Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. And today, Sonal and I are lucky to have Alec Ross with

this on the podcast. And Ross is a new book out, Industries of the Future. He was the senior

advisor for innovation to Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State. And Alic, you also

worked for President Obama during the first two years of his initial presidential campaign.

That's right.

He actually, the reason why Hillary hired me was because I helped beat her.

I helped run technology and media policy for his presidential campaign.

And so that when she then became Secretary of State, she recruited me to run the innovation agenda, though I should

note from at the very beginning of this podcast, that did not include responsibilities for homebrewed

email servers.

Let's just get that out of the way right now.

I'm glad we got that out of the way.

We're going to talk about Hillary Clinton and politics later.

But, Alec, welcome to the podcast.

We're glad that you're here.

Thank you. Yeah. One of the things, you know, that really intrigues us about the topic of your book is we've

covered a lot of different countries and experiences and how each of those regions encounters tech with

voices on the ground and each of those places from Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa, India, China, Myanmar.

We've just covered a lot of different regions.

And we think you have a really unique perspective that goes across like 196 countries,

the view of the entire chessboard and how it all comes together.

And so I'm really interested in hearing your perspective starting from there.

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