a16z Podcast a16z

Over the last decade, we’ve seen the marketplace model evolve and grow, and this year a16z is back with our fourth edition of the Marketplace100 – a ranking of the top private marketplaces by GMV - giving a unique window into what may be to come.

This year’s list features nearly three dozen newcomers, including marketplaces for refurbished electronics, precious metals, and sustainably raised meat. And in this episode, we break down key trends from the report together with a16z’s Consumer partners Connie Chan, Olivia Moore, and Zach Cohen.

If you’d like to see the full ranking of the largest consumer-facing marketplace startups and private companies, you can find the full report https://a16z.com/marketplace-100.

It’s both easier and harder than ever to build a successful podcast. In this episode, we chat with Sriram and Aarthi from the Good Time Show, who ventured into the world of audio peak pandemic and have since interviewed the likes of Elon Musk, Calvin Harris, and Naomi Osaka.

We get their perspective on how to succeed in this competitive landscape, differentiation and the sliding scale of entertainment and information, the difference between an audience and a community, podcast analytics and how they’re changing, and even what Sriram has learned from his frontrow experience at Twitter recently.

With every new technology, some jobs are lost while others are gained. People often focus on the former, but in this episode we chose to highlight the latter – a highly creative role that emerges alongside AI: the prompt engineer.

Until AI can close the loop of its own, each tool still requires a set of prompts. Just like a composer feeds an instrument the notes to play, a prompt engineer feeds an AI a map of what to produce. And if we know anything from music it’s that composing great music takes great skill!

In this episode we explore the emerging importance of prompting with Guy Parsons, the early learnings of how to do it effectively, and where this field might be going.

Will the prompt engineer be more like the highly sought after DevOps engineer, or a proficiency like Excel that you find on every resume? Listen in to hear Guy’s take.

Starting in the 1960s, technology companies, funded by the U.S. Department of Defense, were essential for creating the processors that would eventually launch satellites and guide missiles. Half a century later, today’s tech companies can — and need — to move even faster and smarter, as international adversaries scale up their aggressions. In this episode, Anduril Industries Founder Palmer Luckey will discuss how Silicon Valley is using new technologies to build new tools, systems, and companies to defend our nation and its interests.

Should AI belong in the courtroom? Joshua Browder ventured to run an experiment where a robot lawyer would defend a court case. Looking to up the ante, he even offered $1m for a Supreme Court hearing! His experiment was met with a threat of 6 months jail time. Listen in for the full story.

What would you do if you believed in an idea but everyone said it would fail, nobody would fund you, and the industry was experiencing a nuclear winter?

Despite experiencing exactly that, Sandbox VR founder Steve Zhao doubled down and invested all of his personal savings into the unproven business. 7 years and 1 bankruptcy later, Steve has built the world’s leading full-body VR experience with over 30 locations across the globe.

In this interview, we get to chat with Steve about the many challenges he faced, how Sandbox made it through the pandemic, the future of VR, and the difficult task of tackling hardware, software, a new computing platform, and real estate.