VC's & Angels

Investing to make a return both financial AND societal isn't new, but the opportunities to reach and build businesses in communities that have been underserved by tech are larger than ever. One example is the business opportunity presented by hairstylist platform Mayvenn, which a16z recently backed. 

In this segment of the a16z Podcast, Kesha Cash (founder and general partner of the Impact America Fund, also an investor in Mayvenn) discusses how she puts her fund’s money to work in markets that target underserved Americans. Cash is joined by a16z’s Tawny Holguin (who leads our seed and early scouting efforts) to breakdown the intricacies -- and opportunities -- of so-called “impact investing.” Do core business principles change at all? But then how does impact get measured? And what happens when you connect more communities to tech?

a16z Podcast: Investing in Communities

One of the most active and fastest growing open source big data cluster computing projects is Apache Spark, which was originally developed at U.C. Berkeley's AMPLab and is now used by internet giants and other companies around the world. Including, as announced most recently, IBM. 

In this Q&A with Spark inventor Matei Zaharia -- also the CTO and co-founder of Databricks (and a professor at MIT) -- on the heels of the recent Spark Summit, we cover the difference between Hadoop MapReduce and Spark; what are the ingredients of a successful open source project; and the story of how Spark almost helped a friend win a million dollars.

a16z Podcast: A Conversation With the Inventor of Spark

The pod continues its U.K. road trip, meeting up with three startup founders -- including one startup accelerator programme -- to discuss the entrepreneurial ecosystem in London and more broadly the U.K. and Europe. 

Let’s be clear upfront: London is not the center of the universe when it comes to technology. But the diversity of industries and thinking in the British capital brings with it advantages when starting a tech company, say our guests on this segment of the podcast, which includes Michelle You, co-founder of Songkick; co-founder of Lifecake, and former Skype engineer Nick Babaian; and Matt Clifford, co-founder of London-based accelerator Entrepreneur First. 

So what does it take to build flourishing startup communities?

a16z Podcast: Building Tech Startups in a Place Where Tech Isn’t Everything

Our final segment from the road in the U.K. features two well-known investors and entrepreneurs in the London tech world: Seedcamp co-founder Reshma Sahoni and Shakil Khan (known to all simply as Shak), the founder of CoinDesk and an early investor in Spotify where he also headed up special projects.

Reshma and Shak break down the venture scene in London, and describe the particular way the best companies scale in Europe ... it's not what you are probably thinking. Finally, they brag about some European startups we should all be paying attention to.

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VC's & Angels

Monty