Today, we’re publishing transcripts from some of our most listened-to a16z Podcast episodes here on Future.
Since 2014, the a16z Podcast has been the place to go (in audio, a medium we love in all its forms!) for expert conversations about innovation and the future, as technology transforms everything from how we work to how we eat, learn, and play. The a16z podcasts have also appeared on numerous top charts, best-of lists, media pieces and writeups, and have even led policymakers to suggest legislation based directly on listening to episodes.
We make these shows to help make sense of it all: for the tech curious, for builders, or for anyone just trying to understand the future, now. We do that by thoughtfully curating insights straight from top business leaders and entrepreneurs, leading industry and academic experts, book authors, and other emerging experts around the world… all of whom (or whose work) will shape and influence our future.
Now, we’re expanding our podcast network by asking even more voices to contribute on our platform, at Future — our new media site examining the technologies driving the future, as told by the people building it.
These episodes explore tech trends — like the meaning of emoji (and the standards behind them), with Jennifer 8 Lee and Fred Benenson; clearing away the noise around NFTs, with Linda Xie and Jesse Walden; the importance of TikTok beyond the hype, with Eugene Wei; what’s hype/ what’s real about GPT-3 in AI; and many more. The episodes also discuss company building for businesses of all kinds — whether early startup or Fortune 500 — basically anyone building and scaling new businesses and products, technology practices and inventive ways, categories, or culture under great uncertainty. For example, what comes first, product-market fit or sales?… and so on.
Many of my favorite episodes are in this set, including ones recorded some time ago but still timely today such as “Things Come Together: Truths about Tech in Africa” (the title is a play on “things fall apart”, also the title of the novel by famous Nigerian author Chinua Achebe), which included on-the-ground voices from tech ecosystems in different countries there. Other personal favorites include episodes on textiles as technology, science, math, culture, really civilization… to episodes such as “Making a (Really) Wild Geo-Engineering Idea Real”, on how scientists, drawing on CRISPR technology from the Church Lab, are trying to rewild an Ice Age/ Pleistocene era biome — complete with gene-edited, lab-grown woolly mammoths — in Arctic Siberia. What drives such apparently crazy ideas, and actually carries them from the lab to the field, and across time?
Because after all, what is innovation but deciding what to do next — and making sense of where we’ve been and where we’re headed. That’s what we’re here to do on Future. And now, the a16z podcast network is moving here, too.
Thank you for listening (and, now also reading)! You can sign up for updates on upcoming new pieces from Future as we keep adding more to the site from all kinds of thinkers and builders; as always, we aim to help separate the signal from the noise.