What Makes a Great Entrepreneur? | Ben Horowitz on Vintage x Vintage

a16z co-founder and General Partner Ben Horowitz joins James Norman on the inaugural episode of Vintage x Vintage for a conversation spanning entrepreneurship, investing, hip-hop, and what changes when AI makes building dramatically easier. Ben reflects on going from Netscape to becoming a first-time CEO, why every founder eventually hits a “we’re fucked, it’s over” moment, and what he learned from building a16z around the needs of entrepreneurs. He explains why great investors should look for world-class strengths rather than an absence of weaknesses, and why expanding the ways we recognize talent can raise the bar rather than lower it. They also look at the current AI cycle, why Ben believes it is bigger than the internet, how AI changes who can become a builder, and why the infrastructure beneath today’s models may need to be rebuilt from the ground up.

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

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

  I think it was midnight and my phone rings. Unknown caller. So I'm like, oh, it's Kanye. I go, yeah, what's up? And he goes, hey, Ben, I heard you're having a barbecue tomorrow. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I am. I want to record in your studio. And I'm like, yeah, I don't have a studio. Or their strengths world-class? Or are they the best in the world at something? And then you overlook everything else. That's what makes a company great. And that's what makes an entrepreneur great. Not, oh, they don't know how to do this. Or wow, they know nothing about finance. There's so many things that are wrong with every entrepreneur. Every great entrepreneur has got something like horribly wrong with them. But that's okay. You know, it's what are they truly great at? What they're great at?

• 0:43Erik Torenberg?

  What separates a great entrepreneur from everyone else? For Ben Horowitz, it isn't the absence of witnesses. It's having a strength so exceptional that everything else becomes secondary. Today's episode comes from our recommended listening series, where we feature standout conversations from people across our broader network. This one comes from Vintage and Vintage, where host James Norman sits down with A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz for the show's inaugural episode. Ben shares what he learned going from engineer to first-time CEO, how those experiences shake the founding of A16Z, and why evaluating founders means looking for world-class strengths rather than trying to find someone who checks every box.

• 1:25Erik Torenberg?

  They also get into AI and why Ben sees this moment as bigger than the internet. As the cost and difficulty of building software collapses, creativity becomes increasingly important, opening the door for people with deep knowledge of a problem to turn that knowledge into a product. And throughout the conversation, James and Ben return to a shared influence: hip-hop. From the lessons Ben took from Nas at his lowest point to why he created Paid in Full to recognize the pioneers who shaped the culture.

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Welcome to the first episode of Vintage and Vintage.

• 1:59Ben Horowitz?

  This is the first one?

• 2:00Speaker 02

  The first one.

• 2:01Ben Horowitz?

  All right. Well, that's good. We're getting off with a bang.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  Right. You know, stepping into the game. But to start the conversation is Vintage and Vintage. You are a certain vintage of entrepreneur. We also have a certain vintage.

• 2:12Ben Horowitz?

  An old vintage.

• 2:13Speaker 02

  We have a certain vintage of wine as well. So like, and all the wines are connected to like the relationships. This is Continuum, right? But it's actually like Montreux. So Robert Montreux, you know, they kind of set the tone for American wine. But by 93, though, there was like this like virus vineyard situation in Napa. And so they had to go public. Under duress, like, oh, we gotta get this money, but I keep going. Didn't turn out that well because Wall Street directors came in and like abused the name. And now you have the Robert Montreux wine that people would know today. But it kind of fell apart by 04 and the family had to pick up the pieces. But the youngest, the youngest son came along and decided to make Continuum. And he wanted to shoot for the stars, take all the learnings he had, inner workings of how to make great wine and make this. And so this was born out of the struggle.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  And similar to my guest today, did same in Silicon Valley. Set the tone for cloud computing. Had to sell the heart of the company to keep the thing going. Even after going public, stock dropped as a result and had to crawl out of that. But like, took the knowledge one had in the team and the inner workings of how the thing was managed, obsware, and you know, clawed your way back from people's like, he's, they counted them out. Nah, they're not gonna make it. It's a dot com boom, but it's like, you know, got the $1.65 billion exit. And so Continuum is special and legendary. My guest, special and legendary. But it's great because of the struggle. And so this is the hard thing about hard things in the bottle. And this is my guest, Ben Horowitz.

• 3:38Ben Horowitz?

  All right. That's a very nice introduction. Thank you, Howie.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  So.

• 3:41Ben Horowitz?

  Or so I call, I call you James. Most people know you as James. I'm talking from the New Me days.

• 3:47Speaker 02

  Right. So, and actually, hold up. Actually, take a look at the year in the wine before that.

• 3:52Ben Horowitz?

  2017.

• 3:53Speaker 02

  Okay. We did something pretty funny and crazy. We did something pretty.

• 3:56Ben Horowitz?

  Was that the CEO barbecue with Kanye?

• 3:58Speaker 02

  It was.

• 3:59Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, boy.

• 4:00Speaker 02

  It was a day in the studio with Yay.

• 4:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, that was, that was wild. So for you listeners, what happened was

• 4:10Ben Horowitz?

  we're having the CEO barbecue, which is a big event at my house and so forth. And it's like, I think it was midnight and my phone rings. And, you know, I, I heard, I guess I didn't turn off the ringer. And I look at it, unknown caller. So I'm like, oh, it's Kanye. And so I answer the phone and I go, yeah, what's up? And he goes, hey, Ben, I heard you're having a barbecue tomorrow. And I was like, yeah, yeah, I am. He's like, can I come? I was like, sure, you can come. He goes, oh, can Kim come? And I'm like, yeah, Kim can come. Of course she can go. Well, can Chris come? Yeah, Chris can come. And he goes, okay, great. And I want to record in your studio. And I'm like, yeah, I don't have a studio.

• 4:56Ben Horowitz?

  And he goes, okay. And so like, okay. Then like I wake up 6:30 in the morning, I get a call. Hey, Ben, this is Noah. I'm Kanye's engineer. He's like, I'm just calling about the specs on your studio. And I'm like, I don't have a studio, Noah. He's like, what do you mean? I have a studio. What are we gonna do? Kanye is expecting a studio. Like, we gotta have a studio. I'm like, oh, shit. So I call Chris and Nate. I'm like, who do we know who has a studio? And they're like, Howie. And I'm like, okay, well, let's call him because like Kanye's coming over. We need a studio. And so we call you, we're like, what are you doing? Howie, he's like, watching Netflix?

• 5:36Ben Horowitz?

  Okay. I was like, is that studio you have portable? And he's like, yeah, it's portable. And so, long story short, you drove the studio down to my house and we set it up in the room. And then a lot more crazy stuff happened.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Right.

• 5:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, he was playing us the Pablo album.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, we went through a lot of them. We went through, we went through Push's album. We went through all the, basically all the Wyoming stuff.

• 6:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 6:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically all of it.

• 6:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So he was, that was a.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  It was a legendary day.

• 6:06Ben Horowitz?

  Crazy thing. That was a legendary day. There were, there were a lot of beefs at that barbecue, too. There was conflict, which we could get into later. But we probably should take up the whole podcast with that.

• 6:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, that would be the hip-hop, the champs situation. Hip-hop's important. Like, we're both hip-hop heads. When did hip-hop become a thing? You know, when did it be like, oh, I can see myself in that and it's motivating me to do things? Like, how did that, how did it come, how did it come be?

• 6:31Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. So it's kind of a slow thing. So I, you know, I was probably like 12 years old when Rapper's Delight came out. That was kind of the first one that a lot of us heard. You know, if you, if you weren't in New York. I think the first one where I was really like, ooh, this is gonna be very different was when Run DMC Hard Times came out. And I was like, this has a whole nother feel to it than anything I've heard. So I was like really into it. But the thing that made me like locked into hip-hop. So I went to school in New York. I had this friend who I grew up with who had gotten shot in the face, like in like some kind of weird gun accident. And he was blind. And so, you know, I was very worried about him. We were super close.

• 7:17Ben Horowitz?

  And, you know, I call, I would call home to my mom. It's like, how's Seth doing? Is he all right? Is he gonna be okay? She's like, you know, he hasn't spoken to anybody since he's been shot. He's just, you know, sitting in the hospital. Everybody's worried he's suicidal, this and that and the other. And so I got the idea of being like a dumb 18-year-old kid. I was like, you know, hip-hop is so great. Like, it's like the most, like, you can have nothing and you'll rap about your shoes and like, my shoes are the best. And I'm like, you know, he needs that feeling. And so I would record the DJ Red Alert and Chuck Sheldon show.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  That's where all the, that's where all the good stuff was.

• 7:51Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I'd sit there on Saturday night. Everybody else would be out and I'd be just like recording. And I would send him like the tapes of the show. And then I called home to see how he's doing. And they're like, well, he's talking now, but all he'll talk about is hip-hop. And DJ Red Alert and, you know, Rock the Bells and all that. And I was like, oh, cool. So then when I went out that summer, we started a hip-hop group called the Blind and Deaf Crew. Blind and D E F. And we rapped about being blind. I wrote most of the lyrics. I wrote things like, the blind, deaf crew, you know where fly. Three of us, but we got four eyes.

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Oh, man.

• 8:34Ben Horowitz?

  You know, just talk, rapping about being blind. And so then I was very attached to it after that. You know, and it's, you know, hip-hop is very business-oriented, as you know, particularly in the early days. It was all about business.

• 8:45Speaker 02

  Right.

• 8:46Ben Horowitz?

  Strictly business.

• 8:49Ben Horowitz?

  And so, you know, when I started writing on business, so many of the ideas came from those old hip-hop songs. And so I started just, you know, putting the lyrics at the top of the post, mostly to give credit where credit was due. Because of like, you know, I hear an idea.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  This is my thought. This is my inspiration. So I'm, you know.

• 9:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, just put it out there. So like, you know, it came from, I didn't come up with this idea. It came from Rakim or it came from Rick Ross or whatever. And so then I got really associated with it and all that kind of thing.

• 9:18Speaker 02

  Okay. It was funny, though, because knowing where I'm coming from, I'm of a different, different vintage, though, right?

• 9:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  So you, it would be impossible for you to be growing up on the West Coast and be of your vintage and actually like grow up in hip-hop because it just didn't travel. There's no DSPs and stuff. So it's like, versus like, you know, I'll be six years old listening to, you know, wherever it's Hammer or whatever. I'm nine, listening to 36 Chambers. You know what I'm saying?

• 9:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So it's like, it's like a different walk.

• 9:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, no, no. It was, actually, it's so, my friend Roland Fryer, the economist at Harvard, just wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal kind of on, you know, did influence or did hip-hop had a bad influence in society? And the way he did this study, which turns out, no, it had a positive influence, was because no radio stations played it. So you could track the cohorts from the cities that had hip-hop and see how they did versus the cities that didn't have hip-hop. And it turns out the cities with hip-hop.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  The inspiration level is just like, you know, their level. I guess that's the drive.

• 10:26Speaker 02

  You're getting into college, you're doing your thing, and now like you're getting into entrepreneurship. How did we get into like, I'm gonna work at, I'm gonna work with Mark and do all these things?

• 10:35Ben Horowitz?

  I, I own in position to be an entrepreneur very easily in that, you know, by the time I was 25, I was married, I had three kids, like, so I was just trying to-

• 10:44Speaker 02

  That's normal life right there.

• 10:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know, keep the lights on. That was my main thing. And, and, you know, it's a little, you know, starting a company was a much more unusual thing in those days, you know, it's, it's kind of more systematized now. So I started as an engineer at a company called Silicon Graphics and-

• 11:02Speaker 02

  It was with Ken?

• 11:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, Ken Coleman. Yeah, yeah, Ken, Ken hired me in there. You know, I kind of learned the ropes, learned how to be an engineer, learn product management, that kind of thing. And I, I ended up going to Netscape. A lot of ex-SGI guys were there. And that's where I met Mark. And, you know, I was still just trying to, like, I was happy to be like making money and, you know, Netscape went public. I think I got a million dollars out of that, which was crazy. I couldn't even believe it. I was so rich. And-

• 11:35Speaker 02

  So you thought?

• 11:35Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, so I thought. And then, you know, once Netscape kind of got sold, Mark is like, hey, we should start another company. You know, I didn't have it cross my mind to do something like that. And I was like, well, who's gonna be the CEO? He's like you. And I'm like, alright. Alright, I'll try, you know, I said, I don't know anything about being CEO, but that's, that's kind of how I got started.

• 11:57Speaker 02

  I mean, it also actually speaks to a lot of, you know, the, the Sandoval trajectory of said company that finally gets to an opportunity. So like, the first time you really step into something, there's gonna be downs, right?

• 12:11Ben Horowitz?

  Always. Like, I don't know, anybody's who doesn't have like, not just downs, but like existential, what we call the, the whiffy moment, we're fucked, it's over. Like that, like you can't build a company without that. Like, that happens. And a lot of, like, a lot of companies fail just because the founders can't handle that moment. It's a, it's a tough moment.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's definitely, I find it to be like, this whole, and I'm, I'm new to the investment game over the past five years, but like, I do find it like, the people is everything. I'm, I'm very good at picking a company.

• 12:45Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  Alright, I feel like it's probably an evergoing evolution into like identify great people.

• 12:49Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  You know?

• 12:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, it, it's really hard because you only know so much about them. And it's a little like dating, right? They're coming, they're putting their best foot forward when they meet you. So you really have to get deep into their background. But then, like, it's also, it's one of those things where you're one person in life, and you're another person under extreme pressure. Like, those are two different cats.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, your, your, your whole chemistry starts working differently.

• 13:15Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so like, how people are gonna perform in that situation is really, you know, if you haven't seen it, you don't know what's gonna happen, to be honest with you. And I mean, this is, like, one of the reasons, you know, Elon love him or hate him, God bless him, that guy is very good under pressure.

• 13:33Speaker 02

  The man is bold.

• 13:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, like, he is, like, there's no amount of pressure where he's not gonna perform. You know, that, that is what you want. And that's, you know, that's why he's probably the greatest entrepreneur of our time.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  So when you're, when you're all the way down to extreme down, what is one, one bar that comes to mind? It was popping in your mind, but like, well, I gotta keep going?

• 13:54Ben Horowitz?

  Well, it's probably from Ether, you know, what is it? Left me for dead, stiff and rotten, the Nas line? You know, like, that's, like, that, that's the, the feeling, like, okay, when I, because you remember, Ether came out when Nas was at his lowest. He was way down. And Jay-Z was like, literally the biggest rapper in the world at that point. And he got hit with the takeover where Kanye did the beat. So like, it was that fucking, you know, like, yours, everybody was like, wow. And then Jay-Z rapped his ass off, that great fucking song, Takeover. And Nas, at the bottom, bottom, bottom that any rapper could possibly be at.

• 14:40Ben Horowitz?

  And, and he said it, you know, you left me for dead.

• 14:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:44Ben Horowitz?

  You know, and so that, that's the feeling you want. Like, now I'm gonna come out with Ether.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:49Ben Horowitz?

  When you think I'm dead, I'm gonna come out with Ether.

• 14:51Speaker 02

  Because I think the same thing. And now like, because of Kendrick, we have the evolution of Not Like Us, which is like Ether 2.0.

• 14:57Ben Horowitz?

  It is, it is. It's a little, that's a little different one to me in the way that went down. Because Kendrick, Kendrick's career was also on the down-

• 15:07Speaker 02

  Right.

• 15:08Ben Horowitz?

  During that battle. But he wasn't as far down as Nas was at the time. But Drake was like Jay-Z, there's no question. But that was more, you're taking rap in a direction I don't like.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 15:22Ben Horowitz?

  You know, so I'm gonna have to get out of my room and stop talking to myself. You know, just did a whole album of introspection. I'm gonna come out of that and I'm gonna deal with you right now. Because I don't like you. That was, that's a little different feeling for me, but I-

• 15:40Speaker 02

  It was a vibe. Alright, so we digress. Back to the tech thing that all y'all want to hear about. So build the company, sell the company. I don't know why, I mean, I don't know why nearly immediately after that, you decided to go build a venture firm and then mess around with NewMe. But like, tell me about this 2008 to 2011 time, where like, you said I'm gonna build a venture capital firm. And when you did it, it was nothing like the other stuff, really. I mean, the way you approached people, all these people running around the building, who's a partner, who's not a partner? Like, what's going on in this building? You know?

• 16:11Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, so the idea was, it kind of came out of how hard it was to build the company. And I always felt like, wow, if you're a founder and you start something, you know, you don't know how to be a CEO. You don't know how to build a company. And you kind of think, at least in those days, I thought, oh, the venture capital firm would help me with that. And they weren't really set up for that idea. They, they were kind of like, really, really good at picking entrepreneurs. They made a lot of money for their LPs.

• 16:50Ben Horowitz?

  And they were very smart guys. But, you know, to build a company, you need to feel like you can run a company. And that means you gotta be able to call important people. You've gotta be able to kind of have somebody to talk to who really knows what you're going through, who can, you know, help you with things. You need to be able to have like, turn on a recruiting army. You've gotta, you know, these days, you gotta be able to deal with like, policy issues and this kind of stuff. And so, you know, the idea behind Andreessen Horowitz was really like, wow, what if we made a better product, not for LPs, but for entrepreneurs? The first thing you have to do is like, forego like, a lot of your salary,

• 17:35Ben Horowitz?

  because you have to take the fee monies and build this platform to, you know, help entrepreneurs kind of build their company. And that was kind of the initial idea with it. And then, we always thought the thing that we could provide entrepreneurs that they would value most would be this network. And we always thought of the firm as a network. And so how does the, you know, how can you, like, if I could call anybody, if that kind of bleeds into everything you do, because now like, you feel like somebody. This was the idea behind the CEO barbecue. Oh, if I go to a barbecue, and I'm me, just like this little entrepreneur, and then I see Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Kanye West,

• 18:16Ben Horowitz?

  okay, I must be important. Like, I feel like I have a whole nother feeling about myself. And that was like, a lot of the idea of, of the firm. Because it's a network, you know, one of the things I thought, I was like, you know, like, I'm looking at all these venture capital firms, and not any of them are networked like literally into any black people. And I know that's like, like a crude way of saying it, but like, I was like, wow, that's an opportunity for me. I'm gonna fucking build that network. I'm gonna build the definitive network in Silicon Valley for like, black entrepreneurs, black entertainment people, everything. And that's gonna give me a huge advantage, because that's a whole like, important part of the world. And so that brought me to NewMe. Which was like, you know, I was looking under every rock. I mean, NewMe was definitely under a rock in that.

• 19:01Ben Horowitz?

  So this woman, Angela, ran it. And it was an accelerator for black entrepreneurs. There is a lot of talent in NewMe. So there was you, there was Chris Bennett, Chris Lyons, Nate, Nate Jones.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  Nate, Fred, Fred Hudson.

• 19:15Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah, Fred Hudson, yeah, yeah, from Pigeon Lake, yeah. A lot of talent and a lot of ambition, I would say, you know, out of NewMe. So, so that ended up being like, a really good idea, at least for me. I, I think for the firm, we got a lot of value out of it. You know, we're a major investor in Wonder School. You know, we had Chris, and Chris still works here, has done a lot of things. You know, Nate worked here for a while. All those kinds of things. So, yeah, it's been-

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, for the small investment.

• 19:42Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I went, I spoke at NewMe twice.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  Right. Aaron and Nam did do 645. Aaron came up.

• 19:48Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  Like, you know, Aaron popped up, they popped up to NewMe, like, I wanna be Ben, I wanna see what's going on. Like, you know, they started, they started their thing.

• 19:55Ben Horowitz?

  Good, I should have hired Aaron. That's the one that Chris Lyons got, but-

• 19:58Speaker 02

  Being a VC is about picking winners. Tell me something about picking winners. How do you manage emotion? How do you become great at picking winners?

• 20:05Ben Horowitz?

  It's a tricky thing, because really what ends up mattering is the entrepreneur. Like, if you just, if you had a perfect-

• 20:16Ben Horowitz?

  Rating system and you could exact go like, do you want this entrepreneur or this idea? You would take the, you'd take the entrepreneur every time. The problem is, you know, as you were saying, like, it's hard to evaluate entrepreneurs. You don't know that much about them when they come in. And you don't know how they're going to perform under pressure. And so then you need the idea to help you evaluate the entrepreneur. Like, what did they go through in their life to get to that idea? And how good an idea is it? And like, you know, how much original work did they do to get there? And that kind of thing. So like that ends up being the lens at which you see the entrepreneur.

• 20:59Ben Horowitz?

  Now, the mistake to make is like, there's something you don't like about the idea. And you pass on a great entrepreneur, like, that's a mistake. Or, you know, vice versa. You're like, this is a great entrepreneur, but you don't realize his idea is no good. So probably not as good as you think. So, so it is tricky in that sense. And then, uh, yeah, you don't know how they're going to perform under pressure. And then the other thing that like, the other trap that, uh, you know, we'll get into from time to time is, you know, we have all these great analytical people and they'll be able to figure out everything that's wrong with any idea or any company or any entrepreneur. But that's not what matters.

• 21:43Ben Horowitz?

  What matters is, are their strengths world-class? So are they the best in the world at something? And then you overlook everything else. Like, kind of going back to Elon, like, he's got some personality issues.

• 21:58Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like, he upsets people from time to time, but like, his strength is so ridiculous that you would put money on that every time. And I think you wanna, you wanna look at the magnitude of the strength. And I think that, like, every entrepreneur we see who gets to us is pretty good.

• 22:15Ben Horowitz?

  But are they, like, outstanding? Are they better than everybody else at, at this? And that's what makes a company great, and that's what makes an entrepreneur great. Not, oh, they don't know how to do this, or, wow, they know nothing about finance, or they're, um, you know, whatever, they're done with marketing, or, like, there's so many things that are wrong with every entrepreneur. Every great entrepreneur has got something, like, horribly wrong with them, but that's okay. You know, it's, what, are they truly great at what they're great at?

• 22:53Speaker 02

  When you think about, you know, picking the person and be like, well, those things, not so good, but this person's gonna make some moves. Definitely sent waves through Silicon Valley, but blowback from the culture on like, you know, the firm kind of getting behind the Trump campaign to some degree, you know?

• 23:12Speaker 02

  And so when you think about something like that, do you think about it as, well, I know something that some people don't, so this person's gonna, you know, arises the winner? Or this person is the winner, and so I'm gonna play the game with the winner? Is the former the latter? How do you think about the decision?

• 23:29Ben Horowitz?

  With the Trump, so with the Trump thing, you know, like, we try to be as apolitical as possible, but we had run into massive problem with the Biden administration on kind of two fronts. One was crypto, and then the other was AI. So on crypto, they basically, they didn't outlaw, so they didn't, they did these extra legal things. So they kicked all the crypto entrepreneurs out of the banking system. They hit them with Wells notices that were like fake lawsuits, um, you know, on things that were just undefined. And so we were trying to get them to like, can we just have some laws? Can we have some regulation?

• 24:12Ben Horowitz?

  And they blocked all of that, and they just kind of attacked the industry because they didn't want it. And so we were stuck there, but the bigger problem around that was, we didn't have a relationship with the administration. I mean, we couldn't get one. And it, it drove me crazy, uh, cause like, I mean, I called everybody I knew to try and like, can we get a meeting with, with Biden? And people call me arrogant, like, who are you to ask for a meeting with the president?

• 24:38Speaker 02

  You deserve a meeting with Biden.

• 24:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. But, you know, then I come to find out, like, so I spoke to Sundar at Google, I spoke to Dave Ricks, and Eli Lilly. Yeah. Tim Cook, nobody got a meeting with Biden, the whole four years. And then the same thing happened to us in AI, where they, they went as far as, like, the last executive order from the Biden administration was to say it's illegal to sell a GPU without prior government approval for that sale. So like, it would have literally taken us out of the AI, you know, competition at the chip level. The thing that we decide is, okay, like, we've got to have a relationship with whoever the next president. And, and at the time, we endorsed Trump on tech.

• 25:20Ben Horowitz?

  He was clearly gonna beat Biden, like, there was no question.

• 25:24Ben Horowitz?

  Then, um,

• 25:25Speaker 02

  Kamala came around.

• 25:26Ben Horowitz?

  You know, Kamala came around, and so it was like, okay, well, what if she wins? Like, we knew we weren't gonna have a relationship with Biden, so there was nothing to lose. With Kamala, you know, I had known Kamala, Kamala came to the CEO barbecue, like, she'd been to my house many times, so forth. I knew her. And I called her up and like, I actually, I wrote a tech policy for the campaign. You know, they, they didn't want to take a tech policy position, which, that made me nervous, I gotta be quite honest with you on, but, um, on that, you know, we made a donation to her, just to, so that we would have a relationship there. Anytime you're involved in politics, people are gonna be mad. They're mad at Nicki Minaj now, they're mad at Kanye, they're mad.

• 26:07Ben Horowitz?

  From my position, I have to make the world work for new tech companies like that. That is, you know, our responsibility as kind of the, the big VC.

• 26:18Speaker 02

  I mean, for me, like, probably not a decision I could make, but I'm not sitting in your position either. I also don't run a big building as a money machine. You know, there's two different, two different sides to that. Let's look at it this way. From your vintage, you come from like, real hippie, this is Silicon Valley, people's running around the streets, probably no shoes on, like, that's Silicon Valley, right?

• 26:38Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, it used to be different, yeah.

• 26:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, and so like, that Silicon Valley was like, let's call it, performatively inclusive. It was exclusive, since is why we did NuMe and all these things, like, you could be involved, but kind of not because it was a thing. But now, we're kind of in the space of performatively exclusive, but it's quite the special, it's quite the special time for it to be inclusive, because AI has commoditized the ability to build.

• 27:03Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  You know what I mean? Like, people who were otherwise not in the game can now be the expert and be the best. I mean, I refer to MIT.

• 27:11Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, so I have a little different version of the history. So.

• 27:15Speaker 02

  And you got the history, so I'm like, argue the history, so this is why we're here.

• 27:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, I think in the early days, the only people who wanted to be in tech in the eighties were like, you know, Jews, Chinese, and Indians, men. Like, there, there were just very few women who majored in computer science, who did anything like that, or, or anybody else, you know? And Ken was like, super exceptional. Tech wasn't sexy, like.

• 27:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, it wasn't built to be exclusive, but it was like, these are the people who were participating.

• 27:41Ben Horowitz?

  I know what I'm good at. I value it highly, I contest for it in an interview, I'm hiring me. Like, that's just generally how it goes. So like, once you start that way, that's how it, that's how it grows. And like, not that nobody can get in, but the people that get in are like, hyper-exceptional, like Ken. You know, like, it's not that different than hip-hop, right? Like, Eminem can get in, but that's a very high level. Yeah, that's a very fucking high level to be Eminem. I mean, like, Jesus Christ, like, that guy is, but like, if you're a mediocre white guy, like, you got no chance.

• 28:13Speaker 02

  No.

• 28:14Ben Horowitz?

  Um, and like, some of that is because, you know, you get tuned to.

• 28:17Speaker 02

  It's the media, it's the culture, like, how, how things, I always tell people this, like, I say, when I'm explaining how people are, how people self-select and how the media's shaped our worldview, I'd be like, if I come in the room dressed like this, and the next guy comes in the room with like, a pocket protector and glasses and can't talk well, who's the better developer?

• 28:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, right, exactly.

• 28:34Speaker 02

  Oh, but it's me.

• 28:34Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 02

  Right? So like, you know?

• 28:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you have to overcome that, for sure. So, so I think that, what we did is, we said, look, you're, you know you, but you don't know the skills you don't have, and you have no idea how to test for them, and you have no idea that they even exist. So like, how do you, how do we get around that? And so, you know, we created this hiring process where we have people from different backgrounds look at every job profile and go, hey, you know, like, if I was hiring that, I would look at these things. You know, you need a relationship person. Actually, how we got Chris was, um, It was really a relationship job, but the hiring manager had been an investment banker.

• 29:20Ben Horowitz?

  So he had all these investment banker criteria.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 29:23Ben Horowitz?

  And if you, anybody knows Chris Lyons knows he would flunk that test. But I was like, well, but this is a relationship job. So like, let's look for people who are like relationship people. And I was like, he is a like world-class relationship guy, like really good. And so because we hired him on that criteria, which was the right criteria for that job, that meant once he got on board, we knew why we hired him. If we had thought that we hired him for financial modeling and he was black, he would never got promoted. He's been promoted like eight times. And that's because we know what he is, right? Like, we know the special thing that he has. Philosophically, I think the right answer is you really want to widen the bar, not lower the bar, raise the bar.

• 30:08Ben Horowitz?

  You want to widen the bar so that you can see all the criteria that you would need in that job, even if you don't have it. You have to get hired on the same criteria.

• 30:15Speaker 02

  Right. I remember I went to get a job as an engineer. So like, there was a moment, I went to get a job for engineer for like a year. And I'm the only black person there. I was like, cool. I was like, all these people are talking crazy in here. This person is talking sideways to me at work. Now I understand why this doesn't work because if you don't run a process properly, you end up putting, you're not able to build a real culture. Like these people actually can't work together. They don't respect each other.

• 30:37Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, they don't know why they hired you. Yeah, it's just crazy. Well, there's a funny story that I, I had this crazy conversation with Stout. And, you know, he calls me up, he goes, Ben, I used to be president of Sony Urban Music. And I was like, yeah, Steve, you know, it's Steve, you know, he's talking loud. And I was like, I know. And he goes, yeah, but it wasn't urban music. It was black music. They made me call it urban music to not sound racist. And I was like, oh shit, that's stupid. And he's like, no, no, no, that was one of the stupid part was because we called it urban music. I wasn't allowed to market in rural areas, like all black people live in the city. I was like, that's dumb shit. And he's like, no, I don't even think you're listening very carefully. I was president of Sony Urban Music.

• 31:19Ben Horowitz?

  I had Michael Jackson, but white people don't like Michael Jackson. It wasn't fucking black music, it was music. But the D I, the, the program for it made it smaller than it was, not bigger than it was. And I was like, you know, that's what we did in Silicon Valley. We had urban HR. It's like, no, it's talent. It's not black talent, it's talent. You just have to be able to see the talent. You got to be able to listen to the music. And then now it's gone the other way, as you said, like, I agree with that. It's like, well, it's a meritocracy. Well, what does that mean? Well, I'm going to hire me. It's like, okay. And I think like, it's been a big advantage for us in venture capital. Like, I mean, you know this, like, we get to people that they're never getting to. Because we've got people who can do those things that they won't hire because they can't, not because they, it's not a racist thing, it's they can't see them.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  They can't see it.

• 32:05Ben Horowitz?

  They can't see them, they're blind, they're talent blind. And, you know, like, you know, and we're like, all of us are talent blind. That's why you need like a process and a methodology.

• 32:16Speaker 02

  To like open your aperture and stuff.

• 32:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know, Margaret, the legendary Margaret Wenmark is running marketing for us. And I was like.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  She's been around forever.

• 32:23Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, she, she's here at the beginning, right?

• 32:25Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, from the very beginning.

• 32:27Speaker 02

  I remember I met her, I was like, oh man, I need, I need someone like this one day.

• 32:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, she had all women working for her. I was like, Margaret, like, why can't any men like past year, like, what's in your profile? They can't, they can't fucking qualify for it. She's like helpfulness. It's like, she's right. And, but, you know, like that, think about that as a criteria. Like, how valuable is that in venture capital? Like, everybody wants a venture capitalist who's helpful. But I, you know, I know how to interview for that and so forth. And so like, by developing that, you know, at the time, we were, you know, predominantly men. Now, I think we're like 54% women, but we didn't have any women criteria. We just had like helpfulness as criteria. You know, these are the things that change, that make you stronger. Not like, you're not compromising, you're actually getting better by being able to see.

• 33:14Ben Horowitz?

  If you can see all the talent, like, we're all in a talent war, we're all competing for talent. If you can see more talent, you're gonna win.

• 33:21Speaker 02

  We're getting to the climax here in terms of like, all right, now we have AI. Like, I actually, I'm actually feeling a little bit of an itch, like I'm not building right now. Like, I literally can't make it through a day without generating some code to build something because.

• 33:35Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  It's crazy, right? I could be on cloud code on my phone and it's like, you know, now, now like, for instance.

• 33:41Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, I was talking to Deshawn, he became an engineer.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, no, no, no. But I told you, Sean, I was like, hey, man, you don't have to hire anybody to build this stuff. He's like, all right, I'm hopping. And now he's addicted.

• 33:51Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, he's addicted, he's out of his mind.

• 33:52Speaker 02

  Right, I got, I got an agent here, I got an agent here. I only got four people, maybe I can make it two. Like, you know, like.

• 33:58Ben Horowitz?

  He's almost like a AI fiend.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  He's an AI fiend. I think there's like, literally, I think there's going to be AI rehab at some point. Because it's like, if you right now, if you can't force, if you're not like in your bed at night, like, go to sleep, go to sleep, then you're not on it. Because like, there's so much that can be done. It's like, it's crazy. But I guess my point is that, going back to like the, the larger aperture of opportunity here, like, now, we can like open up the, the, the stratosphere for like, people who would not have been a fit before. Like, if I come to you, I've never built a product in my life, I've never worked at a tech company. Oh yeah, I worked at this oil and gas company, I really know this process works, I'm going to build this company. It'd be hard to accept that this might work. Right? But now, you could be like.

• 34:41Ben Horowitz?

  You can go from idea to company very fast.

• 34:43Speaker 02

  Right.

• 34:44Ben Horowitz?

  Without, without being able to hire, all, all the barriers that were there before, aren't there. I a hundred percent agree. I mean, like, that's why I think it's like, it's more important to get people into tech. Because they're not even getting into tech, they're, they're just getting into ideas. It's like, okay, here's, and, and this is, by the way, it's happening in every, like creativity is now the big thing.

• 35:07Speaker 02

  Creativity is the thing, like.

• 35:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, if you can use the tools, all you need to do is be creative. This opportunity is probably even bigger because, right, any idea you have, you can make.

• 35:17Speaker 02

  You can manifest.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  We both were around when the internet began, was on BBS boards and prodigy.net and all these things. I mean, like.

• 35:29Ben Horowitz?

  CompuServe, yeah.

• 35:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, all that, you know, a million little disks sitting around. You know.

• 35:37Ben Horowitz?

  AOL used to fucking send a disk to you, like you couldn't open your mail without getting an AOL address. Serial box, oh, it's AOL.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  You know, memory was.

• 35:46Ben Horowitz?

  I was expecting a toy.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  You know, memory was hard to come by back then. I used to go to the store, I used to get like a box of them and just like, can't put tissue in that? No, I can't record on that. But, uh, the internet was big. Like, I mean, that's how we both got to this conversation right here. But like, to me, it's like, this is bigger, this is like the fourth industrial revolution. Like, what's your, if people talk about.

• 36:07Ben Horowitz?

  I think it's clearly bigger than the internet.

• 36:09Speaker 02

  People talk about it like, it's a sector, like, we're talking about, oh, it's a bubble, like crypto. I'm like, crypto is a thing, it's a conduit, but like, it ain't AI.

• 36:19Ben Horowitz?

  You know, AI is a new computer.

• 36:20Speaker 02

  Right.

• 36:21Ben Horowitz?

  Like, it's a, it's, it's like the reinvention of the computer. Imagine the entire computer industry got invented, but instead of it developing over 80 years, it developed over two years. And then like, that's AI, and then it's more powerful on top of that. Anything you think you can solve, you can solve. You know, we've already seen it, like, people are taking it so for granted because they're so worried about like, uh, Skynet or whatever. But traffic deaths, huge problem, solved with Waymo. You know, cancer, we're solving that for sure. Any idea, any like major problem, like, is getting figured out with AI right now. Like, it is wild.

• 37:06Ben Horowitz?

  So, like, as an entrepreneur, it's like, just find a problem. You know, and you can go like solve it and people will be like fired up and willing to pay you. And you've got a business. I mean, it is, it is like that powerful.

• 37:20Speaker 02

  So you've been through a bubble, like a real bubble. You know, there's money going out here that ain't coming back to people. Like, where, where, where is the bubble-esque part of this? I don't be concerned with it, but where is, for everybody who's talking about a bubble, where's the bubble component to this?

• 37:33Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I mean, you gotta remember, right, oh, the internet bubble, well, like, the internet's here. It's kind of important, could have made a lot of money on it. Look, where bubbles come from and where the internet bubble came from is like, there's technology and how that advances, and then there's consumer adoption, and that's like, goes more in fits and starts. And then there's investor sentiment.

• 37:58Speaker 02

  Right.

• 37:59Ben Horowitz?

  And investors are like manic depressive. They get overexcited and then they get totally depressed.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  It's never going to work.

• 38:06Ben Horowitz?

  And they'll actually, so there, there's a, a kind of an opposite of the bubble going on right now, I think, a little bit in, uh, with investors. But in the internet time, what happened was, um, investors were like, the internet, it's the biggest thing ever. I'm putting all my money on it and it's never going to go down in price. Okay, the problem was, the time they decided to do that, there was like. Fifty or sixty million people on the internet. Half of them were on dial-up. It was very expensive to build these things. There wasn't a big enough market to make money in selling a lot of the ideas that people had. So like, the thing crashed down.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  I mean, arguably, right now, though, like, ChatGPT ain't making no money. These guys are like, Jimmy and I, they give it away, ChatGPT, they give it away for free. How can we catch up with Anthropic? Like, just keep running this computer, like.

• 38:53Ben Horowitz?

  Well, kind of. OpenAI went like zero to twenty billion dollars since November twenty twenty-two.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 38:59Ben Horowitz?

  So like that, and by the way, the, you know, the price of a token is dropping like a hundredfold a year.

• 39:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, wait for that crossover.

• 39:06Ben Horowitz?

  Look, consumer adoption is going faster than anything we've ever seen. The technology works and is advancing as fast as everything we've seen.

• 39:16Ben Horowitz?

  And are people gonna get, because we're so early in the cycle, there are companies that are in a good position now that there will be a technological change and they'll get wiped out. But that's not really a bubble to me. That's just like investing. That's just how it goes.

• 39:30Speaker 02

  That's part of the times.

• 39:31Ben Horowitz?

  People were trying to say, oh, the demand for Nvidia chips is artificial. They, you know, they're just investing in companies. And that's where, like, the demand for Nvidia chips right now is just unlimited. Like, they can't make enough chips. Like, that is actually true. And so that, a lot of the narratives around the AI bubble, I just think, aren't correct. Now, will we hit a bubble at some point? Yeah, quite possibly. I mean, look, we had a bandwidth bubble, a bandwidth bubble in two thousand and one. We had too much bandwidth. Like, how could that even be possible? Like, we're at the beginning days of the internet. How could you have too much bandwidth? Well, the bottleneck moved, right? Like, we had a bandwidth bottleneck, and then that became like, oh, the servers weren't good enough. We couldn't even put the bits on fast enough, you know, to serve the video.

• 40:16Ben Horowitz?

  We quite possibly could have a temporary glut in GPUs if we, like, don't have enough power or, like, you know, or cooling or whatever. Like, that's obviously possible. So the big thing that's different about AI is, in my generation, and in every generation, you could not throw money at a problem, right? Like, if I wanna catch you in your company, and I said, I'm gonna hire a thousand engineers tomorrow now, I have data, and I buy enough GPUs, like, I can solve shit. And the greatest example to me is, right, like, OpenAI got to ten billion in revenue, and Elon started a cult.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:57Ben Horowitz?

  And he, like, you know, he's almost at product parity with them, you know, in like, a couple of years.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  This is an important position, though. So how does this change how you choose what you're investing? The world, to me, they've seen the change happen, but they're not changing the way they're thinking around like, this is the deal I should do, this is the person I should back. You have to reshape how you think about investing in a company.

• 41:21Ben Horowitz?

  It's hard to calculate. So there's ones that you wouldn't expect to sustain that do. So like, one of my favorite examples is Eleven Labs.

• 41:30Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, those guys.

• 41:31Ben Horowitz?

  Eleven Labs, okay. Of all the things, if you rewind back to when we made the first investment, that you would go, okay, they're probably vulnerable to the big guys, is, well, the big guys aren't gonna be able to make their models talk. Really?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  They will be able to.

• 41:46Ben Horowitz?

  Of course they'll be able to make their models talk. But it turns out that Eleven Labs, a very, very clever company, one, they got in the developer stack. They built a better product for developers. So what does that do? Well, they've got a built-in set of customers, and then they're in the data feedback loop. Oh, they're getting every, you know, voice case and so forth, and they're training their model on better proprietary, like, real-world in-use data. Then they built the product kind of subtleties around it. So, oh, yours can talk, but I can talk in Spanish, exactly like I'm talking in English,

• 42:28Ben Horowitz?

  with the exact intonations, laughing in the right way, everything perfectly. Oh, guess what? I got the Netflix deal. I get the Televisa deal.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Now I got more.

• 42:38Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like, and now I've got more feedback. And I'm, so I'm kind of building up a voice product that's very, very special. And that, yeah, you could throw more GPUs at yours, but you may not be able to do the things I do, because I've got better data. I've got, you know, like, I've got a model that's really tuned to the use cases that have value, as opposed to like every damn thing that everybody wants to do. And so like, there are things like that. On the other hand, you know, like, every, every software company, SaaS company in the world, it's like, is trading at a very low multiple right now, because there's a real belief that, hey,

• 43:20Ben Horowitz?

  even as a customer, I can rewrite.

• 43:22Speaker 02

  No, no, no, this is real life. I was like, you know, you know what happened? I got in Claude Code, right? This must have been a year ago. I got in Claude Code. I was, I'd already been in Cursor, you know, I'd already been, you know, before that, I'm copying from ChatGPT. So I got in Claude Code, and I was like, this goes crazy. I'm never gonna look at code again. And then the next day, I was like, cancel HubSpot. I'm building my own CRM. Like, I was like, like, this thing sucks. Like, I want it to work for me.

• 43:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:46Speaker 02

  I could just build my own. One week later, got my own CRM.

• 43:50Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 43:51Speaker 02

  Affinity, cancel. Got my own fundraising platform. Like, why, like, you have to build something that is very special for me to be like, I'm not gonna build it myself. And right now, obviously, that's unique to engineers or like, you know, product-oriented people. But like, the time may come where you're on a website, and you're like, I don't want it this way. Can I have it this way?

• 44:11Ben Horowitz?

  So I think the world, or at least Wall Street, is anticipating that a lot. Now, look, there are other things that those companies have, and, you know, for, you're building something for you. Like, if it's for, at the individual level, probably a little different than, you know, American Airlines running whatever SAP or something. Like, that's a little harder to figure out what the hell that is.

• 44:35Ben Horowitz?

  And then, you know, they've got data and, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But still, yet and still, like, that's a real thing where you can chase, you by using GPUs that you don't even own, that Anthropic owns, can chase down HubSpot for your use case like that.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 44:52Ben Horowitz?

  Like that, you wouldn't even consider doing that.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  No, it wasn't even a consideration. But now, I, it's reverse. When I look at buying some software, I'm like, is this really worth four hundred dollars a month? Or should I spend four days and just have my own? You know, like, there's a reverse consideration.

• 45:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 45:11Speaker 02

  Cheers, sir.

• 45:15Speaker 02

  I'm gonna actually bring out my paper for my signature question. I wanna get my signature questions right. All right, this is about legacy.

• 45:23Speaker 02

  When the next vintage of VCs talk about Ben Horowitz, what do you want them to say? What's your mark on the game?

• 45:35Ben Horowitz?

  That's something I really don't think, Mike Tyson had a great question on legacy. He's like, what are you talking about? I'm just gonna be dust, dirt.

• 45:44Ben Horowitz?

  It's a crazy question. I don't think about that.

• 45:48Ben Horowitz?

  I, you know, for me, like, I hope that people feel like I moved the culture of investing to a better place, to one that's more about helping people build companies than, you know, just make money. So that would be, that'd be my hope.

• 46:09Speaker 02

  Okay, so, before we finish up that question, and I was talking about VC, think about Ben as the human. Because, because, because your name's on the firm, they made you have your name on the firm. Like, you know, you have this direct association all the time. Me as a, you know, Ben as a human, when you leave, it's like, you, what makes you feel accomplished? What makes you feel like, oh, I did my thing?

• 46:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, I mean, you know, I really feel like it's the, you know, the people who work here, like, going back to the NFL analogy, you know, the coaching tree idea and that kind of thing. Like, I mean, to me, you know, how many, you know, who are the great people who worked here? And then, like, did they become better people while they were here? And like, that's the main thing on the business front. You know, I think, you know, on the personal, personal front, like, Paid in Full, to me, is really, really important. And I intimidate everybody into coming, as you know. Thank you for your, for your contributions.

• 47:12Ben Horowitz?

  You know, if we forget the people who kind of sacrificed their lives to inspire us,

• 47:22Ben Horowitz?

  then, you know, you get into a very nihilistic existence. We're gonna make those guys feel as important as they should feel. And then, in return, like, we just get so much more meaning out of who we are. And so that's, you know, that's, that's super important to me.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, you know, as that can grow, that can become, you know, the SAG, the Pension Plan, the, you know, the base of, you know, hip-hop continues. I think it's a, I think it's an important thing that probably should've been done a long time ago. People were too busy talking about urban radio.

• 48:00Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, you know, like, it's, it's so funny how many, like, one of the things that got me to start Paid in Full is so many, like, podcasts and this and that thing. Somebody ought to do something about this.

• 48:10Speaker 02

  Someone should give them their flowers before they're gone.

• 48:12Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  It's like, well, let me go back to my back.

• 48:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Like, so I was just like, oh, why don't I just do it? And, you know, like I said, I get way more out of it, I think, than, than everybody. So, you know, it's an easy thing to do in that sense.

• 48:29Speaker 02

  What's something that, you know, you think's gonna happen, you know, in the next, say, eight to twelve months as a result with, you know, the current landscape within technology?

• 48:40Ben Horowitz?

  So I think the infrastructure for AI is just, out of date is not strong enough. It's just like wrong. And it is very reminiscent to me of the infrastructure for cloud computing being wrong. Like, everybody in the beginning of cloud computing is like, oh, we'll just take, you know, our software. We'll put it in the cloud, we'll put it on the other side of the wire, and then that'll work. But, you know, it didn't work at all. And eventually, we rebuilt everything from storage to networking to, you know, the way operating systems work and virtualization and, you know, containers and this and that and the other. And like, you know, the whole thing got reconstructed.

• 49:22Ben Horowitz?

  If you look at AI, I mean, just, just start with the workload, right? So somebody makes a database query, you kind of know what that is. Somebody makes an AI query, like, that thing could run for a week. I mean, who knows what, like, you know, so like, what is the underlying set of systems that handles those requests, that manages that correctly and so forth? Like, it doesn't exist yet. If you look at, I mean, Nvidia, God bless them, but like, you know, you wanna talk about a power-hungry, low-yield, you know, chip built for something entirely different.

• 49:53Speaker 02

  For playing video games.

• 49:54Ben Horowitz?

  For playing video games. And, and, you know, is, now that we know, like, a fair amount about the models, is that the right answer? Probably not. Then the models themselves, like, in these models, you literally have to suck down all the data on the internet to get them trained.

• 50:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:09Ben Horowitz?

  Like, that seems like a lot of training. Is that gonna be where we end? So I think that the, you know, from the model on down, everything's gonna change. And there's gonna be a lot of opportunity in that.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  All right, man. Well, thanks for joining us.

• 50:23Ben Horowitz?

  All right, no, no, great, great to be here. Like, great to kick it off.

• 50:27Speaker 02

  Yeah, for sure, man. No, it's gonna be, it's gonna be a great series. Appreciate you kicking it off for me.

• 50:30Ben Horowitz?

  Yes, sir. All right.

• 50:35Erik Torenberg?

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

• 51:19Erik Torenberg?

  A16Z, or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.