More About Frank
Frank Chen heads our Early Stage Venture (ESV) Programs team and is responsible for developing company-building enablement products, including the Founder Library and an LLM-based chatbot interface. He also organizes programs like Time to Build and Master Class events. These initiatives, designed for founders and their leadership teams, are a crucial part of the support offered by the ESV operating team.
Prior to this role, Frank helped launch a16z’s Talent x Opportunity (TxO) Initiative to discover and support cultural geniuses in building large, enduring businesses around their cultural breakthroughs. At a16z, Frank also built and scaled the firm’s deal and research team whose goals were to find and invest in great entrepreneurs and build a comprehensive knowledge base of trends, technologies, products, and people along the way.
Prior to Andreessen Horowitz, Frank held a series of product management, user experience design, developer relations, and executive roles at HP Software, Opsware, Loudcloud, Respond.com, Netscape Communications, Oracle Corporation GO Corporation, Apple, and IBM Research.
Frank holds a B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University where he graduated with distinction. Back in the stone age when he did this, AI was going through a deep winter, but he was too clueless to know this. But he’s now enjoying a Revenge of the Nerds moment given how critical artificial intelligence is to so many different startups solving the world’s most challenging and important problems.
Latest Content
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In this week’s episode of 16 Minutes, our show where we talk about tech trends in the news, what’s hype/ what’s real, and where we are on the long arc of innovation, the topic is semiconductors – specifically, the ongoing global shortage that began last summer and has intensified in recent weeks. So much so, that the U.S. president signed an executive order just last week to address concerns around the shortage, calling for reviews of supply chains for critical sectors of the economy.
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In today's episode of 16 Minutes, where we take a look at the news and what it means for the long arc of innovation, we've got segments on artificial intelligence and public-markets innovation.
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We cover the latest news since Nvidia (maker of GPUs among other things) announced its intent to acquire Arm (provider of silicon IP for system-on-chips inside billions of devices), arguing that "This combination has tremendous benefits for both companies, our customers, and the industry." But how so, when critics are worried about channel conflict, shepherding the broader ecosystem of users, and other issues? Some believe the deal may not go through, and there are also concerns about it for geopolitical reasons (U.S.-based Nvidia, UK-based Arm, China), so how do we tease apart "what's hype/ what's real" here when it comes to understanding the broader implications of the deal?
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Given all the recent buzz around the language model GPT-3 -- what is "it", how does it work, where does it fit into the arc of broader tech trends -- what's hype, what's real here? Are we really getting closer to artificial general intelligence? We cover all this and more and discuss broader implications for startups, incumbents, and the future of work too.
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In this special "2x" explainer episode of 16 Minutes -- where we talk about what's in the news, and where we are on the long arc of various tech trends -- we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model that's optimized to do a variety of natural-language processing tasks. The paper about GPT-3 was released in late May, but OpenAI (the AI "research and deployment" company behind it) only recently released private access to its API or application programming interface, which includes some of the technical achievements behind GPT-3 as well as other models.
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In this podcast, a16z operating partner Frank Chen interviews Stuart Russell, Founder of the Center for Human-Compatible Artificial Intelligence (CHAI) at UC Berkeley. They outline the conceptual breakthroughs, like natural language understanding, still required for AGI. But more importantly, they explain how and why we should design AI systems to ensure that we can control AI, and eventually AGI, when it’s smarter than we are. The conversation starts by explaining what Hollywood's Skynet gets wrong and ends with why AI is better as "the perfect Butler, than the genie in the lamp."
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In this 19th episode of our news show, where we cover recent headlines from our vantage point in tech, we cover the following news items: 1) Recent moves to regulate artificial intelligence (AI) software including the White House's recent guidance (and op-ed from the U.S. CTO) on AI in general, as well as limits to exports of specific AI software that went into effect this week -- with operating partner Frank Chen (whose talk was cited in an earlier White House report); 2) Recent activity on the topic of negative interest rates as well as quantitative easing, given recent remarks (and paper) from former chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke -- with general partner Alex Rampell, who covers all things fintech.
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This is a written version of a presentation I gave live at the a16z Summit in November 2019. You can watch a video version on YouTube.
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If you've listened to parts 1 and 2 of this 3-part podcast series (which originally aired on YouTube), you learned whether venture capital is the best source of funding for your startup, and you've successfully negotiate...
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How to raise a convertible note and structure economic and corporate governance terms, liquidation preferences, and independent board members.
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Incentives matter. So understanding the incentives of venture capitalists will help you decide if raising money from a venture investor makes sense for your business.
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How have we gotten to this point with machine learning? And where are we going?
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Stanford research shows those venture capital-backed companies founded since 1979 account for 43% of all US public companies, 57% of public company market capitalization, and 82% of the country's total R&D budget. Th...
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Stadiums packed to capacity filled with screaming fans. Global audiences in the hundreds of millions. A multibillion-dollar economy. College scholarships for the top players. Talent agents. Professional teams with dedica...
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In this episode, which originally aired on YouTube, a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya talks with Frank Chen about five challenging problems the community is trying to solve right now to enable a new computing platform and a...
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As companies digitize, they change the way they make decisions: decisions are made lower in the organization, based on data, and increasingly automated. This creates opportunities for startups creating new ways to collec...
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Before Cortana, before Siri, before Alexa, even before smart interactive voice response (IVR) systems, there was Microsoft’s Office Assistant, one of the first widely deployed digital assistants that shipped as part of M...
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Join longtime Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda in conversation with a16z Deal and Research operating partner Frank Chen for an insider’s account of how Apple designed software in the golden age of Steve Jobs, spanning products like the first release of Safari on MacOS to the first few releases of the iPhone and iOS (very first codename: "Purple").
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Do you sometimes wish you had been born in a different decade so you could have worked on the fundamental building blocks of modern computing? How fun, challenging, and fulfilling would it have been to work on semiconduc...
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In this conversation, which you can also find on the a16z YouTube channel, a16z Enterprise Deal Partner Jad Naous talks with Operating Partner Frank Chen about how decision-making is changing across organizations of all...
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In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- which originally aired as a video on YouTube -- general partner Alex Rampell (and former fintech entrepreneur as the CEO and co-founder of TrialPay) talks with operating partner Frank Chen about the quickly changing fintech landscape and, even more importantly, why the landscape is changing now.
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Some of the most successful companies and products have been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it... if managed well.
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We've defined network effects -- from what they are and aren't to how to measure and manage them in practice -- but network effects have still always been hotly debated: Where are they, are they real, are they enduring.....
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Some of the most successful companies and products -- from the phone era to the internet era -- have all been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people...
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When people talk about trends in education technology, they often focus on how to disrupt higher education in the U.S., whether it's about breaking free of the "signaling" factor of elite educations or how to shift educa...
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M&A in the biotech industry is off to a fast start in 2019. Just this past weekend, Roche announced it is acquiring Spark Therapeutics; Ipsen announced its acquisition of Clementia Pharma; and GE announced a spinoff...
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Even though hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every single day, very few people have been able to reveal the secrets and the stories behind designing them. But software engineer Ken Kocienda, who worked t...
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This is a written version of a presentation I gave live at the a16z Summit in November 2018. You can watch a video version on YouTube.
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Artificial intelligence has not only become an international arms race, competition has now heated up as companies look to adopt machine learning/deep learning at an unprecedented pace. But the conversation about AI has...
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Continuing our series on what's next for education startups, in this a16z hallway conversation general partner Connie Chan talks with deal and research team operating partner Frank Chen about apps and services she's seen...
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Everyone expects schools at all levels -- from pre-school to post-graduate universities -- to change fundamentally as software turbocharges both students and teachers, enables new business models, and brings scale to an...
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The past and future of marketplace startups -- where are we? Ever since eBay popularized an internet meeting place for buyers and sellers of, well, just about everything, we’ve been waiting for 100 other at-scale marketp...
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watch time: 40 minutes
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What is different on that factory floor from Henry Ford to today? In this conversation, Prasad Akella, Founder and CEO of Drishti; Paul Daugherty, Chief Technology and Innovation Officer of Accenture, and author of the r...
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watch time: 46 minutes
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The story of technology is not unlike what often happens in dramatic stories and plays, where a “deus ex machina” or character drops down magically from the skies onto our world stage. But in reality, technology never co...
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As cars become more like iPhones and less like just, well, cars -- everything changes, from data to mapping to interfaces to security and more. How so? Where are we anyway, given all the hype around when self-driving car...
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watch time: 30 minutes
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Data, data, everywhere, nor any drop to drink. Or so would say Coleridge, if he were a big company CEO trying to use A.I. today -- because even when you have a ton of data, there's not always enough signal to get anythin...
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There are many reasons why we’re in an “AI spring” after multiple “AI winters” — but how then do we tease apart what’s real vs. what’s hype when it comes to the (legitimate!) excitement about artificial intelligence and machine learning? Especially when it comes to the latest results of computers beating games, which not only captures our imaginations but has always played a critical role in advancing machine intelligence (whether it’s AI winning Texas Hold’em poker or beating the world human champ in the ancient Chinese game of Go). Deal and research operating team head Frank Chen and a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky ponder all this and more, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, in this episode of the a16z Podcast. We ended last time with the triumph of data over algorithms and begin this time with the triumph of algorithms over data … is this the end of big data?
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Is a network — whether a crowd or blockchain-based entity — going to replace the firm anytime soon? Not yet, argue Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson in the new book Machine, Platform, Crowd. But that title is a bit misleading, because the real questions most companies and people wrestle with are more “machine vs. mind”, “platform vs. product”, and “crowd vs. core”. They’re really a set of dichotomies. We (Frank Chen and Sonal Chokshi) discuss all this and more with Brynjolfsson and McAfee, who also founded MIT’s Initiative on the Global Economy — and previously wrote the popular The Second Machine Age and Race Against the Machine. Maybe there’s a better way to stay ahead without having to run faster and faster just to stay in place like Alice in a tech Wonderland.
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Turnabout is fair play: That's true in politics, and it's true at Andreessen Horowitz given our internal (and very opinionated!) culture of debate -- where we often agree to disagree, or more often, disagree to agree. So...
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We've met with hundreds of Fortune 500/ Global 2000 companies, startups, and government agencies asking: "How do I get started with artificial intelligence?" and "What can I do with AI in my own product or company?"
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Thanks to freeways, cities became something to get through instead of something to get to. Now, as the next transportation revolution -- from rivers to trains to cars to autonomous cars -- promises to change the face of...
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From the significance of Google DeepMind's AlphaGo wins to recent advances in "expert-level artificial intelligence" in playing an imperfect/ asymmetric information game like poker, toys and games have played and continu...
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watch time: 30 minutes
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What (on earth) does it take to get a signal to Pluto? Stanford senior scientist and astronomer Ivan Linscott, part of the team that ran the radio science experiment on the New Horizons probe, shares in conversation with...
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How will the entire industry be affected as companies not only adopt, but essentially offer, microservices or narrow cloud APIs? How do the trends of microservices, containers, devops, cloud, as-a-service/ on-demand, serverless — all moves towards more and more ephemerality — change the future of computing and even work? Cockcroft (who is now a technology fellow at Battery Ventures) joins this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Frank Chen and Martin Casado (and Sonal Chokshi) to discuss these shifts and more.
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For better or worse, most of the computing systems that run much of our lives (whether invisibly or visibly) have become increasingly complex -- they're not fully engineered; they're almost grown. And with that we enter...
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Who has the advantage in artificial intelligence — big companies, startups, or academia? Perhaps all three, especially as they work together when it comes to fields like this. One thing is clear though: AI and deep learning is where it’s at. And that’s why this year’s newly anointed Andreessen Horowitz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Computer Science is Fei-Fei Li [who publishes under Li Fei-Fei], associate professor at Stanford University. Bridging entrepreneurs across academia and industry, we began the a16z Professor-in-Residence program just a couple years ago (most recently with Dan Boneh and beginning with Vijay Pande).
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watch time: 28 minutes
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The world's most valuable company, Apple, made a number of seemingly incremental announcements at its most recent annual developer's conference (WWDC) -- that Apple Pay is coming to the web; that Siri is being opened up...
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watch time: 45 minutes
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Why are people so fired up about a computer winning yet another game? Whether it's checkers, chess, Jeopardy, or the ancient Chinese game of Go, we get excited about the potential for more when we see computers beat huma...