Ben Horowitz: Why Hesitation is a CEO’s Worst Enemy

In this conversation from Lenny’s Podcast, Ben Horowitz joins Lenny to discuss the psychological muscle every founder needs, why hesitation can be fatal for CEOs, when it’s time to replace a founder, and how to normalize failure while building confidence. They also explore the Databricks founding story, investing in Adam Neumann after WeWork, whether AI is in a bubble, where the real opportunities lie, and Ben’s work with the Paid in Full Foundation supporting hip-hop pioneers. The result is a candid look at leadership, product management, and what it takes to build enduring companies.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today, we've got a feed drop from Lenny's podcast, a conversation with Ben Horowitz, co-founder of A16Z and Lenny Richitsky. It's Ben on founder psychology, hesitation as the enemy, how to think about hiring, firing and managerial leverage, and why PMs are mini CEOs. Let's get into it.

• 0:22Ben Horowitz?

  The worst thing that you do as a leader is you hesitate on the next decision. The thing that causes you to hesitate is both decisions are horrible. Probably one of my bigger ones on that was we went public with $2 million in trailing 12 months revenue at 18 months old. That's obviously a bad idea. But the truth of it was the alternative was going bankrupt. And that's a worse idea.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  It's very difficult and painful to be a CEO, to be a founder. In spite of that, so many people want to start companies.

• 0:51Ben Horowitz?

  The psychological muscle you have to build to be a great leader is to be able to glik in the abyss and go, okay, that way is slightly better. We're going to go that way. If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like.

• 1:09Speaker 02

  You are famous for writing one of the most popular pieces of literature for product managers.

• 1:14Ben Horowitz?

  What I was trying to get at in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager was the job is fundamentally a leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you.

• 1:28Speaker 02

  There's always this kind of sense that the PM is not the mini CEO. How dare you call yourself that? I actually think that's exactly what the PM is.

• 1:34Ben Horowitz?

  It doesn't matter if you write a good spec or you have a good interview or you do this or do that. What matters is that the product wins.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Today, my guest is Ben Horowitz. Ben is the Z in A16Z, the world's largest venture capital firm with over $46 billion in committed capital. Their investors in OpenAI, Cursor Andro, Databricks, Figma, basically every generational tech company. He's also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. Ben is endlessly fascinating. He started a rap group when he was younger. He started his career as a product manager and wrote the now famous Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager piece. In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover a ton of ground. And Ben shares stories and insights that he's never shared anywhere else. With that, I bring you Ben Horowitz.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  I want to start with a question that a close friend of yours suggested I ask you, Shaka Singhhor. So Shaka, he's like, we could do an hour just on how interesting this guy is and the things he's done.

• 2:37Ben Horowitz?

  It's three hours on Joe Rogan, that is. He's very.

• 2:39Speaker 02

  Okay. So we're not going to do that. Just to give a glimpse, he was in prison for 19 years. He was in solitary for seven years. He led a huge prison gang. You wrote about him in your book as a great exemplar of great culture in the prison gang that he ran. So interesting. But something that he learned from you, that he told me I need to ask you about, is about success and how to be successful and how it's not what people think. And he said that you learned this lesson from a pilot. What is that story? What is that lesson?

• 3:12Ben Horowitz?

  Well, it's kind of, I mean, I'd say it's a long life lesson, but the pilot story is, I actually, you know, I ask people like silly questions sometimes when I meet them. And so, you know, I met this gentleman who was a pilot and, you know, it was right around the time JFK Junior crashed his airplane and ultimately died. And I asked him, I was like, you know, like, what happened? Because there's always, you know, the story in the press, and I know this from them writing about me or anything, is it's always what's the best narrative, not what's true. So you can never kind of actually find out what happened.

• 3:53Ben Horowitz?

  You just find like the best storied version of what happened. And, you know, the story in the press was all about, oh, he wasn't trained on instruments, instrumentation was flying at night. And I wanted to know, is that right? And the pilot said, well, he said, really, it's like all plane crashes are a series of bad decisions. And none of the decisions by themselves is that bad, but when you add them up, it's bad. So the first decision was he needed to get wherever he was going, and that was the priority. And in flying. That can't ever be the priority, you know, because there are conditions, there are things that happen. And then the second one was, well, like his timing of when the

• 4:38Ben Horowitz?

  sun would go down was wrong. So he thought he'd be flying in sunlight and he wasn't. And then, you know, once he got up there, it was, you know, when the plane was, you know, going down, kind of making it go up was a bad decision because he was upside down. And like, you know, so, so it's, and I can't remember all the things, but this guy had like 17 steps, you know, 17 bad decisions in a row. And the big thing for me that, that I felt was really true is it's, you know, one decision leads to another. And so, you know, if you can break, you know, psychologically, you can take the sunk

• 5:22Ben Horowitz?

  cost, then that gets you out of a lot of bad paths. And then, you know, a little good decision may be difficult, but you have to believe it's going to lead to the next one. And, you know, a lot of success is about that, you know, it's a, it's a small thing, a small thing that's hard to do, that doesn't seem to have a high impact. But it leads to the next small, hard to do thing. And then eventually you get an outcome. So, so that was kind of the concept, but.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  So the lesson there is just success is just a bunch of little things. It's not this like, oh, I got here and a big thing.

• 5:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, like somebody were to write a story about me, they would be like, then Ben did this really smart thing and blah, blah, blah, you know, happy ending. But, you know, it really wasn't like that. And I don't think it's like that for you or anybody. And then, you know, I spent a lot of time with Shaka on, you know, how, because, because it's always your own psychology that, you know, gets you. And one of the kind of most insightful things he said to me is, you know, because he was in, most people who are in solitary for seven years, that's it. You're insane. Like you're never coming back from that. It's just an impossible thing. But if you like study his story, he actually kind of really was massively self-improved coming out of solitary, which is, you know,

• 6:39Ben Horowitz?

  like, and he wouldn't recommend that for anybody, just to be clear, it wasn't solitary. But what it was, you know, as he changed in solitary, he was able to change a big set of beliefs that he had about himself that kind of got him out of that. And the thing that his conclusion from it, which I thought was really interesting, he's like, look, I was in prison for 19 years. I was in solitary for seven. I come out, I can't rent an apartment. I can't vote, you know, I can't get a gun. I can't do like, like no rights. None of that was anything compared to what I did to myself. And I think that's very true for CEOs in general, people in general, is that like all the things that you perceive that are happening to you

• 7:22Ben Horowitz?

  that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it. You know, if you believe what people say about you, if you believe what they did to you, then, then that destroys you. But if you, if you go like, that's not me, you can overcome almost anything. And that's, you know, he's got a new book out on that anyway. That, that I think is very good because that's the, you know, I say more than anything, that's the key to success.

• 7:56Speaker 02

  Something you, it's like, if you look at all the writing you've done, it's essentially about the struggle and pain and suffering of being a CEO. You're hard, you know, your first book's the hard thing about hard things. There's a lot of talk these days about just how important struggle is and how valuable it is to go through struggle. Jensen's big on this, you know, he talks a lot about just, you have to go through pain and suffering to be a great leader.

• 8:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you don't really have a choice, you know, like that, that's true.

• 8:20Speaker 02

  There's something that I saw you share that I love, which is running towards fear versus running away from fear, something that you tell all your leaders to, to work on. Easy to hear, hard to do. We don't like doing things that are scary, running towards things that are scary. Why is this so important? Why is this something people need to learn to do?

• 8:37Ben Horowitz?

  Well, so the biggest mistake that you made, there are the, the worst thing that you do as a leader, like there's things in your control and there's things like out of your control. And hesitation is, you know, that, that's generally the most destructive. I mean, I go through all the ways that it's destructive, but it's extremely bad. And the thing that causes you to hesitate is

• 9:02Ben Horowitz?

  You know, both decisions are harming, right? Like, there is, like, it's not business school where, like, you're going through a case study. And if you had done that, then the company would have gone this way. But if you had done that, it's a great success. Like, that's not actually, you know, what happens to a CEO. What happens to a CEO, it's like, okay, if we rearch, you know, like, this product is, the architecture is not going to actually get us to where we need to go. I kind of know that. But if we rearchitect it, like, we're going to probably miss all the features, miss the quarter, have trouble raising money, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So like, that's really bad.

• 9:46Ben Horowitz?

  And then not rearchitecting is really bad. And so I'm just going to try, like, and avoid this subject because I don't, I don't even want to deal with either of those. And that's, that's the worst thing because if we are, you know, if action is the better choice, then, you know, that's good. And then if you don't make an explicit decision, then the whole company is going to get nervous because they know that the architecture is whack and you got to fix it. And, you know, like, probably one of my bigger ones on that was, you know, we went public with $2 million in trailing 12 months revenue at 18 months old, right? Like, and people, like, that's obviously a bad idea.

• 10:28Ben Horowitz?

  I mean, like, there's no question that wasn't a bad idea. But the truth of it was the alternative, because where the private markets were was going bankrupt, and that's a worse idea. And if you look at that time, you know, March of 2001, when we went public, you just look at the number of CEOs that hesitated on that and didn't do it and went bankrupt. It's a lot. And so that's, you know, that...

• 10:55Ben Horowitz?

  Getting good at making a decision that everybody's going to go, wow, that was insane, Ben. Like you and like the Wall Street Journal wrote a whole like long story about how stupid I was. And then Business Week wrote a story called "The IPO From Hell." That was the name of like our idea, the IPO From Hell, which like was accurate in a sense. But so like, that's really bad. But it wasn't as bad. And this is why it's so scary to make that decision. Because you know, that's going to happen. I knew those stories would get written. Like, there was no question. And yeah, and that's, that's the kind of muscle. So like, if you think about it, like the psychological muscle you have to build

• 11:38Ben Horowitz?

  to be a great leader is to be able to like, look in the abyss and go, okay, we're going that way slightly better. We're going to go that way. And it's very hard to do. All right. I would say it's a thing people struggle. And it began something, should I fire the head of sales? So I don't want to have that conversation. Like, and then I'll have to replace them. And then like, there's going to be a bad PR story. And then, and, and, and, and, and you can kind of quickly calculate all the bad stuff that's going to happen if you do it. But if you don't do it, that's probably going to be much worse. And you know, kind of, that's why you have to run towards the pain and darkness.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  What is the advice you share with founders? Because as you said, it's very hard to do this. Just like, what helps them actually get better at this? Is it just Ben being by their side, telling them this is how it is? Is there anything else you can?

• 12:27Ben Horowitz?

  No, no, no, no, no, no. Like, I would say this is one where, you know, I can't really coach you to be good at this. Like, I can point it out and like, so that you recognize that you were slow or whatever. But it's kind of like, I always like it when I talk to them. It's like football, like, you know, you have a really fast, great athlete. But if they don't trust their eyes, if they don't run to the ball when they see it, if they think, oh, maybe that was a fake, then they're that step slower. And then they're not, they'll never be as good. And CEOs are like that, you know, if you don't trust what you see, and you don't run at it, then like, you're just not going to be good.

• 13:12Ben Horowitz?

  It's hard to get CEOs not to hesitate. But like one thing, the thing that does help is, you know, they look at it and I look at it and, you know, and I kind of confirm, no, that that is as it appears. And, you know, sometimes they're afraid of the conversation. So that one I can help with. So, you know, a CEO might be afraid, like, they want to do something, but they don't know how to say it. They don't know how to have the conversation with the employee. So I can walk them through that. You know, I had an instance where the CEO said, hey, you know, like, I need your help then. My CTO, he's an asshole. And I was like, okay, you know, like, great.

• 13:56Ben Horowitz?

  I said, but you're not going to fire him because I know he's a good CTO. Or are you asking me, should you fire him? He said, no, no, I don't want to fire him. And I was like, so you're asking me what to do because you don't know how to have that conversation with him about being an asshole without him quitting? Like, that's what you're saying? And he goes, yeah, that's the problem. And so I go, well, like, why is he an asshole? And he says, well, he's an asshole because, you know, the other day, he made like a very junior young woman in our finance organization cry. And I was like, oh, that's kind of, yeah, I got you. I said, like, this is what I would say to him. I'd say, I just shut him down. And I would say, look, you're a really good director of engineering because you do a great job of managing the team, get the products out, all that.

• 14:40Ben Horowitz?

  But like, you're not really a CTO because to be a CTO, you have to be effective with other parts of the organization. You can't just be like effective only with engineering. And so, you know, and making like somebody cry, like, she's never going to do anything you want. You lost all effectiveness with all the findings by doing that. And so if you want to get good at that, I'll help you all work with you on it. But if you don't, I'm going to have to hire a CTO at some point because like, obviously I need that. And, you know, and then he's like, oh, okay, I can have that conversation. You know, I can't have the conversation that, hey, you're an asshole because I don't want him to quit. But I can have the conversation that's more specific. And a lot of kind of getting people not to hesitate is just getting them over that.

• 15:25Ben Horowitz?

  And so, so often like, and I would say, You know, early in a CEO's career, a lot of it is just not knowing how to have the conversation.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  There's also, I imagine, an element of, I just want to be liked. I don't want people to hate me. You have this great line that you want to be liked and respected in the long run, not the short run.

• 15:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's tricky because it's so... By the way, I have to deal with this in the firm too. And you know, like, you know, people want to be entrepreneur friendly. I'm like, no, it's not trendly. You know, respectful, but you got to be able to tell them the truth in a way that you probably don't tell most of your friends the truth. Because your friend, you know, like anthropologically, we want people to like us. Like, it's just so that, you know, they don't throw us to the lion or whatever like that. That's just kind of a thing. So you say, tell people what they want to hear. But in dealing, you know, at a company level and a, you know, in a context that you're on the board of somebody's company, you got to be able to tell them what they don't want to hear. That's the most important thing you're going to say.

• 16:27Ben Horowitz?

  And yes, they're not going to like it when you say it. There's no question. But over time, like it could save the company. And maybe, you know, all the most important things I said are things that I said to CEOs that they did not want to hear. You know, like, that's what leadership is about. It's making... If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like.

• 17:01Ben Horowitz?

  And that's where leadership comes in because you know that's where it's got to get to.

• 17:07Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, that's, that's the thing that takes practice. I think, you know, when Jensen talks about, like, you got to get to near death to get yourself to do that. That's true. You know, it's hard, it's hard to build that. If everything's going great. And I would tell you like the CEOs who kind of had an easy run of it for their like, let's say they just launch a product that's an instant hit. It's very hard for them to develop that muscle compared to the ones that built a company like Jensen where you like, you know, gunning it out for multiple decades before they had big success.

• 17:41Speaker 02

  Clearly, it's very difficult and painful to be a CEO, to be a founder. In spite of that, so many people want to start companies. So many people like dream of having their own company. What do you, who is not right to start a company? Like, what advice do you share with folks that are thinking about starting a company that may not understand just what they're about to get into?

• 18:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so it's funny. So there's a couple of things, you know, John Reed, who was the CEO of Citigroup when I, when I started as CEO, said to me something I never forget. He said, Ben, the only reason to start a company is because you have an irrational desire to do so because it's not worth the money. And, you know, I was like, wow, he doesn't, he didn't even quantify how much money. And this guy's running cities, so he's a very numbers banking guy. And he didn't quantify it. And I remember when we sold LoudCloud for $1.6 billion, I remember thinking, wow, that wasn't worth the money.

• 18:40Ben Horowitz?

  So I think if you're doing it for the money, that's a very bad reason and it'll be extremely difficult to get to an outcome. You really have to have an irrational desire to do something larger than yourself to kind of improve the world in some way that, you know, somehow like that is your purpose. And if you don't feel that, then you'll never get through it. It just is too many, too many bad things happen along the way.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  So then how do you think of founders that are kind of looking around for ideas that kind of brainstorm, that look for, you know, market opportunities versus come from, I have a mission, I gotta do this thing in the world?

• 19:22Ben Horowitz?

  If you have a, my business partner Mark always talks about this, like, if you have a product that forces you to build a company, that is a great case of it, right? Like, okay, you built something and the world wants it and you need a company to deliver it. That's gonna, you know, you already have the right product. And so that's very helpful. I think there are cases of people, I think Hewlett Packard was kind of built that way that their life, okay, like, we gotta build technology, you know, as if that abstract, we got built in technology for the world. And then they started with, well, like, what do you need? They called it the next bench thing. What is the engineer sitting next to me need? The next engineer on the bench was so the kind of how they defined the first set of products.

• 20:07Ben Horowitz?

  So it can work the other way, but like, I think the thing that is in common is like, it's just a very abstract idea that like, you have to build something that's going to be important that like, is gonna, people are gonna like working there, people are gonna benefit from the products. Like, you have to have some, like, weird concept other than, oh, this is gonna be successful and I'm gonna make a lot of money.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  On these lines, something else Shaka suggested ask you about. Apparently, there's a story where the CEO of Databricks asked you for $200,000 in the early days, and you said no. And it's not because you didn't want to, you know, invest and it's more about helping him think bigger. What happened there?

• 20:51Ben Horowitz?

  So there were six, six of them, they're six HD students. And, well, and Jan Stojka, who was their professor.

• 21:00Ben Horowitz?

  And Jan is super genius, but, you know, they, I think, you know, when I, when I met with them, they were like, you know, we need to raise $200,000. And I knew, you know, like, I knew at the time that what they had was this thing called Spark. And they had, you know, the competitor was something called Hadoop. And Hadoop, you know, had very well-funded companies already running towards it. And Spark is open source. So like, the clock was ticking. And, you know, and I think they didn't quite know what they had.

• 21:41Ben Horowitz?

  But I, and then there's also a thing always, although I wouldn't say Jan has this mentality, but professors in general, like, it's a pretty big win if you start a company and you make $50 million. Like, you're a hero on campus. Like, that's a, that's a pretty cool thing to have done. And so I'm always a little nervous about a kind of a company that comes out of academia thinking too small anyway. And so I said, look, I'm not going to write you a check for $200,000. I'll write you a check for $10 million of dollars. Because like this company, you need to build a company. You need to really go for it. If you're going to do this, otherwise, like, you guys should stay in school. And they were all grad writing right then. So that was kind of that. And Ali,

• 22:27Ben Horowitz?

  Ali actually was VP of Engineering at the time. And it was a while, you know, before I made him CEO. And that was very good luck on my part, because I had no idea that they had a guy that good inside the company who could become CEO when I invested. Like, that was just, you know, God smiled on me and gave me that one.

• 22:51Speaker 02

  So, speaking of Ali, I actually asked him what to ask you about. And he immediately shared this story. I don't know if you remember this, in your first one on one with him after you made him CEO, he was struggling with a bunch of low performers, because he was coming in to lead the company. And he was trying to turn things around, trying to coach them, trying to level them up. And your advice to him was, quote, "You don't make people great. You find people that make you great, that make the company great, that you learn from, not the other way around." And there's something that he called managerial leverage. What is that all about? What's the lesson there?

• 23:24Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. So like, understand, he had just become CEO. So I was teaching him, he had been VP of Engineering. And CEO is different. And I'll get into why and what I mean by leverage. So I actually wrote a post about this with a little weighing quote, where I think the quote was, "The truth is hard to swallow and hard to say too. But I graduated from that bullshit. Now I hate school." And that was always my feeling about this particular idea, was, look, if you're VP of Engineering, you can develop people. You can teach them to be better engineers. You can teach them to be better engineering managers. Like, that's very, like, doable. But if you're CEO...

• 24:07Ben Horowitz?

  Like, what do you know about being CFO? Like, what do you know about being, you know, VP of HR? What do you know about any of these jobs? You know, except maybe VP of Engineering, right? Like, and so the idea that you're going to take somebody who doesn't, who isn't world-class at marketing and make them world-class, and you don't know anything about marketing is a dumb idea. It just doesn't work. And then the company can't afford for you to be spending time on that because they need you to make very high-quality, fast decisions. They need you to set the direction for the company, and they need you to have a world-class team. And so like that, and it's a very hard lesson if you've been VP of Engineering because if you're a good VP of Engineering, you do develop your people.

• 24:52Ben Horowitz?

  But as a CEO, like, it's not like you don't do any of it, but it is very, very small, you know, compared to it. So I like to make things just very stark. So you, you get what I'm saying. I don't like to hedge it. And then managerial leverage means, it is very simple. It's, okay, if I have the ideas about what your department should do next, if I, you know, am kind of pushing you to kind of move your organization forward, then that's no leverage. What's leverage is if you're telling me what you should do and how you can push the company forward, that's leverage. Then I'm getting kind of more than I'd have if you weren't there. Otherwise, I could just manage a fucking team. And that's the point.

• 25:37Ben Horowitz?

  When you feel like you're not getting leverage, when you gotta go say, hey, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we doing that? That's when you gotta make a change. And by the way, he's unbelievable at that, as good as anybody I've seen. As a guy who's not callous as a CEO, he really cares about the people who work for him. He really wants them to have great careers and all that, but he does not hesitate. Like, if he's losing leverage, he'll make a move.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  Kind of going back to the origin story of A16Z, something you guys were really big on was helping founders stay CEOs, become great CEOs, not replace them with professional CEOs. I want to, I want to flip this question on you. When does it actually make sense to replace a CEO? When are people not going to make great CEOs?

• 26:21Ben Horowitz?

  It really, there's a very consistent thing that happens, which is, you know, then somebody doesn't make it. And it kind of starts with confidence is the way I would put it. So.

• 26:34Ben Horowitz?

  When like if you you invent a product, you kind of recruit a team, so forth. All of a sudden, you're CEO. But you don't run a big organization. You don't know how to do that. Like, most founders are like that. And so if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to make mistakes. And they all make a lot of mistakes. And then when you make those mistakes, they're very expensive. You know, like, they could cost you to do a down round, or they could cost you to lose a company, or they could cost your customer, or you screw up the product. Like, they're very high impact. And not just on you, but everybody who you talked into joining you. And so that kind of motion can really cause you to lose confidence. And then if you lose confidence,

• 27:19Ben Horowitz?

  what happens is you hesitate on the next decision. And as we talked about, like, hesitation is very dangerous because, one, like, it locks up the company. But even worse, what happens is if you have senior people working for you, they get very nervous and they feel like they need to jump into that void and make the decision for you. And that's when it gets political, like, very political, because people are, like, vying for power inside your little, you know, screwed up company. And so now you've got a political dysfunctional organization. And that, you know, like, that's generally where, like,

• 28:03Ben Horowitz?

  okay, the founder probably can't run this thing anymore. Is, you know, that's how it happens. So, you know, most of what we do as a firm is to try to help people with that confidence problem. And there's, like, a whole series of ideas that we have around that. But that's, you know, you kind of have to somehow climb the confidence and the competency curve together. It's very hard to do. And particularly, like, if you're an engineer and you're used to getting things right, or if you've been a straight A student or something like that, it's very disconcerting. Most of the answer is better to have, like, CEOs who are, like, C-minus students, you know?

• 28:41Ben Horowitz?

  Why is that? Yeah, the little feces is like, well, like, it's just good to be used to failing. So I think I I wrote this, but like the the median on the CEO kind of test is like 18. It's not like 90. And so you got to be comfortable getting a lot of D minuses because a D minus is fine. You know, as long as you don't get the F, as long as you don't run out of cash, as long as you don't lose all ten. You know, okay, like you got through it, keep going. You know, and that's that's a lot of the the thing that we try to do CEOs.

• 29:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, it comes back to the your core, I don't know, message through your first book is just how much you will fail and how much you will struggle and how much pain you'll go through a CEO.

• 29:26Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. And, you know, like, I mean, a lot of why I wrote that book was just to analyze that. I think what happens is, you know, particularly, you know, when I wrote it, and I think it's come back and been true now is like the way the narrative gets written on all these successes is like, oh, they came up with a genius idea and then they built this company and they hired all these smart people and it was all great. But like, that's not at all how it happens. And, you know, I've spent enough time with like, everybody from like Mark Zuckerberg to Sam Altman and so forth, that like, they all go through that same thing that you, who has, you know, your struggling company go through, like, you screw a lot of things up and they have massive consequences.

• 30:12Ben Horowitz?

  But you you have to kind of maintain your confidence.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  Actually, I was at a storytelling event last night and I were chatting, I was chatting with someone that I ran into there and told her I was chatting with you today. And she said how meaningful your first book was to her as a founder, exactly as you said, normalizing that it's very hard and painful and this is just the way it is.

• 30:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And the feeling like, I mean, you know, like, if you think about organizational design or You know, goals and objectives or OKRs or whatever management technique like you need like a, you know, a basic like eighth grade education to like do any of that stuff. It's not that complicated. The difficult part is the the feeling that you have when you have to do it is very like the hard thing to matter a reorg is you're redistributing power. So you're going to have people really fricking mad at you because somebody's losing power if you do it correctly. And that person may be like a really good employee. Dealing with that is the hard thing. Like knowing how the organization should work to make communication better. It's not that complex.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think about I was at Airbnb for a long time and just thinking of Brian, who I don't even know if he had a job before Airbnb.

• 31:21Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah, no, I spent a lot of time with Brian and he after COVID, he it all kind of clicked for him. And then he did that. He invoked that good talk on founder mode and so forth. But the reason that was so articulate is because he had screwed every one of those things up. And, you know, he hired LT and, you know, all this stuff. And these are very senior people and, you know, he didn't, he wanted to defer to them, but you can't defer as the CEO, you know, because you know what Airbnb should be doing. He may know what fucking finance should do, but you know what Airbnb should do and this kind of thing. And then then it gets really wild. When you like, you can't defer decisions

• 32:05Ben Horowitz?

  as a CEO, you got to like understand what people are saying and go now we're going to do this.

• 32:09Speaker 02

  And this again, comes back to the point of you have to go through the struggle and pain and failure to learn those lessons.

• 32:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, like, I mean, it's they're really hard to learn without kind of doing and without often like without paying the consequence. And I, you know, like even I like I make mistakes. I was having a conversation with Ali the other day and I was like, he's like, how's it going, Ben? And I was like, well, you know, like, I'm finally dealing with something that I had put off for, you know, a very long time.

• 32:39Ben Horowitz?

  And he said, why did you put it off? I said, because things were going too good. I didn't have to deal with it. And he's like, yeah. He said, I know that. Like, I'd say Ali is, you know, one of the, if not the kind of best private company CEO out there, and he's making a mistake, and I'm making a mistake. So like, it's just tough.

• 32:58Speaker 02

  You said that one of the, maybe the main reason founders fail as CEOs is they lose confidence. And you had some ideas that you guys have to help founders work through that? Are there a couple you can share how you help?

• 33:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. So we do, we do a lot of things on that. So the kind of design of the firm is about confidence. So the first thing is, well, what would it give you? Well, like, if you can get stuff done. So what if I could give you a network that's as good as Bob Iger's that were day one, like, the day you stepped into the job? And so, you know, we have 600 people at the firm. And why is that? Well, most of them are building that network for you so you can call any CEO or anybody in Washington, or, you know, kind of any executive or that kind of thing. And get them on the phone, and they'll talk to you, and you can kind of deal with that thing. And then that just makes you feel like a CEO.

• 33:51Ben Horowitz?

  And then, you know, we have a lot of people in the firm like myself, who you can talk to on like a CEO to CEO basis, as opposed to an investor to CEO, and just kind of feel that. Early in the firm days, we used to do this, I think I'm gonna bring back in some form, this thing called the CEO barbecue. And it was like, you know, a lot of people have these events where like, you know, they bring in speakers and this and that and the other. And I always felt like those were, one, they were too many days, and then sometimes, you know, the, what they said wasn't really applicable and that kind of thing. And so, well, I said, well, why don't we just have a barbecue? And like, I would barbecue.

• 34:34Ben Horowitz?

  We get everybody in my backyard, almost 500 people at the peak, which is why I had the kind of stuff. Because I couldn't cook that much food right after that. And then, you know, we'd have Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg and Kanye West. And so you're a CEO in there, you're like, wow, like, I must be important. I'm here with all these guys and we're just hanging out, having a drink, eating barbecue. And so then when I go back to my company, I like, I feel like I am somebody and like, okay, I might not be like, perfect at all this, but I am really a CEO. I was at the CEO barbecue, crying out loud in that kind of thing.

• 35:13Ben Horowitz?

  And so, you know, that's, but it's all, the whole idea was always like, okay, do you feel like you can do it? Cause that's, you know, that's half the battle. And look, having been in, and you know, every CEO has been in a position where they feel like, well, maybe I shouldn't be the one running this thing. Maybe it's just too big for me. And that's a bad, you don't, you don't want to go there. And because as we said, founders can get to the next product. And that's something that, you know, almost no professional CEO is able to do. Like there have been rare cases, but very rare.

• 35:54Speaker 02

  So clearly you've worked with a lot of companies, a lot of founders. Let me kind of zoom out a little bit and ask you this question. What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building companies? That goes against common startup wisdom?

• 36:06Ben Horowitz?

  Well, you know, the common startup wisdom keeps changing, you know? Like one of the early ones that, you know, was wrong and it kind of Brian articulated it. And then now I think a little bit of what people have gone to is also wrong. So the first idea that was wrong was like, okay, build a team of like senior executives. You know, as soon as you get product market fit as fast as possible and they can scale the thing. And I think that you got to build that team slowly and deliberately kind of pace to your ability to integrate and then manage them. Because if you bring in a bunch of senior people and you don't know really.

• 36:49Ben Horowitz?

  How they match to your company, or how that function works, or so forth, then you're going to start deferring. And once you start deferring, it's going to get out of control very fast. Because they're going to build empires, they're going to get political, they're going to do all that kind of thing. So that was bad advice. You kind of have to do it in a measured way. I think that founder mode, I think a lot of people have taken to never hire anybody with experience. And that's also bad advice. In that, look, somebody who knows how to do something can really accelerate your thing. So very early on, one of the founders, great founder, Arsalan at Databricks was running sales. And I'm like, Ali, like,

• 37:33Ben Horowitz?

  you're going to have to hire like, somebody who knows sales. Because Arsalan's PhD in computer science. Like, I like that. But then, that's probably not where you're going to have to start if you're going to catch these guys before they take Spark and like, use it against you. And, you know, and I sat down with Arsalan and explained why. I said, look, you know, a lot of what's sales, there's a lot of knowledge in how to build a worldwide sales organization. There may be knowledge of customers, territories, territory splitting, rep profiles, like, there's just like a litany of stuff that you really can only learn by doing trial and error. And you don't know anything. And so, like, you're phenomenal, like, let's get you, you know,

• 38:18Ben Horowitz?

  and he's still, he's a very senior executive in the company now. But we need somebody who knows that. And the idea that there are companies that go, okay, we're just not going to hire that because we're in founder mode. That's also a mistake. So then, there's a lot of, it's more subtle than you think. And it's more complex than you think. And so you kind of have to get all the way to the truth. And these little snippets of advice that DCs give, because they watch some fucking podcasts, are all fucking stupid. Like, it's just, there's a lot of depth to these things. You have to know the answer to the next question, the next question, and the next question. And it does drive me crazy. Like, one of the funny things that happened along these lines, just to show you how little

• 39:02Ben Horowitz?

  You know, as an investor about what it means to be CEO. One of the, we were at a board dinner, one of the CEOs says to me, he goes, or one of my, one of our CEOs says, hey, you know, Ben, like that thing you told me a while ago about, don't be CEO at home. He said, like, I was doing that and I stopped and it really helped me. And then the other kind of VC said, yeah, you know, you got to unplug sometime. And I said, I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? He's CEO, he's not unplugging. Like, he's getting shit all the fucking time. Like, he's got to deal with that. Like, that was not what I meant. I was like, you can't go home and boss your family around. That's what I meant.

• 39:41Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like, so, so it's, you hear something from like, somebody who, but if you haven't done it, you don't even know what that means. And so then you, kind of then trying to transfer the advice to the next guy, that's not gonna work. So, anyway, so, but it's, you know, like, he was very innocent. I don't want to kind of speak bad of him, but like, that's how it sounds, right? But that's not what it is.

• 40:06Speaker 02

  That's an amazing story. So, the advice partly here is just don't believe everything you see on Twitter and little soundbites of advice.

• 40:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, like, and I think actual CEOs know it. And that's kind of how, like, people in my profession can get a bad wreck. Because, like, giving advice, that's not something that you know, but something that you heard is very dangerous, I think.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  So, speaking of advice that you've shared that might be out of date now, you are famous for writing one of the most popular pieces of literature for product managers. There's a lot of PMs that listen to this podcast called Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager. And if you actually go to that post today, at the top, you say, this document was written 15 years ago and is probably not relevant today for PMs. I present this merely as an example of a useful training document. Still, people link to it, I actually just link to it as an, as just like, this is something every PM needs to read. What is it that you think people should maybe not take away from it? And what do you think people still should take away from that piece?

• 41:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so the reason I wrote it when I wrote it was,

• 41:09Ben Horowitz?

  I had a lot of product managers and one thing about product management is it's a job that's completely different at every company and there is no training for it. So like everybody kind of figures it out as they go. And depending on what's being emphasized, like they'll get wrapped around the axle on, you know, like if it's enterprise company, okay, well, like, you know, pitching to customers or like, I need to be like really good with the press or I need to be really good at writing, you know, the product requirements documented, that kind of thing. And none of the, those are all like these tasks, but none of those were the job.

• 41:53Ben Horowitz?

  And what I was trying to get out in good product manager, bad product manager was the job is fundamentally a leadership job and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. So it's like this influence, how do I get people to do what I want? You know, even though I'm not paying them, I can't fire them, I can't promote them and so forth. And which is kind of the essence of like real leadership because if you start to rely on promotion and firing and so forth for authority, then you're never going to be good at being CEO or anything.

• 42:35Ben Horowitz?

  So I wanted them to get into the mindset of, okay, your actual job is to get a product into market that customers love, that's better than anything that anybody else in the world puts in market, like that's your job. And so to accomplish that job, you need engineering to understand you with clarity. You need to understand engineering with clarity. You need to have a really good view of the market and the competitors and the technology and so forth. And you need to kind of put that all together and deliver the thing. And all the other things are tasks that you may or may not need to do.

• 43:19Ben Horowitz?

  I don't know if you need to do them, but like the thing is, you know, you have to be the leader, you've got to get the thing done and. And so what I think it's still good on is that like the mindset, like, you know, be the leader. I think the details of it, you know, of any kind of thing that was kind of task specific was like really for my group at Netscape in like 1996, whenever the hell I wrote it. So it was, you know, it was a kind of document I wrote out of frustration.

• 43:58Ben Horowitz?

  But I am glad that the people still like it. And I think leadership in general is

• 44:07Ben Horowitz?

  under, undervalued, underestimated. It's the most powerful thing. And most of the great, you know, great companies, Jensen is a great example, like what a phenomenal leader he is, not just of Nvidia, but of the whole industry. And he doesn't have authority over the industry, but like he drives it forward. And that's, and that's why the good product manager, bad product manager is so important because that thing, if you learn how to do it, that's the thing.

• 44:35Speaker 02

  I didn't realize you wrote that initially as just an internal document and then you made a film.

• 44:40Ben Horowitz?

  It was, it was kind of before blogging took off. So it's just an internal thing and I published it later. It was, I was just getting so mad, you know, and by the way, my product management team at the time was like very good, very talented people. They just, they just were not getting that concept. So, you know, like David Widen said, Coastal Ventures, Raghu Raghu Ram, who was, went on to be CEO of VMware. I mean, like the team was like that team.

• 45:09Ben Horowitz?

  But they were driving me crazy. And so I just, I was like, I can't yell at people anymore. I have to like explain to myself.

• 45:19Ben Horowitz?

  And so it's a good thing. If you find yourself yelling at people, like you probably haven't explained what you want. It was the other big takeaway from that.

• 45:27Speaker 02

  Did you ever think that piece would be so long lasting and so, I don't know.

• 45:30Ben Horowitz?

  No, I didn't even know, like, I thought it was kind of like aggressive when I wrote it. Like you could tell I was mad because I called a good product manager, bad product manager. It's like bad dog, you know, bad product, bad, bad product manager. That's the, that was kind of the emotion I had. So. You know, it's kind of shocking, yeah, some of the things that you write. I would say that that's, you know, I'm kind of creative and you probably know this. Like the ideas that you have, the things that you write in five minutes end up being much better than things you write in five weeks, you know. And I find in talking to, you know, musicians or writers or anybody, everybody has that same experience, like the thing that you've already synthesized so much that you just

• 46:14Ben Horowitz?

  have to run it out is that's the best stuff.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  There's something that you mentioned there in your answer about the PM being the leader. There's always this kind of sense that the PM is not the mini CEO. How dare you call yourself that? I actually think that's exactly what the PM is. They're basically the closest to the CEO. Their kind of job is to think like the CEO within the team.

• 46:35Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, people get mad, you know, like, because everybody, you know, like, this is the whole challenge of management in general, like, people get jealous over stewardship. But like, from, from the perspective of the PM, like, it doesn't matter if you write a good spec or you have a good interview or you do this or do that. Like, what matters is at the product range. And you have to get all the way to there and kind of work backwards from that. And you can't do that without leadership because it is about, okay, we want to build that. And you're not necessarily the person that comes up with every idea or this or that. I mean, you're just the keeper of the vision, you know? And that's true for CEOs too.

• 47:20Ben Horowitz?

  Like, you don't want every idea in a company coming from the CEO. Like, that's, I think it's a misunderstanding what a CEO is, is why people don't like that. They don't know what a CEO is. But a CEO isn't the one who has every idea, gives every order, does every, that's not the way it works. The way it works is there's somebody who's got to consolidate, you know, get all the good ideas, prioritize them, decide which good ideas we're going to do, and then get everybody on the same page if they have very high fidelity understanding of what that is.

• 47:54Ben Horowitz?

  So that it is a CEO kind of function. Now, it doesn't mean like I'm better than you. It just means like that's what I'm doing.

• 48:02Speaker 02

  Let's talk about AI. I'm very proud of us. It's been almost an hour. We haven't even mentioned AI. I think that's a record. Okay, so I asked Adam Neumann, WeWork founder, now Flow founder, someone you work closely with now, what to ask you about. And he said he has some really interesting insights about how AI is impacting hiring.

• 48:20Ben Horowitz?

  You know, Adam is probably the single most controversially investment that we ever made. Like, we got called everything from stupid to sexist to racist to this and that for like, like literally just funding that.

• 48:37Ben Horowitz?

  And I think it's going to end up being one of the best investments we ever made. He's doing a phenomenal job there. But it's, there's an important principle in, in that, which kind of we do as a firm, which I think is not widely done, but I would love it if people copied it, which is, and it's something I learned, you know, somewhat from Shaka, which is you, you don't judge a person by the worst thing that ever happened to them. Like, we've all had bad things happen to us. We've all made bad decisions. Most of them, they don't make a mini-series about, right?

• 49:21Ben Horowitz?

  And so like to judge them on that, you want to judge people on what they do well, not what they screwed up. And, you know, because that's where you see the talent. I mean, if you look at what Adam did well, it's truly spectacular.

• 49:38Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like WeWork, everybody knows what WeWork is. It's like, it's the main, more important commercial real estate brand than WeWork. Like, you can't. And so like, what an accomplishment. And then, yeah, and there were so many things that went into that. And, and, yeah, so many things he did right. And then if you kind of look at, really unravel the things that went wrong, most of it was like a combination of inexperience and nobody around him that were telling the truth. And so like that, and, you know, maybe he wasn't good at listening to the truth either at the time.

• 50:15Ben Horowitz?

  But to throw away a guy on that, which is, by the way, the world was so mad at us for not throwing him away, for believing in him, is just, it's a big mistake. And, you know, I credit Mark, because Mark is the one who called him up originally and just said, hey, Adam, what are you doing? Because like, you know, we watched what you did at WeWork, and we thought it was pretty impressive. And so I think that, you know, that's probably the biggest secret there. It's not really about AI, but I think that, like, looking, yeah, Judge Al Davis once said, you know, coach players on what they can do. And I

• 50:56Ben Horowitz?

  think that's very true. You know, judge people on what they can do. You know, coach people on what they can do, like, help them take their strengths and use them as opposed to over-focus on their weaknesses and just, you know, hand wringing about the one fucking thing they don't know how to do. Because, look, everybody's uneven.

• 51:16Speaker 02

  What is that? Like, what you're describing, essentially, this is the job of an investor, is to find an underappreciated asset and invest, or before, something people don't see.

• 51:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. And I mean, I think that it's, you know, like, venture capital is really about investing in people, right? Like, you know, that, you have ideas as an investor, but like, what you really are ultimately betting on is the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur's idea, because the initial idea isn't where they end up usually. It changes a lot with everybody we invest in. So, you know, you kind of have to make the judgment on the person. And, you know, how you do that is, is really, really important. And one of the things we emphasize inside the firm is, look, like, we're investing in strength, not lack of weakness. Like, I want to know, like, how good, like, are they world-class? Do they

• 52:09Ben Horowitz?

  have a world-class strength? And, you know, can that beat anybody? And, like, everybody's flawed. And so, like, let's help them deal with the flaws, and, you know, surround them with people who can handle that, and put the right person on the board who can talk to them. Like, I go to all Adam's board meetings, you know, Mark's on the board, I go to all his board meetings, because... I'm the one who's good at like killing a guy who's that confident. When he's like, okay, that's not your best idea. Like, that's a good rope for me. But that's how you deal with that. You don't, you know, throw him away and go, oh, okay. Like, we don't want to be called names. We're not going to invest in Adam Neumann after we built WeWork. That's crazy.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  It's also why you guys invested in Clue, I imagine, similar.

• 52:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that's right. Like, if you look at what those guys did, that was like some like high level marketing genius, too. And that's really something. Plus, the product is awesome.

• 53:09Speaker 02

  I'm going to bring us back to AI. Something that a lot of people are talking about right now while we're recording this is this potential huge bubble we're in with AI. Sam Altman said, we're in a big bubble, which is, you know, that's saying a lot. I'm curious just how you think.

• 53:21Ben Horowitz?

  What is it saying? So you gotta like, first of all, I should qualify this by saying, I'm an investor and Sam's a CEO. So CEOs have to have much more purpose when they talk. Investors just have to be entertaining. So you gotta give Sam credit for like, what is it in his interest to say it? Well, like, if it's a bubble, then the one thing you should invest in is him and not all these guys chasing after him. So that I would say like, that's very smart. And then the other thing that's smart about it is there's nothing that you can say to the press that will make them love you more than saying, all investors and

• 54:06Ben Horowitz?

  like entrepreneurs chasing this are idiots. Like, they love them because, you know, the press are generally haters. And so it's just like red meat for the haters, which is also super clever. So I think whether even he believes that or not, that was a super smart thing to say. So I'll just put it there. Whereas what I'm going to say won't be as smart, but it will. I don't really have an axe to grind here. I mean, I could have an axe to grind and say, okay, like, let's get all the other investors out. I'll say it's a massive bubble.

• 54:41Ben Horowitz?

  But what I would say about that is, so the first thing, the one thing about bubbles is, anytime everybody thinks it's a bubble, it's not a bubble. Because in order for it to bubble, you need capitulation. In that you need kind of everybody to believe it's not a bubble because then the prices really go out of control. But as long as there's people who think it's a bubble, then it's hard for that to happen. And it's funny, I had this debate in The Economist, I think with Steve Blank in like 2011 or 12, when everybody thought it was a tech bubble, if you can imagine that, which

• 55:26Ben Horowitz?

  it absolutely was not. But because there were like 1,400 articles saying that we were in a tech bubble. And yeah, I mean, you know where prices were then compared to where they are now. But I knew because everybody was saying it was a bubble, it wasn't a bubble. Like I knew that. The prices were higher, but the reason the prices were higher was we're getting to global market. AI prices are higher than prior prices, but if you look at the revenue growth and numbers, we're not seeing anything like it. The products are working. ChatGPT, Sam's product worked so amazingly. We've never seen that before. Like not even Google, not anybody. And so like that's real.

• 56:08Ben Horowitz?

  And yeah, we have companies that went from zero to 800 million in a year and that kind of thing. And so it's not a, I would say there's a basis for the prices going up, first of all. Now, will the, I think the thing that's right about kind of what Sam is saying is the landscape is early, really early. The technology is very immature, as amazingly as it works. Yeah, there's a long way to go to improve it. So it's very possible, you know, when you have

• 56:46Ben Horowitz?

  That much technological change that the positions that these companies have achieved with their high revenue isn't sustainable in that there will be a competitive change that either lowers prices or a new number one emerges or that kind of thing. And so that's possible, but I wouldn't characterize that as being like a financial bubble. In that, like if you go back to the great dot com bubble that everybody is always waiting for it to happen again, which I was CEO during, the thing that happened there was very different, which is it was the internet and every smart investor knew that the internet was a big deal. Like, how could you not fucking know that the internet was a, of course, it's a big

• 57:31Ben Horowitz?

  deal. But like, if you go back to 1996, at Netscape, we had 90% browser shit and we had 50 million users. So there were 55 million people on the internet in total. And half of those were on dial-up. And then to build a product like Evite, the greeting card company, had 300 engineers. That's how hard it was to build this stuff. And so the math didn't work and the math didn't work on any of those ideas, but the investors kept pouring money in. And then eventually, you know, everybody went bankrupt because there was no revenue coming in.

• 58:13Ben Horowitz?

  And like when they figured that out, then nobody would invest in anything. And of course, then everybody realized, well, the internet was actually real. And Paul Krugman didn't know what he's talking about and like it was going to be a big thing. And then Facebook and Google and all these things emerged. But the thing that made it a bubble was like the unit economics didn't work, the businesses didn't work. Like, these businesses are all working and they're being priced appropriately for how they're growing. So that's not in effect. So the thing that you could say is they're not going to keep growing like that or like and so forth. And I'm not sure about that. Like the products, like I said, are working so much better than any technology product

• 58:57Ben Horowitz?

  that we've ever built has worked. Like, it's just mind-blower how good this stuff is. And so...

• 59:05Ben Horowitz?

  I don't know. If I had to bet, I would bet not a bubble. Yeah, I think there will be some dislocation. I think companies that I think always in venture capital, if you've got like a run like this, then the great company and the crap company both get funded. But, you know, that's just, that's just venture capital. That's not a bubble.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  For founders starting companies these days, when you look into the future of the AI industry, say in five, 10 years, how do you, how do you think things will play out? Slash, where do you think the biggest opportunities remain? Where are you guys looking to invest most?

• 59:43Ben Horowitz?

  In infrastructure,

• 59:46Ben Horowitz?

  I think that like there is obviously like a real estate, power, cooling play. I think that's a little outside of,

• 59:56Ben Horowitz?

  you know, kind of hardcore technology investing that we do. But there's another layer, which is like, who can run, you know, take a given open source model, who can run it the cheapest with the kind of lowest latency? And that's going to be extremely valuable, like whoever has that. And, you know, Google has been historically very good at that and so forth. And Sam is really trying to build that now with Stargate. And so I think that's going to be a very important layer of value. I think that, you know, on the foundation model side, you have to be very selective as an investor. So in order to compete in foundational model world, our basic rule at time is

• 1:00:39Ben Horowitz?

  you have to be able to, you know, without much product progress, raise at least $2 billion. Because that's basically what it can cost you to train something that gets you competitive enough to make money. And they're just jury chief founders like that. So Ilya is one of those, you know, Mir is one of those. Fei Fei is one of those, but like, that's the kind of class of person you need. And there's, you know, whatever, there's certainly less than 10 of those in the world. And so that's kind of like an important area, but a small area.

• 1:01:16Ben Horowitz?

  And then I think the application layer is going to be very, very interesting. And I think that, you know, if you look at Sam, like he's making most of his money off ChatGPT, almost all his money off ChatGPT now. And ChatGPT is like,

• 1:01:35Ben Horowitz?

  You know, I it looks like it's got a real like it or not, it's got a real moat. It's very hard to knock it off its perch. There's all, you know, everybody's taking a shot at it. People, great distribution like Google and, you know, Elon and Zuckerberg and everybody. And like, the thing just keeps going like it is. So I think the applications are both more complex and kind of stickier than people thought they were originally like. So the thing that people got very wrong is this whole thin wrapper around GPT. Like, that's really wrong. In fact, here's how wrong it is.

• 1:02:15Ben Horowitz?

  Back in the eighties, they're that same phrase was used, but it was thin wrapper around an R D DMS.

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  A database.

• 1:02:24Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it meant companies like Salesforce were basically just a thin wrapper. And I think that that's kind of the mistake people made. So like, we're in at this company, Cursor, and if you look under the covers in Cursor, they've built like 14 different models to really understand how a developer works, like a high end, like a real developer. And they have that those models have tons and tons of interactions with how people talk to their friend Cursor about how they should design their programming and so forth. And that's like real, that's not, that's not just a thin layer on a foundation model.

• 1:03:07Ben Horowitz?

  And I think there are many, many applications like that. And

• 1:03:15Ben Horowitz?

  and so I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity at the application layer. There's going to be some opportunity at the foundation model. And of course, you can invest in SAM, you can invest in Anthropic and so forth and as well.

• 1:03:28Ben Horowitz?

  But there will probably be like a very small number of companies at that set. And then a almost unlimited number of companies at the application layer. And then, you know, as the technology advances, well, of course, see more things we can body AI. I mean, already, you know, autonomous cars are working like really well now. And after a long, long, long, long time, since I think Sebastian won the the challenge in 2006, when he drove the self-driving car across the country. And here we are 20 years later and now they're deployed. So that was a long time. Robots, I think, is a harder problem than self-driving cars.

• 1:04:12Ben Horowitz?

  So we'll see how that goes. But, uh, you know, there's certainly a lot in that world as well.

• 1:04:19Speaker 02

  Wow. Okay. There's a lot to this answer. Something that, no, that was exactly what I was looking for. The cursor example, it's something that comes up a lot on this podcast in the application layer specifically. The thought that the way to win in this space and to build a moat is, as you said, build your own model slash have proprietary data that you build through people using your product. Thoughts on that?

• 1:04:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's ends up just being what's required. So it turns out that the universe is long-tailed, is fat-tailed, and humans are very fat-tailed in terms of human behavior, human conversation and so forth. So to get to the real meaning of it and to get to the kind of essence of the problem. You know, in any domain, uh, turns out to be, I think, more complex than we thought. And so like the early things and, you know, people were running around saying, okay, there's going to be one big brain to rule them all on these kinds of things. That's kind of not played out yet.

• 1:05:26Ben Horowitz?

  And, and in fact, like, if you look underneath the covers.

• 1:05:32Ben Horowitz?

  You have L L Ms which have generalized pretty, you know, like in fascinating ways, but they've kind of also accentuated in that, um, you know, we, we have run out of data for the most part. And so if you look at the G P T five L L M compared to the G P T four one and how much more it costs to train and so forth, like it's, you know, it's definitely not going linear anymore. On the other hand, the reinforcement earnings side has been linear, but it doesn't generalize. So if you build a great, uh, programming model, it may be an idiot at math. And so that I think is just very different than what people

• 1:06:14Ben Horowitz?

  would have said three years ago. And I think that's kind of, you know, that there's not something that's both scaling and generalizing yet. And, you know, maybe we'll get there, but that certainly opens the door to something that's more user friendly, that's more effective in any number of domains than just the basic foundation model infrastructure. Now those models are incredibly important and they're, and I think OpenAI is probably 80% of the revenue in AI or something like that now, like it's just massive. So that foundation model is really, really important. Um, and then like the, the, the basic consumer app

• 1:06:55Ben Horowitz?

  is really, really important. Um, that just answers whatever hell you want to know. Like those, those things are like very, very real. But I do think, you know, particularly, and then if you get into like enterprise stuff and then it's no longer internet data, it's their data. That becomes very different. Like Databricks is having a lot of success there because, okay, well, once you're inside a company, guess what? Like you care about access control. And that's hard with an AI world, you know, it gets trained on some stuff. How does it know who has access to that information, who doesn't and so forth? Um, you have semantic issues. So if you look at an enterprise,

• 1:07:40Ben Horowitz?

  Find 10 enterprises, they all have a different definition of what a customer means. Like you would think customer is a basic thing. Well, is it a department at AT&T? Is it AT&T? Is it like a person at AT&T? Is like, what the hell is the customer? And it turns out to be very, very, very meaningful. Particularly if you're trying to figure out like important games like churn and this and that and third. So like that kind of stuff matters. So it, I would just say like the problem space is a lot bigger than you can just attack with a basic foundation model. Currently, you know, maybe that will change.

• 1:08:20Ben Horowitz?

  And like if that changes, then certain prices will have in retrospect looked way inflated and others will look, you know, too low. But, you know, that, that is TBD.

• 1:08:34Speaker 02

  So a big takeaway from this is that there's still tons of opportunity for founders to start companies building AI products.

• 1:08:40Ben Horowitz?

  I think so. I mean, you can solve so many, everything that we couldn't solve with software, we can solve now almost. So it's a really big world. And it's funny, you know, like, cause we're investors in Waymo. And one of the things when you get into like what took so long to make Waymo's so safe like they are now? It wasn't the things that everybody reported on the podcast. It wasn't sleet and, you know, heavy rain. And it was people. It was like this human who was driving 75 in the 25 zone. It was very hard for the AI to anticipate because it was rare, but important.

• 1:09:20Ben Horowitz?

  And the number of rare, important, crazy shit that humans do is very high. And I think that that goes for all of AI. So to make things work really well, you have to understand this, this very kind of fat tail of human behavior.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  Along this AI thread, something that is really important to you, clearly, something you talk a lot about is, is the US being successful in AI and in leading the world in AI. Why is this so important? Why is something you spend a lot of time on?

• 1:09:51Ben Horowitz?

  It starts with, I think, my view of the US and its role in the world. So.

• 1:10:01Ben Horowitz?

  My personal view is like, it's very, very, very important. Not for society to be completely fair, because it's not going to be completely fair or completely equal, because we've never had one that's been completely equal. But it's important that everybody have a chance at life, you know, and particularly, you know, kind of both culturally, but also just like, you can't advance the world if, you know, you can't tap into all of your resources. And so if you kind of take away motivation and these kinds of things, you get into trouble.

• 1:10:40Ben Horowitz?

  And if you look at the kind of every country today, and this is, by the way, so you want like the right amount of decentralized power. You know, you don't want it to be completely concentrated. Concentrated power makes it very, very difficult for everybody to have a chance. This is the big kind of lesson of communism over the last 100 years is, it turned out, right? And, you know, we saw politicians selling it this way today. It's like, oh, it's power to the people. No, no, no, it's power to you, because you're removing all power from the private sector and installing it into the government, and then you're putting yourself in charge of the government. And so I become extremely powerful.

• 1:11:20Ben Horowitz?

  And this is why it didn't matter if it was Mao, or Pol Pot, or Ceausescu, or Stalin, everybody died. Because when you give anybody that much power, nobody has a chance. There is no incentive. There's no carrot, there's only stick. And so you use that stick. And that's just the nature, it's a systems problem, it's not a person problem. It's not Stalin was evil, Ceausescu was evil. It was like, that system is evil. And that's the same with fascism, right? Hitler or Mussolini, it doesn't matter, like, that level of power is evil. And the US does the best job systematically. It's the best system.

• 1:12:04Ben Horowitz?

  It's got all kinds of issues, it's got problems, people are trying to defeat it. But, you know, one of the things that...

• 1:12:12Ben Horowitz?

  You know, if you look at kind of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, like the language is very important. You know, it's we hold these truths to be self-evident. What does that mean? It means it's not my rule. It's not the president's rule. It's God's rule. And so those rules are above the president. And then you work in that context and that distributes power because you're under the law, not under the person. And we see that, you know, now even with Europe where Europe is kind of, the leaders are going, well, I have a rule. It's you can't say certain things or I'll throw you in jail.

• 1:12:57Ben Horowitz?

  And the kind of shield they hide behind is, well, like we have to keep the kids safe. But if you say something that I don't agree with and the kids hear it, they're not safe, right? Like the kind of transited property of bullshit like is going to override. And so it's really important that we have at least like one society. And as flawed as we are, as flawed as the US is, it's still the best. And you can see it by the number of new company creations, the number of new ideas that come out of here and so forth. It's really, really important that the US kind of stays important and powerful in the world. And we know from the last century, if you look at the last century,

• 1:13:40Ben Horowitz?

  who were the countries that had economic power, military power, cultural power? They were the ones that industrialized. Yeah. And the ones that industrialized first and best. And the ones that didn't became colonies, right? Like, you know, Russia, China, like they were slow on industrialization and they fell into this very fucking dangerous system.

• 1:14:05Ben Horowitz?

  Looking forward, that's going to happen again, but it's going to be AI. And so it is kind of fundamentally important not just to like America, but to humanity, that America succeed at that, you know, like we don't have to be the one winner or this or that, but we do have to be like in that tier. And, you know, as I go around the world and travel, I can't tell you, everybody and everybody was getting, by the way, very, very worried about us earlier. And they say, look, we need you to succeed, you know, don't destroy the dollar, don't like fall behind AI, don't over regulate it too early, don't do these things, please,

• 1:14:48Ben Horowitz?

  because we need you to win, like, because we're all like counting on that. And, and I think it's, it's the most important work that we do. It's why we're so involved in policy and, and so forth. I think this is also, you know, very going to be very, very true with crypto, which ends up being an incredibly important networking technology that complements AI. And, and so that's, yeah, and that, you know, that work is, I would say, beyond for the money, like that's, although like we will end up making a lot of money with the right policies, like, so I don't want to like seem totally philanthropic on this, but, but it's

• 1:15:32Ben Horowitz?

  more important than, it's certainly more important than us succeeding or anything like that, that, that the country succeed.

• 1:15:39Speaker 02

  Speaking of philanthropic and other passions of yours, something that I don't think most people know about you, and I think will give them another insight into how interesting you are, you run an organization called Paid in Full, which is incredibly cool. Talk about what that's about, why this is so important to you.

• 1:15:58Ben Horowitz?

  We kind of, our ethos as a firm is kind of, well, it's something from nothing, you know, like this is the greatness of entrepreneurship. You start with nothing and then you, you make something really important. And you know, that kind of, that is also how hip hop started, where you have like a bunch of kids who didn't even have instruments. And they kind of created something out of nothing. And the people in that world always talk about that. And you know, one of the really unfortunate things that happens is the people kind of who invent the art form, and certainly in the case of hip hop, don't get anywhere near the kind of proportional benefit of their invention.

• 1:16:43Ben Horowitz?

  And a lot of the guys, you know, people have forgotten about or, you know, are kind of struggling to make ends meet and so forth. So what we created was this thing called the Paid in Full Foundation, named after Rakim Eric Bisson, which I did call Rakim and ask him for permission to use the name, so we just take it. And what we do is we give essentially pensions to the old rappers that enable them to kind of continue their work. And then we have a big event, go to paidinfullfoundation.org for tickets, which is amazing, where they kind of get the award and, you know, and they're celebrated by all their peers and so forth.

• 1:17:27Ben Horowitz?

  And it's really phenomenal. But, you know, so some of the awardees have been Rakim, Scarface from the Ghetto Boys, Roxanne Chanté, Grandmaster Kaz, Koul Madi. This year, we're honoring George Clinton for being shambled, Kool G Rap and Grand Pumba. And also Jaleel from Houdini. And it's just, it's very, I can't even describe how high impact it is on these guys. I mean, I think Rakim was touring close to 200 nights a year, and he got his award and came out with his first album in 15 years, and is doing amazingly well. And all of a sudden, you know, everybody's going, oh yeah, that's the greatest rapper of all time.

• 1:18:11Ben Horowitz?

  It's like they're finally going back and remembering all the things he did. Roxanne Chanté, I mean, nobody had mentioned her in years and years and years. And I think six months after, we gave her the award, and the Grammys gave her a lifetime achievement award, which is amazing. So it's a super high impact. It's a great thing, you know, as a hip hop fan, I say dream come true, so.

• 1:18:35Ben Horowitz?

  Finally built.

• 1:18:36Speaker 02

  What is, what's the origin story of you and hip hop? I imagine many people look at you and wouldn't imagine you, you, these records behind you, Nas gifted you, you, you're so deep into the community. Just how did this all begin?

• 1:18:48Ben Horowitz?

  Well, so there's, I actually wrote a blog post on it called The Legend of the Blind MC, which I think would be, if you're really interested, it's worth reading, but it is kind of a story of me becoming a rapper and, and like how that occurred and how it went and so forth. But, you know, like I always say, the very short story is, you know, I was in New York when it, at the birth of hip hop and where it could birth, when it really became big, kind of 84th or 88. And yeah, it's just the most exciting thing, you know, to see a new art form kind of pop out and the creativity and everything, you know?

• 1:19:28Ben Horowitz?

  Once music kind of becomes mainstream, I would take, it's very shaped by business. And like in the early days, there's no, yeah, everybody's just coming out with whatever idea they have and so forth. And so there's, the early days of rock and roll were like that. The early days of jazz were like that, so.

• 1:19:48Speaker 02

  I see now even more why you guys brought on Eric Torenberg. Beyond his many talents, he's also really big into rap himself.

• 1:19:55Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I need to, that, that's a good reminder. I need to make sure I get to pay for.

• 1:20:02Speaker 02

  Ben, this was incredible.

• 1:20:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  Is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with or share before we get to our very exciting, quick lightning round?

• 1:20:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, I would just say, um, you know, like if you're a CEO listening to this, then know that like, how you feel about yourself is going to end up meaning as much as anything. And so like, take your time on that. Don't, don't.

• 1:20:36Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like self evaluation is the one of my favorite quotes is that when my old manager sold me a select card, there's no, there are no, from this day on, no credit will be given for predicting rain, only credit for building an ark. And I think that's more true for CEOs than anybody, you know, you have to build the ark. Like, it doesn't matter, like, if you predict you're gonna fail, you still fail. It doesn't, it gets you nothing. So what you have to do is figure your way out of it and spend all your time on that.

• 1:21:08Speaker 02

  Well, with that, we've reached our very exciting lightning round. I've got five questions for you. Are you ready?

• 1:21:13Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, sir.

• 1:21:14Speaker 02

  First question, what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people, not including your own books?

• 1:21:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so two that I learned a lot from, one is The Weirdest People in the World, which

• 1:21:30Ben Horowitz?

  it's a kind of big history book, but through an anthropological kind of cultural lens. And it's really fascinating, explains an awful lot about like how society works and how little changes in the rules completely changed the culture. You know, one of the things that he basically endeavors to explain, okay, why did the West get ahead of the rest of the world? And it kind of comes down to like a weird anomaly with the Catholic Church where they've kind of enforced monogamous marriage. And it turns out that the natural state of humans is

• 1:22:11Ben Horowitz?

  polygamy. But the problem with polygamy is there's no cooperation among men, which is a problem. And as a result, and then everything is secret. So there's no shared, there's no sharing of knowledge, because it's all kept in the family in what he calls kin based culture. It leads to something called kin based culture. And like even recipes won't be shared if you're in a kin based culture, because it's a secret. So you can't build science, you can't build cities, you can't build big companies. And, you know, so because the West kind of enforced bride monogamous marriage early.

• 1:22:50Ben Horowitz?

  He was able to kind of evolve into all these things and he kind of shows why and how. He does these psychological tests today with people from kind of monogamous marriage culture, kind of like Western culture and kin-based culture. And the psychology is completely different. And he gives examples like, yeah, if a person murders another person, is that still murder if that person who did the murder is your brother? In Western society, yeah, that's a murder. In kin-based culture, it's not murder. It's just not. And so like, that's really different. And so like morality is different, like everything kind of comes off of that.

• 1:23:32Ben Horowitz?

  So it's just a fascinating, fascinating book. So that's, that's one. I'd say, you know, another book that I recommend a lot is Shaka's book, his first book, Writing My Rhymes. He has a new book that I think is better, which is called How to Be Free. So I'm going to start. It's not quite out, or maybe it's releasing, it's releasing like next month. So I recommend it. So what it does is it goes through like, how did he work his way out of prison and solitary confinement to his current psychology? And what are the techniques he used? And it's, they're very powerful, very powerful ideas. So I think that like, she always asks me like, how do you deal with it?

• 1:24:17Ben Horowitz?

  Like, how do you deal with it? You know, and the last kind of like work-life balance or like, and it's like, what are you talking about? No work-life balance for she's. Or particularly like entrepreneurial CEOs, like come on. But like, what do you do? Do you meditate? Do you do this or that? But he kind of goes through the things that you really ought to do. So that, that's what I would recommend if somebody's wondering like, how do you deal with all this pressure?

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  I love this, just the whole idea of Shaka being this help for CEOs, someone that killed someone, went to prison, led a prison gang. I just love that, how valuable his lessons are.

• 1:24:54Ben Horowitz?

  Prison gangs turn out to be really complicated things to manage enough. Sorry for getting into this, but the problem with running a prison gang is You're just dealing with people who all come from broken culture. Right? Like, so in any organization, like, the fundamental thing is trust. And so you're bringing in a bunch of no-trust people. And so you can't. And like, and it's kind of like a military organization. It's a gang. And if you think about a military operation, if you don't have trust, people don't trust the order, then you're completely dysfunctional. So how do you build trust from zero is a very interesting problem. And he's a genius at that, by the way.

• 1:25:39Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, I learned a lot from kind of talking to him about it. So like that, from a management standpoint, it's a, I would just say it's an important kind of a boundary case of how you build culture. And so he is very, very smart at that.

• 1:25:59Speaker 02

  Can you just show?

• 1:26:00Ben Horowitz?

  And if have to, like I said, you have to look at people about, you know, their greatness, not, not the worst thing they ever did.

• 1:26:08Speaker 02

  I know this is a lightning round, but can you just show one example of something he did that was like, wow, that's a really good lesson, someone trying to create a good culture that worked for him?

• 1:26:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so like one of the things that he did that I thought was really smart is, well, he did a couple of things. One is just like a simple thing was he just made everybody eat lunch together in the gang, just to kind of build rapport, relationship, trust, like it's all in one thing. We're all together in that. And I think, you know, like particularly in like remote world and so forth, people really underestimate how powerful like just that idea can be. And then, you know, another thing he did is he, he made kind of like morality, you know, he had kind of very specific things about.

• 1:27:04Ben Horowitz?

  You know, if you, you had to be good to your word internally and externally. And so normally a gang, you went like, you know, like I said, it's kind of a kin based culture thing, but it made it much more powerful when he said, look, like you, you can't do devious like shit outside the gang either. And he had a bunch of examples of that, that I went through in the book, but it's a very, like, like I said, because you're building it from zero, you really have to take a hard line on things that I think people in companies don't even take a hard line on, like, you

• 1:27:45Ben Horowitz?

  know, is it okay to lie internally? Probably not. Is it okay to lie to a customer? Well, in some organizations it is, but like in Shaka's organization, like that's as big a cutout to you as lying internally. And, and these things I think end up being really important.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

  We're going to link to this book. This is What You Do Is Who You Are. This is your second book that fewer people know about, and this is one of the stories you tell and just what the lessons are.

• 1:28:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's kind of a more advanced book, you know, like I think people don't, you kind of have to survive to want to care about dealing with the cultural issues. And the survival book has a bigger audience.

• 1:28:21Speaker 02

  Amazing. Okay. We're going to keep going with lighting round. Is there a favorite recent movie or TV show you have really enjoyed?

• 1:28:27Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So on TV, I really liked Slow Forces, which is like a show about the MI6 kind of cast offs guys. And then I, you know, I haven't seen a lot of movies lately, but I watched Centers. I went to the theater for Centers and it's, I mean, just the cinematography is unbelievable and the story is really original and the acting is incredible and the costumes are amazing. So it's just like a great. Kind of comprehensive piece of work. Like, people have, the craftsmanship on that thing is just a lot beyond what most people making movies are doing these days. So I really enjoyed that.

• 1:29:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, I hate scary movies, but I watched it and loved it.

• 1:29:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it wasn't that scary.

• 1:29:14Speaker 02

  It wasn't that scary, but still, you know, zombies popping out of corners. Not my jam usually. Is there a product you recently discovered that you really love? Could be a gadget, could be clothes, could be something else.

• 1:29:25Ben Horowitz?

  I bought a coffee machine called the Technovorm Mocha Master, which is freaking incredible. In fact, a friend of mine saw it and I was like, what is that? And I just bought it for him too, because it's so awesome. Like, this thing makes coffee bad.

• 1:29:44Ben Horowitz?

  It's just like pressured. Like, there's no bitterness. It's completely clean. It's amazing. Only problem with it is I can't drink coffee that it doesn't make anymore.

• 1:29:56Ben Horowitz?

  I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing.

• 1:29:58Speaker 02

  That might be. That might come out someday in the AI future.

• 1:30:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:02Speaker 02

  Two more questions. One, do you have a, is there a motto that you often come back to, find really useful and work in life?

• 1:30:09Ben Horowitz?

  The thing that I would say has had the biggest impact on me is something my father said to me years ago, which is, "Life isn't fair." And that seems like really, really simple, but I think that the thing that defeats people more than any other thing that I've seen just in life is the expectation of some fairness.

• 1:30:36Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like, it's just not fair. And there are like, all kinds of stuff that are gonna happen to you that,

• 1:30:45Ben Horowitz?

  you know, and it happens to everybody, that don't happen to other people that are completely unfair, but it doesn't matter, because that's the way it is. And as soon as you get that idea out of your mind, then you can just deal with it. Like, oh yeah, of course it's not fair, but I'm gonna, what should I do now? Which is the real question, not how do I go back and get people to be fair? Because nobody's gonna be fair. It's not fair. It's the nature of it. If you think about it for more than five seconds, you'll realize that. And I think a lot of...

• 1:31:18Ben Horowitz?

  You know, and it's as an individual, like if you want to make the world a better place, whatever, but for as an individual, do not expect anything to be fair. It'll only defeat.

• 1:31:28Speaker 02

  Final question. This comes from Shaka, actually. He gave me so many great suggestions. I had to save this one for last. Okay, so the question is, if you had to build a business curriculum from two hip hop albums and one funk album, what would they be and what?

• 1:31:44Ben Horowitz?

  I think probably Follow the Leader by Rakim. I thought that was so.

• 1:31:56Ben Horowitz?

  And, and the reason is kind of what we had kind of gotten into earlier, which is

• 1:32:06Ben Horowitz?

  leadership. So when he came out with that song, which was like, you know, maybe the greatest hip hop song I've ever written. You know, he's telling people to like, follow him, you know, follow the leader. And just to have the idea that he was the leader of the entire art form, not just, you know, his band. It is like amazing idea. And, and then the way he expressed it was incredible. And then he's got, he's got other great concepts in there that would give you like, it's hard to listen to that record and not have confidence.

• 1:32:47Ben Horowitz?

  I think from a like competitive, purely competitive standpoint, Stillmatic from Nas. I mean, that's one with Ether. That's the one with Get Yourself a Gun. That's the one with You Demand. It's kind of like all of like, the idea of competition is kind of encapsulated in that, in that album. So that, that would be the other one. And then funk. For One Nation Under a Groove, for sure. One Nation Under a Groove, because it's kind of like, this is, how do you initiate people into like, a concept or an idea? And, and you

• 1:33:31Ben Horowitz?

  write, how do you infuse them? Like, One Nation Under a Groove is all about joining the nation. And like, it's so musically interesting and kind of getting people to be part of that. That is from like. I don't, if you ask me tomorrow, I probably have three other ones.

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  Incredible. I'm going to go listen to these. Ben, final question, where how can listeners be useful to you?

• 1:33:53Ben Horowitz?

  If you get something that makes you better, please take it. If you need kind of more advice on it, let me know. But like my job is to help everybody build something great. So if you're, if you're an entrepreneur, thank you for that.

• 1:34:07Speaker 02

  Also check out Paid in Full, paidinfullfoundation.org if you want to learn more about.

• 1:34:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, definitely. We would love to have you.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  Amazing. Ben, thank you so much for being here.

• 1:34:16Ben Horowitz?

  All right. Awesome. Thank you, Lenny. Bye, everyone.

• 1:34:20Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

• 1:34:45Speaker 00

  Thanks for listening to the A16Z Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, let us know by leaving a review at ratethispodcast.com/a16z. We've got more great conversations coming your way. See you next time.

• 1:35:00Speaker 00

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