The a16z Show

In this special episode from a16z’s Bio Eats World podcast, general partners Vijay Pande and Jon Lai join bio editorial lead Olivia Webb to discuss the intersection of games and health, including:  what constitutes a game, the “healthy dessert” problem, and the challenge of building a game that’s both fun and therapeutic. You can subscribe to Bio Eats World wherever you get your podcasts.  Stay Up...

This week, we have a special episode for you, from our newest podcast, " web3 with a16z " . This episode features Chris Dixon – founding general partner of a16z crypto and former entrepreneur himself – and Kevin Rose – the co-founder of Proof Collective, as well as co-founder of Digg, former investor at GV, and longtime entrepreneur and podcaster. In this wide-ranging hallway-style conversation fr...

Audio is no longer just audio anymore -- podcasts now pull from new video platforms like TikTok and older ones like radio, user experience is growing and changing, and it's easier than ever to create audio content. Where do all these mediums converge and where do they diverge -- when it comes to user experience, product design, recommendations, discovery, and more? In this episode from October 202...

While building and shaping culture is as relevant as ever for startups and companies today, leaders have sought the answers to these questions for hundreds of years – and there is practical advice to be had by examining different cultures across time and around the globe. In this episode from December 2019, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz sits down with host Sonal Choksi to talk about what actually m...

Behind many great leaders, you’ll usually find a great mentor. The mentor-mentee relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have, in both their careers and in their lives. So how do you find a mentor? What are different kinds of mentorship? And how can it help you break into an industry – or help others break in themselves? In this episode from July 20...

In this episode from October 2021, Michael Dell, founder and CEO of Dell Technologies and one of the longest serving founder-CEOs in the technology industry, joins a16z general partner Martin Casado, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, and host Sonal Choksi on the occasion of Michael’s book, Play Nice to Win: A CEO’s Journey from Founder to Leader.   There are lots of challenges in being public while...

In this episode from February 2019, Jyoti Bansal, founding CEO of AppDynamics and co-founder of Unusual Ventures, joins a16z general partner Peter Levine, a16z partner Sateesh Talluri, and host Sonal Choksi to discuss how product and sales evolve together for enterprise go-to-market, including key milestones for both product development and marketing, frameworks for how to think about pre- to post...

This week, student loans are back in the news, with the administration's announcement of a plan to forgive student loan debt for certain kinds of borrowers. Outside of the specific policies, though, student loans are often the first of many big financial decisions that young people make as they begin to build credit history and join the labor force. So what role can technology play in serving this...

Can you get better at decision-making with practice? Many founders, investors, and builders must make many critical decisions, big and small, every day, and improving the quality of your decision-making process can become a big competitive advantage.  In this episode from October 2020, expert decision strategist, author and professional poker player, Annie Duke, joins a16z managing partner Jeff Jo...

What can we learn from the evolution of open source communities and how might they be applied to online communities and the creator economy today? Author Nadia Asparouhova joins host Sonal Choksi to talk about Asparouhova's book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software , from Stripe Press. They start with a  a taxonomy for communities, and then dig into how open sourc...

Whether it’s moderating a live panel discussion, managing your (virtual) All Hands meeting, or even guiding a cross-functional team to a decision in an important meeting, mastering the art of helping a group communicate is a critical skill for many of us. In this episode from November 2020, expert communications and presentations coach Matt Abrahams , who is also a lecturer at Stanford’s Graduate...

What does the success of TikTok's algorithmically-driven product tell us about the future of creators and the creator economy, product design, and innovation within video? In this cross-over archive episode from our tech news podcast, 16 Minutes on the News, we go deep into the what, why, and how of TikTok's algorithm, which lies at the heart of the product and drives its "creativity network effec...

In this episode from December 2018, Hennessy, currently the chairman of Alphabet as well as Turing Award-winning computer scientist, joins a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen, a16z general partner Martin Casado, and host Sonal Choksi for a wide-ranging conversation about moving from academia to startups, the history of Silicon Valley, the “Stanford model”, how to build enduring organizations, and more...

In this hallway-style conversation with a16z's Margit Wennmachers, longtime operating partner for Marketing, and Kim Milosevich, CMO for a16z crypto, open up the black box of crisis communications with Sonal Choksi and explore the process and mindsets before, during, and after a crisis. They discuss common FAQs like: What constitutes a crisis? Can someone inside a company "call it" early and preve...

Over the last 20 years, the idea of “designing biology” has gone from science fiction to just science, as the field of synthetic biology has exploded, with applications from therapeutics to manufacturing and more.  In this episode from January 2019, one of the pioneers in the field, professor James J. Collins of MIT, joins a16z general partner on the Bio + Health fund, Vijay Pande, and editorial p...

In this episode from July 2019, Kurt House, CEO and co-founder of Kobold Metals, John Thompson, professor of earth and geosciences at Cornell; and Connie Chan, a16z general partner for consumer, talk with editorial partner Hanne Winarsky about the way technology is transforming how we find cobalt, and the mining industry as a whole, as well as the science behind why cobalt is so critical for batte...

In this episode from October 2019, People. AI founder and CEO Oleg Rogynskyy and a16z partner Peter Lauten discuss with Das Rush about what the rise of AI in B2B means for enterprises, workers, and startups. They explain why AI provides a strong first mover advantage to enterprises that adopt it early; how it can automate lower level tasks, maximize our focus, and, ultimately, make our work more m...

In this episode from October 2019, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen and former a16z podcast showrunner Sonal Choksi bring on MIT economist and bestselling author Andrew McAfee to discuss why the lessons of human growth in times past, from the Industrial Revolution onwards, might not apply to our future. It used to be that the only way for humanity to grow — and progress — was through destroying the...

Blockchain, crypto, web3 – these terms get thrown around a lot and sometimes interchangeably, but what are the actual connections between them? And what are some mental models and analogies for thinking about this blossoming area of computer science? To dig in on these topics and more, we have another crossover episode this week, part of our occasional series where we share curated episodes from o...

In this special “innovation overview” episode from April 2021, the a16z crypto team and other experts take you from the ground up of crypto and web3 — from the basics, to more recent developments, and beyond – through the lens of an oral essay with brief segments on what crypto is, how it really works, and where it’s going. We chose this particular archive episode this week in honor of a new show...

In this episode from February 2017, a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal, former Lytro CEO (now Vice President, Subscription Services, at Google) share stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their companies survive in hard times, including making and living through major pivots, selling new products before they were ready, figuring out financing with market...

In this episode from February 2021, early Amazon execs Colin Bryar and Bill Carr -- in conversation with a16z's Sonal Chokshi -- go beyond the well-known artifacts of Amazon innovation, like the memo and the press release, and share the leadership principles, decision making practices, and operational processes that helped Amazon continue to innovate, invent new products and learn from its mistake...

Gross margins–which are essentially a company’s revenue from products and services minus the costs to deliver those products and services to customers–are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup and growing business. And yet, figuring out what goes into the “cost” for delivering products and services is not as simple as it may sound, particularly for high-growth software busine...

This week, we have a special crossover episode from June 2021: Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO podcast, interviews a16z general partner David Ulevitch about David’s journey from working at an ISP and Dot Com company mp3.com in high school; to starting, running, and selling his own enterprise security company, OpenDNS; to becoming an investor at a16z. They also discuss the value of product mar...

In this wide-ranging conversation from April 2019, a16z’s Frank Chen sits down with Ken Kocienda, a longtime software engineer and designer at Apple from 2001 to 2017, who wrote a book about his career there, called Creative Selection. They discuss Ken’s unconventional path from freelance photographer to software engineer at Apple, his work on many core products from Safari web browser to iPhone,...