Of the 371 board seats that opened up last year (within Fortune 500 companies that is), 39% ended up going to first-time board members. So how did they pull it off? What are some strategies for landing your first board seat -- especially if you don’t...

As technology outgrows the tech industry, it moves from selling utilitarian products to selling things that fulfill other desires or pleasures. The Apple Watch is a perfect example of this market shift, says a16z's Benedict Evans. "It's another step ...

Companies founded by a group of engineers often have a deep-seated mistrust of sales -- or more precisely, salespeople. That was the case at GitHub, says CEO and co-founder Chris Wanstrath: It wasn't until their customers started asking for a sales o...

It may seem like good apps or services sell themselves. That's what the whole viral thing is all about, right? Wrong, says Daniel Shapero, who helped build LinkedIn's enterprise sales team from a small core group to more than 1,200 people all over th...

Online marketplaces are growing much faster than e-commerce overall. Why is that? And what new kinds of marketplaces powered by the internet and mobile are we now seeing? a16z's Jeff Jordan and Anu Hariharan share their observations here and also exp...

You've heard the story: Slack began as a game. But almost exactly 1 year ago today, the internal tool the team built for its own use became a team communication app that anyone (and especially enterprises) can use -- and is now one of the fastest gro...

Consumers seem content with the mobile duopoly we currently have. So what can be gained from a third mobile operating system? If it's an open computing platform, argues Cyanogen CEO and co-founder Kirt McMaster (in discussion with a16z's Zal Bilimori...

A crisis can be an opportunity to change your culture. But you have to get through the crisis first, and that starts with getting to the truth of what happened. a16z's Margit Wennmachers, who co-founded The Outcast Agency, and Judy Smith, the founder...

Apple absolutely crushed its most recent quarter, and unquestionably owns the high-end of the smartphone market, says a16z’s Benedict Evans. So where does Android fit in the ecosystem going forward? Where is the leverage for Google? Not to mention fo...

Virtual reality (VR) -- and augmented reality (AR) -- seem to be everywhere these days, showing up in demos and offerings from the world's biggest gadget makers to the Hollywood, gaming, and media crowds. But what's the difference between VR and AR? ...

Tracy Chou from Pinterest, and Chris Granger and Jamie Brandon from Eve, discuss whether coding is a literacy (or as Granger puts it, a "superpower" ). But as software infuses every industry and much of our lives, do we all really need to start writi...

Does your burglar alarm need to speak to your thermostat? What about your lighting system? And if all those things need to interoperate, how does that happen -- and what does that look like on the shelf at Home Depot? These are just some of the quest...

Storage as a set of technologies in the datacenter has a conservative reputation when it comes to innovation. Reliability, capacity, speed, and cost -- those have long been the only levers to pull in storage technology. Until Paula Long had the idea ...

What does an operating system for today's datacenter look like? Why do we even need one, and how does it function? Mesosphere's Benjamin Hindman, the co-creator of Apache Mesos, joins Steven Sinofsky for an all-OS discussion. --- The views expresse...

It's been a long and (at times) interesting battle pitching iOS vs. Android. It's time to let it go, says a16z's Benedict Evans. It's time to move on to a new set of questions -- and ideas -- in mobile. --- The views expressed here are those of the...

The Internet of Things puts intelligence into all kinds of things -- especially in the home, from appliances to light bulbs and door locks. But we still have a ways to go. “We need to be very patient in this category,” says Quirky CEO Ben Kaufman in ...

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 ...

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...

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 ...

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...