Initial public offerings come up a lot in my conversations nowadays, thanks to my job. Plenty of people I meet have opinions about unicorns and IPOs. With companies staying private longer, many have achieved enormous valuations by the time they go public, when the rest of us finally have an opportunity to invest in them.

The most common question I get about tech IPOs is: How do you even keep track of these things? I was surprised that I couldn’t find a convenient dashboard that’s updated regularly to track the performance of unicorns after they go public. …

Here are three takeaways from a16z’s podcast “Software Programs the World”, in which Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Scott Kupor, and Sonal Chokshi discuss the thesis behind a16z’s Fund V. This is a notable episode because it’s rare to have Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz on the stage together.

Cheaper computing enables software to program the world

Fund V’s thesis is a continuation of Fund I’s thesis, famously documented by the Wall Street Journal article “Marc Andreessen on Why Software Is Eating the World”. a16z started 7 years ago to invest in the simultaneous growth of mobile, social and cloud. …

We just checked off the last feature on our v1 list. Engineers think we can clear the bug list by Friday. Servers are provisioned. We have our emails to TechCrunch standing by in our drafts folder. Someone asks:

Hey what did we decide to do for analytics?

Without thoughtfully defined, well-instrumented analytics, we won’t know whether we’re achieving our goals. Here are my thoughts on the key decision points.

Note: this guide is vendor-agnostic. Most analytics vendors nowaday provide similar and comprehensive features to help us instrument our apps.

Ownership

The product team should own what data to collect, because it…