However, in the four years since their spectacular, glittering Windsor wedding, it seems as if the now-rogue royal couple have gone from controversy to controversy, and everything they do is a drama.

But now she is back in the fold in a very loose way. Anyone watching that recent royal walkabout will note that Catherine, the Princess of Wales, kept a well-heeled distance and never made eye contact — and with one good reason: she is terrified that anything she says will be in Meghan’s next big interview.

PRINCE HARRY AND PRINCE WILLIAM, KING CHARLES REUNITE TO WALK TOGETHER BEHIND QUEEN ELIZABETH II'S COFFIN

Meghan has often borne the brunt of the most salacious headlines and can't seem to shake the reputation of royal wrecker. But now, thanks to the dramatic twist of royal turns with the demise of the late queen, Meghan is back and knows it; and is thus loving all the attention that this former actress can muster. She even dressed on the royal walkabout like a throwback to Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee and wife of former King Edward VIII, who was forced to abdicate the throne to marry her. But now Meghan is in the throes with Harry, and Harry does not want her to leave.

The problem is that they were never supposed to be away from the U.S. for longer than a week and are clearly missing their children. Harry had hoped to fly them over, or so the reports go, but with the oh so private couple and the way they have hidden the children from public view, they now are considering not doing this. But I hear Meghan thinks, given the response that she has received, that she should go back to the U.S. ahead of the funeral and leave Harry with his family to attend it.

King Charles III stands inside Buckingham Palace with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as the royal family awaits Queen Elizabeth II's casket. Jeremy Selwyn King Charles III stands inside Buckingham Palace with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle as the royal family awaits Queen Elizabeth II's casket. Jeremy Selwyn Thing is, Harry feels vulnerable and alone without her — let's not forget he has dumped on his close family for the last two years, so he figures if she goes back he is all alone. Yet Meghan is of two minds, too. If she leaves, she is deemed as showing no respect at all for the monarchy — a no-win situation. But, moving forward, the general sense is that the public here in the U.K. would be more than happy to have this part-time, ex-royal duchess depart and make sure the media focus is only on the great lady, the late queen.

But the war in Ukraine has decimated the Russian military that Putin spent years building, while raising questions about his grip on power, Russia experts and military analysts told Insider.

"Russia's invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic defeat. So far the Kremlin has not been able to achieve its strategic level objectives and it has incurred significant costs. Russia's military is going to have to be rebuilt," George Barros, a military analyst with the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), told Insider.

"The conventional ground army ground force that the Kremlin has spent the last two decades on creating — seeking to create a modern military — that force has been just largely degraded and in a large part destroyed in the past six months of war in Ukraine," Barros added. "It's very true to say that the conventional Russian ground force has taken a significant beating in Ukraine. It will have to be rebuilt."

Though it's difficult to confirm death tolls with the fighting ongoing, US military estimates last month put Russian casualties as high as 80,000. Among the dead have been senior officers, including generals.

Barros said that it will likely take "a generation to recreate" the Russian officer corps, which is "definitely going to have a long-term strategic impact on the net assessment for Russia's conventional military."

And though Putin has so far avoided declaring a general mobilization to make up for significant troop losses in Ukraine, the Russian leader in August ordered the military to increase its ranks by 137,000 starting in 2023, an ambitious goal seen by some as unachievable and one of many signs that the Russian military is being hollowed out by the war in Ukraine.

Long before the emergence of web3, MMOs also provided early evidence that players valued ownership of digital assets and would trade them with one another for real money. Browser-based MMO RuneScape launched in 2001 with free trading between players and developed a vibrant virtual economy around player-vs-player combat where victors could claim their opponents’ items and sell them for real money. The space MMO Eve Online also featured robust player trading around in-game assets and a currency called PLEX which represents 30 days of subscription time.

Core Loop is a new game studio innovating at the intersection of the MMO genre and web3. Core Loop is building a modern cross-platform MMO with a blockchain-based virtual economy, playable across PC and mobile devices. The team is innovating in many different areas — including designing an AI-directed, dynamic world that evolves based on the actions of the community. And in a nod to Eve and RuneScape, the game’s economy will be player-driven with the ability for participants to truly own the assets they craft/earn, and to potentially make a living in the game long-term.

We first met founders Vincenzo Alagna and Dan Chao nearly 2 years ago and bonded over our shared love of MMOs and community-driven games. They are uniquely well-suited for this project — Vincenzo was CTO and President of Machine Zone, where he oversaw multi-billion dollar franchises such as Game of War and Mobile Strike. Dan was the lead game designer at Funzio (acquired by GREE) and launched one of the first NFT strategy games called CryptoAssault. The two have known each other for almost a decade, and together epitomize the convergence of games, social, and web3.

Vincenzo and Dan have impressed us with their execution and hustle, developing an impressive early prototype of their game and growing the team to over 15 talented developers, pulled from many of the top studios in the industry. Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading the Series A for Core Loop and will be supporting them closely through both the a16z games and crypto teams.

We believe the next generation of MMOs will combine the best of social and systems design from traditional MMOs, with web3 powered virtual economies built on true ownership and the ability for players to earn a living in the game. Core Loop is leading the way and we couldn’t be more excited to work together. Check out their Discord for early access to the game!

Years ago I had the privilege of seeing how GitHub transformed the world of source code management by turning it into a collaborative, social community. The follow-on effects of that laid the foundation for many essential behaviors and asynchronous workflows we use today. They unlocked a massive wave of productivity for developers.

However, GitHub and related tools only solve part of the productivity problem. Today’s developer workflows still require a large amount of asynchronous, local work before code is pushed on to the main branch. Unfortunately, much of that local workflow remains inefficient and redundant as a result of either async conflicts or new failures due to the macro trend of shift-left strategy (think Secops, infra-as-code, cost savings, etc). As a former developer myself, it’s incredibly tedious and frustrating to waste time rerunning pull requests due to merge failures and broken builds on local workflows.  

We believe the modern dev productivity stack should include a combination of “top-down,” GitHub-style, global collaboration framework combined with efficient, “bottom-up,” local-workflow tooling. It should give continuous feedback to developers, eliminating several tiny and redundant workflows. It should help developers eliminate context switching and preserve their flow time, thereby unlocking the next wave of developer productivity.

As we began searching for this kind of local workflow tooling, we met David and Eli, co-founders of Trunk.io, who previously built similar tooling at Uber. In previous jobs they experienced the painful failures of the developer workflow and set out to rebuild systems from scratch, creating an all-in-one solution for scalably checking, testing, merging, and monitoring code. Their ultimate goal is to empower engineers to stay focused on shipping code faster. We were immediately drawn to their vision, which deeply resonates with our developer productivity thesis.

David and Eli have also assembled an exemplary team to tackle this problem, attracting some of the greatest engineering talent from high-growth tech companies. At a16z, we love to back deeply technical founders building generational products that will improve the lives of millions of developers worldwide and are thrilled to join Trunk on their journey.

Every engineering leader who wants to unblock developers to improve their productivity should look at Trunk’s upcoming suite of tools.

I am excited to announce that we have promoted Sarah Wang to General Partner on the Growth investing team. When we started the Growth Fund in 2019, we set out to back founders executing on unusually big visions for emerging categories. Over the last three years, we’ve backed companies that are just at the point of finding product-market fit all the way through to investing at IPO, and we announced our latest, $5B Growth fund last week to continue to do so. The opportunity to partner with growth stage companies has never been greater, and we now have over $10B in assets under management¹ across three Growth funds to invest in enterprise, fintech, consumer internet, crypto/web3, and bio+healthcare companies. I couldn’t be more thrilled to have Sarah play an even larger role in this on the Growth team. 

When Sarah joined my team at a16z three years ago, she quickly made an impression, and has already worked with some of our most exciting enterprise companies, including leading the firm’s investments in Sourcegraph and Crossbeam. She has also been a true thought leader in the enterprise space, as seen here and here. In her role as General Partner, Sarah will be focused on leading new investments and partnering closely with founders across the enterprise technology space. 

Sarah came to a16z from TA Associates where she invested in and partnered with founders of growth stage companies, and served on the board of ZoomInfo/DiscoverOrg. She got her first taste of venture at DCM Ventures and Radicle Impact and started her career at BCG and Morgan Stanley. After I started at a16z and set out to build the Growth team, three separate people recommended Sarah unwaveringly and offered an introduction. As I got to know her, I understood why. 

If early-stage venture investing is about asking “What if it works?”, later-stage venture investing is asking the question “Is it working?” At the Growth stage of a company, many investors can answer the “is it working” question, but pairing it with the ability to see the value of “what if it works” is what makes for great outcomes. Sarah is as good as it gets at that. 

We often say there are only 3-5 important questions that matter in deciding whether we should make an investment. Sarah is incredibly talented at framing those questions, relentlessly seeking answers, and interpreting what she finds to make the right judgments. To me, being a General Partner means, “would I trust this person with my money to invest?” The answer for Sarah is a resounding yes. 

She’s also a world-class partner and board member to founders. She is diligent, rigorous, and tough, but she combines that with an optimistic and positive personality that carries over to how she sees partnering with great companies. When we hired Sarah three years ago, I spoke to Henry Schuck, the CEO of ZoomInfo, along with one of her fellow board members. Those reference checks were so positive that I worried both were going to try and swoop in to recruit Sarah themselves! 

Please join me in welcoming Sarah to this new role. I’m proud to call her my partner. 

¹ Assets under management is defined as committed capital across a16z growth fund families. For regulatory assets under management, see adviserinfo.sec.gov

These retailers are critical to the lifeblood of commerce in these regions, and B2B marketplaces that provide constituents with credit to expand their businesses, guarantee payments and delivery, and software to order and promote products are gaining adoption. The software and financial products built into these marketplaces are extremely sticky, and can be a trojan horse for financial operating systems for retailers, distributors, wholesalers, and manufacturers. In some cases, these marketplaces can even be distribution points for consumer financial services.

We’ve seen many iterations of this model from Colombia to Indonesia (see below for a non-exhaustive map), and we believe there are two product primitives these marketplaces need to include:

• “come for the tool, stay for the network” software for marketplace participants to enable digital transactions and financial management

• embedded lending and payments to create liquidity in the marketplaces and to monetize a generally thin margin industry

Because it is open and programmable, Ethereum offers a vast uncharted expanse filled with opportunity.

Over the last few years, this frontier has attracted its first major settlements. The freewheeling bazaar of decentralized finance (“DeFi”) has grown into a sector that is beginning to compete with Silicon Valley. This year, a second ecosystem began to put down roots: the creator economy of cryptoart, music, and media.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum community is poised to adopt the most significant changes to the core protocol in its short history. The frontier is finally paving its busy roads.

Like in 2018 and 2019, our goal is to zoom out and show you the bigger picture. This blog post is not comprehensive — writing a comprehensive roundup about Ethereum is nearly impossible. Instead, we focus on a handful of trends we believe were most significant.