South Central Los Angeles -- which includes Watts and Compton -- in many ways still hasn’t recovered from the Rodney King riots of 1992. In South Central L.A. there isn’t the same opportunity found elsewhere in L.A. When Oscar Menjivar returned as an...

Many of the most successful companies have their foundations in university labs -- from data science to the web browser itself. Yet the process of moving from research project to successful startup isn't always straightforward. With the goal of smoot...

a16z’s Chris Dixon and Mike Hearn talked about all things bitcoin on the a16z Podcast a couple months ago, including an issue that has bitcoin developers on edge these days: the question of how best to scale the bitcoin blockchain before capacity run...

Can digital work fight poverty? Can companies be profitable and also do social good -- especially in a society where the proxy for value is capital and much of that value accrues to platforms? And finally, what's the difference between a mission-driv...

Longtime New York Times technology and science writer John Markoff joins the a16z Podcast to discuss our changing relationship with technology and machines ... as well as the changing nature of Silicon Valley itself (where Markoff grew up). Jumping ...

Messaging app WeChat tells us a lot about mobile and business in China. In a recent deep-dive primer on the WeChat phenomenon, a16z partner Connie Chan analyzed WeChat and the notion of app-within-apps, payments as a gateway drug, platforms vs portal...

After the smartphone, what business has the global scale (in terms of people and profits) that make it attractive for tech companies to turn their attention and capital towards? The answer, argues a16z’s Benedict Evans, is the automotive industry. Su...

Google, eBay, even the Web itself, in the beginning all of these things appeared as point products, interesting in their way, but small. Of course, they weren’t. “There is this swallow-the-red-pill moment that happens,” Marc Andreessen says, “Where ...

How do you face down cancer? Get told you can’t get life-saving organ transplants, and go about getting them anyway? And in the middle of that mental and physical storm, how do you find the thing that you and only you were meant to do -- and start bu...

As more and more of what we do for fun and work- happens online, establishing identity becomes ever more critical. Whether it’s for dating or sending money, you want to trust that not only are you interacting with the person you think you are, but th...

This special episode of the a16z Podcast is based on a Q&A from an early screening we hosted of Universal Pictures’ Straight Outta Compton, the story of the group N.W.A. that revolutionized music and pop culture. The Q&A features Ice Cube, producer,...

When you're going for a board interview -- especially when it's your first board seat -- you're actually not supposed to go into it advocating for yourself and trying to convince people that you're a good operator, as you might in a job interview. So...

There's been a lot of activity lately around trying to improve equity compensation (for example, by removing tax liabilities that handcuff them). Or by making equity more equitable in other ways; as former Groupon CEO Andrew Mason observed, "When sta...

The key to any great company is the people. Of course, part of attracting and keeping the best people is compensation. It seems straightforward, but if you don’t develop a philosophy early around how you are going to compensate all those great employ...

There are few things as old as financial catastrophe, except maybe finance. But in the latest fiscal meltdown in Greece, people started asking questions about whether newer technology -- bitcoin and the underlying blockchain -- could help. One of tho...

Given the endless time we all spend with our noses in our phones, it may not be too surprising to hear that the smartphone has taken over the tech world. But the smartphone’s dominance is so complete, says a16z’s Benedict Evans, that it’s useful to t...

Why do so many-government led efforts to build the next "Silicon Valley" in one geography or another fail? Is it misguided to even try? But then what does make such innovation clusters work? In this segment of the pod a trio of expert guests -- Anna...

We sat down with four jet-lagged high school hackers from Nigeria, Brazil, and India -- representing some of the finalists in this year’s Technovation coding competition in San Francisco -- to hear about the mobile apps they created, the culture of c...

It’s not just the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon that lean on a massive and growing corpus of data, today every company is a data-driven company. In this world, access to data -- and how you manage it -- is what matters, says Ash Ashutosh, fo...

Biology startups have been around for a long time. But the world has changed since that first wave of bio startups, and especially more recently, due to the "peace dividends of the smartphone wars". So what happens when you combine those cheap sensor...