The period from 2000-2016 was one of the best of times and worst of times for tech and the Valley (dotcom, financial crisis, Google IPO, Facebook founded, unprecedented growth, and so on), and John Hennessy -- current chairman of Alphabet, also on the boards of Cisco and other organizations -- was the president of Stanford University during that entire time. Given this vantage point, what are his views on Silicon Valley (will there ever be another one, and if so where?); the "Stanford model" (for transferring IP, and talent, into the world); and of course, on education (and especially access)? Hennessy also co-founded startups, including one based on pioneering microprocessor architecture used in 99% of devices today (for which he and his collaborator won the prestigious Turing Award)... so what did it take to go from research/idea to industry/implementation? General partners Marc Andreessen and Martin Casado, who also founded startups while inside universities (Netscape, Nicira) and led them to successful exits (IPO, acquisition by VMWare), also join this episode of the a16z podcast with Sonal Chokshi to share their perspectives. But beyond those instances, how has the overall relationship and "divide" between academia and industry shifted, especially as the tech industry itself has changed... and perhaps talent has, too? Finally, in his new book, Leading Matters, Hennessy shares some of the leadership principles he's learned -- and instilling through the Knight-Hennessy Scholars Program -- offering nuanced takes on topics like humility (needs ambition), empathy (without contravening fairness and reason), and others. What does it take to build not just tech, but a successful organization?

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 a...

Our first instinct as technologists or users of technology is to think of ‘connectivity’ as digital connectivity — the internet, our smartphone. But the internet is just the latest in a long line of con...

We often hear stats like “more people have mobile phones than toilets” about places like Africa, but what does that actually mean for people? “It is b.s.,” (no pun intended!), argues one of the...

As software becomes core to every industry, there is a need for more and more software development across practically every department in a company. But as anyone who has tried to get quality software developed knows, th...

Blockchain technology — and the cryptocurrencies they enable — have the potential to reshape the world as completely as the internet did 30 years ago. Just as we don’t need to understand what TCP/IP is ...

Here’s a list of crypto readings and resources (2018-2019). It’s organized from building blocks and basics; foundations (& history); and key concepts—followed by specific topics such as governance; privacy ...

watch time: 6 minutes

The history of computers is often told as a history of objects, from the abacus to the Babbage engine up through the code-breaking machines of World War II. In fact, it is better understood as a history of ideas, mainly...

[vimeo 109975875 w=720 h=404]

[vimeo 108183618 w=720 h=404]

Whatsapp had 450 million monthly users and just 32 engineers when it was acquired. Imgur scaled to over 40 billion monthly image views with just seven engineers. Instagram had 30 million users and just 13 engineers when ...

Follow the leader is a title, theme, task Now you know, you don’t have to ask