’s Largest Supercomputer v. Biology’s Toughest Problems
14 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Proteins are molecular machines that must first assemble themselves to function. But how does a protein, which is produced as a linear string of amino...
The Return of Home-based Healthcare
12 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The way we deliver healthcare has changed enormously over the last century, shifting from house calls by doctors to your own to institutionalized sett...
The Future of Primary Care
11 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Primary care was meant to be the front door to the healthcare system, but in some ways never set up for success to begin with. We need a new operating...
All about Section 230: What It Does and Doesn't Say
09 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
We cover the tricky but important topic of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law has been in the headlines a lot recently, in ...
What We Can't Reveal We Can't Heal
04 Jun 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Given recent events around George Floyd and far beyond, this special episode of the a16z Podcast features Shaka Senghor, a leading advocate for crimi...
SaaS Go-to-Upmarket
29 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
For a SaaS company, it's easier to move upmarket than down, and this gives SaaS startups the advantage against incumbents. In this episode, David Ul...
New Fan Engagement Models for Athletes and Influencers
26 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Today’s episode is about a practical application of crypto — namely, the way it can “tokenize” fandom. More broadly, it’s about fan engageme...
Don't Call it a Brain in a Dish!
24 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Our understanding of the human brain and its disorders has always been limited by our lack of access to living, human, developing brain tissue. For th...
Pandemics: Early Detection, Networks, Spreaders
23 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Pandemics are predictable; what's not predictable is the intensity, or the precise timing of arrival. That's where early detection -- not just rapid w...
Podcasting and the Future of Audio
20 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This podcast (first recorded in 2019, now being rerun) -- is a podcast about podcasting: But it's really all about audio. A lot's changed... and a lot...
Growth in Turbulent Times
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In normal times, every company operates against some hypothetical growth model—a data-driven framework that describes how your product grows and h...
Journal Club: Using CRISPR to Prevent Coronavirus and Influenza Infection
15 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of a16z bio Journal Club, general partner Vijay Pande, bio deal team partner Andy Tran, and bio editor Lauren Richardson discuss a nov...
What's Next in Gaming
07 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Video game technology has evolved into a global phenomenon that extends far beyond entertainment. In this episode, John Riccitiello, CEO of the game s...
Undruggable Drugs
06 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, we take a deep dive into the world of drug development—specifically "undruggable drugs": a category of protein,...
The Next Generation of Cultural Influencers in Tech
02 May 2020
Contributed by Lukas
This episode—which originally took place as a live event—is a conversation between Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner and a16z Cultural Lead...
The Chief Security Officer in (and out of) a Crisis
29 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The Chief Security Officer (CSO/CISO) used to manage on-premise servers, now the information they have to secure has migrated to the cloud. As the res...
Journal Club: Finding New Antibiotics with Machine Learning, What Coronavirus Structures Tell Us
26 Apr 2020
Contributed by Lukas
a16z Journal Club (part of the a16z Podcast), curates and covers recent advances from the scientific literature -- what papers we’re reading, and wh...