So You Want to Launch a Newsletter: Tips From Substack Writers

This special episode of the a16z Podcast is based on a Q&A from an early screening we hosted of Disney's Queen of Katwe, now in theaters. The movie -- directed by Mira Nair and based on a book by Tim Crothers -- depicts the true story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi. The conversation, hosted by Ben Horowitz, features actor David Oyelowo who (among other roles, previously played Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in "Selma") and plays Robert Katende, the engineer-turned-mentor who taught community sports and chess to kids in the slums of Kampala, Uganda. photo credits: Prentiss Earl lll

30 Sep 201621min

From the silver age of on-prem software companies like SAP and Siebel Systems to the golden age of enterprise software-as-a-service, we're now seeing an explosion of data. All types, all sizes, and all over the place. And much of it is a sort of industrial "data exhaust", where companies aren't quite sure what question to ask of the data but are being bombarded with data due to the variety of data sources available today -- from websites to sensors (and therefore data capture) everywhere. Before there is even a signal in the noise. So how do you solve a problem like this-Data? Beyond requiring new types of plumbing and integrations, enterprises now expect -- given the age of mobile, web, cloud, and heck, let's add millennials to the mix too -- self service. To be able to ask, get, fit (curve-fit), predict. To take back the enterprise from the patchwork of integration and number of vendors we all have to deal with -- the scope of which most companies in fact are not truly aware of. It's about the lifecycle of data in the enterprise, argues Snaplogic founder and CEO Gaurav Dhillon in this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Scott Kupor. It's in fact about the evolution of data overall -- from data warehouses to "data lakes": in stages, from purification (like wrangling data) to bottling (prepping for consumption by data scientists) to making sense of streams and streams of data! The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

22 Sep 201628min

Just as "social networking" is a bland term that doesn't really capture the layers of what happens underneath (and on top of) social networking platforms, "crowdfunding" is a broader phenomenon than what the term and tools implies. Or so argue the guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast, Tilt co-founder and CEO James Beshara and a16z general partner Jeff Jordan with Sonal Chokshi. Crowdfunding isn't just about reaching a certain threshold to make something, but it's also about "pre-commerce" or "pretail" -- the next evolution in commerce, which involves the ability to suss out demand before production and sell directly to consumers. Crowdfunding is also about "social commerce" -- the ability to not only build community, but trigger collective action towards some goal. There's even a sort of Dunbar's number equivalent for crowdfunding, the tipping point at which the momentum of this collective action takes over (hint: it involves the magic number of 34%). Beyond crowdfunding, there are broader themes of economic change and behavior at play here -- whether it's people's tolerance for waiting and buying something before it exists; a new type of scarcity and desire for experiential buying; or makers creating or co-creating things publicly, and even incompletely. All we know is that we're at a watershed moment of sorts -- as evidenced by car manufacturer Tesla's pre-orders for its Model 3, which is not even going to be available for a few years. And yet...! The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

18 Sep 201627min

"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.

13 Sep 201633min

Sleep, productivity, and creatively are intimately linked, for better and for worse. And "we are living under a collective delusion that burnout is the way to succeed," observes Arianna Huffington, author of The Sleep Revolution. Not only does this affect our health and resilience, she argues, but the data shows that even though we are working longer hours than ever, we lose 11 days of productivity a year per employee due to sickness or diminished capacity. (It also hurts our ability to work in teams.) This isn't just a problem in the tech industry, either. BuzzFeed News senior writer Nitasha Tiku observes that "Any business book that's valorizing or diving into the life of a CEO is going to talk about how much he or she sleeps." But sleep isn't just a biological act, it's also a psychological (insomnia, anxiety, TV binge-watching?) as well as a socioeconomic one when you consider who gets to sleep (people higher or lower in the workplace hierarchy, other demographic factors?). And where does tech and the tech industry come in here? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Huffington and Tiku discuss the hard realities of sleep -- everything from tech and culture to labor and the evolving nature of work.

6 Sep 201628min

"Incremental change may be good theory, but in practice you have to have a big enough stick to hit everybody with to make everything move at once". So shares Adrian Cockcroft, who helped lead Netflix's migration from datacenter to the cloud -- and from monolithic to microservices architecture -- when their streaming business (the "stick"!) was exploding. So how did they -- and how can other companies -- make such big, bet-the-company kind of moves, without getting mired in fanatical internal debates? Does organizational structure need to change, especially if moving from a more product-, than project-based, approach? What happens to security? And finally, what happens to the role of CIOs; what can/should they do? Most interestingly: How will the entire industry be affected as companies not only adopt, but essentially offer, microservices or narrow cloud APIs? How do the trends of microservices, containers, devops, cloud, as-a-service/ on-demand, serverless -- all moves towards more and more ephemerality -- change the future of computing and even work? Cockcroft (who is now a technology fellow at Battery Ventures) joins this episode of the a16z Podcast, in conversation with Frank Chen and Martin Casado (and Sonal Chokshi) to discuss these shifts and more. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

31 Aug 201627min

For better or worse, most of the computing systems that run much of our lives (whether invisibly or visibly) have become increasingly complex -- they're not fully engineered; they're almost grown. And with that we enter a brave new world of "biological" (as opposed to a more "physics") mindset applied to computing. It's more like evolution, horns and all. This isn't just abstract or backend-only stuff. Complex system design affects everything from datacenters and SaaS to word processors and cars, touching human lives in very tangible ways. So how do you solve problems in such systems? How do you even begin to understand "the system" in the first place? And is there anything out there yet that lets us test and verify the output of these systems? (Inquiring minds want to know!) All this and more in this episode of the a16z Podcast, a riff on the theme of "complicated" with complexity scientist Samuel Arbesman and author of the new book Overcomplicated. Also joining the conversation (with Sonal Chokshi) are a16z board partner Steven Sinofsky and research and deal team head Frank Chen. image: brewbooks / Flickr

30 Aug 201618min

Bitcoin quickly made its way from a whitepaper to a production network, which is pretty amazing when you think about it. But its scripting/ programming language was initially, intentionally, limited for a few reasons, which meant that building new apps on bitcoin wasn't always easy. Enter ethereum in 2014 -- a public blockchain platform that moved away from the "Swiss-army knife" approach to a more general protocol approach. This would in turn allow endless (and entirely new) use cases to be built on top of the blockchain, whether smart contracts or "app coins" that allow decentralized crowdfunding and decentralized business models. The results, at first glance, may seem just like a new way of financing a company. But it actually goes much deeper than that: They're really software protocols that are almost replacing centralized companies or what those companies would do. The possibilities are endless... In this episode of the a16z Podcast, Ethereum inventor and co-creator Vitalik Buterin joins Fred Ehrsam, co-founder of Coinbase (an a16z portfolio company) in conversation with Chris Dixon. The conversation covers everything from the politics of open source (and value of network effects even when those networks split) to the challenges of mainstreaming and scaling tech. And what happens next?

28 Aug 201650min