The a16z Show

It was illegal to fly autonomously in U.S. airspace when Keller Cliffton started Zipline, so the company went somewhere that would let it prove the technology worked: Rwanda. A decade later, Zipline has made more than 3 million deliveries and is bringing its autonomous delivery network to the U.S. Keller joins Sophia Dew on The Method to explain why Zipline started by delivering blood to hospitals, how operating in the real world shaped the company, and why almost everything has to be reinvented every time the business grows 10x. They also discuss Zipline’s expansion into U.S. home delivery, how the company organizes teams more like special forces than a traditional hierarchy, and why Keller believes demand could eventually reach 50 billion instant deliveries a year in the U.S.

James Gleick — acclaimed science writer and bestselling author of Chaos: Making a New Science as well as biographies on polymaths Isaac Newton and Richard Feynman — joins Sonal Chokshi and Robert Hackett to discuss his new book, The Telephone: A New History. It is a story of a device — who really invented it, how? — of a network, of a lab, and of how innovation happens. The telephone was dismissed as a toy or a frivolity — at best, something people could use to listen to concerts or sermons from home. Even with a working invention, everyone was still trying to figure out what a telephone was for, using the framework of what they already knew. Then its users started finding their own answers. Farmers built their own decentralized networks using barbed-wire fences — the “devil’s rope” — and, over time, research at a company built around phone calls helped lay the foundations of modern computing. This conversation explores the nuances of building at the frontier: competing inventors, the experiments, the “scenius of genius.” Why did established businesses underestimate it? Did the telephone network have to become a monopoly? What made Bell Labs so productive? And how a single invention could set off a technology revolution?

AI isn’t just helping defenders find vulnerabilities. It’s giving attackers the speed and expertise to exploit them faster than many companies can respond. Wiz co-founder and CTO Ami Luttwak joins a16z General Partners Zane Lackey and Sarah Wang to unpack what he calls “Black October,” a wave of vulnerabilities and agentic attacks that he believes marks a turning point for cybersecurity. They break down PHP2Shell, why AI is collapsing the time between vulnerability discovery and exploitation, and what happens when open-source models put increasingly sophisticated offensive capabilities in more hands. Ami explains why startups are becoming attractive targets, particularly when they hold valuable AI credentials, and why yesterday’s secure architecture may no longer be secure as models improve. The conversation then turns to defense. Ami argues that companies need to continuously attack their own systems, automate investigation and patching wherever possible, design infrastructure assuming sophisticated attackers will get in, and rethink security stacks built for a slower era. His warning is simple: if attackers can move in minutes, defenders can no longer operate on human timelines.

AI is collapsing the distance between an idea and a playable game. What happens when almost anyone can build one? In this episode, a16z General Partners Anish Acharya and Jonathan Lai discuss how AI is changing game development, from generating art and code to operating tools like Blender and game engines directly. They explain why cheaper development could let studios take more creative risks while opening game creation to people without traditional coding or design skills. They also explore modding, remixing existing games, and the emergence of AI-native experiences that generate characters, abilities, and storylines on the fly, potentially creating games that never really end.

The internet boom built bandwidth. The AI boom is building intelligence. Mike Volpi, who helped shape Cisco’s strategy during the internet buildout, asks what that era can teach us about this one. Mike joins a16z’s Raghu Raghuram and Guido Appenzeller to compare today’s investment in GPUs, data centers, and power with the fiber boom of the late 1990s, and explain why the infrastructure could prove valuable even if the market corrects. They also discuss NVIDIA, custom silicon, networking, and the changing economics of GPUs, plus lessons from Cisco’s acquisition machine. And Mike explains why he thinks this technology cycle could be even more consequential than the last.