Latest

The Untapped Potential of Less

Leidy Klotz

To harness the untapped power of subtraction in the future, we need to understand why we haven’t embraced it in the past.

The Creator Economy Comes for Gaming

Joost van Dreunen

Players are discovering new ways to monetize, whether by building original game worlds, selling in-game goods on the blockchain, or engaging new streamer tools.

Semiconductor Shortage and the Global Supply Chain Squeeze

Frank Chen and Zoran Basich

Frank Chen and Zoran Basich of a16z cover the bigger picture of the chip shortage that has led to stalled production for major U.S. automakers.

Amazon Narratives — Memos, Working Backwards From Release, More

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...

The Machine that Made the Vaccine

Stephane Bancel, Jorge Conde, and Hanne Winarsky

This episode of Bio Eats World takes us from a world of pipette and lab benches to a world of industrial robots making medicines.

Fintech for Gen Z and Millennials

Amira Yahyaoui, Anish Acharya, Seema Amble, and Lauren Murrow

How tech-enabled financial tools can cut through bureaucracy, downsize student debt, and optimize consumers’ financial futures from an early age.

Degrading Drugs for Problematic Proteins

Carolyn Bertozzi and Lauren Richardson

Many diseases are caused by proteins that have gone haywire in some fashion. So how do you get rid of these problematic proteins? Dr. Bertozzi and her lab developed a class of drugs that, in essence, tosses the disease-related proteins into the cellular trash can.

The Biology of Aging

Laura Deming, Kristen Fortney, Vijay Pande, and Hanne Winarsky

Once a fringe field, the science of aging is now entering a new phase with the first clinical trials of aging-related drugs. As the entire field shifts into this moment of translation, what have we learned? What are the basic approaches to developing aging-related drugs? How is studying aging helping us understand diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's—and increasing the amount of time we are healthy—today? 

Tiktok and ‘Seeing Like an Algorithm’

Eugene Wei and Sonal Chokshi

The algorithm that powers TikTok, the short video platform that grabbed massive marketshare in cultures and markets never experienced firsthand by the engineers and designers in China, beating out other apps in the U.S. But with talk of U.S. ownership/partnership for TikTok, what happens if the algorithm isn't included? And what can we learn from the "creativity network effects" flywheel of TikTok; about "algorithm friendly" product design; and more broadly, for the future of video.

GPT-3, Beyond the Hype

Frank Chen and Sonal Chokshi

What's real, what's hype when it comes to all the recent buzz around the language model GPT-3? What is "it", how does it work, where does it fit into the arc of broader tech trends (natural language, neural networks, deep learning approaches, more) -- and are we really getting closer to artificial general intelligence?