a16z Podcast: Inside Apple Software Design

Join a16z Deal and Research operating partner Frank Chen for a conversation with longtime Apple software engineer Ken Kocienda for an insider’s account of how Apple designed software in the golden age of Steve Jobs, spanning products like the first release of Safari on MacOS to the first few releases of the iPhone and iOS (very first codename: “Purple”).

In this podcast, which originally appeared as a video on our YouTube channel, Ken vividly shares about the creative process, how teams were organized, what it was like demo’ing for Steve Jobs, and many other fun stories. Along the way, we repeatedly probe the question: is Apple’s obsession with secrecy during the product development process a feature or a bug?