a16z Podcast

Hiring a VP of Product -- especially as the founder of the company -- can almost feel like handing over your baby to someone else to hold, observes a16z executive talent team partner Caroline Horn, w…

with Brandon Ballinger (@bballinger), Mintu Turakhia (@leftbundle), Vijay Pande (@vijaypande), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread)

There’s been a lot of talk about technology -- and AI, deep learning…

Author and professor at George Mason University, Peter Leeson describes himself as not just an economist but as a "collector of curiosa." In his latest book, WTF?! An Economic Tour of the Weird, Lees…

with Frank Chen, Steven Sinofsky, and Sonal Chokshi

There are many reasons why we’re in an “A.I. spring” after multiple “A.I. winters” — but how then do we tease apart what’s real vs. what’s hype whe…

with Tim O'Reilly and Benedict Evans

In this hallway-style podcast conversation, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly and a16z partner Benedict Evans discuss how we make sense of the most recent wave …

with Ion Stoica, Peter Levine, and Sonal Chokshi

We’ve already talked quite a bit about the Algorithms, Machines, and People lab at U.C. Berkeley (AMPLab) — all about making sense of big data — so wh…

Head of the largest bioengineering lab in the world, former chairman of the FDA and one of the few recipients of the National Medals of Science and of Technology and Innovation, Bob Langer's work has…

with Chris Dixon and Fred Ehrsam

We’ve already talked about why bitcoin matters. But as the set of cryptocurrencies — and networks and “tokens” enabled by the underlying blockchain — grow (Ethereum b…

with David Mack, Joseph Okpaku, and Matt Spence

How should startups engage with policymakers, build their own government relations (GR) function (whether in house or with consultants), and just begin…

with Wei Luo, David Rumsey (@davidrumseymaps), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread)

In this episode, Wei Luo, founding COO of DeepMap -- who build HD maps for autonomous vehicles -- and David Rumsey, f…

with Juan Benet and Chris Dixon

The story of how innovation happens is a long one — from government funding early basic research, to the heyday of corporate R&D like Bell Labs, to startups as experim…

with Michael Dearing (@mcgd), Bob Sutton (@work_matters), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread)

Bob Sutton's book The No Asshole Rule was all about how to foster company cultures that don't tolerate ass…

with Russ Roberts, Noah Smith, and Sonal Chokshi

Beyond the overly simplistic framing of trade as “good” or “bad” — by politicians, by Econ 101 — why is the topic of trade (or rather, economies and p…

We tend to talk about tech and parenting through devices and artifacts -- screen time, to code or not to code -- but actually, there's a bigger, macro picture at play there: game theory, economic inc…

with Clayton Christensen, Marc Andreessen, and Steven Levy

In business, mistakes of omission may be just as bad as (if not worse than) mistakes of commission -- simply because of the loss in potentia…

"Young hungry and scrappy" is how Hamilton described his country, and it's how many -- including the guests on this episode -- describe startups... or more precisely, the mindset that engineers in st…

What is "infrastructure" actually? In the 19th and 20th century, that usually meant the transportation systems supporting roadways, airports, trains... but we don't even really know yet what it might…

with Ben Horowitz, Scott Kupor, and Caroline Moon

“The only unforgivable sin in business is to run out of cash” [so said Harold Geneen], yet startup CEOs “always act on leading indicators of good new…

What do disease diagnostics, language learning, and image recognition have in common? All depend on the organization of collective intelligence: data ontologies. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, …

with Graham Allison and Matthew Colford

"When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens." It's true of people, it's true of companies, and it's even more true of countries. It…