NFC (near field communication) technology has been around for about a decade, and with the exception of transit cards mostly outside the United States it’s gone nowhere. Now Apple has debuted Apple Pay. Has Apple filled in the gaps in terms of user e...

It’s a problem most entrepreneurs would love to face, a massive valuation offer from investors for the startup they’ve been killing themselves over. But what terms come along with that big number? In this segment a16z’s Scott Kupor is joined by two s...

Profitless Ponzi scheme, or the greatest company in the world led by an absolute genius? Amazon is a polarizing company. Quarter after quarter, as it grows ever larger gobbling up categories and adding businesses, Amazon manages to produce exactly no...

Given that physical retail is expensive, what’s the right distribution mix for startups? In this podcast with Tristan Walker (who is building health and beauty brand Walker & Company from scratch), we hear Ron Johnson's lessons learned from arguably ...

Teenage siblings Ima, Asha and Caleb Christian from Atlanta, Georgia join Ben Horowitz for a discussion about the motivation and origins of their new app, Five-O. In the aftermath of the tragedy in Ferguson, Missouri, the young developers built Five-...

The five-year anniversary segment with a16z founders Ben Horowitz and Marc Andreessen picks up with a discussion of Clayton Christensen's theories around disruption. Why Christensen's thinking is very much on the mark today, and how his theories help...

Around the firm we use “software eats the world” as a guide for how technology will impact every industry and every person – from education to healthcare and government. As a16z marks its five-year anniversary, we turned to the fellow who came up wit...

Jim Barksdale in the run-up to the Netscape IPO told potential investors that you can make money in software in two ways: bundling and unbundling. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky revisit that thesis in the context of a mobile app world -- how Fac...

Peter Levine goes deeper into the changing nature of the data center with Yoram Novick, CEO of Maxta, and Florian Leibert, CEO of Mesosphere. Does ARM architecture, the foundation of the chips in practically every mobile phone, have what it takes to ...

There is a shift in enterprise hardware from expensive, proprietary hardware to cheap components plucked directly from the consumer hardware supply chain. While that trend has been underway for some time thanks to companies like Google, Facebook and ...

Open source software has permeated practically every nook of the software world. The biggest companies and largest-scale systems all lean heavily on open source code. Yet, with the exception of Red Hat, no one has built a great business on top of ope...

Fashion, function or just a fad? Wearable technology is getting huge amounts of attention from companies of every size and stripe. Consumers are slapping on fitness bands, experimenting with smart watches and trying on jewelry that syncs with their s...

There are great examples of communities helping to grow and solidify online marketplaces. eBay in its early days certainly leveraged the power of community to bring buyers and sellers onto its platform. Today, companies like Etsy, Uber and Airbnb are...

Apple during its most recent quarter reported growing app store sales and flat iPad sales. Where do tablets go from here, especially in light of the Apple and IBM partnership announced? How does the iOS ecosystem stack up against Android now that we ...

What if we could tap into our government with the same speed and ease as our smartphones and search? Can technology make a difference in how government operates, and how we citizens interact with it? Two-time Mountain View Mayor Mike Kasperzak, OpenG...

One of the ways to damage a fast-growing startup is to not have an HR person. But when is the right time to bring someone on? What qualities should you look for? How can you preserve the company culture and energy that got you where you are -- while ...

Managing enterprise networks with thousands of users and endpoints has been hard enough. Now that large enterprise networks routinely include hundreds of thousands of nodes it’s amazingly difficult and time-consuming (we’re talking days often) to ge...

The Google I/O keynote was epic in at least one respect, length. For three hours Google laid out the near horizon for all things Google. This included the next version of Android; a new platform for connected watches; Google for your car; yet another...

The datacenter has long been -- there's no nice way to put this -- a bit of a snoozer. Expensive boxes running expensive software. No more, says a16z General Partner Peter Levine. Along with Chris Dixon, Levine lays out a vision for the datacenter of...

People Marketplaces are a lot like eBay -- connecting buyer and seller -- but for services, says a16z General Partner Jeff Jordan. These two-sided marketplaces are cropping up across the economy, from finding a ride to house cleaning and pet sitting...