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 see computers beat humans. But then nothing "big" -- ...

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 murder and released almost two decades later in 20...

YouTube star Casey Neistat rejects the term “viral video,” which is strange because he’s had more than his share of internet monsters. To say I want to make a viral movie, is like a musician saying I want to make a hit song -- it’s just not a good pl...

If network effects are one of the most important concepts for software-based businesses, then that may be especially true of data network effects -- a network effect that results from data. Particularly given the prevalence of machine learning and de...

It's not incompetence, but competence, that causes companies to be disrupted. That applies to big companies and small, as well as people too. Or so argue Clayton Christensen and Marc Andreessen in this podcast, based on a conversation at Startup Gri...

The mobile world has fallen hard for VR, says Benedict Evans. But will virtual reality mean real profit for hardware makers? Evans offers his observations on VR and more gleaned from the largest gathering of the mobile industry, Mobile World Congress...

Virtual reality is coming fast, and everyone seems to assume that it will be gamers who get to have all the fun first. But there are other applications for VR that could also bring it into the mainstream. “It could very well be business users,” says ...

Infrastructure. It powers everything from cities to computing, yet is sometimes considered "boring" because it is so invisible to so many of us. But as software continues to eat the world, infrastructure has come to the forefront. And some of the mos...

The principal political binary of the past century was the political 'left versus right'. But in the 21st century the binary has shifted -- the battleground now is 'open versus closed'. Those states and societies that embrace economic, political, an...

No matter how one views Xiaomi -- and there are many ways to view it, for better or worse -- one thing is clear: It, and other such companies (like WeChat and Alibaba), indicate a broader trend around innovation coming from China. Companies and coun...

During his “Stratos” jump Felix Baumgartner fell faster than the speed of sound, reaching an estimated speed of 833.9 mph plummeting from the edge of space. Baumgartner’s return trip to earth lasted just over nine minutes, but there was seven years o...

The NFL has descended upon Silicon Valley for Superbowl 50, and a16z was fortunate to have 30 of the world’s best football players post-up at the firm to talk about the intersection between the world of professional sports and venture capital. Joe ...

Max Levchin helped build PayPal. Then he went onto tackle gaming at Slide. Now he’s back in the world of payments and finance with his latest startup Affirm. a16z’s Angela Strange talks with Levchin about Affirm’s opportunity in the world of finance,...

Technology companies are running hard at almost every part of the traditional banking business -- from raising funds to moving money from one person to another. And as you would expect, that has meant change, both in terms of the banking services tha...

From Aaron Sorkin to Steve Jobs to Meredith Perry and Elon Musk, "original" thinkers -- such as entrepreneurs -- do a lot of different things to move the world to their visions. And many of those things (and traits) are counterintuitive, such as ... ...

Your homeowner’s insurance didn’t anticipate Airbnb. Your car insurance certainly didn’t see Lyft and Uber coming. And when your car drives itself, it’s anyone’s guess how the insurance industry will wrap its collective head around that one. a16z’s ...

There are fewer and fewer parts of our lives that don't feel like an extension of our smartphones. Any song you might want to hear. Any place you might want to go. And a ride to get there. All served up simply, quickly, at the right price, and with a...

We often hear stats like “more people have mobile phones than toilets” about places like Africa, but what does that actually mean for people? “It is b.s.,” (no pun intended), argues one of the guests on this episode. Then there are statistical predi...

The thing about enterprise security, from the outside at least, is it reads like a Hollywood thriller. Nation states are after your company’s most valuable assets and they must be stopped at all costs. And yes, some nation state-sponsored hacks have ...

Smartphone components have become a kind of Lego kit for all kinds of consumer technology. Cameras, sensors, and batteries all get mixed and matched in different permutations to create different gadgets. It might be something that enables your connec...