Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. Today's episode features A6 and Z partners, Mark

Andreessen, Chris Dixon, and VJ Ponday, who spent the last year here as a professor in residence.

The topic we're focusing on today's bio, and more particularly, the intersection of biology

with computer science. We're starting to see an inflection of many different things coming together,

and, you know, this is a confluence of many effects on the biology and genomics side as well as on the computer science

side as well.

Clearly, the world has changed. So what's different? Why now? Is more bio-innovation

possible for more entrepreneurs than ever before because of cost, much like what AWS did

for web startups? Or is it about something more?

It's not just about cost or capex. It's about doing things that you couldn't do before.

We're seeing the ability to do types of experiments that even with a huge pile of cash wouldn't necessarily be all that easy to do. And so having something which in a sense used to be impossible

now become cheap, inspires people to do really new and exciting things.

And finally, how do we know?

As it many innovations that come around before but take off only at certain times, how do we know that this time is different?

You say it's different this time. I'm skeptical.

Yeah, no, that's very natural, I think, because things are always different this time until they're different.

Okay, so that's the introduction for today's A6 and Z podcast.

Let's hear from Mark, Chris, and B.J.

Let's start by, you know, thinking about history and then think about what's going to happen in the future.

So historically, you know, for the last 30 or 40 years, there have been kind of two worlds of venture capital and two worlds of

startups, high-tech startups. There's been the computer science or IT world, which is well

known. And then there's been the life sciences world. And the life sciences world, you know, has been

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