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Welcome to the A16Z podcast.

I'm Michael Copeland, and I am sitting here with Frank Chen and Chris Dixon.

Welcome, guys.

Hey.

Hi.

We are here to discuss Verizon and AOL.

4.4 billion for AOL.

What does that say about Verizon and the carrier business and what does it say about AOL's business?

Yeah, I mean, if you'd ask me this morning, before I saw this, the likely acquisitions today,

this would be not on the list or not on the list. It was surprising. I think the, you know,

the short answer to probably every tech M&A you see anywhere for the last five years is mobile.

Right.

You can pretty much answer any, you can go to any tech cocktail party and just answer everything with mobile and you'll sound like, you know what you're talking about.

I think increasingly it's probably also mobile video is the answer to all these things.

So somewhere there's a, you know, there's a power, probably a McKinsey PowerPoint that has the words,

mobile video, programmatic, advertising, synergy, user tracking, et cetera, which, you know,

was the kind of justification for this.

The, you know, I think that there's sort of broadly like, sort of a positive and a negative

...