This is the 15th episode of 16 Minutes, our news show where we cover the top headlines, the a16z Podcast way: what’s real / what’s hype; what’s interesting from our vantage point in tech. This week (after a bri...

It’s clear that all kinds of commerce companies and consumer products have been disrupted — or enabled — by tech. Yet for certain categories, like consumer packaged goods (CPG), it seems like tech hasn&...

The “death of retail” in the face of e-commerce and tech disruption is a very real phenomenon, but what about the flip side of that story — that is, retail thriving despite all odds?

This episode of the a16z Podcast takes us on a quick tour through the themes of economics/historian/journalist Marc Levinson‘s books — from An Extraordinary Time, on the end of the postwar boom and the retur...

As companies expand out from the internet into the rest of the economy — the proverbial bits to atoms — “the business models are becoming more complicated, more interesting, more payment based”, ...

Just as “social networking” is a bland term that doesn’t really capture the layers of what happens underneath (and on top of) social networking platforms, “crowdfunding” is a broader phenome...

In India, where many small towns do not have "organized" retail, mobile and web retail is leapfrogging over physical department stores. How do new companies connect people to products when the logistics infrastructure is still nascent?

In the future, we’re all going to be shopping on video apps like TikTok. Whether you’re buying instant noodles or high-end sweaters, it has become increasingly clear that short video clips are the future of ecommerce...

I sometimes think that if you could look in the safe behind Jeff Bezos’ desk, instead of the sports almanac from Back to the Future you’d find an Encyclopedia of Retail, written in maybe 1985. There would be Post-...

watch time: 23 minutes

watch time: 20 minutes

watch time: 24 minutes

Network effects — where a product or service becomes more valuable to its users as more people use it — are one of the key ways software businesses maintain a better product and more defensible market positio...