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16 Things

a16z.com

21–30 of 135 posts

Re: 16 Things

#21
post #3

Considering how much is happening in the 3D printing space this year, I'm surprised that it isn't on this list. It is an enabler of IoT and Crowdfunding, drones, and even the "Sensorification of the Enterprise". Cdixon even retweeted this recently: "Holograms are like print preview for 3D printing." Also where is Drones on this list?

"Also where is Drones on this list?"

I second that, that was the first missing item that popped into my head as I scanned over it.

Re: 16 Things

#22
post #21
post #3

Considering how much is happening in the 3D printing space this year, I'm surprised that it isn't on this list. It is an enabler of IoT and Crowdfunding, drones, and even the "Sensorification of the Enterprise". Cdixon even retweeted this recently: "Holograms are like print preview for 3D printing." Also where is Drones on this list?

" Also where is Drones on this list? " I second that, that was the first missing item that popped into my head as I scanned over it.

Which is weird because A16Z invested in AirWare (and they, as all VCs, love to talk to their book!)

Re: 16 Things

#23
post #19

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from…

The subscription/download orientation of podcasting is so ridiculous. With music and video you just find what you want and consume. I don't want to subscribe and I don't want to download!

Subscription is available (and popular) on YouTube for video, and the content of Podcasts is generally episodic, lending itself to a subscription model. What about this do you find to be 'so ridiculous'?

Re: 16 Things

#24
> http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/digital-health/

LOL, I love these stories, especially when featuring games like these:

> [...] Tomorrow? To understand your personal diagnostic data, you might soon depend more upon an iPhone app developed in a garage than on your local MD.

This garage theme is annoying. The fact that Jobs and Woz had a garage ruined garages... Seriously. They literally changed use in the post-jobs era. If your father owned a garage and you didn't come up with (at least) Dropbox, you're a loser!!!!

On a more serious note now.. The author seems to prefer applications written in a garage to measure things like blood glucose levels instead of machine-based lancets. If he were diabetic, I wonder, would he use an iPhone application to measure his blood glucose levels, or the MD?

Re: 16 Things

#25

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from…

I have been working over ideas recently on how to solve the problem of people podcasting in different geographic locations. I think the big problem is latency and audio quality. The audio quality one seems like it is easily solvable with local recordings on both ends adjusted for said latency.

The other thing I think would be cool is if with something like the oculus rift you could tune is and sit as the third person or at the table that it was happening at and actually look around. For example imagine sitting at the table with Charlie Rose interviewing Bill Gates.

Re: 16 Things

#26

Notably missing: drones. This is a seriously expanding new industry.

The majority of their portfolio companies are based in the US, where regulation will likely stifle the growth of commercial drones, at least during 2015.

Re: 16 Things

#27
post #20

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from…

I still think that people need to be told about the medium and often convinced why they should care. I think we'll probably start seeing more networks of podcasters that can pool their resources to produce better content, kind of like what npr has done and what http://gimletmedia.com is trying to do. I'm not really convinced that podcasts will be able to be entirely supported through ads in the future so I think ther…

It would certainly make sense for Soundcloud to leverage their position beyond the hosting standpoint yeah. I wonder what are their thoughts on this manner.

Re: 16 Things

#28
Their "Security" section is a bit naive. The questions it poses go all the way back to the 1990s. If the Jericho Forum had started a VC fund, this page would be their investment thesis. The 2000s saw a wave of companies try to capitalize on "deperimiterization", some with huge capex requirements (one NAC startup had designed and contract fabbed their own MIPS core). They all flopped.

Maybe it's true that firewalls are less effective in 2015 than they were in 1998. The problem is: customers don't buy on effectiveness, they buy on cost-benefit. Firewall effectiveness can drop by 90% and they will still have a better cost-benefit than the alternatives. There's a reason for that: firewalls are the most straightforward network implementation of Saltzer & Schroeder's principles, and those principles are probably Right. Everywhere. In code. On the network. In identity and access management.

Why is 2015 different? "The cloud"? If "the cloud" is what's changed, that should be the thesis: we need security solutions for the cloud. Unfortunately, that is also a tired thesis.

Similarly: the shift from prevention to recovery seems like a manifestation of the narrative bias. Sure, there are lots of newsworthy cleanups, and one very successful consulting- to- product- to- consulting pivot company in that space. But customers don't derive the same value from recovery as from prevention. The dirty secret of "recovery" work --- forensics, attribution, &c --- is that it's driven largely by legal compliance concerns, and probably doesn't have a great intrinsic ROI.

Maybe there's an opportunity for a "full stack" vertically integrated insurer informed by a compliance and forensics practice.

There are markets that seem to work the way VCs want security to work. For instance, mobile happens, and all the sudden you can build and 10+x a company that just does for mobile apps what Google Analytics does for web pages. Security just doesn't get valued by customers that way.

Also: "if you fight fire with fire, you're just going to get burned"... what does that even mean? P(burn|fighting-with-fire) ≥ P(burn|fighting-without-fire).

Re: 16 Things

#29
post #19

In the 'Online Video' section he calls out podcasts as an emerging/trending medium. I'd love to hear more about where people in HN community feel it's moving. Of course there's the obvious Serial momentum, and as a passionate consumer of podcasts I'd love to think through with you guys a little more where we think it'll go. For example a YouTube-like podcast portal seems like a potential option (i.e. moving away from…

The subscription/download orientation of podcasting is so ridiculous. With music and video you just find what you want and consume. I don't want to subscribe and I don't want to download!

Yeah I agree, it's sort of the 'early adopter' version of where it'll be in a few years hopefully. That said because it's sort of a different medium model, I can see why this is hard to change or move past.

Re: 16 Things

#30
post #5

For instance, the cost of an endpoint CPU and memory is a 1000x cheaper than the cost of CPU and memory in the server. [1] What do they mean? How was that calculated? It sounds completely wrong. [1] http://a16z.com/2015/01/22/cloud-client-computing/

If you make people bag their own groceries, it's 1000x cheaper to the grocery store.

More like, if you make your employees buy their own computers, the company saves lots of money!
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