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 crypto networks and aiming to give creators more power in the commercial sphere. Zoran Basich of a16z talked to two guests deeply immersed in these topics. Kayvon Tehranian is the founder and CEO of Foundation Labs, a platform for buying and selling limited edition goods. Think of it as a crypto marketplace that creates new revenue streams for creators, and financial incentives for buyers. Before that he was head of product at cryptocurrencies marketplace Dharma Labs, and he has long worked on making crypto more accessible to the mainstream. Jesse Walden is a former a16z partner who recently launched his own fund, Variant, which focuses on what he calls the ownership economy enabled by crypto. He also previously cofounded the startup Mediachain, which was acquired by Spotify, and is a former music promoter and manager whose focus was on helping artists stay independent. Kayvon and Jesse explain how the emerging crypto models differ from previous attempts to create new revenue streams for artists, and about the role of speculation and hype in creator markets. They also debate whether these new markets will largely be driven by financial motives, or whether cultural factors will be equally powerful in determining the growth of creator markets. And they offer advice to creators interested in exploring this new world, including important practical guidance on expectations and timelines.

This episode explores the process and economics behind creating an independent newsletter. In this candid conversation, host Lauren Murrow talks with four Substack writers—an artist, a technologist, a journalist, and a clinical researcher-turned-psychedelics scholar—about how to find and foster an audience, the calculus behind going paid versus unpaid, the pressure to produce, and financial benchmarks for making a living from newsletter writing.

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 went from licensing to producing original content. But what does it takes to create an organization capable of reinventing itself? Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings explains...

with @guyraz @smc90 For better or for worse, we tell the stories of entrepreneurs as one of the mythical hero's journey: that's there's a call, a test, a destination... But are we indulging in hero worship or failure porn? Where does and doesn't optimism come in for building? Storytelling IS business -- whether it's a company or a community or a product or a movement -- and is not just about the stories we tell others but the ones we tell ourselves.

with @pmarca @zoink A wide-ranging Q&A all about education, from the purpose, past, and present of education; the economics of education (student loans & the debt crisis, government funding, cost disease, accreditation capture); tradeoffs of "hard" and "soft" degrees; and whether or not to drop out and go straight to field or startup. What's the best advice for students and others contemplating change in their careers... how do you get noticed?

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.  Host Lauren Murrow is joined by Bharat Ramamurti, the original member of the COVID-19 Congressional Oversight Commission, which is tasked with evaluating the impact of coronavirus relief loans; Naftali Harris, the CEO of SentiLink, a software company that builds technology to detect synthetic fraud; and a16z fintech general partner Alex Rampell.

We know community is important -- whether for developer relations for your platform or just other types of communities -- but how do we measure the success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or schwag)? How do we know we're even measuring the right things? And when it comes to developer relations specifically, where should devrel sit in an organization (product, sales, engineering)? Who should you hire first? And how do you reconcile developer as customer vs. developer as community member?

with @pwang @martin_casado AI/ML development is like reining in the natural world, more like physics and even metaphysics, where data and models are fluid. But this not just a philosophical observation; it has real implications for the margins, organizational structures, and building of such businesses. Especially as we’re in a tricky time of transition, where customers don’t even know what they’re asking for, yet are looking for AI/ML help or know it’s the future. So what does this all mean for the software value chain; for open source collaboration and commodification; for a new type of AI/ML company; and for the future of software businesses?

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 the pandemic, but the debate around education's "disruption," and what that means for educators doing the hands-on work of teaching, has been swirling for years. In this episode, a16z general partner Connie Chan and host Lauren Murrow are joined by educators and experts Josh Kim, the Director of Online Programs and Strategy at Dartmouth College, and David Deming, Professor of Education and Economics at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

with @rvenkayya @jorgecondebio WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from 12 years of vaccine development compressed into 12 months or so? What will and won’t be compromised here, and where do new technologies (like mRNA) come in? Where will vaccines likely be distributed first; who will and won't get them initially; how do we maintain not just safety and efficacy of vaccines but trust and transparency when it comes to mis/information? We may actually see the emergence of a "Neo Anti-Vaxxer"... but we may also be entering a renaissance for vaccinology after this pandemic.

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 that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user? In this discussion, which was recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April 2020, a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talked about building communities — specifically, communities of open-source developers — with GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner. They discussed how to engage early users, how to turn them into your biggest advocates, how to create superfans, and more. Today, GitHub is the leading community for open-source developers and others. They also discuss in-person communities vs. distributed communities, a topic that is very top of mind today.

with @jorgecondebio @andy23tran and @lr_bio On this episode of the a16z Journal Club we discuss new research using engineered T cells to attack and destroy the "sleeping" cells that build up as we age and underlie many age-related conditions. This research lays the groundwork for a possible therapy that, in addition to treating specific diseases like liver fibrosis, is broadly health-promoting and restorative as we age.

with @nayafia @smc90 Communities are everything, but the word "members" is faceless. What if there's a better, more modern way to understand, support, and design for communities of all kinds -- whether open source, passion economy, or other groups coming together? Nadia Eghbal offers the latest research and insights from her new book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software... but it's not all participatory, and it's not all public, either.

with @smc90 @withfries2 Given 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 -- what's hype, what's real here? Are we really getting closer to artificial general intelligence? We cover all this and more and discuss broader implications for startups, incumbents, and the future of work too.

with @AndreaCoravos, @beauwoods, and @omnivorousread Many don’t realize we even need to think about the possibility of security hacks when it comes to things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and more. But when bits and bytes meet flesh and blood, security becomes literally a life or death concern. So what are the issues and risks we need to be aware of in exposing security vulnerabilities in connected biomedical devices? This conversation—with Beau Woods, Cyber Safety Innovation Fellow with the Atlantic Council, part of the I Am The Cavalry grassroots security initiative, Founder/CEO of Stratigos Security; Andy Coravos, co-founder and CEO of Elektra Labs, advisor to the Biohacking Village at DEF CON (both of whom were formerly EIRs at the FDA); and a16z's Hanne Tidnam covers how we should begin to think about addressing these security issues in the biomedical device space. What are the frameworks that should guide our conversations, and how and when (and which!) stakeholders should be incentivized to address these challenges? How did the FDA begin to think about security as part of the safety of all medical devices, including software as a medical device, and how we should think about understanding, monitoring, and updating the security of these devices—from philosophical statements to on-the-ground practical fixes and updates?

With Nathalie Balaban and @lr_bio Antibiotic resistance is an urgent problem, but many aspects of how bacteria acquire this ability to evade the drugs designed to target them are still mysterious. On this episode of the a16z bio Journal Club, Lauren Richardson interviews Professor Nathalie Balaban about her group’s research into the conditions that promote antibiotic resistance in patients suffering from life threatening infections and how to prevent it with carefully and rationally selected drug combinations.

with Joel de la Garza, Jonathan Lusthaus, and @omnivorousread Cybercrime is unfortunately as evergreen a topic as the problem itself—which is why we’re re-running this popular security episode all about the criminal industry of cybercrime from 2019. The idea of the cybercriminal as lone wolf or hobby hacker is no longer much of a reality. Instead, the business of cybercrime looks a lot more like a large, global technology business, with many of the same structures, challenges, and even casts of characters that legitimate businesses have. In this conversation, a16z’s Joel de la Garza, a16z operating partner for information security (formerly CSO of Box and head Citigroup’s Cyber Intelligence Center), and Hanne Tidnam, discuss with Jonathan Lusthaus, Director of the Human Cybercriminal Project at the University of Oxford, the evolution of cybercrime into a sprawling and sophisticated international industry.

with @MartyMakary and @julesyoo Dr. Marty Makary—surgical oncologist at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and health policy and innovation expert—has long been a passionate advocate for transparent pricing in the healthcare system. We don’t talk enough (or really at all) about price in healthcare, says Makary (instead, we talk about cost). But shedding a light on prices in healthcare—from not just what those prices are but how prices are set and the value we all receive as consumers of the system overall—can help us measure quality in medicine, and be a driver for real behavioral change in the healthcare system, correcting many of the unintended consequences of a fee-for-service system like surprise billing or unnecessary medical procedures. In this conversation with a16z General Partner Julie Yoo, Makary and Yoo discuss what price transparency in the healthcare system could really do; how we can "steer" towards the good physicians who are not just highly skilled, but make the right judgment calls based on need and holistic health, not cost; how we might distinguish between high value and low value through medical appropriateness; and how we might gain clinical wisdom from other kinds of scientific discovery beyond randomized controls, especially during the wartime protocol of COVID-19.

More than 98% of the information on the web is lost within 20 years, and huge gaps exist in our digital and cultural history. Zoran Basich and Alex Pruden of a16z talk to Brewster Kahle and Sam Williams, who are using different approaches to attack this problem. Brewster cofounded the Internet Archive, which is well known for creating the Wayback Machine that crawls a billion URLs every day. Sam cofounded Arweave, a company that uses decentralized crypto networks to store information forever. For both of them, this issue has implications that go far beyond just data storage. It touches on issues of censorship, government manipulation of information, and how historical context is necessary for well-functioning societies. They discuss how decentralized models offer the promise of building a next-generation web that works better for users.

In part 2 of our series on human performance, rock climber Alex Honnold talks about the risk, fear, and preparation around his free solo of El Cap... and the parallels it has with entrepreneurship.