Ben Horowitz on TBPN: Three Decades with Marc and Building for the Long Game

Following the announcement of a16z’s new fund, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder and general partner Ben Horowitz joined TBPN to discuss how Andreessen Horowitz has evolved its firm structure as technology becomes embedded across every sector of the economy. Ben reflects on which lessons from The Hard Thing About Hard Things still apply to founders, why entrepreneurship remains difficult at any scale, and how long-term partnerships shape decision-making inside the firm. He explains the move toward specialized, independent investment teams, how a16z evaluates new markets, and why AI represents a generational technology shift that changes how companies are built and how investors operate. The conversation also lessons from prior technology cycles and bubbles, the role of public policy in sustaining innovation ecosystems, and how founders can navigate modern media attention and public discourse while building durable, long-term companies.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

  We got a lot of criticism from other funds going like, that's crazy. You know, no billion dollar fund has ever returned money. If you look at AI, the technology is like working and getting to the world right now. With everybody talking about a bubble, I was like, oh, great. We're not in a bubble. Because it's when nobody believes it's a bubble that it becomes a bubble. The tech industry itself used to just not be that big. And now the tech industry is all industry.

• 0:31Erik Torenberg?

  Following the announcement of A16Z's new fund, Ben Horowitz joined TVPN to discuss how Andreessen Horowitz has evolved its venture firm structure as technology expands across every sector of the economy. Driven on decades of operating and investing experience, Ben reflects on why entrepreneurship remains difficult at any scale, how long-term partnerships influence decision-making inside a venture firm, and why specialization and independence have become central to A16Z's model. He explains how the firm evaluates new markets, adapts to faster technology cycles, and stays close to founders while operating at scale. The conversation also covers Ben's perspective on AI as a generational platform shift, how its change in company formation and investor judgment, how to think about market size

• 1:15Erik Torenberg?

  and fund scale, and what founders should understand about navigating media attention and public discourse while building durable, long-term companies. Let's get into it.

• 1:26Speaker 02

  We have Ben Horowitz, the founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the Horowitz in Andreessen Horowitz. Ben, how are you doing? Welcome to the show.

• 1:34Ben Horowitz?

  Good. How are you guys?

• 1:36Speaker 02

  We're fantastic. Massive news today. Congratulations, obviously. We'll get into the fund structure. I'm sure we'll have a bunch of questions there. I wanted to kick it off with a reflection on your book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. What is the one piece of advice that you think has aged particularly well from that? What has never changed? And then maybe you could take me through some things that might have changed in this era, bigger companies, AI. What do you go back to and what do you maybe think needs an update?

• 2:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think it's still really hard to be an entrepreneur. And one of my favorite quotes in the book is something Mark said to me. You know, when things were extremely bad, he said, you know, one day we'll look back on this, chuckle nervously and change the subject.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  I think some of us have seen those eighteen years.

• 2:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, he always says, things get darkest before they go completely black.

• 2:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's underrated how long you two have been in partnership beyond just this, this firm. You've worked together for so long.

• 2:52Ben Horowitz?

  Thirty years.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Thirty years, what a run, an overnight success, a true overnight success, if there ever was one. How is, how do you two like to work together now? How is, how is the day to day working at the firm?

• 3:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that it works pretty well. I mean, we have pretty different roles. So I run the firm and then, you know, Mark is kind of, in a lot of ways, the face of the firm. And he also, you know, he gets very deep on specific things. So policy, AI are kind of the two things that he's like super focused on right now.

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:33Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, he has many, many ideas about, you know, running the firm. And I have many ideas about things he does. And so, you know, it's very collaborative, I would just say.

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:44Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, we argue all the time about everything.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  As any good partner does.

• 3:49Ben Horowitz?

  Sometimes he's right, sometimes I'm right.

• 3:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, how is the structure of running the firm? How is the structure of the firm changing in this era? Obviously, the numbers are bigger, but on the fundraising side, but maybe not on the team's side. What's changing? Is there anything that you've felt like this technology shift requires different management of the firm?

• 4:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, for sure. I think that, you know, what's happened is where we have such a powerful new technology platform that the number of really important companies that will be created out of it has just multiplied.

• 4:28Speaker 02

  Interesting.

• 4:29Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, like the tech industry itself used to just not be that big.

• 4:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:34Ben Horowitz?

  And now the tech industry is all industry.

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:37Ben Horowitz?

  And that change is kind of what really changed the architecture of the firm. So originally, you know, we look like every other venture firm. We were, you know, a team of venture investors. You know, we were a little different in that we had a more elaborate platform.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:53Ben Horowitz?

  But now what we've done is we've kind of subdivided the technology market into all of its submarkets. So, you know, infrastructure, applications, you know, crypto, early-stage bio, these kinds of things, American dynamism. And each of those teams is basically, looks like the original Andreessen Horowitz, but they're independent of each other. And that enables us to both kind of cover the whole market in a very, very serious way, but also be nimble and not have, I mean, you don't want 20 people in a room talking about a deal.

• 5:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:30Ben Horowitz?

  Like, you're not going to get to the truth like that, you know, just in my management experience, it turns out you can't have a conversation with 20 people.

• 5:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:38Ben Horowitz?

  You have a presentation.

• 5:40Speaker 02

  How do you think about empowering the firm or the sub-teams to become subject matter experts and actually investigate and prosecute deal theses in entirely new markets where no one in the firm might have ever done an oil and gas deal, or a solar deal, or some bio thing that's entirely new? And you have a team, but there's, you know, new markets forming and new markets coming online as potential transformation targets for technology. How are you keeping the firm sharp on every corner of the global economy?

• 6:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so a lot, a lot of times, you know, there are super experimental things that we'll look at, but we don't necessarily kind of build the organization around yet. And then...

• 6:26Ben Horowitz?

  You know, but once we commit the flag, then that, you know, our big commitment would be, okay, we'll create a fund around it. So, you know, we did that with crypto. We made the Coinbase investment before we had the crypto fund, but then we, as we got into it, we said, well, like, this is going to be a larger market and it's super different than everything we're doing. So we need to commit around that. More recently, you know, with AI, AI, like the way you build AI companies, the nature of the AI founder is just so different than everything that we've seen before, that we ended up bringing in a lot of expertise from the outside. We kind

• 7:07Ben Horowitz?

  of reoriented everybody on the inside. Like, we actually had, you know, a huge amount of training materials and like, you know, basically exams to make sure that, you know, everybody who has worked on that was what we call AI native and understood like all aspects of it before getting into it. Just because, you know, these things do tend to be different. And this is why you see a lot of people age out of venture capital and then a lot of kind of firms be not what they once were. You know, they were very important in 2015, but they didn't necessarily make the transition. They didn't bring in the right kind of talent.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. As, when you're managing the firm, how do you think about the dividing lines and the walls between different funds? We've seen just with, just with the Neo clouds, a lot of those folks started as crypto companies. Then they became AI companies, but they're building things at such massive scale, I wouldn't be surprised to see them in an American dynamism portfolio because they're sort of re-industrializing. So are you the person that the firm, that one of the subdivision leaders comes to, to say, hey, I want this in my fund? How does that work?

• 8:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So there's not that much conflict in that, you know, the categories are pretty clear. There are, you know, it happens occasionally where they bump into each other, but, you know, for the most part, it's like, what are you really trying to do? And then the entrepreneur will gravitate towards one of the funds. Based on what they're trying to do, like, we want to sell things to the government.

• 8:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:50Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, that's likely going to go into American dynamism, whereas like, okay, we've got, you know, eight PhDs in AI, that's almost certainly going to end up in infrastructure.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:01Ben Horowitz?

  Um, you know, kind of model world and that kind of thing.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:04Ben Horowitz?

  And so, you know, it's really matching that the funds are, you think about markets of entrepreneurs, and the funds are designed to address that market of entrepreneurs, and those tend to be fairly distinct. Now, sometimes, uh, you know, people will try to game us and get rejected by one part and then they'll go to the other.

• 9:25Ben Horowitz?

  We have very, very, very good, comprehensive data on everything we've seen. We've got extremely good systems, so we could be catching those people.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:34Speaker 03

  When did you realize a $15 billion fund was possible? Was it, was it, did you, did you imagine this kind of scale was possible from, from inception? Or, or was it a, did you build that?

• 9:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, our first one was $300 million, so we definitely weren't thinking about it then. You know, we thought 300 million was a lot, and people, you know, thought we were raising too big a fund in 2009.

• 9:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:58Ben Horowitz?

  But now, like, what we've done is, we, we've kind of looked at the markets and said, okay, you know, how big is this market? And then what kind of fund do we need to kind of win in that market? And generate a large return? And, you know, we tend to have a relatively optimistic view of the future. I think there are some, like, cynical VCs out there and like, when I was a boy, felony racing rent was high.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  She's like, play the game on the field.

• 10:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, we, we like to look forward and not look backwards. And so, as a result, like, something, you know, I think we. Have done a good job of getting ahead of the game. Like when we raised Fund Three, which was a billion dollars, we got a lot of criticism from other funds going like, "That's crazy, you know, no billion dollar fund has ever returned money." Yardy, yardy, yardy, yardy. And we're like, "Well, okay, but like the world didn't look like this and software is eating the world and things are getting bigger." And we think that like we can deploy a billion dollars. And you know, that fund, you know, had Coinbase and Databricks and Lyft and Digital Ocean and GitHub and like a lot of big outcomes.

• 11:13Ben Horowitz?

  And if we didn't have that much money, it'd be a problem.

• 11:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. On that note of optimism and understanding the scale of the internet as it eats the entire world, how did you process the bubble talk that took place in the back half of 2025?

• 11:30Ben Horowitz?

  Well, you know, I was CEO during another bubble.

• 11:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:34Ben Horowitz?

  So I know a lot about bubbles. Look, I think that, so there's a couple of things that I learned from the bubble that we were in.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  One was... Sorry, sorry. We keep a bubble gun handy.

• 11:49Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, look, you know, one of the things, if you look back at that bubble, there were, there were a lot of things that were present then that are definitely not present now. So like probably the biggest being the internet. Everybody knew the internet was going to be giant. But at the time that everybody was investing all the money, the internet was very, very small. So if you go back to 1996, at Netscape, we had 90% browser share. And, you know, we had $50 million in revenue. So the entire, or we had 50 million users, sorry, 50 million users. So the entire number of people on the internet was 55 million.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:32Ben Horowitz?

  So like, so you're funding these companies and giving them a $10 billion valuation, selling into a market of 55 million people. Like, and then half of those were on dial-up. So it was limited in what you could do. And so those valuations were running way, way, way ahead of the technology is kind of what caused the bubble. You know, if you look at AI, the technology is like working and getting to the world right now. Like, how many people are on ChatGPT? And, you know, how is that business going? It had, I think, zero revenue in November of 2022. And I don't know what the current number is, but it's probably between 15 and 20 billion.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:13Ben Horowitz?

  Like, we've never seen that before. So the things are working, like the things that that that were bubble-icious in 99 aren't quite the same. But, you know, to me, the biggest thing that I learned was right before the bubble burst, nobody thought it was a bubble. And Warren Buffett, who had never invested in any tech in early 2000s, started investing in tech.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  Whoa.

• 13:37Ben Horowitz?

  So everybody capitulated and agreed prices would never go down. Like, that's what you need to get to a bubble. It's a psychological phenomenon, you know, not a not a financial phenomenon. And so, you know, right now, with everybody talking about a bubble, I was like, oh, great, we're not in a bubble. Because it's when nobody believes it's a bubble that it becomes a bubble. Same with the financial crisis, by the way. If you look at the price, you know, the kind of interest you pay on like home loan debt in in in 2007, it was the lowest in history.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:13Ben Horowitz?

  Right before it all came crashing.

• 14:15Speaker 02

  It should have been the highest.

• 14:16Ben Horowitz?

  Right before everybody defaulted.

• 14:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 14:18Ben Horowitz?

  You know, it was the lowest in history, and that's because it was a bubble, because everybody believed, hey, they're not building any more land anymore, you know, like that's what's going on. And so, once you get into that kind of psychological convergence, that's when you really get into like a really crazy bubble. Now, look, in venture capital, everything is always priced at either half or double what it's worth. Like, that's the that's the steady state. And so are there going to be things that are, you know, priced way too high? Yeah, of course.

• 14:48Speaker 02

  Speaking of land, how are you processing the move out of California? The news in California of the wealth taxes? It's a lot of folks are saying, you know, California might shoot themselves in the foot, kill the golden goose. How have you been processing the news?

• 15:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, so it's very kind of like an interesting kind of view of the world, I think, that that the

• 15:15Ben Horowitz?

  The groups in California have been kind of pushing this idea. So, you know, I go all over the world. I've met like in the last year, you know, the president of Mexico, the president of El Salvador, you know, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia. So like, I'm always with world leaders or I've spent a lot of time with them. And they always want to know like, how do we create Silicon Valley here? And when you look at Silicon Valley-

• 15:42Speaker 03

  We want a golden goose. We like your golden goose, we want one.

• 15:45Ben Horowitz?

  It's pretty remarkable that like, we've repeatedly created companies with larger kind of GDP than most countries, like routinely, we've done that. And so rather than asking like, how did we do that? It's like, well, how can we like rearrange it and, you know, run an experiment and see if it destroys it or not? And so I think that's probably the weirdest part of it for me, that people would think about it that way. Like, I mean, like if you start confiscating wealth and, you know, taxing unrealized capital gains for people who aren't liquid, like, so actually we saw this in Norway.

• 16:29Ben Horowitz?

  So Norway has an unrealized capital gains tax. And Norway's got like a lot of extremely smart people, great entrepreneurs, but they all left. And when you talk to entrepreneurs in Norway, they're like, well, I literally can't pay the tax because the company got marked up, whatever, a billion, $2 billion. And I own a lot of it and I can't get that money out. It's a private company. And so I'm stuck, so I have to leave the country. And there are no entrepreneurs and there is basically no tech entrepreneurs in Norway now. And if you wanted to get, it's been so hard to break the Silicon Valley network effect, but this is the best strategy I've seen.

• 17:13Ben Horowitz?

  If you wanted to wreck the California tech.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  How are you processing? It feels like today we have this incredible optimism within the technology industry, this incredible excitement. And then outside of the technology, you know, your neighbor or somebody nearby has like this, there's, it feels like this real tension and kind of fear from broader society about the work that is being done within the technology industry. And you see interviews that, you know, AI leaders will give where they'll say, we're, we're summoning the demon or they'll say, you know, you know.

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Not the most optimistic storytelling.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  We're gonna end, the, the world will end, but we're gonna create some great companies. So I think people like this, these, these interviews and these quotes spread so quickly. A lot of people have heard them and the question from the broader populace is like, hey, do we need to do this?

• 18:02Speaker 02

  What's the optimistic vision?

• 18:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, or, or can we stop, right? And obviously, technology is, you know, proven to be somewhat inevitable, relentless.

• 18:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 18:15Ben Horowitz?

  So I, I think the good news is it speaks to the importance of the moment. So this is on the order of the microprocessor, the steam engine or something, or electricity or something like that. So, and those things all turned out to be like really good for humanity.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  Was there that much with, with electricity, was there like the level of fear?

• 18:35Ben Horowitz?

  It was. Oh, yeah.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  Cause there was people that would like go and obviously I know the stories, people that would like, their job was to write, uh, light the lamps, right?

• 18:43Ben Horowitz?

  But. Oh, yeah, like if you go back and read about the beginning of electricity, it's wild. Well, they made a law when automobiles first came out, there was a law in the United States that said, if you're driving your car and you see a horse, you have to stop the car, disassemble it. And wait for the horse to pass.

• 19:04Speaker 02

  Disassemble.

• 19:05Ben Horowitz?

  Well, like, like it was that level, that was the regulatory idea. So, yeah, I mean, I think, by the way, watches were the same. You know, when watches came out, there was like huge fear that like people would never be able to have a conversation again, cause they'd be just checking, checking the time always. And so, yeah, these technologies like generate a lot of fear, but I think that, you know, the good news on it is, you know, this one is really important. I think that the impact into the well being of humanity is going to be bigger than certainly anything in my lifetime. And, you know, one of our bigger problems, I think, is there are people in the industry going for regulatory capture who kind of feed into the fear, to the fear.

• 19:49Ben Horowitz?

  And then, like, there are also people who have just, you know, it's moving so fast it is actually freaked them out who are working on it. And that's.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  How do you advise, how do you advise portfolio founders or even people at the firm around processing noise? Think historically, you know, there wasn't like this constant chatter, right? We have like X now, which is like a constant, you know, stream of consciousness from millions of people that are sharing their opinion. And it's, you know, I know a lot of entrepreneurs that, you know, one day, everybody's saying that they're the greatest thing ever. And then the next day, you know, people start to criticize. And how do you kind of like, what's your, what guidance do you give there?

• 20:33Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think that like, the world of media changed. And it's, I think it's tricky for people in companies to process because if you grew up in marketing or in old media, your whole concept of the laws of physics is different. So in old world, you were always thinking defensively because there were, there were very few channels to get your message out. The format was very tight. You know, you could get a quote in here, or you could get a few sentences before the host cut you off or whatever. Yeah, you know, you guys watch CNN from time to time. And so like in that world, the way you would think about media is just like, let's make sure we don't say the wrong

• 21:18Ben Horowitz?

  thing. Let's spend hours and hours crafting message and so forth. You know, the new world, it's like wide open. There's media everywhere. The formats are whatever you want it to be. And so the right kind of. Way to think about it is you have to be interesting. And don't worry about making a mistake because you can just come back tomorrow and flood the zone, you know, like just keep going. And that, I think it's, I found it very, very difficult to reorient somebody who has spent a career in old media world, kind of thinking in a new media way. And so the biggest thing that like I really talk to our CEOs about is like, you've got

• 22:00Ben Horowitz?

  to approach the, you have to approach new media with new media thinking, new media people, that kind of thing. And it really, it's a remarkably opposite world. It's like, you know, it's like you're landing on Mars and you're like, well, what the fuck happened to gravity?

• 22:20Speaker 03

  Different.

• 22:21Ben Horowitz?

  And you can't even say, well, no, gravity is different here because it's like, no, no, gravity just is. Like, I can't deal with the fact that that's just, that's just the truth.

• 22:32Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, we would love to keep talking about media. Yeah. Very few things that, that we. We should ring the gong. But we know you have a late, you got late fees if you're late to meetings. So this gong is for the whole A16Z team. Congratulations. And we won't keep you any longer, but come back on again soon and congratulations. Thank you so much for taking the time.

• 22:55Ben Horowitz?

  Thank you for taking the time to see you guys.

• 22:56Speaker 03

  We'll talk to you soon. Goodbye.

• 23:00Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 23:26Erik Torenberg?

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references, and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies, and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.