Today, we’re releasing transcripts from some of our most popular episodes of the a16z Podcast here on Future.
Since 2014, the a16z Podcast has been the go-to place (in the medium of audio, which we love in all its forms!) for expert discussions about innovation and the future as technology changes everything from how we work to how we eat, learn, and play. The a16z podcasts have also been featured on several top charts, best-of lists, media articles and writeups, and have even influenced policymakers to propose legislation based directly on listening to episodes.
We produce these shows to help make sense of it all: for the tech curious, for the builders, or for anyone simply seeking to understand the future, now. We do this by carefully curating insights directly 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 influence and shape our future.
Now, we’re building on our podcast network by inviting even more voices to contribute on our platform, at Future — our new media site exploring the technologies driving the future, as told by the people building it.
These episodes cover tech trends — like the meaning of emoji (and the standards behind them), with Jennifer 8 Lee and Fred Benenson; cutting through the frenzy around NFTs, with Linda Xie and Jesse Walden; the significance of TikTok beyond the buzz, with Eugene Wei; what’s hype/ what’s real about GPT-3 when it comes to AI; and many more. The episodes also cover company building for companies of all kinds — whether early startup or Fortune 500 — basically anyone building and scaling new businesses and products, technology practices and creative ways, categories, or culture under conditions of great uncertainty. For instance, what comes first, product-market fit or sales?… and so on.
Many of my favorite episodes are in this collection, including ones recorded a while ago but still relevant 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 featured tech ecosystem voices on the ground from 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 motivates such seemingly crazy ideas, and actually moves them from the lab to the field, and across time?
Because what is innovation after all, but making decisions on what to do next — and making sense of where we’ve been and where we’re going. That’s what we’re here to do on Future. And now, the a16z podcast network is migrating here, too.
Thank you for listening (and, now also reading)! You can sign up for updates on upcoming new pieces from Future as we continue to add more to the site from all kinds of thinkers and builders; as always, we aim to help separate the signal from the noise.
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