Future

27/09/2022

Organizations that let their SaaS appetites grow unchecked face three major risks:

Costs: With remote work becoming the standard, we’ve seen software become the second biggest expense line for many companies. However, up to 25% of SaaS apps and licenses go unused. If your company’s top two expenses are people and technology, you’re wasting a bunch of money on one of your top expenses.

Compliance risks: Think of your company and its data as a castle. You need to prove to auditors that it’s well protected. Now, picture every app as a window, doorway, bridge, or entry point to your castle. The more apps, the more scrutiny you’ll receive from auditors.

Operational efficiency: Your team is certainly not collaborating well when they use multiple types of the same app, such as Monday, Jira, Asana, or ClickUp. And internal support tickets grow exponentially with the number of apps used.

Nevertheless, writes Lumos co-founder & CEO Andrej Safundzic, many of the apps your company uses actually are the ingredients for building a great product. After all, building a technology company is complicated. And to do it effectively you need the right components and tools. However, the trick to taking advantage of them is to think about how to masterfully manage all your software.

Here's how to unlock your company’s full potential through technology by changing the priorities of IT, security, and procurement — the teams that generally care about software operations. Instead of making them fix problems (e.g. resolving IT tickets), help them create infrastructure that empowers employees to operate software themselves and to become a self-governed workforce. 👇

Lumos CEO Andrej Safundizc explains why companies that use software wisely have a competitive advantage over those that blindly consume it.

01/09/2022

Far too many products still fail because there’s simply no demand for them. How does that happen? Or, how do so many startups launch entire businesses without realizing users didn’t need their products?

By overlooking user research.

Every tech company has to build and ship new products to continue growing. And, whether there are 10 users or 10 million users, the key to building successful products is understanding who the users are and what they want. User research is the unsung hero of determining a product’s viability and the secret ingredient to its success.

Most founders and product teams already know research is important and impactful, but not all product teams understand how to prioritize user research in the early stages of company building (especially given the breakneck pace of a startup) or how to evolve a research function as a company grows.

Sprig founder & CEO Ryan Glasgow provides a blueprint for investment in research at every stage, so teams can focus work on the right products and features, and build them with their users in mind.

Sprig founder and CEO Ryan Glasgow explains why the key to building successful products is understanding your users and what they want.

31/08/2022

There are times in the startup lifecycle when the stakes are much higher than usual. In these instances, a goal requires even more focus, ex*****on, and clarity. All of these can be achieved through a framework Anchor cofounder Michael Mignano has come to call "SuperGoals."

A SuperGoal is a high stakes, focusing goal for a team. It has a clear and urgent timeframe, an open-ended method of achievement, and a single measure of success that everyone can understand.

SuperGoals unlock exceptional outcomes for teams when the stakes are highest. They supersede everything else by uniting colleagues with a shared sense of urgency while unleashing creativity and reinforcing clarity needed to bring them closer to the desired goal.

Few goal-setting frameworks deliver the singularity of SuperGoals — you only get one, it’s not aspirational, and it must be accomplished.

Mignano shares his framework for setting and executing on SuperGoals, along with real life examples of how he's used them.

When your back's against the wall, you need a SuperGoal: a high stakes, focusing goal that instills a sense of urgency and clarity.

30/08/2022

New models for synthetic embryos have recently emerged, but bioengineers aren’t growing humans now.

In this interview, CalTech and Cambridge professor Magdalena Zernicka-Goetz and Future editor Nicole Neumann discuss recent advances in technologies that allow us to use stem cells to create embryo-like structures with a brain and even a beating heart in a dish.

They explore how these ‘synthetic’ embryos are built and the limits of their similarity to natural embryos grown from fertilized eggs. Zernicka-Goetz also explains how they can help us understand why pregnancies fail, how to build organs from scratch, and even how to rejuvenate aging bodies.

But first, she reveals the key insight that has allowed us to grow these embryo models in a dish longer than ever before: that the cells that will make up the body cannot do it alone.

Caltech Professor Magda Zernicka-Goetz explains recent progress in building 'synthetic' embryos from stem cells and their applications.

29/08/2022

Compared with many startups, 37signals cofounder Jason Fried’s views around workplace culture, structure, and strategy could be considered subversive. He’d call them “honest,” a word he uses often when describing his leadership style. The outspoken maker of Basecamp and HEY has cultivated a reputation as a tech industry contrarian over the past two decades with his “in-the-moment” approach to company management and his commitment to profitability over growth. (“Growth at all costs is an anathema to us,” he says.) Over the years, some of his stances have earned praise — a shunning of overtime and an embrace of the four-day workweek, for example. Others, like his aversion to targeted advertising (“ethically wrong”) and his decision to deter political talk at work, have prompted raised eyebrows and Twitter pile-ons.

Fried talks with Future editor Lauren Murrow about his conviction in short-term thinking, his framework for startup longevity, and the number one thing he looks for when recruiting and hiring remote workers.

The Basecamp and HEY cofounder discusses the power of short-term thinking, his framework for startup longevity, and the key thing he looks for when hiring remote.

26/08/2022

Introducing Future's Web3 Water Cooler — a Slack chat about a trending topic in crypto moderated by editor Jeff Benson

This week, Orca Protocol’s Chase Chapman, Austin Hurwitz of Venice Music, and IP lawyer Nuzayra Haque-Shah discuss the intellectual property frameworks surrounding NFTs.

They tackle the current legal landscape, community confusion about commercial rights, creative control, and aligning with web3 ownership. Plus, examples of innovation and five key takeaways for builders.

A Slack chat to talk about CC0, commercial rights for NFTs, and the future of intellectual property in web3.

25/08/2022

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?

The term “data room” is a holdover from the 1900s, when companies used to print physical documents and present them in secure rooms for investors and other prospective partners to review. Today, data rooms are virtual — but they’re still an important part of the diligence process.

Justine Moore on the a16z consumer investment team explains what founders need to know about building their data room, including what the specific metrics that investors are hoping to see, the documents you don’t need, and red flags to look out for.

Examining a startup's virtual data room is an important part of investors' diligence process. Here's what data to include and what to leave out.

23/08/2022

Jeff Bezos famously said, “Your margin is my opportunity.” Now, writes Chris Herd, your office is your competitor’s opportunity, and any company that’s less remote than its biggest competitor risks losing its most talented people to that business.

In the same way e-commerce has decimated many physical stores, he believes remote companies will crush office-based companies

The combination of portable computing, great communication and collaboration software, and the internet has empowered new ways of working and living to emerge. In the face of this, companies that don’t adapt will bleed talent to their competition, and companies that embrace remote work will replace companies that don’t.

Chris explains why he believes it’s a movement that won’t be undone.

Forty percent of workers are considering quitting. Management that opts for empty arguments to force people back in-office will bleed talent to their competition.

18/08/2022

Why don’t we have a DALL-E or GPT-3 for science? The reason is that although scientific research is the world’s most valuable content, it is also the world’s least accessible and understandable content.

There are no generative AI models trained on the vast body of scientific research publications. If there were, getting evidence-backed, plain-language answers to scientific questions would be among the simplest benefits. Generative AI for science could help reverse the deceleration of innovation in science by making it easier and cheaper to find new ideas. Such models could also provide data-backed warnings of therapeutic hypotheses that are certain to fail, counterbalancing human bias and avoiding billion-dollar, decades-long blind alleys.

Josh Nicholson, co-founder and CEO of scite, explains what it would take to unlock scientific data at scale to make generative AI for science possible, and how it would transform the way we engage with research.

A GPT-3-like AI model for science would accelerate innovation and improve reproducibility. Creating it will require us to unlock research.

11/08/2022

Dirk Ho**ig, the co-founder and CEO of Commercetools, explains “headless commerce” and why this API-centric architecture (often built atop cloud infrastructure and microservices) is especially important in the world of online retail and digital transactions.

Plus, his insights into where we’ll see the next wave of innovation in commerce, including AI, AR devices, and machine-to-machine in B2B transactions.

Commercetools CEO Dirk Ho**ig explains headless commerce and microservices, and why we'll see innovation in AR, in-car, and B2B commerce.

10/08/2022

You used to put side projects on a CV to land a career in tech. Now, side projects can be your career in tech.

A random game about flying a small yellow bird between Super Mario pipes exploded into Flappy Bird, netting $50K a day. A dev built Wordle for his GF, it sold to the NY Times for over $1M.

How did this happen?

Ben Stokes calls it gambling at the side-project casino.

Building internet projects is like gambling because the excitement before you launch your next idea is addictive; you just don’t know what will happen.

With no-code resources and tools like Stripe, it’s easier than ever to write and deploy a project.

The effort put into an internet project is often detached from its results. Embracing this randomness in practice simply means launching more projects.

A site like Product Hunt allows you to get an idea on Monday and launch it to thousands of people by Friday.

Whether it’s the desire to create, learn, or get rich, there’s a fundamental change happening with how developers view their projects.

Here's why developers are building so many side projects: https://bit.ly/3SIlErY

04/08/2022

Neuroscience and AI have a long, intertwined history. Artificial intelligence pioneers looked to the principles of the organization of the brain as inspiration to make intelligent machines. In a surprising reversal, AI is now helping us understand its very source of inspiration: the human brain. This approach of using AI to build models of the brain is referred to as neuroAI. Over the next decade, we’ll make ever more precise in silico brain models, especially models of our two most prominent senses, vision and hearing. As a result, we’ll be able to download and use sensory models, on demand, with the same convenience that we can do object recognition or natural language processing.

Patrick Mineault, a neurotechnologist and founder of xcorr neuroAI consulting, predicts that neuroAI will first find widespread use in art and advertising, especially when connected to new generative AI models like GPT-3 and DALL-E. While current generative AI models can produce creative art and media, they can’t tell you if that media will ultimately communicate a message to the intended audience — but neuroAI could.

In this piece, Patrick explains what neuroAI is, how it might start to evolve and start to impact our lives, how it complements other innovations and technologies, and what is needed to push it forward.

AI-created models of the brain will enhance art, advertising, and health by predicting how our minds will respond to images and sounds.

03/08/2022

The widespread adoption of AI tools like Jasper and CopyAI is sparking new questions: How do AI copywriters stack up against human writers? How is the increased use of AI writing tools impacting SEO and search results? And most importantly for companies and creators, how can you intelligently use this AI revolution to your advantage?

Chris Tweten, CMO at Spacebar Collective, writes about a future in which AI copywriting tools will dramatically increase the productivity and, eventually, quality of copywriters — but where the rise of such tools will also heighten demand for skilled human writers and editors.

GPT-3 is a neural network machine learning model used to generate text. Chris Tweten explores how AI copywriters compare to humans and their potential to change SEO.

02/08/2022

Sam Lambert, CEO of PlanetScale and previously VP of engineering at GitHub, sat down with Future editor Derrick Harris to discuss a number of topics related to cloud native software-delivery models, including what good serverless looks like, who should run Kubernetes, and the emergence of “cloud-prem” — a deployment model that combines the strengths of on-prem software and SaaS offerings. He also shares his experience becoming a non-founder CEO, and his advice on when and how to make the move from engineering to management.

Sam Lambert is CEO of PlanetScale, a MySQL-compatiable serverless database provider. Prior to joining PlanetScale (then as chief product officer), he was VP of engineering at GitHub. In this interview, Lambert discusses a number of topics related to cloud native software-delivery models, including w...

29/07/2022

Ethereum’s biggest-ever upgrade — the move to a proof-of-stake consensus mechanism — is right around the corner. But while The Merge should add security and sustainability, it doesn’t include sharding, the long-anticipated method of scaling the network.

In Part II of our conversation with Ethereum Foundation researcher Danny Ryan, he talks about upgrades users can expect in the future, including danksharding, stateless Ethereum, and security updates that grapple with the rise of miner extractable value (MEV). He also explains how this years-long effort resulted in new methods for researching and testing future upgrades.

Danny Ryan details the path forward for scalability, explains the possibility of stateless Ethereum, and shares lessons learned from testing.

27/07/2022

After years of research, development and testing, Ethereum will transition from proof of work to proof of stake in the coming months. Instead of “miners” using computational energy to process transactions, “validators” will lock up, or stake, their assets in the network in return for ETH rewards. The upshot is increased security and a much smaller environmental footprint for the decentralized network.

Danny Ryan is an Ethereum Foundation (EF) researcher helping to coordinate the network upgrade, known as the Merge. It’s part of a larger constellation of upgrades, once referred to as Ethereum 2.0, aimed at making the network more secure, sustainable and scalable.

Ryan joined Future to talk about the Merge. In Part I of our conversation, he explains the decision to temporarily prioritize security and sustainability over scalability, how the upgrade enables liquid stakers and other emerging actors, and why Ethereum doesn’t take a day off.

The Ethereum Foundation's Danny Ryan discusses how the Merge will increase security and explains how proof of stake impacts developers.

26/07/2022

How to connect the new cloud-native world to existing enterprise requirements 👇

Thomas Graf, co-founder and CTO of Isovalent and creator of a popular open source (and cloud native) networking technology called Cilium, talks with Future about the roles that Cilium and eBPF play in the growing cloud-native networking ecosystem, as well some broader trends around Kubernetes adoption and evolution. He explains who’s using and buying Kubernetes within large enterprises, where cloud native infrastructure still needs to improve, and how the desire for standardization is driving innovation.

Isovalent co-founder and Cilium creator Thomas Graf discusses the state of cloud native networking and where the future of enterprise Kubernetes lies.

21/07/2022

Jeremy Howard, artificial intelligence researcher and co-founder of fast-dot-ai, discusses what it means for different industries and even global regions now that people without PhDs from specialized research labs can build and work with deep learning models. He shares his thoughts on how to best keep up with state-of-the-art techniques, prompt engineering as a new skill set, and the pros and cons of code-generation systems like Codex.

18/07/2022

Most of the world’s leading consumer marketplaces looked like completely different businesses at their inception. Amazon was famously an online bookseller, while Uber started as a black car service. DoorDash launched as “Palo Alto Delivery” (reflecting its narrow geographic range), while Booking exclusively helped travelers find hotels in the Netherlands.

This type of focused launch makes sense — it allows a marketplace to start building network density and find product-market fit. But as things start to work, most marketplace companies feel pressure to grow. Marketplace operators have to make choices about how to use their limited resources: do they further pe*****te their existing market or try to expand into something new?

Justine Moore and John Koelliker talked to over a dozen marketplace operators from companies like Instacart, Depop and Airbnb and synthesized their learnings on when, where, and how to expand into new geographies and verticals.

Takeaways from 30 successful marketplaces—including Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, and Instacart—on when, where, and how to grow.

15/07/2022

MIT professor Rick Young, a16z Bio + Health general partner Jorge Conde, and Bio Eats World’s (and Substack’s head of writer development) Hanne Winarsky discuss what we’ve learned about the 98% of the genome we thought was junk — from hiding the evidence of ancient viral infections to making every face look unique, and how studying non-coding DNA led to the discovery of a gene on/off switch that no one expected.

Non-coding or 'junk' DNA is 98% of the genome. MIT Professor Rick Young explains how we're finally starting to understand what it does.

12/07/2022

Sales enablement — the strategic use of people, processes, and technology to improve sales productivity and increase revenue — is the (usually) missing key for sales organizations that want to evolve beyond a handful of overachievers and into a well-oiled, agile, and high-performing commercial machine. Along with go-to-market — how an organization engages with customers to convince them to buy its product or service — sales enablement plays a critical role in how commercially agile a company is. However, between the two functions, it is GTM that is most covered in business literature and thought leadership articles, leaving sales enablement under-studied and most companies confused on how to even start building this muscle, what skills to look for in the talent market, and where to place it in their organizational structure.

With that in mind, Vassilis Tziokas, the Sales Strategy & Enablement Lead at Microsoft, shares some thoughts on how companies can build a solid sales enablement strategy that will elevate their GTM strategies and accelerate their sales engines.

Sales enablement — the use of people, processes, and tech to improve sales productivity — is key for a well-oiled, agile, and high-performing sales machine.

07/07/2022

Jennifer Doudna won the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for her co-discovery of CRISPR/Cas9, a versatile genome editing platform. In the decade since its discovery the toolbox of CRISPR technologies has exploded, acting like rocket fuel for curiosity-driven science. It is also increasingly a foundational technology for many biotech companies.

In this conversation, Doudna chats with a16z general partner Vijay Pande. Previously, he was a Professor at Stanford University, where he directed the Biophysics department. During his time there he also founded the Folding@Home Project and Globavir Biosciences.

Pande and Doudna grapple with questions facing scientists at this inflection point. How do you recognize a discovery that will open further opportunities to engineer biology? What will happen as CRISPR tools mature? What does a biologically engineered future look like, and what responsibility do scientists have to ensure these tools are used responsibly?

Along the way, Doudna touches on what she’s struggling with, what surprised her, and what may never be engineerable.

A Q&A with Jennifer Doudna. Inside: recognizing CRISPR-level tools to engineer biology, what she struggles with, and what may never be engineerable.

06/07/2022

The world of artificial intelligence and machine learning moves very fast. So fast, in fact, that it’s remarkable to think that it was only a decade ago when the AlexNet model dominated the ImageNet competition and kicked off the process that made deep learning a bona fide technology movement. Today, after years of headlines about game-playing, we see ever-increasing innovation that applies to the real world.

In the last couple of years alone, AI/ML models like GPT-3 and AlphaFold delivered capabilities that catalyzed new products and companies, and that stretched our understanding of what computers can do.

With that in mind, we thought we’d revisit our AI/ML coverage in Future over the first half of the year, as well as catch you up on some — but certainly not all — of the major industry developments during that time. As you’ll see, some combination of large language models, generative models, and foundation models are a major source of attention, and we’re just skimming the surface in terms of understanding what they can do and how the world outside of large research labs can utilize their power.

A recap of artificial intelligence and machine learning coverage in Future so far in 2022, as well as the biggest advances in AI/ML research.

05/07/2022

Thomas Dimson, who built Instagram's first content ranking system, remains confident that algorithmic ranking is the best choice for social media platforms, but knows that it is not without downsides. To name a few: increased platform control over content distribution, opaque operating criteria, risks of promoting harmful content, and general user frustration. Those downsides recently led Twitter’s potential future owner, Elon Musk, to call for “open sourcing the algorithm.”

Given how little open sourcing a machine-learning model tells us about its effects, this idea may be overly simplistic, argues Dimson. But the call for transparency is valid, and he believes it can begin with disclosure into experiments similar to the one he led at Instagram.

In this article, Thomas provides a starting point for thinking about transparency in the context of modern ranking systems. He discusses why experimentation is both essential in algorithmic ranking and a better focus in future efforts to demystify content distribution on social media.

What would meaningful transparency mean for social media platforms? The author of Instagram's original ranking algorithm lays out a vision.

22/06/2022

Daphne Koller, founder and CEO of insitro, joins Future editor Nicole Neuman for a Q&A to discuss making the successful transition from academia to industry, and how to build a company culture that fosters cross-functional collaboration.

Plus, she breaks down the challenges with creating accurate machine learning models from biomedical data, and examines the success of AlphaFold, why it happened now, and whether we can expect to see similar advancements in other areas of bio machine learning.

AI expert Daphne Koller of insitro identifies what we'll need for future AlphaFold-level successes and explains why some fail the academia-to-biotech transition.

15/06/2022

How to successfully pull off the "acquihire."

Peter Blackwood and Tina Ferguson share advice they have compiled over the course of years assisting portfolio companies in evaluating and executing on these strategic opportunities.

They address several key facets to a successful acquihire transaction, including:
✅ How to think about defining your priorities.
✅ How to diligence the opportunity.
✅ How to think about deal structure considerations.
✅ How to properly integrate the newly hired individuals into your existing organization.

Advice from a16z experts on figuring out whether an acquihire makes sense and, if so, how to successfully pull it off — from due diligence to deal close.

10/06/2022

Securing the software supply chain means putting more onus on devs but, as Kim Lewandowski, co-founder and head of product at security startup Chainguard, explains, it’s important to “find that balance between making things more secure and not pi***ng everyone off.”

In this interview with Future editor Derrick Harris, Kim discusses the concept of a secure software supply chain and why the idea has caught on so strongly over the past few years. She also addresses the challenges that come with trying to balance developer productivity against the need to vet open source components, and the need for large enterprises to support the open source the open-source tools they use in the name of security and project sustainability.

Chainguard's Kim Lewandowski explains why secure software supply chains are all the rage right now, and why open source is a double-edged security sword.

06/06/2022

Info Diet offers a peek into the personally curated feeds and media habits of the people shaping the future. In each installment, a different builder spends two days chronicling all the content they consume in order to stay ahead of the curve.

This time: Michelle Kennedy, founder and CEO of Peanut App, an online community to connect women throughout all stages of womanhood. Michelle lives in London, where she launched Peanut five years ago.

The London-based entrepreneur gets her daily fix of venture news, reads up on motherhood narratives, and winds down with sleep stories.

03/06/2022

Most startups building emerging technology still struggle to work with the Defense Department, argues Jeff Decker, program director of the Hacking for Defense Project at Stanford University’s Precourt Institute of Energy. These companies would do well to spend the summer reading comic books — Iron Man, specifically — and absorbing some of the lessons.

The Iron Man model: giving the Pentagon what it needs, not what it wants.

In order to create Iron Man-like innovations, defense tech startups must optimally engage the Pentagon instead of treating it as just another customer.

24/05/2022

Establishing trustworthiness early is a fundamental part of the interview process. Nothing else matters if you don’t think you can trust someone. Hopefully, you’ll build trust by way of multiple interviews, references, working sessions, etc. — but how can you get comfortable with someone you are meeting for the first time in the interview process, and vice versa?

To this end, one fundamental error hiring managers make is being so focused on assessing candidates’ skills that they forget the importance of building trust early in the very first meeting. Often the pushback is, “I’ll build trust once I know I want someone for this role.” Jeff Stump, who leads a16z’s talent network, suggests doing the opposite: Build trust whether or not you see that candidate in the role.

Here’s how to build trust in an initial interview ⬇️

a16z talent partner Jeff Stump shares his beliefs on the importance of trust and integrity, and how to determine whether job candidates have them.