-
Flexport’s co-CEO and founder, Ryan Petersen, chats with a16z Growth Editor Das Rush, in a fireside chat recorded at the a16z San Francisco office. They start with the question of why Ryan has chosen – of all the problem spaces to work on – improving the resiliency of the supply chain. They then cover just how complex the supply chain is in the era of ecommerce, evolving customer expectations, and ultimately how we can rearchitect our supply chain to meet them.
-
B2C2B — also known as bottom up — has helped companies like Slack, Zoom, Dropbox, and other software companies break into B2B. Now B2C2B is coming to digital health, as a wave of startups are first selling products a...
-
Non-fungible tokens (NFTs) have energized the crypto world in the last six months, bringing new creators, collectors, fans, and participants to the space and spotlighting the underlying blockchain technology. This explos...
-
When I joined the Coinbase board in 2017 as its first independent director, crypto in many ways was still the wild west. Back then the perception of crypto was that it was largely used by bad actors, and in fact my own i...
-
As companies evolve -- especially from product to sales to scaling operations -- so must the leaders. But can the same person transition across all these phases? When and when not; what are the qualities, criteria, and tradeoffs to be made? Two enterprise startup CTOs share a glimpse into their journeys on the question of to CEO or not to CEO; managing their psychology and tactics for managing transitions; and much more.
-
The story of textiles IS the story, history, and evolution of technology and science (across all kinds of fields, from biology to chemistry); of commerce (as well as management, measurement, machines); but most of all, of civilization (vs. just culture) itself. That's what Virginia Postrel's new book, The Fabric of Civilization: How Textiles Made the World is all about. But it is in fact a story of innovation, of human ingenuity... which is also the theme of the a16z Podcast.
-
Since Netflix started in the late 90s as a DVD-by-mail rental service competing with Blockbuster, it has completely reinvented itself... twice – first, when it went from DVD rental to video streaming platform, and then again when it went from licensing to producing original content. But what does it takes to create an organization capable of reinventing itself? Netflix CEO and co-founder Reed Hastings explains...
-
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.
-
Our understanding of the human brain and its disorders has always been limited by our lack of access to living, human, developing brain tissue. For the first time, that’s changing. In this episode, Sergiu Pasca, Pr...