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Episodes

Marc Andreessen

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto

We are told that technology is on the brink of ruining everything. But we are being lied to, and the truth is so much better. Marc Andreessen presents his techno-optimist vision for the future.

34 mins

David Ulevitch

Planning and Managing Layoffs

How you handle a layoff, how you communicate it to the people impacted, and how you manage and lead throughout the process really matters. It takes careful thought and planning, but it may be the most important planning you ever do as a leader.

23 mins

Justine Moore

The Insider’s Guide to Data Rooms: What to Know Before You Raise

It’s time for your startup to fundraise. You prepare a deck, practice your pitch, and start reaching out to investors. If a first meeting goes well, it often ends with a request to share your “data room.” But what is a data room, and what should be included in it? What is a data room?...

11 mins

Peter Blackwood, Tina Ferguson

The Complete Guide to Acquihires

In today’s ever-competitive environment to drive growth, identifying and hiring key talent through a structured transaction—known as an “acquihire”—has become an increasingly popular and effective way for companies to address hiring needs and accelerate product innovation and development.  Often joining the acquiring company as a unit or existing team, employers also tend to benefit from...

30 mins

Bryan Kim

Do You Have Lightning In a Bottle? How to Benchmark Your Social App

When a new social app starts to “work,” it feels like magic, but often looks like a black box. What causes a product to take off, and then continue to pick up steam—to the point where millions of people are using it daily for years to come?  This is especially tricky because most social apps...

11 mins

Doug McCracken, Joshua Lu

Play to Win: Mobile Game Soft Launch Best Practices

Exploring soft launch best practices, myths, and limitations to determine the right strategy to soft launch your game.

15 mins

Alex Rampell

Distribution vs. Innovation

The battle between every startup and incumbent comes down to whether the startup gets distribution before the incumbent gets innovation. The TiVo Problem In 1999, ReplayTV and TiVo invented the Digital Video Recorder (DVR). It was an incredible innovation — allowing you to “pause” live television. But TiVo had no value without “content” to pause. That...

4 mins

Tugce Erten

Why Pricing and Packaging Matters More When You’re Launching Your Second Product

successfully launching these products means finding product-market fit all over again—but this time, you have a much slimmer margin for error.

9 mins

Ben Horowitz

Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO

In peacetime, it’s all about growth. In wartime, it’s just about surviving.

8 mins

Daisy Wolf, Vijay Pande

How We Live Longer

The most impactful way to fix healthcare is through improving the consumer experience, which has been largely ignored to date. In today’s modern world where you can order groceries, buy flight tickets, and wire money from your phone, taking care of yourself and navigating the healthcare system remains impossibly hard.

7 mins

Joe Schmidt, Kristina Shen

Vertical Operating Systems: One System of Record to Rule Them All

When computers were first built, each new application had to be programmed specifically for each chip. This was very complicated for developers and, as a result, the companies that created operating systems to simplify this complexity became some of the most valuable companies on earth. This is true for systems, and it’s also true for...

10 mins

Marc Andreessen

Why AI Will Save the World

There's a full-blown moral panic about AI right now. But the real risk is losing the race to global AI technological superiority.

41 mins

Katherine Boyle

Building American Dynamism

Two weeks before the start of our perpetual lockdown, The New York Times columnist and Substack writer Ross Douthat released “The Decadent Society,” a survey of America’s general apathy toward building a more dynamic future. While the book itself isn’t particularly surprising in its critique, the timing of its release was important: it was among...

13 mins

Ben Horowitz

The Struggle

The Struggle is when you know you’re in over your head, but you can’t be replaced.

6 mins

Jeff Jordan, Anu Hariharan, Frank Chen, Preethi Kasireddy

16 Startup Metrics

We have the privilege of meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs every year, and in the course of those discussions are presented with all kinds of numbers, measures, and metrics that illustrate the promise and health of a particular company. Sometimes, however, the metrics may not be the best gauge of what’s actually happening in the...

15 mins

Chris Dixon

Doing Old Things Better Vs. Doing Brand New Things

New technologies enable activities that fall into one of two categories: 1) doing things you could already do but can now do better because they are faster, cheaper, easier, higher quality, etc. 2) doing brand new things that you simply couldn’t do before. Early in the development of new technologies, the first category tends to...

3 mins

David George

Are You Ready to Be a Public Company?

The real checklist: credible growth story + operating leverage + accurate forecasting.

12 mins

Angela Strange

Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company

In the near future, I believe every company will derive a significant portion of its revenue from financial services. That’s going to fundamentally change banking as we know it. Even companies that have nothing to do with financial services will have the opportunity to benefit from fintech.

16 mins

Marc Andreessen

Why Software Is Eating the World

Software is eating the world. More than 10 years after the peak of the 1990s dot-com bubble, a dozen or so new Internet companies like Facebook and Twitter are sparking controversy in Silicon Valley, due to their rapidly growing private market valuations, and even the occasional successful IPO. With scars from the heyday of Webvan...

14 mins

Olivia Moore

How Are Consumers Using Generative AI?

To see how people are interacting with generative AI, we used data to rank the top 50 GenAI web products by monthly visits.

10 mins