One on One with Marc and Ben

With @pmarca and @bhorowitz In this special episode, Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc and Ben have two “one on one” conversations, answering questions from Twitter covering everything from company building to tech trends and culture.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Hi everyone and welcome to the A16Z Podcast. I'm Amelia and this week we're sharing two one-on-one conversations with Andreessen Horowitz co-founders Marc and Ben, covering everything from company building to tech trends and culture. These originally took place as live chats on social audio app Clubhouse, where Ben and Mark now host weekly one-on-ones, the name partly inspired by a newspaper column Andy Grove did in the 80s. And these conversations take place every Monday at 7:00 PM Pacific Time. You can find these and other conversations at our separate new feed, A16Z Live. But we're sharing these first two episodes here, nearly three hours worth, where Ben

• 0:43Speaker 00

  and Mark cover everything from advice for founders, the evolving ways we work together remotely during the pandemic, and how to create great co-founder relationships, to the future of major tech trends like decentralization, crypto, voice, video and text, and much more.

• 0:59Marc Andreessen?

  So first of all, thank you, everybody, for joining the inaugural tryout of a new show that my partner Ben and I are considering putting on on a regular basis if it goes well. It's called One-on-One with A and Z. It's actually inspired by our kind of hero of Silicon Valley and being a CEO and running companies and creating technology, Andy Grove, who in the 1980s, he had a, he had some, he used the most advanced communication technology of his time in the 1980s. He had a newspaper column in the San Jose Mercury News called One-on-One with Andy Grove. And in fact, there's a book of his columns that I highly recommend people buy. It might be out of print, but he would, he would take, take questions and sort of, it

• 1:44Marc Andreessen?

  was a very rare opportunity for somebody to ask, people ask questions of somebody like him. So, you know, we're no Andy Grove, but you know, we'll, we'll do our best. So we put out a call for questions on Twitter and we got, I would say, an extraordinary range of very, very smart questions. I would say I was, I was, I was actually very impressed by the, the depth and seriousness of the questions. I would say for people who have given up on the idea that there is intelligence on the internet, at least these threads, at least these threads refuted that. And so, thank you, everybody who submitted questions. We lined up a dozen that we're going to start with today, and then if this goes well, we'll continue to solicit. And we'll do new questions and then the goal, this is at least starting out as a guest free

• 2:28Marc Andreessen?

  show and so the goal is to, is basically to engage in questions from, from, from anybody who wants to ask them on Twitter and then maybe we'll argue about the answers every now and then. So I will start us right off in the deep end of the pool with a question from a Twitter username, The Network Hub, which is, "I would love an expansion into the wartime and peacetime CEO concept." And then I would add to that, "Where do you see wartime and peacetime CEOs in the industry today?" And so Ben, maybe you could start, you wrote in your first book quite a lot of the topic of wartime, peacetime CEOs. For people who haven't read it, maybe you could basically articulate the theory of what

• 3:11Marc Andreessen?

  you meant by that and then I would love to know, like, where do you see these two types operating in the, in the, in the, in the world today?

• 3:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so that's a great question. So you, peacetime wartime CEO is, the original blog post was kind of about these two different modes of operation and, you know, I wrote it because, actually Andy Grove was one of the inspirations for it, interestingly, but I wrote it because, you know, when you read business books, it's always about, you know, delegating management and don't micromanage and, you know, whatever you do, never publicly humiliate anybody or anything like that, right? And then you read the stories about kind of the most legendary CEOs like Steve Jobs and Andy Grove and they were always publicly humiliating people and, you know, they oftentimes

• 4:02Ben Horowitz?

  would drop down to incredibly low levels and make very, very specific decisions about things. And so I wanted to kind of articulate, you know, my interpretation of what they were doing and it really came down to these two modes that you're in when you're a CEO, one being kind of wartime and one being peacetime and I kind of wrote it to convey, you know, at the time, the feeling of what each one was and, you know, you know, the...

• 4:34Ben Horowitz?

  Peacetime CEO doesn't, you know, care about the details. They let, you know, their people handle those. And I think I wrote something like, you know, wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat's ass if it, you know, gets in the way of the prime directive. And so that kind of feeling of being all over everything and really much more dictatorial versus more empowering and kind of enabling was the contrast in the original post. I think the thing that

• 5:05Ben Horowitz?

  I missed, or I didn't do a good job of explaining in the original post is why you're in one mode or another. Like, what is peacetime and what is wartime? And, you know, I think that peacetime, you know, if the general direction of the company is correct, and you're expanding and growing the original idea, then peacetime is really good because it harnesses, I think, maximum creativity in an organization. And you kind of, and everybody understands. You hired everybody in for a certain kind of job and a certain kind of strategy, and then you train them in a certain way. And then you, you really want to unleash them to do their thing. But that's different when, you know, the company is in a crisis or has to change directions

• 5:50Ben Horowitz?

  very quickly. And the way I would kind of describe it is, you know, if you're building the American military for the Cold War, you know, you build it in a certain way with certain kind of weapons, certain kinds of strategies, certain kinds of training for military personnel. And then one day you wake up and you find that you're fighting ISIS. And everything about what you built is wrong. And now you got to get your leadership from where they are to where you are. And that generally requires a very different mode. And that's, you know, often when you go into wartime, because if you let them kind of get there on their own, it's going to take too long. And, you know, I just give one quick example of this. And then, you know, I was working with a company who got, you know, very hard

• 6:35Ben Horowitz?

  hit by the pandemic due to the nature of their industry. But they had been a really successful kind of company, growing and, and doing things. And, you know, they had some, what I would say, peacetime executives, you know, very good, like a really credible, you know, head of HR and so forth. But, you know, the, you know, they, they kind of

• 7:01Ben Horowitz?

  You know, we're having trouble with attrition and so forth and wanted to kind of give this very kind of generous re-upping of everybody's equity. And that that's just like a very peacetime idea. It's kind of, you know, let's retain everybody, you know, we need them all because we're building this big thing and, you know, we've got to compete with Google and so forth on that. But the real situation was, we couldn't even afford to keep the people we had. So what were we doing? We need a wartime mentality. No, no, no. Like, we're not going to do that. What we're going to do is we're going to find the, you know, the exact people we need and we're going to overpay them. And then like if other people quit, like, we're going to live with that because we have a leaky boat and like, we can't carry all these people. Sure.

• 7:45Ben Horowitz?

  And so that, you know, that that's kind of the difference in mentality to expand on that original thing. If you look at today, you know, companies are in peacetime. I think Salesforce.com is clearly in peacetime. They're sort of, you know, for the most part, you know, expanding in major footprint, a giant kind of system of record lock-in type of position. And they're looking for more and more ways to enhance that and, you know, protect themselves a bit, but it's not dictated by the CEO, you know, from on, you know, every move that the company is making. You know, and you'd contrast that with, I think, Zach said he was going into wartime

• 8:25Ben Horowitz?

  and, you know, he's got really specific crisis on his hands with, you know, what's happened with social media and, and kind of the perception of it and so forth. And so he's, he's clearly in wartime mode. And I give that back to you, Mark.

• 8:38Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. How, two, two follow-up questions for you. So one is, how long can a company stay in wartime mode before it, it breaks in some way?

• 8:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, like, I, I think you can go for a very long time. I mean, I think that, you know, in some ways, like, Jobs always ran Apple that way. And I don't think Cook does like nearly as much, although it has some remnants of it. But the, the CEO like has to... Be able to organize in a way where he or she can engage at a very, very fine level of detail on, you know, what ends up being like really minute decisions in some ways, you know, right down to, you know, very specific things about a product or something because you, you, you can't afford to get anything wrong. You can't afford to make a misstep. And so if you're in a mode where you can't afford to make a misstep, then that can be

• 9:31Ben Horowitz?

  done. It takes a very specific kind of leader, which is why most CEOs can't actually run in the other mode. If they're wartime, they run in wartime. If they're peacetime, they run in peacetime. Generally can't, can't switch modes.

• 9:45Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Well, you could, you could argue that like history shows that there are two different, you know, there's both those two kinds of political leaders also, right? And so you've got sort of the famous example of Winston Churchill, you know, who, who was, you know, not that, you know, necessarily like, you know, destined to be like prime minister and play the role that he played until, until World War II. And then sort of immediately upon the end of World War II, he was tossed right out.

• 10:05Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Cause he was just drunk at that point, right? Like, you know, he, he couldn't, he was too bored. Like it wasn't intense enough. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. It's really hard. Um, it's really hard to find somebody you can change personalities in that sense.

• 10:22Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And then another question, and you, you brought this up. And so I'm keying off what you said is, you know, the wartime CEOs, there is this pattern, or I guess question, is there this pattern where they do tend to humiliate people in public? Um, and when that happens, um, uh, you know, to the extent that you believe that's a pattern, like, is that basically like a hundred percent always over the line? Like they're just pushing things too far? Or are they doing it to prove a necessary point? Um, you know, should it be part of the standard toolkit? Um, how do you think about that?

• 10:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So I think they're good about it. It's not arbitrary. It's to drive home a really important point into the culture. Um, so, you know, if you

• 11:02Ben Horowitz?

  You know, Jobs would do it to kind of just say, look, we're not good enough here. Like, whatever, whatever, whatever, like, this is just not good enough. It's not Apple standard. And my, one of my favorite examples is Andy Grove. He, you know, he was crazy about being on time. And, and that made sense in Intel, because Intel had to be high precision, because they're making chips. And everything was about chip yield and all these kinds of things. So like, being on time, you know, it was part of that, part of like, we don't make mistakes. We, we're a highly disciplined organization. And so he's at a meeting and, you know, he's running Intel and Intel's, you know, giant, most important company in Silicon Valley.

• 11:44Ben Horowitz?

  And somebody comes in late to the meeting and he looks at him and he says, all I have in this world is time and you're wasting it. And I can't even imagine how that would make that person feel. But I guarantee you, nobody who was in that meeting or heard about that meeting or knew anybody in that meeting was ever late to a meeting again at Intel. So it's kind of a, a technique for changing broad scale behavior. You know, with a, with a very sharp message. And, and like, it's a sacrifice. It's a Confucian idea. It's, you know, the good of the whole is more important than the good of an individual.

• 12:23Marc Andreessen?

  Right. Okay, good. I'm sure this, this, this will probably already generate follow up questions, which we'll certainly be happy to take for next time. But let's move to the next topic, which is very, very topical, very relevant. And this is, I paired two questions here, so I'll read them both. So, Aman Bedruden asks, are there any, are there any noticeable differences you've noticed about the characteristics of successful founding teams? Or let's say, you know, startups and tech companies in a remote work from, work from home world versus in person? What are your portfolio companies learning to do that other startups might be missing? And then Rosali Sepla says, what are your thoughts about VC's investors and startup founders looking outside of Silicon Valley to build? Is it realistic? Is it permanent?

• 13:04Marc Andreessen?

  Is it possible to build something big and magical in Miami or Houston that looks and feels as successful as what was built in San Francisco? And I have, I have a thousand thoughts on this, but Ben, please start.

• 13:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I wonder if we're gonna agree. So.

• 13:19Ben Horowitz?

  You know, it is pretty new that the work from home thing. So it's a little, I would just say the jury's still out. On the one hand, on the other hand, like the productivity, like just like at the outputs of the startups. In this work from home mode, it is very impressive. In terms of just anything, you know, like time to revenue features built this that. Anyway, you'd measure velocity of a startup. It's really hard for us to tell that they're working from home. I would just say that across the board. I do feel, and I'm not sure about this, that. There used to be a bit more of an advantage to the really magnetic, hyper energetic.

• 14:01Ben Horowitz?

  Charismatic CEO when they had everybody in the office than they have now over the more. Low key introverted.

• 14:14Ben Horowitz?

  CEO like I do feel like that gap. Closed a bit in terms of, you know, assembling the world class team and doing all those things that I just feel like the. Even more nerdy CEOs have, you know, gained ground on that a bit.

• 14:33Ben Horowitz?

  But, you know, it is, that is a little hard to tell.

• 14:38Ben Horowitz?

  You know, some of the.

• 14:41Ben Horowitz?

  People are, I would say the people who are executing the best are the ones who are. You know, just really over communicating on everything. Frequency of all hands, really amazing onboarding ideas, how they get people. Ranted into the company.

• 15:02Ben Horowitz?

  You know, and those kinds of things, you know, really aggressive use of all the tools. You know, not just Slack and Zoom, but every new tool that comes out.

• 15:12Ben Horowitz?

  You know, doing all their, you know, continuing with all their events online and all these kinds of things. So. Just, you know, the people who are really leaning in and acting like work from home is going to last a while, I think, are doing. A kind of more effective job with their people than than people who are just waiting for it to go away. And then on the, well, why don't I stop there and let you answer part of the question and then we'll talk about Miami.

• 15:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so absolutely. So um, I'll say a couple of things. So one is like, I am just like completely flabbergasted. You know, as I know a lot of people are by this experiment that we've been running. Like, if you had asked me in, you know, December of 2019, you know, what would happen if basically all tech companies sent everybody home? Um, you know, I would have predicted catastrophe. Like, I am just like positively shocked and enormously impressed. Um, like, I go so far as to say, like, I don't actually know of any tech companies that have not run well through this, through this, through this, through this whole process, which is just like, which is just astonishing. Like, I would have, I would have predicted disaster. Um, and it's just because, you know, we just, we, those of us who've been a business for all, we just have like so much experience for what it means for everybody to be at the office and how valuable that is.

• 16:20Marc Andreessen?

  And the idea that you're just kind of blowing that up and going to this totally new mode of operation and you're not going to have like huge negative fallout has been like incredibly surprising to me. Um, and so like, my views on like what's possible now have like really broadened, uh, really broadened out and expanded. You know, to, to the point where I might get carried away on this topic, but like, I, I, I think the world has really fundamentally changed. Um, the other observation I would make is we're running all these experiments and experiments are fantastic, but the experiments, of course, are all incredibly unnatural. Right? Because it's not just that we sent everybody home. It's also that we sent everybody home, you know, A, because of the pandemic. You know, B, we shut down all the schools and sent all the kids home, right? Which is a, you know, real, real challenge for parents. Um, you know, C, we told everybody they can't like visit their friends and family, you know, D, we told everybody they can't go to like restaurants or like

• 17:05Marc Andreessen?

  sporting events or shows or like dinner parties or anything. And so we've run, like, I, I think I'm ready to make the argument, like, we've run the harsh version of the experiment. Um, when we come out of this, I think is when we get to run, I would say the more normal version of the experiment, right? Which is like, okay. Like, what if you could work from home, but you could also, like, your kids could go to school and you could go out to dinner and, like, you could go see your family. Right? Um, and so like, however well things are working now, like, I think you could make a case that, you know, the companies that continue to do, you know, continue to be either total or partial work from home, um, things will go even better than they're going now. Ben, would you agree with that? Or do you think that's too optimistic?

• 17:44Ben Horowitz?

  Um, I, I think it's certainly possible. I think that, um, you know, one thing is,

• 17:55Ben Horowitz?

  you know, young people in particular, like their social network is at, at work and they value that. It's one of the things that, you know, we've had, I, we've had comments from our own employees saying, you know, all the joy is gone from the job. Like the thing I like most is being around the people, all these smart people. And so great. And I get to see them. And, uh, you know, it's like a very big part of my life and being remote, you know, that's gone. So I, I think that's a real thing. And then the other one, you know, they, you get into things like career development and you know how that works. And, and I, I kind of think in a way it would be better work from home because, you know, maybe less politicking and all that kind of thing. But, um, I think that's

• 18:39Ben Horowitz?

  an open question. And then, you know, the final open question for me is just, you know, kind of information and sales. Like so in a meeting, um, my friend Steve Stout had a, had a great thing. He said to me on this, which is like the information you get, you know, particularly in a sales situation before the meeting and after the meeting is usually more valuable than the information you get in the meeting. Um, and so I do think there's real competitive advantage to, to being face to face because there's not really a before and after a meeting on Zoom. Uh, so, so I, you know, it's, it's definitely going to be interesting to find out. I'm not sure.

• 19:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. Yeah. And then the other thing that I really noticed is that my extrovert friends, um, you know, which are, you know, a lot of the people who are running companies or senior executives in companies, you know, basically the big debate that they're having is, you know, do we all go back to work? Do we all go back to the office? In fact, you know, maybe for, for the reason you just described, um, uh, you know, because they like being around people, um, you know, or do we go to a hybrid model, right? And so the hybrid model, of course, is one in which, you know, maybe people are in the office, you know, three days a week or four days a week, or even two days a week. And, you know, maybe there's flex and, you know, they're, they're starting to work on like, well, how do we have, you know, how do we do meetings and are meetings all on Zoom? Or do we have, you know, conference rooms plus Zoom setups and so forth? And so there's sort of this kind of hybrid thing. And I think, you know, probably the

• 20:00Marc Andreessen?

  my sense is the median Silicon Valley company is probably assuming the world will go hybrid. You know, for the most part.

• 20:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 20:08Marc Andreessen?

  What I noticed is that my introvert friends have a very different point of view on this, which basically is like, basically, it's like, finally, the world has discovered that all this like in-person stuff is not necessary. And in fact, you know, my introvert friends say I'm getting a lot more joy out of the way things are working now. I have one company where like, there was this actually very interesting form of feedback in the survey that they did last fall, which basically is the engineers were all of a sudden like, ah, finally, we're on a level playing field with all the sales guys.

• 20:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 20:37Marc Andreessen?

  It's like, we're not just getting talked over in every meeting.

• 20:41Marc Andreessen?

  And so, and then, and then what the introvert's point to basically is like, there are actually two kinds of tech projects that have been very successful over the last, you know, 30 years that never involved offices, right? And, and one form is open source, right? Which I don't think there's been a single open source project, you know, including Linux and GNU and, you know, many, many, many Emacs and many, many other things over the years, you know, where there was ever quote unquote on office. You know, it was, it was always fully distributed. And in fact, you know, primarily, you know, completely online communication, you know, tremendous amount of basically, you know, the old days, you know, Usenet and IRC, you know, these days, it would be like, you know, whatever Slack and, and things like that. And then, you know, more recently crypto, right? In which, you know, many of the, you know, world's leading crypto projects, even the ones that are set up as companies, you know, just kind of assumes, you know, default remote.

• 21:26Marc Andreessen?

  You know, honestly, to the point where it was making me nervous last year, as we were, we were funding more and more crypto companies that were, were remote first. And so what those companies basically say is, look, like, it's all in the mechanics of how you build, you know, basically the communication infrastructure and the tooling. And if you build that stuff all properly, you know, you're, you're going to basically be able to run these things fully remote in perpetuity. And yeah, some people might not like it because they want an office to go to. But for the people who like that kind of thing, they'll be hyperproductive in that kind of environment. Yeah. Anyway, so what, what's your view on that?

• 21:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think that with both kind of open source companies and, well, and crypto companies kind of are open source for the most part.

• 22:07Ben Horowitz?

  You don't, the, the thing that They don't tend to do, at least, you know, in that mode is kind of sell to organizations. And like if you sell to individuals or individuals within organizations or that kind of thing, that the whole face-to-face thing is, I think, a lot more overrated than if you're kind of trying to, whatever, convince IBM to go wall-to-wall slack or something like that, then that that becomes really complex to do over a video if your competitor is showing up in person. And so there are certain kinds of things that I don't know that I've seen people solve yet.

• 22:52Ben Horowitz?

  But, you know, maybe like the people get used to like living in that way and communicating in that way and that works. I mean, I definitely am open-minded about it just because it's been so shocking what's happened so far.

• 23:06Marc Andreessen?

  Well, it may also just, you know, it may just be different kinds of companies, right? And different kinds of employees that kind of sort, you know, kind of sort along this axis.

• 23:14Ben Horowitz?

  I think that's right. And then, look, there are, you know, we, I just talked to a crypto company, I won't name the name, but, you know, very smart founders and, you know, they're building, you know, one of the hottest projects and it's a developer platform. And they can't wait to get back in the office because they just like being in the office with each other so much.

• 23:35Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. Right. Yeah. In fact, there are other companies, of course, that we know that that literally have, you know, have, they literally now have homes or compounds, you know, often in very creative places, which actually turns out to be good for the burn rate.

• 23:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's very true.

• 23:53Marc Andreessen?

  So let's go to a third question, which is actually a management question that kind of follows from Susan Groff, which is, in the hard thing about hard things, you warn against the management standard, don't bring me problems without bringing me a solution. And I think she means by that that you disagree with that statement. Is that right?

• 24:10Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think it's a dangerous cultural idea. So I think that as in, you know, this is, and you're really good on this topic, which is how the system should behave and how you should behave as an individual are not the same thing. And, you know, for the system, i.e. the communication system of a, of a company, if people have it in their head, that don't bring me a problem if I don't have a solution and I don't know the solution, or if it's just like too hairy and complex a problem for me to like know how to solve, right? Like if I'm an engineer, like do I really know how to do the CEO job better than you and I can tell you how to solve this F'd up problem that I'm dealing with? Then you, you lose the information,

• 24:54Ben Horowitz?

  which is extremely dangerous because you have to know what's wrong with your company if you're gonna fix it. Like the first step in fixing a problem is knowing you have a problem. And so I think it is like a really dangerous idea. Now, individually in a career, I think that, you know, as you're kind of be trying to be a good employee, it's good to try and think of a solution for the problems you come up with for sure. So I, I think that part of it is fine. But, you know, I think the challenge for CEOs is how do you get bad news to get to you? Because people are afraid to, you know, tell the CEO the bad news. And one of my favorite parts of the movie, The Wiz, is when Eveline did that

• 25:35Ben Horowitz?

  number, Ain't Nobody Better Bring Me No Bad News. Because it's like, you know, because I'm gonna be pissed, I don't want to deal with that, that bullshit. And like a lot of CEOs do give off that vibe. And I think that that, you know, companies always degenerate that have that culture. And when you think about, well, how do you encourage it? You have to normalize it. You have to make it so that, hey, we love problems. We love to hear about the broken shit in the company. You know, it makes us feel good. And, you know, one of the things that I did, used to do is In order to come to my staff meeting, and staff meeting was always kinda, you know, when you're a CEO, people want to be in that meeting because it's kinda the innermost circle. It said, "Look, you're not allowed in the staff meeting unless you tell me something

• 26:20Ben Horowitz?

  broken in the organization." Because I know that we have a lot of things broken because we're big enough, and if you don't know one, then you're not doing your job, and I don't have any use for you in my meeting." And so that would kinda normalize. Everybody goes, "Okay, not only are we allowed to talk about it, but we're being forced to talk about all the things wrong with the company." And then that just kinda made it normal. And then, once it's normal, it's just easy to deal with it because it takes the emotion out of it. Whereas if somebody, once a year, comes to you and says, "Hey, your culture is all messed up and it's broken, and like, we don't have a strategy," or all the, you know, things people say when it gets out of hand.

• 26:56Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 26:57Ben Horowitz?

  Then it makes you feel like, "Okay, that's abstract, it's weird, I don't even know what the fuck to do with it, are you criticizing me?" Like, you get all that, and then it just makes it worse. Whereas if you know every little thing that's wrong, it never gets to that point, and you can solve things, and it's just kinda a normal way of living.

• 27:13Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and so Susan asked, added the question, "How do you build a culture where critical information flows, especially now when everybody's remote?" Because presumably, right, the mechanisms that you had in the past, you know, may probably are not working in this environment.

• 27:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know, that's a really great question, and I think it's, um, it's a little hard to answer because, you know, we're in the middle of it. I think that, um, you know, we, I can say this, you know, at our firm, you know, and as you know, Mark, like, we're redesigning all the meetings, we're trying to make better and better use of the tools. And then I think that as a, um... As a leader, you just have to, you don't bump into people in the hall. So if you don't call them individually, and you're doing actually a good job of this too, which is like, you know, also helps me,

• 28:12Ben Horowitz?

  is just like call people up and, and talk to them because in lieu of bumping into them, because you're not going to bump into them. And so you're missing a whole lot of communication and particularly, you know, where you kind of get like people like to, people in a meeting don't want to say, hey, this is all screwed up. But like if you bump into the hallway and you go, hey, like, how's it going? Anything in your way? What's making it hard to do your job? Then they'll tell you. Um, but you have to recreate that artificially, I think is probably one of the biggest challenges.

• 28:46Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So as an introvert, I never liked bumping into people in the halls. And so that technique never worked for me.

• 28:53Ben Horowitz?

  It seems like this is better for you.

• 28:55Marc Andreessen?

  This is better. So yeah, so Ben alluded to my technique. So what I'm doing now, which has worked quite well. So, and it's a, it's a, it's a two-part win, which is I've been going for these really long walks. Uh, either in the morning or the afternoon, you know, finding someplace where I can go for, you know, two or three hours, uh, on a walk. Um, and then basically I just, I literally keep, you know, keep a rolling cadence of one-on-one phone calls. Um, and try to touch everybody, um, you know, who's, who kind of is in this category, you know, maybe once a month. Um, and then I bet, and then what happens? I just pack all those calls into those walks. Um, and it, yeah. And like, I think number one, it's been good. And then number two, it's like, people do like, this is a time where people really value feeling connected. Um, so say so far, everybody's been very excited to talk to me on my walks. Nobody has, nobody has said it's not a good use of time.

• 29:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. And everybody picks up the phone right away. It's great because nobody's doing anything.

• 29:45Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. So actually, okay, on a related topic. Okay. So Anisa Mirza asks, um, can you tell us about a time you felt most lonely and isolated as a founder? Uh, and advice to fellow founders struggling with this? Um, so let me just, I'll just start by saying like, this, this is honestly something I always struggled with. Um, you know, specifically when I, when I was the founder of, of, of companies. Um, it's, it's, it's honestly, you know, it's been easier with venture firms are different. So it's, this has been easier, but you know, being in the hot seat as the actual founder of a company.

• 30:15Marc Andreessen?

  You know, it's really hard. And then there's, there's like an even more advanced version of the hard, right? Which is like, if you're, if you're doing it on your own, like if you're a solo, they call a solo founder.

• 30:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 30:22Marc Andreessen?

  Um, or, or if, you know, or, or if, or if for whatever reason, you get in a situation where you can't, you know, you can't have this kind of relationship with, with the other founder, other founders. Um, and so I think part of it is just like, it's just really tough. Um, and this is part of the kind of, I think, thing that comes with founding a company. Um, honestly, which is, is just like you, you do, and, and as well as being a CEO. Um, which is like, you really do naturally basically internalize all the issues. Um, and you internalize all the problems and all the stress and you, you know, personally identify with it. Um, and you get emotionally wrapped up in it. Yeah, exactly. And then you really do have a major issue figuring out who to talk to. Um, because if you talk to people in the company, you, you know, you really risk like really warping,

• 31:05Marc Andreessen?

  you know, kind of a, a lot of things which, which we, we could talk about. You know, if you talk to people on the outside, you know, there's, there's two problems. One is, you know, they just, they might not understand, right? Which is, which is a real, real challenge. And then the other is, um, yeah, they might be sympathetic, but they just like fundamentally like don't understand what you're going through. And then the other is of course, like you have to be very careful who you can trust. Cause you know, these are all the most important things. Um, you know, and if, if, if the company's high profile or has raised a lot of money or whatever, like there's real risk involved. Um, and so I guess I would say I for one, like really struggled with this. And so I, and I, and I, and I just say that even without giving an answer, because I would just say like, this is, this is super normal. And, and my experience is like a lot of founders at least, like really never want to admit this. Um, because it feels, right? It feels like admitting it basically signals weakness. Um, and signaling weakness as a founder is, is extremely dangerous. And so.

• 31:51Ben Horowitz?

  The ultimate weakness, like, you know, you're terrified. You don't think you can do the job. You don't think you belong, you can be CEO. Um, you don't want to do the job, all those things.

• 32:03Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 32:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, you've also, you know, this, what you described is kind of, was the main reason I wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I mean, that book was basically about this problem.

• 32:15Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Ben Horowitz?

  Uh, which is, um,

• 32:18Ben Horowitz?

  You know, people don't, there, there's, and the other CEOs won't tell you how like screwed up their company is. Right. You know, so, so you feel like you're all alone. I mean, the worst, the very, very worst moment that I ever had on this was, and I wrote about in the book, but, you know, we were on the, we were going out to do the IPO, the impossible IPO, literally called the IPO from hell by Business Week while we were on the road. Like, so, while we're on the road, IPO from hell, we have three weeks of cash. Um, it's, you know, the NASDAQ dropped. I think, uh, every single day we were on the road, our comparables dropped 50%.

• 32:59Ben Horowitz?

  Well, you know, in the three weeks we were selling things, just like the worst fucking time ever. And, you know, I get a call, uh, you know, while we're trying to get this thing done, from my father-in-law, who, you know, like, and you have to know, you know, my father-in-law, he and I were close, but he never called me. Like, he just, he wasn't a guy who called you on the phone. Like, that wasn't his thing. And, you know, the other thing about him was, like, he had been through everything in life. You know, his, his father was shot when he was five years old. Yeah, he was a black man in Texas and, you know, he and his mom, his mom couldn't do anything. So he, she had to marry this horrible guy with 12 kids.

• 33:43Ben Horowitz?

  And they like literally, you know, had him out, like, uh, they, they wouldn't let him eat with them. They would throw his food into the pig pen. He'd have to fight the pigs for the food when he was five, like that type of shit. So he'd been through like that. And then he had two children who had passed away. And like just a really been through hard, hard things. And he called me. And I could tell by his voice, he was shaking. Um, and, you know, he said, look, um,

• 34:12Ben Horowitz?

  Felicia can't breathe, but she's my wife, but she's gonna, you know, we think she's gonna be okay. We're at the hospital and I'm on the road and like, I know I need to go home. Like I, but I can't go, the company is over if I go home. Like, there's no way this IPO is landing if we go there's, I mean, you know that Mark, nobody else knows that, but you and I know, like, there's no way if I went home there, it's over. Um, and, you know, trying to make that decision between like the company and all 500 employees going like, getting laid off and everybody losing their money and the whole thing being over. Um, or like not going home when like my wife's like in an emergency situation at hospital.

• 34:57Ben Horowitz?

  Uh, was like the worst feeling in the world and I couldn't even, you know, it was one thing I couldn't even discuss it with you because what could you tell me other than to go home? Like there's no, it puts you in an unfair position and, um, like we ended up completing the IPO and I still feel badly about that. Uh, but it, you know, it's just, I, I would just say, and, and, you know, one of my wife's favorite piece that I wrote is called the struggle. Cause it, it's about that feeling that I had that day. Um, and all I can say is, you know, you just have to keep in mind that that is the path to doing something larger than yourself. To doing something great is to go through that pain.

• 35:42Ben Horowitz?

  Um, and there's no way to it other than through that pain. So it's part of it, uh, but it, man, it's hard and you gotta focus on what you can do, not what on you, not on what you can't do, cause there's a whole lot that you can't do in that situation.

• 35:58Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And then you, you highlighted something that I think gets missed in the public discussion a lot, um, which is, you know, kind of the way these companies get talked about, it's like, you know, the founders or CEO or whatever are kind of doing these things for themselves and for their own aggrandizement, but you know, there's, there's probably some truth to that from time to time, you know, to be so honest. Um, but you know, you alluded to something which is like, it wasn't just you and it wasn't just me, right? And I just, in a, in a, in your situation, it was 500 other people. Uh, who worked for the company. And by the way, it was even beyond that, right? Because it was also like all the customers, you know, that had like bet their careers on us.

• 36:29Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 36:29Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Like if we went away, like all of a sudden, they just looked like idiots, you know, for having, having, for having, you know, kind of trusted us. And so like, and then there's, there's all the families. Um, and then of course, you know, this was in a time, you know, which, you know, hopefully won't repeat, but this is, and this is in a time where like you couldn't just go across the street and get a job, right?

• 36:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you couldn't, you could not get a job. Yeah. Like, I mean, it's like nine months, a year, year and a half to get a tech job at that time. Yeah.

• 36:52Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. And so like the, the, the pressure and you know, in, in boom times, I think you kind of forget this just because it's like, okay, one of these companies doesn't work out. People presumably can go get other jobs, but like, number one, that's not even necessarily true in boom times. Um, because like, you know, different people have different backgrounds and skill sets. And maybe it's not so easy. Um, and then the other is like, it doesn't, it's the times aren't always like this. Um, and they won't always be like this, you know, for, for, for any of us either, you know, going forward. So, so this, this level of pressure and, and of course, you know, it, it sort of combines, which is like when the market turns down, you know, it's much, much easier to get in trouble. As a company, right? Uh, and to, and to be faced with these challenges.

• 37:26Ben Horowitz?

  Yep. You know, it all goes together. It's terrible. And then, and then, well, the other thing is all the people who you're letting down are all the people who trusted you, right? They trusted you to, they trusted their career with us.

• 37:37Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 37:37Ben Horowitz?

  And, and now like, we're going to just break that trust massively. It's, it's a scary feeling.

• 37:44Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So maybe we could end on, maybe at one, or on this question, we can end on a, on a, on a practical note. So, um, I, I've never been a part of it, but, um, the CEOs, there's this thing called the YPO. Uh, kind of chance for a young, young president's organization that a lot of CEOs I know have been a part of. Um, and it basically, I think it's a good model, which they basically set up essentially a trust bubble. Um, and it basically, it's a sort of a very carefully calibrated organization where you become part of a group of peers. Um, and then they basically sign up to like really trust each other, right? Cause they gotta like actually talk about like the real shit. Um, and it can't leak. Um, and so I know a lot of CEOs have been through that who like that a lot. And then, you know, the obvious, you know, kind of, you know, kind of homespun version of that is, you know, like, uh, you know, kind of a group of founders basically creating the same, the same thing or, or working with, you know,

• 38:29Marc Andreessen?

  their, you know, their venture firm or their, their angel investors or whatever to, to figure out a group like that.

• 38:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, I look, I I've heard great things too. I've never been in one. Um, I I kind of wish I had been in one. But I I think that's a lot of it, like just knowing that there are other people who have it worse. I mean, like, one of my favorite conversations I have with CEOs is I I have one CEO whose business just got absolutely wrecked by the pandemic, you know, but he's still, he's still doing like an amazing job with it. But you know, he he said to me, Ben, I'm the first post-revenue company, you know, pre-revenue company, I'm the first post-revenue company. And I said, no, I was the first post-revenue company. And so it's, you know, just like that feeling that he's like, okay, I'm talking to somebody who like screwed it up worse than I did.

• 39:19Ben Horowitz?

  Is a is a is a nice feeling. So having having a group with people who will tell you the truth, I think would be a huge help.

• 39:27Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, another version of that would be the for-profit, the nonprofit company that used to be a for-profit company.

• 39:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 39:35Marc Andreessen?

  Find yourself running a charity. Um, so, uh, let's see, let's keep going. So, um, actually on the same management theme. So, um, who, uh, Suneel Rajaraman asks, who is the best CEO you worked with whose companies did not succeed?

• 39:52Ben Horowitz?

  You know, so let me say this first about that is that we've worked with a lot of really outstanding CEOs whose companies didn't work. And, uh, and kind of at a high level, actually, one of the greatest CEOs, um, you know, that I ever met was Bill Campbell and his company, Go, failed miserably.

• 40:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 40:19Ben Horowitz?

  And so, you know, sometimes the idea at the time, you know, the timing is just wrong. And no CEO, no matter what your skill set, um, can necessarily get you out of that problem. And so I, you know, a failed company to me doesn't mean that the CEO is no good. That that is not how I interpret that at all. But, you know, we've had, we've had a lot of great ones in the portfolio. One that comes to mind that who just did an amazing job, um, but, you know, like the technology just wasn't going to get there was Jason Rosenthal at, uh, Lightyear. I thought, you know, he he did an amazing job as a chief executive, but.

• 40:59Ben Horowitz?

  You know, building the team, executing the plan, pivoting, winning the deals, everything that you would want a CEO to do, but it just didn't, you know, work at the end of the day.

• 41:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. Yeah, I'd highlight, I was actually gonna answer, answer the question in a, in a, in a different way, complimentary way, which is, you know, the, the related question is like, you have these things, and you, you mentioned Go, Bill Campbell's company Go is an example from the early 90s. You have these companies that didn't work, which then in later years turned out to have been like an explosion of talent.

• 41:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 41:29Marc Andreessen?

  Like, made its way, like, if you look at, so I'll just back up for people who haven't heard about this. So, actually, way, way before the iPhone, and way before the iPad, like, 20 years earlier, people had these ideas for basically handheld computers, tablet computers, computers, you know, handheld computers that were phones. Like, these ideas were old ideas. And so, there was an entire generation of companies in late 80s, early 90s, around, at the time, at the time, the term was pen computing. Basically, the idea was a computer in your hand, that you would, you would interface with it, with a, with a pen, with a stylus. But it was basically, that's that idea. It was basically iPhone, iPad, 20, 20 years too early. And so, there was a whole generation of startups that actually formed to actually build those things at that time. And I think they, basically, across the board, all failed.

• 42:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, General, General Magic.

• 42:13Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, Go, and they, every single thing, every, yeah. I don't think anybody succeeded, right?

• 42:21Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And so, total web, but what was, what was interesting was, so Bill, Bill Campbell's company, with this company called Go, and ba- basically, they were building iOS, like, 20, 20 years earlier. And then, they were working with another company called EO, that was building the chip that didn't work, which basically, today is like, you know, the Apple, you know, they're like the Apple chips. But like, Go became legendary in later years, because like, Bill went on to play these, like, you know, central roles in the turnaround of, of Apple, and in the, you know, kind of creation of Google, and all these other companies. And then, there were all these other.

• 42:47Ben Horowitz?

  And he ran into it, yeah.

• 42:48Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and he ran into it. And then, there were all these other executives that came out of Go. Like, if you trace the family tree, like, they ended up running, like, it's all like, like, half of Silicon Valley. And they did a great, a great, a great example, our friend Stratton Sklavos, right?

• 42:59Ben Horowitz?

  Stratton, Donna Dudek, Stratton Sklavos, Mike Homer, you know, that whole executive staff were great companies, yeah.

• 43:06Marc Andreessen?

  So, just, Stratton is one example, I think, was the head of sales at Go. And he was, he became later the CEO of Network Solutions, and basically built the domain name industry that we, you know, that we, we know today. And so, you know, that company was a talent explosion. You mentioned General Magic, which was another one of these talent explosions. Like, it didn't work at all, but like, those people are all over the valley, you know, still.

• 43:26Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:27Marc Andreessen?

  And then, you know, even the PayPal mafia, like, you know, PayPal worked. You know, it worked better than Go. But, you know, it didn't get that big, you know, before eBay bought it.

• 43:40Ben Horowitz?

  It was acquired, yeah.

• 43:41Marc Andreessen?

  Right, exactly. And then, again, that talent explosion is like all over the valley. And so, there's something special, you know, in some of these companies where they just like, it's like there's something about the people who were selected. You know, there's something about the nature of the mission of those companies that, you know, caused those people to want to be there. There's something about the leadership, the coalesced all that. There's something about the, you know, just like, and then there's almost something about the tragedy of it almost, which is like, you know, like, people who are at those companies tend to have a burning desire to prove themselves.

• 44:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yep, yeah, I noticed that with the PayPal people.

• 44:15Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, right, right. The PayPal people, I don't know if they, you know, I don't know if they would say this out loud. I don't know if they admitted to themselves, but like, I think they all look back and they say, wow, you know, PayPal could have been a big independent, you know, it could have been a Google, Apple, you know, Microsoft, Amazon class company, you know, and, you know, for example, had it not been built right into the teeth of the 2000 crash, you know, along with their company. But, yeah, it's, so there's something special. And then, you know, the other thing that you kind of see when you've been in the business for a while is basically, it's like, okay, sometimes you have your choice, or maybe question, Ben, this is a question for you, which is like, sometimes you have your choice. You're hiring for a job and you've got one person coming out of basically a failed company, where it's like, okay, they had really good people there, like, I know that, but like, you know, how do I think about that on their resume? And like, it never got very far.

• 45:00Marc Andreessen?

  And did they really see what great look like? And did they really learn good things? And then you've got somebody else who's coming out of a company that basically is just like extremely established and dominant, you know, and very powerful. And there you've got this totally different set of questions, which is like, you know, what did they really do? And how hard did they work? And so forth and so. But like, a lot of people would go for the, basically, the name brand in those cases. And by the way, not just because it's the name brand, because like, the feeling is, okay, if, you know, somebody who's been at a big, successful company has probably learned more about how to succeed than somebody who was at one of these, one of these companies that didn't work.

• 45:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and I think that I think that logic gets way overplayed and is is a lot wrong. You know, people really focus on hiring, of course, out of companies like Google and Facebook, and partly because, you know, they're so powerful in their college recruiting scheme. So they get a lot of raw horsepower in terms of into the company. But if you would compare that to kind of the people who came out of PayPal or General Magic, I would say you're you get kind of more for your money out of PayPal or General Magic because you're getting someone who went through the extreme struggle of trying to find product market fit with like some of the smartest people in the world.

• 46:14Ben Horowitz?

  And that, you know, that gauntlet that they ran, you can't produce at Google. Like, there is no experience at Google that matches that. You know, there's no like just amount of, you particularly when you're talking about leadership positions, like you can't replicate that in a company that's got a monopoly. It's just there's no, there's no real inventiveness, sense of urgency that that that that can exist in those environments in the same way. So I do think, but but it's not, you know, it's not just any startup. It's the special one.

• 46:46Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 46:47Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, those are, you know, the ones that have the, you know, all those companies had an amazing VC funding, you know, brought in like crazy talent and, you know, and still failed. So so that, you know, I would say if you get somebody out of a company like that, that that's going to be the best. Also, the other thing is, you know, in the special case of salespeople, I think, you know, companies who try and recruit their sellers out of monopolies is just silly because that's not really selling. That's just, you know, accepting orders. Like, how hard is it to sell AdWords? Like, not hard. Whereas how hard is it to, you know, sell the second place or the third place enterprise,

• 47:32Ben Horowitz?

  you know, piece of software and make your number? Almost impossible. So you have to take into account the degree of difficulty in the job when you look at some of these things.

• 47:41Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, you may remember, remember Bill Davidow, who's a selling legend who wrote a book on high tech marketing. He said the definition of a great marketer is somebody who can sell a dog.

• 47:52Marc Andreessen?

  He didn't mean a canine, to be clear. He meant like a product that sucks.

• 47:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely.

• 47:58Marc Andreessen?

  Or not even a product that sucks, like a product that nobody wants.

• 48:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 48:02Marc Andreessen?

  Right?

• 48:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. No, it's funny, you know. Ali Ghazi actually, I'm doing a session with him on ClubS tomorrow at five, but Ali is the CEO of Databricks. And he hired the head of sales there, Ron Grabowski. He had come from a company that was literally selling FTP. Like FTP, like file transfer, but like a more secure version of it.

• 48:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 48:35Ben Horowitz?

  And that's what he was selling. And he was able to, like, literally get that company public, selling that. And so, you know, Ali and I always talk about, he's like, the reason he's good is he had to sell FTP. You know, now he's selling like the AI platform for the world.

• 48:58Ben Horowitz?

  And so it's so easy for him. It's like crazy. And then all the guys who could sell that working for him at the last place, also incredible.

• 49:07Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, well, it's like taking, it's like taking the, taking the, like, ankle weights off of a marathon runner or something, right?

• 49:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no doubt, no doubt. Just, yeah. Large ankle weights.

• 49:17Marc Andreessen?

  Large, large, large and very outdated ankle weights.

• 49:22Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, good. So let's move on. So Arjun Shah asks, and Ben, this will be great for you. So what methodical ways can an unknown or under-networked founder leverage to gain access to startup capital?

• 49:36Ben Horowitz?

  You know, I think that our friend Paul Graham had the greatest line on this that he made into T-shirts, which is, you know, make something that people want. You know, if you, the great thing about the world today is it, you know, it doesn't cost, it costs you your time to make something, but if you make it and people want it, every investor will pay attention to that. And You know, that's the best calling card by far. Much better than any kind of networking or, or, you know, work or finagling or, or anything like that. If you can, you know, manifest your idea and, you know, we're seeing this in music too, by the way. Where it used to be, you know, you'd have to like know somebody and get to Hollywood or get to New York and all this stuff.

• 50:21Ben Horowitz?

  And now you've got guys like NLE Chapa, you know, 16 years old in Memphis and makes a song and puts it out. And all of a sudden he's got an eight million dollar contract. And I think that's very true in venture capital right now, which in, you know, like in the old days, you, it would take a lot of money just to get a company started. And that's not the case anymore. You need a laptop. And so that's, you know, if you really have the gift and, um, you know, have the inspiration and the genius, then you make something that people want and you will get the money.

• 50:56Marc Andreessen?

  So let me ask the, let me ask the tougher version of the question then, building on that. Which is like, okay, that, that sounds good, but like, you know, basically, you know, everybody knows. By the way, you know, correctly or not, but everybody knows that like venture capitals, venture capital, very common for venture capital firms to only take warm introductions, um, right? And which means introductions, introductions brokered by somebody they already know. And that, you know, a lot of investors won't look at things that, you know, quote unquote, come over the transom, which is to say kind of just, you know, show up or get sent in. And so, you know, if I'm somebody, um, by the way, this was me once upon a time, growing up in the park fields in Wisconsin.

• 51:31Ben Horowitz?

  But you knew Jim, somehow you met Jim Clark.

• 51:33Marc Andreessen?

  Well, that was Jim, Jim, Jim decoded that one. Like had I not, had I met Jim, I would have had this very direct, direct issue.

• 51:41Marc Andreessen?

  But, but, you know, the, the serious form of the question, right? It's like, okay, like, you know, look, these, these VCs and these angel investors and everybody, like they're all running around doing deals today. They're running around doing deals with people, you know, kind of through these networks that they've built, you know, over the years. Like, you know, look, maybe they didn't all start with like a silver, you know, spoon in their mouth. They're kind of built into the Silicon Valley network, but like somehow they got there. And now they all talk to each other and they talk to kind of people who are like them. And, um, and, you know, they're, they're so busy taking referrals from the people that they know and have worked with in the past. And they, you know, they don't really want these kind of cold, these, these cold leads. And so basically like, how do you punch into this network? Like, you know, I guess I'd say is if, if you don't have the thing somebody wants, or even if you do have the thing, you know, you build the thing that people want, like how, how do you, like, what's the best way to punch to that network if you're not already in it?

• 52:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so, so I would say, you know, kind of first off, you did make something that somebody wanted, which was the browser, which is how Jim Clark found you, right? Yeah, that's true. And Jim Clark wasn't a VC or anything. He was a guy who had built a company. And I think that, you know, particularly when you make technology products that people want, technology people find out about it. And then there, it's a very short path to get to somebody like us, if you know anybody in technology who likes your product. I mean, we, that is a pretty fast connection. Like, it's not, it's not closed end in the least. Like, it's not like, I would say,

• 53:07Ben Horowitz?

  things I've heard about trying to crack into Hollywood, which is like a much more closed and difficult and challenging system in that way. And then I would say, you know, there's so many ways to meet tech people now. You know, with social media, with Clubhouse and so forth. I mean, my wife runs a show that, you know, is like, you know, people inside and outside of tech. And then we do a lot of work to try and expand our network to get to more and more people. But, you know, you just, you gotta meet people. They have to get to know you. You know, if you're smart, they always want to introduce you to their other smart friends.

• 53:50Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, builds on that and so forth. But like, I think the main thing is to engage it and not get discouraged and not feel like you don't belong. I think that the thing is, most people get self-defeated on this as opposed to, I mean, I also came from the outside, right? You know, nobody in my family ever worked in a company or started a company or knew anything about companies. You know, we were all politics and then my mom was a nurse. And, you know, so I, you know, like, how do you get in? And you just keep like, trying to meet people. And look, you have to have the talent. It's a very competitive field and all that kind of thing. But if you have the talent and you work, what I think we see is like, most of the people in Silicon Valley, interestingly, are outsiders.

• 54:35Ben Horowitz?

  Like, when you think about the people we fund, and you go back through their history, like, they didn't, you know, they came from other countries. Yeah. Like, let alone, like, they're not, most of them are not from the US. Yeah.

• 54:50Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, including some pretty exotic places like communist Romania.

• 54:54Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, communist Romania, we've got people from Jordan in the portfolio, we've got people from Egypt. You know, just all over the place, you know, quite a few people from Israel. And, you know, like a lot of, most of them English as a second language, you know, we just had Vlad on the other day on two of the clubhouse things, like, you know, he's not from here. And it's, you know, it's an amazing place in that way.

• 55:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I'd give maybe two tactical or two kind of practical things that people could think about. So one is, you know, one of the just amazing opportunities that exist today is that these these big companies, these big tech companies are now so big. And they're hiring so many people and they're hiring so many people in lots of different places. And so that just the most obvious thing I would say in additional events that is like, look like go to work for one of the giants. You know, and preferably one of the giants is still on their way up, right? So, you know, a company with like, you know, continuing momentum. And like, even even if that involves, like, this would be my cheat code, like, if I if I just like showed up here and I didn't have any connections, that's what I just like get into any of these companies and then work your way up. Once you're inside and you'll just like naturally build a network, like if you work

• 56:08Marc Andreessen?

  at it and then the people at those companies at the big tech companies, the a lot of the, you know, engineers and the managers and the VPs and so forth at those companies are like highly connected into the startup world, you know, many of them come from the startup world. And so that's that's like one cheat code. I just bring it up because I think there's a specific version of this problem, which is somebody who's in like, you know, another city or whatever and working at a, you know, maybe not even in tech or in a mid-sized tech company that maybe Valley people haven't heard of and they're they're wondering how to kind of get plugged in. It may be there's like one more step in their career path.

• 56:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, I think that's a really good idea. And, you know, companies are networks. So like everybody, every employee there is in the network and and everybody quickly finds out who's good. And so, you know, you go to a company like that and you're good and it will get recognized really fast, by the way.

• 56:55Marc Andreessen?

  And then the other is, there's a book that I read years ago that I can't believe I read, and I have no idea why I read it, but it's always stuck with me. Ben, you'll find this very funny. Um, the book, the book is called Never Eat Alone.

• 57:06Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah, I know that book.

• 57:08Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, yeah, yeah.

• 57:09Ben Horowitz?

  The ultimate networking book.

• 57:10Marc Andreessen?

  It's the ultimate networking book. Um, and, um, what he basically says, and this is years ago, but the way I remember it, what he basically says, um, is, look, flip the problem. Um, instead of being the person who's trying to figure out how to get in the network, basically be the person that helps everybody else get into networks. Um, and, and basically what he says is, and he, he structures them basically as dinners. And, and so he has this basically, this whole template laid out for basically how, how to start holding dinners, um, and then basically how to invite like cross-sections of people, uh, in those dinners, um, so they can get to know each other. Um, and then of course, you know, the next step beyond that is you become known as the people who, the person who brings people together, and then before you know it, like you're starting to like broker people for like jobs. Um, by the way, you're starting to introduce people who end up, you know, in romantic relationships.

• 57:56Ben Horowitz?

  And by the way, just that skill, if you're elite at that, you don't need any other skills. Like, that's good enough to make your career.

• 58:04Marc Andreessen?

  Right, exactly. And so, and, and what he points out is people don't have to wait, this is the thing that's stuck with me in the book, you don't have to wait until you're successful to do this, right? Um, because there are always lots of young people running around who have this exact same problem. Um, and so you basically start by gathering all the people like you, right? Um, you know, especially like, you know, early, people who are earlier in their careers. And then basically as people's careers develop, you get into this feedback loop where, where, you know, sort of members of your network, people participating, right? Um, uh, you know, they, they start gaining power and influence, and they start knowing people, and then you're able to, you know, through them pulling other people. Um, and, and then it's, it's also this kind of thing, you know, you're trying to do at the firm, which is it's sort of a pay it forward, you know, kind of thing, um, which is, you know, instead of, instead of starting by asking people for things, like introductions to people, you know, start, start by giving them.

• 58:48Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and then you, you end up building basically so much gratitude, uh, through that, that the, the rest of it's actually really easy.

• 58:54Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely. Like, it takes a lot of social courage to do that, but like, if you've got that, um, they, yeah, that, that definitely works.

• 59:03Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, and he says, like, he says, yeah, he says, people overthink it. It's like, it doesn't need to be like a fancy steak restaurant, or like a fancy whatever this, that. It's like, you know, like, you know, a bunch of, a bunch of, you know, card tables and a, you know, and pizzas, you know, is a good way to get started. And so it's a, it's actually a, a low, a low-cost way to go. Uh, Ben, we're about at eight, are you good to go a little bit longer?

• 59:22Ben Horowitz?

  Sure.

• 59:23Marc Andreessen?

  Okay, let's keep going. All right, we're going to shift to a few industry topics that are very hot right now. So Jitam Thakkar asks, when and what do you think would be the inflection point after which the centralized web would gain traction as a potential competitor to traditional centralized internet and cloud? And Ben, I'm going to ask you to start.

• 59:43Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so I think there are, um, I wouldn't characterize it as one inflection point. So I, I, I think that what we're seeing already is kind of multiple inflection points. So we kind of, you know, the first one was kind of Bitcoin like really holding value and, and, uh, you know, people going, wow, this really is going to be worth something, um, which is amazing because it's just a piece of software, right? Uh, and, you know, just like the fact that that happened is such an incredible breakthrough. And then, you know, there was a quick inflection point that went away, or two quick ones on Ethereum.

• 1:00:22Ben Horowitz?

  One was, um, CryptoKitties, and then the other was, uh, ICOs. Uh, and, you know, for regulatory reasons and performance reasons, those didn't quite take, but they certainly built awareness and created a lot of developer activity. Um, and then that's led to DeFi, which is another, I think, you know, really important inflection point. Uh, and then also NFTs or non-fudgeable tokens. Um, and we're seeing just some major amazing activity in that space, both in, you know, in the art world and then also with Dapper Labs and collectibles, uh, like NBA Top Shot and so forth. So like every time there's a new

• 1:01:04Ben Horowitz?

  really interesting application of the technology, you know, things start to inflect. Um, there's a huge amount of energy now, uh, to kind of build decentralized social, you know, just due to the, you know, deplatforming and so forth. And, you know, many of the building blocks are there, um, you know, with storage systems and then, you know, the ability to do naming, you know, and then there's various naming things. And then also like what Ethereum, you know, can provide there and, and whatnot. So, you know, there's a need for that. Nobody's built one that's, uh, performant and is usable. It's the current social networks, but, you know, as that comes, it's very likely to move things forward. But

• 1:01:48Ben Horowitz?

  You know, or when you think about kind of how tech, one technology really challenges another, it does happen in waves. So if you think about SaaS, you know, first it was just little companies who would buy it, then the features got more robust in bigger companies, and then security got better in even bigger companies. And now the pandemic has hit, and you know, hopefully everybody will go to it. But, you know, it's gonna be a lot like that. I don't think it's gonna be like one application in one point in time.

• 1:02:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I make a couple of observations. So there's a few aspects of this that I can't talk about because of professional affiliations. But, you know, I make a couple of observations. So one is like, this question now exists at every layer of the stack. And that's new.

• 1:02:33Marc Andreessen?

  And I think honestly, I think the world, I think the world changed when Parler was, was, was killed. Because Parler, Parler, Parler was killed. I mean, by the way,

• 1:02:42Ben Horowitz?

  Parler, of all things, built on WordPress, like, may be the worst technology ever of our lifetime.

• 1:02:48Marc Andreessen?

  And yeah, and yes. And so, like, the thing that was so striking is like, Parler was taken out at like, every layer of the stack in the same day, right? Like, they said, like, there's a little, like, every service provider they had dumped them on the same day. And like, you know, look, maybe that doesn't happen to like, a lot of things. Maybe that, you know, we'll see what that trend is. But like, a lot of the really sharp engineers and entrepreneurs that I'm, you know, talking to, that we're talking to on this stuff are, you know, basically since that moment are now thinking, and I would say a much broader way about this question, which is like, okay, like, there may be issues now at every layer of the stack, right? And, and by the way, those, you know, obviously, those issues now exist at the level of the App Store. Those issues exist at the level of, you know, DNS,

• 1:03:28Marc Andreessen?

  those levels of payments. They, can I, Ben, can I, I don't know if I, if I ask you if I can mention it, I will have already mentioned it. But can I, can I mention the personal connection you have to be platforming in the, in the payment space?

• 1:03:46Ben Horowitz?

  You know, that's a very dangerous association for me because it keeps getting banned.

• 1:03:52Marc Andreessen?

  So I'm gonna go ahead and mention it because it's just too good, it's too good not to, and plus I know he like, he would enjoy the publicity.

• 1:03:58Ben Horowitz?

  Um, yes.

• 1:04:00Marc Andreessen?

  And by the way, like, you know, he's, he's, I would justifiably, I think, fairly upset, I think, about what happened, but like, Ben's father actually got banned at one point from the payment networks and from the banking system. Um, and so for, for those of you who think that sanctions are something that we only apply to Iran and North Korea, uh, that's no longer the case.

• 1:04:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:04:19Marc Andreessen?

  People can, people can Google this if they want, I won't, I won't, for spend to go into it, but, um, at the payments level, I'm sorry, I couldn't resist. Um, and then, um, you know, also like, you know, at the CDN level, um, you know, and then the CDN level is like, you know, only one step above the ISP level. Um, and then, um, you know, the app store is like adjacent to the browser, right? And so, you know, if the, you know, if the companies that make phones are, are, are willing to ban at the app store, you know, you know, potentially the browser at some point becomes identified as loophole.

• 1:04:54Marc Andreessen?

  Um, you know, the email client, um, and so like this, this thing, you know, what, what, and again, for good, bad, indifferent, however you look at it, like this thing that happened, um, seems to have really, um, let's just say energized. Uh, some of the smartest people we know into thinking, I would say much more broadly about this now, you know, this is like a big challenge. And so if you literally said, look, the challenge here is to build like a parallel internet, right? Or a parallel like tech stack, like that's really hard. Um, on the other hand, like, you know, maybe, maybe that opportunity is getting larger, we'll see. Um, the other thing I would say is, you know, people say about, about, um, about, I was arguing with a friend of mine, economist, uh, friend of mine the other day, and he's like, look, like this censorship thing, like, yeah, everybody's all in a tizzy, but like not that many people are getting censored, it's not that big of a deal. And aren't people just gonna stay where, you know, where they are?

• 1:05:38Marc Andreessen?

  And it's like, well, there is another reason for decentralization, right? Um, and, and, and that reason, at least historically, and that reason is what, what, what's called permissionless innovation. Right? So, so, so censorship is like, censorship is like, it's sort of the, it's the thing that you saw that now goes away. Right? And then permissionless innovation is the thing that doesn't exist yet. Right, and this is really what the web had going for it like early on and what actually TCP/IP had going for it early on. And actually even what like Twitter had going for it early on, which basically is you could build whatever you want. And you could build whatever you want without asking anybody for any permission. Like just to give an example, to build the browser, to build Mosaic, I never had to ask anybody's permission.

• 1:06:23Marc Andreessen?

  I didn't have to go to the phone company and ask permission. I didn't have to go to, you know, the tech companies to ask for permission. Like I could just build the code, deploy it, and it just worked. And so these distributed systems, right, have this, generally they have this characteristic that you can build whatever you want on top of them, which sort of falls out naturally from the fact that they're distributed, which is to say there's no central, you know, kind of no central checkpoint. And so the other way to think about this that I think about a lot is like, okay, when you have a centralized system of any kind where there is this checkpoint, probably they're not just censoring things that already exist, probably they're preventing things from being built that don't exist yet. Right, and these by definition are things that you can't see, right? So my friend I was debating this with, he's like, okay, well, give me like six examples of the things that don't exist yet.

• 1:07:07Marc Andreessen?

  And I'm like, well, like I could, I can make up examples, right? I can hypothesize examples, but we won't know for sure until it's possible to build. Because at that point, what you'll find is like a thousand really smart creative people will come up with ideas that, you know, you and I would have never thought of. And so that's the other form of energy that can be potentially unleashed here. And I'm really curious to see, you know, kind of how many layers of the stack this happens in, because I think it might be a more dramatic change than people think.

• 1:07:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and you know, to your point, I think the internet, like if you look at the number of brand new things that nobody had thought of that were built on the internet because there is permissionless innovation, I would expect the same thing to happen here. And already kind of we're seeing that like nobody built, you know, digital trading cards on the centralized system. And because one, they didn't have permission, and then the other was... They weren't going to make any money. So the other thing, like the centralized thing doesn't not only ban you and not give you permission, but also taxes the hell out of you. Even if you do it, as we're seeing with, you know, Apple charging 30%, you know, you build an app on that, like you pay them 30%.

• 1:08:17Ben Horowitz?

  You build an app on the internet, you don't pay anybody anything. And you build an app on the decentralized web and the decentralized system and you're not going to pay anybody anything. And I think that really changes the velocity of innovation by, you know, it's not by like twice as fast, it's like 10,000 times as fast when you do that.

• 1:08:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's right. Bill Joy had something on this. He said years ago, Bill Joy was the founder, one of the founders of Sun Microsystems, which actually itself was one of these platforms that people built a lot of things on. And he said Joy's Law, he said, no matter how, no matter how great your company is, most of the smart people in the world don't work there.

• 1:08:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:08:57Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:08:57Ben Horowitz?

  And I think that's the biggest argument for decentralization right there.

• 1:09:01Marc Andreessen?

  Right, exactly. Okay, good. And then look a related question, which from Ryan Gentry is, has crypto had its Netscape moment yet? Why or why not? And let me actually.

• 1:09:15Ben Horowitz?

  That's a good question for you. I guess I was at Netscape.

• 1:09:18Marc Andreessen?

  You were.

• 1:09:19Ben Horowitz?

  Found a Netscape.

• 1:09:21Marc Andreessen?

  You were there. You were dealing with the consequences of everything that I said in public. Um, so let me expand the question, actually. Let me actually differentiate or propose a framework, Ben, to talk about this, which is, let's get, say there are Netscape moments and then there are iPhone moments. And I think they might actually be different. So the Netscape moment, I think, is what we were just talking about, which basically is the moment of like people going, aha, now that this thing exists, I can build X, Y, and Z on top of it. Which is based, and I say that because like, Ben will certainly remember, like, you know, when, early on at that escape, it was not actually clear what the internet killer apps were going to be. Right? Like, you know.

• 1:09:59Ben Horowitz?

  That's a question we got every day, right? Like every day, like, what's the killer app? What's killer app? What's killer app? And it's like, fuck, we're the killer app.

• 1:10:09Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. And then, you know, look, people, you know, smart people, you know, Jeff Bezos, you know, famously got in his car and drove to Seattle and with his wife and, you know, started Amazon, but like that was, you know, that wasn't part of our plan. And so, you know, nor was eBay, nor was, you know, Yahoo or any of these other things. So, um, yeah, so the Netscape moment is kind of like, okay, it's, it's the moment of the arrival of permissionless innovation, um, in which people can build whatever they want. And then let's say the iPhone moment is like the moment of like broad-based sort of fundamental high engagement consumer acceptance. Like where basically a large number of people in their personal lives just go, okay, like that's the thing and I have to have one of those and I'm going to use it all the time. And so Ben, where do you think, where do you think crypto is on, on both of those, uh, uh, fronts right now?

• 1:10:50Ben Horowitz?

  So I feel like we're past the Netscape moment and, and the reason I say this is so, and you remember, nobody remembers this, but me and you, Mark, but in early 1995, IBM bought Lotus.

• 1:11:02Marc Andreessen?

  Yep.

• 1:11:03Ben Horowitz?

  And when they bought Lotus for three billion of dollars, um, had they instead bought every single internet company, including Netscape, Amazon and eBay and Yahoo, uh, they would have paid, they could have bought all those companies for less than they paid for Lotus. Like, so that's where it was after the Netscape moment. Cause that was 95, which is a Netscape moment here. Um, and you know, crypto like Bitcoin's worth nearly 700 billion dollars right now. So like, I feel like crypto were past that and people have gone a high and the developer energy is amazing against it right now. And the, you know,

• 1:11:45Ben Horowitz?

  we just see a higher and higher caliber of developers coming in every single day on the crypto team. It's, it's like head spinning what's going on. So I really feel like we're there. Um, I don't think, um, and you know, you're kind of a...

• 1:12:02Ben Horowitz?

  I would say more of a master of consumer behavior and adoption, but I don't think we're yet at the iPhone moment when kind of everybody is like, okay, I have to have that. I still think it's a little, the world of crypto is a bit confusing to people, but I feel like it started with, you know, between NFTs, the rise of Bitcoin and what's going on in distributed finance, I feel like we're getting close.

• 1:12:35Marc Andreessen?

  Why don't you describe, actually, it's a super hot all of a sudden, this idea of NFTs, and as you said, this looks like this may be like one of the things that really tips us. Maybe describe for people who haven't heard of NFTs, what they are.

• 1:12:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so, you know, it's a way to own something that's a digital good, so, which is kind of an amazing and weird concept. And it started, you know, kind of the first really popular one was this thing Crypto Kitties, where, you know, you could get these different cats and they would have properties and they could do cool things like breed with other cats and then you would get more Crypto Kitties. But the thing that makes them different than just a picture of a cat on the internet is, from a kind of cryptographically strong standpoint, I own it and I have one of one, just like I have one of one Bitcoin or like,

• 1:13:24Ben Horowitz?

  you know, one of one ETH. So it's mine. And I now own this good. And it's a virtual good, but of course, baseball cards are a virtual good. Like, Honeck Wagner card is worth millions of dollars, but the cardboard that it's printed on and the stale bubblegum that it came with is worth nothing.

• 1:13:43Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right.

• 1:13:44Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, that's the same for, you know, I don't know what the canvas and the paint that Boscet used cost, but it was nothing compared to the value of his painting. And so now you can do that digitally, but then you add on all these amazing digital properties. So NBA Top Shot, Dapper Labs, there was a LeBron James dunk, which is a video, you know, that you can own that and have the one of one card that you can then trade with your friends and all these kinds of things. And that, you know, went for $76,000. And a lot of it, you know, it's a better card than you can do on cardboard because you have the full power of computers and so forth. And they can have different properties and so on. And, you know, the art can have different properties.

• 1:14:29Ben Horowitz?

  Uh, so it's a, it's really like a super exciting field and you know, it's so exciting for visual artists right now because all, all of a sudden, there's a whole new way to kind of share your creativity with the world and make money and, and all these things and you, and a whole different kind of collector and, and whatnot. So, uh, you know, i- it's, it's really taking off.

• 1:14:53Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I've been arguing, you know, people kind of, some people, you know, argue very vehemently that this thing should, you know, these kinds of things either shouldn't, shouldn't work or won't work. And I'm like, well, you know, you made the point on like the paintings. I would also say even like sneakers, sneakers are virtual goods, right? Like sneaker, $200 pair of sneakers is like $5 of plastic, right?

• 1:15:12Ben Horowitz?

  $5 of plastic and then I don't know if they pay the Uighurs at all, right?

• 1:15:16Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right.

• 1:15:16Ben Horowitz?

  I'm sorry, that was, that was an Oz collection. Please don't assassinate me, Chinese government.

• 1:15:22Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Don't worry. They're not listening. They, they banned us today.

• 1:15:25Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, that's right. That's right.

• 1:15:26Marc Andreessen?

  We're, we're off the hook. Um, so, um, uh, yeah. And so like, you know, $195 of your $200 sneakers or whatever, you know, which a lot of people collect and, and, you know, a lot of people collect sneakers, don't even wear them. Um, you know, which is like, I can tell you, nobody did that when I was a kid.

• 1:15:41Ben Horowitz?

  Um, yeah, not in Wisconsin at least.

• 1:15:44Marc Andreessen?

  Wisconsin. And so, so like it's already $195 virtual good that happens to have $5 of plastic in it. Um, and so I would say, and I would also say, look, like, you know, and again, like a lot of people are cynical about this kind of thing, but it's like, look, like a big part of the entire point of life, right, is, is, is aesthetics, right? Like the design of the thing, you know, the way that we live and the design of things around us and like artistic creativity, right? And like all that stuff is virtual. Like by definition, it's all virtual.

• 1:16:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a feeling. You, you know, you're buying a feeling, uh, and, and what's that worth? You know, potentially a tremendous amount of money.

• 1:16:22Marc Andreessen?

  Yep, exactly. And so, yeah, this, this is, this is the kind of thing that gives it, we've been, I have a lot of confidence in kind of the consumerization, uh, crypto, actually tipping, actually I think like basically right now.

• 1:16:33Ben Horowitz?

  Um, yeah, certainly feels that way.

• 1:16:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. Okay, good. All right. Uh, three more. Let's see three more and then we'll try to see if we can wrap it by 8:30 or so. So, um, two, uh, related questions. So, uh, Joe, uh, Fileo says, what are the great problems that today's entrepreneurs must solve? Um, and Anisa Mirza says, what are the most important startups not being built?

• 1:16:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, those are such great questions and I almost feel too small to answer them. But like I think, you know, one of the ones that we just discussed is so important, which is,

• 1:17:10Ben Horowitz?

  you know, decentralizing everything. And I think it's critically important for many reasons. Well, here's, you know, one of the biggest, you know, decentralizing many of our kind of public and government institutions, meaning, you know, our government is very centralized. And as a result, like all kind of centralized things, it's subject to kind of slowness, rot, incompetence, corruption, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And I'm not saying do away with government, but I'm saying, you know, put the more power in the hands of the people to organize themselves and to make a contribution to society permissionlessly.

• 1:17:56Ben Horowitz?

  Because right now, one of the most exciting things that we see on these platforms is, you know, the ability to kind of self-organize and, you know, self-organize, agree, make contracts with each other and do things, you know, from, okay, our neighborhood needs a bridge or needs, you know, security or, you know, needs a better park or all these kinds of things. We can't do this without going through, you know, getting permission from the government today. But like, we absolutely can do them. We just need a different way to organize ourselves and get to a kind of a permissionless society. And I think that's,

• 1:18:37Ben Horowitz?

  you know, it's a step that we need to get to and one of the most important things that I think we need to build. You know, like, there's a lot of things that have to happen technologically. But when we think about the scale of society, um, you know, we're just running into a lot of issues um, with how big we are, you know, and it's not, I, I'm not saying that it's bad guys and all politicians are bad. Congress is a bunch of assholes or anything like that. I'm just saying like, we're really big. And just like when companies get really big, like when the country gets really big and old, um, the old systems, the old processes, the old rules, uh, work much less well than when you set them up.

• 1:19:16Ben Horowitz?

  Um, and so having a way that everybody can contribute, uh, to working together would be, you know, I probably the most important thing for, for our country and for mankind.

• 1:19:28Marc Andreessen?

  And that's obviously a very broad problem statement. And so there's potentially entire industries. I mean, beyond just like many of our products, there's probably many different industries. I mean, what you just said.

• 1:19:36Ben Horowitz?

  Sorry, humankind. I, I correct myself. I don't.

• 1:19:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 1:19:40Ben Horowitz?

  I use the old language, which is definitely outdated.

• 1:19:43Marc Andreessen?

  And, you know, potentially, potentially animal kind. We'll, we'll see. We'll see what we can do.

• 1:19:46Ben Horowitz?

  We'll see, yeah.

• 1:19:47Marc Andreessen?

  Um, so I, yeah, so the, the lens I would put on this is, um, basically, uh, I'll apply a little bit more of sort of an academic or abstract kind of framing, but, um, if you, you can actually go online, you can actually, there's a unit of the US government called the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and they kind of track the economy, um, really closely and really, really well. Um, probably the best sort of analysis like on, on the planet. And, um, you know, they, they will basically give you on their website. They'll just show you basically the, the breakdown, basically the entire economy right into, into slices. Um, and what you notice if you look at that, like if you do a pie chart of like US, uh, what they call gross domestic product. So like the total output of the US economy. It's really striking what you see because you see these, basically these small slices of the pie where tech is like super active

• 1:20:31Marc Andreessen?

  and super relevant, right? And so media and entertainment, right? Or like, you know, video, you know, video games, obviously, or like, you know, retail, right? Um, or, you know, electronics, or, um, you know, there's just like, you know, if you just kind of go down the list of the things that Silicon Valley does, like, you know, we, we, we tend to do really well in kind of those, those, those smaller slices of the economy. And then there are these other things that are these just giant slices of the pie, right? And, you know, the big obvious one is like healthcare. Healthcare is one-sixth of the American economy and growing. Right? And so on its current course of speed, it's going to go from one-sixth to one-fifth to one-fourth to one-third to one-half of the economy. Of course, it has the characteristic that, you know, many things are causing it to get that large, including the fact that nobody wants to pay for it.

• 1:21:15Marc Andreessen?

  But, you know, that's really big. And then there's another, you know, really big slice for education. There's another, you know, really big slice for housing. There's another big slice, to Ben's point, just simply for government, like for, like, basically, just like the operations of the country. There's actually another big slice for, you know, basically law kind of in there. And these are, these are things in which tech is either, you know, either somewhat present, but hasn't had a huge effect, or it's just basically like not present, right? And so you just kind of say, like, historically, you give an example, historically, you know, private homes, like private home construction is this just gigantic industry in the US. It's really central to people's lives. It's really central to, you know, what's called the American dream, the idea of like being able to own your own house, be able to raise your family there.

• 1:21:59Marc Andreessen?

  And like, you know, Silicon Valley historically has had almost nothing to do with this. Transportation, by the way, is another big one. Silicon Valley, you know, 10 years ago, had almost nothing to do with transportation. You know, we've really worked our way in there now, you know, and sort of between like what Elon's done with Tesla and then with self-driving cars and with, you know, transportation as a service, you know, with companies like Lyft.

• 1:22:22Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, that's an example. We're actually making progress, but that's, that's one that's really striking because, because as of 10 years ago, we, we really hadn't. And so I think, you know, part of the process, but a big part of the opportunity for the, for the industry for the next, you know, 20 or 30 years is to go basically take on those challenges.

• 1:22:38Marc Andreessen?

  They are more complicated, right? They're very large. And so when things work in those markets, they can get very big. But they are very complicated. There's a reason why we're not as far along in those sectors. And it's because those sectors, they're typically more complex. They, they, there are more economic issues, right, in terms of how various things are paid for. You know, like with healthcare, there's also generally a lot more government involvement in those markets, right, a lot more regulation. And so they, they are harder. But it, it is pretty clear to me that like a lot of the future of this industry ought to be in those markets. And Ben, see what you think of that.

• 1:23:11Ben Horowitz?

  I totally agree. I mean, I think that's a great way to look at it. It's like, what are the things that we need to build everywhere where prices are going up?

• 1:23:19Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:23:19Ben Horowitz?

  You know, and that because that's going to have the biggest impact because that's clearly where we haven't applied technology and things have gotten older and bigger. And when things get older and bigger and you don't apply technology, they generally get much worse.

• 1:23:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:35Ben Horowitz?

  And it's clearly much more expensive, no question.

• 1:23:38Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. And I would also say like, and we might spend some more time on this in another program, but I would also say like, this issue is actually central to what's happening in our politics. And I, and that's not a statement of left or right. It's just, it's actually a statement of the animation, both on the left and on the right, which is basically the extent to which it feels to a lot of people in the country, like their ability to live a better life than their parents did and their ability to raise a family and their ability to own a home and their ability to have like high quality healthcare and high quality education. Like, you know, these are like fundamental markers of like basically satisfaction in life, right? For, for people and for their families at like a very deep level. And so, you know, those sectors, right? Housing prices just keep rising. Education prices just keep rising. Healthcare prices just keep rising to Ben's point. Like those sectors generally are on a one-way track of

• 1:24:22Marc Andreessen?

  rising prices. And I, and I, and I think a lot of the political anxiety, both on the left and the right, is oriented fundamentally to this. And, and, and to, to think about that, just like close your eyes and imagine that all of a sudden, those three things, all of a sudden started to fall in price. Right? And, and all of a sudden, it's like, oh, wow. Like I can get a really good house and like it costs like 20% less than it did five years ago, and it's going to cost like 20% less five years from now. Right? And like it's, these, these, this is going to be something that's like affordable for me. Right? And it's, you know, same thing for like a high quality education, same thing for high quality healthcare. And so, you know, it's like today, you know, today, if you just track prices, you know, you know, a hu, you know, a hundred inch, you know, TV that like covers your entire

• 1:25:04Marc Andreessen?

  wall, you know, is on its way to being costing a hundred dollars. Right? And then a four-year college degree is on its way to costing a million dollars. Right? And it, and it, like literally a million dollars. And it, and it kind of feels

• 1:25:15Ben Horowitz?

  I won't say which I'd rather have.

• 1:25:17Marc Andreessen?

  Well, it kind of feels like it should be, yes, that is, that is one question. And of course, right now with COVID, they are kind of the same thing. But, um, you know, it, it kind of feels like that should probably flip, right? Like it, it, it kind of feels like that, that, that those are probably not the directions you want to go from a societal standpoint. So, uh, we in the tech industry have work to do. Okay, closing question, final question. What unwritten rule about, oh, sorry. Norris Siddiqui asks, what unwritten rule about the world did you discover and how did you discover it?

• 1:25:47Ben Horowitz?

  So, and this is one that people, by default, hire themselves. And they basically profile themselves and they understand themselves. And so to be good at all, or even competent at doing anything with a diverse group, you have to learn to both understand talent that you don't have and see talent that you don't have and value talent that you don't have.

• 1:26:26Ben Horowitz?

  And that is a skill that I would say most managers never develop and it takes a lot of development to do. And I discovered it, look, just by working in organizations and you notice, oh, you know, there's a woman manager, she seems to have a lot of women working for her. Oh, there's an Asian manager, he seems to have a lot of Asians working for him. Oh, there's a white manager, he has a lot of white managers working for him. And it's, but then if you get deeper into it, they tend to have the exact backgrounds and the exact skill sets of the hiring person, which is natural. You know, I know what I'm good at, I can test for it in an interview, I value it highly. But if you want kind of a team that can do more than what you, just you yourself can

• 1:27:11Ben Horowitz?

  do, then you have to be able to recognize things that you can't do. And that is, I would just say, something that almost nobody can do naturally. It's something that takes work and effort and most people don't know that they need to learn it and put in the effort. They think they just need to be not sexist or not racist, which doesn't work, by the way. You actually have to really learn it and understand it. And the analogy I like to use for this is a football team, you know, if, like, if you were a wide receiver and you just can't evaluate people who weigh 300 pounds and you put everybody on the team, runs really fast and is really skinny, then you're going to lose every football game.

• 1:27:53Ben Horowitz?

  And I think that's the way, people just don't look at other kinds of talent that way, but it's really kind of critical in organizational development and business and these kinds of things.

• 1:28:04Marc Andreessen?

  Good. We may, we may come back to that in a future show. That is a very deep topic. Um, I would nominate two. So one, I, I just, I got from Steve Jobs, but I think about it all the time. Is, um, uh, Steve once said, um, this is a great, it's a classic Steve thing. All of the things in the world around you, uh, were designed and made by people who are no smarter than you.

• 1:28:26Ben Horowitz?

  And I've always found that to be.

• 1:28:30Ben Horowitz?

  Is that true?

• 1:28:32Marc Andreessen?

  Well, it was.

• 1:28:32Ben Horowitz?

  I, I always feel they were, were smarter than me.

• 1:28:35Marc Andreessen?

  It was, I was just saying, it was true for Steve.

• 1:28:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:28:41Marc Andreessen?

  The rest, the rest of us might, might, might have a, might be, might be pulling our, our, ourselves up for a while. But like, look, there is a lot to it. Um, there, there is a lot to it, which is basically like nothing that exists around us, like just magically happened. Like, and, and, and it, I, I have to find like, I don't know if people have this experience. Now as a kid, it's kind of like, I always kind of have this question of like, okay, why is it that way? Um, and then the answer was always like, well, because it is, right? And, and then, you know, the next version of the answer is like, well, because it always has been.

• 1:29:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yep.

• 1:29:11Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And then it's like, a, a, and actually, you know, it's interesting. You know, when I was a kid, it was like pre, pre Wikipedia and it's just like, okay, then I'm stuck, right? Like, I'm like, okay. Like, okay, that's it. That's all I'm going to find out. And like, if I wanted to like dig into like, I don't know, like, you know, why did chairs have four legs and not three or five, or like any, any question? Right? It's like, okay, you know, trip from the library, kick card catalog, like, you know, interlibrary loan, like, you know, good luck. Um, you know, at least today, you can just literally, some of my favorite uses for Wikipedia, which is like literally, it's like, okay, how did that happen?

• 1:29:40Marc Andreessen?

  And so, you know, the, the world has really opened up in that way, but the, the derivation of that is just like, okay, all, all this stuff got designed and built. And then when you, when you go back and you kind of dig into like, okay, who did it? And how did these things come, come about? Like, you know, it's generally some crazy story, right? Like it generally is not, you know, somebody in like a big, you know, research lab doing dot, dot, dot. Like it's, you know, usually some crazy person out in the fringe somewhere who like had some crazy idea. Um, and like, that was the thing that took. And, and so it's, it's basically like, yeah, I, the message I carried away from what he was saying is like, the world is actually a more inviting place, uh, for invention and for creativity. Uh, yeah, it seems because like literally that's everything.

• 1:30:16Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, my, you know, my favorite book on this is the one that you recommended, The Tube.

• 1:30:21Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 1:30:21Ben Horowitz?

  About the invention of television.

• 1:30:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yes.

• 1:30:23Ben Horowitz?

  Wacky that was. And just like guys, it's like trying stuff. And then all of a sudden you had TV.

• 1:30:30Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so I'll just give the brief. I love that book. It's a book, it's called Tube. It's like an MIT history series or something. But like, yeah, the legend of TV, you know, is there was this guy, Philip Farnsworth, in San Francisco in like the 1920s who just like figured it out and that was that. But it, but it actually turns out there was like this 50 year backstory. They, they basically started working on TV right, right around the time they got the telegraph to work. So it was, you know, kind of around that time period, 1860s, 1870s. There were just like a bunch of crazy people who just had this idea that says, well, you know, you know, we can do sound, you know. They, they had radio, you know, they had radio starting to work, they had telegraph starting to work. And so it's like, well, we could do pictures. And then, but like, they didn't have anything. They didn't have any, they didn't have any.

• 1:31:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that was all that started with that idea.

• 1:31:12Marc Andreessen?

  Like they didn't have like, you know, this is a time when they didn't have indoor lighting yet, right? And so the, the, the extent to which some of these people spent like decades of their life, like there's this guy, he goes through the whole story of this guy, I think a Scottish guy. And he literally invented and actually deployed analog television. Sorry, that's not right. Mechanical television.

• 1:31:34Marc Andreessen?

  Television is a mechanical device. So imagine like no tube, you know, forget even flat screens, like no CRT, no tube, no nothing like. And he literally, it was like spinning blocks. It was like a television made out of Legos.

• 1:31:49Ben Horowitz?

  Which is not that different than Charles Babbage's.

• 1:31:52Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:52Ben Horowitz?

  Original computer, which is like a computer made out of wood powered by steam.

• 1:31:57Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. And so he had this thing, it would literally sit and it would spin these blocks that had different colors on them. To show images, you know, it's like a 32 by 32 grid or something like that. And like the thing is sitting there all chunking away, spinning the things. And he got it to work.

• 1:32:11Marc Andreessen?

  And he took it to the BBC, which owned all the spectrum in the UK at that time. And he said, please could I have a slot where I could like test this thing? And, you know, of course they thought he was like completely out of his mind. And then they finally gave him, I think, if I recall correctly, the Thursday night and midnight slot for 15 minutes.

• 1:32:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's right. That was right. It's Thursday midnight.

• 1:32:33Ben Horowitz?

  Which is what they gave like rap music, by the way, when it started out too.

• 1:32:37Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. And of course BBC is like, yeah, look, you can have the slot. And then if there's any consumer demand, we'll expand it. Right? And it's like, okay, consumer demand, number one for this crazy mechanical television, but number two at Thursday night at midnight.

• 1:32:49Marc Andreessen?

  Right, like, you know, thank you so much, you know, BBC overlords. And so, and this is like, you know, what, 20 years or something before Fallow Farnsworth got his thing to work? Or like, it may, you know, something like a decade or something like that. So, so anyway, the point being is like, there, there are these backstories to these things where like, they were genuinely new. Um, and they're, and by the way, look, like, you know, a lot of people don't pull this off. Like, a lot of people, you know, a lot of people are, are this guy and not, not Fallow Farnsworth. But, like, the thing actually had to get built. It took like, a huge amount of invention and creativity to do it. Um, and that having a big history, you know, obviously a big impact on history, but like, it, it, you know, this, this was something that people volunteered into. Like, there was never like, a program, right? There was never like, a national, I don't know, a National Science Foundation for Television or something at that point that decided that this was gonna exist.

• 1:33:32Marc Andreessen?

  Um, it's anyway, the, the, the, the, the whole, the whole world kinda works like that. So, actually, we're past 8:30, um, why don't we leave it there? Benjamin, thank you for joining me.

• 1:33:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 1:33:40Marc Andreessen?

  For the first trial.

• 1:33:42Ben Horowitz?

  Absolutely, thank you, Mark. Thank you, everybody, for coming. Uh, we really, really appreciate it. And then a special thanks to everybody who submitted questions on Twitter. Um, they were amazing, and the ones we didn't get to today, we will get to.

• 1:33:53Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, absolutely, 100%. Thank you, everybody, have a great night.

• 1:33:56Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:33:58Marc Andreessen?

  So, welcome back, uh, welcome back. This is the second, uh, show of One on One with ANZ. Um, which, as I said, uh, last time, is a, a show that we are, uh, starting and running weekly Mondays, um, at this time to, uh, uh, basically, in the, in the, in the model of something Andy Grove used to do, uh, which in his, in his, in his era was a newspaper column in our area, era, Clubhouse Room. Um, and, uh, so we are going to, um, uh, read a bunch of questions proposed by, uh, uh, folks on Twitter. Um, and then we will answer them and then argue about the answers until, um, probably around midnight. Um, uh, we, uh, I have to say that, uh, once again, uh, this week, uh, the quality of the questions is extraordinary.

• 1:34:41Marc Andreessen?

  Um, so, uh, we have no shortage of great questions. We've picked out 11 of the best questions, um, and we're queuing up all the others for, for future shows. But, as I said, the, the, the questions are guaranteed to be fantastic, and then we'll, we'll, we'll see about the answers. So let's dump, let's dive straight into the deep end of the pool. And let's start off with kind of the most serious of the questions perhaps, and then kind of work our way, hopefully up a little bit in terms of cheerfulness. But this is a really, I think, important question and a really profound question for this year. As sort of COVID drags on. So Ashley asks, Ben says, quote, layoffs break trust. A third of people in San Francisco have filed for unemployment and a lot of that is tech companies having to

• 1:35:24Marc Andreessen?

  restructure and scale back at the end of 2020 due to COVID struggles. How does Ben view

• 1:35:34Marc Andreessen?

  long-term traumatic impact of this period?

• 1:35:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's a great question. It actually reminds me, reminds me of my career during the dot com bubble and a lot of layoffs and trauma in that sense. So that does have differences. So let me kind of start with just why, and it's obvious, but, but I think it's subtle as well as why layoffs break trust. Because when you're a CEO, you kind of, you know, look, people are nice to you because you're the boss. And you can take that too far in your mind, thinking they really like you and maybe they don't like you as much as you think they do. And then when you do a layoff, that gets tested in severe ways. So like a layoff is a break in of trust because you literally broke the promise, you know, when you hire people,

• 1:36:19Ben Horowitz?

  you tell them this is going to be a great company. It's going to be awesome. You're going to have fun here. Your career is going to advance. And then all of a sudden, you're firing people and sending them home. And a lot of CEOs will make the mistake while saying, well, you know, we laid off, you know, maybe we laid off people who we didn't really need or didn't really want. And that may be true, but those people who you laid off are closer to people in your company that are staying than they are to you often and in every.

• 1:36:51Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, so I mean, there's no way you're closer to every employee than than anybody else is. And so the people who stay, you know, you're gonna lose trust with them because they're friends, they respect them, like them, so forth. Get laid off, so you've got this huge kind of

• 1:37:06Ben Horowitz?

  trust crisis, so to speak, and the reason why that's so fundamentally bad is that trust is the kind of essential ingredient of any culture of any organization, and the reason is trust is so highly related to communication, right, and that if I trust you entirely,

• 1:37:29Ben Horowitz?

  you barely have to talk to me because I know whatever you do is gonna be in my best interest, and I trust that it's the right thing. And if I trust you not at all, then you can talk to me all day long, and I'm not gonna hear a word you say, because I don't trust you. And in an organization

• 1:37:47Ben Horowitz?

  that's detrimental to have a communication breakdown like that and a trust breakdown like that, and and you kind of hear

• 1:37:54Ben Horowitz?

  you know, like, if you follow football, you always hear, well, you have to trust the system, like, the players will say, you have to trust the system, and the reason is, okay, if I don't trust my teammates, then if they don't do what they're supposed to do, then it doesn't matter what I do, and therefore it doesn't, you know, and as soon as it doesn't matter what I do, then you have chaos, and that's very true in a company and very true in a military organization and anything, and so you know, when you have layoffs, the first thing to do is is you've got to start to, the day you do the layoff, you have to start working on rebuilding trust, on making sure that everything that you say is true at that moment, that you're restoring honesty and so forth. And you and you do the layoffs in the right way, and I, you know, I've spoken a lot about this in writing and so on, but

• 1:38:39Ben Horowitz?

  you know, if you're in that situation where you're doing a layoff, just know that it's gonna be the end of your company if you don't start rebuilding the trust and the faith in the in the organization in a real way that day.

• 1:38:52Ben Horowitz?

  It's exacerbated in COVID, and this is something I've noticed kind of in our own firm, is that

• 1:39:01Ben Horowitz?

  Kind of face to face is a natural free trust builder. Like it's basically like if I'm with you and I can see you and I can see your intentions. Um, and you know, if I can, you know, shake your hand or give you a hug or touch you like that's that, that, that creates trust in a way that's almost impossible to do on video. It's, it's actually the one thing that

• 1:39:30Ben Horowitz?

  uh, and so, you know, so you have that problem on top of it. So I think that, you know, any leader uh, right now has to be thinking very hard about, okay, how can you, how can you create trust? How can you maintain trust? Um, how can you rebuild trust, you know, coming out of this? Particularly if you stay remote, um, because that, you know, it's such a fundamental underpinning of everything that you're going to do.

• 1:39:56Marc Andreessen?

  Mm hmm. So, well, let me ask you two questions. So first of all, um, you know, when the dot com crash happened, you know, there was the, I'd say widespread view that it was the fault of the tech companies.

• 1:40:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Marc Andreessen?

  Um, right, uh, it was like our fault. Um, when, um, you know, the financial crisis happened, it was, you know, the fault of the banks. Um, you know, when a company

• 1:40:18Ben Horowitz?

  Which was, which was, I think,

• 1:40:22Ben Horowitz?

  I feel like it, it wasn't more true with the banks, but what was true with the banks is they actually risk our money, meaning taxpayers, whereas we just risked our investors' money, which, you know, as a VC, like, we know that we knew that the job is dangerous when we check it, like that seems more fair, but anyway.

• 1:40:42Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, we're still, uh, we're still waiting for the tech bailout from, uh, from 2000. Um, uh, and then, um, you know, when it, when a company gets into trouble by itself, you know, it has a whatever bad product release or something, you know, it, you know, it blames itself or it blames its executives or its CEO, but it's like, it's pretty clearly somebody's fault. Covid is, you know, Covid is different, right? Because Covid is like, at least in theory, like Covid is nobody's fault. Um, and, you know, it's like, uh, you know, it's like, quite literally, after God, you know, kind of territory. And so I guess the question is, does the fact that Covid is anybody's fault, does that make any of this easier? Or does this just, does that really actually not matter? Because we're talking about people's lives and that's just actually not a factor.

• 1:41:21Ben Horowitz?

  Well, there's a couple of things on that, though. One is, um, not every company is laying off. Uh, so if you're doing the layoff, you know, and particularly I see this in like software, like SaaS. So like, it's one thing, you're a travel company and that kind of thing. That's a little, maybe you get a little more of a pass. But let's say you're like a SaaS software company. Um, but, you know, the way, you know, your, your stage of development, you know, your way of selling so forth, you're gonna have to do a layoff. There are a lot of SaaS companies that didn't do layoffs. Uh, so, you know, at that point, you are gonna take the blame. And then the other thing that happens in a layoff is you end up laying off some of the wrong people if you're big enough.

• 1:42:02Ben Horowitz?

  Um, and I'll just give you an example, like I laid off, uh, and, and it, and it kills things. So Eric Vishria, who's a great partner at Benchmark Capital now, and used to work for me at Opsware. I laid off, uh, a really good friend of his, who was one of the smartest guys in our company by accident. Like, I didn't lay him off directly, but he was laid off. Um, and, you know, I had known Eric since he was nineteen years old and he had been working for me for years. And he was so mad at me, he was, you know, ready to quit over that. Um, and that didn't have anything to do with the fact we did the layoff. It had to do with the fact that we laid off the wrong guy. Uh, and, you know, so you, you, you do have those kinds of issues as well.

• 1:42:42Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. And then let me outline a scenario. So I, I don't, like, after the last year, I don't want to predict anything anymore for the rest of my life. Um.

• 1:42:52Marc Andreessen?

  World is apparently getting very strange, but um let me lay out a scenario for what follows kind of covid. And I I think there's actually pretty, I have pretty good odds of this scenario, which which basically is like, okay. Like we've we've passed through this like one way door where we now realize like we we being CEOs and investors like we now realize that it's possible to structure and run companies differently than we all thought. Um, and we know that, you know, remote work is a lot more viable than we thought. And then that opens up, you know, all kinds of questions. Um, around, you know, where should our workforces be located? And some of that is employee driven because they want to move and some of that is like, well, you know, like a lot of my friends who are like CEOs in New York, they're like, oh, like, I don't need all these back office people in New York anymore. Like I can move them to like Minnesota or something and it's, you know, it's going to be actually just fine.

• 1:43:36Marc Andreessen?

  I didn't know I could do that and now I can like, you know, save our shareholders a lot of money by doing that. By the way, I can create a lot of jobs in, you know, places that maybe don't have them. Um, and so, so there's all that. And then there's just like basically this sense, I think, among CEOs, or there there will be that basically is like covid is to some extent to get on a jail free card for doing anything you want to do to restructure your company. In a way that maybe you were always thinking about, but you know, maybe you would have thought would be too, you know, too traumatic or or or dramatic. Um, and and so there's a real scenario coming out of this that a lot of companies are going to go through a, you know, really like dramatic level of restructuring and change. That will result in, you know, potentially a lot of, you know,

• 1:44:16Marc Andreessen?

  well, you say geographic movement of jobs, but the thing with with with when jobs move geographically is the people, you know, people don't usually move en masse. Right? And so you end you end up cutting jobs in one place and adding jobs somewhere else. And then there will be companies that simply like, don't hire back, right? They'll just be like, okay, now's a chance to like replace, you know, 5,000 people, you know, customer service people with software, right? And we can just basically say like, this is all part of the restructuring we're doing after covid. And so, so it feels like we're going to go into a period where there's going to be a lot of change in the economy and and in jobs. And then the the the good side of that is like academically, like basically that should that should that should lead to like really rapid productivity growth in the economy and that's good because that should lead to economic growth and wage growth and so forth. Like in general, that this is like an economically healthy thing in terms of the the growth rate of the economy.

• 1:45:01Marc Andreessen?

  But in the process, like a lot of people's lives will get disrupted. And so I I guess I'd be curious like what, you know.

• 1:45:08Ben Horowitz?

  We've been going through that a lot, you know, with with um, you know, kind of technological change, I would say over the last 25 years. Um, so then this is an accelerant even on that.

• 1:45:19Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so you know, as a CEO yourself and then as somebody who talks to and advises a lot of CEOs, like, how do you, you know, how do you think, you know, given the opportunity that they will use in front of them, like, how should they think this through?

• 1:45:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so, look, I think you have to embrace the future. And like a really simple analogy that, as you know, I use around the firm is, look, when Google introduced free lunch, like, I don't care if you think free lunch is good or bad, at some point, you had to offer free lunch because you couldn't hire anybody because everybody expects free lunch, right? And so, you can't, you know, hide from the future if you're a CEO. And if people are offering work from home and kind of changing their business and making it more efficient, like, you can't stick your head in the sand on that. You have to really understand it and look at it and see if it's going to give you competitive advantage or disadvantage.

• 1:46:11Ben Horowitz?

  And one of the things that really, you know, kind of knocked me on the ground when I heard it because it convinced me so much that you have to, you know, that work from home is a real, real thing that we're never going to get away from because it's very important is, a lot of the young women who work for us said, like, this is the first time in my life that I've been able, that I felt like I could have a career and be a mother and be good at both. And so, like, that's, that's a much bigger thing than, you know, a commute or anything else. And so, now, you know, you are in a new world. And so, I think the first thing is you've got to embrace the new world and you have to understand it

• 1:46:55Ben Horowitz?

  and you have to, you know, as our friend Sheryl Sandberg would say, you have to lean into it and not run away from it. Having said that, you know, as a leader, I think that things that are kind of, there's categories of things that are kind of unknown, unsolved in this kind of new environment, you know.

• 1:47:18Ben Horowitz?

  Trust and loyalty, particularly if you hit a crisis, like if everything is going well in the company, you can get away with bad culture, bad management, a lot of bad things. But when you hit a situation where like a competitor gets the better of you, um, you know, you're in a tough position, then all these things matter tremendously. So kind of getting out and really understanding, okay, how is career development different? How is, how are people's feelings about our organization different? Um, and what can we do to make those optimal? In the new work environment, I think are critically important questions. And if you ignore them, you'll, it'll run through your fingers as soon as you hit a crisis. So good.

• 1:48:03Ben Horowitz?

  So it's funny, George Tenet, our friend George Tenet, every time I saw him at Allen Company would say to me about Trump, because at the time, when we were still going to Allen Company, because there was no COVID.

• 1:48:15Ben Horowitz?

  But things were going like reasonably okay in the country. There were a lot of, like, he'd say a lot of crazy stuff, but it wasn't really like a, it didn't kind of melt down the whole country. But what George used to always say is like, just wait till there's a crisis, then we're, we're going to be totally screwed because this guy just says crazy shit all the time. And, you know, like in a crisis, it's going to be problematic. And I think that, um, that's kind of like what this is. Like, I don't think it matters unless there is a real crisis, but in a crisis, it's going to be the only thing that matters.

• 1:48:50Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, a friend of mine observed is like, you know, it like up until now to like, you know, either fire somebody or to quit. Um, you know, it was always like a thing, right? Because you're like in the office. It's like, you know, the secret meetings in the conference rooms. It's like, you know, somebody's actually going to leave. They have to pack up their desk. It's like, you know, you have to say goodbye to everybody, right? It's like, there's all this shame, right? It's like this sort of thing. Right? And so my friend observed, he's like, okay, if all the meetings are going to be on Zoom, then you just log off Zoom one day, right? And you log into a different Zoom the next day. And, you know, it's a different set of faces. Yeah.

• 1:49:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know, that's a really good point, also in terms of kind of what I spoke about earlier, right? So then maybe your peers don't care about you as much either.

• 1:49:35Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:49:36Ben Horowitz?

  Right? They're fine. You got fired. You're not really my friend. I only knew you on video. It's not like we had a beer or something.

• 1:49:45Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:49:45Ben Horowitz?

  That that's that's an interesting point. I I think that's I think there's a lot of truth to that.

• 1:49:50Marc Andreessen?

  Um, there's this concept and there's this concept in psychology of the it's called the parasocial relationship. Um, and so it's it's the it's sort of the friendship. Actually, it's actually the word feeling people like filter celebrities they don't know. But it's basically this idea of like, it feels like it's a relationship, but it's not.

• 1:50:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:06Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:50:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that that's right. That's right.

• 1:50:12Ben Horowitz?

  It, uh,

• 1:50:15Ben Horowitz?

  it definitely cuts both ways. I mean, it's an interesting. It's it's a very interesting observation. And then, you know, and maybe you just have to get like a thousand times better at training and onboarding because, you know, the workforce is going to be even more fluid than it is now.

• 1:50:33Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right. Exactly. Um, okay, good. Uh, well, we can come back to people have, you know, feedback on that. This is obviously critically important topic. So feel free to um, ask more follow up questions on Twitter. Um, and we'll continue to uh, to talk about it in the weeks ahead. Um, so uh, second question, um, Zheng Tan asks, what is something first time founders, especially ones who haven't had prior startup experience, miss and wish they could course correct earlier? And I have a I have a big nominated nomination on this one, but I'll I'll let you go first and then I'll follow.

• 1:51:01Ben Horowitz?

  You're like the one that every single one of them misses, um, is and it's a psychological trick. So basically, your first time founder, you become CEO. Um, you don't know how to do the job because it's not a job that you know how to do intuitively. Nobody does. Um, but yet you're CEO and you're recruiting everybody in. So you're supposed to know how to do the job. And so that kind of psychological paradox stops you from really doing the real work to learn how to do the job. Meaning,

• 1:51:38Ben Horowitz?

  ask uh, the right people, the right questions at the right time so that you can come up the learning curve faster. And where I'll tell you where this manifests itself always is in executive hiring. Um, we don't I don't think we have a single founder that like went out and aced executive hiring like their first time through it. You know, everybody makes tons of mistakes and has to fire all their execs and rehire them. And the reason is, hey, you've not been CFO. You've not been head of HR, but here you are hiring it. You don't even know what the job is. You know, you're out there like hiring a Japanese interpreter. You don't speak Japanese and you're not getting any help. And you're acting like you know how to do it because you think you're a CEO, which you are, but you're not really.

• 1:52:17Ben Horowitz?

  And so the right, kind of, the right answer to that is, you know, really get some help, get trained up on like, what is that job? You know, what do good, you know, what's the difference between a good CFO and a great CFO through the mouth of an actual CFO? Um, like, how do you go about learning all those things? And almost every first time founder, there's a whole class of things around that that they screw up, but, but it's all comes from that same point of, I'm really supposed to know how to do this, but I don't. So rather than ask somebody and reveal myself, I'm going to just go ahead and screw it up. And then, of course, in Silicon Valley, there are many, many advisors who give advice, uh, despite the fact that they have no idea what they're talking about. So that, that exacerbates it as well.

• 1:53:03Marc Andreessen?

  But, but they always sound confident.

• 1:53:06Ben Horowitz?

  Always confident. They've heard it from somebody who knew, right? Like, it's like a third-hand weird type of thing.

• 1:53:12Marc Andreessen?

  Yes. So the thing I would nominate, and I've been, I'll be curious what you think of this. The thing I would nominate is it goes to the nature of the relationship with the co-founders.

• 1:53:21Ben Horowitz?

  Um, oh, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's a good one.

• 1:53:25Marc Andreessen?

  So this, this is a separate thing than, than what Ben was talking about, but although they.

• 1:53:28Ben Horowitz?

  I made that mistake myself, you know?

• 1:53:30Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, yes.

• 1:53:32Ben Horowitz?

  No, thank you so much.

• 1:53:33Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, well, uh, there's still time. Um, so, um, so, and basically there's two scenarios here. So scenario number one is you're a sole, you're a solo founder. Um, and, you know, I think there are certain people who can do that. Um, I don't think I could do it. And I, and I, in fact, I never have, and I would not want to. Um, just because like doing it by yourself, like I, I didn't, you know, kind of, it goes actually to some stuff that you were talking about, which was like to not have anybody to talk to who's like in the same, you know, in the same, in the same boat with you. Um, you know, with all the same knowledge, like to have to like have all that pressure just be on you. Um, seems intense. So anyway, I, go ahead.

• 1:54:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yes. Yeah, yeah. And you can wind off track very fast.

• 1:54:12Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 1:54:13Ben Horowitz?

  Because you don't have somebody to calibrate. Yep.

• 1:54:16Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. So you're, you're like living in your head. Right? Yeah, exactly. You're like having all these debates with yourself and you're under incredible pressure. Um, and so that's, that's a, it's a, it's a, it's, it's really tough. And of course, this is one of the reasons why people then have multiple founders. So then the multiple founder thing, basically, the way I think about, I guess, give a conclusion first and then explain why. So the conclusion is as follows, which is like, I've had many, many conversations with like founding teams, where they're very, very worried about, you know, who's going to be on their board and they're very, very worried that the VCs are going to like judge them and fire them and like, you know, and every, and every once in a while that happens and there are, you know, some, some famous stories of that happening in the history of the valley. But they're very worried about that. What they're never worried about is them turning on each feather.

• 1:54:57Ben Horowitz?

  Which happens quite a bit.

• 1:54:59Marc Andreessen?

  Which happens quite a bit. And, and, you know, if you're, if you're in our job, basically what you see is the ratio of this is like a hundred to one or something. Right? Or maybe it's more, maybe it's like 500 to one or a thousand to one, which is like when, when, when, when, when there's a, when there's a traumatic event at the top of the company, that affects the founders, it's virtually always the founders turning on each other. And it is, it is almost never the investors or the, or the board members. And so it's like, okay, like, you know, why can that be? And, and then of course, the thing that you do is you basically like, you, you have this conversation with the founders and they, and every, in every single case, they assure you that won't happen to them. Right? Because like, you know, they're, you know, they've, they've been, you know, they've, they've known each other since age six, you know, they've, they've like, you know, been best friends forever.

• 1:55:40Ben Horowitz?

  Those ones do better than the ones that, you know, met at Y Combinator or that kind of thing, I have to say.

• 1:55:47Marc Andreessen?

  Right. Yeah. The more, yeah, right. Exactly. The more recent ones are the shotgun weddings where somebody said, oh, you two, you two should team up. Or somebody said, you know, or even worse, to get funding, you have to go find a co-founder and then you, right, you do it on the fly. Yep. And so then it's like, and, and, and basically it's like, okay, well, why does this happen? Right? And I would say like, I don't know about what you would say, but it maybe is like, I don't know, half of successful companies or something. There's like a founder schism. Or maybe more.

• 1:56:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. I mean, well, if you look at kind of just Silicon Valley, well, I mean, you know,

• 1:56:20Ben Horowitz?

  but just pick any big company and go, well, where is the other founder? Like, where is Larry Ellison's co-founder? What happened to all the co-founders at Facebook? You know, like, we're, we're, we're all of those.

• 1:56:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Why didn't, yeah, why didn't Paul, it's actually funny, you know, why didn't Paul, I'll never go, right. Why didn't he ever go back to Microsoft after he, you know, he actually got better and like went on to have like quite a life and like, why didn't you go, you know, he's already, but didn't go back?

• 1:56:43Ben Horowitz?

  He explained that in a book, you know, like he heard him talk about.

• 1:56:47Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. So Paul was so mad at Bill. Paul was so mad at Bill for a story that he tells in the book, which is an amazing story that he literally held this story for thirty years before he wrote it in a book. And then he published it in the book without giving the Microsoft people any advance warning. He was so excited to have his revenge. So that's like a great example. So it's just like, okay, like there's these founder splits all over the place. And then it's like, okay, well, why is that? And my view on that is the reason it's just because like, it's just, it's just flat out the pressure, right? It's just like, okay, you might have known somebody, you know, hopefully for longer than a month or a year, but like, you know, you've been in various circumstances together, but you haven't started a company before. And then you're in this like incredibly high pressure, you know, hothouse, you know, kind of situation in which like things really start bearing down. And then

• 1:57:32Marc Andreessen?

  that's when you start to discover things about each other, right? And so you start to discover things about level of commitment. You start to discover things about work ethic. You start to, you know, discover things about responsibility, conscientiousness, you start to discover things about like emotional control. You start to discover, you know, loyalty issues. And all of a sudden, oh, and then the other thing that happens, right, is like, there's, there's, there's often like a big competence difference, right? And so like one founder will turn out to just be like a lot more competent. Or even let's, let's, let's even use a different word, scalable. Where, you know, one founder is the CEO, they're scaling with the company, you know, the investors are just putting huge amounts of effort and trying to make sure the CEO scales, you build a team around the CEO, and the other founders are like, you know, wait a minute, like, what's happening here? You know, what about me?

• 1:58:18Marc Andreessen?

  And then, you know, they're often getting side, you know, kind of sidelined in the process. And so, so it's just, it's basically just like, okay, like, this is something that is really worth thinking through. And I guess what I would say is like, I, I don't know if I've ever actually met a founder in a team that has really thought this through. And then I have, I so far have an exact, I would say a hundred percent failure rate at convincing people how important this is. And by the way, the tip off on how and how the tip off on my failure rate actually is that it goes to founder vesting. Which is founders really ought to like re vest their stock like frankly as often as they can. And in my in my view, or at least like at the time of like raising venture capital.

• 1:59:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, they always feel burned when one of them walks away and the other one's building the company.

• 1:59:07Marc Andreessen?

  Oh, people get so mad. I mean, it is it is you'll have one founder who literally walks away with just a giant amount of money for, you know, in retrospect, doing very little work. And that person is just absolutely furious because they feel like, you know, they got iced out of the company. And they're they're missing out on the glory. And then you've got this the founder CEO who's still running the company who's just furious. That there's this person out there who's made all this money and continues to make money every day. Right. Based on based on work that he's not doing.

• 1:59:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, we've had so many of those conversations because it's usually the CEO that remains and the CEO usually goes. Why am I getting more stock? My co founder left not doing anything and has the same stock as me. Like I've heard that. I've heard that at least a dozen times.

• 1:59:51Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. And so the and you you would think it's like the emotion of this. It's like, don't these people have like enough going on? And isn't there like enough real work to do? And like, isn't it shouldn't people be happy that they're successful? And this is the kind of thing where it just like. It gnaws at you like so deeply. And and especially like under pressure, like this is the kind of thing. It's like the burr in the saddle where it's just like.

• 2:00:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, it's a big one. For sure. Well, you know, it reminds me of the what you talked about is kind of there. There's a great line. I forgot which Samurai book, but basically with the Samurai kind of in the code was. In ordinary times, matters of character cannot be determined, but when something happens, all is revealed. And that kind of gets at the thing is like they they join each other in ordinary times. They don't know. You know, you don't know the integrity, the honesty, the courage of your co founder at that point. But then you get married. Then you divide up the company.

• 2:00:53Ben Horowitz?

  Then something happens and then you find out who the real person that you founded the company was is and it's. It's difficult.

• 2:01:03Marc Andreessen?

  Yep, exactly. And so I would say for first time founders, uh, tread very carefully. If you're gonna do it yourself and tread very carefully if you're gonna do it with somebody else. Um, and this stuff like this stuff matters like this stuff matters so much during the process of then all the work that follows. So this stuff will definitely have a big impact.

• 2:01:21Ben Horowitz?

  Actually, you know, one of the best things that ever happened to us is like, we had like a pressure incident. When we were raising the A round, and I think that that that helped the company. Get through like some of the horrible shit. Um, you know, that just just cause.

• 2:01:37Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 2:01:38Ben Horowitz?

  You know, we had something happen. So that kind of revealed a little bit about who each other were. If that hadn't happened, like we wouldn't have been tested so early. It might have been a lot different, right?

• 2:01:49Marc Andreessen?

  So we have something to thank that guy for.

• 2:01:51Ben Horowitz?

  Exactly.

• 2:01:55Ben Horowitz?

  We won't name names today.

• 2:01:57Marc Andreessen?

  No, no, that's right. Um, so, uh, all right, next question, uh, and actually it's somewhat related. So, uh, uh, Vinnyak Renaday asks, is there any observable difference between founders of one billion versus 10 billion versus hundred billion dollar? Uh, market cap companies, you know, sort of, let's say, you know, kind of by by venture standards, small, medium and large outcomes. Um, independent externalities like market slash speed of adoption slash killer talent in the exec team. So so specifically differences in the founders.

• 2:02:28Ben Horowitz?

  You know, the.

• 2:02:30Ben Horowitz?

  The CEOs that that we've worked with who have had the really big outcomes, um. You know, be it, uh, Todd McKinnon or Mark Zuckerberg, um, you know, kind of across different kinds of things. So there are like the common things are just unlimited determination. And, um, extreme courage, I I would say like those are the two like character traits that they both have. There are other things like founder velocity and this and that and the other, but to kind of get to really big, you have to. One, you have to walk away from a lot of money many times. So, you know, that takes like a tremendous amount of determination to do that.

• 2:03:14Ben Horowitz?

  And then, um, you have to.

• 2:03:19Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you you just have to like be willing to walk through and unbelievable amount of pain along the way. So tho- those are kind of the character things, at least that I noticed. Um, you know, there's other like talent wise and, you know, how brilliant they are and how great the ideas are, are of course huge factors in how what the outcome is.

• 2:03:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. So I agree with that. And then the thing I would nominate, um, that's in addition to that, the thing I would nominate is I think it's, it's the ability of the C, the CEO, the founder CEO to calibrate the importance of direct control, um, versus building an organization that can scale. Um, and I guess what I would say is like the, the, the most advanced founders, my, my view anyway is that, basically what they, you know, the, the most advanced, the most advanced founders of CEOs, like their, their attitude, basically. But it actually goes to, actually goes to something Andy Grove said in his book, which is the, the output of a manager is the output of this organization. Um, and so the, the, the sort of company version of this is, you know, but, but the company is, the company is the extension of the CEO.

• 2:04:21Marc Andreessen?

  Like it, just focusing for a moment on the CEO, like the, the company is like an extension of the CEO's ability to like get things done. Um, and have things, and have things happen. Um, and so the CEOs who think, I would say, very kind of broadly and expansively about what it means to build an organization that can scale in order to get more and more done, where the CEO doesn't have to be in the room. Um, you know, it is, it's definitely a requirement for the, for the large outcomes, like you have to do that at some point. Um, and then I guess I'd say, you know, founders, there, there are founders who, where the companies clearly have that potential where they just, they, for whatever reason, they feel like that's just too, I don't know if it's too much of a threat or a challenge or what it is, but like they kind of feel like they need to have too much control in the moment and they can't quite ever let that happen.

• 2:05:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that characteristic is, is a tricky one to develop because, um, you have to be, in order to do what you're saying, you both have to be okay with like things being broken in the organization. Cause they're, you're letting them out of your control. So you're going to have things that are embarrassing to you, that are kind of bad. But then at the same time, you have to be extremely urgent about getting all those fixed. Um, so it's that balance of not, uh, basically stretching yourself out so thin because you have to review every stupid word and everything. And you have to, you know, like, uh,

• 2:05:45Ben Horowitz?

  Rewrite people's code and do all these kinds of things that that people feel the need to do at the extreme micro level. But at the same time, you have to really care about kind of pushing things forward and getting them better. And that's difficult psychologically. Because if you can't take the fact that things aren't good. Like, most people are either happy-go-lucky, like, okay, it's fine, everything's broken and I don't care. And that's terrible. Or they're like, so incensed about it that they're too controlling and they don't they they're not able to grow the organization effectively.

• 2:06:25Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, right. And then you get this thing where it's like, there's just clearly more potential, but it's like the company just simply can't get to it.

• 2:06:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, like, there's, there's a lot of things that are really important and amazing to do. And you're just not going to do them.

• 2:06:38Ben Horowitz?

  And that, like, it's, and that's usually the best rates you make is to walk away from a real opportunity because there's a bigger one that you're working on.

• 2:06:47Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Yep, okay. All right, next question. So our friend Louis Anslo asks, how do you think about neuro atypical founders? Is ADHD, which is, I think, it's attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder, considered a net positive or a liability? Something to be managed and worked around? Or something to be balanced with a more neurotypical co-founder? And I would, I would extend the question from ADHD also, of course, to, you know, sort of Asperger's or the autistic spectrum.

• 2:07:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so this is, you know, is a kind of topic I've spent a lot of time on because, you know, I've got an autistic daughter. So the whole kind of, the way, like, I think one model to or way to look at this is, you know, there's a kind of a distribution of nervous systems.

• 2:07:42Ben Horowitz?

  And then you do have, you know, in that distribution, there are ones that are very deviant, that are a few standard deviations off the norm or in so forth in various ways. Um, you know, certainly autism is, is, uh, is, is pretty, uh, you know, kind of off the mean. Um, but interestingly, genius is also way off the mean. And there's a lot of, you know, there's, there's been much written about kind of overlapping characteristics. So, you know, they, they're, you know, for years, everybody talked about Bill Gates's kind of Asperger's autistic kind of tendencies from rocking to, you know, his messy hair and all those kinds of things.

• 2:08:21Ben Horowitz?

  And, um, you know, Einstein was known for continuing to put the spoon in his mouth long after the cereal was gone and that kind of thing. And Van Gogh cut off his ear and gave it to his girlfriend, which if you work with, you know, uh, special needs kids, you know, that's very inappropriate social behavior. Uh, so, you know, all these kinds of things, um, that, you know, we would consider to be maybe a mental health issue or, or something atypical are also kind of present in people's nervous systems who see the world differently, who have some special kind of genius. And so for us as investors, um, you know, that kind of thing, we'd never rule somebody out on that.

• 2:09:06Ben Horowitz?

  Uh, in that, like, if they are a genius, they may very well be manic. They may have A D H D, they may have all these things. But then there is a follow on question, which is, can they function? Are they functional? Um, you know, can they, and particularly can they function in the context of an organization? And, uh, like, that's a high bar. And, you know, many people who have those conditions, you know, can't, and it's not for them. Um, so it's not automatic that, you know, we see somebody who's, uh, you know, bipolar and we go, okay, we're definitely giving, you know, her all our money because she's going to be amazing. She may be Elon Musk, she may be amazing, but she, she may also like be impossible to work for.

• 2:09:51Ben Horowitz?

  And so it's, uh, you know, there's not an easy answer, but I would just say that, you know, like people with deviant nervous systems are, are special in our society. And, you know, like some of them can make great contributions and some of them, you know, we need to take care of. But, uh, the one thing we definitely don't want to do is, you know, use CRISPR to eliminate some of these conditions because they, uh, contribute amazingly to moving us forward. Right.

• 2:10:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, you know, the other thing that maybe is happening culturally, you know, there historically, there was a lot of shame and still is associated with, you know, a lot of mental, mental conditions, including, including these, um, uh, you know, they were sort of, you know, considered to be things not to talk, not to be talked about or to be hidden away. Um, you know, this, the stigma, it feels like the stigma is coming off over time. Um, and in fact, you, you do run into more people who basically are, you know, you're, you're into people all the way, all the way on the other side where like they, you know, sort of are very happy to announce it. Um, and then just a lot of people who are just more open about it. Um, and so, you know, it may be the kind of, it may be the kind of thing that is going to get easier to discuss. Um, and then also as a consequence, like easier to deal with and, and easier to help people with.

• 2:10:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know, our, our friend, the late Bernard Tyson was really good on this topic where he said, like, the name mental health is a dumb idea. Like, it should just be health. Um, because how is mental health different than any of the effects, physical health? And by calling it mental health, we stigmatized it. And, uh, and that's, that's really been kind of the dumbest thing that we did is stigmatize mental health. Cause not, not only, um, you know, it's, it's treatable in many ways, but also sometimes it's a huge advantage. So, uh, it's great. We're making progress there.

• 2:11:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And then a book, I actually have, I haven't read the book, but I'm really looking forward to it. Um, there's a, there's a researcher that probably the world's leading autism researcher, his name is Simon Baran Cohen. So B A R O N C O H E N. Um, and his, his son, by the way, is Ali G, um, or Borat, although fortunately Simon is a lot more serious, Simon's a lot more serious than his son. Um, uh, and, uh, he, he just, he's written a number of books on, on autism and the autistic spectrum. And he just wrote a book called The Pattern Seekers. Um, and he, he actually tells sort of the historical story that Ben was referencing. And he sort of, he goes, apparently the thesis of the book is kind of goes through history, showing how, you know, a large number of the people who like really moved civilization forward over the last few thousand years are people who were, you know, somewhere on the autistic spectrum or had these, these, these

• 2:12:20Marc Andreessen?

  various issues. Um, so anyway, I, I haven't read it. I've heard it's great. Um, so for people who are interested, I would, I would recommend that. Um, okay. Let's see. All right. Okay. Good. Okay. Change the topic. Different, uh, different topic. Um, uh, different domain. So, uh, Powak, uh, Zataki asks.

• 2:12:39Marc Andreessen?

  Views on text versus audio versus video content consumption and creation patterns, and how the world read internet will change in each of these three directions. And of course, this is like a very relevant question, you know, this is a very relevant question, just because, you know, we live in a world saturated, obviously, with media, and there's all these controversies around, you know, social media, you know, streaming and, you know, video and all these things over the last decade. And then, of course, here we are in Clubhouse, right, which is like, you know, essentially a brand-new medium, you know, that kind of, you know, borrows from, you know, everything from, you know, conference calls to talk shows, but like, it's fundamentally a new dynamic. And so, like, where is this all headed? And so, let me advance a thesis, and I will say, I am shamelessly ripping this thesis off from somebody who's in the room, and in fact, is actually in the top row of the

• 2:13:22Marc Andreessen?

  room, Antonio, our friend Antonio, that basically borrows on work done by media researchers like sixty, you know, fifty, sixty, seventy years ago, including Marshall McLuhan and this guy named Walter Ong, who did this, did this sort of very interesting work on this topic, where he basically, the thesis basically is that there's, there's sort of two kinds of cultures, in terms of how media intersects culture and sort of, you know, potentially determines culture, or determines the shape of culture. He said, there's sort of two kinds of cultures, there's oral culture, or what he calls orality, and then there's literary culture, or literate culture. And so, and think, and think of this historically, think of this historically as, you know, there were people way before there was writing, right? And there were people way before there was math, right?

• 2:14:06Marc Andreessen?

  You know, so idiograms and like all the numbers and all these other things. And so, how did those people communicate? And how did they, you know, sort of shape their ideas, transmit their ideas? How did they develop culture? Like, how did they develop ideas that actually passed on from generation to generation? And they were, and they were by definition oral cultures, right? The, the, the one thing that they could do was, was, was speak, and so, the entire culture was built around this, this kind of, this kind of oral foundation. And then, you know, later on, it's interesting, like, the Greeks, I think, sort of, were one of the inventors of, of, of writing, but then they actually continued a largely oral culture for the next few hundred years. Um, and then, you know, kind of literary culture developed, you know, the, the, actually Christianity, the Bible, you know, was a big part of it and then, you know.

• 2:14:49Ben Horowitz?

  The printing press, yeah, sure, right.

• 2:14:50Marc Andreessen?

  Right, exactly. Then the printing, the printing press kind of kicked it into gear, like for real, right? Cause the printing, the printing press lets you move from a very small number of people who could literally hand copy out books, who were called scribes to a world where you could have mass production and, and right, the thing that was, the very first thing that was mass produced was the Bible. The very second thing was, uh, uh, scandal sheet newspapers. Um.

• 2:15:10Marc Andreessen?

  Fake, fake, fake news media. Um, li- literally scandal sheets in and around the Vatican, um, spreading all kinds of scurrilous rumors. Um, and then, you know, the Enlightenment basically, right, like in the seventeen hundreds, you know, around there, the Enlightenment basically was like, okay, now we have this basically technology for literary idea transmission. Um, and so now we're going to write everything down. We're going to like also do the same thing with numbers. We're going to like have mathematics. We're going to all of a sudden have, like, and all of a sudden, like, all of the, like, big debates are going to happen, like, through the written word. Right? We're going to have all these, like, you know, manifestos and we're going to have, like, you know, the American Constitution and like, you know, these things are all, we're going to have, you know, philo- philosophy as we, we understand it now. Right? It's distinct from religion, which is, you know, basically through, through a process of writing. Um, and so then we moved into this world where we have a literate culture and

• 2:15:56Marc Andreessen?

  the thing about this change, at least the way the theory goes, is the thing around this change is that if you think about it, like, an oral culture,

• 2:16:04Marc Andreessen?

  like, pre-rational is not quite the right term, but it's like the focus is not rationality or logic. The focus is on, uh, interpersonal interactions.

• 2:16:11Ben Horowitz?

  Right, relationships, yeah.

• 2:16:13Marc Andreessen?

  Relationships, right. So oral cultures, in, in the theory, oral cultures are social in nature. Uh, they're emotional in nature. Um, they have to do with, right, around, uh, human relationships. Um, they have to do, they're, they're very family centric, tribal centric. Um, you know, they're very focused on establishing, you know, very strong bonds, you know, between family members or tribe members. They're very focused. You know, for, for a very long time, by the way, they were all inherently, inherently religious. Like, for a very long time, basically, families and, and tribes both essentially were, were religious cults. Um, to be, and, and the religious cult was, was basically the, the, the, the sort of, the idea of the community as encoded into its traditions transmitted orally. Um, basically, it, it ended up, ended up, ended up in the form of a cult, you know, it passed, passed through generational lines.

• 2:16:58Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so, and, and of course, what did, what, what didn't they have, right? They didn't, you know, they didn't, they didn't have like almost everything today that we would, we would think of as like science uh, or rationality, or you know, basically like, or like, let's say abstraction. Right? They didn't, they didn't really, they, they really had abstract concepts. Cause like, how would you, like even if you thought of an abstract concept, how would you ever possibly communicate it? Um, and so basically it's like, okay, human civilization then is like an oral culture up until like call it the Gutenberg and the Enlightenment. Uh, then you know, in the West, it, you know, in, in, you know, in various places, various times, we become, you know, in theory, literate cultures. You know, but of course the oral culture doesn't die. Right? And the oral culture kind of.

• 2:17:35Ben Horowitz?

  Even in the West, it continues, right? Exactly.

• 2:17:38Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. Right. Exactly. And by the way, right? What is sort of a classic expression of oral culture is music. Right? And it's like, so it's like, why is there music and why is there music with lyrics? Right? And if you think about it, like, if you go back, like over the last few thousand years, it's basically because what they could do was they could, the, the only way to get information reliably from generation to generation was to encode it in the form of a poem. Uh, or in the form of a story, right? Or in form of musical lyrics, right?

• 2:18:05Ben Horowitz?

  Like Homer or proverbs or all those things, right? Were, were memorizable, right? Uh, yeah.

• 2:18:11Marc Andreessen?

  And there's, there's actually all this research about how basically like they, they use like the structure of like poems, kind of through the like the, you know, the, the, around the Greek time or even like a, uh, you know, sort of a later on, it's like, you know, there's, is, is this like very dense information packing. It's like they're optimally structured for like maximum, maximum information per line. Cause like you, you're just like, the, the odds of it getting through, right? Were just not that high. And so you, you, you had to really focus on, on distilling it down.

• 2:18:34Ben Horowitz?

  There's such an awesome amount of wisdom in, in some of that stuff. Yeah.

• 2:18:37Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. Well, that's the thing is it's all, you know, this, this idea of the Lindy, the Lindy thing is like the things that last. And it's like, what, whatever, whatever songs or poems or, you know, um, you know, sort of epic poetry, like whatever survived was kind of by definition, the best of what those people had to offer. Cause it was.

• 2:18:54Ben Horowitz?

  That they remembered.

• 2:18:56Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And it was important enough to pass down to their kids right across, you know, dozens or even hundreds of generations.

• 2:19:02Marc Andreessen?

  So anyway, but but like oral culture continues and of course oral culture is like, you know, conspiracy culture. Right? Because it's like, okay, like, how do we explain what's happened in the world? We can't deal with the abstractions. So we need to come up with, you know, basically, you know, the social kind of theories, which which are sort of the form of conspiracies. So anyway, it's like, okay, we had oral culture, then we had literate culture, and then it's like, okay. Does the internet and social media, right? And, you know, for that matter, things like Clubhouse, like. Are they a continuation of like literary culture or are they a return to oral culture?

• 2:19:33Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And by the way, here we are talking.

• 2:19:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:37Marc Andreessen?

  Right? And so what we're doing here is, you know, very similar to what our.

• 2:19:42Ben Horowitz?

  Although in this case, we're talking about books, so.

• 2:19:44Marc Andreessen?

  We we are. Well, so it's actually funny. So I'll just tell one more little story on this and then get your reaction. So. Uh, Socrates, right? He was like, you know, one of the smartest people who ever lived. Uh, Socrates actually hated writing. Uh, there's a famous thing that he did in one of his things. So so Socrates actually never wrote anything down. He only ever spoke and and that's why it's all what we know about.

• 2:20:03Ben Horowitz?

  Plato, yeah.

• 2:20:04Marc Andreessen?

  Plato, right? Plato wrote everything else down. Um, and so literally, it's like Socrates refused to write anything down on principle. And then there was this like Plato kid following him around, right? In Athens, like scribbling all this shit down. And Socrates is like, okay.

• 2:20:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, he was anti-writing, right? Socrates was anti-writing because he thought it messed up your memory.

• 2:20:23Marc Andreessen?

  That's right. That's right. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:20:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:25Marc Andreessen?

  He said, look, he said, look, everything that's important, right, is something that you should be, you're like. Well, so one of the famous things he said, one of the famous things he said was he said, look, the problem with writing is it doesn't talk back.

• 2:20:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:20:35Marc Andreessen?

  Right? Like, and so it doesn't matter how often you read something, you're never going to get anything different, right? Whereas when you like talk to somebody, you have a chance, you know, he had the the dialectic. When you talk to somebody, you have the opportunity to actually gain new knowledge. Right? Because you you can actually stress test each other. And so he he was actually, he shit all over, he shit all over writing.

• 2:20:54Ben Horowitz?

  He was like the original Luddites. He's like, that new writing technology sucks.

• 2:20:58Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly, exactly. And so anyway, like the theory, and this is from Antonio, but the theory, basically, the theory would be basically the internet. Is sort of paradoxically essentially shoving us back or forward into a new oral culture. Um, which is why it's so rife with all of this, you know, crazy, you know, whatever you want to call it, conspiracies, misinformation, you know, sort of. Yeah, and I would say right for good and for bad, maybe, right? Which is just like all, let's just say. All kinds of wildly creative thinking and expression that would never make its way into a book. Right, or into a, you know, whatever, you know, at least a classic version of a magazine or a newspaper.

• 2:21:33Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:34Marc Andreessen?

  Um, but all of a sudden, just like people are able to, and literally what's happening is people are, people are talking about it. And so the theory basically would be like, we're, we're headed actually back into what is actually a much more oral culture, um, and, and for better or for worse.

• 2:21:46Ben Horowitz?

  That, that, that's an amazingly interesting take on that question. And I think, I think it's right. It's interesting though, you know, the, the other thing I was going to bring up is, um, and you, uh, mentioned Marshall McLuhan, but, um, the medium is the message.

• 2:22:05Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 2:22:06Ben Horowitz?

  And it is, you know, one of the things about the different formats, you know, be it kind of the very short form text on Twitter versus the longer text on, uh, Facebook, which is the, you know, longer text on Medium or Substack, um, versus Clubhouse versus Zoom. It, it is, the ideas, uh, that you can get across are all very, very different. And like, one of the things that's been amazing on Clubhouse is listening. It's absent on Twitter and it's mostly absent on other things. You know, there's kind of our conversation, I would say, listening and adding to the

• 2:22:46Ben Horowitz?

  knowledge is, um, you know, the kind of additive knowledge through conversation is not something that happens on the other, uh, social networks, or at least not for me.

• 2:22:58Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah.

• 2:22:59Ben Horowitz?

  And so this, this has been a real breakthrough on Clubhouse, I think. Uh, and so it's exciting to see where it goes, but, um, it's certainly oral. So maybe more like Socrates.

• 2:23:13Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Well, we, we, we definitely need the Socrates at Clubhouse. I'm not sure.

• 2:23:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, less like Wingnut, you know?

• 2:23:21Marc Andreessen?

  Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe that's Elon. I'm not sure. Um, so, um, you know, I guess the question, the question I'd ask you, Ben, is like, how do you, cause I know you, you know, you think a lot about music, um, like, how, and, and sort of music, not just as like a form of entertainment, but like as a mechanism of, I think you'd, you'd say like cultural transmission.

• 2:23:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:23:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And so like, how, how would you think about like the role of music, like, you know, in this framework?

• 2:23:44Ben Horowitz?

  Well, it's interesting cause you know, music is, um,

• 2:23:50Ben Horowitz?

  And when you kind of spend time with musicians, like the thing that they're always after is the feeling. Like, how do they translate the feeling and the meaning of the feeling into kind of a work of art? And, you know, often like the huge challenge is how do you like create a new feeling? Or like, or correspond, you know, kind of anchor in a feeling that you have. And which goes very much, you know, like it's not surprising that it's it's it's part of oral culture in that sense. And so I think that, and then in that way, it kind of always tries to both drive

• 2:24:33Ben Horowitz?

  as well as represent the culture that it comes from and that it, you know, either of the time period or the locale or what have you.

• 2:24:45Ben Horowitz?

  But it is also like dramatically affected by social media because people are going for shorter and shorter feelings in music, I would say. You know, it's one of the kind of weird kind of challenges that goes on because people want, okay, I want that feeling for this five minutes. But it's not like, you know, when we were kids, we would listen to albums over and over and over and over again. You know, and get very attached to them because they would kind of bring us to a literally a place, a time and a set of friends that that we couldn't otherwise get to.

• 2:25:25Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right. Yeah. Okay, good. For people who are into this topic, two books I'd recommend. So one, as I mentioned, Walter Ong, his book was called Orality and Literacy. And it is available on Amazon. And then there's another book that came out, it's an extraordinary book, by the way, by an anthropologist named Joseph Henrich, spelled H E N R I C H. And he just wrote this book called Weird, W E I R D, W E I R D.

• 2:25:52Ben Horowitz?

  That's a great name.

• 2:25:54Marc Andreessen?

  It's a, it's a great name. It's a, and weird as an acronym, uh, weird as an acronym for Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic. Um, and it's this, it's a great book. It's this, it's sort of this take down of basically the entire field of psychology, uh, on the basis of like the Western psychology. Basically, it's only been studying basically undergrads at Western colleges as their test subjects for like the last hundred years. Um, and that those are like the most uncharacteristic people in the world, um, as compared to like everybody else.

• 2:26:20Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:20Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and actually it's, which is a whole topic. But anyway, the, the, the point, the point, the point of bringing it up is the first chap, chapter actually opens on this topic. Of oral versus literate. And he actually goes into the science and I was not aware of this. It's, it's, it's incredible. Uh, he gives an incredible explanation. Um, when people in a society, um, become literate, um, their brains physically change. Um, and what happens, he says, is that you need basically more, you know, neurological processing to deal with written language. Um, and so what happens is your brain expands its ability to interpret basically, uh, symbols. Um, and in the process, it steps on the part of the brain that interprets faces.

• 2:27:04Ben Horowitz?

  Well, and that goes together, right? Like, you know, the, uh, it screws up the whole relationship culture. If you don't remember anybody's name, because you don't recognize their face, it screws it all up. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah.

• 2:27:15Marc Andreessen?

  Exactly. And of course, you know, there are people, by the way, I, I have admitted this, that there are people who literally have this, you know, thing called, you know, face blindness.

• 2:27:22Ben Horowitz?

  Uh, yeah.

• 2:27:23Marc Andreessen?

  You know, where they, they literally, literally can't tell the difference. They literally can't, you know, I've actually had this happen where like, I literally don't recognize somebody I met two minutes ago. Right? And it's just like, uh, it was just like, you know, for a long time, I was just like, okay, I just like something. It's like, I'm just confused or something. And it's like, oh, this is actually a thing. Um, but anyway, um, uh, you know, this is actually like a real, there's actually a real thing in the brain. Like there's a section of the brain that is devoted to basically interpreting faces. And that is the section of the brain that like deals with, you know, basically how to, but it's not, it's not just recognition. It's also like, how do you interpret emotion? Right, um, right. How do you do bonding and have relationships and know when somebody's upset? And so anyway, it's, it's, it's interesting because like it's an actual physical change in the brain and it's a non, uh, it's not a change in the DNA. Um, it's a change in the, uh, in the actual physical structure.

• 2:28:04Ben Horowitz?

  So it's a, it's a neuroplasticity, but it's probably, but it's heritable. Yes.

• 2:28:10Marc Andreessen?

  So he, this is the thing that freaked me out is he says it's heritable.

• 2:28:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:28:13Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so I, I gotta say, I, I'm not enough of a neurologist to understand this, but yeah, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a neurological change. It's heritable despite being not genetic. And at least in theory, like if it's not genetic, at least in theory, presumably this means like if, you know, there was like a nuclear war or something and we, we reverted entirely to orality, you know, presumably our overtime.

• 2:28:31Ben Horowitz?

  It evolved back.

• 2:28:33Marc Andreessen?

  Our brains will go back, yeah. And by the way, you know, justifiably so, because they would need, they would need that skill. Um. So anyway, all right, that's enough on that topic. Yes. Um, okay. Let's see. Let's go to, so let's go to these are now, let's go to some more personal topics, um, or more, more individual level topics. So. Uh, Gabby Goldberg asks, how do you structure your days and your work in general to avoid burnout? And then related, uh, Ishani J Patel, Ben starts laughing right off the bat. Um, what does your morning routine look like and how does it set you up for a successful day?

• 2:29:06Marc Andreessen?

  And so.

• 2:29:06Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I'd laugh because it presents that like I avoid burnout.

• 2:29:10Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 2:29:10Ben Horowitz?

  Which I don't think that's true, but, um, and it like the things that I find, I mean, there, there's just general like routine things like wake up, drink some water, exercise, and then, you know, kind of, I like to not do correspondences in the morning, like I'd rather kind of read, you know, what's ahead of me for the day. Um, and then I find it to be very useful, you know, like, and, and you and I are really lucky in that we're able to do the thing that we like doing the best, which is, you know, meeting people who want to change the world and learning about new, their new ideas. I mean, like, and then like helping them do that. I can't even.

• 2:29:52Ben Horowitz?

  Imagine doing any other job, like I would definitely retire if you kick me out of the firm or if I could get out of like it. So getting back in touch with that, like why I am excited about it. And I usually go through my calendar and I ask myself that question like, why am I excited about this meeting? Why am I excited about that meeting? And by the way, if I'm not, I cancel.

• 2:30:15Ben Horowitz?

  Cause you know, it obviously is, they don't need me for it at that point. So.

• 2:30:19Marc Andreessen?

  In fact, you might be counterproductive.

• 2:30:22Ben Horowitz?

  No, exactly. Cause I'm just gonna be angry and, and get us a bad reputation and a, a negative score on some system.

• 2:30:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, what, what about you? How do you keep?

• 2:30:32Marc Andreessen?

  Yes. Yeah, so, um, so I've had kind of two modes of operation in my life. And you know, this firm has kind of kicked me from one end of the second. So for, for a long time, I would say I would describe it as just sort of pure fury.

• 2:30:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:46Marc Andreessen?

  So.

• 2:30:48Ben Horowitz?

  Like to prove yourself. Yeah, no, like the chip on my shoulder, that, that's been a challenge for me is like, you know, I don't have nearly the chip on my shoulder that I once did.

• 2:30:58Marc Andreessen?

  Um, yeah.

• 2:30:59Ben Horowitz?

  Although you, you've done a better job at maintaining it.

• 2:31:02Marc Andreessen?

  Well, I look for, I look for new motivators. Well, we'll talk about, about that in a second, but, um, yeah. So like for a long time, like how I worked literally was like, wake up in the morning, just like work all.

• 2:31:15Marc Andreessen?

  Go to sleep and repeat. And so it wasn't like, it was not, it was not structured per se. Um, you know, there's some lucid here in a calendar, but mostly it was just work all the time. And then when, when there's more time left over, like work some more. Um, and so, you know, if you're sufficiently motivated, you can do that for a while and probably maybe you don't want to do that your whole life. Um, you know, with this.

• 2:31:35Marc Andreessen?

  Firm, I would say, well, two things. One is this firm and then, you know, obviously having a family, which I, I did relatively late, late versus, versus a lot of people is, it's like, okay, like, both this, this firm or this business and then having a family just simply demands more structure. Um, if you want to like, honestly.

• 2:31:48Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you can't just work all day and. Really bad for family life for all of those young couples listening.

• 2:31:54Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, do, do not recommend. Um, and so what I've done actually is a, as a one eighty. So I wrote this productivity blog post, I think in two thousand and seven, and I basically, it was, I actually sort of lifted it from Arnold Schwarzenegger, who claimed to have this as a technique. And basically it's the, it's the, it's the, it's the idea of not having a calendar. Um, so it's this idea that like your day is wide open and then you just like work on whatever's the most important that day. And you know, this is like what Warren Buffett says he does, right? He's, it's like, well, actually Warren Buffett says he does this. He's like, Warren Buffett's thing is like, look, if you call me up and you're like, hey, let's get together next Thursday, you know, my answer is no, like I, I don't book things like in advance. But like, you know, if you do find yourself in Omaha next Thursday, give me a call. Uh, um, and you know, you know, when you're, when you're Warren Buffett, you can do that. When you're Schwarzenegger, you can do that.

• 2:32:38Marc Andreessen?

  Um, and so like I, I was sort of like trying to push it as far as I could in the other direction, but like, you know, in this job.

• 2:32:49Marc Andreessen?

  Like basically what I've done is a total one eighty. And so now I've gone to like total structure. Um, and this goes to the burnout question. So it's like, okay, how could you use total structure not to just drive yourself crazy, but to avoid burnout? Um, and the, the thing that a friend of mine told me, the thing, the thing to basically do is schedule all the stuff that you like to do first. Interesting. I would take it the opposite, but that's, that's interesting. Yeah. Oh, so this is the thing. This is the psychological thing. This is, this is a friend of mine is a psychiatrist. So he, he said, look, he said, the, the thing that people have, he's like, well, look, there's, there's some people who just like, you know, are on a schedule their whole lives, right? And you know, a lot of athletes are like this. Um, you know, and they just like naturally follow a schedule. And if it wasn't written down, they would follow it anyway. And you know, these are the same people who like balance their checkbook, right? Um, and, and so some people.

• 2:33:33Marc Andreessen?

  But like for the rest of us, including me, like that doesn't happen naturally. And so, and, and so basically what happens is people realize they don't have enough control over their lives and, and things are slipping away. And so they're like, okay, I'm going to now get organized. Right? Um, and I'm going to have a, a schedule. And so they, you know, create a calendar and then they, they, they put in the calendar, all of the stuff that they have to do. Right? And, and then now they look at that thing and it's like a rock, right? A, you know, hanging from your neck. Yeah. And then you get, yeah, then your, your whole day is wrecked. You get in a bad state. It's like this every day. And maybe, you know, I've had this experience. I'm sure you have like every, you know, it's just you wake up in the morning. It's the opposite of what you said. Instead of waking up in the morning and looking at your calendar and getting excited, it's looking at your calendar and being like, oh my God, like what have I done? Right? Um.

• 2:34:17Ben Horowitz?

  I'm ruining my life. I hate my life. I want to skip.

• 2:34:19Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Well, and there's actually, there's actually this thing. It actually, sleep scientists actually say there's this thing called the revenge effect. Where, and I, I've had this in the past where literally what happens is you're doing things all day long that you have to do. And then you basically go home at night. And you're like, finally, I have time for myself. And then basically what happens is you stay up too late, basically, basically inflicting revenge on yourself. Right? Like, a- and specifically inflicting revenge on the person who tomorrow morning is going to have to wake up and do it again. Right? Um, right. And so, and you just like, you know, the idea of going to bed just like makes you mad. And so you don't do it. And then, and then you, you know, then your, your health starts to suffer. It's, it's a, it's a lot of professionals end up with sleep disorders. In part because of this. And so it's like, okay, like, that's bad. That's dysfunctional. And so that's, that's why he says, basically, you flip it.

• 2:35:03Marc Andreessen?

  And so what you do is you, you open up the calendar and, you know, you start from scratch. If you're, you know, taking this seriously. And then you block out all the stuff you want to do. Right? And then it's like, okay, here's the time I'm going to spend with my family, but you know, whatever spouse, kids, da, da, da. Here's the time I'm going to spend by myself. Here's my, here's, I want to watch TV at night. Here's my hour to be able to watch TV. I want to play Xbox. I want to go on a walk. I want to, you know, whatever. I want to zone out. Um, you know, I want to have time that's not scheduled, right? And it's just like boom, boom, boom, boom. Like those things go on the calendar. Right? And then those things are as important as everything else. Right?

• 2:35:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, that's, that's such an important point. Um, about all of this is people get into feeling guilty about the dumbest shit. I feel guilty if I don't take every meeting somebody asks for.

• 2:35:53Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 2:35:53Ben Horowitz?

  Or like, you know, but what the organization needs from you is they need the energy, they need the like, the positivity, they need the sharp thinking. They don't need you to like drag your ass through thirty meetings in a row that you don't want to go to. And, you know, people get that mixed up in their mind all the time. And it's particularly, you know, like if you're a CEO, because look, you, you hired all these people. They want to meet with you. You've got customers. They want to talk to you and so forth. And it's, you know, how can you say no to that? Um, but you gotta say no to that because they, they don't want that you. You know, they, they, they, they want the good you.

• 2:36:35Marc Andreessen?

  Well, and specifically like where this heads, right, is the you will be like bleary eyed, like unhappy, you know, hungover, sleep deprived. overweight, right?

• 2:36:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:47Marc Andreessen?

  Right, you know, diabetic, like unhealthy, right? This is why, this is probably why everybody used to smoke. Um, right, because it's like the one thing they could do that they can control over. Um, and so, yeah, exactly. And then like, yeah, you get in the meeting and somebody's in a fall mood and it's like, it doesn't have to do with the meeting. It's just that that is meeting number, you know, twenty eight for the day. And, you know. Yep.

• 2:37:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yep, yep, yep, yep. No, definitely.

• 2:37:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. And so, yeah, so it's, it's, it's the direction of energy, right? And then, and then basically like my friend says, look, you know, there are no free lunches. And so you've got the twenty four hours in the, in the day, seven days of the week. And so you fill in all the stuff you want to do, right? And then you fill in all the stuff you have to do. Right? And then, you know, you probably have, you know, at that point, fifteen pounds of shit in a five pound bag. And so then you need to start prioritizing, right? But then, and then you basically want to prioritize on both sides, right? So you want to like really focus in on. I'll give you an example, like I, you know, I like working out and I like watching TV. Okay, like those are going to happen together. Right? And so like, you know, during the week, I'm just not gonna, well, yeah, I'm just not gonna watch TV where I'm not on the treadmill. You know, like that, that, that's just a trade off I have to make because it just literally doesn't fit. Or, or to your point, the, the trade off at work, which is like, I'm just not gonna, I'm not gonna take that, I'm not gonna take that.

• 2:37:55Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, I'm just, I'm not gonna take that fourteenth call. Um, you know, there, there, there is a limit on how much I can do. Um, and then this made me sound incredibly productive and functional. So let me compromise that by saying my morning routine, my morning routine is what I call hot docking. Um, and Ben, you, you've been the recipient of this many times, which is my morning routine is the opposite of, uh, get up two hours ahead. And like you said, like, you know, drink some water and meditate and review, like, I don't do any of that.

• 2:38:21Ben Horowitz?

  He just walked right into the meeting.

• 2:38:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, I, and, and by the way, work from home.

• 2:38:27Marc Andreessen?

  Has been, I've had to watch this because it's been getting, it gets a little crazy. But like literally, it's like, oh, my first call, you know, my first calls at, at, at eight AM, the alarm is set for seven fifty eight.

• 2:38:40Marc Andreessen?

  Roll out a bed, slap the headphones in and off we go. Um, so that's the other side. Okay. Uh, three more to go. So Dave R. Watson asks, do you believe in gut instinct? And if so, can you give an example of when you've used it successfully?

• 2:38:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, well, it's interesting because there's like a scientific

• 2:39:05Ben Horowitz?

  kind of explanation where there are a gigantic number of brain cells in your gut. So your gut is actually like fairly smart at doing certain things. Although I think it's mainly like controlling digestion and things like that. But the way I would describe kind of gut instinct in terms of, you know, particularly if you have a job leading an organization,

• 2:39:31Ben Horowitz?

  a lot of it comes out to you're synthesizing all this information from many, many, many places. And it all kind of accumulates in your nervous system, ultimately as a feeling. And, you know, when I was CEO, like CEO of a struggling company, if there was something wrong in the company, I would get physically ill. Like if there's something really wrong, like I would automatically get physically ill. I knew there was something wrong in the company. I could just feel it. It was that kind of bad. It gets so tight to your nervous system. And kind of the one time that I actually remember the most actually was a conversation between you. You and I had Mark over, it was a long conversation, but we got an offer to buy Opsware

• 2:40:15Ben Horowitz?

  for like a little over $4 a share, I think. And at the time,

• 2:40:23Ben Horowitz?

  look, we had been through so much, like it would have been like a nice, you know, a nice like get out of jail free card almost kind of thing. But I knew, like, I could feel like where we were in the market, what was going on and so forth. And I knew that was like just too low a price to sell it for. But I couldn't, I literally couldn't articulate why. And I remember we had like six conversations about it. But I knew, I was like, no, we're not going to sell it. We're not even going to entertain that one. Because I know it's wrong. And that was, you know, getting back to the co-founder thing, the fact that you had enough trust in my knowledge to not make me articulate it.

• 2:41:05Ben Horowitz?

  Like got us to whatever 14 and a quarter a share, which is what we ultimately sold it for. But that was 100% a good feeling in that I couldn't articulate it, which is kind of a little bit, I think, my definition of that.

• 2:41:20Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, so that's, yeah, so, yeah, so I think the key word in what you said is synthesis. Uh, in my view, um, which is basically like gut instinct when it's useful. It's the result of the fact that you have spent, you know, just an enormous amount of time. Right. Ingesting information, right. And so this is why like it's Ben's talking about when you're CEO. But like, you know, when you're CEO, you're talking to people all the time about the state of the company. You have this like composite view that forms, right? That's the result of like a thousand conversations and like a thousand pieces of information. And like, you know, to your point, like maybe with a gun to your head or something, you could like diagram it all the way out. But like, at the end of the day, it's the summation of all of this information. So, so I think that that's a really big deal, right?

• 2:42:00Marc Andreessen?

  And, and, and so like, you know, for people who, for people who put that level of work in understanding something like, you know, their, their instincts can often be quite good. Um, um, what I see, um, and this is something I try to guard against myself. I don't know how successfully, but I'm trying to, what, what I see is people who are really good at that, who really have that dialed in for the first call at 10 or 15 years of their career. Um, and, and it's just because like, it's actually the earlier, earlier conversation you're having. It's, it's like they're working around the clock. They're talking to everybody. They understand everything, right? You can ask them like any question about the field. You can ask them any question about their company. Um, you know, anything about the technology, like they understand all of it because they're absorbing all this information, right? And they're, and they're making these gut calls and these gut calls, you know, they're not always right, but they're often right.

• 2:42:44Marc Andreessen?

  And you know, often you talk to successful people and they, they will, they will credit a lot of this to, to those things. And then what happens at some point is they just like, they stop doing all that work.

• 2:42:53Ben Horowitz?

  And they still use it, but they believe they can still do it. Yep.

• 2:42:57Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, that's exactly right. And so now instead of, you know, having the decision based on a thousand conversations or a thousand pieces of data, it's based on 300. Right. And then, you know, before long, or three, right? Exactly. Right. And then, you know, and this corresponds with, you know, the, the reason this is so like, you know, kind of deceptive when it happens is, you know, this is kind of when people are at their most successful, right? And so this is when like people have had this like amazing run in a lot of cases.

• 2:43:22Ben Horowitz?

  And everybody trusts them. Yeah.

• 2:43:23Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, everybody trusts them. Everybody talks about how smart they are. Everybody's complimenting them all the time, you know, they, you know, if it's, it's a tech or business, they've made money. And then it's like, okay, now they've got hobbies, you know, now they've got, you know, they're, you know, they're taking a lot more, you know, personal trips and they're, you know, out of the office. And, and, you know, they're just not like, they're just not, they've just advanced beyond like just that sheer level of work. Um, yeah, and then they they're still making the gut calls and they're and now now that now they just they literally have no foundation whatsoever for the gut calls and they and they don't even know it.

• 2:43:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, it's funny, because when we thi- this was one of the most challenging parts of um starting the firm. Is that there were some things that I had done a lot of work on, or you know, like, well, the first investment I made was. Um, or the first that I went on the board of was Okta, of course, and that was something that I knew. For twenty years, I knew that category, like I I I'd been working on it forever, you know, since we did L DAP at Netscape. And so like, it was the easiest investment choice ever for me. And then, you know, I, you know, I know people well enough. I I really like Todd and Freddie. But. You know. That one was too easy.

• 2:44:38Ben Horowitz?

  And so over time, you know, I I would say almost every mistake I made in venture capital is exactly what you're saying, which is. I didn't have the knowledge I thought I had, and so I had to kind of rebuild the discipline to go. You know, know enough about things to to make an investment or to not like screw up an investment that somebody else was going to make. Where they had done the work like that. That was a relearning for me. Um, after, you know, and as you say, like, success is your worst enemy. As soon as you start thinking you're successful because of you. As opposed to the exact things that you did, plus a lot of luck, then you totally ruin yourself. Yeah.

• 2:45:16Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Ben will recall, we had this, uh, we had, uh, we had this discussion with Jeff Bezos when we were first starting, starting a venture firm and you you can tell the story, Ben. Do you recall the conversation with Jeff?

• 2:45:26Ben Horowitz?

  Talking about why we went go build another company that.

• 2:45:29Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. That one. Yeah, that one.

• 2:45:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so Jeff, Jeff says, well. Alan, I, you know, I'd like to invest in you guys in your venture capital firm, but why aren't you going to just like quit and go start another company like you can obviously do that. You're like super successful entrepreneurs. And I said to Jeff, I said, Jeff.

• 2:45:49Ben Horowitz?

  If you, for whatever reason, like sold Amazon or retired, would you go and like start another company and be CEO? He's like, absolutely not. And I said, well, why not? And he said, look, I've loved the fourth grade, but I'm not going back to the fourth grade.

• 2:46:05Ben Horowitz?

  And it's, you know, you don't want to live your same life over again. It was such a funny moment with him.

• 2:46:11Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, exactly. So it's that problem. Um, okay, uh, second to the last question, pen ult- pen ultimate question. Um, Ash R O. asks, what you suggest to those who will be going to college now? Um, so that they can be future-proof, um, innovate in futuristic technologies, not just bytes, but also biotech, energy, et cetera. And so let's like, let's double underline there. I think the, the, this sort of future-proof concept, like, how do you? What can you get out of college? Or how do you think about college or skills acquisition at that age such that it's still going to be relevant? You know, and, and is useful to you 10, 20, 30 years down the road? As you either go into different fields or as the actual, you know, as the topics themselves change.

• 2:46:49Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, I, you know, I go back, I, I, I think I've said this many times in the past, but the most important thing in college by far is learning how to think and, um, and ju- just learning how to think and becoming more sophisticated about, you know, understanding many more ideas, um, you know, what they mean, what their impact is and getting, you know, then the beautiful thing about college is you're with so many people from so many different backgrounds. You can get so many perspectives. And then, you know, taking that ability to learn into the future with you. And that's, that's the only way you can future-proof because things are going to be very different. Um, I, I also think, you know, like people think of

• 2:47:34Ben Horowitz?

  computer science incorrectly, you know, and part of it has just been, well, it's like learn to code. And it's like, well,

• 2:47:42Ben Horowitz?

  that's a little bit of it, but I would think of information science in general is kind of like, it's a tool like mathematics. Um, and so it's very useful because you can apply it to so many things and the principles are applied to so many things. And so. You know, you should think about learning things that are in that class that are tools that you can apply to every field. And certainly, you know, mathematics and computer science can be applied to anything. And, and, and, you know, like with, with really interesting new results if they haven't been applied before. So that kind of thing is also very valuable.

• 2:48:18Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah. Yeah. So, yeah. So, and people may know, this is one of the reasons why I was confident in writing this, this essay called Software Reads the World, almost 10 years, 10 years ago now.

• 2:48:28Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:48:29Marc Andreessen?

  And why I was, why I was kind of so confident pegging things on software. And it's, it's literally this process of like, well, we just saw it with the Moderna vaccine as an example, right? So like, you know, prior vaccines, like try to develop a vaccine for COVID the old fashioned way, like you have to get a culture, you get a sample of the thing, you have to culture it, you have to try to develop a, you know, sort of a defanged version of it or diluted form of it to turn into a vaccine. You know, that's kind of how vaccine developments happen. And with the Moderna vaccine, they got, they, they literally never had, I don't think the live virus early on, they just had the genetic.

• 2:48:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, they, they did not. They didn't, they didn't have it in the lab, yeah.

• 2:49:00Marc Andreessen?

  Yep, exactly. So they.

• 2:49:02Ben Horowitz?

  This is a good thing too, because it's been known to escape from the lab.

• 2:49:05Marc Andreessen?

  Especially, especially, yes, I'll, I'll stop there. Um, so, um, yeah, so what, what they got was they got the genetic code, which is, which is data, um, emailed to them, um, and from China, and they were able to copy, basically, I think it's like, I'm sure it's more complicated than this, but they copy and paste it out of the email, right? And like, put it into their program, um, that, you know, drives their manufacturing process. And two days later, they had the vaccine, right? And, and, you know, obviously a far more effective vaccine than they would have had the old fashioned way. And so it's like, you know, that process, you know, it's just an example of like a lot of biological science now, it's this very interesting intersection of computer science and engineering on the one hand, with kind of, you know, wet, you know, kind of classical wet biology on the other hand. Um, and so, you know, and this, this, this is leading towards a future of basically like,

• 2:49:50Marc Andreessen?

  you know, vaccine, you know, vaccine development and therapeutic development literally happening on laptops, right? Which is like a, which is, you know, which is just like an incredibly wild concept, right? To be able to, you know, CRISPR, the ability to be able to program genetics, you know, synthetic bi- synthetic biology. And so you've got this thing where all of a sudden, like, computer science is this lever into this whole other field. Um, and so the same thing is true in material science, the same thing is true in, you know, in increasingly chemistry, like there's, there's, there's all these different, you know, economics, um, all these other fields, um, e- even by the way, like analysis of either in the humanities, like analysis of music or analysis of language, it's increasingly computational. Um, and so I, I, I do feel like we have this kind of magic, a lot sometimes call it like alchemy, like almost philosopher's stone.

• 2:50:34Marc Andreessen?

  Right. The legend of the philosopher's stone was this thing that turns, turns lead into gold and we never, we never found that, but we did find this thing that basically turns code into things that happen in the real world. Um, or, you know, like quite literally like ideas that you type into a computer that like pop out the other end in the form of a, of like a vaccine. Um, and so like, I, I think like that's going to be a really good bet, uh, across many fields, uh, for the next thirty years.

• 2:50:58Ben Horowitz?

  Um, for sure. And you know, the mistake we made, we called it computer science. That was the dumbest name ever because people think it's tied to the machine.

• 2:51:06Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right.

• 2:51:07Ben Horowitz?

  Where it's a completely abstract set of concepts for describing and understanding the world and changing the world and programming.

• 2:51:13Marc Andreessen?

  Right, that's right. That's right. Exactly right. So, so yeah, exactly that. Um, okay, good. So, and then we are at eight nineteen, so we're right on track. So let's go to our last question. So our friend, uh, Wakas Ali, um, asks, um, has Mark gotten you, Ben, into trouble because of his sense of humor?

• 2:51:32Marc Andreessen?

  What's the key to building the kind of co-founder partner relationship you both enjoy? And of course I have to immediately challenge the question. Um, and the assumption that my sense of humor has gotten us into more trouble than your sense of humor.

• 2:51:43Ben Horowitz?

  My sense of humor has definitely gotten us into trouble as well.

• 2:51:46Marc Andreessen?

  But please, please, please discuss.

• 2:51:49Ben Horowitz?

  I feel like your sense of humor has gotten you into trouble. I think maybe my sense of humor has gotten us into trouble. Like, see, the problem with your sense of humor is that it's all like sarcasm. And, and, and, but you've got like a sarcasm poker face. So nobody knows that it's sarcasm.

• 2:52:10Ben Horowitz?

  And and if it's on Twitter, they definitely don't know it's our

• 2:52:14Marc Andreessen?

  Definitely do not know. I can confirm that. And yours, then?

• 2:52:19Ben Horowitz?

  Well, and then mine.

• 2:52:22Ben Horowitz?

  Because my sense of humor always evolves around saying things that are unacceptable to say

• 2:52:28Ben Horowitz?

  in polite society. And so it's it's just, yes, they're both problematic. And they're very, very problematic.

• 2:52:36Marc Andreessen?

  Yes, exactly. Um, so, um, yeah, I I will just tell you like, I I will say, I will say this, whenever Ben says something completely inflammatory, um, and it's, um, and it's usually quite funny, but completely inflammatory and there's blowback, my immediate reaction is, oh, thank God it wasn't me.

• 2:52:54Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. It happens.

• 2:52:56Marc Andreessen?

  Definitely. And I'm just, and I'm literally, I'm literally like so grateful that it's not my fault this time.

• 2:53:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that that, well, that's a nice thing because you never get mad at me because you're just happy.

• 2:53:08Marc Andreessen?

  And I and I know I I will do it in the future. And then, um, okay, the more serious part of the question now, what's the key to building the kind of co co-founder partner relationship that we enjoy? And what do you think?

• 2:53:18Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I mean, I think the big thing is that

• 2:53:22Ben Horowitz?

  we don't.

• 2:53:24Ben Horowitz?

  Like, we care about each other's feelings, I guess, but not enough to prevent us from saying anything.

• 2:53:30Marc Andreessen?

  Right.

• 2:53:30Ben Horowitz?

  And and so I like, like, we're both okay. I mean, to me, the the real key is that we can argue and hurt each other's feelings a lot and not, um,

• 2:53:44Ben Horowitz?

  and not have that affect the relationship at all, which is, you know, it's a difficult thing to do, and it's a trust that you build over a long period of time, but it's the only way you can actually learn from each other is if you challenge each other and like, not on some whatever bullshit theoretical concept or something, but on like a core, core thing like Ben, the way you're running the firm is you're fucking the whole thing up and like people aren't communicating correctly and we're going to run right into a wall. Like, if if you can't say that to me, um, then the relationship's just not that valuable because who the hell else is going to say it to me, right? And that's the, that's the magic of co-founders.

• 2:54:25Ben Horowitz?

  And like, you know, and I can, by the same token, I could tell you like, you know, you're you're fucking all mad about this thing and like, you're full of shit. You're like, you don't even know what's going on. And and you have to be able to hear that.

• 2:54:38Ben Horowitz?

  And then, and then we get stronger every day. Um, but if you, like, if you've got a happy relationship or you've got a relationship where you don't like each other, like neither of those work, it's gotta be, you know, it's gotta be where you really, really interact on controversial things that you both have strong feelings about and can get to an answer. Like, that's, that's a relationship that's got value.

• 2:55:03Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. And then I, I'd add two things, or at least here's, here's how I think about it. So, um, and this is how I advise people when they're, they're thinking about having this, you know, kind of partnership or having like a, you know, a, like a founder partnership or something. Um, basically, it's like, the way I think about it is, it, like, the partnership has to be more important to me than being right.

• 2:55:23Marc Andreessen?

  And what I mean by that is like, there are all these issues that come up, um, and there are all these opinions that I have, right? I've got an opinion on everything. I always think I know what to do. Um, and like, everybody, you know, you know, I love, I, God knows, I love expressing my opinion. So like, and I love getting in my way, right? Like, I'm, I'm a, you know, I'm a, I'm a control freak as much as anybody else. And so, it's like, and by the way, I'm convinced that I'm right, right? Like, cause like, you know, I, I've been, you know, doing this for a long time and I, you know.

• 2:55:48Ben Horowitz?

  And you spend a lot of time talking to yourself and you talk yourself into it.

• 2:55:51Marc Andreessen?

  I do, exactly right. I have a very vigorous debate in my head and I end up agreeing with myself. Um, and so, it's like, I'm right. And so, I, you know, I show up and, you know, I, I still do that. I show up in the discussions. It's like, okay, I'm right. I know what to do. But it's like, okay, like, what's more important? Like, being right? And, and I say being right because it's, it's, the way, the, the light, the lighter way of saying this is what's more important, making the decision or the partnership? Um, but it's easy in the abstract to say, oh, the other person should make that decision. It's much harder to let the other person make the decision when you know that you're right.

• 2:56:23Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:23Marc Andreessen?

  Right?

• 2:56:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, that's a tricky thing. Yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:26Marc Andreessen?

  Right. And so it's that feeling of like, I actually know what the right thing to do here is. And he thinks he does, but I actually know. And like, he disagrees with me. And like, I have to get my way because I'm right. Right, and of course, what's happening is, you know, you, he, you know, the person is saying like the exact same thing to themselves, right?

• 2:56:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:56:42Marc Andreessen?

  For the exact same reasons, right? And I mean, and you know, and then of course, it's in the heat of the moment, so who knows who's right, you you won't find out till later, so. So the way I think about it basically is like, you you the the partnership has to be more important than being right, which means basically, at least here's here's what I tried to do is you have to, you have to seek out opportunities. Opportunities to let the other person be right. Um, and and and to make the call. Um, and and the way I think about it honestly is, I think about it, it's almost, and it's, I don't mean it like, I don't mean it mechanically like this, but it's a little bit like. It's it's banking trust, is how how I think about it. Which is like, the more decisions I can let you make. Like, the more you'll trust me that if I really have a strong point of view, right, someday, and if I really put my foot down, right? That is, that is not just me being me, but like, this must be at an incredibly unusual level of severity.

• 2:57:26Marc Andreessen?

  Um, because, you know, there's another thousand times where we were discussing serious topics, and I was like, well, look, here's what I think, but let's go with what you think.

• 2:57:33Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, I think that, um. I think that part's true, definitely, too. Um, you do need like a tremendous amount of. Mutual respect to pull that off, of course, because otherwise, it just drive you crazy. Um, you're watching somebody fuck up the whole company.

• 2:57:50Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, right. Well, that's the thing, you can't, right, the thing that would kill that is if you then tried to do the accounting, right, after the fact. And so, like, if you try to keep track of the number of times when you defer to the other person, and it turned out they thought they're right, and it turned out they're wrong, and you're sitting there like two years later, and you're like, well, shit, like, that's happened like twenty times, like.

• 2:58:05Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:06Marc Andreessen?

  Like, then you're, I think, basically, it's over.

• 2:58:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know, and on, it's funny, and on investment decisions in particular, um. That's the most dangerous shit.

• 2:58:18Marc Andreessen?

  Did you? Right, actually, uh, this is the Annie Annie Duke book, uh, Thinking in Bets, where she uses the the word, uh, she introduces the term resulting. Right, which is evaluating decisions after the fact by their outcomes, um, as opposed to the process you put in them.

• 2:58:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, and and making sure that process is right.

• 2:58:34Marc Andreessen?

  Yep. That's right.

• 2:58:35Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:36Marc Andreessen?

  Um, yeah, so I think that's the, I think that's the, um. Yeah, so I would, I would, I would nominate that as as as the thing, and I would just say, like. It's a, just observing other people, like, that's, that's a, that's, that's a hard thing, like, it's, it's hard, it's hard on the ego. Um, you know, we're, uh, in this world, like, we're all high ego people, and so it is hard on the ego, and you have to, like, it it it's a level of commitment to the partnership that has to supersede the ego, which is really hard.

• 2:58:59Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's hard, and then.

• 2:59:03Ben Horowitz?

  Just finding somebody who you can

• 2:59:09Ben Horowitz?

  deal with at that level, who you can tell, who you trust them enough that the number of mistakes that you, they make, you're gonna be okay with.

• 2:59:20Marc Andreessen?

  Right, right, right. And then the final thing I'd say is the thing that Ben said earlier, which is like, you probably won't really know if it's one, if it's like an actual like solid partnership until it really goes through serious stress, right? And you, you go, you're like, when you really go, right? When you really go through the shit, like, and it's gotta be something like really serious, like something existential to the company or to the, you know, to the effort or some, you know, to your lives, like, you know, who can I actually?

• 2:59:43Ben Horowitz?

  Like a dot com crash and three layoffs and, you know, going public with $2 million in trailing revenue, that type of shit.

• 2:59:51Marc Andreessen?

  That kind of stuff, exactly. And so, but now the good news is like going through the shit, like number one, you, you, you discover a lot about the other person and that, that's incredibly illuminating and gives you the foundation. But the other is like, you know, if you go through enough shit together, it's like the new shit you go through, this isn't that bad in comparison. Um, and so you kind of both get calibrated and you, you both kind of calm down. Um, which is also.

• 3:00:13Ben Horowitz?

  And you also know, like, you know, the thing that happens when things go bad is paranoia, right? Like, it's like, okay, are they, you know, this other person, you know, gonna fuck it all up? Are they trying to fuck me? Are they gonna ruin my reputation? Are they gonna like, you know, all that kind of thing goes through your head? But, you know, if you've been through that, then you know where that comes out. And so that, that, and the paranoia is as bad as the actual problem, by the way.

• 3:00:39Marc Andreessen?

  Yeah, yeah, that's right. Yep. Okay. Fantastic. Benjamin, it is eight twenty eight PM. We have nailed the timing. Thank you so much to the people who asked all the questions. Please keep the questions coming and we will see you all back here, um, in exactly six days and twenty three, twenty three hours.

• 3:00:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Thank you, everybody. Great questions and thank you so much for listening.

• 3:00:59Marc Andreessen?

  Okay. Fantastic. Have a great night.