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.We are in my … | Continue reading
One of the myths of SaaS is that the products are so good, so easy to use, so quick to deploy … that the product sells itself. Given the popularity of try-before-you-buy and freemium-to-premium models for software as a service, it’s easy to see where that myth comes from. But as … | Continue reading
The concept of video search is a critical functionality that social media companies are starting to realize they need to figure out… and fast. | Continue reading
Our nation has a housing crisis.The demographic trends driving America’s housing market are impossible to ignore: our country is creating households faster than we’re building houses. Structural shortages in available homes for sale push housing prices higher, while young … | Continue reading
We’re very excited to announce that we’re leading the series B for Fly.io. Fly is one of the fastest-growing core infrastructure companies we have ever seen. And it’s worth understanding why. | Continue reading
Reference guides for key decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) entity selection, and features, from Miles Jennings’ & David Kerr’s ongoing series of legal frameworks for DAOs. Read part one, “A Legal Framework for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” here. Part two, “DAO … | Continue reading
We at a16z started investing in bitcoin in 2013, several years before we had a dedicated crypto fund. We have always been big believers in Bitcoin, its unique history and its foundational role in crypto. It’s hard to … | Continue reading
An overview of the biggest recent crypto hacks – from phishing to governance attacks – to help better understand and improve web3 security. | Continue reading
The best industrial research labs throughout history have played a critical role in pioneering much of modern technology. Two modern examples of successful research labs — both founded in the wake of radical advances in the field of artificial intelligence … | Continue reading
A tool for crypto airdrops that protects the privacy and public wallet-linked financial history of token recipients using zero knowledge proofs. | Continue reading
As an NFT collector, you should care about on-chain provenance. The most authentic provenance for an NFT is when it is initially minted directly from a creator’s wallet or a smart contract that the creator owns. However, with a few … | Continue reading
“Financial operations” (FinOps) is an emerging software category with a massive opportunity to streamline, automate, and optimize how we move money, while giving the entire organization a real-time view of a business’s financial health. | Continue reading
The next frontier in computing, which will take shape this decade, is building apps on programmable blockchains. Programmable blockchains are interesting for the same reason that innovation on smartphones spiked after opening up development to third parties via app stores. … | Continue reading
Today, we’re excited to announce the release of How to Win the Future, a policy agenda for the third generation of the internet. It will be a living document housed in our new web3 policy hub alongside a growing … | Continue reading
It’s time. We need an internet that can help us retain leadership in a world of increasing competition, unlock opportunity for the millions on the margins of the innovation economy, and enable people to take control of their digital lives. The solution is web3—the third generatio … | Continue reading
Building software has gotten insanely cheaper and faster. The infrastructure provided by the cloud or IaaS vendors has evened the technical ground for builders. A flourish of no-code tools have shortened the prototyping cycle down from weeks to days. As … | Continue reading
Plus, fintech as crypto goes mainstream, independent insurance agents on the rise, and fintech influencers in LatAm. | Continue reading
We're leading the Series A for Syndicate, which is building the protocols and tools that will enable DAOs to reach their full potential. | Continue reading
There has never been a better time to start a company. The industry is rich with blogs, podcasts, tweetstorms, and newsletters providing guidance to new founders. And the last decade has seen the emergence of strong online communities, alumni networks, … | Continue reading
One of the most difficult decisions that a CEO ever makes is whether or not to sell her company. Logically, determining whether selling a company will be better in the long term than continuing to run it stand-alone involves a huge number of factors, most of which are speculative … | Continue reading
Helium users operate hotspots from their homes and businesses and are rewarded with HNT, the native token of the Helium network. | Continue reading
Titan sits at an interesting intersection between passive robo-advisors and active stock-picking, allowing their customers to “ride shotgun” alongside some of the best fund managers in the world. | Continue reading
If software is eating the world, code is swallowing companies whole. Whether living across multiple repositories or within a single monolith, an astonishing amount of code—and its associated languages, systems, and tools—has become a reality at not just scale tech … | Continue reading
This episode of the a16z Journal Club explores new research into how intelligence evolves and features authors Li Fei-Fei and Surya Ganguli. | Continue reading
Plus, will neobanks be winner take many? How to choose the right partner bank? News and analysis from the a16z fintech team in our monthly newsletter. | Continue reading
Yet our best trained, best educated, best equipped, best prepared troops refuse to fight. As a matter of fact, it’s safe to say that they would rather switch than fight.—Public Enemy (sampled from Thomas Todd), Fight the PowerEarly … | Continue reading
Andreessen Horowitz announces a new $2.2 billion crypto fund to continue investing in crypto networks and the founders and teams building in this space. | Continue reading
Andreessen Horowitz announces a new $2.2 billion crypto fund to continue investing in crypto networks and the founders and teams building in this space. | Continue reading
Debates over work from home vs hybrid vs HQ are becoming increasingly polarized. There's a reason for this, and it is rooted in how disruptive forces take hold. | Continue reading
Shef, which aspires to be a marketplace for authentic meals from local ‘shefs’, knocked on our (now virtual) doors. They enable cooks who are fluent in any of a broad selection of different cuisines to earn money doing the cooking they love. And consumers get authentic ‘home-cook … | Continue reading
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 present moment, that attention … | Continue reading
There is no doubt that the cloud is one of the most significant platform shifts in the history of computing. Not only has cloud already impacted hundreds of billions of dollars of IT spend, it’s still in early innings and … | Continue reading
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.At first glance, the calculus seems simple: the employee … | Continue reading
Maven works with the world's leading creators to help them create online courses, organized into multi-week programs that bring a group of students together to increase participation and accountability. | Continue reading
“Just win baby.”—Al DavisThis post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace.Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? … | Continue reading
Supply strategy is the key to owning demand. There are three main strategies for supply differentiation: comprehensiveness, exclusivity, and curation. | Continue reading
Here’s a list of crypto readings and resources. It’s organized from building blocks and basics; foundations (& history); and key concepts — followed by specific topics such as governance; privacy and security; scaling; consensus and governance; cryptoeconomics, cryptoassets, and … | Continue reading
The a16z NFT Canon is a curated list of readings and resources on all things NFTs, organized from the big picture, what NFTs (non-fungible tokens) are and why they matter... to how to mint, collect, and do more with them -- including how they play into various applications such a … | Continue reading
Project-based workers are an exploding population: 59 million Americans performed freelance work in 2020, representing 22% year-over-year growth and 36% of the total workforce. Unlike traditional employment, project-based workers can rotate among different employers dozens of tim … | Continue reading
This first appeared in the monthly a16z enterprise newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest in enterprise and B2B.For technical founders, building out a successful enterprise sales motion and team can be one of the most … | Continue reading
The company's core mission is to reimagine not only how consumer financial products work — it's to reimagine money itself. | Continue reading
A livestream shopping platform and marketplace where users buy and sell collectibles like Pokemon cards, sports cards, Funko Pops, and more. | Continue reading
Non-fungible tokens offer fundamentally better economics for creators by removing rent-seeking, enabling granular pricing, and reducing customer acquisition costs. | Continue reading
On new creator platforms, individuality is a feature, not a bug. | Continue reading
The way we pay for healthcare in the US has long been by fee-for-service: per doctor visit, per test, per surgery, per hospital stay. But that system has led to rapidly escalating volumes of services and cost to the system—without actually improving outcomes. What if we shifted e … | Continue reading
For more than 100 years, companies have existed in a binary world, either private or public. Private companies have been highly restricted in how they can raise money, sell stock, provide employee liquidity, and otherwise manage their ownership. Public companies … | Continue reading
We embraced speaking directly to our audience — from the builders of the future to the tech-curious — right as the firm was started in 2009. It started out with blogging about why we invested in a founder/founding team. Initially, … | Continue reading
The government should turn every social security number into a unique and secure bank account, enabling it to deposit money directly to consumers. | Continue reading