General

For better or for worse, we tell the stories of entrepreneurs as one of the mythical hero's journey: that's there's a call, a test, a destination... But are we indulging in hero worship or failure porn? Where does and doesn't optimism come in for building? Storytelling IS business -- whether it's a company or a community or a product or a movement -- and is not just about the stories we tell others but the ones we tell ourselves.

A wide-ranging Q&A all about education, from the purpose, past, and present of education; the economics of education (student loans & the debt crisis, government funding, cost disease, accreditation capture); tradeoffs of "hard" and "soft" degrees; and whether or not to drop out and go straight to field or startup. What's the best advice for students and others contemplating change in their careers... how do you get noticed?

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.

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.

Given recent events around George Floyd and far beyond, this special episode of the a16z Podcast features Shaka Senghor, a leading advocate for criminal justice reform (and bestselling author), and Terry Brown, a former...

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.

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".

This episode—which originally took place as a live event—is a conversation between Seattle Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner and a16z Cultural Leadership Fund partner Chris Lyons.

A robot lawyer that helps people automatically fight bureaucracy to get money back, find hidden money, or sue others/ go to small claims court. Also now helps people delay utility bills and rent payments that are eligible for an extension or waiver of late fees due to the coronavirus crisis.

A home care company and network of home care agencies that cares for elders and also puts caregivers at the center.

A hiring platform for nurses in the U.S. used by hospitals and health systems that helps hospitals find nurses faster, offers free continuing education to nurses everywhere, and puts nurses at the center.

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.

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.

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

The creator of hit shows like Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and others, writer and executive producer Shonda Rhimes shares lessons she's learned about pitching ideas, storytelling, leadership, and scaling a business across mediums.

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.

It used to be that the only way for humanity to grow — and progress — was through destroying the environment. But is this interplay between human growth vs. environment really a zero-sum game? Even if it were true in history, is it true today? If capitalism is not responsible for environmental degradation, than who or what is? And where does (and doesn’t) technology come in? @pmarca and @smc90 interview MIT economist @amcafee about all this and more, given his new book, More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources — and What Happens Next.

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.

This is episode #5 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.

This is episode #4 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.

Laurene Powell Jobs is, among many other things, founder and President of the Emerson Collective -- the social impact firm she founded to drive change and reform through philanthropy, investing, and policy solutions. So...

This special, almost-crossover episode of the a16z Podcast features Billions co-showrunner Brian Koppelman — who also co-wrote movies such as Rounders and Ocean’s 13 with his longtime creative partner David Levien — in conversation with Marc Andreessen (and Sonal Chokshi). The discussion covers everything from managing up — when it comes to executives or investors sharing their “notes” aka “feedback” on your work — to managing down, with one’s team; to managing one’s partners (or co-founders)… and especially managing yourself. How to tame those irrational emotions, that ego?

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?

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Johnson shares with a16z crypto general partner Chris Dixon and a16z’s Sonal Chokshi specific strategies — beyond good old-fashioned pro/con lists and post-mortems — for modeling the deliberative tactics of expert decision-makers (and not just oil-company scenario planners, but also storytellers). The decisions we’re talking about here aren’t just about individual lives and businesses — whether launching a new product feature or deciding where to innovate next — they’re also about even bigger and bolder things like how to fix the internet, or what message to send aliens with outcomes spanning centuries far into the future. But that’s where the power of story comes in again.

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.

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...

Evolution and technology have allowed our human species to manipulate the physical environment around us — reshaping fields into cities, redirecting rivers to irrigate farms, domesticating wild animals into captive food sources, conquering disease. But now, we’re turning that “innovative gaze” inwards: which means the main products of the 21st century will be bodies, brains, and minds. Or so argues Yuval Harari, author of the bestselling book Sapiens: A Brief History of Mankind and of the book Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, in this episode of the a16z Podcast.

"We throw around words like 'crisis' very easily, but this is a global crisis, and it is of historic proportions," says current U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Tony Blinken about the refugee crisis (for which he and his d...

The Industrial Revolution (and period between 1500-1700) was an unprecedented age of technology and economic progress -- not unlike today's, in fact -- where we took “quantum leaps” forward in tech by taming electricity,...

This special episode of the a16z Podcast is based on a Q&A from an early screening we hosted of Disney's Queen of Katwe, now in theaters. The movie -- directed by Mira Nair and based on a book by Tim Crothers -- depi...

This episode of the a16z Podcast covers all things distributed systems — encompassing cloud and SaaS; A.I., machine learning, deep learning; and quantum computing — to the role of hardware; future interfaces; and data, big and small. Podcast guests Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (in conversation with Scott Kupor and Sonal Chokshi) also share the one piece of advice from a management and go-to-market perspective that all founders should know. And finally, why simulations matter… and what do we make of our current reality if we are all really living in a simulation as Elon Musk believes?

"Anybody who is interested in China, who's developing things in China, who's doing business with China needs to be thinking about the instinct towards politics over pragmatism", argues New Yorker staff writer (and former...

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Marc Andreessen and 21 co-founder Balaji Srinivasan cover everything from deciding what ideas to work on and the optimal type of startups to work at, to the funding environment and pendulum swings of deciding when to IPO. They also discuss the VC “formula” of weighting product vs. market vs. team; the full-stack approach to cracking industries that tech could never enter before; and recent tech trends and news including The DAO, AI, VR/AR and the “Instagrammification of everything”, more.

With three experts from various backgrounds and regions of Africa — Nkiru Balonwu of international music media company Spinlet; Alan Knott-Craig of free wi-fi non-profit Project Isiszwe; and Nanjira Sambuli of Kenyan startup incubator iHub — we explore the nuances of what connectivity in Africa really means. How does this change app design? What does it mean for doing business with Africa? What does it mean for businesses in Africa trying to compete with Silicon Valley (is there really local advantage)? All this and more in this episode of the a16z Podcast.

a16z Board Partner Steven Sinofsky and Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie discuss findings from a study of the information economy that has been built on cloud and mobile. The findings were based on workflow data collect...

The announcement by Apple of its new programming language Swift is prompting developers to consider yet again how to tailor their efforts in the battle between iOS and Android. Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky discuss...

China has been a tough market to crack for U.S. internet companies. One of the key reasons is China has its own crop of hugely successful and highly innovative companies. Chris Dixon, Connie Chan and Benedict Evans highl...

Infinitus is tackling this problem by building the first AI platform specifically designed to automate healthcare phone calls and data gathering.

Pantheon is an AI-enabled architectural firm that can provide the same high-quality deliverables that you'd expect from a traditional firm.

Today, we are thrilled to announce our investment in Alchemy as they work to better connect our life sciences and healthcare delivery systems and solve these supply-demand mismatches in the pharmaceutical value chain. Alchemy has emerged to empower the long tail of independent providers with the physical, clinical, and digital infrastructure they need to fully serve their patient communities effectively, and profitably.

Las Vegas Metro Police improved public safety with $6.3M in state-of-the-art tech from Skydio and Flock Safety, enhancing intelligence and awareness.

If these modalities have proven to be so effective (in some cases, even curative) against cancer, is there a role for them outside oncology, in the treatment of chronic diseases that might also be driven by a population of bad-actor cells? Arda Therapeutics is building upon exactly this bold hypothesis.

Braintrust is a devtool platform for any product effort — from simple apps to sophisticated products — based around large language models.

As the market-leading AI scribe for veterinarians, Scribenote automates burdensome documentation requirements.

GCTx is flipping the entire iPSC differentiation paradigm on its head. Rather than manually iterating through a limited set of differentiation protocols, the Human TFome technology platform instead deploys large-scale combinatorial screening to discover new hypotheses and new protocols that are as-yet unknown to even the best biologists.

Fei-Fei Li and are team of experts at World Labs are building a spatial intelligence model that can generate 3D worlds that users can interact with.

Mintlify lets companies publish quality software documentation that aligns with their brands, including guides, API reference, and examples.

Pylon provides a single view of customer issues, wherever they are happening — Slack, Teams, chat widget, ticket forms, or emails.

Cursor is a fork of VS Code that’s heavily customized for AI-assisted programming, with loads of features designed to integrate AI into developer workflows.

We're excited to announce our investment in Black Forest Labs (BFL), which is building the world’s best open visual models for developers.

Daylight is building a decentralized protocol to fund and coordinate distributed energy resources.

a16z is proud to lead Saronic’s Series B and continue supporting founder and CEO Dino Mavrookas and his team of engineers, veterans, and operators.

We are entering the new SaaS era, moving from Software-as-a-Service to Service-as-a-Software.

The time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.

Here's where AI agents and software can have the most immediate impact on your business, and make you more efficient and productive.

Pharma represents one of the biggest industries in the world. The top 10 pharma companies account for over $3.4T in aggregate market cap, and last year, the US alone spent more than $700B on pharmaceuticals and prescript...

We’re excited to share that we’re investing in k-ID - the best-in-class compliance engine for online safety and privacy management.

Recently, we invested in Function Health, a company that embodies the vision and excitement we had when writing those theses. The one piece we underestimated is the current state of latent demand among consumers for a new approach to healthcare and longevity.

This medical home is exactly what knownwell is building – and scaling. Through a hybrid virtual and in-person care model, knownwell offers both primary care as well as longitudinal specialty care, inclusive of weight management, diabetes care, medication (and side effect) management, multi-disciplinary nutritional counseling, and behavioral health services.

a16z is excited to invest in Decagon, an AI agent that automates customer support for a business, and to have led their seed round.

Talkiatry addresses the acute end of the behavioral health market—psychiatric care—by offering virtual treatment covered by patients’ insurance.

There is perhaps nowhere more exciting or impactful to build such tools than in healthcare—where progress is often so constrained by human expertise. Valar Labs is taking on exactly this challenge, and bringing AI into the toolbox for better cancer care.

We're thrilled to lead the $5M seed round for Yellow, a company focused on revolutionizing 3D character creation through generative AI.

The opportunity to build the next iconic cybersecurity platform has arrived: Wiz, a global leader in cloud-native security.

We have just raised $7.2B for American Dynamism ($600M), Apps ($1B), Games ($600M), Infrastructure ($1.25B), and Growth ($3.75B). This marks an important milestone for us.

Tennr understands unstructured inputs, applying AI reasoning and decision-making to perform complex end-to-end workflows.

We’re excited to partner with the Espresso team to help bring to life a more seamless and interoperable future for Ethereum.

We’re excited to announce A16Z GAMES' investment in Kaedim, a new type of co-development platform providing AI-powered art outsourcing.

The release of the latest Ideogram.ai model is a massive step forward for image models. We're excited to lead their Series A.

It's a pleasure to announce that we're leading EigenLayer's Series B. We're excited to partner with founder Sreeram Kannan and the whole team on building a platform that unlocks a new dimension of open innovation on top of Ethereum.

Tigris has built a globally available S3-compatible distributed object-storage service that makes the application developer’s job as simple as possible.

Upstash powers caching and messaging for tens of thousands of production applications across four different products, including many AI applications.

As students of financial markets, we’re keenly interested in moments of inflection which alter market structure, spawn dominant new institutions, and catalyze the growth of new asset classes. Historically, these shifts h...

There comes a point after 12 years where you either double down or figure something else out. I’m still a loyal a16zer but will embark on something new.

Doppel is building a next-generation approach for detecting and removing fraudulent accounts and phishing attacks across various channels.

Over the past decade, data infrastructure across industries has been modernized by many disruptors like Databricks, Fivetran, et al. The modern data stack has made it much easier for companies to ingest, store, query, an...

What will it take for AI to go mainstream with consumers? Effective model aggregation, a better UI, and a powerful platform for creators. Enter Poe.

Luma AI is building fast, high-quality, and deployable foundation models that let anyone create interactive 3D assets based on text prompts.

Distributional is building a platform for robust and repeatable testing of AI and machine learning models so teams can push to prod confidently.

If a candidate supports an optimistic technology-enabled future, we are for them. If they want to choke off important technologies, we are against them

Tome is launching with over $200 million to advance its PGI platform to focus on in vivo and ex vivo applications, with support from a16z Bio + Health, ARCH, GV, Longwood, Polaris and other leading investors. First up on Tome’s in vivo surgical slate: monogenic diseases of the liver. On the ex vivo cell engineering front, Tome is using PGI to rewire cells to cure common, chronic diseases—an area of great promise—with an initial focus on B-cell driven autoimmune diseases.

Mistral is at the center of the open source AI developer community. This is the most promising path to achieve robust and trusted AI systems.

Air Space Intelligence is a modern aerospace company addressing the software crisis in aerospace in both the enterprise and government sectors.

Smart energy grids. Voice-first companion apps. Programmable medicines. AI tools for kids.
We asked over 40 partners across a16z to preview one big idea they believe will drive innovation in the coming year.

While most small molecule drugs bind and inhibit the disease-causing activity of their (typically intracellular) protein targets, Gate Bio instead attacks harmful extracellular proteins by eliminating them at their very root: right where they are produced and secreted from the cell.

911 call centers – also known as public safety answering points (PSAPs) – are one of the most actively used public-safety infrastructure systems in the United States, fielding an estimated 240 million calls per year. Tha...

We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.

Led by CEO and Founder Ben Leventhal, Blackbird seeks to reward and delight consumers with elevated dining experiences, powered and personalized by web3.

Insights from leaders at OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic, Databricks, Character.AI, Roblox, insitro, and Figma on where we are, where we're going, and the open questions for building the next wave of AI.

We’re leading a Seed investment in Proof of Play, an on-chain game studio and tech company that’s committed to building a future with composability, interoperability, and permanence at the core of gameplay.

TipTop creates tools that reduce the consumer code of owning products. They offer customers a guaranteed buyback price at the time of purchase, so they only pay for the product while they need it.

a16z will lead the Series A of Moment, a new company building infrastructure that abstracts away the complexities of embedding fixed income investments in any application.

These founders are tackling big challenges ranging from improving wellness through video games to addressing absenteeism in K-12 schools through a learn-to-earn model to delivering affordable internet service to underserved communities.

Socket monitors open source packages for the most important security issues, covering the spectrum of risk across the software supply chain.

We’re thrilled to announce Anjney Midha will be joining a16z as a general partner to lead our growing AI efforts.

As we strive to find and support the most ambitious life sciences founders, we also work to connect these founders with exceptional advisors who have traveled the journey before.

Apex’s flagship Aries platform satellite bus is being manufactured for scale, targeting both commercial and defense companies where speed is critical.

ElevenLabs is on a mission to give every program a voice through its proprietary speech synthesis, voice design, and cloning technology

Over the last year it has become clear that blockchains and the software movement around them -- usually called crypto or web3 -- can only succeed with a clear regulatory regime that provides an open pathway for startups...

As we have seen the Pomelo team build out their virtual clinic, care model, and software platform, they are dedicated to a few key principles which we believe are absolutely critical to building a scalable company in this space.

There's a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.

A curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI, including generative AI, LLMs, and transformer models.

The very nature of generative AI—conversational, scalable, accessible to non-technical users—has the potential to solve the shortcomings of previous generations of rules-based chatbots and other such products in making these concepts a reality.

We’re leading a $100 million Series B round in vector database provider Pinecone, to support its vision of becoming the memory layer for AI applications.

Most people don’t know that nuclear energy — a clean, carbon-free energy source — accounts for 20% of electricity in the United States and over half of its carbon-free electricity. However, while large nuclear reactors a...

Character AI is a platform, based on a proprietary LLM, for creating and chatting with different AI characters. We're leading their Series A!

Years before the first blockchain was created, the sci-fi space MMO EVE Online proved out many of the core principles that define web3 today. This is why we are excited to be partnering with CCP on a new project set in t...

Understanding what’s in an image — one of the simplest cognitive tasks for most humans — is a stubbornly difficult problem for artificial intelligence systems to solve.

The contractor payroll market is massive. Roughly one-third of U.S. workers have performed freelance work in the last year, and $1.4 trillion is paid out to contract workers annually. In many ways, contractors are the ba...

There is a moment of wonder in every great game that makes you sit back, take a breath, and really appreciate what it is that you’re experiencing: stepping out into the world of Zelda, overcoming Margit for the first tim...

Every so often, we meet founders with unusually strong conviction about solving systems problems. They’ve often lived through the pain of bad software, diagnosed the cause of their suffering, and made it their mission to...

It’s very rare to see a new building block emerge in computing. If aliens landed on earth and decompiled our software, every app would look roughly the same: some combination of networking, storage, and compute. The way...

Since kicking off the Talent x Opportunity (TxO) Initiative, we have invested in 27 companies building products and services based on unique cultural insights. The founders we backed and continue to support have taken tr...

Every student can learn, just not on the same day, or the same way. – George Evans

We are thrilled to announce that a16z Games has led the Series Seed investment in Snapser, a games backend technology company poised to become the de facto platform for games studios.

In recent years, we’ve seen a renaissance in productivity software. To make knowledge work seamless, internal teams have largely moved off of “hard files,” toward real-time workspaces with commenting, collaboration, and...

Debt is daunting—its labyrinth of complex rules, opaque governing bodies, and unique vernacular makes it difficult for the average consumer to understand. Concepts like credit scores, APRs, retroactive interest, and coll...

We are thrilled to announce that a16z led the Series A investment in Voldex, a game studio that acquires, improves, and builds games on the massive user-generated content (UGC) platforms, Roblox and Minecraft.

Cyber incidents have reached a crisis level over the past decade. In 2021, the U.S. saw 1,862 data compromises, affecting nearly 300 million people (a nearly 100% increase from five years ago). Cybersecurity practitioner...

Within every era of technology, the most talented entrepreneurs have taken unsolved problems and open questions and turned them into businesses.

We’re thrilled to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading the seed investment in Seidr AB who are building the next generation of midcore cross-play games. Based in Stockholm, a hotbed of games innovation, Seidr’s f...