Latest Interviews

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.

Breaking the Bank: How Asian FinTechs Are Redefining Financial Services

Dan Murphy, Kevin Jacques, Donald Lacey, Akshay Naheta, Simon Paris

The event analyzes the rapid divergence between Asian FinTech markets and legacy systems, highlighting a strategic industry shift from consumer-focused models to B2B platformization and embedded finance. It details how insurance and banking sectors are transforming through IoT data, usage-based pricing, and regulatory consolidation, while capital flows increasingly favor late-stage firms with proven unit economics over early-stage valuations. Finally, the discussion outlines critical success factors for founders and incumbents, emphasizing that long-term partnership strategies and deep regulatory expertise are essential to navigate fragmented global landscapes and avoid commoditization.

Asia's Next Frontier: Building Capabilities for Translational Research

Tanisha Carino, Christiana Bardon, Carl Firth, Annalisa Jenkins, Baiju Shah, Chris Bardone

Faster Cures and Milken Institute convene Asian policymakers and industry leaders to address the critical "Valley of Death" separating basic science from clinical cures across the region's rapidly expanding R&D landscape. The discussion highlights Singapore's strategic shift toward translational funding and data infrastructure, China's accelerated regulatory reforms, and the Harrington Project's hybrid model designed to bridge skill and capital gaps for high-burden diseases. While genomic initiatives and reimbursement changes promise to modernize access, the session concludes that overcoming cultural barriers in patient advocacy and workforce specialization remains essential for translating scientific knowledge into effective patient treatments.

Deep Learning Basics: Introduction and Overview

The MIT course "Deep Learning for Self-Driving Cars" leverages the `deeplearning.mit.edu` platform and Google Colaboratory to guide students through fundamental architectures like CNNs and GANs while utilizing TensorFlow and PyTorch frameworks. It contextualizes the field's evolution from 1940s perceptrons to modern AlphaGo and BERT, emphasizing that current success relies on the synergy of massive datasets, specialized hardware like TPUs, and open-source tooling. Despite these advancements, the curriculum critically examines limitations in general intelligence and robustness, urging the integration of human oversight to navigate ethical challenges and transition the technology from the peak of inflated expectations to practical productivity.

Of Tweets and Trade: U.S. Outlook

Gerard Baker, Christine BN Chin, Carlos Gutierrez, Gilbert Kaplan, Frank Luntz, Gil Kaplan, Steve Oaken, Ralph Simon

A panel of economic experts and policymakers analyzed the Trump administration's shift from multilateral to bilateral trade negotiations, citing Section 301 investigations against China and the renegotiation of NAFTA as strategies to counter state-sponsored intellectual property theft. While polling data reveals that 81% of the audience believes these policies damage global growth, experts like Frank Luntz and Christine Chin warn that the prevailing anti-trade sentiment stems from automation-driven job displacement rather than trade deficits alone. The discussion concluded that future economic frameworks must integrate new social buffers and educational initiatives like the "Education Moonshot" to address the structural challenges of the 21st-century workforce in the Indo-Pacific region.