Company Building

To see how people are interacting with generative AI, we used data to rank the top 50 GenAI web products by monthly visits.

Thanks to generative AI, the much-discussed topic of “self-driving money” finally has a chance to achieve its potential.

Despite the ease of product building, sustainable growth has become increasingly challenging as many traditional channels no longer deliver the same results. In these challenging times, we explore the remaining growth opportunities. How can we achieve a balance between efficiency, profitability, and growth? Which channels are still relevant and how can they be effectively mastered in 2023? Join us as we discuss these questions with three seasoned experts who have successfully navigated similar confusing times in the past: Gina Gotthilf, leading Latitud and renowned for her impressive tenure as the VP of Growth at Duolingo; Kieran Flanagan, a long-time SVP of Marketing at HubSpot; and Bryan Kim, Consumer GP at a16z, who held various leadership roles during Snap's hypergrowth phase up to its IPO.

Field Notes is a video podcast series on consumer tech by a16z. Connie Chan talks to former Vogue publisher Susan Plagemann of WME Fashion about editorial and social strategy.

When a new social app starts to "work," it feels like magic, but often looks like a black box.

A few weeks ago, Apple released a stunning statistic: they’ve paid developers over $320B — yes, billion! — since the launch of the App Store in 2008, highlighting the cast opportunity in the marketplace. And around the same time, a16z Consumer Partner, Olivia Moore, compiled a list of the top apps across the US app store throughout 2022. In this episode, you’ll get to hear which apps made it to the top and what they have in common. Hint: the big winners were in social, but perhaps a new wave of social apps! We also get the scoop on what it really takes to not just hit #1, but stay there. This episode highlights numerous surprising examples ranging from a new-age Beanie Baby app, a viral talking dog, an app from 2012 that finally broke the top 10, and the Chinese app that’s been at #1 for a majority of 2023, and it’s not TIkTok! There are endless learnings about how new founders can take advantage of these opportunities.

If leveraged well, AI has the potential to greatly enhance students’ abilities to think critically and expand their soft skills.

From entertainment franchise games to the precision delivery of medicines, small modular reactors to loads of AI applications, here are 40+ builder-worthy pursuits for 2023.

Online platforms are passionately hoping that paid membership models may be a new answer to existing advertising revenue ceilings. After all, at $3-5 per member a month, the revenue is sure to add up — or does it?

As we enter the third school year of the Covid era, a disturbing new normal is settling over the country. Students continue to be chronically absent; nearly 50,000 Los Angeles public school students failed to show up on...

It’s time for your startup to fundraise. You prepare a deck, practice your pitch, and start reaching out to investors. If a first meeting goes well, it often ends with a request to share your “data room.” But what is a d...

Early in the COVID pandemic, my colleague D’Arcy Coolican and I penned “COVID-19 and the Great Rehiring”. The premise of the piece was that the magnitude of the disruption to employment during the pandemic would require...

This week, we published the a16z Marketplace 100, a ranking of the largest and fastest-growing consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies. See the full index and analysis here, and visit a16z.com/marketpl...

Chinese New Year, the biggest holiday in Chinese culture, is traditionally celebrated with family gatherings, fireworks, a national TV show with over a billion viewers, and gifted red envelopes (stuffed with money). For...

Many skeptics thought the internet would never reach mass adoption, but today it’s shaping global culture, is integral to our lives -- and it's just the beginning. In this conversation from our 2019 innovation summit, Ke...

Editor’s note: It’s Summit Week at a16z, so each day we’re re-sharing some of our favorite talks from the last few years. a16z Summit is an annual, invite-only event bringing together thinkers, builders, and innovators t...

There might be no more beloved image of the American entrepreneurial spirit than that of neighborhood kids who open a sidewalk lemonade stand on a hot summer day. With a little bit of “capital” from their parents -- lemo...

Many of the most consequential projects of the internet era -- from Wikipedia to Facebook and bitcoin -- have all been predicated on network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it...

The most successful companies and products of the internet era have all been predicated on the concept of network effects, where the network becomes more valuable to users as more people use it. This is as true of compan...

The mobile world has fallen hard for VR, says Benedict Evans. But will virtual reality mean real profit for hardware makers? Evans offers his observations on VR and more gleaned from the largest gathering of the mobile i...

China has been in the headlines lately for the ongoing acceleration of its capital outflows and concerns over the reliability of its reported economic data. As various businesses and investors hastily adjust their foreca...

SaaS -- instantly delivered, subscription-based software -- has officially taken over our professional lives. But it's also well on its way to now taking over our personal lives.

Insurance is all about distributing risk. With dramatic advances in software and data, shouldn’t the way we buy and experience our insurance products change dramatically? Software will rewrite the entire way we buy and e...

Amazon has a tendency to polarize people. On one hand, there is the ruthless, relentless, ferociously efficient company that’s building the Sears Roebuck of the 21st Century. But on the other, there is the fact that almo...

BY JEFF JORDAN

Brainstorm: ways for 19 yr old to make $ that require only a computer, Internet, paypal a/c, high school edu. No credit, no job exp. Go!