-
a16z Podcast: When Fantasy Football and Crowdfunding CollideFrom 🇺🇸 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 WorkFrom 🇺🇸 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 EverythingFrom 🇺🇸 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 BlockchainFrom 🇺🇸 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 ThielFrom 🇺🇸 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 MattersFrom 🇺🇸 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 MediaFrom 🇺🇸 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 ProductsFrom 🇺🇸 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...
-
a16z Podcast: Apple Takes on Payments and Your WristFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-10 00:52
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...
-
a16z Podcast: Raising Money and Valuing Startups -- What Happens When Things Don't Go As Planned?From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-08 18:02
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...
-
a16z Podcast: Everything You Need to Know About AmazonFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-05 16:58
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...
-
a16z Podcast: Building Brands and Running Retail -- Ron Johnson and Tristan Walker Break It DownFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-09-03 23:10
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 ...
-
a16z Podcast: Three Kids, One App, One Love -- The Five-O StoryFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-08-28 18:59
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-...
-
a16z Podcast: Ben and Marc Explain (Practically) Everything – Part 2From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-08-26 19:40
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...
-
a16z Podcast: Ben and Marc Explain (Practically) Everything – Part 1From 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-08-25 20:00
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...
-
a16z Podcast: The Topic That's Lasted the Entire History of Computing -- Bundling and UnbundlingFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-08-15 15:46
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...
-
a16z Podcast: The Consumerization of ITFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-07-31 21:45
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 ...
-
a16z Podcast: Mobile Invades the Data CenterFrom 🇺🇸 a16z Podcast, published at 2014-07-31 21:41
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 ...