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
AS THE INTERNET has evolved over its 35-year lifespan, control over its most important services has gradually shifted from open source protocols maintained by non-profit communities to proprietary services operated by large tech companies. As a result, billions of people … | Continue reading
When you base your life on creditand your loving days are donechecks you signed with love and kisseslater come back signed insufficient funds—Funkadelic, Can You Get to ThatThanks to Ward Cunningham, the metaphor technical debt… | Continue reading
We’ve been doing this roundup every year since the a16z Podcast first began — and in fact, if you’re new to our podcast, a good way to “start here” is to just catch up on popular episodes of past years! … | Continue reading
Security is countercyclical: the business tends to boom while broader macro conditions deteriorate. | Continue reading
In this special episode of Bio Eats World, airing just after the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee recommended that the agency authorize the vaccine for emergency use, Moderna CEO Stephane Bancel tells the story of not just the vaccine’s developmen … | Continue reading
These are the fintech ideas and themes that defined the year, based on 50 of our most-used words in 2020. | Continue reading
It’s not very often you see a demo that you think about for years. And yet that was the case with Parsec, the leading product for remotely accessing graphics intensive and latency sensitive applications from anywhere. I first met … | Continue reading
No category is really won until the social product is built. These are challenges and the open opportunities in building "social+" companies. | Continue reading
Taking cues from gaming, entertainment, and abroad, video-first products are transforming the future of education, shopping, and solopreneurship. | Continue reading
Two artists exploring crypto-powered marketplaces, Murat Pak and Signe Pierce, explain how crypto is enabling new business models and revenue streams. | Continue reading
Expanding the menu of production processes represents a huge opportunity to make biomanufactured products cheaper and thus far more likely to succeed in the market. We see several ways entrepreneurs can seize this opportunity and help realize the vision of a bio-based economy. | Continue reading
Open source financial services building blocks. | Continue reading
The introduction of top down sales is one of the most important changes a bottom up, product-led startup faces — and only an elite few have made the leap. Get insights and frameworks from the sales & business leaders who helped Atlassian, Dropbox, Gainsight, Github, SendGrid, Sla … | Continue reading
Great communities make great companies, and community-building is now part of a broader shift in B2B businesses towards bottom-up growth. As part of that shift, companies are relying on communities as a key method for growing and engaging their user … | Continue reading
“Got crack all in my drawers, I’m just honest.”– Future, HonestAre you an honest person? I’ll bet that you answered “yes.” If you did, who else do you know that’s completely honest? I’ll bet that was much harder … | Continue reading
As the technical capabilities of data lakes and data warehouses converge, are the separate tools and teams that run AI/ML and analytics converging as well? | Continue reading
Apple recently announced the first new lineups of devices based on Apple Silicon M1 chips, which officially came out today. And since there’s already plenty of analysis on performance, benchmarks, and more, we cover the big picture: Apple’s moving away from Intel chips, and to th … | Continue reading
Today we are excited to announce the closing of two new funds, bringing our total assets under management to nearly $16.5 billion. While many things in our industry have changed since we started the firm in 2009, closing these funds … | Continue reading
In basketball and tech, spotting superstars has gotten easier with a deeper understanding of efficiency and usage metrics. | Continue reading
Jade Raymond of Google Stadia discusses how cloud gaming will revolutionize play and unlock unprecedented storytelling and socializing in virtual worlds. | Continue reading
I am very excited to announce our partnership with Isovalent in their journey to redefine networking and security. Isovalent is the driving force behind both eBPF and Cilium, projects in Linux that provide a software networking layer for modern cloud … | Continue reading
Where does life truly begin? How do we understand the fundamental nature of what is “alive” and what is “not alive”? In this episode of Bio Eats World, Professor Jeremy England discusses his new book, Every Life is on Fire, … | Continue reading
Breaks on a bus, brakes on a carBreaks to make you a superstarBreaks to win and breaks to loseBut these here breaks will rock your shoesAnd these are the breaks—Kurtis Blow, “The Breaks”About a … | Continue reading
This first appeared in the monthly a16z enterprise newsletter. Subscribe to stay on top of the latest in enterprise and B2B. As much as we hear about artificial intelligence and machine learning, they are just one facet of an even … | Continue reading
A decision framework for evaluating investments in companies—and re-evaluating growth models—as we chart a path forward through COVID. | Continue reading
Today, some of the most valuable corporations in the world today are “network operators”. Thanks to network effects, these platforms become more valuable to existing users as each new user joins. Network effects are innocuous at first, but can cause … | Continue reading
Universal access to payroll data unlocks new capabilities and use cases for lenders, neobanks, employers, and B2B fintech companies. | Continue reading
The most common mistake people make when evaluating new technologies is to focus too much on how they improve existing use cases. | Continue reading
Five years ago, if you were building a system, it was a result of the code you wrote. Now, it’s built around the data that is fed into that system. And a new class of tools and technologies have emerged to process data for both analytics and operational AI/ ML. | Continue reading
If the past was marked by massive onscreen lectures and static content, the future will be interactive, engaging, and propelled by a global teaching pool. | Continue reading
We cover the latest news since Nvidia announced its intent to acquire Arm (including recent geopolitical concerns around the deal). But what's hype, what's real here -- and the broader history of computing innovation that's relevant here -- when it comes to understanding the broa … | Continue reading
Tech is remaking the banking system from the inside out. | Continue reading
Beyond simply matching candidates with employers, modern job platforms offer extra features that foster long term success for job seekers and companies. | Continue reading
This interview was recorded earlier this year and originally appeared on The Observer Effect; it has only been lightly edited for formatting here.TABLE OF CONTENTSOn productivityLet’s get into it. Over a decade ago, you wrote a … | Continue reading
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 … | Continue reading
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 busines … | Continue reading
From embracing memes to enabling early evangelists, Proletariat CEO Seth Sivak describes how his team fueled Spellbreak's sleeper success behind the scenes. | Continue reading
From Dungeons & Dragons to Magic: The Gathering, Warhammer to Werewolf, traditional analog games are being augmented and improved by new digital tools. | Continue reading
To understand why the popular narrative around IPOs is wrong, you have to take apart the IPO process, how stock markets work, and what the “price” of a stock means. | Continue reading
Today, the majority of SaaS company revenue comes from subscription fees. With fintech products and services, the future may look very different. | Continue reading
When tech investors talk about valuation as "multiples" on revenue, what does that really mean? We demystify the role of entry multiples and share the two factors that matter most in tech growth investing. | Continue reading
The long tail of AI is, in some ways, a measure of the complexity of the problem being solved and the effort needed to tackle it. There are, however, ways to treat the long tail as a first-order concern and build for it. | Continue reading
Communities are everything, but the word "members" is faceless. What if there's a better, more modern way to understand, support, and design for communities of all kinds -- whether open source, passion economy, or other groups coming together? Nadia Eghbal offers the latest resea … | Continue reading
Today, the majority of SaaS company revenue comes from subscription fees. With fintech products and services, the future may look very different. | Continue reading
This episode celebrates the 20th anniversary of Folding at Home, the distributed computing project for simulating protein dynamics. Run on millions of devices, Folding at Home is the world’s largest supercomputer, and tackles some of biology’s toughest problems, including COVID-1 … | Continue reading
What's real, what's hype when it comes to all the recent buzz around the language model GPT-3? What is "it", how does it work, where does it fit into the arc of broader tech trends (natural language, neural networks, deep learning approaches, more) -- and are we really getting cl … | Continue reading
Growth+sales gives enterprise startups the advantage over incumbents. But it's not easy to get the tactics right. We look at the common failure modes and how to avoid them. | Continue reading