The a16z Show · Monday, July 13, 2026
Barbara Liskov detailed her transition into distributed systems research, sparked by a paper from Bob Kahn outlining the challenges of building distributed programs. She saw this as a significant problem ripe for exploration, leading her to dive into the field.
“And I started looking around and I read a paper by Bob Kahn in which he talked about the dream of distributed computing.”
“And how there would be distributed programs that had components at different nodes of the network and communicated over the network. And only nobody knew how to build them. And so I thought, there's a great problem. So I jumped into distributed computing.”