a16z Podcast
The a16z Podcast is the go-to place for discussions about technology, innovation, and change as it impacts all our lives, covering everything from tech trends and culture to company building for companies of all sizes. As technology changes everything — not just in Silicon Valley or in traditional “tech” companies, but across all industries — it’s also changing the way we all work, live, eat, learn, and play. This show aims to help make sense of it all: for builders, for the tech curious, for anyone seeking to understand the future, now, through carefully curated, in-depth yet accessible, nuanced conversations with top industry and academic experts from around the world; company leaders, builders, makers; book authors; and emerging voices.
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Featured Episodes
The Environment, Capitalism, Technology
Contributing Guests
Andrew McAfee, Marc Andreessen, and Sonal Chokshi
It used to be that the only way for humanity to grow — and progress — was through destroying the environment. Sure, the Industrial Revolution brought about the growth of our economies, our population, our prosperity; but it...
Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials
Contributing Guests
Amira Yahyaoui, Anish Acharya, Seema Amble, and Lauren Murrow
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 fi...
Amazon Narratives — Memos, Working Backwards From Release, More
Contributing Guests
Colin Bryar, Bill Carr, and Sonal Chokshi
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 lines of business — we often hear about things like: Memos...
LATEST EPISODES
NFT Use Cases, Today and Tomorrow
Contributing Guests
Devin Finzer, and Katie Haun
Recently, a16z and the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research hosted the NFT Virtual Summit, which brought together leading thinkers and builders on the topic of NFTs, or non-fungible tokens — these tokens are enabling new creator...
Man, Mosquito, Malaria Vaccine
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, Rajeev Venkayya, and Jorge Conde
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 ago that a candidate "malaria vaccine becomes first to achieve WHO-specified 75%...
Crypto, an Oral Essay
Contributing Guests
Linda Xie, Chris Dixon, Jesse Walden, Scott Kupor, Dan Boneh, Alex Pruden, Ali Yahya, Eddy Lazzarin, Zoran Basich, and Arianna Simpson
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 really works, and why it matters. This "innovation overview" is meant as a...
On Monetizing Community with Patreon Cofounder Sam Yam
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Li Jin, and Sam Yam
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 platforms share one thing in common: They all enable independent creators to monetize...
The Creator Economy: NFTs and Beyond
Contributing Guests
Chris Dixon, Jesse Walden, and Kevin Chou
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 artists, musicians, videogamers, game developers, and writers to create entirely new...
All about NFTs
Contributing Guests
Linda Xie, Jesse Walden, and Sonal Chokshi
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've never seen anything like this before" to "is this like ICOs all over again" to...
The Next Wave of Marketplace Startups
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Sriram Krishnan, Jeff Jordan, D'Arcy Coolican, and Connie Chan
In the tech world, marketplaces are a hot topic. That term—marketplace—encompasses a huge swath of services we use every day, from grocery delivery to online shopping to remote learning. How have marketplace dynamics changed since...
The Third Vaccine, and Vaccine Choice
Contributing Guests
a16z
https://a16z.com/2021/03/15/16-minutes-58-the-johnson-johnson-vaccine-and-covid-efficacy-rates/
Companies & Culture: What You Do Is Who You Are
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and Ben Horowitz
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 how companies create culture: A lot's changed... and a lot hasn't. a16z editor in...
Boss Talk with Ben Horowitz
Contributing Guests
Ali Ghodsi, and Ben Horowitz
Boss Talk is a weekly live show on Clubhouse, where a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi discuss CEO stuff, leadership stuff, management stuff… you know, boss stuff. Here we share the second installment; in...
All About Ransomware
Contributing Guests
Tom Hofmann, Das Rush, and Joel de la Garza
In just the last couple years, ransomware has grown into a multibillion dollar industry. It has evolved from taking systems and servers hostage to stealing data, and it has proven capable of shutting down global organizations. In...
One on One with Marc and Ben
Contributing Guests
Marc Andreessen, and Ben Horowitz
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 questions submitted via Twitter. The show is based in part by a newspaper column that...
Amazon Narratives: Memos, Working Backwards from Release, More
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, Bill Carr, and Colin Bryar
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 lines of business -- we often hear about things like: Memos, six pages exactly and no...
Anatomy of the SolarWinds Hack: Who What Where When How
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, Steven Adair, and Joel de la Garza
In this special “3x”-long episode of our (otherwise shortform) news analysis show 16 Minutes -- past such 2-3X explainer episodes have covered section 230, Tiktok, GPT-3, the opioid crisis, more -- we cover the SolarWinds hack,...
Psychedelics: Striking a Balance Between Benefits and Side Effects
Contributing Guests
David Olson, and Lauren Richardson
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 neuropsychiatric conditions such as depression, addiction, and PTSD. But there’s...
Developers as Creatives
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and David Ulevitch
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 from on-prem to cloud & SaaS to the API economy, where application programming...
Section 230: Everything You Need to Know -- Tweets, Free Speech, Beyond
Contributing Guests
Mike Masnick, and Sonal Chokshi
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 clearest-but-still-nuanced explainers I've heard - worth listening to". So what does...
Baumol's Cost Disease, in Healthcare... and Where We Go Next
Contributing Guests
Vijay Pande, and Marc Andreessen
If software’s eating the world -- and more specifically, bringing costs down and increasing productivity through entire industries -- why have some industries, like healthcare, been so resistant? And what could the future look like...
Words of 2020! (and Metaphors, and Interfaces of the Year)
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and Gretchen McCulloch
"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 Oxford English Dictionary did NOT name a word of the year. But do we really need the...
The Machine That Made the Vaccine: Company, Platform, Innovation
Contributing Guests
Hanne Winarsky, and Jorge Conde
In this special episode of Bio Eats World -- which aired right after the FDA authorized Moderna's mRNA vaccine for emergency use -- Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells the story of not just the vaccine’s development, but the machine...
The PPP Omnibus: Eminent Domain, Fraud, and Fintech
Contributing Guests
Alex Rampell
This episode features two relevant but previously recorded episodes, discussing the relevance of the Paycheck Protection Program (or PPP) from the Small Business Administration and the role of government stimulus/ pandemic relief for...
The Holy Grail of Social + Fintech
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Anish Acharya, and D'Arcy Coolican
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 wave of financial products.While revealing one’s financial information was once...
On Fear and Leadership: Product to Sales CTOs & CEOs
Contributing Guests
Martin Casado, Sonal Chokshi, and Armon Dadgar
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. In any case, as companies evolve, so must the leaders -- but can the same person...
On Food As Medicine (A Holiday Snack)
Contributing Guests
a16z
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, distribution, and more? General partner Julie Yoo talks with the founder and former...
Crypto Creators: On Art Galleries to 'Tokenized' Collectibles
Contributing Guests
Signe Pierce, Murat Pak, and Zoran Basich
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 the creator economy. The big picture is that emerging "tokenization" models,...
What to Know about Those Vaccines
Contributing Guests
Vineeta Agarwala, Sonal Chokshi, and Jorge Conde
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 comes to the announcement last week from Pfizer and BioNTech that their vaccine...
The Social Serendipity of Cloud Gaming
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Jonathan Lai, and Jade Raymond
True cloud-native games—those exclusive to and solely playable within the cloud—are poised to revolutionize gameplay and unlock new avenues of hyper-personalized storytelling and socializing. It's a vision that, though steadily...
The Great Data Debate
Contributing Guests
George Fraser, Martin Casado, Bob Muglia, Michelle Ufford, and Tristan Handy
Lakes v. warehouses, analytics v. AI/ML, SQL v. everything else... As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the separate tools and teams that run AI/ML and analytics converging as well?In this...
How to Moderate Talks, Panels, Meetings, More (Virtual and Beyond!)
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and Matt Abrahams
How to moderate good, productive discussions and navigate tricky conversations is top of mind -- whether doing a panel, conducting a live event, presenting a talk (or hosting a podcast), managing (and even just participating in!) a...
Textiles as Tech, Science, Math, Culture... or Civilization
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and Virginia Postrel
"The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they're indistinguishable from it." That quote from computer scientist Mark Weiser is from a 1991 paper where he...
Data Alone Is Not Enough: The Evolution of Data Architectures
Contributing Guests
Martin Casado, and Ali Ghodsi
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...
Designing for, Marketing to, and Partnering With Gen Z
Contributing Guests
Tiffany Zhong, and Connie Chan
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...
The Present Future of Audio: Talk, Music, Video, Interactivity
Contributing Guests
Gustav Söderström, Sonal Chokshi, and Connie Chan
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...
How to Decide, Convey vs. Convince, & More
Contributing Guests
Jeff Jordan, and Annie Duke
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...
Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Amira Yahyaoui, Seema Amble, and Anish Acharya
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...
Degrading Drugs for Problem Proteins: Journal Club now on Bio Eats World (ep 2)
Contributing Guests
Carolyn Bertozzi, and Lauren Richardson
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...
The Biology of Aging: Introducing Bio Eats World (ep 1)
Contributing Guests
Kristin Fortney, Vijay Pande, Laura Deming, and Hanne Winarsky
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...
TikTok & Beyond: The Algorithm Question, The Future of Product
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and Eugene Wei
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...
The New Fan Club: Creators, Fans, and the Power of Markets (& Crypto)
Contributing Guests
Jesse Walden, Kayvon Tehranian, and Zoran Basich
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...
So You Want to Launch a Newsletter: Tips From Substack Writers
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Edith Zimmerman, Patrice Peck, Lenny Rachitsky, and Zach Haigney
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...
Designing a Culture of Reinvention
Contributing Guests
Reed Hastings, and Ben Horowitz
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...
Heroes & Myths in Entrepreneurship -- Guy Raz
Contributing Guests
Sonal Chokshi, and Guy Raz
"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...
The Question of Education
Contributing Guests
Dylan Field, and Marc Andreessen
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...
Pandemic Relief and Fraud: Willful Deceit or Design Defect?
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Bharat Ramamurti, Alex Rampell, and Naftali Harris
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...
Measuring & Managing Community Orgs, Developer Relations and Beyond
Contributing Guests
Amir Shevat, and Mikeal Rogers
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...
Reining in Complexity: Data Science & Future of AI/ML Businesses
Contributing Guests
Martin Casado, and Peter Wang
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...
Online Learning and the Ed Tech Debate
Contributing Guests
Lauren Murrow, Josh Kim, David Deming, and Connie Chan
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...
On Vaccines and Vaccinology, in COVID and Beyond
Contributing Guests
Rajeev Venkayya, and Jorge Conde
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...
Turning Open Source Developers Into Superfans
Contributing Guests
Chris Dixon, and Tom Preston-Werner
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...
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