with @PascaStanford, @VijayPande, and @omnivorousread Our understanding of the human brain and its disorders has always been limited by our lack of access to living, human, developing brain tissue. For the first time, that's changing. In this episode, Sergiu Pasca, Professor of Behavioral Science at Stanford, talks with a16'z General Partner Vijay Pande and Hanne Tidnam about the wild new tech that's pioneering a whole new approach to understanding the brain: brain organoids. This conversation covers what these organoids can and can’t do; what they’re good for understanding and where that understanding becomes limited; why calling these “brains in a dish” or “mini-brains” isn’t the right terminology at all; and finally, how far can this new tool and model be taken now and in the future, leading us closer towards understanding psychology itself on a molecular level.

with @nachristakis @jorgecondebio Going from rapid warning to early detection through social network sensors can make all the difference when it comes to contagion/ the spread of disease and pandemics. Can we get public health bio surveillance without sacrificing privacy and agency?

with @nwquah @conniechan and @smc90 This (rerun) podcast is a podcast about podcasting: But it's really all about audio...

In normal times, every company operates against some hypothetical growth model—a data-driven framework that describes how your product grows and how you acquire new users. These, of course, are not normal times. In the fallout from the pandemic, most founders and CEOs are in the process of completely revamping their growth models from the bottom up amid new and unpredictable consumer behavior. This episode explores how to think about growth in turbulent times, according to two growth experts: a16z general partner Andrew Chen, who previously led the growth team at Uber, and Brian Balfour, formerly the VP of Growth at HubSpot, now the founder and CEO of Reforge, a masterclass in growth strategies.

with @vijaypande, @andy23tran, and @lr_bio a16z Journal Club covers a new approach for preventing coronavirus and influenza infection using the genome editing platform CRISPR-Cas.

John Riccitiello, CEO of the game software development company Unity Technologies, discusses the rise of esports and streaming, the potential of cloud gaming, and far-reaching applications for game technology.

with @jaybrander, @JorgeCondeBio, @vijaypande, @omnivorousread A deep dive into the world of drug development—specifically "undruggable drugs": a category of protein, protein family or even piece of RNA that’s so difficult to target that many researchers don’t even want to touch it—with Jay Bradner, President of the Novartis Institute for BioMedical Research.

This episode—which originally took place as a live event—is a conversation between Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner and a16z Cultural Leadership Fund partner Chris Lyons.

As the responsibility of CSOs has expanded, the role has moved from technical IT to the boardroom. How do the best CSOs prepare for and respond to a crisis, from redteaming to comms? What responsibility should cloud & SaaS vendors, not to mention the government, have in security and data breaches?

with @vijaypande @andy23tran @heyjudka @lr_bio a16z Journal Club covers recent advances from the scientific literature; this inaugural episode for bio covers 2 two different topics: (1) identifying new antibiotics through a novel machine-learning based approach; and (2) characterizing the novel coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic

Announcing a16z Journal Club, a new show where we curate and discuss recent research papers with a16z experts and others. The first episode is of bio journal club, which focuses on why specific scientific advances matter from our perspective at the intersection of biology & technology.

Today’s episode is one of our intimate hallway-style conversations — or as intimate as remote work allows anyway. It’s all about the history and future of protocol development. a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya, formerly Distributed Systems & Machine Learning researcher at Stanford & Google Brain, wrote a tweetstorm earlier this year about the “Narrow Waist of Blockchain Computing” (we link to in the show notes). Ali observed that the Internet Protocol, which emerged out of research labs and government funding decades ago, has taken the world from zero devices to more than 15 billion connected devices today. What was it about the Internet Protocol that allowed building so many applications on top? Helping us answer this question is a16z general partner in enterprise Martin Casado, who pioneered software-defined networking. He co-founded Nicira, which was acquired by VMware; and then he led their Networking and Security Business Unit, which he scaled to a hugely successful business, so he knows a thing or two about this topic. The two debate the tension between bottom-up design and top-down architected approaches to internet applications, including the role of standards bodies. More broadly, their discussion is about how innovation plays out in practice, and they end by sharing advice for entrepreneurs today. But they begin with a quick history and description of the “Narrow Waist,” and the conditions that create it:

@pmarca reads out loud IT'S TIME TO BUILD

an announcement about a new, occasional series of posts from us, read out loud here

with @ljin18 @samyamiam @laurenmurrow The Passion Economy -- where online platforms enable people to make a living off their unique interests and skills -- is a trend that's become increasingly relevant as the demand for virtual work grows.

a16z General Partners Jorge Conde and Julie Yoo talk with Hanne Tidnam about some of those big forces and dynamics in the healthcare system, at the intersection of business, policy, and public health: how in healthcare like perhaps nowhere else, broken policy can lead to broken business models that, in the wrong circumstances, can then lead major failures in public health like the one we’re seeing today; where we’ve seen this before, in the markets of vaccines, antibiotics, and diagnostics; and what should be different next time, so that when a new pandemic hits we aren’t facing another perfect storm.

Will remote work be our new reality, even after the pandemic passes? And if so, what are the current technologIes and practices that support organizational communication and alignment for distributed teams, development and otherwise?

Dr. Bobby Green, MD (Community Oncologist and Chief Medical Officer, Flatiron Health) and Dr. Sumit Shah (Oncologist and Head of Digital Health, Stanford Cancer Center) join a16z's Vineeta Agarwala (physician and general partner) and Hanne Tidnam to talk about what is happening to oncology during the outbreak—how treatment is affected; what kind of clinical decisions oncologists and patients are having to make, and how they're making them; the tech tools that specialists are using, and how they could improve; and what happens to oncology as a whole when it's forced to go virtual.

with @bobkolker, Stefan McDonough, and @omnivorousread In this episode, we dive into the remarkable story of one American family, the Galvins: Mimi, Don, and their 12 children, 6 of whom were afflicted with schizophrenia. Robert Kolker follows the Galvin's from the 1950s to today, through, he writes, "the eras of institutionalization and shock therapy, the debates between psycho-therapy versus medication, the needle-in-a-haystack search for genetic markers for the disease, and the profound disagreements about the cause and origin of the illness itself." So this conversation, with a16z's Hanne Tidnam, is more than a portrait of one family; it covers all of how we have struggled over the last decades to understand this mysterious and devastating mental illness: the biology of it, the drivers, the behaviors and pathology, the genomics, and of course the search for treatments that might help, from lobotomies to ECT to thorazine.

For any business, there are three core financial statements – the income or P&L statement, the balance sheet, and the cash flow statement. While these statements can show investors and the board how the business is doing, they can do more than just keep score on your business – they are one of the best tools you have to run it, especially in times of crisis.