Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. It's not just the likes of Google, Facebook, and Amazon that lean on a massive and growing corpus of data. Today, every company is a data-driven company. And in this world, access to data and how you manage it is what matters, says Ash, Ashatosh, founder and CEO of Actifio.

Who among us doesn't say that data is not the

lifeblood of their business? And the largest hotel company, Airbnb, owns no hotel rooms. The largest

taxi company owns no taxis. Whether you are small, you're large, the smallest of the

organization still live on the fact that you have to be competitive in the world and data becomes a lifeblood of how you're going, the smallest of the organization still live on the fact that you have to be

competitive in the world and data becomes a lifeblood of how you run the day-to-day business.

In this segment of the pod, we get in the weeds with Ashutosh and A16Z's Peter Levine

on how this data-driven world is changing the technology infrastructure that is the engine

behind it and the companies that use it.

The blueprint for computing is coming from these hypercloud environments, and whether it's

on-prem or cloud, the fundamental data center design is changing.

And if data is at the core of a business, being competitive in the

business world requires one thing above all, speed. The classic example, you could have the best

hospital in the world, but if the ambulance takes too long to get there, there's really no point.

Right. When you're in trouble, it's the speed that matters. That and Ashtosh and Levine discuss ramping sales teams, going international, and what's

driving the timing of IPOs, or really the lack of IPOs.

Finally, Ashatosh offers his response to being referred to as a unicorn.

Do you like that term, unicorn?

I really hate it.

Tell us how you feel.

Peter's in the room and Ash is in the room,

and that means we're probably going to talk about enterprise technology

...