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In this episode of "My First Sixteen," a16z's Seema Amble chats with Gusto cofounder Tomer London about establishing product-market fit and product discovery.
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Vijay Balasubramaniyan and Martin Casado
Deepfakes—AI-generated fake videos and voices—have become a widespread concern across politics, social media, and more. As they become easier to create, the threat grows. But so do the tools to detect them.
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Fei-Fei Li, Justin Johnson, and Martin Casado
Fei-Fei Li and Justin Johnson are pioneers in AI. While the world has only recently witnessed a surge in consumer AI, our guests have long been laying the groundwork for innovations that are transforming industries today...
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Nikhil Buduma and Derrick Harris
Ambience cofounder Nikhil Buduma discusses how to build vertical applications with AI models, including in health care, and why tech expertise isn't enough.
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Steph Smith, Naftali Harris, and Joel de la Garza
In this episode, we cover the recent data breach of nearly 3B records, including a significant number of social security numbers. Joining us to discuss are security experts Joel de la Garza and Naftali Harris. Incredibly...
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Ian Webster and Anjney Midha
PromptFoo creator Ian Webster discusses the importance of red-teaming for AI safety and security, and of bringing those capabilities to more organizations.
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Dean De Beer, Joel de la Garza, and Derrick Harris
Command Zero CTO Dean de Beer discusses how large language models can help with cybersecurity incident response, and how to build products on LLMs.
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Travis McPeak, Kevin Tian, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Joel de la Garza, and Andrej Safundzic
Is it time to hand over cybersecurity to machines amidst the exponential rise in cyber threats and breaches?
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Mohammad Norouzi, Jennifer Li, and Derrick Harris
In this AI + a16z podcast episode, Mohammad Norouzi shares his story of building influential text-to-image models at Google and cofounding Ideogram.
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Guido Appenzeller, Matt Bornstein, and Derrick Harris
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, a16z partners Guido Appenzeller and Matt Bornstein discuss the state of the generative AI market, about 18 months after it really kicked into high gear with the release of ChatGP...
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Dean De Beer, Kevin Tian, Travis McPeak, and Derrick Harris
Security-startup founders Dean De Beer (Command Zero), Kevin Tian (Doppel), and Travis McPeak (Resourcely) share their thoughts on generative AI.
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Zane Lackey, Joel de la Garza, and Derrick Harris
In this AI + a16z episode, a16z's Zane Lackey and Joel de la Garza discuss how generative AI and LLMs could effect profound change in cybersecurity.
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Feross Aboukhadijeh, Joel de la Garza, and Derrick Harris
In this episode of the AI + a16z podcast, Socket's Feross Aboukhadijeh and a16z's Joel de la Garza discuss the open-source software supply chain.
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Edo Liberty, Satish Talluri, and Derrick Harris
Pinecone Founder and CEO Edo Liberty discusses the promises, challenges, and opportunities for vector databases and retrieval augmented generation (RAG).
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The AI + a16z podcast captures our thinking on artificial intelligence across a broad swath of areas, from infrastructure to business implications.
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Naveen Rao, Matt Bornstein, and Derrick Harris
Naveen Rao of Databricks joins a16z's Matt Bornstein and Derrick Harris to discuss where we're at in terms of large language model (LLM) adoption.
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Jim Zemlin, Mitchell Baker, Percy Liang, Anjney Midha, and Derrick Harris
This episode of the AI + a16z podcast features a panel discussion from back in February, focused on the state — and future — of open source AI models.
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Mira Murati, David Baszucki, Noam Shazeer, Dario Amodei, Dylan Field, and Martin Casado
The AI Revolution is here. In this episode, you’ll learn what the most important themes that some of the world’s most prominent AI builders – from OpenAI, Anthropic, CharacterAI, Roblox, and more – are paying attention to. You’ll hear discussion around the real-world impact of this revolution, on industries ranging from gaming to design, and the considerations around alignment along the way.
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Mira Murati, Noam Shazeer, Dario Amodei, Martin Casado, and David Baszucki
The AI Revolution is here. In this episode, you’ll learn what the most important themes that some of the world’s most prominent AI builders – from OpenAI, Anthropic, CharacterAI, Roblox, and more – are paying attention to. You’ll hear about the economics of AI, broad vs specialized models, the importance of UX, and whether we can expect scaling laws to continue.
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Eddy Lazzarin and Zoran Basich
Today’s episode is all about crypto security — that is, the new mindsets and the new strategies for storing crypto assets safely while also allowing holders control and access.
(As a reminder, none of the following should be taken as investment advice, please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information.)
We’ve covered security trends more broadly a ton in our content, which you can find at a16z.com/security, as well as crypto-related trends including NFTs, and the creator and ownership economies.
But as more people enter crypto lately — thanks to the boom in NFTs, decentralized finance, and much more — we share specific best practices and options for securing crypto as well as discussing how it all fits this next evolution of the internet: web3.
Our expert today is a16z crypto data scientist Eddy Lazzarin, who joins host Zoran Basich. He covers practical approaches ranging from passwords to crypto wallets and what users can do; the evolution of crypto briefly; and the big picture mindset shifts involved here as well.
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Vineeta Agarwala, Jorge Conde, Vijay Pande, and Zoran Basich
In today’s episode we have two short segments, both on bioscience topics.
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Joel de la Garza, Das Rush, and Tom Hofmann
How ransomware works, from the anatomy of a hack to how the groups operate; the role of nation-states, insurers, and regulators; and what to do if your stuff is taken hostage...
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Colin Bryar, Bill Carr, and Sonal Chokshi
When you hear stories about Amazon's famous "invention machine", we often hear about things like: Memos, six pages exactly and no powerpoints at al! Or, the idea of "work backwards from the press release". But what's lost is the how, as well as the broader narrative of how all companies and leaders, not just Amazon and Bezos, can define their ways as they scale. After all, Amazon was once a small startup, too. So in this episode -- the very first podcast for the new book Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets from Inside Amazon -- the authors share firsthand observations and experiences from being in "the room" where it happens, from AWS, Kindle, and Prime to more importantly, the leadership principles, decision making practices, and operational processes that got Amazon there. Can other startups do the same?
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Steven Adair, Joel de la Garza, and Sonal Chokshi
In this special “3x”-long episode of our (otherwise shortform) news analysis show 16 Minutes, we cover the SolarWinds hack, one of the largest known hacks of all time... and the ripple effects are only now starting to be revealed, especially given latest news reports from the U.S. government. What actually happened, when does the timeline really begin? We help cut through the headline fatigue of it in this "anatomy of a hack" teardown -- the who, what, where, when, how -- from the chess moves to the step by step long game.
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Jeff Lawson, David Ulevitch, and Sonal Chokshi
The rise of developers -- as buyers, as influencers, as a creative class -- is a direct result of "software eating the world", since every company is a tech company (whether they know it or not). Developers are therefore the key to solving business problems and to thriving not just surviving, argues Jeff Lawson, CEO of Twilio, in his new book, Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century. Lawson shares hard-earned lessons learned, mindsets, and tactics -- from "build vs. buy" to "build vs. die", to the art and science ("mitosis") of small teams -- for leaders and companies of all sizes and kinds.
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Joel de la Garza, Ali Yahya, Zoran Basich, and Sonal Chokshi
We're back to covering multiple items on our show 16 Minutes -- which covers the news, occasional explainers, and teases apart what's hype/ what's real -- as well as where we are on the long arc of innovation.
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Vijay Pande and Sonal Chokshi
In this episode of our show 16 Minutes -- where we talk about the headlines, and where we are on the long arc of tech trends -- we cover the news around Google DeepMind's AlphaFold system for predicting the 3-D structure of proteins outperforming 100 teams across 20 countries in the 14th Community Wide Assessment on the CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction) challenge. The challenge, which takes place every other year (over several months) tracks progress, key metrics, and state-of-the-art on predictive techniques for protein folding.
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Martin Casado, Armon Dadgar, and Sonal Chokshi
As companies evolve -- especially from product to sales to scaling operations -- so must the leaders. But can the same person transition across all these phases? When and when not; what are the qualities, criteria, and tradeoffs to be made? Two enterprise startup CTOs share a glimpse into their journeys on the question of to CEO or not to CEO; managing their psychology and tactics for managing transitions; and much more.
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Martin Casado, Bob Muglia, Michelle Ufford, Tristan Handy, and George Fraser
Lakes v. warehouses, analytics v. AI/ML, SQL v. everything else... As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the separate tools and teams that run AI/ML and analytics converging as well?
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Virginia Postrel and Sonal Chokshi
The story of textiles IS the story, history, and evolution of technology and science (across all kinds of fields, from biology to chemistry); of commerce (as well as management, measurement, machines); but most of all, of civilization (vs. just culture) itself. That's what Virginia Postrel's new book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is all about. But it is in fact a story of innovation, of human ingenuity... which is also the theme of the a16z Podcast.
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Ali Ghodsi and Martin Casado
Just having data is not enough: it takes an entire system of tools and technology to extract value from data. a hallway style conversation between Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Founder of Databricks, and a16z general partner Martin Casado explore the evolution of data architectures.
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Amir Shevat and Mikeal Rogers
We know community is important -- whether for developer relations for your platform or just other types of communities -- but how do we measure the success of community initiatives and even artifacts (like events or schwag)? How do we know we're even measuring the right things? And when it comes to developer relations specifically, where should devrel sit in an organization (product, sales, engineering)? Who should you hire first? And how do you reconcile developer as customer vs. developer as community member?
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Peter Wang and Martin Casado
AI/ML development is like reining in the natural world, more like physics and even metaphysics, where data and models are fluid. But this not just a philosophical observation; it has real implications for the margins, organizational structures, and building of such businesses. Especially as we’re in a tricky time of transition, where customers don’t even know what they’re asking for, yet are looking for AI/ML help or know it’s the future. So what does this all mean for the software value chain; for open source collaboration and commodification; for a new type of AI/ML company; and for the future of software businesses?
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Rajeev Venkayya and Jorge Conde
WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from 12 years of vaccine development compressed into 12 months or so? What will and won’t be compromised here, and where do new technologies (like mRNA) come in? Where will vaccines likely be distributed first; who will and won't get them initially; how do we maintain not just safety and efficacy of vaccines but trust and transparency when it comes to mis/information? We may actually see the emergence of a "Neo Anti-Vaxxer"... but we may also be entering a renaissance for vaccinology after this pandemic.
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Chris Dixon and Tom Preston-Werner
In this episode, we continue our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. Today’s topic: How do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends about? One that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user? In this discussion, which was recorded at our Crypto Startup School in April 2020, a16z General Partner Chris Dixon talked about building communities — specifically, communities of open-source developers — with GitHub cofounder Tom Preston-Werner. They discussed how to engage early users, how to turn them into your biggest advocates, how to create superfans, and more. Today, GitHub is the leading community for open-source developers and others. They also discuss in-person communities vs. distributed communities, a topic that is very top of mind today.
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Nadia Eghbal and Sonal Chokshi
Communities are everything, but the word "members" is faceless. What if there's a better, more modern way to understand, support, and design for communities of all kinds -- whether open source, passion economy, or other groups coming together? Nadia Eghbal offers the latest research and insights from her new book, Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software... but it's not all participatory, and it's not all public, either.
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Frank Chen and Sonal Chokshi
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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Andy Coravos, Beau Woods, and Hanne Winarsky
Many don’t realize we even need to think about the possibility of security hacks when it comes to things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and more. But when bits and bytes meet flesh and blood, security becomes literally a life or death concern. So what are the issues and risks we need to be aware of in exposing security vulnerabilities in connected biomedical devices?
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Brewster Kahle, Sam Williams, Alex Pruden, and Zoran Basich
More than 98% of the information on the web is lost within 20 years, and huge gaps exist in our digital and cultural history. Zoran Basich and Alex Pruden of a16z talk to Brewster Kahle and Sam Williams, who are using different approaches to attack this problem. Brewster cofounded the Internet Archive, which is well known for creating the Wayback Machine that crawls a billion URLs every day. Sam cofounded Arweave, a company that uses decentralized crypto networks to store information forever. For both of them, this issue has implications that go far beyond just data storage. It touches on issues of censorship, government manipulation of information, and how historical context is necessary for well-functioning societies. They discuss how decentralized models offer the promise of building a next-generation web that works better for users.
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Martin Casado, Sarah Wang, and David George
Gross margins are one of the most important financial metrics for any startup, but figuring out what does and doesn't go into them as a company grows is not as simple as it sounds. In this episode, we discuss why and when margins matter, and how they evolve along the way.
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Mike Masnick and Sonal Chokshi
In this special "2x" episode (#32) of our news show 16 Minutes -- where we quickly cover the headlines and tech trends, offering analysis, frameworks, explainers, and more -- we cover the tricky but important topic of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. The 1996 law has been in the headlines a lot recently, in the context of Twitter, the president's tweets, and an executive order put out by the White House just this week on quote- "preventing online censorship". All of this is playing out against the broader, more profound cultural context and events around the death of George Floyd in Minnesota and beyond, and ongoing old-new debates around content moderation on social media.
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Joel de la Garza and Sonal Chokshi
In this week's episode of 16 Minutes on the News with Joel de la Garza, in conversation with Sonal Chokshi, we discuss the security and privacy concerns around Apple and Google’s approach, called "privacy-safe contact tracing". Yet technology is not the biggest part of this discussion; it’s also about rights, cultures, and values... and the bigger questions around what happens when people are "transformed into cellphone signals".
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Nicholas Christakis and Jorge Conde
Going from rapid warning to early detection through social network sensors can make all the difference when it comes to contagion/ the spread of disease and pandemics. Can we get public health bio surveillance without sacrificing privacy and agency?
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Joel de la Garza, Joe Sullivan, and Das Rush
As the responsibility of CSOs has expanded, the role has moved from technical IT to the boardroom. How do the best CSOs prepare for and respond to a crisis, from redteaming to comms? What responsibility should cloud & SaaS vendors, not to mention the government, have in security and data breaches?
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Martin Casado and Ali Yahya
Today’s episode is one of our intimate hallway-style conversations — or as intimate as remote work allows anyway. It’s all about the history and future of protocol development.
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Joel de la Garza, David Ulevitch, and Sonal Chokshi
Zoom has not only experienced unprecedented, rapid growth (from 10M to 200M daily active users) due to the coronavirus pandemic and shelter-in-place -- but is also seeing a shift in use cases from primarily enterprise to more consumer as well. At the same time, there have been several security issues and concerns around Zoom, including "zoombombing" porn; home-grown encryption; and key-management systems, servers, and engineers in China.
What's hype/what's real in the headlines here? In this episode of 16 Minutes, a16z general partner David Ulevitch (former SVP/GM at Cisco), and operating partner for security Joel de la Garza (former CSO of Box) break it all down in 16+ minutes with Sonal Chokshi. What does it all mean for related tech trends in bottom-up SaaS -- from user onboarding and the flip side of "earning the right to be complicated" to pricing & packaging -- as well as for open source; and cloud security, particularly when it comes to video?
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Joel de la Garza and Das Rush
We are in the midst of a rapid and unprecedented shift to remote work. What does it mean for security when the airgap between work and life is gone? How prepared are organizations? And what should security professionals...
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Steven Sinofsky and Sonal Chokshi
This episode of our news show teases apart what was just a concept, what's near from the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2020). Board partner Steven Sinofsky (in conversation with Sonal Chokshi) takes us on a quick tour of the based on his annual field trip report from the floor.
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Stuart Russell and Frank Chen
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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Jonathan Lai, Martin Casado, Joel de la Garza, and Sonal Chokshi
News and trends covered this week include:
* Star Wars trailer in Fortnite, gaming, and future of social -- with @tocelot
* Congress warns tech companies to take action on encryption, or else "we will impose our will on you" -- with @martin_casado @joeldelagarza
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Julie Yoo, Venkat Mocherla, Joel de la Garza, and Sonal Chokshi
This is the 14th episode of 16 Minutes, our weekly-ish news show where we quickly cover the top headlines of the week, the a16z Podcast way: what’s real, what’s hype from our vantage point in tech. This week, we cover the following news -- with a16z experts general partner Julie Yoo and market dev partner Venkat Mocherla from the bio team, and former CSO/ a16z security operating partner Joel de la Garza.
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Connie Chan, D'Arcy Coolican, Joel de la Garza, and Sonal Chokshi
This is the 13th episode of 16 Minutes, our weekly-ish news show where we quickly cover the top headlines of the week, the a16z Podcast way: what’s real, what’s hype from our vantage point in tech. This week, we cover the following news -- with a16z experts general partner Connie Chan and D'arcy Coolican from the consumer team, and former CSO/ a16z security operating partner Joel de la Garza.
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Lisa Hawke and Steven Sinofsky
The government wants to get onto the cloud! But how do they assess the levels of risk in adopting specific cloud products, and which "cloud service providers" (aka "CSPs") to work with? That's where FedRAMP -- the Federa...
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Julie Yoo, Joel de la Garza, and Sonal Chokshi
This is episode #6 of our new show, 16 Minutes, where we quickly cover recent headlines of the week, the a16z way -- why they're in the news; why they matter from our vantage point in tech -- and share our experts' views on these trends as well.
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Naftali Harris, Joel de la Garza, and Hanne Winarsky
Synthetic fraud—yes, it's a thing: a new evolution of consumer fraud that’s been emerging in financial services, to the tune of $1-$2B a year. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Naftali Harris, co-founder and CEO of Se...
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Vijay Pande and Bharath Ramsundar
Deep learning has arrived in the life sciences: every week, it seems, a new published study comes out... with code on top. In this episode, a16z General Partner Vijay Pande and Bharath Ramsundar talk about how AI/ML is u...
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Recorded as part of our NYC roadtrip, this episode features Cornell Tech PhD student and software engineer Phil Daian, who researches applied cryptography and smart contracts -- and who also wrote about "On-chain Vote Buying and the Rise of Dark DAOs" in 2018 (with Tyler Kell, Ian Miers, and his advisor Ari Juels). Daian is joined by a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya (previously a software engineer and machine learning researcher at GoogleX and Google Brain), who also recently presented on crypto as the evolution -- and future -- of trust.
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Sonal Chokshi, Jyoti Bansal, Peter Levine, and Satish Talluri
One of the toughest challenges for founders — and especially technical founders who are used to focusing so much on product features over sales — is striking “product-market fit”. The concept can be defined many ways, but the simple definition shared in this episode is: it’s when you understand the business value of your product.
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Joel de la Garza, Jonathan Lusthaus, and Hanne Winarsky
The idea of the cybercriminal as lone wolf or hobby hacker is no longer much of a reality. Instead, the business of cybercrime looks a lot more just like that -- a large, global technology business, with many of the asso...
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Susannah Fox, Anil Sethi, Vijay Pande, and Sonal Chokshi
The problem of "dark data" in healthcare isn't just a feel-good empowerment thing, but a structural issue that leads to miscommunication and extra friction, different players in the entire healthcare system not being abl...
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Fred Wilson and Chris Dixon
There’s all sorts of interesting tech trends happening right now, including AI, VR/AR, self-driving cars and drones (as well as interesting stuff happening in verticals like healthcare and finance) — and there’s a lot also happening in seemingly more “mature” tech revolutions, such as mobile and cloud. But where are we now, really, with these shifts… and how does that inform how we think about the next couple decades?
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Martin Casado, Andrew Chen, Russ Heddleston, and Hanne Winarsky
What happens when the bottoms up, organic growth usually associated with consumer companies starts to go…. enterprise? Part of our continuing podcast series (you can listen to part one on user acquisition and part two on engagement/retention) on growth, this episode explores the increasing trend of enterprise growth shifting to be more “bottoms up” — with a16z general partners Martin Casado and Andrew Chen, and DocSend CEO and co-founder Russ Heddleston, in conversation with Hanne Tidnam.
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Denis Nazarov, Jesse Walden, and Devon Zuegel
The open source movement enabled so much in computing, including the collaborative building of libraries -- that is, building blocks of code that developers could combine together to build applications. But as these appl...
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Denis Nazarov, Jesse Walden, Ali Yahya, and Devon Zuegel
Cryptonetworks are often compared to firms, people, or even coral reefs -- but, observes a16z crypto partner Ali Yahya, they might be much more similar to cities. Where does that analogy fit, and where does it break down...
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Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, and Devon Zuegel
“Show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcomes.”
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There's a lot of knowledge out there -- and networks of talent (especially in Silicon Valley) -- on what to do in the early stages of a company, going from 0 to 1, and even in going from 1 to 100... but what about beyond...
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Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Steven Johnson
The rise of zero-sum thinking -- which has come snapping back recently -- slows and even halts progress, observes Marc Andreessen. Because you're then dividing up a smaller piece, adds Ben Horowitz, instead of growing the pie altogether. This is true not just in economics, politics, and tech, but also in business relationships (and life), too.
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Peter Levine and Chris Wanstrath
There are over 20 million programmers out there -- and double that, if you count everyone else coding in other ways -- but where are the next 100 million developers? How do we get to a billion developers? The answer, obs...
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Sonal Chokshi, Stina Ehrensvärd, and Martin Casado
Here's the hard thing about security: the more authentication factors you have, the more secure things are... but in practice, people won't use too many factors, because they want ease of use. There's clearly a tension b...
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Gregory Allen, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, Ryan Tseng, and Hanne Winarsky
We now live in a world where connecting the dots between intel and modeling threats has become infinitely more complex: not only is the surface area to protect larger than ever, but the entry points and issues are more d...
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John O’Farrell and Gerard Ryle
The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists is the organization responsible for the compilation and release of the first the Panama Papers, a series of 11.5 million documents that detailed the offshore deal...
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Lisa Hawke and Steven Sinofsky
Given concern around data breaches, the EU Parliament finally passed GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) after four years of preparation and debate; it goes into enforcement on May 25, 2018. Though it originated in...
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Cristina Cordova, Augusto Marietti, Laura Behrens Wu, and Sonal Chokshi
APIs (application programming interfaces), observe the guests in this episode of the a16z Podcast, can be described as everything from Lego building blocks to Tetris to front doors to even veins in the human body. Becaus...
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Matt Billmann, Florian Leibert, Karthik Rau, and Martin Casado
What happens when monolithic architectures are broken down into containers and microservices (or when things are broken down into smaller units, not just in infrastructure but perhaps even in company structure too)? From...
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Joel de la Garza, Stina Ehrensvärd, Niels Provos, and Martin Casado
Given the heated discussions around security and the c-word (“cyber”), it’s hard to figure out what the actual state of the industry is. And clearly it's not just an academic exercise -- it is a matter of both business s...
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Suhail Doshi, Gil Elbaz, Jeff Glueck, and Lauren Berson
In 2017 The Economist declared data to be the world's most valuable resource. And yet “data insight” is one of those phrases that, while important, is now so ubiquitous it’s been numbed of meaning. So how do you actually...
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Juan Benet, Olaf Carlson-Wee, and Chris Dixon
The internet, believe it or not, was just the beginning. Yes, it spawned an incredible number of uses (some unexpected), from marketplaces and commerce to publishing and social networks... but that’s all been built with...
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Scott Clark, Ion Stoica, and Frank Chen
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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Sonal Chokshi, Scott Clark, Joseph Spisak, and Martin Casado
When you have "a really hot, frothy space" like AI, even the most basic questions -- like what is it good for, how do you make sure your data is in shape, and so on -- aren't answered. This is just as true for the compan...
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Sonal Chokshi, Frank Chen, and Steven Sinofsky
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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Sonal Chokshi, Ion Stoica, and Peter Levine
We've already talked quite a bit about the Algorithms, Machines, and People lab at U.C. Berkeley (AMPLab) -- all about making sense of big data -- so what happens when the entire world moves towards artificial intelligen...
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Fred Ehrsam and Chris Dixon
We've already talked about why bitcoin matters. But as the set of cryptocurrencies -- and networks and "tokens" enabled by the underlying blockchain -- grow (Ethereum being one of the fastest-growing ones), where do we g...
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Juan Benet and Chris Dixon
The story of how innovation happens is a long one -- from government funding early basic research, to the heyday of corporate R&D like Bell Labs, to startups as experiments before product-market fit. Through all that...
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Russ Roberts, Noah Smith, and Sonal Chokshi
Beyond the overly simplistic framing of trade as “good” or “bad” — by politicians, by Econ 101 — why is the topic of trade (or rather, economies and people adjusting to trade) so damn hard? A big part of it has to do with not seeing the human side of trade, let alone the big picture across time and place… as is true for many tech innovations, too.
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Sonal Chokshi, Mike Curtis, and Li Fan
"Young hungry and scrappy" is how Hamilton described his country, and it's how many -- including the guests on this episode -- describe startups... or more precisely, the mindset that engineers in startups need to balanc...
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Graham Allison and Matthew Colford
"When a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens." It's true of people, it's true of companies, and it's even more true of countries. It's also the fundamental insight captured by ancient Greek his...
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Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky
What happens when companies grow exponentially in a short amount of time -- to their organization, their product planning, their behavior towards change itself? In this hallway conversation, a16z partners Steven Sinofsky...
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Sonal Chokshi, Jeff Cordova, and Vijay Pande
A funny thing happened on the way to quantum computing: Unlike other major shifts in classic computing before it, it begins -- not ends -- with The Cloud. That's because quantum computers today are more like "physics exp...
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Sonal Chokshi, David Damato, Herb Lin, and Matt Spence
"We're always fighting the last war" -- that's a phrase historians like to use because policymakers and others tend to be so focused on the threats they already know, and our mindsets and organizational structures are or...
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Martin Casado, Nathaniel Gleicher, Matthew Olsen, and Matt Spence
When individuals gain the abilities that only nation states once had, how do we put cyber threats in perspective for policymakers -- without unduly "inflating" the threats? As it is, security is an intense and important...
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Nearly every cybersecurity discussion/presentation follows this formula: We don't know what we're doing; the bad guys are getting smarter; our defenses are getting worse; everything's more connected than ever; we're head...
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Kamala Harris and Matt Spence
"Slow down, cowboys" -- that's what Senator Kamala Harris (D-California) said when prosecutors in her office wanted to bring a case against companies that let apps download someone's entire address book, because surely t...
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Sonal Chokshi, Benjamin Wittes, and Hanne Winarsky
Rules, guidelines, regulations, and "laws" are all sometimes used interchangeably -- but what's legal and what isn't is far more complex when it comes to policy, especially when politics (and technology) enters the pictu...
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Mike Lempres, Jared Polis, David Schweikert, and Matthew Colford
There's an interesting paradox when it comes to the U.S. government and tech: Either they're an inventor, early adopter, and buyer of emerging new tech ... or they're a very late adopter (as in the case of government off...
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Michael Morell, Matt Spence, and Hanne Winarsky
When it comes to spycraft -- or rather, "tradecraft," as they say in the biz -- what do the movies get right, and what do they get wrong? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Michael Morell -- former Deputy Director and...
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Marc Andreessen and Dan Primack
In this lively conversation -- from our recent a16z Tech Policy Summit in Washington, D.C. -- Axios' Dan Primack interviews a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen about the two major narratives dominating discussions about the...
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Chad Rigetti and Chris Dixon
Moore's Law -- putting more and more transistors on a chip -- accelerated the computing industry by so many orders of magnitude, it has (and continues to) achieve seemingly impossible feats. However, we're now resorting...
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Sonal Chokshi, James Watters, and Martin Casado
Watters, who is the SVP of Product at Pivotal (part of VMWare and therefore also Dell-EMC), is a veteran of monetizing open source — from OpenSolaris (at Sun Microsystems) to Springsource (acquired by VMWare) to Pivotal Cloud Foundry — with plenty of failures, and successes, along the way. He shares those lessons learned in this episode of the a16z Podcast with Sonal Chokshi and general partner Martin Casado (who was co-founder and CTO of Nicira, later part of VMWare before joining Andreessen Horowitz). These lessons matter, especially as open source has become more of a requirement — and how large enterprises bet on big new trends.
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Nadia Eghbal, Mikeal Rogers, and Sonal Chokshi
The culture of open source has changed across generations, from previous ones that had to fight for the brave new way -- to the current "GitHub generation" that not only accepts open source, but expects it as the default...