The a16z Show

Data, data, data – it’s long been a buzzword in the industry, whether big data, streaming data, data analytics, data science, even AI & machine learning — but data alone is not enough: it takes an entire system of tools and technology to extract value from data.  A multibillion dollar industry has emerged around data tools and technologies. And with so much excitement and innovation in the space:...

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 episode is all about how brands can better understand, collaborate with, and resonate with this hugely influential segment of consumers.  Our guest, Tiffany Zhong , is the 24-year-old CEO of Zebra IQ , a company that helps brands interpret the wants of Gen Z c...

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 broadly? Can we borrow from the present and future of video (e.g., TikTok ) to see what's next in audio (more layers, more interactivity)? Can we borrow from the past of audio (i.e., radio) to see what's next for audio experiences (more blending o...

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It seems like investors are especially obsessed with the psychology of decision making -- high stakes, after all -- but all kinds of decisions, whether in life or business -- like dating, product management, what to eat or watch on Netflix -- are an "investment portfolio" of decisions... even if you sometimes feel like you're making one big decision at a time (like, say, marriage or what product t...

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 approach to finances and their mindset around credit and debt. This episode explores how fintech founders are now designing products tailored to the financial challenges of younger consumers, from managing and avoiding student loans to building credit to s...

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 and into our daily lives -- on the verge of revolutionizing our world in ways we are only just beginning to imagine. Many diseases are caused by proteins that have gone haywire in some fashion. There could be too much of the protein, it could be mutat...

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 into our daily lives -- on the verge of revolutionizing our world in ways we are only just beginning to imagine. In this episode, we talk all about the science of aging. Once a fringe field, aging research is now entering a new phase with the first...

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), given China’s revised export controls ? But more broadly -- well beyond the specifics and politics of this deal -- what does the success of TikTok tell us about “creativity network effects”, where every additional creator makes the rest of the comm...

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 opened up by emerging decentralized technology. It's a new type of fan club, driven by crypto networks and aiming to give creators more power in the commercial sphere. Zoran Basich of a16z talked to two guests deeply immersed in these topics. Kayvon Tehran...

This episode, part one in a two-part series on the Creator Economy, explores the process and economics behind creating an independent newsletter. In this candid conversation, host Lauren Murrow talks with four Substack writers—an artist, a technologist, a journalist, and a clinical researcher-turned-psychedelics scholar—about how to find and foster an audience, the calculus behind going paid versu...

Since Netflix started in the late 90s as a DVD-by-mail rental service competing with Blockbuster, it has completely reinvented itself... twice – first, when it went from DVD rental to video streaming platform, and then again when it went from licensing to producing original content. But what does it take to create an organization capable of reinventing itself? In this episode, originally recorded...

"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 there's a call, a test (multiple tests!), a destination... But nothing truly follows such a clean, linear, storytelling arc. Stories of success and resilience are messy and full of "sleepless nights, anxiety-ridden fears, moments of real despair and...

Monopoly, oligopoly, cartel. All three of those words can describe the (not so) modern education system today, given the cost structures, economics, and accreditation capture -- in everything from who can and can't start a new university (when was the last time a significant change happened there anyway?!) to where government funding really goes to the student loan and debt crisis. Yet degrees do...

This episode examines the potential for misuse and fraud among those applying for the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP)—and how fintech and software provide overlooked tools to stop it.   On March 27th, the government enacted a $2.2 trillion dollar stimulus package called the CARES Act, the largest aid measure in history. The act provides more than $500 billion for the Paycheck Protection Program,...

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 success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or schwag), given how indirect and long-cycle so much of it is? How do we know we're even measuring the right things, and is there one key metric or KPI for measuring the health of a c...

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 Anaconda — who also created the PyData conferences and grew the early data science community there, while on the frontlines of trying to make Python useful for business analytics. He views both models and data as fluid , more like metaphysics than typical data...

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 school—virtually. The intersection of learning and technology has been accelerated by the pandemic, but the debate around education's "disruption," and what that means for educators doing the hands-on work of teaching, has been swirling for years. In this...

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 development compressed into 12 months or so? What will and won’t be compromised here, and where do new technologies -- like mRNA or messenger RNA vaccines -- come in? Where will vaccines likely be distributed first, who will and won't get them initially,...

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 you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends about? One that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user? In this discussion, which was recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April 2020, a16z Gene...

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) can be programmed to recognize a huge range of target proteins and cell types. So what other types of cells should we train CAR Ts to recognize and destroy to improve human health? On this episode of the a16z Journal Club, a16z General Partner Jorge...

We're living in an unprecedented era of online collaboration, coordination, and creation. All kinds of people are coming together -- whether in an open source project or company , an R&D initiative, a department in a company, a club or special interest group, even a group of friends and family -- around some shared interest or activity. But the word "members" is faceless, and doesn't help us reall...

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 OpenAI that’s optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks.  It’s a commercial product, built on research; so what does this mean for both startups AND incumbents… and the future of “AI as a service”? And given that we’re seeing all kind...

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. But when bits and bytes meet flesh and blood, security becomes literally a life or death concern. So what are the issues and risks we need to be aware of in exposing security vulnerabilities in connected biomedical devices? This conversation—with Beau W...

Ever since the discovery of antibiotics, microbiologists have worried about and studied how bacteria acquire resistance to these drugs. Adding to the complexity of this problem is the fact that it is not always clear whether the conditions that drive the evolution of resistance in the lab occur in patients suffering from bacterial infections. This is where the work of Nathalie Balaban -- Professor...