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a16z Frontier show

a16z crypto, Robert Hackett, Sonal Chokshi

The a16z Frontier show explores how unlikely ideas become technologies that change the world. We cover AI, crypto, biology, robotics, and new computing devices — with an eye toward the products, networks, and industries they could make possible.

Each episode features conversations with founders, researchers, scientists, engineers, economists, and other thinkers working at the frontier. From networks of intelligent agents to programmable money and autonomous machines, we examine what’s working, what remains unsolved, and what it takes for an experiment to become something people use every day.

Produced and hosted by the a16z Frontier team, the show combines reporting, analysis, and first-principles thinking with lessons from the history of science and technology. We explore how breakthroughs happen, how new markets emerge, and how people turn ideas that once seemed far-fetched into things we can’t imagine living without.

Learn more at a16zfrontier.com.

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Posts should not be considered investment advice or an advertisement for investment services. Reposts of third-party content are not attributable to a16z; see disclosures for more information: https://a16z.com/disclosures/.

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  • 25 episodes
  • Avg 50 min
  • English

Episodes 25

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  • #137
    Friday · 1 hr 1 min

    The first network effect was a phone call (ft. James Gleick)

    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.

  • #131
    August 13 · 1 hr 15 min

    The 'Useless' Theory Behind Modern SNARKs (ft. Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan)

    More than 30 years ago, Gödel Prize Winner Noam Nisan helped develop a proof technique that he never expected anyone to use in the real world. At the center of that breakthrough was the sum-check protocol — an elegant technique that emerged from Noam Nisan’s early work on interactive proofs. At the time, even Nisan assumed ideas like these were far too theoretical to become practical technology. Today, sum-check sits at the heart of some of the fastest modern SNARKs, proof systems that are inc

  • #129
    August 10 · 57 min

    How Zero-Knowledge Proofs Were Invented (ft. Co-Inventor and Turing Award Winner Shafi Goldwasser)

    How can you prove that something is true without revealing why it is true? What began as an attempt to solve a seemingly playful problem — playing poker securely over the telephone — ultimately changed how computer scientists think about proofs, privacy, and verification. In this episode of First Principles, Turing Award–winning cryptographer Shafi Goldwasser joins a16z crypto Head of Research Tim Roughgarden and Research Partner Justin Thaler to tell the origin story of zero-knowledge proofs

  • #130
    August 1 · 58 min

    Marc Andreessen and Chris Dixon: Why America Needs CLARITY

    a16z Cofounder and General Partner Marc Andreessen and a16z crypto Founder and Managing Partner Chris Dixon on why the CLARITY Act matters. Congress is debating once-in-a-generation market structure legislation that could determine where financial and internet infrastructure gets built. Chris and Marc join host Robert Hackett to discuss why regulatory clarity matters, what the current policy environment has cost the United States, and what is at stake for developers, entrepreneurs, consumers,

  • #127
    July 27 · 58 min

    How AI is Changing the Way We Build Companies (ft. Guy Wuollet and Noah Citron)

    For the first time, companies can treat AI token spending almost like headcount: allocate more money, deploy more intelligence, and potentially get more work done. That shift could change much more than engineering productivity. It could reshape how companies form, how teams are managed, how businesses are financed, and who is best positioned to build them. In this episode, a16z crypto General Partner Guy Wuollet and Head of Engineering Noah Citron join host Robert Hackett to explore the econo

  • #126
    July 24 · 54 min

    The Story Behind RSA: The Invention That Secured the Internet (ft. Turing Award Winner Ron Rivest)

    Before the internet could become a place to bank or transact, it needed a way for strangers to know who they were talking to, and whether a message could be trusted. Turing Award winners Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard Adleman helped invent it. In this episode of First Principles, Rivest tells the story of how they developed RSA, the first practical public-key cryptosystem. Their breakthrough made it possible to encrypt information, verify identities, and authenticate messages across an op

  • #123
    July 14 · 1 hr 25 min

    Why markets fail — and how to fix them (ft. Nobel economist Alvin Roth)

    Long before crypto made coordination programmable, Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth was designing markets where coordination could save lives. In this episode of First Principles, Roth tells the story of how he helped build systems for some of the hardest matching problems in the world, from where doctors train and where students go to school to how kidney donors can reach the patients who need them.

  • #122
    June 25 · 36 min

    Leslie Lamport on the Science of Distributed Systems

    Before blockchains could reach consensus, Leslie Lamport had to define what agreement even meant when computers fail, lie, or disappear. In this episode of First Principles: The Scientific Roots of Blockchain Technology, Turing Award-winning computer scientist Leslie Lamport joins Tim Roughgarden Head of Research at a16z crypto and Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University, and a16z crypto Research Partner Ittai Abraham to trace the ideas that helped define modern distributed comput

  • #121
    June 22 · 35 min

    Before Blockchains, There Was State Machine Replication (ft. Barbara Liskov and Tim Roughgarden)

    Every blockchain today leans on replication ideas worked out in the 1980s, by a Turing Award winner who wasn’t thinking about how it might apply to money at all. In this episode of First Principles, a16z crypto Head of Research and Columbia professor Tim Roughgarden speaks with Barbara Liskov, MIT professor, Turing Award winner, and one of the most influential computer scientists in programming languages, data abstraction, fault tolerance, and distributed computing. a16z crypto research partne

  • #120
    June 22 · 20 min

    How Bitcoin Rewired a Classic Computer Science Problem (ft. Tim Roughgarden and Ittai Abraham)

    Bitcoin often gets credited with inventing trustless consensus. It didn’t. The problem was named decades earlier — in the world of distributed computing — and researchers spent years studying how machines could reach agreement even when some participants were faulty, adversarial, or corrupt. What Bitcoin did was something different: It solved a classic Byzantine agreement problem in a radically new, permissionless setting. And it took the research world years to fully recognize what Satoshi ha

  • #116
    May 13 · 35 min

    The Real Reason Behind Most DeFi Hacks

    Following major DeFi exploits, a16z crypto GP Eddy Lazzarin and security engineer Matt Gleason break down the recent surge in crypto hacks. Their argument: AI isn't creating new vulnerabilities—it's making existing ones easier to exploit. They explore whether defenders can evolve as fast as attackers, the role of geopolitics in cyber activity, and what users can do to stay safe online.

  • #115
    May 5 · 1 hr

    We Raised $2.2B. Here’s Why.

    a16z crypto is announcing Fund 5: $2.2B to back the founders building the next era of crypto. All four GPs — Chris Dixon, Ali Yahya, Guy Wuollet, and Eddy Lazzarin — join Robert Hackett to discuss why now, what's changed, and where it's all headed: from regulatory clarity and stablecoins, to AI agents, programmable money, and the infrastructure defining crypto's next chapter.

  • #114
    April 27 · 57 min

    The end of ads? AI agents are about to change how we buy

    Agents can now browse, decide, and buy on your behalf. So what happens to the internet's business model? Sam Ragsdale (founder & CEO of Merit Systems) joins a16z crypto's Eddy Lazzarin, Noah Levine, and Robert Hackett to unpack the open agentic commerce stack — from the headless merchant thesis to stablecoins vs. credit cards, and why the web's economic contract is quietly breaking.

  • #113
    April 22 · 17 min

    Why AI is so centralized: How it's built, who controls it, and what comes next

    Gensyn cofounders Ben Fielding and Harry Grieve join us to discuss why AI’s infrastructure problem runs deeper than most people think. They explain how today’s AI ecosystem depends on a highly centralized stack of data and compute, why that matters, and what it would take to rebuild AI as open, decentralized infrastructure. Along the way, they cover how AI models are trained, why crypto may be essential to the future of AI coordination, and the rise of autonomous AI agents with onchain identitie

  • #112
    April 17 · 42 min

    How Bots, Deepfakes and AI Agents Are Forcing a New Internet Identity Layer

    Ben Horowitz and Erik Torenberg speak with Alex Blania of Tools for Humanity about World and the growing need for proof of human verification online. They discuss the challenge of proving human uniqueness at scale, the privacy model behind World ID, and why platforms from social media to dating apps to video conferencing may soon need stronger ways to verify that users are real people.

  • #111
    April 8 · 18 min

    How DeFi lending actually works (with Paul Frambot, cofounder and CEO of Morpho Labs)

    Morpho cofounder and CEO Paul Frambot joins us to discuss how onchain lending could change the future of finance. He explains what Morpho does, the biggest misconception in DeFi lending, why institutions are starting to pay attention, and how open blockchain infrastructure could make lending markets more transparent, competitive, and efficient. Paul also shares his longer-term view of a financial system with broader access to capital and more customizable financial products.

Showing 1–20 of 25 episodes