a16z Podcast
From Netscape to VMware, Raghu Raghuram has been at the center of nearly every major inflection point in enterprise technology.
In this episode, Raghu joins Ben Horowitz, Martin Casado and David George to reflect on the early internet wars with Microsoft, how Netscape’s browser battles shaped a generation of founders, and the inside story of one of the most successful tech acquisitions in history, VMware’s $1.3B purchase of Nicira, which redefined modern networking and grew into a multi-billion-dollar business.
They discuss how VMware scaled from tens of millions to over $13 billion in revenue, what it took to outlast the cloud revolution, and why AI is now triggering the biggest infrastructure reset since virtualization. Raghu shares his vision for the next decade — from data-center robotics and energy-aware compute to how AI is reshaping both startups and giants alike.
Resources:
Follow Raghu on X: https://x.com/RaghuRaghuram
Follow Ben on X: https://x.com/bhorowitz
Follow Martin on X: https://x.com/martin_casado
Follow David on X: https://x.com/DavidGeorge83
Stay Updated:
If you enjoyed this episode, be sure to like, subscribe, and share with your friends!
Find a16z on X: https://x.com/a16z
Find a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16z
Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5bC65RDvs3oxnLyqqvkUYX
Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/a16z-podcast/id842818711
Follow our host: https://x.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures
Stay Updated:
Find a16z on X
Find a16z on LinkedIn
Listen to the a16z Podcast on Spotify
Listen to the a16z Podcast on Apple Podcasts
Follow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg
Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures.
Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

-
Reining in Complexity: Data Science & Future of AI/ML Businesses
There is no spoon. Or rather, “There is no such thing as ‘data’, there’s just frozen models”, argues Peter Wang, the co-founder and CEO of Anaconda — who also created the PyData conferences and grew…
-
Online Learning and the Ed Tech Debate
This episode is all about education and technology, a topic that’s especially top of mind this week as students in much of the country return to school—virtually. The intersection of learning and technology has been…
-
On Vaccines and Vaccinology, in COVID and Beyond
WHEN are we going to have a COVID-19 vaccine, and how the heck are we going from (what’s been traditionally been up to) 12 years or so of vaccine development compressed into 12 months or…
-
Turning Open Source Developers Into Superfans
In this episode, we continue our community series with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building. Today’s topic: How do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell…
-
Journal Club: Slaying the Sleeper Cells of Aging with CAR T
CAR T therapy is a groundbreaking medicine that uses engineered T cells to attack cancer. But CAR T cells (that is, chimeric antigen receptor T cells) can be programmed to recognize a huge range of…
-
Working, Making, Creating in Public… and Private
We’re living in an unprecedented era of online collaboration, coordination, and creation. All kinds of people are coming together — whether in an open source project or company, an R&D initiative, a department in a…
-
GPT-3: What’s Hype, What’s Real on the Latest in AI
In this episode — cross posted from our 16 Minutes show feed — we cover all the buzz around GPT-3, the pre-trained machine learning model from OpenAI that’s optimized to do a variety of natural-language…
-
Taking the Pulse on Medical Device Security
Many don’t realize we even need to think about the possibility of security hacks when it comes to things like pacemakers, insulin pumps, and more. But when bits and bytes meet flesh and blood, security…
-
Journal Club: A New Path to Antibiotic Resistance
Ever since the discovery of antibiotics, microbiologists have worried about and studied how bacteria acquire resistance to these drugs. Adding to the complexity of this problem is the fact that it is not always clear…
-
Cybercrime, Incorporated
A dive into the sociological, operational, and tactical realities of this murky underworld, Lusthaus and de la Garza discuss who the players are, what they are motivated by, and specialize in—as well as how basic…
