a16z Podcast

There's no question automation is taking over more and more aspects of work and some jobs altogether. But we're now entering a "third era" of automation, one which went from taking over dangerous wor…

Innovation or invention? Platform or app? Vertical or horizontal? Strategy or tactic? Does the smartphone eat VR? And (not to get all existential about it or anything but), what is an app, really?

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One of the most important lessons of the internet age is what happens when we give people -- including companies, developers, engineers, hobbyists, and yes, even a few bad (or dumb) actors -- a new p…

It almost seems like gospel -- or at least a given -- today for startups to embrace the cloud. Services like AWS have powered an entire generation of startups that can now spin up new applications, n…

If the next 20 years of startup-led tech innovation are going to be about addressing massive problems -- like health, energy, transportation, cities, education, and more -- it will mean more directly…

Sometimes, our career paths are accidental not intentional... but then it all fits together and makes perfect sense in hindsight. This was especially true for Ezra Klein, who went from writing for hi…

Every big technological shift (per Carlota Perez) brings with a structural shift too — an “institutional adjustment” in how companies innovated and build new products, according to Steve Blank and Ev…

Whether you think of it as a distributed ledger, decentralized database, computing infrastructure, open source/ software development platform, cryptocurrency, transaction platform, or financial servi…

So many modern e-commerce sites and marketplaces are really digital forms of their physical counterparts, which makes it easier to figure out how to present and sell products online. But in India, wh…

When the iPad first came out in 2010 there was chatter that went in two directions:

1. It’s just a big iPhone
2. I’ll never carry a laptop again

Both were wrong. The big iPhone comment was quickly dispel…

Our first instinct as technologists or users of technology is to think of 'connectivity' as digital connectivity -- the internet, our smartphone. But the internet is just the latest in a long line of…

So... about those bots. Bots bots bots. Bots!

In this episode of the botcast, a16z partners Benedict Evans and Connie Chan -- along with Chris Messina, longtime advocate of the open web and more -- p…

Developers are more than just influencers inside the enterprise -- they're now buyers, too. That's a huge shift from before, when only IT and other departments had that kind of purchasing power. (It'…

The hallmark of many great technical founder/CEOs is that they envision a better way of doing things, and that's why they're building a company that delivers on that better way, often disrupting the …

Some of the best management books are actually military books, argues Ben Horowitz. There's just a certain mental toughness and focus that that experience gives you, adds Dick Costolo based on his ob…

Most investors try to invest in things that don't change and last forever -- Warren Buffett for example loves Heinz ketchup! But VC is about investing in things that do change... a lot. How does this…

In this episode of the a16z Podcast sharing more founder stories, Ben Horowitz interviews a16z partner Lars Dalgaard about SuccessFactors, one of the earlier software-as-a-service companies. (It was …

How do you get into tech when you don’t have a tech background? And what special expertise can leaders from other fields -- like the military -- bring to tech startups?

This Q&A -- with Lars Dalgaard…

Why are people so fired up about a computer winning yet another game? Whether it's checkers, chess, Jeopardy, or the ancient Chinese game of Go, we get excited about the potential for more when we se…

Men and women who have spent decades in prison are being released into an iPhone-enabled world that they hardly recognize. Shaka Senghor is one of those people, imprisoned at age 19 for second-degree…