-
A step-by-step framework to test if you know who your ICP is—or build it out if you don’t.
-
We explore what MCP is, how it changes the way AI interacts with tools, what developers are already building, and the challenges that still need solving.
-
In the “Maslow's hierarchy” of the healthcare industry’s needs, the infrastructure layer is the foundational workhorse of the system. Healthtech infrastructure refers to the utilities and systems-of-record that underpin all of the core operational transactions, financial transactions, data exchange, and interoperability actions that occur across the healthcare system everyday.
-
The Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) remains focused on bringing African Americans into tech at the earliest stages of innovation. Our 2024 nonprofit partners add unique strengths and fresh perspectives to our growing network. We’re excited to collaborate to increase Black participation across the tech ecosystem.
-
Blockchains are a way to build new networks, ensuring people have voice and choice in the networks they contribute to and use every day.
-
We discuss our favorite books and reading recommendations from team a16z crypto for summer 2024 on the web3 with a16z podcast.
-
The most impactful way to fix healthcare is through improving the consumer experience, which has been largely ignored to date. In today’s modern world where you can order groceries, buy flight tickets, and wire money from your phone, taking care of yourself and navigating the healthcare system remains impossibly hard.
-
Guidelines for readying a web3 project for a token launch, from creation to custodians
-
Big tech companies depend entirely on the people who use their apps and platforms, without sharing control, ownership, or rewards. There is another way forward: A future defined by digital ownership.
-
Each new modality needs to find its platform-disease fit—the diseases it is uniquely suited for. But finding fit has increasingly turned into a fight; many have crowded into the same indications. With an expanding arsenal to treat disease, how will patients, clinicians, and the market determine what tool to use?
-
Consider a model of two competing platforms that each seek to attract both consumers and a content producer
-
At the end of the day, even the best AI models will fail if they don’t figure out a way to achieve broad distribution and profitable monetization, so it’s important to understand the psyche of the buyers and decision makers who will determine the fate of your products.
-
Ittai Abraham (Intel) surveys some of the amazing scalability advances in blockchain technologies over the past 5 years.
-
We believe the largest opportunity long-term is in leveraging AI to change not just how we create games, but the nature of the games themselves.
-
Captions helps creators quickly and easily script, record, and edit video content with a focus on short-form videos.
-
AI will have the greatest impact on life sciences and health when it can succeed at specialist tasks like diagnoses and medical procedures.
-
a16z General Partner Jeff Jordan writes about his 12 years at the venture capital firm and what he's planning to do next.
-
We are pleased to introduce you to some of the new, innovative organizations the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund works with every day to advance more African Americans into the tech industry.
-
In a world of retweets, upvotes, and right swipes, studies show that many of us still feel lonely. Thanks to generative AI, we potentially have a new solution: companion chatbots.
-
To successfully raise in today's climate, founders will need a different mindset, approach, preparation, and process. Here are some tips.
-
How can digital health founders successfully implement channel partnerships to accelerate the distribution of their products and services? When should they use them? How should they use them? We spoke with the founders of Omada, Ginger, and Cedar, each of which have successfully utilized channel partnerships, and surveyed 36 other digital health startups to analyze the state of channel partnerships in the market today.
-
At a16z, marketplaces represent one of our favorite business models. Our annual Marketplace 100 provides insight into the latest consumer marketplace trends across industries.
-
When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify t...
-
The public market situation for healthtech can seem pretty depressing. Recently IPOed healthtech stocks are underperforming the broader market, with some falling 95%+ from their IPO—meanwhile, more traditional companies...
-
If you’re a fintech nerd like me, you’ve probably opened up more neobank accounts than you can count.
-
Now that the launch of the highly anticipated real-time payments network FedNow is finally happening, what will it mean for real-time payments in the U.S.?
-
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...
-
Ben Horowitz discusses the leadership styles of Intel’s Andy Grove and Apple’s Bill Campbell, how Okta won its market with culture, and how to look for and hire the talent you don’t have in an interview with David Weiden...
-
In today's ever-competitive environment to drive growth, identifying and hiring key talent through a structured transaction—known as an “acquihire”—has become an increasingly popular and effective way for companies to ad...
-
COVID is changing many things about the world. Some will be permanent, some will be temporary, but for most things, we simply don’t know yet. A decision framework I’ve been using when evaluating investments in companies...
-
This interview was recorded earlier this year and originally appeared on The Observer Effect; it has only been lightly edited for formatting here.
-
How pricing works, how post-IPO activity is influenced by the 4 types of stock market investors, and how we can improve the less-than-ideal price discovery of IPOs.
-
When tech investors talk about valuation as "multiples" on revenue, what does that really mean? We demystify the role of entry multiples and share the two factors that matter most in tech growth investing.
-
Partner banks, chartered institutions that provide fintech companies access to banking products, have exploded in recent years—by our count, their ranks have grown more than five times over the past decade. Today, there...
-
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino, a social scientist who studies organizations, breaks down what makes rebels different in how they tend to see and do things—whether that’s cooking, flying planes, or holding board meetings—and what we can all learn from “rebel talent” to make our organizations more productive and innovative.
-
Professional rock climber Alex Honnold is best known for his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite — a feat that required climbing 3000 feet of sheer rock face without a rope or safety gear. In the two years since reaching...
-
Clayton Christensen (1952-2020) pioneered disruption theory, one of the most influential -- and misunderstood! -- theories that has influenced thinkers and makers in Silicon Valley and beyond.
-
In this special guest hosted episode -- cross-posted from the new show Starting Greatness (featuring interviews with startup builders before they were successful, hosted by Mike Maples jr) -- Marc Andreessen shares some rare, behind-the-scenes details of his story from 0 to 1... from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape.
-
Some of the common myths and misconceptions around direct listings (and IPOs), as well as the details and nuances of true pricing, investor days, forward guidance, and more.
-
“Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong
-
Sisu joined with Snowflake in Oct. 2023. Read their announcement here.
-
I watch your actions not just captions in the sh*t you post
-
“To me it's kinda funny, the attitude showing a n*&#a driving
-
It's the oldest rule of disruption: People inside the company almost always see the next thing coming, but have a hard time being heard or driving actual change.
-
If history repeats itself, the next social network won’t look like the social networks we know today.
-
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...
-
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.
-
Summer is finally here, and hopefully that means a little more time to kick back, relax, and read. So we at a16z compiled our biannual recommendations (you can see the last one here) of what to read. There are 64 total p...
-
For startups seeking to build a sustainable and enduring business, we’ve covered a lot of the strategic financing milestones along the way -- from mindsets for startup fundraising to when and how to build a finance funct...
-
A lot in technology -- and venture -- happens in decades. New cycles of technology come and go, including some secular shifts; a new generation of founders matures; and so much more changes. So when Andreessen Horowitz (...
-
a16z Managing Parter Scott Kupor’s new book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road, is a guide to engaging with and understanding VC that covers everything from terminology and term sheets to the fundraising process, governance, and...
-
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...
-
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Bob Tinker, author of the book Survival to Thrival and founding CEO of MobileIron, and a16z general partner Peter Levine, talk with Hanne Tidnam all about how to find the right go-to-market fit for the enterprise startup. How do founders avoid that moment of reckoning after product-market fit, but before growth? When should an enterprise startup accelerate sales investments? -- the "Goldilocks problem" (not too early, not too late!) -- and pick the right sales team and go-to-market model for their product and their customers? And if you're stuck in that moment where growth stalls, what are the right tools to get out of it? What are the important metrics to know both where you are, and when you're out of the woods?
-
“Crossing the chasm” is a popular concept for almost all new products/startups, and is a useful lens for entrepreneurs to view the theory of innovation. The concept was first coined in the popular book title of the same...
-
0/ Mastering bottoms up adoption *and* enterprise sales is really hard. Yet many of the fastest growing enterprise companies do. This thread explores some of the considerations and why juggling both motions is a lot more...
-
Is it possible that ancient Greeks and Romans dreamed of technological innovations like robots and artificial intelligence millennia before those technologies became realities? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Adrien...
-
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...
-
Perhaps the single greatest early challenge faced by founders in early markets is going from product to sales -- specifically, a repeatable sales process. Occasionally, a product draws the market with such force that the...
-
0/ Traditional enterprise GTM strategies are being eaten from the bottom by bottom-up adoption (SaaS, open source, dev tooling) and from the top by services.
-
0/ Questionable fund raising advice you may want to think twice about before following. A thread.
-
This episode of the a16z Podcast provides perspectives from both sides of the table (in-house vs. agency, big company vs. startup) for what it takes, featuring PR legends and veterans Shannon (Stubo) Brayton, chief marketing officer at LinkedIn (formerly at OpenTable and formerly vice president of corporate communications at eBay) and Margit Wennmachers, operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz who heads up the marketing function (and who co-founded and later sold The Outcast Agency), in conversation with Sonal Chokshi. It’s not dictation — whether from company to agency, or agency to reporter, or PR to internal stakeholders — there’s a lot of strategic thinking involved even with seemingly incidental things. And… it’s a leap of faith.
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As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partn...
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For B2B2C business models, Rampell and Casado discuss growth lessons, the significance of sales expansion in enterprise contexts, and the when and how of building more than one product.
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B2B2C companies sell a product or service to a business, gaining customers and/or data from that business that they get to keep and use.
-
The conversation covers everything from the differences between private and public investing, and between startups and big companies -- to how people, teams, organizations, and even nation-states can evolve through principles like "believability-weighted idea meritocracies" and more. But... can adults really change? What are the differences between the two you's, and between closed-minded and open-minded people, and how do they play out across the roles of a "teacher", "student", or "peer" in organizations of varying scale? It's not as obvious as you might think, and knowing how you know -- and what we don't know -- can help.
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Nearly every early tech startup at some point gets enamored with the idea of partnering with another tech company. This is usually driven by the heady, very seductive idea that a partnership will accelerate credibility,...
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Leadership is not just about management, but about passion, a bit of humor, and resilience. General partner Peter Levine and Dick Costolo (entrepreneur, former CEO of Twitter, and erstwhile comedian) share their thoughts...
-
watch time: 6 minutes
-
listen to the audio version of this article:
-
The purpose of category creation, argue the guests in this episode of the podcast, isn't just about making a dent in the way companies work and changing what people do every day... it's about setting the price. And with...
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Many iconic technology companies began with concepts that were new to the industry. In hindsight, the narrative goes something like this: Founder built thing X. Y bought it. Then all of a sudden Z started using it. Next...
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There's a new C-level role in town: the CCO, or Chief Customer Officer. This episode (based on a previous event) is all about the rise of this new role, why it's so important -- and what the actual scope and function of...
-
Hiring a VP of Product -- especially as the founder of the company -- can almost feel like handing over your baby to someone else to hold, observes a16z executive talent team partner Caroline Horn, who hosted an event on...
-
In this hallway-style podcast conversation, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly and a16z partner Benedict Evans discuss how we make sense of the most recent wave of new technologies --- technologies that are perhaps more...
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Bob Sutton's book The No Asshole Rule was all about how to foster company cultures that don't tolerate asshole behavior. But sometimes, dealing with an asshole is unavoidable -- in life or at work. So what are the best t...
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“I’d be a billionaire if I could get a dollar for all the bullshit I hear today"
-
"The only unforgivable sin in business is to run out of cash" [so said Harold Geneen], yet startup CEOs "always act on leading indicators of good news, and lagging indicators of bad news" [according to Andy Grove]; after...
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A founder’s perspective on what leaders should do starting a year or two out, in rough chronological order.
Uncategorized
All Uncategorized Content
-
Ben Horowitz discusses the leadership styles of Intel’s Andy Grove and Apple’s Bill Campbell, how Okta won its market with culture, and how to look for and hire the talent you don’t have in an interview with David Weiden...
-
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Harvard Business School Professor Francesca Gino, a social scientist who studies organizations, breaks down what makes rebels different in how they tend to see and do things—whether that’s cooking, flying planes, or holding board meetings—and what we can all learn from “rebel talent” to make our organizations more productive and innovative.
-
In this special guest hosted episode -- cross-posted from the new show Starting Greatness (featuring interviews with startup builders before they were successful, hosted by Mike Maples jr) -- Marc Andreessen shares some rare, behind-the-scenes details of his story from 0 to 1... from the University of Illinois and Mosaic to Netscape.
-
Some of the common myths and misconceptions around direct listings (and IPOs), as well as the details and nuances of true pricing, investor days, forward guidance, and more.
-
It's the oldest rule of disruption: People inside the company almost always see the next thing coming, but have a hard time being heard or driving actual change.
-
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...
-
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.
-
A lot in technology -- and venture -- happens in decades. New cycles of technology come and go, including some secular shifts; a new generation of founders matures; and so much more changes. So when Andreessen Horowitz (...
-
In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Bob Tinker, author of the book Survival to Thrival and founding CEO of MobileIron, and a16z general partner Peter Levine, talk with Hanne Tidnam all about how to find the right go-to-market fit for the enterprise startup. How do founders avoid that moment of reckoning after product-market fit, but before growth? When should an enterprise startup accelerate sales investments? -- the "Goldilocks problem" (not too early, not too late!) -- and pick the right sales team and go-to-market model for their product and their customers? And if you're stuck in that moment where growth stalls, what are the right tools to get out of it? What are the important metrics to know both where you are, and when you're out of the woods?
-
Is it possible that ancient Greeks and Romans dreamed of technological innovations like robots and artificial intelligence millennia before those technologies became realities? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Adrien...
-
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...
-
This episode of the a16z Podcast provides perspectives from both sides of the table (in-house vs. agency, big company vs. startup) for what it takes, featuring PR legends and veterans Shannon (Stubo) Brayton, chief marketing officer at LinkedIn (formerly at OpenTable and formerly vice president of corporate communications at eBay) and Margit Wennmachers, operating partner at Andreessen Horowitz who heads up the marketing function (and who co-founded and later sold The Outcast Agency), in conversation with Sonal Chokshi. It’s not dictation — whether from company to agency, or agency to reporter, or PR to internal stakeholders — there’s a lot of strategic thinking involved even with seemingly incidental things. And… it’s a leap of faith.
-
For B2B2C business models, Rampell and Casado discuss growth lessons, the significance of sales expansion in enterprise contexts, and the when and how of building more than one product.
-
The conversation covers everything from the differences between private and public investing, and between startups and big companies -- to how people, teams, organizations, and even nation-states can evolve through principles like "believability-weighted idea meritocracies" and more. But... can adults really change? What are the differences between the two you's, and between closed-minded and open-minded people, and how do they play out across the roles of a "teacher", "student", or "peer" in organizations of varying scale? It's not as obvious as you might think, and knowing how you know -- and what we don't know -- can help.
-
Leadership is not just about management, but about passion, a bit of humor, and resilience. General partner Peter Levine and Dick Costolo (entrepreneur, former CEO of Twitter, and erstwhile comedian) share their thoughts...
-
The purpose of category creation, argue the guests in this episode of the podcast, isn't just about making a dent in the way companies work and changing what people do every day... it's about setting the price. And with...
-
There's a new C-level role in town: the CCO, or Chief Customer Officer. This episode (based on a previous event) is all about the rise of this new role, why it's so important -- and what the actual scope and function of...
-
Hiring a VP of Product -- especially as the founder of the company -- can almost feel like handing over your baby to someone else to hold, observes a16z executive talent team partner Caroline Horn, who hosted an event on...
-
In this hallway-style podcast conversation, O'Reilly Media founder Tim O'Reilly and a16z partner Benedict Evans discuss how we make sense of the most recent wave of new technologies --- technologies that are perhaps more...
-
Bob Sutton's book The No Asshole Rule was all about how to foster company cultures that don't tolerate asshole behavior. But sometimes, dealing with an asshole is unavoidable -- in life or at work. So what are the best t...
-
"The only unforgivable sin in business is to run out of cash" [so said Harold Geneen], yet startup CEOs "always act on leading indicators of good news, and lagging indicators of bad news" [according to Andy Grove]; after...
-
"Orthogonal thinking" but "shared core values" -- that's what makes an ideal board... especially when it comes to "independents", i.e., board members who aren't also investors. But how do you get the most out of those in...
-
There's feedback and there's guidance; there's praise and there's criticism. All of it is important to do better work, but to develop a better and more productive workplace and relationships -- especially given how much...
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A board veteran who has sat on both sides of the table, CEO of PagerDuty Jennifer Tejada shares what you gain from board membership (vs. being only an operator). How does being a board member change you as a CEO, and vic...
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The hardest thing about pivots (major shifts in company/product direction) isn't just the actual pivot. It's the courage to make the decision... and being honest with yourself as a CEO. Especially since, no matter how gr...
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In the age of the internet -- where information is freely available online, and connections between sellers and buyers of software products are visible on LinkedIn -- do analysts really matter? Do they play a role in dec...
-
In business, as in politics, "the movement is the message" -- whether that "movement" is a product that's taking off grassroots-style in an enterprise, or is a political candidate. In fact, you can think of political cam...
-
In many ways, managing startups is about managing uncertainty: in product, market, and... people. So what happens when changes in the business require changes -- and sometimes reductions -- in the workforce?
-
Some of the best management books are actually military books, argues Ben Horowitz. There's just a certain mental toughness and focus that that experience gives you, adds Dick Costolo based on his observations.
-
How do you get into tech when you don’t have a tech background? And what special expertise can leaders from other fields -- like the military -- bring to tech startups?
-
Most investors try to invest in things that don't change and last forever -- Warren Buffett for example loves Heinz ketchup! But VC is about investing in things that do change... a lot. How does this basic mindset challe...
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The NFL has descended upon Silicon Valley for Superbowl 50, and a16z was fortunate to have 30 of the world’s best football players post-up at the firm to talk about the intersection between the world of professional spor...
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Mellody Hobson, president of Ariel Investments, sits down with Ben Horowitz during a16z's 2015 Tech Summit for a wide ranging conversation on investing, the state of markets, and how Hobson began her career in finance. O...
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There's been a lot of activity lately around trying to improve equity compensation (for example, by removing tax liabilities that handcuff them). Or by making equity more equitable in other ways; as former Groupon CEO An...
-
-
Have we as a culture become expert at globalizing industries, but are we failing when it comes to truly world-changing technological breakthroughs? Is competition bad for business? Should you bother with creating the “nt...
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While many entrepreneurs want a massive valuation, there are terms that come along with that number.
-
A step-by-step framework to test if you know who your ICP is—or build it out if you don’t.
-
We explore what MCP is, how it changes the way AI interacts with tools, what developers are already building, and the challenges that still need solving.
-
In the “Maslow's hierarchy” of the healthcare industry’s needs, the infrastructure layer is the foundational workhorse of the system. Healthtech infrastructure refers to the utilities and systems-of-record that underpin all of the core operational transactions, financial transactions, data exchange, and interoperability actions that occur across the healthcare system everyday.
-
The Cultural Leadership Fund (CLF) remains focused on bringing African Americans into tech at the earliest stages of innovation. Our 2024 nonprofit partners add unique strengths and fresh perspectives to our growing network. We’re excited to collaborate to increase Black participation across the tech ecosystem.
-
Blockchains are a way to build new networks, ensuring people have voice and choice in the networks they contribute to and use every day.
-
We discuss our favorite books and reading recommendations from team a16z crypto for summer 2024 on the web3 with a16z podcast.
-
The most impactful way to fix healthcare is through improving the consumer experience, which has been largely ignored to date. In today’s modern world where you can order groceries, buy flight tickets, and wire money from your phone, taking care of yourself and navigating the healthcare system remains impossibly hard.
-
Guidelines for readying a web3 project for a token launch, from creation to custodians
-
Big tech companies depend entirely on the people who use their apps and platforms, without sharing control, ownership, or rewards. There is another way forward: A future defined by digital ownership.
-
Each new modality needs to find its platform-disease fit—the diseases it is uniquely suited for. But finding fit has increasingly turned into a fight; many have crowded into the same indications. With an expanding arsenal to treat disease, how will patients, clinicians, and the market determine what tool to use?
-
Consider a model of two competing platforms that each seek to attract both consumers and a content producer
-
At the end of the day, even the best AI models will fail if they don’t figure out a way to achieve broad distribution and profitable monetization, so it’s important to understand the psyche of the buyers and decision makers who will determine the fate of your products.
-
Ittai Abraham (Intel) surveys some of the amazing scalability advances in blockchain technologies over the past 5 years.
-
We believe the largest opportunity long-term is in leveraging AI to change not just how we create games, but the nature of the games themselves.
-
Captions helps creators quickly and easily script, record, and edit video content with a focus on short-form videos.
-
AI will have the greatest impact on life sciences and health when it can succeed at specialist tasks like diagnoses and medical procedures.
-
a16z General Partner Jeff Jordan writes about his 12 years at the venture capital firm and what he's planning to do next.
-
We are pleased to introduce you to some of the new, innovative organizations the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund works with every day to advance more African Americans into the tech industry.
-
In a world of retweets, upvotes, and right swipes, studies show that many of us still feel lonely. Thanks to generative AI, we potentially have a new solution: companion chatbots.
-
To successfully raise in today's climate, founders will need a different mindset, approach, preparation, and process. Here are some tips.
-
How can digital health founders successfully implement channel partnerships to accelerate the distribution of their products and services? When should they use them? How should they use them? We spoke with the founders of Omada, Ginger, and Cedar, each of which have successfully utilized channel partnerships, and surveyed 36 other digital health startups to analyze the state of channel partnerships in the market today.
-
At a16z, marketplaces represent one of our favorite business models. Our annual Marketplace 100 provides insight into the latest consumer marketplace trends across industries.
-
When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify t...
-
The public market situation for healthtech can seem pretty depressing. Recently IPOed healthtech stocks are underperforming the broader market, with some falling 95%+ from their IPO—meanwhile, more traditional companies...
-
If you’re a fintech nerd like me, you’ve probably opened up more neobank accounts than you can count.
-
Now that the launch of the highly anticipated real-time payments network FedNow is finally happening, what will it mean for real-time payments in the U.S.?
-
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...
-
In today's ever-competitive environment to drive growth, identifying and hiring key talent through a structured transaction—known as an “acquihire”—has become an increasingly popular and effective way for companies to ad...
-
COVID is changing many things about the world. Some will be permanent, some will be temporary, but for most things, we simply don’t know yet. A decision framework I’ve been using when evaluating investments in companies...
-
This interview was recorded earlier this year and originally appeared on The Observer Effect; it has only been lightly edited for formatting here.
-
How pricing works, how post-IPO activity is influenced by the 4 types of stock market investors, and how we can improve the less-than-ideal price discovery of IPOs.
-
When tech investors talk about valuation as "multiples" on revenue, what does that really mean? We demystify the role of entry multiples and share the two factors that matter most in tech growth investing.
-
Partner banks, chartered institutions that provide fintech companies access to banking products, have exploded in recent years—by our count, their ranks have grown more than five times over the past decade. Today, there...
-
Professional rock climber Alex Honnold is best known for his free solo of El Capitan in Yosemite — a feat that required climbing 3000 feet of sheer rock face without a rope or safety gear. In the two years since reaching...
-
Clayton Christensen (1952-2020) pioneered disruption theory, one of the most influential -- and misunderstood! -- theories that has influenced thinkers and makers in Silicon Valley and beyond.
-
“Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong
-
Sisu joined with Snowflake in Oct. 2023. Read their announcement here.
-
I watch your actions not just captions in the sh*t you post
-
“To me it's kinda funny, the attitude showing a n*&#a driving
-
If history repeats itself, the next social network won’t look like the social networks we know today.
-
Summer is finally here, and hopefully that means a little more time to kick back, relax, and read. So we at a16z compiled our biannual recommendations (you can see the last one here) of what to read. There are 64 total p...
-
For startups seeking to build a sustainable and enduring business, we’ve covered a lot of the strategic financing milestones along the way -- from mindsets for startup fundraising to when and how to build a finance funct...
-
a16z Managing Parter Scott Kupor’s new book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road, is a guide to engaging with and understanding VC that covers everything from terminology and term sheets to the fundraising process, governance, and...
-
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...
-
“Crossing the chasm” is a popular concept for almost all new products/startups, and is a useful lens for entrepreneurs to view the theory of innovation. The concept was first coined in the popular book title of the same...
-
0/ Mastering bottoms up adoption *and* enterprise sales is really hard. Yet many of the fastest growing enterprise companies do. This thread explores some of the considerations and why juggling both motions is a lot more...
-
Perhaps the single greatest early challenge faced by founders in early markets is going from product to sales -- specifically, a repeatable sales process. Occasionally, a product draws the market with such force that the...
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0/ Traditional enterprise GTM strategies are being eaten from the bottom by bottom-up adoption (SaaS, open source, dev tooling) and from the top by services.
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0/ Questionable fund raising advice you may want to think twice about before following. A thread.
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As a former CEO and software engineer (Citrix, XenSource, VERITAS, etc.), board member of GitHub (recently acquired by Microsoft), and lecturer in management at the Stanford Graduate School of Busines, a16z general partn...
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B2B2C companies sell a product or service to a business, gaining customers and/or data from that business that they get to keep and use.
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Nearly every early tech startup at some point gets enamored with the idea of partnering with another tech company. This is usually driven by the heady, very seductive idea that a partnership will accelerate credibility,...
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listen to the audio version of this article:
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Many iconic technology companies began with concepts that were new to the industry. In hindsight, the narrative goes something like this: Founder built thing X. Y bought it. Then all of a sudden Z started using it. Next...
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“I’d be a billionaire if I could get a dollar for all the bullshit I hear today"
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A founder’s perspective on what leaders should do starting a year or two out, in rough chronological order.
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"Got crack all in my drawers, I'm just honest."
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In my experience, bad salespeople talk too much and LISTEN too little. If you’re closing deals and you haven’t been listening aggressively, you just got lucky. That success won’t be repeated. Active listening sounds tire...
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“I’m into distribution, I’m like Atlantic
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The route by which you distribute your product to customers—i.e., the channel—is key, as is the decision whether to partner with others.
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As a former software engineer and CEO, I used to hold the “engineer-centric” view that sales is not a critical function in an organization. I believed that product excellence and market fit obviated the need for a formal...
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Engineering is one of the most critical functions at a tech company; in fact, as every company becomes a tech company in some form, it’s critical to every company. But in tech companies in particular, engineering is resp...
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Many CEOs think the chief financial officer (CFO) is a utility position… and they’re dead wrong. It’s easy to see the CFO as a glorified “scorekeeper” reporting arrears on things like revenue, expenses, profit/losses, an...
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I have never fired anyone too early.
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Should I take my company public? Why? If so, when and how? In this post, I’ll demystify these questions and provide a framework for answering them.
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I wrote a post last week about the challenges in valuing portfolio companies in venture capital that I thought was wonky and inside baseball. But when I got lots of follow-up questions from people, I realized that the ba...
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One of the many tradeoffs that early startup employees choose to make is between cash, and options. For some employees however this may end up being a Faustian bargain of sorts.
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Network effects. It’s one of the most important concepts for business in general and especially for tech businesses, as it’s the key dynamic behind many successful software-based companies. Understanding network effects...
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"At sixteen, son was watching him, mesmerized
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When you start a company, it’s you and your co-founder against the world. You will sacrifice everything to build your vision. Sleepless nights, forgoing a social life, letting your health go to crap, and even neglecting...
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Andy Grove, former Chairman and CEO of Intel, came to the United States as a refugee from Hungary. With a relentless energy and exceptional mind, he helped build the iconic tech company Intel -- and in the process, Silic...
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In most interview situations there’s often an odd, sometimes disturbing imbalance, and it boils down to one word: power. Who has it, who doesn’t. Typically it’s the interviewer who has more power, because they’re the one...