Latest Interviews

The Stories We Tell Feat. Jay Shetty

Jay Shetty

Challenging the triviality of current social media usage, the presentation outlines a strategy to leverage mobile penetration for distributing life-changing wisdom through emotionally resonant storytelling. By transforming passive consumption into active participation, campaigns by National Geographic and mental health initiatives achieved massive global reach, turning viral moments into offline community support and mentorship networks. The proposed framework prioritizes understanding audience pain, integrating entertainment to enhance retention, and enabling co-creation to facilitate implicit learning.

Putting Principle into Practice: How to Make Sustainability Profitable

Ryan Brennan, Curt Custard, Hiromichi Mizuno, John Murphy, Hugh O'Reilly, Mark Watson, Hiro Mizuno

Senior executives from major global entities including GPIF, Newton, Coca-Cola, and John Swire & Sons convened to analyze the integration of sustainability into long-term investment and corporate strategy. The panelists established a consensus that divestment is less effective than active engagement, citing empirical evidence that engaged companies generate significantly higher returns while avoiding the "rhetoric" caused by undefined standards. Key outcomes included the adoption of rigorous ESG metrics, the alignment of executive compensation with sustainability goals, and a strategic shift toward cross-sector collaboration to address complex challenges like water scarcity and decarbonization.

Emily Weiss: Rethinking the Business of Beauty

Emily Weiss

Founded by Emily Weiss in 2010, Into the Gloss evolved into Glossier by leveraging over 200 consumer interviews to launch products like Boy Brow with a return rate under 1.5% while rejecting traditional six-month development cycles. Operating as a hybrid hardware and software entity that derives more than 70% of revenue from peer-to-peer channels, the company prioritizes intentional growth over rapid scaling despite facing significant venture capital barriers. Weiss and early investor Kirsten Green have challenged the industry's male-dominated funding patterns, positioning Glossier as a female-led brand that achieves massive scale to validate the viability of women-focused categories.

Working Smarter: The Future of Jobs

Richard Ditizio, Mary Gu, Robert Kelly, Dimitra Manis

This event synthesizes critical demographic shifts and technological disruptions, projecting that the global population will age significantly by 2050 while automation displaces 14% of the workforce. Speakers highlight stark disparities in educational progress between the US and Asia, alongside the rapid cost reductions in genomic sequencing and vertical farming that promise to redefine economic output. The discussion concludes with policy recommendations for gender equality and parenthood support, aiming to align future capital markets and digital fluency with a universal dream of opportunity based on merit rather than geography or origin.

The Evolution of Leadership

Heidi Toribio, Sharanjit Leyl, Marina Mahathir, Michael Owen, Igor Tulchinsky, John Wood

The Milken Women's Leadership Summit gathered industry leaders like John Wood, Marina Mahathir, and Michael Owen to redefine inclusion as active participation and highlight the fusion of data, artificial intelligence, and human resilience in modern governance. Participants addressed the critical need to democratize financial education through initiatives like WorldQuant University while navigating digital scrutiny and leveraging technology to bypass media restrictions in global advocacy. The session concluded with a consensus that future leaders must balance decisive action with long-term ecosystem building, prioritizing transparency and humility as the ultimate measures of character.

Deep Learning State of the Art (2019)

This 2019 lecture analyzes the transition from deep learning's initial breakthroughs to a new era of theoretical development, highlighting the 2018 NLP revolution led by the BERT model and architectural shifts toward Transformers. It details critical advancements in applied domains, including Tesla's neural network-driven Autopilot, NVIDIA's synthetic data strategies, and AlphaZero's success in complex games through self-play. The presentation concludes by evaluating the democratization of training efficiency via tools like FastAI and notes the impending need for fundamental optimization theories beyond standard backpropagation.

The Rise of Blockchain: How To Trust Strangers

Adam Burden, Cory Johnson, Tianmin Liu, Sopnendu Mohanty, Kaidi Ruusalepp

Moderated by Adam Burden, a panel featuring experts from Ripple, Iki Finn, Funderbeam, and the Monetary Authority of Singapore defined blockchain's shift from theoretical trust mechanisms to production use cases that cut settlement times from days to minutes. The discussion detailed specific implementations where Ripple streamlines cross-border payments, Iki Finn traces agricultural supply chains, and Singapore's Project Ubin tests tokenized currency, while highlighting that high-volume transaction integrity remains a technical hurdle. Experts concluded that while the technology offers significant efficiency gains for financial services, supply chains, and government, its widespread adoption depends on resolving regulatory friction and ensuring that governance structures can evolve alongside the code.

a16z Podcast | All About Synthetic Biology

James J. Collins, Vijay Pande, Hanne Tidnam, Hannah, Jim Collins

Emerging from a late 1990s pivot by biomedical engineers seeking to reverse-engineer biological networks, synthetic biology was formally launched in 2000 following the breakthrough construction of a genetic toggle switch by Jim Collins' lab alongside a repressilator by Michael Elowitz and Stan Leibler. The discipline has since evolved from academic skepticism into a hybrid industry balancing rational engineering design with directed evolution and machine learning, ultimately transitioning from failed bioenergy hype to a sustainable focus on high-value biomedicine, therapeutics, and educational programs like BioBits. Looking forward, the field is poised to deliver transformative applications ranging from programmable living therapeutics to environmental solutions like carbon-sequestering algae, bridging the gap between theoretical biology and practical utility over the coming decades.

a16z Podcast | Dark Data in Healthcare

Susannah Fox, Anil Sethi, Vijay Pande, Sonal Chokshi

A speaker outlines a paradigm shift in healthcare where the legal right of "Portability" under HIPAA transforms patients from passive data recipients into the central hubs of their own longitudinal medical records. This approach addresses the "dark data" gap by leveraging real-world evidence and AI to unify fragmented clinical and non-clinical sources, thereby accelerating chronic disease management and clinical trial matching. Ultimately, the proposal envisions a "permissionless innovation" ecosystem where frictionless data access empowers patients to coordinate care across providers and drive collaborative research.

a16z Podcast | The Science and Business of Innovative Medicines

Jorge Conde, Vijay Pande, Sonal Chokshi, Vas Narasimhan

Novartis transformed its portfolio through a $50 billion restructuring that divested consumer healthcare to prioritize advanced therapies, data science, and proprietary platforms for cell and gene treatments. Under CEO Vas Narasimhan, the company enforces strict "standard of care" mandates for project approval, integrates market access early in development, and invested $15 billion to own specialized infrastructure while leveraging AI for financial forecasting and pathology analysis. This strategic pivot targets a 10% clinical success rate by shifting from bespoke drug development to modular platforms and dedicated digital innovation centers, positioning the firm to address undruggable targets and future modalities like xenotransplantation.

a16z Podcast | What’s Next for Marketplace Startups (Hint: Services)

Li Jin, Andrew Chen, Frank Chen

A16Z outlines a strategic shift in digital marketplaces toward the "Managed Era," where platforms assume operational control to address the low digital penetration in heterogeneous service sectors. The firm targets regulated industries such as healthcare and mental wellness, advocating for supply expansion through AI automation and redefined licensing to unlock unconsumed demand. This approach anticipates a future where corporate entities replace individual providers in high-trust verticals to ensure scalable, consistent quality.

Cindy Mi and Qi Lu Share Advice for Entrepreneurs Building Global Companies

Cindy Mi, Qi Lu, Chi Lu

Zhangjiakou-native founder launched VIPKid in 2013 to bridge a massive educational supply gap by connecting over 60,000 North American teachers with Chinese students through a scalable, technology-enabled marketplace. The company rapidly achieved product-market fit by prioritizing rigorous efficacy metrics and a "global from day one" operational model that eventually expanded into a Global Classroom offering Mandarin instruction and AI-integrated personalized learning paths. Driven by a leadership philosophy centering on student and teacher success, the organization now envisions an future where artificial intelligence empowers educators to scale impact while cultivating global citizenship.

The future of work: is your job safe?

Samantha, Justin, Frank Boulier, Joseph Kamau, Max Dewhurst

This event examines the complex transition toward a future where automation and artificial intelligence reshape the global workforce by displacing 45% of jobs while simultaneously generating 133 million new roles through human-technology collaboration. It details the surge in location independence driven by a digital nomad population forecast to reach one billion by 2035, alongside the rapid expansion of co-working spaces and the polarized impacts of the $50 billion gig economy on both developing regions and wealthy nations. Furthermore, the presentation analyzes the ethical and operational implications of workplace surveillance technologies, such as sociometric badges and robotic swarms, which are currently redefining employee monitoring and productivity metrics at companies like Ocado.

How China Is Transforming Southeast Asia

Kirk West, Paul Gruenwald, Robin Hu, Jonathan Woetzel, Francis Sock Ping Yeoh

Panelists analyzed the fragility of South China Sea stability, China's Belt and Road Initiative-driven manufacturing shifts, and severe environmental threats like overfishing and plastic pollution across Southeast Asia. While China projects dominance through massive infrastructure spending and trade expansion, experts highlighted significant friction points including lack of local employment, debt transparency concerns, and ongoing geopolitical posturing with the United States. The discussion concluded that sustainable regional growth requires deprioritizing conflict in favor of accelerated infrastructure development, stricter environmental standards, and renewed U.S. engagement through trade frameworks like the TPP.

A Conversation with Howard Marks: Mastering the Market Cycle

Howard Marks, Michael Milken

Investment strategist Howard Marks emphasizes that historical market cycles and human psychology consistently drive asset pricing, challenging the "this time is different" narrative while highlighting the critical importance of valuation over asset quality. His analysis of structural shifts, from the evolution of bond covenants to the rise of passive investing, underscores that risk is cyclically determined by investor sentiment and liquidity rather than economic fundamentals alone. Ultimately, Marks argues that successful capital allocation requires recognizing probabilistic outcomes and maintaining sufficient resources to exploit the extreme fear and pricing inefficiencies that arise during inevitable downturns.