Our Top Listicles of 2015
While the “listicle” (a portmanteau made from “list” + “article”) has been around for a long time and is here to stay (hooray!), it made its debut on a16z.com in 2015 — with 16 items in each of them, natch. But for this listicle-of-listicles, we didn’t have 16 … so we’re presenting them all.
16 Startup Metrics + 16 More Startup Metrics
Metrics not only sometimes vary in definition from entrepreneur to entrepreneur, they don’t always indicate what’s actually happening in the business. Here’s our list of the most common, confusing, or helpful ones, presented by Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, and others. Because good metrics aren’t just about raising money from VCs — they’re about running the business in a way where you know how and why certain things are working (or not), and can change course accordingly. As one reader shared: “Drive with them, don’t just ‘report’ them”.
16 Common Questions About Fundraising
For most companies, fundraising isn’t about $100-million rounds and “unicorns”; it’s often an anxiety-ridden, lonely, frustrating process filled with uncertainty and self doubt. Entrepreneurs are always evaluating tradeoffs, such as valuation and structure and many more. Here are some answers (presented by Stephen McDermid on our corp dev team) to questions we often hear on the realities of raising capital, no matter what the climate.
16 Ways to Increase U.S. Entrepreneurship (and Competitiveness)
Marc Andreessen tweetstorms his way to 16 somewhat-less-obvious ideas for boosting the entrepreneurial environment in the United States. The ideas cover everything from pre-K to college education; open access research and IP sharing; healthcare and other benefits; tax credits as incentives; and regulatory reforms … all in 140 characters or less. Also included in this listicle are replies and responses from others on Twitter further discussing the ideas.
16 Things
We kicked off 2015 with this list of 16 concepts, ranging from virtual reality and the full-stack startup to the “sensorification” of enterprise apps to the containerization of code and microservices architecture. While the list is far from comprehensive, and does not represent pre-existing theses (since we don’t invest in themes, we invest in special founders with breakthrough ideas), it does indicate a few top of mind trends and observations of interest.
16 Mobile Theses
It’s now clear that mobile is the future of technology and of the internet, says Benedict Evans. But there are still a huge range of different themes and issues that are pretty unsettled. Here, Evans outlines the topics and key issues to think about for each of them.
Bonus: The Pmarca Tweetstorm Collection
What else is a tweetstorm but a stream-of-consciousness in listicle form? In this case, representing the thoughts of @pmarca, all collected on Medium.