enterprise

Today’s episode continues our coverage from a16z’s recent AI Revolution event. You’ll hear directly from a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Databricks cofounder and CEO, Ali Ghodsi as they answer questions around AI and the enterprise, plus their perspectives on open source, whether benchmarks are BS, and the scramble of universities to take part in the very wave they kicked off decades ago.

If you’d like to access all the talks from AI Revolution in full, visit a16z.com/airevolution.

Resources:

• Find Ali on Twitter: https://twitter.com/alighodsi
• Find Ben on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bhorowitz
• Check out Databricks: https://twitter.com/databricks

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Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.

In this episode from February 2019, Jyoti Bansal, founding CEO of AppDynamics and co-founder of Unusual Ventures, joins a16z general partner Peter Levine, a16z partner Sateesh Talluri, and host Sonal Choksi to discuss how product and sales evolve together for enterprise go-to-market, including key milestones for both product development and marketing, frameworks for how to think about pre- to post-product market fit, the role of additional levers like services or pricing, and more.

For the show transcript, you can go here.

In this episode from October 2019, People.AI founder and CEO Oleg Rogynskyy and a16z partner Peter Lauten discuss with Das Rush about what the rise of AI in B2B means for enterprises, workers, and startups. They explain why AI provides a strong first mover advantage to enterprises that adopt it early; how it can automate lower level tasks, maximize our focus, and, ultimately, make our work more meaningful; and for startups, they provide a playbook for seizing the next AI opportunity.

To learn more about the latest in AI, ML, data, and how enterprise are working with these technologies, go to future.com/data.

This week, we have a special crossover episode from June 2021: Joel Beasley, host of the Modern CTO podcast, interviews a16z general partner David Ulevitch about David’s journey from working at an ISP and Dot Com company mp3.com in high school; to starting, running, and selling his own enterprise security company, OpenDNS; to becoming an investor at a16z. They also discuss the value of product marketing for enterprise, David’s philosophy around pricing enterprise products how to survive and lead through hard times, new trends in startup investing, and more. 

This is part of our occasional series where we feature relevant episodes from like-minded shows on the a16z Podcast, to surface other shows you might be interested in. The Modern CTO podcast is by and for CTOs and other technical leaders at places like Microsoft, NASA, Reddit, Launch Darkly, and more, all sharing how to build strong companies and organizations. It’s hosted by Joel Beasley, CTO of Leaderbits and author of the book, The Modern CTO. Check out more episodes of this show wherever you get your podcast. 

And for more on how to grow from a technical to product to Sales CEO, check out David’s previous episode on this podcast called “What Time Is It”.

In this special “3x”-long episode of our (otherwise shortform) news analysis show 16 Minutes -- past such 2-3X explainer episodes have covered section 230, Tiktok, GPT-3, the opioid crisis, more -- we cover the SolarWinds hack, one of the largest (if not the largest!) publicly known hacks of all time... and the ripple effects are only now starting to be revealed. Just this week, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency shared (as reported in the Wall Street Journal) that approximately 30% of both private-sector and government victims linked to the hack had no direct connection to SolarWinds. So who was compromised, do they even know, can they even know?!

Because this hack is a supply-chain compromise involving various third-party software and services all connected together in a "chain of chains", the knock-on effects of it will be revealed (or not!) for years to come. So what do companies -- whether large enterprise, mid-sized startup, or small business -- do? What actually happened, and when does the timeline really begin? While first publicly revealed in December 2020 -- we first covered the news in episode #49 here when it first broke, and there have been countless headlines since (about early known government agency victims, company investigations, other tool investigations, debates over who and how and so on) -- the hack actually began not just a few months but years earlier, involving early tests, legit domains, and a very long game.

We help cut through the headline fatigue of it all, tease apart what's hype/ what's real, and do an "anatomy of a hack" step-by-step teardown -- the who, what, where, when, how; from the chess moves to technical details -- in an in-depth yet accessible way with Sonal Chokshi in conversation with a16z expert and former CSO Joel de la Garza and outside expert Steven Adair, founder and president of Volexity. The information security firm (which specializes in incident response, digital forensics/ memory analysis, network monitoring, and more) not only posted guidance for responding to such attacks, but also an analysis based on working three separate incidents involving the SolarWinds hackers. But how did they know it was the same group? And why was it not quite the perfect crime?

image: Heliophysics Systems Observatory spacecraft characterize, in the highest cadence, the constant stream of particles exploding from the sun affect Earth, the planets, and beyond via NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Flickr

There's a few ontologies for describing the phases leaders -- and their startups -- go through, whether it's product-sales-etc. or pioneer to settler. In any case, as companies evolve, so must the leaders -- but can the same person transition across all these phases? When and when not; what are the qualities, criteria, and tradeoffs to be made?

In this episode of the a16z Podcast, originally recorded as an internal hallway-style chat (pre pandemic!) a16z general partner Martin Casado, who co-founded but decided to remain CTO of Nicira -- and previously shared his own journey, lessons learned, and advice for founders about bringing in an external CEO and the question of "to CTO or not to CTO" -- and Armon Dadgar, co-founder (with Mitchell Hashimoto) and CTO of HashiCorp, chat with Sonal Chokshi about both managing their past psychology through these common questions and decisions. They also share their strategies on managing the specific tactics behind it all: Everything from the "dating" process of finding an external CEO to figuring out swim lanes; handling debates and decisions; who presents, who sells. And while the conversation is a brief glimpse into their longer personal journeys, there's lessons in it for startups and leaders of all kinds on the art of hiring and sales, managing credit and conflict, and more...

In 2014, in "Why There Will Never Be Another Red Hat," Peter Levine argued that Red Hat’s open source business model of commercializing support and services was highly difficult to replicate. Instead, he predicted the future of open source companies would be open source-as-a-service. And today SaaS has emerged as the dominant business model.

In this podcast, recorded as a hallway-style conversation as part of the a16z Innovation Summit last year, Peter chats with Red Hat CIO, Mike Kelly, about what it means to be an open source CIO today – and how even Red Hat is evolving in the open SaaS era. They cover everything from why open hybrid has become the dominant enterprise architecture to how CIOs should think about adopting new technologies to what it takes for an M&A to be successful, beyond the spreadsheets.