Episodes
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Published on 16 Jun 2016. Love the term or hate it, the concept and reality of the "sharing economy" (or "gig economy" and so on) is here to stay. And in fact, argues NYU Stern professor and researcher Arun Sundararajan, it may even reduce the income distribution gap between the haves and have-nots in a way that previous shifts -- like the Industrial Revolution and traditional 20th century institutions -- never did. How?
Because it's a new model for (crowd-based) capitalism -- one where we're increasing the segment of the population that owns the means of production. Or... have we just shifted value from traditional institutions to the platforms instead? Well, let's see what the data tells us. In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Sundararajan (who is also affiliated with NYU's Center for Urban Science+Progress and at NYU's Center for Data Science) shares the latest findings, economics research, and more from his new book on The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism.
We cover the challenges of capturing this shift in GDP (as well as the challenges of GDP and measuring tech progress in general); the challenges of creating a new funding model for the "social safety net of the 21st century workforce"; the challenges of "data darwinism", reputation, and ratings; and finally, how and just who should regulate the sharing economy? -
Episodes manquant?
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Published on 20 May 2016. The Inc. team talks about Harry's, the subscription men's razor company, and how the startup gained market share by buying a 100-year-old razor factory in Germany. The crew also talks about how companies are being sued for misusing biometric technology, and they chat with Toni Ko about selling her makeup company, NYX. Write us: [email protected]: www.inc.com/inc-uncensoredInc. Uncensored is brought to you by Squarespace. Build your website today at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code UNCENSORED at checkout to get 10% off.Support for this episode's Exit Interview comes from Deloitte's Emerging Growth Company team conducting audits to meet the needs of fast-growing companies that seek investor capital or to go public. See how audit can help companies as they pursue high performance at deloitte.com/us/egc.This episode is also brought to you by The Lincoln Motor Company. The elegant and powerful Lincoln MKZ is for listeners who use their vehicle for both personal and business reasons. Find out more at Lincoln.com/MKZ
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Published on 14 Oct 2015. The place where Apache Spark was born, UC Berkeley’s AMPLab has not just created a major open source software platform, it’s spun out more than its share of ground-breaking companies (full disclosure: a16z has invested in three of them).
So how did they get there? How has open source and the AMPLab approach reduced the friction between student and faculty ideas and launching them into the real world?
Co-founder and director of the AMPLab, Michael Franklin, joins a16z’s Peter Levine to discuss the AMPLab model, and their own relationship as an academic and an investor. Haoyuan Li also joins the discussion -- which was part of our 2015 Academic Roundtable -- to offer another perspective. Li’s company, Tachyon Nexus, came out of work he did as a student in the AMPLab and the resulting open source project. Li describes his struggles and victories in making the transition from student to founder and leader of a company. -
http://www.owltail.com/?utm_source=s3&utm_medium=Itunes for more Startup Podcast Recommendations
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Published on 24 Jun 2016. The Inc. team talks about what makes a leader with Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso. Next, Leigh Buchanan and Maria Aspan debate whether entrepreneurs are born--or made. Finally, the team interviews Jon Sebastiani, the serial entrepreneur who sold his healthy jerky company, Krave, to Hershey, about how the deal went down.Write us: [email protected]: www.inc.com/inc-uncensoredThis episode of Inc. Uncensored is brought to you by Squarespace. Whether you need a landing page, a beautiful gallery, a professional blog, or an online store, it's all possible with a Squarespace website. Enter offer code uncensored at checkout to get 10% off your first purchase.Support for this episode's Serious Business debate comes from Salesforce. Salesforce helps small businesses like yours discover how to grow faster than ever before. By managing your sales, marketing and customer service all in one place, your small businesses can succeed at every step. To see how Salesforce can work for you, go to salesforce.com/smallbiz.Support for today's Exit Interview comes from Deloitte's Emerging Growth Company team...conducting audits to meet the needs of fast-growing companies that seek investor capital or to go public. See how audit can help companies as they pursue high performance at Deloitte.com/us/EGC.
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Published on 27 Feb 2015. In this week’s episode Ben and James discuss tradeoffs in the context of net neutrality, AT&T’s new gigabit service, and Lenovo’s Superfish debacle Note: when talking about the history of cable, Ben kept saying “companies” instead of “communities.” Sorry for the confusion! Links Ben Thompson: Netflix and Net Neutrality – Stratechery Ben Thompson: Net Neutrality! (analyzing the current proposal) – Stratechery (members-only) This Week in Tech: Superfishy – Twit.TV Ben Thompson: Lenovo’s Superfish Debacle, AT&T Prices Privacy – Stratechery (members-only) Jon Matonis: Silent Circle And Vertu Partner On $10,000 Phone – Forbes Hosts Ben Thompson, @monkbent, Stratechery James Allworth, @jamesallworth, Harvard … Continue reading Episode 036 – Tradeoffs
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Published on 30 Oct 2017. In 1992, Steve Ells was a classically trained chef working in a high-end restaurant in San Francisco. But after eating a burrito at a local taqueria, he got an idea: to sell burritos and earn enough money to open his own gourmet restaurant. The first Chipotle opened in Denver the following year. Bringing his culinary training to taqueria-style service, Steve Ells helped transform the way we eat fast food. PLUS for our postscript "How You Built That," how Alexander Harik turned his mom's recipe for za'atar spread—a fragrant Middle Eastern condiment—into Zesty Z: The Za'atar Company.
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Published on 15 Apr 2016. The Inc. team talks about how media companies are relying on Facebook to survive, debate whether or not robots will steal our jobs, and discuss how the food instagramming craze is leading to weird trends like rainbow bagels.Write us: [email protected]: www.inc.com/inc-uncensoredInc. Uncensored is brought to you by Squarespace. Build your website today at Squarespace.com. Enter offer code UNCENSORED at checkout to get 10% off.
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Published on 13 Sep 2015. Ben and James discuss James’ sophomore experience at Burning Man, and then turn to the iPad Pro and its paucity of quality of applications. Just how much is Apple responsible? This episode is sponsored by Zendesk. Make your customer service seem like magic by building it directly into your apps, websites and products with Zendesk Embeddables. Links Exponent Episode 016 — Naked People Ben Thompson: From Products to Platforms — Stratechery Emanuel Sa: We Need Sketch for the iPad Pro — Designer News Ben Thompson: App Store Policy Follow-up, The iPad Pro, The iPad Pro Accessories — Stratechery Ben Thompson: … Continue reading Episode 051 — Segue
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Published on 24 May 2017. If you’re Steve Jobs, you can wait for your product to be perfect. But there are almost no Steve Jobs’ in the world. For the rest of us, If you’re not embarrassed by your first product release, you’ve released it too late. Imperfect is perfect. Why? Because your assumptions about what people want are never exactly right. Most entrepreneurs create great products through a tight feedback loop with real customers using a real product. So don’t fear imperfections; they won’t make or break your company. What will make or break you is speed. And no one knows this better than Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg. He shares the origin story of his famous mantra, “move fast and break things” and how this ethos applied as Facebook evolved from student project to tech giant.
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Published on 13 Sep 2016. "Apple isn't just a tech company; it's a tastemaker." Remember the iconic ads of dancing silhouettes in black, with only the headphone wires visible in white? They were a critical part of the larger buy-Apple innovation narrative. So what happens now when those wires -- an emblematic and enduring image -- are no longer visible, as is the case with the removal of the traditional headphone jack in iPhone 7?
It's part of a broader story, both about how product narratives are shared/told and about how innovation happens: "amazingly", subtly, and sometimes, invisibly. Some innovations, like preventing "battery anxiety" or building a platform ecosystem or even laying the tracks for a train that hasn't arrived yet ("ear computers" or "audible computing"? VR/AR? car?) take time. And a direction we may not be able to anticipate from the outside looking in. ...Or so argue the a16zers on this episode of the a16z Podcast featuring in-house analyst Benedict Evans and board partner Steven Sinofsky with Kyle Russell. -
Published on 17 Oct 2014. In this week’s episode Ben and James discuss why Ben thinks the Internet is totally overreacting to HBO’s announcement that they will sell subscriptions directly to customers, and then delve into what might be the underlying motivations behind Gamergate. Links Ben Thompson: The Cord-Cutting Fantasy – Stratechery Ben Thompson: Why TV Has Resisted Disruption – Stratechery Ben Thompson: The Jobs TV Does – Stratechery Kyle Wagner: The Future of the Culture Wars is Here, and It’s Gamergate – Deadspin Paul Graham: Before the Startup – PaulGraham.com Hosts Ben Thompson, @monkbent, Stratechery James Allworth, @jamesallworth, Harvard Business Review Podcast Information Feed … Continue reading Episode 021: Gamergate of Thrones
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Published on 28 Jun 2016. with Fei-Fei Li, Frank Chen, and Sonal Chokshiartificial intelligence automation & robotics coding literacy education machine & deep learning announcements autonomous cars computer vision in-residence Who has the advantage in artificial intelligence â big companies, startups, or academia? Perhaps all three, especially as they work together when it comes to fields like this. One thing is clear though: A.I. and deep learning is where itâs at. And thatâs why this yearâs newly anointed Andreessen Horowitz Distinguished Visiting Professor of Computer Science is Fei-Fei Li [who publishes under Li Fei-Fei], associate professor at Stanford University. Bridging entrepreneurs across academia and industry, we began the a16z Professor-in-Residence program just a couple years ago (most recently with Dan Boneh and beginning with Vijay Pande).Li is the Director of the Stanford Vision Lab, which focuses on connecting computer vision and human vision; is the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL), which was founded in the early 1960s; and directs the new SAIL-Toyota Center for AI Research, which brings together researchers in visual computing, machine learning, robotics, human-computer interactions, intelligent systems, decision making, natural language processing, dynamic modeling, and design to develop âhuman-centered artificial intelligenceâ for intelligent vehicles. Li also co-created ImageNet, which forms the basis of the Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) that continually demonstrates drastic advances in machine vision accuracy.So why now for A.I.? Is deep learning âitâ⊠or what comes next? And what happens as A.I. moves from what Li calls its âin vitro phaseâ to its âin vivo phaseâ? Beyond ethical considerations â or celebrating only âgeekinessâ and ânerdinessâ â Li argues we need to inject a stronger humanistic thinking element to design and develop algorithms and A.I. that can co-habitate with people and in social (including crowded) spaces. All this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast.
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Published on 06 Oct 2017. Earlier this year, we asked listeners to call us with questions for Gimlet Founder Alex Blumberg. Alex answered a bunch of them in an episode last season. But one caller’s question was so big, it needed its own episode. Skyler Gronholz had decided to make a podcast about starting up his life again after several years in prison. But he was anxious about making something bad, and wanted Alex’s advice. In this week’s episode, we find out: can making a podcast about your life actually change the way you live it?--If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration has a number you can call. 1-800-662-HELP. That hotline gives referrals to local treatment facilities and support groups. And it is completely free and confidential.
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Published on 17 Nov 2015. The title of world's financial capital bounces back and forth between London and New York. This year London has bragging rights, but does being the word's center of gravity for finance mean so-called "fintech" companies will naturally flow from that position?
London-based investor Eileen Burbidge joins a16z's Alex Rampell to pick apart fintech in this segment of the podcast recorded on our U.K. road trip. Everything from the term (please make it go away), to the particular barriers and opportunities facing entrepreneurs looking to create what really amounts to better banks. -
Published on 06 Oct 2015. Mention Patrick Byrne, the founder and CEO of Overstock.com, and you’ll elicit a strong opinion. In 2004, one hedge fund manager labeled Byrne the most hated man on Wall Street -- a label he wears proudly.
Byrne started Overstock.com in 1999, and the online retailer has been through a lot of change in the intervening years. At the outset, Byrne didn’t want Overstock to be a technology company trying to get retail right, he wanted to be a retail company that was amplified by technology. Looking back, he says, he had the emphasis wrong -- it should have been on technology.
Byrne has been focused on the technology side of things ever since, pushing Overstock further into the cloud, as well as becoming the first major online merchant to accept Bitcoin. Byrne joins this segment of the a16z Podcast to discuss the state of online retail, value investing in tech, and why he believes Bitcoin and the crypto revolution is bigger than the Internet. - Montre plus
