Best Of Tech & Startups

Yuval Noah Harari’s first book, “Sapiens,” was an international sensation. The Israeli historian’s mind-bending tour through the trump of Homo sapiens is a favorite of, among others, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Barack Obama. His new book, Homo Deus, is about what comes next for humanity — and the threat our own intelligence and creative capacity poses to our future. And it, too, is fantastically interesting. I’ve wanted to talk to Harari since reading Sapiens. I’ve had one big question about him: what kind of mind creates a book like that? And now I know. A clear one.

Before he turned 40, Nolan Bushnell founded two brands that permanently shaped the way Americans amuse themselves: the iconic video game system Atari, and the frenetic family restaurant Chuck E. Cheese's.

Richard S. Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, professors at Harvard Business School, spell out an overlooked career path: buying a business and running it as CEO. Purchasing a small company lets you become your own boss and reap financial rewards without the risks of founding a start-up. Still, there are things you need to know. Ruback and Yudkoff are the authors of the “HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business.”

This must be my year because I've said this a few times but this definitely one of my strongest keynotes to-date. Not only is it a massive talk but it's followed by a super strong Q&A. In this episode, I discuss the beauty of entrepreneurship, the dangers of down-playing social media, my biggest failures to-date, and why a real practitioner isn’t afraid to get their hands dirty. Thanks to everyone who showed me love in Dublin !

I did this interview because I wanted to know happens when one of the most successful venture capitalists becomes a startup founder. Andy Rachleff is the founder of Benchmark Capital, whose investments include Uber, Snap, eBay, and Juniper Networks. More recently, he founded Wealthfront, the automated investment firm. It invests your money with minimal amount of work from you. Then it monitors your portfolio daily to look for opportunities to rebalance or harvest tax losses. Mixergy listeners can get their first $15K managed for free when they sign up at wealthfront.com/mixergy.

Kevin Rose talks with Elon Musk about his comics, favorite books, starting a company, and more. This is a "best of" broadcast from Kevin's Foundation series.

Imagine, for a moment, an alternative universe: One where Netflix got disrupted by some other streaming-content company that made its DVD rental business irrelevant. But that's just a counterfactual. What happened instead is that Netflix cannibalized (or rather, "hybridized") its own core business to make room for a more strategic one given where the tech was going. Given how rare it is for companies to successfully disrupt themselves like this, Reed Hastings, CEO and co-founder of Netflix, shares how they did it in this episode of the a16z Podcast (based on a conversation with Marc Andreessen that took place at our inaugural summit event). But please don't say "only the paranoid survive" -- Hastings believes business leaders need more sophisticated metaphors "to anticipate the paths, and all the judgment it takes, of deciding which competitive path to most explore". It also turns out that sourcing, managing, and supporting creative ideas and creators is not unlike the questions VCs ask themselves -- like figuring out just how much experience first-time entrepreneurs (or directors) need when creating something (like, say, "Stranger Things"). Finally, is there a "Netflix brand" or genre of content -- and if so, just how far can you stretch it so the same brand can produce something like "Orange Is the New Black" one day and then "Fuller House" the next day? Or are we entering an "era of mass customization" where we only see content suited to our interests -- dark and dystopian if that's your thing, sunny and funny if not? How is the industry ecosystem evolving; where do telcos, Silicon Valley, Hollywood fit in? All this and more in this episode.

Technology companies have become a powerful way to build the future. Our goal with this series is to share advice about how you can do it, too.

As an angel investor, as a founder, and as host of 700+ episodes of TWiST, Jason constantly receives questions from founders and superfans. Today, he answers 15 -- from how to passively support viable startups if you have a day job to best fundraising advice, from how much confidentiality founders should expect, to tips for female entrepreneurs to successfully navigate the tricky waters of owning and running a company in a male-dominated landscape. Plus, find out some of Jason’s investment strategies to choosing winners to invest in. This is only the first of two parts, so stay tuned for much more.

Ben and James discuss Mark Zuckerberg’s manifesto, the problem with regulation, and why Facebook needs exactly that.