-
a16z Podcast: Technology and the Opening of Myanmar
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-12-08 23:08
After years of being shut off to the world -- Myanmar is opening itself up. Not just across physical borders, but also the digital. What happens when the vast majority of a population suddenly has access to a cell phone, not to mention Facebook? How ...
-
a16z Podcast: If Coding is the New Literacy, How Can More People Code?
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-12-08 17:33
Technology can be an equalizer, especially as new tools democratize the expertise that was previously held only by a limited few. But is coding really the new literacy -- the fourth “r” -- after reading, writing and arithmetic? Should it be? Why doe...
-
a16z Podcast: Where the Growth in Cloud and Enterprise Software Really Is (with Marc Benioff)
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-12-05 17:15
VCs wouldn't fund Salesforce ("that obviously won't work") when Marc Benioff began. With the cloud a growing part of practically every company, government, organization, and people's lives, a lot's changed since 1999. But what's next? Do enterprise ...
-
a16z Podcast: Security’s Wakeup Call
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-12-03 20:29
The security landscape is changing. Can companies fight back against an increasingly well-armed and sophisticated set of bad players? “I think it is the beginning of a wakeup call,” former deputy secretary of defense Ashton Carter says. “That said, I...
-
a16z Podcast: Guiding Startup Culture -- The Genius ISMs
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-28 16:24
It might seem that culture at a startup is something that is just intuitive. And in the first days, with the first handful of people, that might be true. But the co-founders of Genius.com, Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory (pictured), found that even at 25...
-
a16z Podcast: Ecommerce and the Holiday Shopping Collision
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-21 20:35
How can ecommerce companies deal with the conflicting expectations of consumers and logistics realities of an on-demand economy? How can they compete with ecommerce giant Amazon, which just gets bigger every year? And given all this, how is physical ...
-
a16z Podcast: Where's My Stuff? -- The Lowdown on Logistics and Ops
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-21 17:41
The ease with which we can order anything online masks the tremendous complexity of getting that item to your door in a day or two (or less). Andreessen Horowitz's Jeff Jordan leads a discussion with four experts in ecommerce logistics and operations...
-
a16z Podcast: The Next Phase of 3D Printing
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-19 00:50
In this wide-ranging discussion about the latest and next consumer and industrial applications for 3D printing, we examine (with Shapeway's Carine Carmy and a16z's Tom Rikert): how the software-driven ideal of product-market-fit may be achieved in ph...
-
a16z Podcast: The End of Ownership
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-17 22:17
What happens when the importance of access to things trumps the value of owning those same things? The end of ownership. From computer hardware, to houses, trucks, cars, and more, the notion of ownership is changing as software enables the matching o...
-
a16z Podcast: Sports, Tech, and What We Can All Learn from the Latest Performance Science
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-14 05:17
The modern, average 12-year-old Madden NFL videogame player has actually visualized more plays than any past real-life NFL Hall-of-Famer. And now, for the first time, we're seeing those videogame tactics show up on the field too. There's a "technolo...
-
a16z Podcast: When Fantasy Football and Crowdfunding Collide
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-12 23:15
With 15 million fantasy football players angling for the win in thousands of fantasy leagues, ESPN joined Tilt.com for a discussion about how crowdfunding provides a platform for an obsessed community. --- The views expressed here are those of the ...
-
a16z Podcast: What Makes the Valley Work
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-11-11 21:44
Don Faul, head of operations at Pinterest and a former U.S. Marine Corps Platoon Commander, grills Marc Andreessen in front of a crowd of veterans at an event we hosted for bringing more veterans into startups. The discussion ranges from what makes g...
-
a16z Podcast: Selling Tech to Everyone -- Changes Everything
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-10-31 18:33
It’s always hard to predict how a generational shift in technology will impact the wider world, especially when you are in the trenches building that new technology. It happened with the mainframe computer, mini-computer, and the PC. These were all t...
-
a16z Podcast: Beyond Bitcoin -- The Blockchain
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-10-24 23:57
It’s well understood that bitcoin can be used to buy and sell things/services, and the ecosystem of people accepting the cryptocurrency as payment is expanding. But what else can we use the underlying protocol for? How can we expand the same system t...
-
a16z Podcast: The (Definite) Optimism of Peter Thiel
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-10-17 20:17
What is Silicon Valley’s greatest reigning monopoly? How did PayPal manage to emerge from the dotcom implosion? Can you build a great tech company and keep it private forever? And how did Elon Musk manage to wreck an uninsured, million-dollar car wit...
-
a16z Podcast: Startups as Science Experiments -- Can VC Disrupt Academia?
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-10-02 20:49
It's a myth that startups happen in isolation. Those legendary two people in a garage are often building on the deep and basic research -- long funded by government and conducted in universities -- that has come before it. But with the advent of the ...
-
a16z Podcast: For Buzzfeed Sharing is the Metric that Matters
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-18 01:33
Jonah Peretti is building BuzzFeed to “inform, inspire and entertain” in a world where news and entertainment is increasingly passed around on social networks and consumed on smartphones. Chris Dixon, who is on the board of BuzzFeed as part of Andree...
-
a16z Podcast: Reinventing Media
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-17 21:20
Software, and the billions of transistors that power it, has brought about massive change to all kinds of industries, but none more so than the news business. Today, distribution doesn’t come from the back of trucks, but from Facebook, Twitter and al...
-
a16z Podcast: Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment -- Four Steps for Habit-Forming Products
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-15 21:15
Nir Eyal and Product Hunt's Ryan Hoover, the authors of "Hooked, How to Build Habit-Forming Products," discuss the theory and practice of the book as the publish date of a new edition approaches. Nir lays out the four steps integral to any habit-form...
-
a16z Podcast: Secrets, Power Laws, and Technology – The Ideas of “Zero to One”
From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-12 16:02
Have we as a culture become expert at globalizing industries, but are we failing when it comes to truly world-changing technological breakthroughs? Is competition bad for business? Should you bother with creating the “nth” social network (the answer...