Infrastructure

When you hear stories about Amazon’s “invention machine” — which led to a company with not just one or two products but several successful diverse lines of business — we often hear about thi...

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 a...

There’s a few ontologies for describing the phases leaders — and their startups — go through, whether it’s product-sales-etc. or pioneer to settler. In any case, as companies evolve, so must the l...

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...

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 ther...

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. Becau...

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...

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 artif...

Highlights from the a16z Data and AI Forum, featuring founders building products across the spectrum of data and AI use cases.

Transactional databases have long been the most critical component of application design. Why? Because a steadfast database is generally the ultimate enforcement point for correctness in a messy, distributed world. Witho...

Annealing:  A process that changes the properties of a material to make it more workable. It is a best practice to anneal metals before they are joined together. That way the pieces will stay aligned during the solderin...

Vertical clouds are on the rise, as traditional clouds give way to specialization.

The pressure the cloud puts on margins can start to outweigh the benefits you scale and growth slows. Understand how much market cap is being suppressed by the cloud to help inform the decision-making framework on managing infrastructure as companies scale.

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things...

0/ Is there an Enterprise Margin Crisis? It’s not uncommon to see software startups with surprisingly low margins (30-40%). I believe there is a broader trend going on here, which I explore in this thread.

Editor’s note: It’s Summit week at a16z, so each day we’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 innovator...

Attackers look for the path of least resistance. Recently, that path has shifted from enterprise networks to you and your devices for two reasons. First, as we have built more secure software and systems, it has made it ...