a16z’s Chris Lyons speaks with Earvin "Magic" Johnson about his 30-year journey from athlete to billionaire businessman. They cover the art of deal-making, lessons from mentors Michael Ovitz and Dr. Jerry Buss, and Magic's sports ownership portfolio, from the Dodgers to the Commanders to the Sparks. They also discuss what the next generation of athletes and entertainers should know about equity, building teams, and taking risks. Follow Magic Johnson on X: https://twitter.com/MagicJohnson Follow Chris Lyons ...

Let me just start with what I think the big takeaways are from this piece because this is the first time we've ever done this style piece. We produce so much work and so much analysis. It's like exhaust uh in, you know, inside of our team and we thought, you know, we have so many different thoughts and and points of view.Why don't we put them on paper and share them out with the world. So that was the genesis of this. My big takeaways from doing this one, you know, AI demand side is crazy.The actual uptake ...

We've been trying to make these human voices for literally since the 1700s. Then in the early 1900s, we had the first digital synthesizers. >> Are you um >> that it doesn't cross that threshold of actually sounding like a human and actually making you feel something.Then it shifted into Siri, which has kind of a bit of back and forth. that sounds more realistic, but again, it doesn't cross that threshold of actually sounding like a human and actually making you feel something. >> Marty, it's so great to hav ...

We were the largest wholesale funder in the world 10 years ago. There are a lot of things you want to be the largest in the world. Wholesale fund not one of them.>> We got a lot of criticism like why are you raising money now. What are you stupid. And it turns out that the best time to raise money is when nobody has money.>> Last year the four largest companies contributed 1% to GDP growth with their $400 billion of spending. M&A and capital raising IPOs are driven by confidence. For the last four years, wh ...

In this episode, Jen Kha, Head of Investor Relations, and David George, General Partner, discuss how late-stage private markets are evolving as AI reshapes scale, capital intensity, and growth timelines. They explain why AI-driven companies are staying private longer, how infrastructure spending is changing return profiles, and what this moment means for durability, value creation, and long-term outcomes in private markets. Timestamps: (00:00) Introduction (04:21) The Market Opportunity for AI (26:48) Prici ...

What virtually everybody finds, including Elon Musk, is the real world is just really, really big and really, really messy. >> The AI thing is so interesting, right. Because from a technology perspective, it feels like you can build products pretty immediately that are going to win.>> Our entire way of doing everything as humans, we think it's going to change. We reinvented the computer and the new computer is far better than the one that we have been building on for the last 50 or so years. The purpose of ...

So for everyone that I haven't met before, I'm Alex Rampel on the Apps Fund. I've been at the firm for 10 years. I stole this from Chris Dixon who published a post like this about probably 12 or 13 years ago. And the whole premise is that product cycles drive growth. And you know the top of the chart here is the NASDAQ from 1977 to present. It goes up sometimes, it goes down sometimes. Over the long run, it has gone up. But there have been some very scary down points. So there really there have been four ma ...

I don't like reading text on white backgrounds. My eyes are a little sensitive to light and so early mosaic and escape the backgrounds are always gray and so [music] it was black text on gray backgrounds. What I really wanted was dark mode but I couldn't get there at that point cuz the displays weren't good enough.White text on black backgrounds back then was hard [music] to read because he didn't have enough shades of gray and he couldn't quite get the screen resolution. ...

If you're looking for the extreme outlier, the venture capital business is 100% a game of outliers. [music] It's extreme exceptions on the order of 4,000 venture fundable companies a year that want to raise venture capital. About 200 of those will get funded by what's considered a top tier VC. [music] Um about 15 of those will someday get to $100 million in revenue.And those 15 from that year uh will generate something on the order of 97% of all the returns for the entire category of venture capital in that ...

What virtually everybody finds, including Elon Musk, is the real world is just really, really big and really, really messy. >> The AI thing is so interesting, right? Because from a technology perspective, it feels like you can build products pretty immediately that are going to win. >> Our entire way of doing everything as humans, we think it's going to change. We reinvented the computer and the new computer is far better than the one that we have been building on for the last 50 or so years. The purpose of ...