Latest Interviews
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Challenges in Healthcare Innovation
The healthcare sector faces a critical efficiency crisis known as Eroom's Law, where rising costs and long timelines for drug discovery are exacerbated by a fundamental lack of biological understanding for complex diseases like Alzheimer's. This challenge is driving a rapid convergence of genomics, artificial intelligence, and engineering, which is transforming medicine from an experimental science into an engineered discipline capable of creating intelligent, logic-based therapies. As the industry shifts from traditional animal models to predictive organ-on-chip systems and embraces digital therapeutics, the alignment of payors, regulators, and innovators is accelerating the delivery of curative precision treatments while extending biological design principles into data storage and manufacturing.
- a16z30 min
AI: What's Working, What's Not
The event details the rapid integration of AI into the core strategies of global corporations like GAFA and BAT, highlighting how leaders such as Vladimir Putin view AI dominance as critical to geopolitical power. It examines practical applications ranging from visual recognition and natural language processing to autonomous robotics, while noting that investors are increasingly funding the underlying infrastructure required to build these models. Despite these advances, the presentation clarifies the limitations of current narrow AI, contrasts China's aggressive national data strategy with Western approaches, and reassures audiences that historical automation trends correlate with workforce expansion rather than net job loss.
- a16z24 min
10 Year Futures (vs. What's Happening Now)
The analysis contrasts the saturation of current smartphone platforms with the emergence of new technology curves, noting that while tech giants like Amazon and Google dominate existing markets, historical precedents suggest their dominance remains vulnerable to disruption. It specifically evaluates four emerging sectors through a construction metaphor, identifying artificial intelligence as an active application phase, cryptocurrency and mixed reality as foundational development stages, and autonomous vehicles as early infrastructure work. These shifts are driven by advances in machine learning and computer vision that enable new forms of automation, redefine urban infrastructure, and transform financial trust into programmable software.
- Milken Institute23 min
California Leading the Future of Energy #CALeading
Harry Atwater, Caroline Choi, Mark Herrema, Jane Wells, Richard D'Atezio
At the Milken Institute's 20th-anniversary global conference, 4,000 participants explored the "building meaningful lives" theme by examining California as a microcosm for solving global challenges in health, energy, and infrastructure. Key speakers, including Professor Harry Atwater and representatives from Southern California Edison and New Light Technologies, presented critical data on decarbonizing transportation, leveraging artificial photosynthesis for fuel synthesis, and converting agricultural methane into biodegradable plastics. The dialogue emphasized that achieving the Paris Agreement targets requires massive investment in zero-carbon energy capacity, a seven-million-electric-vehicle fleet by 2030, and strategic shifts toward private-sector innovation to bridge funding gaps in solving issues like malnutrition and clean energy access.
- Y Combinator24 min
The Most Important Decision is Getting Started – Laura Behrens Wu
Laura Behrens Wu, Carolyn Levy
Shippo, co-founded by Laura Behrens-Wu and Simon, built an API platform that processes millions of monthly shipments for 16,000 e-commerce merchants after pivoting to solve critical shipping transparency issues. The company successfully raised $9 million in two rounds despite facing significant hurdles, including 115 investor rejections, team turnover, and a lawsuit, by maintaining transparent communication and executing a compressed four-week Series A process. Behrens-Wu now leverages this experience to advocate for inclusive hiring practices and warns founders to vet investors on their crisis management behaviors while navigating systemic gender biases in the B2B technology sector.
- Y Combinator29 min
Building a Startup is About Solving a Problem - Avni Patel Thompson of Poppy
Founded by Avni, Poppy is a Seattle-based childcare network designed to recreate a modern village by connecting vetted caregivers with families seeking reliability. After a failed subscription box startup and multiple rejections from Y Combinator, Avni pivoted by leveraging manual "concierge" operations to validate demand, eventually securing over $2 million in seed funding and acceptance into the Winter 2016 cohort. The company now operates on a weekly growth rhythm that prioritizes solving core customer frustrations over product perfection, demonstrating how curiosity and user feedback drove the transition from a personal struggle to a scalable business model.
- a16z25 min
Matthew Turk
Matthew Turk, John Luther King Jr., Rich
Cognate, a startup founded by researchers presenting new findings, commercializes an augmented reality system called "Being There" to enable remote experts to virtually collaborate with field technicians by reconstructing physical environments into navigable 3D models. The technology addresses critical technical challenges in environment modeling and annotation rendering, allowing users to independently explore scenes and apply spatially registered instructions without relying on live video streams. Currently targeting the 5.5 million U.S. field service technicians, the platform aims to reduce travel costs and equipment downtime by bridging the gap between dwindling expert availability and an increasingly inexperienced workforce.
- a16z22 min
Michael Jordan
The speaker distinguishes inferential goals across scientific fields and identifies a critical gap between statistical decision theory and computational complexity in big data systems. New minimax theory unifies statistical inference with differential privacy, while the "Bag of Little Bootstraps" algorithm solves scalability bottlenecks by enabling parallel processing of subsampled data. This approach reduces uncertainty quantification time for terabyte-sized datasets from 15,000 seconds to under 300 seconds, facilitating robust, privacy-preserving personalization without the sensitivity of Bayesian priors.
- a16z23 min
Mark Ring
Mark Ring, co-founder of Kojitai, presents an "iso-laminar learning mechanism" that aims to transition AI from performing superficial tasks to achieving genuine world understanding through continual learning. This approach, utilizing a forecasting system developed alongside Rich Sutton, enables robotic agents to autonomously construct complex geometric abstractions like room layouts and obstacle distances from raw sensory inputs without human labeling. While technical hurdles regarding computational scale remain, Ring anticipates that solving these challenges within the next few years will revolutionize industries ranging from autonomous vehicles to intelligent search systems.
- a16z29 min
Culture and Revolution
Ben Horowitz, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Tanya Cushman
This presentation defines organizational culture as the collective behavior exhibited when leadership is absent, arguing it must be deliberately engineered rather than left to self-generate. Through historical analysis of Toussaint Louverture's successful reprogramming of Haitian slave society and modern case studies involving leaders like Steve Jobs and Reed Hastings, the speaker demonstrates that culture is shaped by recruitment, shocking rules, and prioritization decisions. The outcome of these deliberate actions determines whether an organization survives high-stakes environments or suffers economic collapse, establishing cultural transformation as a critical, transferable skill for leadership.
- a16z25 min
A Whirlwind Tour Through Tech Trends in China
China's mobile-first ecosystem leverages extreme urban density and a super-app dominance by WeChat to bypass legacy credit infrastructure, enabling seamless digital payments and unified social commerce through QR codes. This environment has spawned a unique influencer economy where "Wang Hong" figures manufacture and sell products directly to millions, while live streaming and gamified engagement models drive billions in revenue without traditional app silos. Consequently, global brands are compelled to adapt strategies that integrate communication, payments, and entertainment into singular mobile experiences rather than replicating fragmented Western models.
- a16z30 min
16 Questions About Self Driving Cars
Andreessen Horowitz forecasts that collapsing costs and rising utility will drive universal vehicle autonomy within the next two decades, with the automotive industry poised to eclipse the smartphone market through massive revenue potential despite lower unit volume. While established manufacturers pursue incremental feature additions, disruptors like Google and Tesla advocate for a direct leap to Level 5 systems to eliminate mixed-mode accidents, sparking intense debate over sensor architectures, map dependencies, and the eventual shift from ownership to fleet-as-a-service models. This transition promises to drastically reduce accident rates and reshape urban infrastructure, ultimately shifting liability from human drivers to algorithms and rendering traditional consumer automotive marketing obsolete.
- a16z25 min
The End of Cloud Computing
The event forecasts the obsolescence of centralized cloud computing in favor of edge intelligence, where autonomous devices like self-driving cars and drones become decentralized data centers to ensure real-time processing speed. This architectural shift redefines the cloud as a model training hub that aggregates data from trillions of sensors to update local machine learning algorithms through a continuous feedback loop. Consequently, the industry faces a massive market expansion into distributed IoT ecosystems, driving a fundamental transformation in programming languages, supply chain economics, and the operational roles of IT leaders.
- a16z32 min
Mobile Is Eating the World, 2016
The event outlines a global transition from the creation to the deployment phase of technology, where dominant firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon have evolved into economic superpowers leveraging scale to disrupt sectors from retail to content. Driven by a 2012 shift toward data-driven machine learning and a strategic pivot to "AI First," these entities are now redefining human-computer interaction through edge computing and frictionless hardware. Furthermore, the discussion details how this technological momentum is dismantling traditional industries, specifically transforming e-commerce, automotive manufacturing, and urban infrastructure through software-defined models and autonomous systems.
- a16z23 min
Trends in and the Future of Infrastructure
Former VMware executive Martin Casado predicts a massive $4 trillion infrastructure renaissance driven by the transition from proprietary hardware to software-defined services, where startups can bypass legacy incumbents by targeting developer-led procurement. This shift mirrors historical computing epochs that replaced market leaders, as new entrants leverage agile software distribution and service models to capture value across all layers of the stack. Andreessen Horowitz capitalizes on this "unfair advantage" by backing technical founders who can rapidly scale by aligning with developer preferences while simultaneously building the enterprise sales capabilities required to finalize deals.