Company Building

In part 2 of our series on human performance, rock climber Alex Honnold talks about the risk, fear, and preparation around his free solo of El Cap... and the parallels it has with entrepreneurship.

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.

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?

In any company, even the seemingly smallest behaviors will influence your culture, while the loudest proclamations won't.

Many believe that podcasts -- authentic, intimate -- are organic conversations without editing. But most of the work often happens before and after the conversation itself, in everything from the programming to the editing. In this special 500th (!) episode of the a16z Podcast, editor-in-chief and showrunner Sonal Chokshi (in conversation with a16z general partner Connie Chan) shares answers to FAQs about the how, what, and why of the a16z Podcast, and broader editorial operation. They also take us behind the scenes to reveal some unexpected moments and lessons learned along the way, positions on tics and swear-words, failed experiments, and new directions. And where is podcasting going?

In this 10-year anniversary episode of the a16z Podcast, a16z operating partner Margit Wennmachers shares the case study of her work at The Outcast Agency (which she co-founded) and of building the a16z brand, where she heads marketing -- answering some FAQs about how things work, and even revealing some details behind the scenes of popular op-eds and stories about a16z.

"You cannot be IN it... and not be OF it."

When people talk about trends in education technology, they often focus on how to disrupt higher education in the U.S., whether it's about breaking free of the "signaling" factor of elite educations or how to shift educa...

We already know that we have an innate tendency to anthropomorphize robots. But beyond just projecting human qualities onto them, as we begin to share more and more spaces, social and private, what kind of relationships...

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.

Every year, the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) puts the latest and greatest developments in consumer technology on display in Vegas. But beyond the excitement and the hype, what's really here -- or not here -- to stay?...

As chief strategy officer of Goldman Sachs (and former global head of financial sponsors M&A), Stephanie Cohen has seen it all when it comes to the ins and outs of M&A. And what it means to innovate from within,...

In another of our hallway conversation episodes, Benedict Evans and Steven Sinofsky talk all about Tesla (building on this post) -- and more broadly, the nature of disruption overall. How disruptive is Tesla really, and what exactly are they disrupting -- from the dashboard to car makers to vendors to energy source to autonomy overall?

In this hallway-style conversation episode of the a16z Podcast, Benedict Evans and a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky discuss Apple’s September 2018 keynote event and share their thoughts on the new innovations -- and le...

What does it really take to start a startup (or work at one)? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- based on a Q&A with Ben Horowitz as part of an event hosted by a16z's Technical Talent and People Practices team fo...

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...

Everyone talks about the importance of mentorship in our professional development, whether it's networking to broaden career opportunities or learning from someone more experienced. But how does one break into an industry without established contacts or prior exposure? Are things different if mentors/mentees come from different backgrounds? If you're already more established in your career, how can you help up-and-comers... and actually, how could mentees help mentors, too?

Compensation is a topic near and dear to everyone's heart... but what does "compensation" fully mean -- and what does it include, what doesn't it include? How do entrepreneurs compete for talent in an intensely competiti...

Continuing our series on how tech is changing construction -- one of the industries most resistant to change (and facing declining productivity) -- this episode of the a16z Podcast looks at what happens when you go from...

Construction has been one of the industries most resistant to innovation and change over the last decades -- productivity has actually decreased there while it has risen in other industries around it. So how are new tech...

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...

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...

From the old claim that “IT doesn’t matter” and question of whether tech truly drives organizational performance, we’ve been consumed with figuring out how to measure — and predict — the output and outcomes, the performance and productivity of software. It’s not useful to talk about what happens in one isolated team or successful company; we need to be able to make it happen at any company — of any size, industry vertical, or architecture/tech stack. But can we break the false dichotomy of performance vs. speed; is it possible to have it all?

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...

Head of the largest bioengineering lab in the world, former chairman of the FDA and one of the few recipients of the National Medals of Science and of Technology and Innovation, MIT Professor Bob Langer's work has spanne...

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...

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...

"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...

In the age of virality, what does it actually mean to be popular? When does popularity -- or good product design, for that matter -- cross over from desire and engagement... to addiction? Journalist and editor Derek Thom...

Every industry (for-profit, non-profit, government, private-sector) has been touched by tech, with most trying to lead the charge in order to stay ahead. But museums and memorials, by definition, lag rather than lead the...

A crisis is an opportunity to change one's culture, to model scenarios and set up a crisis plan/process, to become a better company. But it's also a bit like therapy, from the act of asking probing questions to get at th...

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.

An aerospace engineer who worked for NASA for over 40 years, Dr. Christine Darden is one of the mathematicians that the book and movie Hidden Figures was based on. Darden eventually would lead the sonic boom team, going...

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Wennmachers and Outcast CEO Alex Constantinople -- both longtime veterans of public relations and building executive profiles -- de-mystify what having and building a personal brand takes. It's not only about "thought leadership", either... a personal brand can also provide a filter for choosing what to do (and what not to do), as well as define your aspirations for where you want to go next. Even if you cringe at the idea of putting yourself in the spotlight.

Thanks to freeways, cities became something to get through instead of something to get to. Now, as the next transportation revolution -- from rivers to trains to cars to autonomous cars -- promises to change the face of...

"Punch above your weight" -- If there's one thing public relations (PR) should help startups and founders do, it's that. Unfortunately, some companies are actually punching below their weight when there's a strong compan...

"Mobile-first" (and now too AI-first) has been a mantra of sorts in design, but what does that mean at a company, product management, and competitive level? Especially given someone at company X will always say "we shoul...

What (on earth) does it take to get a signal to Pluto? Stanford senior scientist and astronomer Ivan Linscott, part of the team that ran the radio science experiment on the New Horizons probe, shares in conversation with...

As people live longer, aging is more top of mind than ever. This is especially true for the "sandwich generation" wedged between caring for aging parents as well as young children at the same time.

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...

Now that we know to price and plan early, price high -- especially for category-creating or "pre-chasm" businesses -- how do we handle freemium models?

We already know that the government is one of the largest IT buyers, but in many ways it is also an IT builder. Especially for areas where the government is doing something that no one else is doing, like running Medicar...

The hallmark of many great technical founder/CEOs is that they envision a better way of doing things, and that's why they're building a company that delivers on that better way, often disrupting the way things have alway...

In this episode of the a16z Podcast sharing more founder stories, Ben Horowitz interviews a16z partner Lars Dalgaard about SuccessFactors, one of the earlier software-as-a-service companies. (It was founded on 2001, IPO'...

You know how talented Andre Iguodala is as a basketball player. You may not know that he signed with the Warriors in part to be near Silicon Valley and the tech scene. Iguodala knows tech, and in a conversation with a16z...

LinkedIn may seem like a gift both for job seekers and hirers, but it's not enough. When (and how) should your company develop a process to attract -- and close -- the best people? In this segment of the a16z Podcast, Ca...

Don Faul, head of operations at Pinterest and a former U.S. Marine Corps Platoon Commander, grills Marc Andreessen in front of a crowd of veterans at an event we hosted for bringing more veterans into startups. The discu...

“In 2014 we ought to be at the point where everybody can get basic shelter, transportation, education and other services without bankrupting the country.” -- Ben Horowitz

One of the ways to damage a fast-growing startup is to not have an HR person. But when is the right time to bring someone on? What qualities should you look for? How can you preserve the company culture and energy that g...

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...

For Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, community is everything. When he needed a double lung transplant, Gilliam turned to the Internet and to his online community to make it happen. He's organized political camp...

Founders and execs from Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Databricks, Gong, and Yubico share their experiences and advice on growing enterprise startups.

"When we reviewed their initial ramp-up plan, our jaws dropped."

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...

When a new social app starts to "work," it feels like magic, but often looks like a black box.

Product and go-to-market teams must align upfront on how to segment customers, and on which features will result in more happy customers.

Understanding how to build a company in the face of a new, immature, or non-existent market is a topic startups should obsess about.

What counts as "cash," developing a plan for that cash, building an adaptable operating model, and dealing with a liquidity crisis.

Tracking metrics and benchmarking is a critical part of scaling a growth-stage company, but there are a lot of common failure modes. For instance, it’s easy to fall prey to confirmation bias and manipulate your numbers t...

How are healthtech companies creating sustainable growth paths by selling to SMBs? Can companies solely rely on SMB sales to get to scale, or do they inevitably need to go upmarket (especially during challenging economic times)? We talked to Nancy Ham, the previous CEO of WebPT, Nate Maslak, CEO and cofounder of Ribbon Health, and Oliver Kharraz, CEO and cofounder of ZocDoc, to unpack their SMB-go-to-market strategies. We also surveyed 33 digital health companies that sell to SMBs to gain insight into a broader swath of approaches that upstarts are taking.

When inbound starts to dry up, it's time to go outbound and build pipeline. Here's how.

If you were interested in quickly launching a startup, here’s an easy formula for finding product market fit. First, identify an existing product in an industry with a low NPS (like most financial services) that has not...

Choosing the right funding structure can have a meaningful impact on the trajectory of your company, its ability to scale, and your bottom line.

An Internet news outlet is asking a lot of people I know, and some I don’t, what I’ve been up to lately. Lord knows what they’ll ultimately publish, so I thought I’d just write this instead.

Design partners, or the first few users of a company's software, are often a key part of the early software development process.

Building your board forward from product-market fit—instead of backward from an IPO date—makes it easier to find the right advisors at the right time as you scale.

Much opportunity exists to build a modern software stack that supports the next generation of default global companies, from local employment law and talent sourcing to multi-country incorporation and expense management.  

Establishing trustworthiness early is a fundamental part of the interview process. Nothing else matters if you don't think you can trust someone. Hopefully, you’ll build trust by way of multiple interviews, references, w...

1) reevaluate your valuation 2) understand your burn multiple 3) build scenario plans to grow back into your valuation.

When it comes to ecommerce, last year in China often means this year (or next) in the U.S. Numerous online shopping trends have swept China before landing stateside one or two years later. This is happening now with supe...

The following is an excerpt from the book The Cold Start Problem: How to Start and Scale Network Effects by Andrew Chen. Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Chen. Published on Future/ a16z, with permission from Harper Collins, an...

The following tweetstorm has been lightly copy edited and formatted. It can be seen in its original form here.

Work during COVID has underscored how distributed teams working remotely can be effective and accelerated the shift from the way we worked in the industrial age to optimizing how we work for the information age. While th...

How we can improve the overall state of the IPO markets, economic growth, and retail access to capital.

The pandemic has been devastating in many ways — from total number of deaths (in the U.S. alone, topping half a million — exceeding the number of deaths across World Wars I and II and Vietnam combined) to devastating eco...

These frameworks help map the user journey to figure out the right product tiers, how to differentiate them, and how to price them.

What makes NBA player (and back-to-back MVP) Giannis Antetokounmpo a bona fide superstar? And what would you look for in the numbers to spot the next Giannis? In fact, just as in tech companies, many sports franchises ar...

What’s really behind the IPO pop? TL;DR: it’s Economics 101. The laws of supply and demand, and marginal pricing, withstand the test of time.

Most recent macro trends – cloud compute, social, mobile, crypto, AI – that have reshaped the technology landscape are rooted in new technical capabilities or pushing the frontier of product form factors. Another shock t...

For B2B startups, a downturn can be a boon – the trick is to survive.

In 2019, long before the outbreak of COVID-19, many lower gross margin tech companies were not being well-received by the public markets, and an excessive spotlight was cast by many on company gross margins. In the prese...

More than 25 million Americans were laid off in April, and that’s just the official count. Unofficially, some economists estimate that more than 52 percent of Americans under the age of 45 have lost jobs, hours, or been...

In the current economic crisis, businesses have been forced to make difficult decisions around resource allocation and cash flow planning. The person most critical in helping the CEO make those high-stakes calls—the CFO—...

How you handle a layoff, how you communicate it to the people impacted, and how you manage and lead throughout the process really matters. It takes careful thought and planning, but it may be the most important planning you ever do as a leader.

Editor's note: Here are some of our best pieces on leadership, grit, and managing a startup in times of uncertainty, culled from our past (almost) decade of archives.

To CEO or not to CEO? It’s a tortured question for startup founders, and the decision on whether the product founder maintains a CEO title or not is far more complicated than you might think:

If you polled a cross-section of companies about their most important software, accounts payable and accounts receivable software would likely not rank high on their lists. It’s the kind of unglamorous, workhorse softwar...

Every company tracks certain success metrics—commonly accepted criteria for the health of a business. But when it comes to marketplaces, those measurements can often be imprecisely defined or muddled in their interpretat...

At a technical level, artificial intelligence seems to be the future of software. AI is showing remarkable progress on a range of difficult computer science problems, and the job of software developers – who now work wit...

Everything you need to know about 409A valuations, including how they’re calculated, when to reevaluate, and the common myths and pitfalls.

0/ There is a dazzling amount of inconsistency in what GTM (go-to-market) metrics are presented at board meetings of early stage B2B (business to business) companies. Here is my hit list of the most important, and why:

You can’t let anyone define you. That’s a mantra Ambassador Susan Rice lives by. From becoming the youngest assistant secretary of state to her role as US Ambassador to the United Nations, she’s learned what it means to...

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.

It’s a Silicon Valley truism that product-market fit matters most for a startup. A founder’s ability to achieve that elusive goal is what separates the mega-donkey-deca-unicorn success stories from the vast majority of s...

When founding a company, we all secretly hope that the best product (ours, of course) will win on its own merits. That’s rarely the case—seemingly brilliant apps often languish without finding an audience. As a result, m...

For most enterprise startups, discovering which segment of the market to focus on is no trivial feat. Early on in the journey, the hunt is for product-market fit with happy customers, regardless of what segment of the ma...

Think of a sales contract as a system of interconnected components and levers that work together to achieve an acceptable level of risk and reward for both you and your customer.

What to make of IPO prices and the headlines hyping their rise or fall? Pricing an IPO is way more art than science.

As of this past month, it's been 10 years since the founding of Andreessen Horowitz -- a.k.a. the numeronym "a16z" -- so we're resurfacing some of our most popular episodes, featuring a16z founders Ben and Marc together...

a16z general partner Andrew Chen talks with repeat entrepreneur, cofounder and CEO Justin Kan. Justin is a repeat entrepreneur who co-founded Kiko Software (a Web 2.0 calendar that pre-dated Google Calendar by 4 years);...

Kik, the Tencent-backed messaging app, raised $150 million in August 2017 in an initial coin offering (ICO). Weeks before that, the SEC issued guidance that ICOs may constitute illegal securities offerings, so it was no...

Data has long been lauded as a competitive moat for companies, and that narrative’s been further hyped with the recent wave of AI startups. Network effects have been similarly promoted as a defensible force in building s...

Have you ever wished you could be in the room when founders present to the Andreessen Horowitz investing team? Even better, do you wish you could stay to hear the discussion after the pitch?

Before Cortana, before Siri, before Alexa, even before smart interactive voice response (IVR) systems, there was Microsoft’s Office Assistant, one of the first widely deployed digital assistants that shipped as part of M...

Even though hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every single day, very few people have been able to reveal the secrets and the stories behind designing them. But software engineer Ken Kocienda, who worked t...

Throughout China, Allen Zhang is known as the "father of WeChat". Zhang’s public persona has much the same cultural importance and weight as the American legacy of Steve Jobs. He is renowned in China’s tech scene as an a...

The topic of pre-chasm startups is one I’ve long been obsessed with, as a former entrepreneur who (along with many colleagues!) founded a company around a pre-chasm technology (software-defined networking), and was invol...

“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...

Network effects are one of the most important dynamics in software and marketplace businesses. But they’re often spoken of in a binary way: either you have them, or you don’t. In practice, most companies’ network effects...

watch time: 16 minutes

Stop and think for a moment about how many ads you saw in the last 24 hours, on Instagram or Facebook or anywhere else. How many did you scroll through and glaze over? What if the number was capped at 2 or 3 a day? How w...

watch time: 25 minutes

1/ My experience is that most pitches go sideways because the investor is lead to believe there is more maturity in a company than their is. And then they leave unsatisfied because there wasn't sufficient focus on the im...

Andreessen Horowitz operating partner Margit Wennmachers shares the founding story of OutCast, the PR agency she co-founded (acquired in 2005); her history as one of its first operating partners at a16z (and what makes i...

Power users drive some of the most successful companies -- people who love their product, are highly engaged, and contribute a ton of value to the network. In ecommerce marketplaces it’s power sellers, in ridesharing pla...

watch time: 37 minutes

Editor's note: This interview with Marc Andreessen was edited and condensed for clarity from the original conversation, and appears in The High Growth Handbook on scaling companies from 10 to 10,000 by Elad Gil. The full...

watch time: 17 minutes

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,...

watch time: 12 minutes

This year marked the beginning of our animated shorts and ongoing "mini-MOOCs", now on YouTube -- subscribe at https://www.youtube.com/c/a16zvideos. Thank you for watching, and thank you to our patient presenters for hel...

We've shared our top podcasts of 2017; now here are 16 of our top written posts, including listicles (but not including slide decks and videos), from this year. One was a guest post, one of them appeared in The Atlantic,...

This year, we saw a transition of presidential administrations -- and all of the accompanying policy and bureaucratic reshuffling that inevitably comes with such a change. Issues of innovation and tech policy have remain...