a16z Podcast

For better or worse, most of the computing systems that run much of our lives (whether invisibly or visibly) have become increasingly complex -- they're not fully engineered; they're almost grown. An…

Bitcoin quickly made its way from a whitepaper to a production network, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. But its scripting/ programming language was initially, intentionally, limited …

Now that we know to price and plan early, price high -- especially for category-creating or "pre-chasm" businesses -- how do we handle freemium models?

While free to premium is a great way to get bot…

"Raise prices." Regular listeners of our podcast have heard this advice more than once. But why is this so key and yet so hard for many technical founders? And how should startups go about raising pr…

This podcast is all about emoji. But it's really about how innovation really comes about -- through the tension between standards vs. proprietary moves; the politics of time and place; and the econom…

From hardware and hardwires to smartphones and social, technology wants to connect. It's almost a native property of technology and especially software businesses, which is why network effects matter…

Seemingly overnight, a single game -- Pokémon Go -- has taken people by storm. But it's a game that was technically years in the making, building on a legacy of creative intellectual property and tec…

One of the biggest misconceptions around network effects (which are one of the key dynamics behind many successful and highly defensible software companies) is confusing growth with engagement. So ho…

We already know that the government is one of the largest IT buyers, but in many ways it is also an IT builder. Especially for areas where the government is doing something that no one else is doing,…

"All of a sudden you can program the world" -- it's the continuation of the software eating the world thesis we put out over five years ago, and of the trajectory of past and current technology shift…

Do we need a new pay system for the way startup employees are compensated? While many people agree that the current 90-day exercise practice — an outdated relic of when companies used to go public/ge…

with Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei), Frank Chen (@withfries2), and Sonal Chokshi (@smc90)

Who has the advantage in artificial intelligence — big companies, startups, or academia? Perhaps all three, especiall…

How far along are we towards the vision of a "cashless, cardless, walletless, frictionless future" for fintech? We're not quite there yet, argued BuzzFeed News technology reporter Charlie Warzel in a…

Love the term or hate it, the concept and reality of the "sharing economy" (or "gig economy" and so on) is here to stay. And in fact, argues NYU Stern professor and researcher Arun Sundararajan, it m…

The world's most valuable company, Apple, made a number of seemingly incremental announcements at its most recent annual developer's conference (WWDC) -- that Apple Pay is coming to the web; that Sir…

The mindset of "move fast and break things", while great for code, isn't exactly great for the human body. So adding computation to biology -- especially in the slow-moving pharmaceutical industry, w…

Technology has always been a force in how we live, work, and play; only now it's accelerating and compounding in unexpected ways. But just because we don't know exactly what form that tech will take …

"Anybody who is interested in China, who's developing things in China, who's doing business with China needs to be thinking about the instinct towards politics over pragmatism", argues New Yorker sta…

Everything old is new again when it comes to startup ideas and how technology innovation happens. But practically, how does that apply to starting and/or working at startups — especially since the de…

"We really want Apple here... Would you please call Tim Cook?"

That's just one of the things Penny Pritzker, the 38th Secretary of Commerce has heard as she and the U.S. Department of Commerce engage…