Adam Neumann: This Is How You Build Iconic Companies

Adam Neumann joins Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, and Erik Torenberg for a candid conversation about entrepreneurship, failure, and building Flow. Neumann reflects on his childhood, military service, immigration to the United States, the rise and fall of WeWork, and what he learned from one of the most scrutinized founder journeys in technology. He explains why Flow is focused on rethinking housing, community, and belonging, and why he believes technology can fundamentally improve how people live. The conversation explores resilience, company building, leadership, real estate, software, flexible living, and the global housing crisis. Along the way, Neumann discusses rebuilding trust, designing for community, and why some of the biggest entrepreneurial opportunities emerge from deeply personal experiences.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  You said, Adam, tell me how you're doing. And I jumped straight into my lessons learned and this had an answer. And you were like, oh, you're still in that stage? And we don't know each other. But I was like, well, Mark, please tell me what that stage is. Because you know, the stage when you forgot everything you did and believe everything that was written about you. It's a stage that will pass.

• 0:21Erik Torenberg?

  Today, we're bringing back one of our favorite conversations from the past year. Few founder stories have generated as much attention or debate as Adam Neumann's. After building WeWork into one of the world's most valuable startups, experiencing one of the most public corporate collapses in recent memory, and returning to start Flow, Neumann's journey has become a case study in ambition, resilience, and second chances. In this conversation, Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Adam Neumann, and I discuss the lessons from WeWork, the vision behind Flow, the future of housing, and why Adam believes community is one of the most overlooked challenges in modern life.

• 1:02Erik Torenberg?

  Adam, welcome to the Ben and Mark Show. I'm glad we have another head of hair on the podcast.

• 1:08Speaker 00

  It's a very brave thing to say.

• 1:11Erik Torenberg?

  We were just talking at lunch about how some entrepreneurs have many ideas. But Adam, you have one idea that you've been refining over your life, just getting it better and better and better. So why don't we go back from the beginning and talk about your background and how you can find a thread to how that led to Flow today?

• 1:28Speaker 00

  I was born in Israel and my parents got divorced when I was eight. My parents are both doctors. And we moved 13 times in my childhood. So I remember moving from community to community, from place to place.

• 1:42Ben Horowitz?

  And what generated all the moves?

• 1:44Speaker 00

  First of all, I think in Israel, being a doctor, because it's such a small place, you study in one place, you fall in another, then you go from one thing to the other. So I think that generated about three of them. Then my parents divorced, generated another one. I think my mother could not stand to be in the same country as my dad, at least for two years, which actually pushed us, which not a lot of people know about it. I lived in Indiana, Indianapolis, I was a Hoosier. For two years, I went to Pacers games and saw the Indy 500 and learned about the three S's. So those were some of the moves. But the other one, my mom, and she's actually comfortable speaking about it, she's bipolar. And she's an oncologist and she's very good at her craft. But being an oncologist and also having the mood swings, she would fight very hard for her patients.

• 2:26Speaker 00

  And no matter what happened, if you were my mom's patient, she would go to war, including with the head of the hospital, to fight for you. And Israel has this medical basket and not everything is included. And some people could afford things, some people couldn't. And she was always finding a way to get people the best treatments she could. But because she was such an excellent doctor, whenever one head of hospital had enough with her, there was always two other heads of hospital ready to recruit, which is something we know about great talent. Great talent always finds a home. So I think that led to a lot of those moves. But for me as a kid, I think for kids, moving is a very difficult thing. I think it's good because I think it makes us stronger, but also think it's difficult. And when you enter a new community as a new kid, you have no friends and you always find yourself looking, where are you going to be with?

• 3:09Speaker 00

  And I used to be attracted, also they were the only ones who would have me, to the uncool kids. So I was the ones who were a little different. And so I would get to a new place, I already knew my place, I'd go immediately to the different kids. And my thing in life was I would befriend them, we would become great friends. Then I would make my way into the social structure or whatever community I went to. And I would bring with me those kids. That was my big winning moment. The toughest community I ever went to was when I lived in the kibbutz. And for those of you who don't know, and that's also where I lived the most. And the kibbutz is where it's almost like a commune. The kids lived together from, in our kibbutz, they stopped it. But a lot of them lived together from age two to 18. They go to their parents for dinners and they spend the weekends, but they're all more kids than not kids.

• 3:52Speaker 00

  And they were so tightly put together that I was the hardest group to connect to. But also, I think the place that affected me the most sort of shaped me with what I think about community and about together. And once you do become part of that community, my mom was a, was a doctor, she would come home very late at night, she would be on call sometimes. There was a whole community taking care of my sister and I.

• 4:17Ben Horowitz?

  And then, you know, as you grew up and got into the world and so forth, like what did those early experiences teach you about community living, how people exist together? That led to the vision that started as WeWork and then is now Flow?

• 4:36Speaker 00

  So first of all, I think there are multiple kinds of communities. There are great communities when a group of people gets together to build something greater than themselves. And then there are communities, which we've seen, I think, more and more of, where you get to a mob mentality. And sometimes that mob mentality actually balances to the lowest common denominator. Luckily enough, the kibbutz and the communities I was experiencing were actually the kind where people come together to do something greater. And it really made me feel that there is more happiness, more fulfillment, more things to do. It's a better way of living when you're surrounded by other people, especially for me, because my childhood was difficult. So I said about my mom, so she would take amazing care of her patients. But I think by 8:00 PM, and it was a very long day, and she would come home

• 5:19Speaker 00

  and my sister and I, we only had one chore, we just had to wash the dishes. We never did. We never did one thing. She just wanted us to come. Because I felt, because I used to walk my sister home from school and I would make the meal. And I did a lot of other things that were important, but they weren't considered a chore. The chore was you wash the dishes. And my mom would come home and the dishes weren't washed. And many times those dishes would start flying. And a lot of times end on the floor or everywhere actually in the house. So that was very extreme as a kid. And I remember the day once, my mom, we didn't have a lot of money also growing up, as well as a social medical system. So doctors don't earn a lot at all. So we always, I remember growing up, it was always either we're at zero or in overdraft.

• 6:02Speaker 00

  So I grew up in my life where you're negative or you can make it back to zero. And when you don't make it back to zero enough times, you get a call from the bank. And then you call grandma and grandma helps a little bit. And then things go back to zero and down to negative. And I remember one time where my mom bought this new set of dishes. And she comes home and again, the same fight. And she starts throwing the dishes, but my sister noticed not the ones she just bought, only the other ones. We started telling us that there was some method to the madness. So it was very difficult back then. And then living in a community always made it better. And no matter what happened at home, no matter how tough the night was, the next morning, everything was okay. And there were neighbors and they heard and things happened. Always people were looking out for us.

• 6:46Speaker 00

  I also remember, and we were just at your father's memorial on Sunday, which was very moving. And I learned a lot about him. And you said a Mark Twain quote there, I think you said something like, when I was 14, I thought my father didn't know anything. And by the time I became 21, he learned so much.

• 7:05Speaker 00

  I think for me, I could really relate to that because as a kid, I always focused about the fact that my mom was so difficult with us. But as I got older and started having, I'm married today with six kids, and started having my own kids and realize how difficult it is when everything is great and you have access to everything and can get very difficult. I realized that for my mom to be a single mom, a doctor, dealing with my personality, which now I see it in my kids, which must have not been easy. There's certain qualities.

• 7:30Ben Horowitz?

  It's a lot of personality to deal with.

• 7:33Speaker 00

  I actually think that in hindsight, what I thought was a challenge was actually exactly what made me who I am today. I think as I was building businesses, it was never tougher than when I was a kid. So there was nothing that could happen that was that bad. And I think sort of, because I do want to make a difference in the world and I do want to make it a better place. And then comes from her and from how she took care of all those patients. And in hindsight, I loved the childhood that we had. So all of that led me to the Israeli army, where I became a Navy officer, where anybody who knew me would have never guessed because you need a lot of discipline. And I think something nice about going to the army, it forces discipline. Because either you're going to be disciplined or you're going to be in trouble. So the big punishment in the Israeli army at the beginning is you don't get to go home on the weekend

• 8:18Speaker 00

  because Israel is so small. Opposed to the US, you serve in the Navy, you're serving, you're very far away from home. You come home every three months, every year. In Israel, the furthest you could go is four hours. My Navy base was an hour from home. So you get to go on the weekends for 24 hours, you go home. It's an amazing thing and you're supposed to rest, but no one rests. You go out, you party, it's a great 24 hours. And for the first nine months, every week I would get punished. I couldn't make it, no matter. By the time I gave up, I was like, the week would start, the commander would walk and say, Adam, you have Shabbat, meaning you're not leaving. And then the week would start. And it took me nine months, actually, someone told me, a very smart officer told me, he said, look, Adam, I think you're going to do great things when you grow up. But you can't be a great leader if you don't know how to be a soldier.

• 9:03Ben Horowitz?

  Brother, you know, that's true for CEOs too. Unless you learn how to be a great employee, like some way, somehow, it's hard to be a great CEO.

• 9:12Speaker 00

  And I think it's true for partnerships. Unless you learn, it's the same thing about partnerships, unless you really learn how to be a great partner, then you're never going to make things work. And it really stuck with me. And he said, the Navy officer course in Israel is two years. He said, you only need two years, not even a soldier, you're a cadet. You just need to make it for two years. And I did. And I credit a lot of my ability to get things done, no matter how complicated they are. Understand how to work in a team, understand leadership. But there's natural leadership that we're born with, but there's things we learn. All of that came together and sort of made me who I am. And then I moved to the US four days after I finished the army. My sister was a supermodel, living in New York City. The family said, Adam, go check on your sister. Let's see what's happening there.

• 9:56Speaker 00

  Because no one knew, she was my younger sister. No one knew what was happening there. So I flew to New York and we lived together. And for the next six years, I lived with Tadi, but I also, for the first four years, went to CUNY Baruch College, City University of New York. And for me, going, and I know it's not an Ivy League school, but for me, going to school was very easy because again, compared to the army, there wasn't any task there that we were going to be given that was so hard. And then I think one more thing that sort of shaped me is growing up, I am still extremely dyslexic. You guys know because I sent my texts. I'm soon start using AI to send my texts. I don't yet, so a lot of spelling mistakes. And I couldn't read until I was in the third grade. So being dyslexic always throughout my life forced me to learn how to deal with things.

• 10:42Speaker 00

  Dealing with communities really shaped me. And going to the army taught me how to be a soldier and then how to be a leader. Then when I brought all of that back and came to the US, things seemed very doable. Everything was possible. And I think what I like about this country so much is I think that's the American dream. Coming as an immigrant from a different country, a kid that in school couldn't even necessarily read or write and had to always work out a system of how to get something done. And coming here, having an idea, building a business, failing multiple businesses, then building a bigger business.

• 11:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 11:15Speaker 00

  Maybe not succeeding as much as we wanted to, then building another business.

• 11:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yes.

• 11:18Speaker 00

  And I think that second chance, that concept of anything can happen, that concept, I heard it a lot again in the memorial on Sunday, that concept of a country where we are all have the ability to achieve what we can and be what we can be. That is, for me, what the American dream is, and that's why I'm so proud to be here.

• 11:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Marc Andreessen?

  There are a bunch of super high profile, very successful people in modern American life who were dyslexic as kids, who really struggled with dyslexia as kids. What connection is there? Like, what is the thing? What is the experience?

• 11:44Ben Horowitz?

  What's the strength that goes with the difficulty?

• 11:47Speaker 00

  First, I think you get very good at hiding it. So my parents, we said, we're both doctors. Second grade, parents getting divorced, grandmother's taking me out to lunch, just because she wants to see how I'm doing, hands over the menu and says, please, order. And takes her exactly 20 seconds to realize the kid can't read. Walk marches me to the principal's office, she was a lawyer. What kind of school are you building here? My grandson can't read. This is horrible. And he looks at her and says, I actually know your grandson. He comes here two to three times a week. We know each other well. And he's going to be just fine. And he's going to have one person reading for him and another person writing for him, and he can do anything he wants. So at the beginning, I think, being dyslexic, you learn how to mask it.

• 12:30Speaker 00

  And you learn you have to use your ears and your listening, especially my dyslexia was both in numbers and in letters. So on the heavier side of dyslexia. And you really learn how to deal with finding solutions. You get embarrassed, I think, a lot at a young age. It's very embarrassing when everybody else can read and you can't. You must make friends, because if you don't make friends, who's going to help you study for the test? So I think those are the beginning. It teaches you that there's always a solution, and it 100% teaches you to think outside of the box. Whatever solution everybody else has, it's not going to work for me. So now let's see what I can do. I think it's changing today. I think something technology is doing, I think it's, I have a lot of dyslexic friends now, everyone keeps calling me about how they're using AI to write stuff, because

• 13:15Speaker 00

  it's just they're not making mistakes anymore. Because my kind of dyslexia, even when you dictate it to the phone, you still get sent, especially with my accent, you still get spelling mistakes. And then you can't fix them. But when you use ChatGPT, you can actually get over that.

• 13:26Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, okay.

• 13:27Speaker 00

  So it's just another little use case that works very well.

• 13:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's great.

• 13:30Speaker 00

  I think the other thing having any disability does, it makes you, when you see someone else who is disabled, and it doesn't matter what kind of disability, because for one thing, each one of us has something that bothers us. And we think it's big for us, but someone else might think it's not. It makes you care.

• 13:47Speaker 00

  Or be very angry.

• 13:50Ben Horowitz?

  Or a little above.

• 13:51Speaker 00

  Or a little above.

• 13:52Erik Torenberg?

  Tell us about when you had the threat of the idea that would one day become flow. You were telling us off camera about how, at your college, you approached a professor with an idea.

• 14:00Speaker 00

  So when I went to Baru College, I joined the entrepreneurs. I thought I wanted to be an entrepreneur. Didn't really know what it is, but I took entrepreneurship and I minored in marketing and one more thing, nothing but studies. And no studies.

• 14:14Ben Horowitz?

  That's from my father.

• 14:16Marc Andreessen?

  You'd already done Middle Eastern Studies by that point.

• 14:18Speaker 00

  I was already past my, I did. I did Middle Eastern Studies.

• 14:22Marc Andreessen?

  Applied Middle Eastern Studies.

• 14:23Speaker 00

  Been applying it ever since. I'm sure we're going to get to it.

• 14:25Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 14:26Speaker 00

  And there was a competition. And it was the first entrepreneurship competition, first prize $50,000, and a seed investment into that idea. And I was sure I was going to win that competition, and I talked in the class and I found the best writer and whoever I thought the best teammates, again, something for my dyslexia. I was very used to finding the best kids in class. And we said, we're going to win this. And I had a huge idea, and it was called Concept Living. And Concept Living was going to be a new way of living, because I used to live in an apartment building with my sister. I was blown away by the fact that we would go up and down the elevator. This is New York City, 2002 to 2008, right after September 11. And no one would say hello in the elevator. And I just found that fascinating.

• 15:09Speaker 00

  And we used to play games at how we're going to say hello to enough people. And I would, I thought I noticed that if you talk to enough people and brought them together, the building's energy changed. And we presented this concept living, and everybody except for us made it to the second stage of the competition. Every single, the stupidest ideas you've ever heard. My team was very disappointed in me, because I led us into a horrible idea. I marched into the dean of business office, who I knew for other reasons. And I said to him, I get it, I missed it, we're not going to go to the next stage, we got to tell me why. Because he was on the panel, on the judges. And he said, Adam, the industry is too big, you're too young, and this is unrealistic.

• 15:51Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, my God.

• 15:53Speaker 00

  And I think, Ben, you were sharing before, I don't think I'm the only one who's experienced that kind of.

• 15:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, this is the story of Fred Smith.

• 15:59Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:00Ben Horowitz?

  Federal Express, where he got a C minus on the paper.

• 16:03Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so Fred Smith, the legendary founder of Federal Express, which is one of the great companies of the 20th century, he went, I think it was one of the Ivy, Ivy business schools.

• 16:09Ben Horowitz?

  Harvard, Harvard.

• 16:10Marc Andreessen?

  Harvard, one of those. And, yeah, and he had the entrepreneur class. He wrote, he wrote his paper on the idea for Federal Express, and they gave him a C minus.

• 16:18Ben Horowitz?

  And so, brilliant, having the hub in Memphis and how it would work.

• 16:24Marc Andreessen?

  Wasn't just a C. It's a C minus. Well, just that final little.

• 16:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. And because it was completely neat idea, but totally impractical.

• 16:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, because it never worked.

• 16:35Speaker 00

  Difference in that story, he goes right out and starts it.

• 16:38Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 16:38Speaker 00

  I wait 10 years. And I think there's, I've always had the lesson from that, like, if you're a dean of anything, if you're a teacher. And you have a young student full of passion, wanting to do something, tell them how to achieve what it is they're going after, not why it's impossible. Because you never know who you might be speaking to.

• 16:54Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Great. So that's, so that started. I think, Ben, also, you said something interesting about that, which, again, for me, the partnership with Mark and Ben is amazing, separate from the fact, from our business partnership, is I learn a lot and I enjoy the partnership and the friendship. You shared something about the fact that, because people ask you about what ideas Adam has, it's always been one idea.

• 17:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, yeah, yeah. Well, that, it was an earlier conversation where I forgot the question Eric asked, but I was like, no, Adam's only had one idea. This is the.

• 17:28Erik Torenberg?

  Well, how you navigate the idea maze.

• 17:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There is no maze. This is it. Like, he's, he's been following this idea for, you know, his whole life now. And so, and, and it's the thing that makes it so powerful in that he and I actually had a conversation with a potential investor the other day, and they're like, well, how come somebody won't be able to replicate the technology?

• 17:53Ben Horowitz?

  My answer was, you know, the technology by itself is somewhat interesting, but it's part of an integrated vision that one, literally one person has. And the thing that I would, the analogy for me has, has kind of been Apple, where if you look at Apple, kind of, and what Steve Jobs did in particular, when he built the product line, there was no piece of software, there was no piece of hardware, there was no, nothing that wasn't already done. Like, all these ideas were done. It was the integrated product line that, you know, with a design sensibility, with

• 18:36Ben Horowitz?

  a usability idea, with the way the technology worked with the person, was the thing that made it so special and so hard to replicate. And, you know, nobody was able to replicate that. And I think that, you know, when you, when we get into flow, what, what I see is, it's a single idea about how people live that's enabled by design and technology and a business model and a culture and a whole set of things. And if you remove any one of them, it's not flow. You know, it's a Windows PC one, and Windows 95, whatever it was, you know, it's that kind of thing.

• 19:16Erik Torenberg?

  Well, we'll get deeper into flow, but first I want to make sure we cover the backstory here, which is, Mark, why don't you talk about how, how you met Adam? Or what you guys saw in Adam? And then let's talk about how this partnership was formed.

• 19:28Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so we didn't, we didn't actually, we didn't, we didn't really, I don't think we ever really met, I don't think, prior to, prior to.

• 19:33Ben Horowitz?

  It was the first phone call.

• 19:34Marc Andreessen?

  I mean, for when I first called you. And, you know, and part of it was, it was a Hatfield McCoy thing, because he was with the Hatfields and with the McCoys. He was the best part founder.

• 19:45Ben Horowitz?

  Those were the days when we actually had a rivalry.

• 19:47Marc Andreessen?

  And we're, and we're across the street from those guys. That's not, that's not, that's not our side of the street. So we never really met. But, you know, we followed the whole saga, you know, all the way up and all the way up and all the way down. And, you know, we noticed a whole, whole bunch of things, you know, kind of, that kind of went through that. But we, we did notice right up front, basically, what Ben just described, which was, which was the integrated vision. And then, and then I, I told Adam this early on, I had a conversation with a guy who's a, one of the top real estate people in the world, who is, you know, had, and this was actually in the middle of, this is when things were starting to go, you know, pear shaped at the time. And I was like, you know, what do you think of this thing? And he's like, look, he's, he's direct quote, he said, there's only two people in the world who have ever successfully differentiated, branded and differentiated commercial real estate. And he said, one of them is currently President of the United States.

• 20:33Marc Andreessen?

  And the other is Adam Neumann.

• 20:36Ben Horowitz?

  We thought, we actually thought that was pretty cool. You know, like that, you're like, what an achievement. And it was right at the time when every, you know, newspaper was shellacking him and all that kind of thing, but. You know, the thing we can't stop thinking about was like, wow, he's one of two.

• 20:54Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, one of exactly two. And what my friends, what my friend said was like, look, it's just like this business has been the way it's been forever, for hundreds, for hundreds of years. For as long as there have been commercial buildings, there's been a certain specific way of doing it. And we've all been trained in how to do it. And it's all very specific way of operating. You know, at the simplest level, you know, we build a shell and then we lease it for 15 years. And then the tenant does all the work on, you know, deciding what the, what the interior is like, what the experience is like. It had another, actually, it's a digression. I had had another conversation like that on that with a, another conversation like that with an entertainment industry mogul some years back when the movie theater business started to cave in. You know, theatrical box office started to collapse. And I was like, well, why don't they upgrade all this? Why don't they reinvent the movie theater? Like, and why doesn't it have?

• 21:33Marc Andreessen?

  There was this famous movie theater in LA. There was one called the ArcLight, and it had this incredible experience of, you know, it had valet parking and it had reserved seating and it had like real food, like real food delivered to you in the seat. And it had like, you know, special screenings where there were no kids allowed. And then they had other screenings where like, kids were definitely allowed, you know, and fully encouraged to yell and scream. And, you know, and, and I was like, you know, why, why aren't there more arc lights? Like, why, why hasn't this experience been getting reinvented? And the, this guy was CEO of an entertainment company. And he looked at me and he said, because they're all owned by real estate guys. Who have absolutely no interest on what happens inside the building. Like, they literally don't care. Anyway, so, so back to my discussion with my real estate friend. It was, it was the same thing, which is, he just said, look, Adam has completely reinvented our industry. It's, it's always going to be like this going forward. It's never going back.

• 22:16Marc Andreessen?

  He's, he's going to unearth the entire thing. And, you know, we work, you know, in some way is going to survive this. And well, they'll, they'll figure out the specific thing with, with the company. But he said, the industry is getting, is getting reimagined. And there's only one guy who's ever been able to do that. I'm in this business. And then, and then you pause for a moment and you kind of think to your point about like the sheer size of the industry. And as, you know, as you always remind us, you know, this is one of the biggest industries on earth, you know, that matters, matters to everybody. And so as Ben and I were talking about it more and more, kind of as we're watching the whole thing happen, it's just like, all right, like there's, you know, there's something very special happening here. Kind of independent of the, of the sort of day to day, blow by blow aspects of the business. And then, and then we'll, we'll talk more about independent of, you know, the, the financial stresses.

• 22:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. The other thing is, you know, we, we keep very good track of what our portfolio companies use. And they're really good indicator of like the best new products because they really care about products. And, you know, almost all of them were, we were customers. And we thought, wow, that's like, super interesting. So we always thought he was a really interesting guy, but you know, because he was with Benchmark, we couldn't call him.

• 23:24Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. So what was the first conversation like? Yeah. So I mean, you, you may remember it better than I do. But yeah, I just, I was actually, I think it was, was it during COVID?

• 23:32Speaker 00

  It was COVID.

• 23:33Marc Andreessen?

  It was during COVID.

• 23:34Speaker 00

  I looked it up before the podcast, May 2020.

• 23:36Marc Andreessen?

  So when the COVID lockdown, the COVID lockdowns hit hard, you know, out, out here. And I, I had this, I didn't have a home office really set up because we always worked out of the office. And so I had just, I was at my dining table with a chair. And after about eight hours of some calls, the entire side of my body from my neck all the way down to my ankles would be basically seized up and in pain. And I was like, I can't live like this. I'm going to die. I'm not going to die COVID. I'm going to die of crippling whatever this is. And so I started taking three hour walks every morning. And I went over to the Stanford campus, which was Stanford campus, May 2020, Stanford campus, completely, completely deserted, except for me taking a long walk. And then there was one staff guy who was stationed at the head of the, of the, of the quad area where I would park. And his job was to yell at me for not wearing a mask.

• 24:20Marc Andreessen?

  As far as I can tell, that was the only thing he did all day. And I would see him every morning and he would yell at me for not wearing a mask. And I would wave my mask at him and just keep walking. Anyway, then I would do three hours of calls. And so I actually, I actually remember this, why I remember the calls, because I remember actually standing in the field at one of the fields at Stanford and actually having the call. And yeah, and it was basically just like, look, like, you know, we've always really admired, you know, what you've done. And, you know, we know, we, you know, we understand what you're going through from the press. But, you know, it basically is, I can't remember if I told this to you, but like our, our philosophy always on this is like, one of the key ways you evaluate founders is like, what difficult challenges have they been through in their lives that they were able to overcome? And the, the best forecast of being able to overcome a profound challenge in the future, which every entrepreneur deals with is having overcome profound challenges in the past.

• 25:01Marc Andreessen?

  And many of the great founders in history have had significant blowups at various points along the way.

• 25:07Ben Horowitz?

  Including like Henry Ford.

• 25:09Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, Thomas, there's tons of examples. Thomas Watson, Thomas Watson, senior, who founded, founded IBM, the guy who founded IBM. He founded IBM in his 40s. In his 30s, he was convicted by the federal government of antitrust. He was like convicted of antitrust violations for, for running his previous company, NCR. Like he was basically already, you know, he's already basically been completely taken down by the government at that point and then started IBM. And so there's just this long history of people who have kind of been through these things. And, you know, some people get punched in the face hard and they never get up again. And other people just get punched in the face. And there's like, wow, it's another opportunity for me to stand back up and, and show what I'm capable of. And so we, we just always felt like it, because somebody goes through something that's very difficult, if they're able to, you know, navigate their way through it and kind of demonstrate their character through it, they, they often have great potential.

• 25:52Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, I don't know, I don't know if it is reasonable for me to draw the, you know, kind of comparison to like what you were describing for, you know, being dyslexic as a kid or whatever, but like being through a fundamental challenge. You know, like that, whether it's in childhood or adulthood.

• 26:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. It's, you know, there, there's a couple of things that go with that. One is anybody who's ever had a great success. Knows that the margin between that and a total failure is very, very thin. And the bigger the success, the thinner the margin. So like, you know, all of us who have been through that go, wow, like, you know, one bad piece of luck and it could have gone completely the other way. And then, you know, we kind of philosophically, very kind of early on in the firm, always felt that what we're looking for is great strength. And like every person has a weakness or has weaknesses.

• 26:49Ben Horowitz?

  And some of them show up in like crazy ways, but that doesn't even matter because everybody's got that. What matters is, are you world class or best in world at what you can do, not what you can't do? And he was clearly, like, clearly, clearly, clearly, like as Mark said, you know, top two in one thing. There's just very few people on earth that are top two in anything. So, you know, it was, it was one of those things where like, we were excited to meet him, not, you know, it wasn't, oh, boy, this is, and we were got all fucked up. That was never a thing.

• 27:28Marc Andreessen?

  And then maybe one more thing, just a general observation, which is kind of the, the old adage of, was it failure, failures, success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan is. There's just, I don't know, actually, I can't remember if I've ever asked you this, but like what a lot of people who go through kind of a big public kind of, you know, take down, tear down of some kind, you know, kind of go through is just like, all of a sudden, everybody they know. And they're just like, you know, the phone's not ringing, right? I've heard this from lots of people. I don't know if it happened to you, but I've heard it happen to lots of people where all of a sudden, it's just like you, you develop, you know, you develop leprosy or something and people just don't want to talk to you. And it's just this like completely bizarre thing. Because it's like, all right, this is like a person who people had, you know, a super high opinion of, and then, you know, lots of relationships with. And then just all of a sudden, you know, it's just like, poof, vanishing. It's like, you know, what is that?

• 28:11Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, every one of those people is probably telling themselves some story about how, you know, they're making the right call by, by separating from the person. But what's, of course, what's happening is what Ted Kaczynski, great famous philosopher Ted Kaczynski, what's called over socialization, right? People are too worried about what everybody else thinks, right? And so people, people get too wrapped up in the sort of mob scapegoating cycle of, you know, being able to, and, and sort of this, this need for this kind of perceived need to kind of, for everybody to agree on everything all the time. And that just has this effect of, I think, too many really promising people being abandoned in key moments. Anyway, I don't know if that happened to you or how much that resonates, but I have talked to many other people who have been through this kind of thing. And I know that that happens. And so, you know, to be able to talk to somebody in that, to be able to talk to somebody in, at that time, I think is, it's, it's like a, it's a blow against conformity.

• 28:55Marc Andreessen?

  Which I think is always a good thing.

• 28:57Ben Horowitz?

  And it's, you know, it's a time when people actually could use a call.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 29:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Speaker 00

  So I think, I think the thing I would add to that is, so I'm not sure we spoke about it. The phone completely was not ringing when you called. And some people are social. I think I'm, I was extra social. So my phone was, and I like, I'm more of a talker than, so really stopped. And it wasn't just that. It was, I say this sometimes, I speak about it. I had a thousand friends a week before, and I went down to 10. And five of them were family members, which I think was part of it. And for me also, I had some of my closest friends working with me, because that's part of our ability. And there was a moment where even people who knew me, who were there for this story, suddenly believed what they were reading. And I do believe we live in a different world. I think we're talking now 2019 and we're now 2025.

• 29:43Speaker 00

  Hopefully the world has changed enough that people know not to believe everything that they read. But I think that was still an end of an era. And we were right place, right time for that. So it definitely stopped ringing. And, and something that I don't know if I've said it to you, but. It was greatly appreciated, that phone call. And what's interesting about phone call, there was no business transaction in that phone call. The phone call was just, how are you doing? And tell me what do you think? And there is something I've shared it before, but it's worth it. We said, Adam, tell me how you're doing. And I jumped straight into my lessons learned and this had an answer. And you were like, oh, you're still in that stage. And we don't know each other. But I was like, Mark, please tell me what that stage is. He goes, you know, the stage when you forgot everything you did and believe everything that was written about you. It's a stage, it will pass.

• 30:28Speaker 00

  And you also told me, and then you told me the same thing, Ben, that you're speaking about. You said, let me tell you what I think about what you did. It was very nice. But you also said at the end of it, you said, Adam, just so you know, and I'm sure we'll talk again. You said, there's only going to be one decision that you need to make moving forward. And that's, are you going to get back in the ring? Or are you not? And he goes, I feel, I don't know you, I feel like you're the guy who's going to get back in the ring. And that's where it's ended. And I was still thinking back at it today. Or if I had someone I was mentoring and they would tell me that Mark called them, I would say, well, call him back. See if there's something you guys could do. There's none of that. It was just that. And the other beautiful thing that you guys did, but market was again you, about six months later, you called me again. Say, hey, Adam, we haven't spoken. What's up? What are you working on?

• 31:11Speaker 00

  And, and, and I was starting to actually work on residential because Ben, you know, to your point, there was always one idea. But I thought I was working on residential as an investment. It was COVID, cap rates, for those who remember, interest rates were literally at zero. Cap rates were wide, for those who understand real estate. When cap rate is compressed, the value of the real estate goes up. So when Mark called, said, what's up now? I said, look, we're doing this, we're doing that, but nothing, nothing that special. Mark's like, okay, let us know if something interesting happens. And between that and the third time that we spoke, I started walking the buildings. And even this is sounding amazing about Corona. So so much change in the world. And I would love to hear Mark, because I think it's so interesting because we gave a lot of forecasts, you and I in Corona. What's going to happen to office? What's going to happen to the home?

• 31:56Speaker 00

  But something that was obvious in Corona is people are not going to give up their homes. And where your home is, is where your heart is. And, and to get back home and you need some version of community. And people back then were so connected digitally more than ever before and no one to talk to. And especially with the mask, if you really want to make it hard, add that barrier. Then tell people they're not allowed to be in the same physical space. And you got yourself an anti-kibbutz moment. And peak anti-kibbutz moment was somewhere in the middle, the middle of Corona. And me and my team, we were like, hey, let's go buy some real estate. My head of real estate goes, his name is Mark. He goes, Adam, how am I going to buy this real estate? We only know how to buy by talking to the landlords because we don't use brokers. We want the deal. So we want to find about the seller that really needs to sell and we need a reason to buy. And I said, go meet them.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  Said, they won't meet me. I said, meet them outside, put them across the table, make sure they have a beer over there. You have a beer over there and scream to each other. And he goes, no one will do it. I said, everyone will do it. No one's calling them. And everyone did it. And our first five acquisitions, who turned out to be amazing acquisitions, who we're going to get to talk about afterwards, but all have amazing bases. And we're done like that. And sometimes all you need to do is, is call the guy or show up. And in Corona, you didn't have to do that much to be very different.

• 33:13Erik Torenberg?

  So how did it change from making some investments to we're going to take a massive swing on residential?

• 33:19Speaker 00

  So two ways. One, I think real entrepreneurs can't help themselves, actually. I think another, so you said, one, what did they go through? I love that. And how did they deal with challenges? And also, can they help themselves? Is this some, is this a problem they must solve? Or do you think it sounds good? If they think it sounds good or they want to be founder because they saw Social Network, the movie? Well, that's not, that's not going to be a good reason.

• 33:45Speaker 00

  Great movie, by the way. That's not going to be, that's not going to be a good reason. But if it's burning from the inside and no matter how many people say they have to do it. What happened is I started walking the buildings and it was lonely. It was soulless. It was depressing. And we're talking, when I say buildings, buildings we bought, this is 400 to 600 apartments. These are shared gyms that look as nice as Equinox and swimming pools and kitchens. And all these rooms that were designed by people, assuming people are going to get together. And not only is no one there, even when people are there, they're not talking to each other. And I just looked at it. I was like, I could do so much better than this. And step one was just like, let's just find a little bit of technology. So we found a company that already existed and we bought it and said, let's just connect them a little bit, not with big intentions.

• 34:30Speaker 00

  And step two is, let's find a great property manager. So we had five assets, so we hired five different property managers. Said, one of them is going to be great. And then we'll have, we'll tell them what to do as asset managers from real estate of the property manager that runs it. And the asset manager, that is the person like the Blackstones and Blackrocks of the world that deploy the cash. And they have a relationship between them. And then we use these different property managers and they were all sort of the same. They all had the same problems. They all told us the same story. They all had the same pitch and their occupancy was completely controlled by supply and demand. And so by that point, so we started working and we started doing it. And immediately we started seeing positive results. So we were like, okay, this is a good direction and we're going to keep doing this. And that was sort of that.

• 35:13Speaker 00

  And by the third time that Mark and I spoke, Mark read an article in the Wall Street Journal. And today we try very hard not to have any articles about us, but that one slipped. So Mark called and said, hey, I read in the Wall Street Journal about a million dollars. You're not telling me you're starting a business. And I said, no, it's actually more us. We are starting a business and he said, you have an idea for a brand. I said, I do, but we're doing it just us and we're, we're taking our time. Mark said, sounds awesome. Maybe you guys can come and share it with us. And I said, I would love to. That really expect, again, no expectation. I think the thing about this relationship is it, it, it formed organically. It took time. There was no rush to do anything. And, and that's what made it so real. And then we went to dinner at Nobu. Mark hosted us.

• 35:59Speaker 00

  Ben was actually not in the first lines. DG was there, he runs growth. And Chris Dixon was there who runs crypto. And we had, and, and we had this very nice dinner. And I remember coming to the dinner and we sit down and Mark goes, so tell us about this new idea. And I said, well, I actually want to start by talking about lessons learned from WeWork. And Mark said, Adam, we, we wouldn't have invited you here if that's what we need to talk about. We've done, we know a lot about you. Don't worry. We might know more about some of your mistakes.

• 36:28Marc Andreessen?

  The good news with WeWork is it was very well documented.

• 36:31Ben Horowitz?

  He read the book, we watched the mini series. We talked to him and they had a lot of employees.

• 36:36Speaker 00

  He said, not only have we read, but you said, not only have we read everything, I know your board members. I actually know, I know all of them. I know them, I spoke to them and, and you're here because we wanted you to come. Let's talk about the idea. And I said, I really appreciate that, but I actually want to learn. I'm sure you have a different take than me. Let me share. And then, and this is for those of you who don't know Mark, once you get, you let Mark go, he has a lot to say. So I started and within minutes, you gave me, until today, I remember you said a few things there that I couldn't believe I never noticed. And one of the things Mark said that was so obvious was, what research did you do about what investors you took? What did you know about their history? What research did you do about what employees you took? What did you know about your tech leaders?

• 37:20Speaker 00

  He said, I get it, Adam, you move really fast and you're passionate and you make things happen. But how much diligence did you actually do? And the answer was actually none for my first investors. They came, they came to me. I didn't know anything, I didn't know any better. Do you know what else existed? But if I did, maybe I would have come. Maybe I would have come here and we would have been in a different place. But, but you know, Ben, you've said it to me, we talked about it, we talk about it sometimes. No, no, I believe in a bigger picture, but separate than the fact that I believe in something greater than myself. I genuinely believe that we go to the place that we need to be. As long as we're willing to learn lessons and change, I know that today I'm exactly where I need to be. And this partnership, this discussion we're having now wouldn't have happened. So we had that dinner and it was excellent.

• 38:04Speaker 00

  And then we started talking about the future of living. And we talked about a pure vision and really what we see. I said, well, we were, and I explained what we already have and explained why we could already start leveraging what we have to then take it to the next level. And then we actually went, but then Mark had then said, so what do you think? You think maybe we should explore something? Said, look, I don't know you, you don't know me. I was a little burned in the past. We're using all of our own money for this. And then Mark, you said to me, how about you take time and get to know us? We'll get to know you and let's see what happens. And it took six months from that point. A lot of people think that this happened fast. It didn't. It took six months from that point to the actual investment, which in this August will be three years.

• 38:44Erik Torenberg?

  Well, one thing I just want to say that's so remarkable is you not only got back in the ring again, after you already built an iconic company. You already made more money than, than you know what to do with. But you also put a large chunk of that liquidity back into the company, sort of a triple down in a way that it seems like Elon is the only person who continuously does that.

• 39:03Speaker 00

  So I think that one, I give a lot of credit to Mark and Ben. And so when they came, when we started Mark, I wonder if you remember this discussion. So we're starting to talk about the business and I immediately was leaning into asset light. Because we should be asset light. Why? Because I heard so many times, because WeWork was an asset light for all the, all the wrong reasons. I said, we need to be asset light. And Mark, you flew and, and now I know, but you traveled down to Miami multiple times. And again, this was before the famous dinner. And we were sitting in the car and we were talking about real estate and you actually talked about your father-in-law. And you shared with me a lot of things that you learned from him over time. And, and I didn't meet him either, but he sounds like an amazing person who's done a lot for the Valley and for California.

• 39:48Speaker 00

  And you said to me, Adam, forget what your team and my team is talking about for a second. Not because we don't respect them. We respect everybody and we're going to hear everybody's opinions. But I just want to know what you think. If I wanted you to build the largest, really disrupt this industry and imagine it the way you imagine it, would you need to own real estate? And I said at the beginning, I would. And you asked me why? And I said, because I want to be allowed to do whatever I want. I want to try everything. I want to fail fast. I want to fix fast and I want to deploy fast. And I said, I want to change everything. I want to change the technology of how it's run. I want to change the operating people of what they do. I want to change the design. I want to change the smell. I want to change the uniforms. I want to change everything about it until it gets to something that I know is right. And you asked me, how would you know when it's right? And I told you, it's a feeling.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  And you said, great. And then you said, I have a suggestion for you. It's not traditional. You have this large portfolio. Take out of this portfolio, whatever you don't think is a fit for Flo. Sell it. But the rest, what do you think is your best stuff? Put it with us, aligned on the top together and we're with you. We go up, we go down, whatever you do, we do. And it took me a second and in the beginning, I thought this was some negotiating, some fancy negotiation tactic. Because it ended up being one of the smartest things we've done. I genuinely believe that the reason Flo today, and we're going to talk about it more, is where it is, was because of that decision. But I think, Mark, I've asked you this before. I think the reason you're the very, you actually had a simple reason for that decision.

• 41:15Speaker 00

  That was alignment, something that I think A16Z is really good at.

• 41:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, in part, that was based on actually watching WeWork, which is by the time you get in a situation where you're fighting with your investors, like things just do not end well. And we've just, we've seen that across many companies. And so, yeah, if we just, our, building a business is so hard if everybody's aligned. If everybody's not aligned, like it becomes punishingly difficult.

• 41:37Speaker 00

  I'll push you on it a little bit because yes, but for venture capital, saying, let's go own real estate, not obvious.

• 41:44Marc Andreessen?

  So let's talk about that for a moment because this also goes into what Flo is doing. So basically, the way I think about this is there's sort of two iconic business models that are kind of held out in Silicon Valley as kind of the best in class, like best business models ever, ever made. And one of them is Microsoft. And the great lesson of Microsoft was you build a horizontal layer of technology, you know, software, operating systems and applications. And then you basically run across, you know, thousands of different hardware implementations, thousands of different, you know, computer, computer makers and chips and so forth. So you build a horizontal layer and you never ever vertically integrate because you want to basically run on everything. So that's, so that's lesson number one. Then lesson number two is Apple, where the lesson is you 100% always want to vertically integrate. You never want to be a horizontal layer because you don't have nearly enough control over the user experience.

• 42:28Marc Andreessen?

  You have to, you know, the old Steve Jobs line is that people who, you know, love software need to build their own hardware. You need to actually control the entire thing. You need to be completely vertically integrated because if you're not vertically integrated, you can't control the user experience. And if you can't control the user experience, you can't deliver the thing, you can't deliver against the vision. And of course, as is true in so much in business and life, those lessons are diametrically opposed, right? They're irreconcilable, like they're directly opposed. And there have been great tech companies built with the Microsoft model and there have been great tech companies built with the Apple model. So, you know, the moral of the story is like, it really depends. Specifically though, if you want to control the actual customer experience and, and you have to, you have to vertically integrate. It's the only way to actually do it because otherwise you're, you're in, you're in the role

• 43:12Marc Andreessen?

  of having to kind of cajole, especially early on. You're in the realm of having to cajole people who don't share your vision into doing the things that are required. Now, having said that, as we talk about all the time, there is an extraordinarily large amount, number of properties out there that could benefit from the brand, the vision, the technology, the platform. And so one of the very interesting kind of things at the heart of the business model for Flo is to what extent, like in the long run, should it be vertically integrated? And to what extent should be, you know, where we own our own real estate? And to what extent should it actually run on across all real estate?

• 43:43Speaker 00

  And then I think for that, we've, we can learn a lot from hotels because hotels have gone through their process. If you take Hilton and Marriott where they started by owning a lot of it. And today, if I'm not mistaken, less than, we're talking about thousands of properties, less than 1% owned. So no matter how much money you could raise and how big, and when we talk about raising money, by the way, we talk about raising money for real estate funds. We're not talking about raising money for Flo parent company. That, that door is closed. And, but no matter how much you would raise, it would always be tiny compared to how big the asset class. And you talked about one of the largest. It, real estate is so large, just so people, for people to understand that we're talking about a $250 trillion asset class. But to try to put it in numbers, a normal building, these multifamily buildings

• 44:27Speaker 00

  is $200 million a building. You buy 10, you're at $2 billion. And 100, you're $20 billion. And 100 is not a big number. It's just you could sit, we're in downtown Miami. You could stand on our roof and point to 100 buildings that could be Flo buildings. And there's five different neighborhoods like that in Florida, in South Florida. And that's just one area. Then you go to New York and you could start going all over the planet. So I think, but I do think that that decision allowed us to be who we are. And also when the time does come, now, so we have two choices. But we also can do the flag business where we come to a person who owns, who owns this multifamily or the other things, the other services that we deliver and put our flag, just like the Four Seasons puts their flag and actually do a management deal where it's our brand, our technology, our experience,

• 45:11Speaker 00

  but the expenses are on the, on the landlord. And some of what's nice also about our alignment is we don't have to make that decision yet today. Right now, we have to build the best product.

• 45:23Erik Torenberg?

  Can we share more about the thesis underlying our bet into Flo in terms of how we saw the, you know, why was this going to be one of the biggest companies in the world?

• 45:32Ben Horowitz?

  I think it starts with, as we got into it, it really came down to, okay, who is Adam? Forget Adam, the entrepreneur, who's Adam the person? You know, what is he good at? What is he not as good at? What are we good at? Can we get along? You know, it was that kind of thing. We had, I think it was a seven hour dinner.

• 45:54Erik Torenberg?

  Oh yeah, talk, talk about that dinner. What was remarkable about that dinner?

• 45:58Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I mean, you know, we really got into it.

• 46:00Speaker 00

  Mark, remember how it started? Mark called me, I saw Mark twice already. Yeah, I didn't know, now I know Mark. I didn't know back then that Mark wasn't traveling as much and this. I knew that Mark jumps in a plane, he comes, he sees you. But Mark calls and goes, hey, Adam, I know we hung out twice, we need one more time. I said, what's up? He goes, well, my partner Ben, you haven't met him, he wants to come hang also. I was like, great, we'll have dinner. That turned out to be a seven hour dinner.

• 46:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's a long dinner. You know, a lot of how you get to know someone is kind of get into the things that, you know, you shouldn't even talk about, right? Like they're, they're not polite, they're not the kinds of things. And so I think Adam asked me, he's like, well, you know, like, looking at me, what do you worry about? Like, what are you really worried about? Like, what do you need to think about? And I can't remember exactly what I said. It was something like, like Adam, like people look at you and, you know, I watched the show. And in the show, the great moment for you was being on the cover of some magazine, Fortune, whatever. I was like, I could see you didn't even care about that. That was nothing.

• 47:08Ben Horowitz?

  The great moment for you was when the company went to the brink and you saved it. And what I need to know is like, I don't want you to chase that fucking feeling because that will cause you to take chances. There are chances that you have to take and then there's chances you don't have to take. And I don't want you taking the chances you don't have to take because, you know, your vision is so incredible. Like it would be horrible to put it at risk for a non-valid reason. And so like, we kind of got into that. And I said, look, I know the feeling because like,

• 47:44Erik Torenberg?

  You did it too.

• 47:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I've been in, I've saved a company like that. Like I know exactly what that, like you never can feel that good. It's walking back into the building and everybody thought the company was over and you fucking saved it. You just pulled it out of like the fire. That's the most unbelievable thing in the world. But you don't want to be in that position.

• 48:02Marc Andreessen?

  Well, and it is worth saying, there are founders who will, if they do not have a crisis, they will create one.

• 48:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:06Marc Andreessen?

  They will absolutely seek out disaster.

• 48:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, yes. And look, we all like, there's a bit of it in everyone. And, you know, if you look at Elon, he takes very aggressive chances. Cause, and he's not afraid of it and he calculates risk, but, but the chances have big payoffs. And the danger is always when you take the chance and it doesn't pay out, but it could, you could lose the company over it. And so, you know, we just had a, I would just say the thing I remember about that was, it was a very honest conversation. It's very hard to have an honest conversation about something like that. It's almost like, people don't really want to look at themselves like that. And, and I was impressed with how introspective and honest Adam could be

• 48:54Ben Horowitz?

  on, you know, a number of topics like that. And so my conclusion is, look, I think that this is somebody that we can work with. The things he wasn't good at, at WeWork, like we're very good at putting together a tech team, you know, understanding which of the six ideas are good and which ones we should probably wait on or not do and that kind of thing. Like that's the, that's a strength of us.

• 49:24Erik Torenberg?

  It's been a few years, you've been on the board, you've, you've tracked the company. Why don't we talk about how the company's progressed and sort of where we're at? Cause you haven't been super public about it and there's some exciting things happening. So why don't you share your perspective?

• 49:36Ben Horowitz?

  Well, it's often an amazing start. I mean, so first of all, the, the thesis of the value of the community, the technology, everything that Adam's talked about, the design, has proven out like before, you know, the product is maybe 5% done, but it's already able to kind of generate, you know, kind of much higher demand resulting in people willing to pay much higher rent for the exact same space and the exact same location as other places, which has resulted in kind of returns on the buildings that are unprecedented.

• 50:18Ben Horowitz?

  We've also, you know, the company had the foresight to expand into Saudi Arabia, which is not something that most entrepreneurs would think of.

• 50:29Speaker 00

  So there, we will finish selling them 24 months from when we started.

• 50:33Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 50:33Speaker 00

  But, but yes, initial, and we're going to sell our first asset. We closed last August, we will sell our five buildings. We will sell our first asset in a month and we'll keep a management deal for the unforeseeable future.

• 50:46Ben Horowitz?

  And then the other thing is we've built a strategic technological advantage. The, so, you know, real estate software has been hampered by old, I would just say very crafty technology. I won't name the company, but everybody in real estate knows the company. And the, the Flo team has basically reimagined.

• 51:10Ben Horowitz?

  What living means. So, you know, rather than orienting around a building, the software is extremely flexible and can organize itself around the citizens, the people who live in the buildings, in the communities, you know, in the world, and meet their needs where they are in the kind of best way possible, the most usable way. Just even like signing up for a building, it's going to take you 100x less time. You know, it's something that kind of obvious and simple. But because of the way these other things are architected, it's very difficult for them.

• 51:54Ben Horowitz?

  And that's just the beginning because what's possible technically, you know, particularly in a connected world and AI world is just unbelievable if you have the right architecture. And so you've got the technological advantage, you've got the community idea working fully, the business is working. So it's been, it's definitely way exceeded our expectations. And I mean, look, we're looking forward to building a great company. But I mean, our expectations were high. We thought, we put a lot of money into this.

• 52:29Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 52:30Ben Horowitz?

  I think the time is the biggest investment we ever made.

• 52:34Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Real estate hasn't had a ton of tech innovation. Like what exactly is, is happening here? What's really interesting? What's the opportunity?

• 52:41Ben Horowitz?

  Well, there's so many, there's so many things in the architecture, but it kind of starts with like, how do you model what's going on? And there's all sorts of components that basically in a normal real estate world get completely ignored. So, you know, you really, as a customer, care about everything from your neighbors to the building, to your furniture, to how you get your mail, to how the parking lot works, to how security works. And you not only care about it, but you really don't want a system

• 53:23Ben Horowitz?

  keeping your information about you. You'd like that to be on your phone. And the system to be able to query it, but not store it. So it doesn't get stolen and these kinds of things. And then if you had that, then you'd be comfortable with a lot more about yourself kind of accessible. And then you can publish what you want to publish, you know, and the way that the company has already taken advantage of that is incredible. So for example, let's say I'm a yoga instructor. Maybe I want everybody in my building to know that. And maybe, you know, they really want to know that I can do that because wouldn't it be great

• 54:06Ben Horowitz?

  to take yoga lessons without leaving my apartment building? And so what's happened already in Flow is not only has the commerce between residents, accountants, yoga instructors, personal trainers, you know, everything you can think of, completely flourished. There are people, many people who, all of their clients for their business, live in the building that they live in. And so this kind of incredible technological flexibility where you have a single platform where that knows everything about its citizens while keeping

• 54:44Ben Horowitz?

  things private, having every service, not only that Flow provides, but that every other person provides, all in one place, is just, it changes the whole way you live. Because, and it changes what's possible. And as I said, I think we're at the beginning of that. And, you know, no other system, I mean, we started with the other systems. And they're just like, they're ridiculous by nature, or, you know, in terms of, they don't even, you know, people are an attribute of a building.

• 55:23Ben Horowitz?

  It's how that works. So think about that.

• 55:25Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Ben Horowitz?

  Like I, as a human being, am an attribute of a building to a real estate piece of software. It's insane. But, you know, this has been completely re-architected. The chief technology officer of Flow is an architectural genius. The way he's designed it has enabled not only everything that Adam envisioned, but, you know, so many things beyond that, where every time an opportunity comes up, it's there. The other kind of capability of the software that's amazing is because it's so flexible, yes, this could be multifamily living, or this could be condos, or this could be a hotel, or this could be office space.

• 56:08Ben Horowitz?

  And it can change literally with the press of a button, which is, you know, all those are separate, completely separate software packages everywhere else in the world.

• 56:20Speaker 00

  So to add to what Ben just said, once you're able to use that architecture, which again is something that I do not believe would have been built with other partners. So I think it's another benefit of this partnership. Once you're able to do that, you're able, you take that multifamily and it really came out of need. We had a multifamily and I just walked in one day and said, hey, furnished apartments. Everyone's doing it in Europe. Why wouldn't the young generation want that? They're, I'm 22, I finished college, I can't buy my furniture, it never looks right. Give me a furnished apartment for an extra $300 a month. And the team literally said, no, no, the system can't do it. And I said, we were using one of the traditional, so I said, what do you mean it can't? Said, it can't, it physically can't. I said, well, I want to do it. So they replicated the building. So we had two buildings. And then I said, okay, no more 12-month leases, we want to give shorter term leases.

• 57:04Speaker 00

  Some people only want it for eight months. Other people want it for 20 months. Oh no, we can't do that. And I said, well, how about short-term stay? What if some people want actually? And I said, well, we have this dream, day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month, year-to-year. Oh no, that, you're going to need four different systems. So you take that architecture, you take that system, you build it in the backend. You build a system, the frontend, you have one brand and you train one team to be able to operate all of that, and the result will be higher NOI. Higher buildings are more profitable. And just to use a little numbers for that, our building in Fort Lauderdale NOI net operating income is 30% higher than when we took over it. It's 95% full today. It was 95% full when we took over it.

• 57:45Speaker 00

  It's not higher occupancy. It's lower churn, higher rent, obviously better experience. And then another interesting thing, which brand does, 80% of most leases in South Florida come from brokers. 90% of all inbound into Flow is direct to the, direct to us, direct to the website. Now, our brand is still young, but even a young brand, and we never said, we didn't say this, but 40% of, sorry, 70% of 40-year-olds and younger in the United States are renters. They spend a third of their wallet, a third of their pocket on that rent. There's not one brand. You have them in hotels, you have them in condos, not one brand. There wasn't one in office before we did that also.

• 58:24Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, one of the things that is so exciting about this business, we were got to where it got with no such technological platform.

• 58:35Erik Torenberg?

  Just the brand?

• 58:35Ben Horowitz?

  Just the brand, yeah.

• 58:36Marc Andreessen?

  This also goes to conversation we had early on about the sort of changing nature of housing in the US, right? Which I, which we've talked a lot about since. And I think a lot about, which is basically there's a bifurcated housing market in the US. The way I think about it basically is there's plentiful cheap housing out the places that don't have great jobs, where people don't really want to live. And then there's basically like impossible bottlenecks on housing stock in, especially the cities, and especially the cities where lots of young people want to live, and especially where the really great jobs are and where the economic growth is. And so just as like a young person starting out in life, like you have a very-

• 59:07Ben Horowitz?

  It's an assault on young people.

• 59:09Marc Andreessen?

  It's an absolute attack on young people. And I mean, it actually becomes, it's actually hard to even discuss this without getting enraged because we're sitting here in California where they have the infamous Prop 13, you know, which was this very explicit, you know, handout to boomers at the expense of basically the, you know, the entire, the entire young generation coming up now. But basically like, if you want to live and work as a young person in a place where you're going to have access to top-flight economic opportunity in all these growth industries, and you want to work in tech, or you want to work in design, or entertainment, or, you know, any of these, any of these, you know, finance, or any of these, you know, kind of growth industries, like number one, you're not going to own a house. Like owning a house is going to be completely unaffordable. And so you're going to be, you're going to be in some sort of multifamily, some sort of rental, you know, situation. And then the other thing is like, there's a really fundamental kind of

• 59:51Marc Andreessen?

  stress point, and I think this is coming fast enough for Gen Z, which is like, all right, are you ever going to be able to get married and have a family? And what is that going to be like? Because can you, can you really do that, like in a small apartment? And, you know, all, all the data, of course, indicates that in all these cities, by the way, all over the world, you know, birth rates are crashing, you know, population, you know, populations are declining, you know, people are not even reproducing at reproduction levels. And so there's this like fundamental social, political, cultural, economic vice that young people are in. And in the absence of something like Flow and the absence of a thoughtful approach, where you could actually imagine having a positive experience and being able to, you know, being able to actually have, you know, fulfilling life and a fulfilling experience, like I think young people are really in trouble.

• 1:00:36Speaker 00

  Well, let's add two thoughts. First of all, I think this is, and we, Mark, we talk not today about politics, but in general about politics. I think it's a main issue globally. And sometimes a lot of other issues become louder, but might be the biggest one.

• 1:00:49Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 1:00:50Speaker 00

  Because if a person doesn't have a home, a shelter, something that they feel that's theirs, how do you expect them to treat other people the way you, they want to be treated? How are you even going to ask them to go to that next level of behavior that we expect from all of us if they can't afford a house?

• 1:01:03Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:01:04Speaker 00

  And so I think that's, I think it's probably the worst deal. A young person can have paying rent, traditionally at the end of every month, you pay that rent, and the only feeling you have is, I just threw the money away? And it actually, this goes a thousand years back, this word landlord, where these lords, and you had to, and you would get a piece of the land, you'd work the land for the Lord, and then you'd give that piece, whatever this, and if you're lucky, you got to keep a little bit.

• 1:01:26Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 00

  And it was all up to them. The entire concept of real estate is, is-

• 1:01:33Speaker 00

  The haves and the haves not, but in a much bigger topic, we hear a lot of noise about a lot of haves and haves not. This is where it's really playing out. So I think with the reality like Flow that we're dreaming of, and we started multifamily, but so we said you could take a multifamily. Now it's now it's rental furnished, unfurnished, short term, long term. We didn't talk about condos, but Flow launched a condo project five months ago. So you can own, you can buy, you can you can rent, you could do anything between. But that's when you're living in these towers. Flow sees a future. There are a lot of single family also, which is another huge part of most single family than multifamily. Another big part of it. So another part of where Flow can come in and offer all these services. And if you can prove, which you can already see with the numbers in Flow,

• 1:02:17Speaker 00

  that the returns on the real estate are actually higher, then landlords and investors all over the world will be very happy to deploy their cash that way. And now they're deploying, and we like to call it a win, win, win. The investor can win, Flow can win as running it, and the user can win. And if everybody can feel like they're a winner and they're getting something much better, then then you really have a new a new solution. Now, there's a lot of not not for today, but to complete that solution, you would have to at some point tackle that word of ownership. But as we said, Ben, you said we're 5% into the journey, maybe even 3% into the journey. But we're just starting. And the other interesting thing is, so you're seeing the properties in Miami already delivering both on top revenue and profitability.

• 1:03:01Speaker 00

  And there isn't profitability is such an important metric for us. If we just spent more and made more, that's not gonna that's not gonna do anything. You're not going to encourage any investment. We need to spend the same and make more, or spend less and make more. And that's why NOI, your net operating income is such a good metric in in these buildings. But then to Ben's point, and then they're starting to do business with themselves. So you spoke about the people who don't have any other business. The way we like to talk about it a lot is how many classes does a yoga teacher need to close the month, just to pay rent? And the answer is not not as much about five classes a week. Every week is enough if it's one on ones, and then they could do group classes. And that's just one example. Also, you talked about it as a citizenship. Once you become part of the Flow community, so we do billing, for example.

• 1:03:45Speaker 00

  We built every so we're vertical, we're completely vertically integrated. We built every single piece, and the pieces we haven't built yet, we're building. Doesn't mean we can't use third party software, let's say, on video cameras or different things they need for security or parking lots there. We don't have to invent everything, but we do have to have it all connected. And when you do that, and you do it on the right architecture, you're able to see things. I'll give you another example, events. 60% of our residents, 60% of the events in Flow are run by residents. And because of the tech, they created it, they published it, they invited people, people registered. If they wanted to build people, they can build people. And it all happens, and 60% is now when we're early. That number is going to go up to 90%. And great communities, we spoke about communities, run themselves.

• 1:04:30Speaker 00

  So one sign, and I know it used to exist in schools, still exists in schools. When you go to Tor University, hopefully a student that's really proud of the school they go to is the one touring you. It's not the salesperson trying to pitch you there. Same thing and same thing in the buildings. If the community, when someone tours the building, a great one of our great, and we're trying to let everyone, there's no more just leasing agents. Everyone can be a leasing agent, because again, if you're holding the app, and that piece is called the host app, you can you can make a lease, as Ben said, very quickly. And everybody has the same information. As you walk around, you just introduce the person touring to residents, and everybody's excited to talk about. And I think this is a good segue into, so if we didn't make it clear enough, Flow is a vertically integrated real estate company that started in long term rentals,

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  then introduced all the other aspects of everything you can do in a building, including condo and office. And then we started offering services that put the resident in the front and allowing them to work with each other. Our technology, our brand, and our operations coming together yield this experience, which is already proven that it's doing a higher return for the owners of the buildings. But before we talk about that, I think the going to Saudi was a very interesting thing. First of all, again, interesting about our dynamics, because think of that board meeting. So you have a few buildings in Miami, they're going great. And now you're coming to the board to say, okay, so our third building is gonna be, and you know, let me guess, New York City. No, Austin, Texas. No, very nice place, but no. And then you say Riyadh.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  And I think that's just not, I think that's not your obvious thing. But again, and this is something else, you talked about success, the difference of success and failure being so small. Again, I believe I believe in God, so for me, it's this. Mark and I have different discussion, how we define God differently, but we believe in something greater than ourselves. We, after the investment was made, you guys got quite a lot of phone calls from your LPs. And you reached out to me and said, I think you might have told me from every single one of them. Hey, you have a lot, so that's a lot of phone calls. And I remember you asked me, Ben, hey, Adam, do you mind coming with me to the Middle East? I'm going anyway. And let's share with not everyone, but top 10, 12 LPs. Tell them what Flow is. And I'm sure it will be great for you in the long run, and it's great to do. You'll meet great people. And that's what we did.

• 1:06:44Speaker 00

  And we walked around, and there are two very funny things that happened. One, we would walk in. No matter what meeting you take with Ben, at the end of the meeting, forget Flow, Ben gets offered money. That's just it's it's it happened to us again last week. It's it's an interesting.

• 1:06:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that was a real estate investor.

• 1:06:59Speaker 00

  It's an interesting, it's an interesting experience to go with Ben. And so people think I'm great at raising money, I'm a beginner. And so we would go to these meetings, and we told them about Flow. And Flow was only in Miami at the time. And what was interesting is, without fail, every one of these LPs, they're all from the Middle East, said, we think this concept would be great for the Middle East, specifically Saudi Arabia for Riyadh. And even in Abu Dhabi, they said the same, and in Dubai, they said the same for a variety of reasons. And once I heard it for the 10th time, Ben was like, hey, maybe we should check it out. And we did. And I went to Saudi, and I think what's interesting when we went, first of all, Saudi is phenomenal. For those of you who haven't had a chance to go there. What I get excited about Saudi, the optimism, the vision.

• 1:07:44Speaker 00

  Ben, I think, might have coined the term a founder led country. So there's a vision, it's very clearly articulated. It's Vision 2030, but there's also now visions for 2020, 2034 and and further. And as part of that vision, you're taking an entire economy that used to depend on oil, and you're diversifying it. And 70% of Saudis are 40 year olds or younger. And so it's a very young population.

• 1:08:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:08Speaker 00

  And there are a lot of them are educated in the West. English is spoken everywhere. And MBS, the leader has not even slowly, quite fast, changed a lot of rules that have made foreigners and foreign investors and change rules internally and externally, inviting a lot of people in. And I think last week, a lot of us saw Trump there, and a lot of people were talking about it. But we've been going there for some time. And choosing to go to Saudi was a very big choice for us as a company. And in hindsight, extremely worked extremely well, but was also very difficult, because there was a lot, a lot of challenges that were happening as we're there. But we got to deploy everything we did. So we went to Saudi, we still want to be vertically integrated.

• 1:08:50Speaker 00

  So we chose five buildings that were going to be condos, which means they were going to sell them. We bought them from the developer. We changed the condos into rentals. And we started deploying the brand, we put our design from the outside, we brought our furniture. We launched it on our tech. It was also the first time we got to launch it on our backend system, not just our frontend system. So it was a very good opportunity for us. Our team, our uniforms, our smell, our music, our art, everything that we do, but also very localized. And because of my past, I have a lot of experience entering into new countries. So it's not something that I haven't done before, but it was definitely different. And we, and the way we wanted to do it is not just use our own money. We were going to raise a local fund, because the theory was,

• 1:09:32Speaker 00

  if and we're only going to raise it from local investors, not go to the big investors that run that run Saudi, but local families. Because I've learned many times, if the local families of a country want to support you, they know what's going on in the country. If you go to all the local families and no one wants to invest, maybe your idea is not as good as you thought.

• 1:09:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:48Speaker 00

  And that's what we did. We raised it from actually 33 different investors. We put our own equity, we got debt from the local bank. We bought these five properties. It was about a billion SAR, which is about $300 million fund. And we started, and that was in August, and then we started operating. We opened our first building in January. We achieved over 90% occupancy within 60 days.

• 1:10:10Ben Horowitz?

  Wow.

• 1:10:10Speaker 00

  We opened our second building right after. And we opened our third building last month. And our fourth and fifth building, we've already preleased to an enterprise that's going to release it for the next five years. So the entire portfolio is going to be stabilized over the next 90 days. That's when you opened in January, and it took 60, it took six months to become NOI positive. And for those real estate people that are listening to this, that's extremely fast for buildings that were at zero. We also have to do everything they do when you go to a new country, which is hire a local team. We're very lucky with a local leader named Fawaz that came from government. It was a CEO himself and did a lot of things. But we're very lucky having a local team.

• 1:10:53Speaker 00

  And something beautiful that happens in Flow, whenever anyone needs to go to Saudi, you too many people volunteer. And if Flo right now say, who wants to move to Saudi? You're getting half the employees in the company raising their hands. Because in Saudi and in Riyadh, we get to take all these visions that we have, but we're the only ones doing it. And as good as our product market fit is in South Florida, and it's really is excellent, it's phenomenal in Saudi.

• 1:11:20Ben Horowitz?

  How amazing is that, that everybody wants to move to Saudi? I mean, just if you went back 12 years, the people in Saudi wanted to move out of Saudi. It's completely turned around.

• 1:11:31Speaker 00

  I really, I really think it is. And it also for us as a company, it forced us to do us launching the technology even before we were fully ready, forced us to see what's working, what's not. It also shows you the power of the platform. It's back to that agility.

• 1:11:43Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:43Speaker 00

  In Saudi, you have to be connected to the government for the rent for variety of reasons. Actually allows you to, to take people out who don't pay rent. There's a lot of reasons for it to work out really well. Our team did it in four days. We didn't think it was a big deal. We talked to people because the system is built to be flexible. It's built to need to connect to external things if it needs to. And because our architect Scott, who is our CTO, knew that he needs optionality, both because he knew how I operate as a leader, but also because he knew that we just don't know yet what we don't know. And when we meet people in Saudi, say, so when are you going to connect to the system? They're like, what are you talking about? We're already connected. Then other people ask us, say, when are you going to become a Saudi company? We heard that takes two years. It's like, I don't know. We have Fawaz and it took us exactly 60 days.

• 1:12:25Speaker 00

  So not only are we operating in Saudi, we're operating as a Saudi company, which I think is, is very important. And, you know, without comparing, but the experience that we're delivering right now in Saudi is, is not just second to none, but it even competes with our local experience in South Florida.

• 1:12:42Erik Torenberg?

  Wow. Talk more about the real estate fund because I know the one in Saudi did tremendously well. But is this a model that you're planning to roll out across regions? Talk more about how that's going to work.

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  So let's start with the real estate fund in Saudi. It was launched and closed and actually got oversubscribed. Mainly because not only are they really up, it's also great to send to your investors back money. So it's, we're very excited to do that. We're planning to send the first check soon. So that's very exciting. Also, when we sold it, the people are buying, they want flow to manage it, which is the beginning of the business model that it's going to become. That is the flag model. So the beginning, I think you have to be vertically integrated because you have to prove it on yourself. You have to put your own money there. But after it's proven, there are a lot of real estate, a lot of, of real estate investors that would like to invest in an above market offer.

• 1:13:29Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 1:13:30Speaker 00

  And connecting it to what Ben said about why is the technology lying us? The moment you have technology that allows you not just to deliver a better service in the building, that creates more loyalty, that lowers churn, that increases rents, that connects the community internally, that allows all these things to happen. By allowing yourself to move from a multifamily to a hotel, extended stay, furnished apartments, corporate housing, it gives you so much flexibility. So Saudi, for example, a lot of expats are moving in. We learned very quickly that these expats are getting one month from the company that hired them. So some numbers for everyone about Saudi, Riyadh has 7.8 million citizens, is growing to almost 10 million by 2030.

• 1:14:13Speaker 00

  So over the next five years, about 5 million expats, big numbers. They get hired by these local companies, a lot of them. They get one month that the company pays them. And then they're supposed to find their own to get paid well. They're supposed to find their own place to live. So we said, okay, great. Let's give one month because that's what fits them. And then we'll see how many of them stay. The conversion rate has been phenomenal. 90 something percent of anybody who took the month is able to stay. But if you're any other landlord and you're the great building manager, that building manager said, hey, I want to sell this new offering. I'll give a month, then I'll give them a lease. The system wouldn't be, I know it sounds crazy. The system wouldn't be able to, you'd find a way to do it if you're very savvy, pen and paper, do a deal, call someone. You do something, but it's not scalable. And I think the other thing about our system that maybe we didn't say enough,

• 1:14:58Speaker 00

  we're building it for scale. If we were building this for just multifamily, you don't have to go as deep as we went in the architecture. If we were building this for just one country, for just one use case, I think a lesson for me from the past, I have zero fear that we're going to grow to be very big. The time, and when the time comes, and when it's time to put fun, I enjoy it. It's, it's my favorite part, probably.

• 1:15:21Speaker 00

  Taking our time now to build a product that's actually scalable, learning from our mistakes, taking the time to make these decisions. Building, I wanted to recruit tech engineers faster than Ben and Mark thought was correct. So we recruit, we, we made it harder to recruit, recruit them in the right speed. I had visions of a, of a huge number of team that we needed. Mark's very big on great products are built with small teams. That was before AI came. Now that AI came, actually, I think a lot of people are starting to understand that. So when you put all those things together, you start seeing a very good offering for, to raise funds against. That's in Saudi. In the U S, we actually bought 30% of a publicly traded company in Israel.

• 1:16:03Speaker 00

  We're non-controlling shareholders. That company has access to retail investors and institutional investors. And with partnership with that company, we have bought two developments in Miami, in South Florida. One in Ventura and one in a place called El Portal. And again, now you're thinking of flow, not just as we're going to run the building, but actually how are you going to run the entire neighborhood? And all those themes that we just said that worked so well for the single buildings will work even better in a neighborhood. So those two fund structures exist. And because we have all this flexibility built into it, we've already proven that we deliver above market returns. So the people who are going to want to invest in our fund are going to understand that by getting access to flow, to flow's technology, to flow's brand,

• 1:16:48Speaker 00

  they're going to get access actually to above market returns, which at the end of the day in real estate, as you said, Mark, only two people did that. But I think the one thing in real estate that's very consistent, if you can deliver the highest returns in real estate for a certain asset class, you're going to attract the kind of money that's interested in investing in that asset class. If you can move between asset classes, you might attract the kind of money that in the past felt uncomfortable with real estate. Because even though it's a safe return, we learned something in the past 10 years is, you know, before Corona, office was great. Then it went to zero hotel and apartments. Everybody wanted one and then it changed. So it's actually not just the largest class, asset class in the world, it's changing.

• 1:17:27Ben Horowitz?

  The thing that the funds give us are, it's really twofold. And I didn't realize this before. So the first thing is obvious to scale. So as Adam said, there's a lot of real estate out there. There are a lot of people who would love to live in a flow community with kind of, you know, be part of something bigger. And we, you know, doing that kind of just through the flow balance sheet would be insane. So it gives us a lot of scale. But the other thing that it does is the people we've partnered with are real geniuses in evaluating real estate and, and kind of getting the right buildings

• 1:18:11Ben Horowitz?

  for the right deal in the right locations. And that's been really amazing to watch, you know, how these people think about how they, how they do that and, and how it works. So it's, and, and we have lots of demand. We're trying to figure out what to do with all the demand.

• 1:18:32Erik Torenberg?

  Ben, we're talking to engineers all, all the time who are pursuing AI ideas, who are pursuing crypto ideas. There hasn't been that many amazing real estate opportunities for, you know, the most brilliant technical minds to sink their teeth into. Why is this an opportunity?

• 1:18:47Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like as an engineer, you want to build things that really impact people's lives and make their lives better. I mean, there, there's many, many things that you can do that have small impact or questionable impact. But this is something where, you know, you're building an environment where for young people, you know, we, as Mark kind of alluded to, you know, it's been much worse than what their parents' opportunity was. And even what their parents' opportunity was, which is a new phenomenon. And this is a chance to make it much better, much better than how their parents lived.

• 1:19:29Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, there, there's not more meaningful work than that. And then it's a, it's an extremely complex technological problem, you know, particularly

• 1:19:43Ben Horowitz?

  kind of coming out of legacy world and all these, you have to basically start from complete first principles. Cause you're starting with who's living there.

• 1:19:54Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:55Ben Horowitz?

  And the software has to be oriented around them, not buildings or apartments or, you know, a bill. Those are, those are features of the person, not vice versa.

• 1:20:09Erik Torenberg?

  Yeah. Let's, let's close this conversation on, on some big ideas around the, the future of living. Mark, in your great blog post about the flow investment and just in our conversations in general around COVID, you'd sort of been struck by how the COVID enabled some unique opportunities for us to rethink how, how we think about sort of the future of cities, of remote work, sort of, you know, in, in office, et cetera. And I know you guys have had some, some, some back and forth on that. Why don't you sort of reflect on, you know, there were some things that played out. There were some things that sort of didn't play out exactly as we thought. Some things were reversed. You know, a few years later, what are your broader reflection? What have we learned?

• 1:20:46Marc Andreessen?

  So I feel like COVID threw almost every aspect of how, at least in the US, how we live and work sort of up in the air, right? And some of those pieces have landed a little bit, but some of those pieces still feel like they're quite high up in the air.

• 1:20:58Erik Torenberg?

  Yep.

• 1:20:59Marc Andreessen?

  So just a bunch of observations. So one has looked like there had been a 60-year history of video conferencing not being a thing and not working. The first video conferencing system was rolled out in 1965. It was AT&T picture phone, completely flopped. There were 50, 60 years.

• 1:21:14Ben Horowitz?

  And there's a whole theory about people didn't want to be seen when they were talking on the phone.

• 1:21:17Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. It's the same kind of theory, so that you wouldn't want to see actors talk in motion pictures of sound. Yeah, exactly. So there's all these arguments. Every science fiction movie had video conferencing, but the real world never had it. And then all of a sudden, just like boom, COVID, it actually happened, right? And that stuck like that. You know, that's now a standard technology everybody's used to. And so, you know, that really opened up the aperture. So that stuck. Then there was the idea that basically all, you know, all work becomes remote, or at least all knowledge work becomes remote. And I would say like that has not stuck that well. It's stuck somewhat, and I would say it's stuck somewhat in two circumstances. One is a lot of CEOs are really struggling, even when they want to get everybody back in the office, they're having a very hard time doing it. And again, this kind of brings up this issue of like where and how do people live?

• 1:21:58Marc Andreessen?

  Because if you could have a much better lifestyle, living and working remotely, then it's harder for you to come back in the office, but you as a human being are much happier and more satisfied. And so a lot, a lot of CEOs found that, you know, many of their best people had actually left the vicinity, you know, of the office by the time COVID came back. And they have this very difficult choice of, you know, trying to kind of coerce them into coming back or coming back two days a week or three days a week. And so that's going poorly. So that's a real struggle. Another thing that happened, which I think was a kind of a big net negative, which I think hasn't really been fixed yet, which is new people entering the workforce had a much worse experience, right? And so COVID was sort of, there was this sort of dichotomous experience where if you were like a 20 or 30-year veteran of a company and like a high-ranking official, it was absolutely

• 1:22:41Marc Andreessen?

  fantastic to work remotely because you got to go to your beach house and, you know, be with your kids, your grandkids, and like be on the golf course. And it's just like this amazing thing. But you put yourself in the, in the, in the, in the shoes of a newly graduated, you know, college grad who's, you know, 22 or whatever, you know, stuck in some box apartment somewhere. And then, you know, basically like, you know, the whole idea of mentorship is just straight out the window because you can't get mentored by a, you know, a face in a, in a, in a Zoom panel. And so there's this sort of failure to launch problem with, with, with young kids and their careers. And I think that, that hasn't been solved. But then finally, I would just say it's not like everybody's just going to go back to work in the office. And the reason for that is because there is this, there is this like massive shift that happened that I think is still underestimated, which is, I describe as followed, which is it, it used to be the case that to have access to the best job opportunities, you had to be in very specific places.

• 1:23:26Marc Andreessen?

  And so there was this old adage that the thing that made Silicon Valley so special is that if you, if you lived and worked in Silicon Valley, you could get 20 other job offers as a database administrator or as a Java programmer without changing your parking spot, right? Because the, because the employers were clustered.

• 1:23:41Marc Andreessen?

  And by the way, that's still true. That's, that's still the case. But if you're remote, you can have 20,000 job offers from companies that are dying for people with your skillset, right? That are, many of which are not located in Silicon Valley, and they're all available on video, and you can just do that. And there are lots of people now who just like work remotely because they, you know, they can, they can do that. And then, by the way, there's this incredible book called Job Stacking that I always recommend, which is sort of this how-to manual to how to hold down two jobs.

• 1:24:04Erik Torenberg?

  I was just gonna say, some people have multiple, yeah.

• 1:24:06Marc Andreessen?

  Remotely, without letting them.

• 1:24:07Erik Torenberg?

  Overemployed.

• 1:24:07Marc Andreessen?

  It's a very careful how-to guide on to make sure each employer doesn't realize that you have, you have, you have the other job. And then, and then there's another chapter, which is how to do it with three jobs simultaneously.

• 1:24:16Erik Torenberg?

  There's a whole subreddit dedicated.

• 1:24:17Marc Andreessen?

  There's a whole subreddit. And now there's the AI version of it, which is, well, you can have, you know, chat GPT do your job anyway. So you might as, you know, it's very helpful to be remotely because it's easy to do that. And so, so, you know, the, the remote thing like, you know, continues to stick. And so, anyway, like this is all just, I, I think a lot of this is just still up in the air, right? And I, we talked to, you know, a lot of Fortune 500 CEOs, and I would say that they're all struggling with this. Like they, they actually don't know how to recover the in-office experience that they used to have, and they don't know if it's, if it's possible to do that. And they're, you know, they're, and they're literally, you know, they're still, it's the point where they're issuing like threats and orders to people of like, you know, we're going to watch your bad, you know, you pay somebody like, I don't know, a half million dollars a year to be like a, you know, senior engineer or something, and you tell them you're going to watch their bad, their badge reading in and out to like track their, you know, motions and then, you know, somehow figure out.

• 1:25:00Ben Horowitz?

  Cards.

• 1:25:01Marc Andreessen?

  You're going to penalize them. Right, right. Exactly. Everybody ends up in a punch card world again.

• 1:25:06Marc Andreessen?

  And so, like, I think this is all just still up in the air. And then we talked earlier about what this means, especially for younger people and this question of like economic opportunity and then family formation and then ability to have and raise kids. And I, and I think the whole concept of how people live and work, I think, I think it's been upended and I don't think it's landed again. And I think that there's, I think there's interesting questions on every single topic that I discovered.

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  There are all these concepts of in the past, you would have people live, work, go to school, do all those things at the same place. I think part of Flow reimagining the future, it also, I think Corona actually helped us in a big way. Because let's take Flow, for example, to build a company of the magnitude that Ben and Mark were talking about, very hard for us to do things remotely. So let's say our engineers, we hire engineers that want to be in the office and the ones we hired before who weren't, we let them be wherever they work because when they were hired, that was the deal that was made with them. But we're finding a lot of people who want to be in office because that's what they want, but we're looking for them. But to create a holistic product, the reason you need sometimes people all in the same room, especially in our world, if the team doing the brand, the team doing the development,

• 1:26:10Speaker 00

  the team doing the engineering, the team doing the product, if they don't interact with each other, they just don't know the things that motivate each other.

• 1:26:16Erik Torenberg?

  Right.

• 1:26:17Speaker 00

  And you can't get that consistent, perfect experience. So for a company like Flow, it's even more important. Now let's think about enterprise sales. You go to an enterprise in the past, you'd say, I'll get you office, I'll give, I'll bill for you. We used to do, we work, we're very good at enterprise. We created office, but maybe office is not enough for a solution. What if I can give you the rental apartments, certain number of nights in a hotel, a school for your kids in the, in the development or outside of the development? And, and the office and experiences all around and the retail. And before you know it, you're creating something very unique. Now, a lot of times when developers have tried to do it in a way that was like Disneyland, it's soulless.

• 1:26:58Speaker 00

  If you can then do it in a soulful way, that really makes people and Flow's mission is to connect people to themselves, their neighbors and their natural world. If you could do those three things, leveraging technology, leveraging operations, leveraging everything and make people feel that way, I think for today's world, it is more relevant and more important than ever before. And as we said before, people are so connected digitally. They've, I think, never been so disconnected, and not for everyone, but for a lot of us, that connection is so important. And Mark was talking even about the birth rate that's going to all the different stuff. We need physical interactions and those physical interactions need to be meaningful. And imagine if an enterprise could not just give you a great job with a great salary,

• 1:27:43Speaker 00

  but could actually give you directionally, a community that you would want to be part of. Suddenly, here's what I do with my family and here's what I do with my kids. And, and there is, I think, a solution that gives a little bit of the good things about working remotely, but also solves the bad things, which is there's a limit to how often we don't want to have social interaction. And I think the future of Flow is, has a tremendous amount of potential. I think we need to keep taking it one step at a time. I think we need to deliver on all the different aspects of the business. So now you heard us talking about funds and raising, raising capital to deploy to people. But only people understand why Flow delivers a higher value and how it's going to give them a higher return.

• 1:28:24Speaker 00

  Keep focusing on the resident as it grows to be a citizen, as Ben likes to call it. Commit to the architecture and keep building the right architecture, both in the backend and the frontend, and create a culture of service and hospitality of people that are excited to be part of delivering this, this version of the future that we see. I think it's great for the US. We know it's great for Saudi. And it's a global, it's a global challenge and a global solution. And I couldn't be more excited to tackle this with our two partners, with a great team that we've assembled.

• 1:28:58Erik Torenberg?

  Adam, thank you so much for coming on the show.

• 1:29:01Speaker 00

  Thanks, Adam.

• 1:29:03Erik 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. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

• 1:29:47Erik Torenberg?

  For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16Z.com/disclosures.