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The a16z Show
How To Lead | Ben Horowitz on My First Million
01:10:40
A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz joins Shaan Puri and Sam Parr on My First Million to talk about how to be a great leader.
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- [00:01]
Ben Horowitz
You kind of strive to get to a point of honesty, true honesty, where you're not lying to yourself. That's hard. To show you what a great CEO he ended up being, he created this two month boot camp for everybody in product management. Every engineer who entered Facebook had to go through this thing, learn everything and so forth. He's like a phenomenal student of management. I see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is going to be fair. Like nothing about life is fair. And so. So the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation.
- [00:37]
Podcast Host (A16Z Intro)
Today's episode is a bit different. A16C co founder Ben Horowitz recently went on the My First Million podcast, and we found the conversation so valuable, we wanted to share it here with you. You'll hear Ben get into how he thinks about wartime versus peacetime leadership, building culture, and making hard calls as a founder. We hope you enjoyed the episode as much as we did.
- [00:59]
Sean
All right, today we're hanging out with Ben Horowitz, the co founder of A16Z. These guys manage 46 billion in assets. They've invested in Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI, a bunch of the big hit tech companies. But today we're talking about stuff that you don't usually get to hear from Ben. So things like how do you actually have a high confrontation conversation? The advice he actually gives his founders. Things like when he met Mark Zuckerberg and he was really young, what he noticed about Mark, that was different. And what makes him such a great CEO that you can kind of steal or copy from Mark Zuckerberg's playbook. Sam, what else have we got, dude?
- [01:29]
Sam
We also just hung out with him, which was like, the best part. And so he tells the story about how he helped catch Tupac's killer. And we also asked him what interests him right now. What books is he reading? What content is he consuming? What rabbit holes is he going down? And it was incredibly interesting.
- [01:44]
Sean
Awesome conversation with Ben Horwitz. Enjoy.
- [01:52]
Ben Horowitz
Okay, so I have a good Tupac story for you.
- [01:55]
Sam
Oh, my gosh. All right. I'm incredibly excited to hear it.
- [01:58]
Ben Horowitz
So my wife is like the biggest Las Vegas evangelist in the world, and she was talking to Quincy Jones's son, QD3, and said, you know, you need to move to Vegas. And he's like, fuck that. I'll never move to Vegas. They didn't solve the Tupac murder.
- [02:17]
Sam
Yeah.
- [02:17]
Ben Horowitz
You know, his sister Kidada was dating Tupac. I was like, let's have dinner with the Vegas PD and see what happened. And so me and QD3 and Nas sit down to dinner with the Las Vegas Police Department, and they bring the whole case file. And it turns out the LAPD really filed the case. Like, almost on purpose, it looks like. So the end of the dinner, I say to the Chief of Police, Mike Gennaro. I'm like, mike, you ought to reopen the Tupac case. And he goes, I'll talk to the sheriff. And next day, I call him. I said, what did the sheriff say? He said, if Ben wants us to open the case, we're opening the case. And they reopen the Tupac case, and they caught the guy.
- [02:59]
Sam
That's insane. So, Sean, like, I don't know Sean, if you know the story, but, like, basically, like, you know, Pac and Suge got in a fight at a. At a Tyson. Mike Tyson fight. And then, like, 30 or 40 minutes later, he was shot right in the Strip on Las Vegas. And it was a cold case for years, but everyone knew who did it. They knew it was this guy named Orlando Anderson. Like, that was, like, the rumor.
- [03:20]
Ben Horowitz
Orlando pulled the trigger. Keefe D told him to shoot him.
- [03:23]
Sam
And, like, everyone knew this, but for some reason, like, it didn't happen. And Orlando ended up dying a handful of years later. And what the craziest thing ever is, there's this guy named DJ Vlad who does these interviews with all these gangsters, and he got him to, like, tell the story about the murder. And this idiot, like, went on a podcast that just said, yeah, here's what happened.
- [03:45]
Ben Horowitz
So here's why he did that. He thought he had immunity because the LAPD proffered him, which means basically, in exchange for testimony, we grant you immunity. But they granted him immunity in la, not in Vegas. What immunity in Vegas pd where life. Oh, that doesn't count here.
- [04:03]
Sam
And then little do we know that Ben's behind the scenes getting it all done. That's pretty awesome. I filed that case religiously. I thought it was riveting. I did not know that you were involved. That's pretty cool.
- [04:14]
Sean
All right, well, I don't know where we want to start, but I just thought, you know, usually, Ben, you don't know this, but we have a little tradition here. We. We like to typically start with our intro music, but for some reason, it's not playing. I'm trying to get this cassette to play, but it's just not playing. What are we looking at here?
- [04:32]
Ben Horowitz
Oh, boy. That is. That's the Blind and Deaf crew. So my friend Seth Clark, this was back in 87 or 88 or maybe 86. Got. Got shot and was blind. So we formed a rap group called the Blind and Deaf Crew Def. And you know, we had all kinds of grimes about being blind and being deaf.
- [04:56]
Sean
You know, I have one here, it's.
- [04:58]
Ben Horowitz
Like the Blind Deaf Crew. You Nowhere Fly. Three of us, but we got four eyes, you know, like that type of, you know.
- [05:07]
Sam
Where did you grow? I mean, like your dad was like a. I know who your dad is. And he was like, he was like a well known academic. But where were you growing up? Where you were around guys who got shot and rapping.
- [05:18]
Ben Horowitz
Well, so I grew up in Berkeley, California, which, you know, kind of is either like an academic town or part of Oakland, depending on, you know, where you are. And I was in the kind of more part of Oakland, Berkeley. And then, you know, I went to school in New York and so I got into rap in New York and then Seth got shot back in the Bay Area and he was very, very depressed because he's blind. He was only. He's a kid, you know, So I sent him these. DJ Red Alert, check Chill Out Mixtapes, you know, were tapes that I taped off the radio show, which had the brand new hip hop, which was, you know, really new at the time. And that kind of cheered him up. And so that's how we got into rap. When we came around, we didn't succeed, but we tried real hard.
- [06:08]
Sean
Well, we wanted to just hang out with you because there's. You'll do. You've done 50,000 podcasts. I think a16z now has 50,000 podcasts. And so.
- [06:16]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [06:17]
Sean
You know, I could sit here and be like, hey, is AI a bubble?
- [06:19]
Ben Horowitz
Right?
- [06:19]
Sean
Like, we can kind of do that. And we'll probably ask you something about AI. But I think more than anything, what we try to do on the podcast is give people a sense of what it's like to hang out with Ben Horowitz. Right? Like, what is it? If they could just be a fly on the wall hanging out? And obviously we come from a business and tech background, so we got a bunch of questions around that. But I think for me and Sam, the most interesting part that I feel like you've. You've contributed to the collective wisdom of founders. Right? Is your stuff on leadership. So you've written two books, I feel like, that are really, I don't know, like top shelf on how to be a leader. And I think it started with a general philosophy.
- [06:54]
Ben Horowitz
So.
- [06:54]
Sean
So tell me why Most management books are terrible. Let's start with that.
- [06:58]
Ben Horowitz
You know, the problem with management generally, I would say, is it's very kind of situational and emotional. And so it's like, oh, here's a book to teach you how to play NFL quarterback. And you could read that 20 times. You go out on the field, like, things are extremely different. If there's a 290 pound guy running at you extremely, very fast, I'm going to kill you. Like, what you feel, like what you think, how you process that is just different. And I think management tends to be like that in that it really has to do a lot with your situation and the feeling you have at the time it happens. And so these management books are written like it's some step by step, you know, like, you know, anybody with a basic like 8th grade education can understand the principles of management. They're not that complicated.
- [07:51]
Sean
It's a cookbook and you could just follow the rest.
- [07:52]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. And it's like, oh, here are the five steps for building a strategy or the three steps for like, you know, setting objectives. It's not actually very useful at all because, you know, that stuff is so simple. So I always thought like, well, the difficult thing, you know, you're either going to like run the risk of running completely out of money if you don't fire half the company, but like, you don't want to have that conversation because you promised all these guys that the company was going to be success when you hired them. So like, the level of inconsistency that you're going to have to go through, the level of like, you know, I was completely wrong about everything and now I'm going to fire half of you because of the mistakes I made will just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself. And like, how do you get over that? And then like, what do you actually say and how do these conversations work? And all this kind of thing is the actual thing that people need to really kind of get an understanding of, like what are the words, you know, that get me out of this thing, at least temporarily. And you know, nobody had been writing like that. The last guy who kind of I thought wrote a book like that was Andy Grove back when he wrote High Output Management. And you know, that book was really old at the time, so I was like, well, somebody ought to write the sequel. You know, we're now, it's been 30 years.
- [09:14]
Sam
Do you think that it's like when it comes to leading, do you think that it's mostly just getting your mindset right? I mean, Is that what you're saying? Where it's like, no, no, no, it's.
- [09:22]
Ben Horowitz
More, it's more complicated than that. You kind of strive to get to a point of honesty, like true honesty, where you're actually being true. Like you're not lying to yourself. That's hard, you know that it's almost like, you know, like if you're, you guys are kind of creatives on the pod, but like to be like a great creative at some point you have to get all the way to that very vulnerable point where you've exposed yourself and all your issues and weaknesses and everything. And leadership is a little bit like that. And that you're kind of pushing and pushing and pushing to get all the way to what's true. So that's, you know, that's part of the process. But the other thing is just, you know, you don't really necessarily completely know what you're doing, particularly when you start and you're building a company. And so you have to kind of have, like, it's a confidence game where you have to talk yourself into, okay, you know, like, I, I think I know enough, you know, to do this. And you know, it can be very little things. Like, I had a conversation with an entrepreneur. He's like, ben, like, I need your help. And I was like, why do you need my help? He says, my CTO is an. And I said, well, okay, but you know, like, he's a good cto. I know that from talking to you before. So you're, you're not even asking me, should you fire him, are you? And he's like, no, I'm not asking you that. And I said, well, tell me why he's an asshole and maybe I can help. And he goes, well, you know, he made like a young woman in our, on our finance team cry yesterday. And I was like, okay, yeah, that's kind of mean spirited for a CTO to do that. And I said, well, you know, so you're really kind of asking me, like, not how to fire him, but just how to have a conversation with him about his behavior without him Quick, that's what you're saying? And he's like, yeah. And I said, well, look, here's what I would say to him. I would say, hey, you know, you're a fantastic director of engineering, but you're not an effective cto. And, you know, if you want to be a director of engineering forever, like, we can just run just like this and it's no problem. You do a great job of managing your team, you get stuff done on time, you're great, but you're not effective with the rest of the organization. And that's what a cto is. The CTO's got to marshal the resources of the whole company to get what he needs to get the job done. And if you go to, like, a junior person, you're like five levels below you and make her cry, you know, you're probably right, but, like, you're never going to get what you want out of her. So, like, you can't be effective with her. Like, how are you going to be effective with, like, execs? So if you want to learn how to do that, like, let's learn how to do that. But, you know, and if not, no problem. But just know at some point I gotta bring in the cto. That's the way I would have the conversation with him. And that kind of got him to went, okay, now I can talk to him. And so, so much of, like, the mistakes that CEOs make are like, they just don't even know how to have the conversation. And so it's, it's a little bit like the mindset part is correct in that there is a, like a confidence part about it where you have to be able to kind of do things when you're not sure that you're right. But there's techniques and there's ideas and there's things in there that, you know, it's just harder than it looks. And the problem is the mistakes. Like, not talking to him is going to multiply, right? Like, because now you're going to isolate engineering and nobody's going to like them. And you're going to have politics in the company. And like, and, and, and, and, and then pretty soon people just don't even want to work there. And you have high attrition. And then you know, well, why the fuck do we have high attrition and this and that and the other, and then the board's all upset and this. So it kind of snowballs on you if you can't deal with these things.
- [13:04]
Sam
Man, this is so cool, because I just read this book called the Motive. And the whole book is how to have a conversation like that. So basically, like, someone shows it and it's like small stuff. So it's like someone shows up too late for a meeting, they're not prepared. They made someone cry. And I remember reading this and I was like, I don't want to talk about this on the pod maybe because I think I feel stupid that I'm Having to learn, like, a script on how to, like. And then I hear you talking about this, and I'm like, yeah, all right. I feel a little bit better because. Why? Why is this conversation hard for me? I feel like this should be easy. I don't know what to say. I literally don't know what words to use for this to be the effective confrontation. And so I had to read a book. And so it's actually really cool to hear you describe that other people. I think you even said, I saw an other interview about Zuck, and I think you referenced Sam Altman. You're like, I've seen inside these companies, they all face these, like, challenging situations, but they just don't know how to, like, communicate.
- [13:51]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, no. People get sucked and, you know, like, no. Nobody there. There's no way to learn, like, how to be CEO of, like, a big company without kind of being CEO. And so you found a company and it starts growing, and you don't know what you're doing, and you make mistakes, and it's very scary. And, you know, it's easy to lose your confidence. And if you lose your confidence, you hesitate. And if you hesitate as CEO, then somebody's gotta step into that vacuum, and then that's when it becomes very, like, political and dysfunctional.
- [14:25]
Sean
You've said before, like, having confrontation the right way is super important. And I nodded my head, and then I was like, cool. I really don't know how to do that, though. So, okay, so what is the right way to have confrontation?
- [14:40]
Ben Horowitz
And it's complicated, but, like, the first thing is you gotta stop thinking about yourself. Right? So, you know, and it could be anything. It could be, like firing somebody or getting them to change their behavior or whatever. You're going to be saying something that they don't want to hear. And so I think people get caught up in, well, either I need to be a tough guy, or I need them to like me, or, you know, some other thing that's about you. But really, you have to go, okay, what am I going to say to them that isolates it to this thing that I'm really talking about, you know, so if I need them to change this behavior, like, how do I get them to hear that in a way they can actually act on it without getting in their feelings? And, you know, in order to do that, you just have to be, like, very straightforward, and you have to be open with how you feel about. Like, if you think they're a shitbird, then you're probably going to have to fire them. Anyway, but if you think they're otherwise good, then you kind of have to let them know that, but in a way where you're not clearly setting them up, you know, you're not giving them a shit sandwich. You're a greatest person in the world, but this is all fucked up and I love you. Like that, that, like, people are onto that. Like, that it's just too simple. So you kind of have to, you know, you have to get to a very honest place with them and say, look, you know, we're working together on this. You're doing this. It's not working. It's not effective. And, you know, like, I can help you get to it to be effective, but I need you to get it to be effective. Like, you have to get that message across. And a lot of it, you know, like, people will accept things from you if they feel like you're basically telling them the truth. Like, you're. I'm, like, completely open and honest about this shit. Like, I'm not, I'm not telling you it's worse than it is. And I'm not telling you it's better than it is. I'm telling you what it is. And, and this is, you know, when I said earlier about, like, a lot of leadership is getting all the way to the truth. You have to sit with yourself and say, like, what do I really think about this? Like, not what, like, motherfuckers were complaining about him or this happened, or, you know, like, it hurt my feelings the way, like, this went down. Like, he's doing that in my company. You kind of have to get beyond that and go, like, what's really true? Why did they do it? You know, can it be corrected? If it can be corrected, what would motivate them to correct it? Like, you, you have to get all the way to, to that. Otherwise what happens is, you know, they're just going to get upset and defensive or like, you know, they're not going to hear it because it's too soft. And it's like, well, yeah, like, Ben kind of doesn't like that, but he doesn't really care. So, you know, how do you get into that, like, meaningful place where people can hear what you're talking about?
- [17:39]
Sean
And you've invested in and known for a long time a lot of the tech, the biggest tech CEOs, and I would say the stereotype of the most successful tech founders is this sort of like slightly autistic, very high iq, lower EQ sort of Persona. But that's not really what would Be good at the thing you're talking about. And so is it that that stereotype is just wrong? And that's not what you've seen when you've kind of been, you guys, I think, invested in Facebook early on, stuff like that. Like, is it that the stereotype is wrong? Is it that they learned these things? Is there like some. Are they taking touchy feely at Stanford? Like, what's helping them be able to do this?
- [18:15]
Ben Horowitz
Yes, I think some of these guys have like, much higher people understanding than you might think. Like the ones who truly, like, can't read people and understand people don't get, like, they don't become Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg, like his mom, by the way, is like a psychiatrist or a psychologist. And like, he's actually pretty insightful. And you can see it like in the deals he's negotiated, the moves he's made. You know, guys who are processing information at that rate of speed. You know, it's a little weird. Like, you always feel like, okay, what the fuck is wrong with my clock? Like, this guy's thinking faster than me. But so my very first conversation I had with Zachist, I think in 2007, and you know, at that time, if you guys recall, you know, the Facebook traffic had flattened and the current, the executive staff that he had at the time was trying to run a coup to force him to sell to Yahoo. So they, they were leaking all this stuff to Bally Wag at the time, and Valleywag was, you know, calling for Zach to be fired. And, you know, that whole stupidness and.
- [19:25]
Sam
That was like that famous story where you like, didn't sell, right?
- [19:28]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, yeah, I meant he didn't sell. But, you know, right at that time, you know, his first question to me was, you know, should I, if I fired my executive team for the second time, would the board be nervous? I was like, well, you know, it's not, that's not even the question mark because, you know, if you're asking that question, then, you know, you kind of have to do it because you, you can't succeed with them. So, you know, whether or not you can see succeed without them is like at least a question mark. Lets you know you're going to die with them. And I said, but like, you know, like, let's talk about like, why they're. They're doing this. You know, like, why has traffic been flat? And he said, well, it said, look, we doubled the size of the engineering team this year. We went from 400 to 800 engineers and we had, you know, the way the product is architected, we had like a MySQL layer and then an API and then the applications are built on the API. But a lot of the new engineers just wrote straight to MySQL and they like worked up the whole thing. And now it takes like 10 seconds to log in. And so traffic flattened because of that. And I was like, well, how do you train these guys? And he said, train these guys? And I never forget that. And I was like, oh, shit. I said, zach, like when, when you're 10 people, there's no knowledge in the company. Like, everybody just comes on and they jump in and they start working and so forth. But you get to like 800 people, a thousand people. Like, do you have a lot of knowledge that's in your company about, like, how the product works, how you check and code everything? You actually have to teach people that because they don't know who to ask or how to learn that on their own. And so you have to do that and like, just, you know, to show you what a, like, great CEO he ended up being, he created this two month boot camp for like everybody in product management. Every engineer who entered Facebook had to go through this thing, learn everything and so forth. So he was like, he, you know, like, he's like a phenomenal student of management, you know, before he became like, you know, now he's one. Call him a student. He's a great CEO, but like a lot of these guys, you know, can figure out the people part pretty fast, I would say. And like I said, the ones who truly don't understand people are, don't actually turn out to be good CEOs. Like, they don't get to that level. Like, you can, you know, you can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zucker so forth, but they are actually very smart about people, all three of them.
- [22:04]
Sean
You, you have these great stories. That's a great story. One, I think that's in your new book is a story that I feel like is relevant to kind of any business size. So some of these, it's like, oh, well, my company's never going to be 20,000 people. So like, I don't really, I can't really relate to this. But one, I thought it was about collection, it was about collecting money, which I think is a, you know, whether you're like an accountant and you have to do this for your clients, your 10 clients, or you're a big business. And I think it's the CEO of Nation Nation Builder. Yeah. Can you tell this story? I thought this was a phenomenal story.
- [22:36]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. So you know, then they're, they're kind of, we're living on the edge, you know, they need every kind of thing collected possible. And you know, she was just like, you know, cash collections would just be, you know, and there were all this dumb stuff that would happen, like they sent out the wrong kind of email or this and that and you know, they didn't get the thing and so forth. And I said, you know, I learned this technique actually from Andy, Andy Grove, where like if a project was off track, he would just go, okay, 8am Every day we're going to meet on it and I'm going to be in the meeting and I'm going to want answers. And what that meeting actually turns into is, you know, every dumb thing going on you can just resolve very, very fast because people don't know who to ask how to resolve it, you know, whether it's a problem and so forth. So I said, leah, just like every day, 8am, get everybody in the cash collection team together and start the meeting by saying like, where's my money? Like, why haven't we collected it? And like make them explain to you why they haven't collected it and you'll be shocked at why they haven't collected it. And sure enough, you know, it's like, well, we didn't know we could edit the email. It's just like you didn't know you could edit the email? Like, but, but it's, you know, those kinds of things start popping up. Oh, I didn't know that I could do this because this is what we ought to be doing, but we're not doing it because I don't think I'm allowed to do it. And it's like, well no, I'm the CEO, you're allowed to do it. And then that can unstick a like dumb project that's way off track or a process that's off track or so forth. So it's kind of like a different idea about management where you know the enemy as you grow, like communication becomes your biggest challenge. And so it's just a way to go like, okay, I'm going to manually unscalably fix communication in this organization right now. And the amazing thing about it is, does tend to be very long lasting where like once they get that then you know, it sustains.
- [24:49]
Sean
I had a experience with a founder. You invested in that. Do you, do you know Suli Ali? He's one of my good buddies and you guys invest in Tiny?
- [24:57]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [25:00]
Sean
He does this exact thing. The founder emailed us and was like, hey, would. You know we're gonna start raising money. You know, we really need to raise money, so it's important. And I would just love to pick your brain on what it was like a very, like, yeah, can I pick your brain? Would you like to go get coffee for this? My house is on fire. And we were like, wait, wait. Just to clarify, is the house on fire? He's like, yeah, yeah, the house is on fire. So we said, okay, well, let's meet, like, now. Why are you emailing me? Let's just talk right now. And so he jumps on the call and like, okay, what do you have so far? You know, let's raise the money. And he's like, here's the pitch deck. And basically in the first 30 minutes, we just gave him like, hey, here's three things. Let's go. Like, these are the three most important things. You got to change this is. This part of the story's broken. You're missing this information, and you know you're not. You're framing it the wrong way. You got to frame it this way. And he's like, okay, this is so helpful. Wow, thank you guys. Would love to touch base again next week. And Sully was like, next week? How long do you think it'll take you to make those three changes? He's like, well, he's like, how about we meet today at 3pm and you show me? And we did two A days with that. And I. It kind of broke my brain a little bit because there was, like, this invisible wall. As a business person, like, you don't meet twice in a day. Like, that would be a faux pas. You know, like, it's like manners. It's like, fuck your manners. When it's like, was this a big problem or not? Like, just clarify that for me, because if it is a big problem, then I'll just keep showing up and saying, okay, now what? Okay, now what? And okay, now. And if you just do that for three days, the, like, all of the excuses get squeezed away is what I found. Like, all the excuses suddenly disappear, and you get to the brass tacks about what's going on. It was amazing.
- [26:32]
Ben Horowitz
That's definitely right. No, no, that's. You know.
- [26:35]
Sam
Yeah.
- [26:36]
Ben Horowitz
Sully and I actually had a lot of conversations, but he. He went through a lot of crises in that, so he. He. He knows.
- [26:43]
Sam
Can I ask you about confidence? You give a talk with A bunch of your portfolio companies about. I think I saw you say that. Like, they don't fail due to lack of competence, but a lack of confidence.
- [26:53]
Ben Horowitz
I would say the number one reason why a founder fails at the CEO job is some kind of lack of confidence, crisis of confidence, whatever it is that causes them to hesitate. Basically, okay, I should do this, and I can see that I should do this, but I'm not sure I should do this. So I'm gonna wait.
- [27:17]
Sam
If you had to teach a class on how to improve someone's confidence, do you have, like, a framework or some bullet points that you would. That you would stand by?
- [27:26]
Ben Horowitz
It ends up being like, at the end of the day, confidence is personal, and you have to feel it yourself to have it. Like, I can't. You know, it's like the wizard of Oz. It's like, I. You know, I can give you, like, a clock and tell you it's a heart or whatever, but, like, at some point, you've got to believe that. And the thing that causes that crisis in confidence is, you know, okay, you invent something, you hire a bunch of people, you make a decision, it's wrong. People really suffer from it. You feel horrible because you're like, wow, I don't know what I'm doing. And I made a mistake, and it had real consequences. Like, most people in life don't have a situation like that until they become CEO. And so then, you know, it's like, well, how do I. How do I recover that? And so, like, a lot of the idea of the firm is like, well, you know, what if you could call anybody? Like, how would that make you feel? Like, what if you could call anybody, you know, in the White House, in Congress, in, you know, like, any executive, you know, any kind of big company CEO, and be able to have a conversation, you know, like, what if we could build that network for you? So that was kind of the idea behind the platform. And then, you know, we would do. I used to have this event, which I should probably bring back, but I ran out of room in my backyard, called the CEO barbecue, where we would bring all the CEOs for the portfolio. And then we would just, like, put, like, very famous people around them. So we had, like, Zach and Larry Page and Kanye all at a barbecue. And they're at the barbecue, and there's no, like, talks. There's no business agenda. There's no nothing. There's no even toast, right? Like, it's just a barbecue. And so it was just to make them feel like, oh, Shit, Like, I know Kanye. Like, I'm. I. I have to be somewhat important. Like, so. So you're trying to, like, imbue this feeling that, like, I may not totally know what I'm doing, but I should be CEO, you know?
- [29:27]
Sean
But I'm at a barbecue with Kanye, and it can't be too.
- [29:31]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah.
- [29:31]
Sam
What about. What about the inverse? When you look at a CEO and you're like, oh, they have just, like, hit this fork in the road now. Confidence is going to go horribly is going to go down, and it's going to be the. Their demise. What decisions do those people make? Like, what are the commonalities between the people who lose it that way?
- [29:46]
Sean
Sort of like the Charlie Munger, like, tell me where I'm going to die so I know not to go there, right? What would be the decisions I would make to. To take me off the path?
- [29:53]
Ben Horowitz
I would say the big thing is it's almost like a lack of decision, right? Like, it's a hesitation. In football, they always say, like, trust. You have to trust your eyes because you could be really fast. But if you don't start running when you see the thing, if you wait, then you're not fast. And that's kind of what it's like for CEOs. Like, you could be really, really smart, but if you wait too long before you pull the trigger, you're not smart anymore. It's too late. And there. There's all kinds of, like, excuses people tell themselves to not make a decision. So, for example, like, the. One of the biggest ones on an executive, like, is, well, if, you know, we made such a big deal when we hired him, like, what is the press gonna say? Or what are the people in the company gonna say? Or, you know, I don't have time to hire a new person to do the job that this guy's fucking up. You know, like, these kinds of. There's all these reasons not to make the decision, and they're all just. If you think about them for more than, like, five minutes, you go, well, that doesn't make any fucking sense. Because this guy's, like, fucking up the whole org. Like, who gives a fuck what the press is? Like, you just get rid of him. Like, start rebuilding now. You know? Like, it's not. If he's doing a bad job. Like, no job is better than a bad job. Like, I think we all know that. And everything kind of ends up like that. I don't know enough to make the decision. Like, I didn't give him enough of a chance. This and that, the other. So it's, it's kind of that lack of confidence that generally causes a no decision. Where there really needs to be a decision is, Is the main. I would say that's the common pattern. Yeah.
- [31:38]
Sean
So in the two examples you gave, the first one was like, ah, the cto, blah, blah, blah. And that's kind of like avoiding the conversation would be the mistake there. And then in this one, like, avoiding the decision would be the mistake.
- [31:50]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. You have to, you know, I wrote a post a long time ago, so called, you know, run at the pain and darkness. You have to run at the pain and darkness. You can't run away from it. If you run away from it, it's all bad.
- [32:02]
Sam
You're pretty good at titling blog posts and books. I think, you know, the hard things about the hard things are like, badass. But I think you said that. I think in the, in the publishing industry, typically the author's book title is not the winning title. And I think you were like, bragging that you're like, that's my title. I came up with it.
- [32:17]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, well, you know, because I didn't need a book. Like, I didn't actually want to write the book. They asked me to write the book, the publisher. So I felt like I could do what I wanted. So I called it what I wanted. Yeah.
- [32:30]
Sean
What, what do you. What excites you? So this, you know, a lot of the stuff we talked about is like, the hard stuff, the pain. And. But nobody gets into this for just the pain, right? Nobody gets into this. The pain is just a sort of necessary that we go through to do the good stuff. I'm just curious, what are you really excited about right now? Like, what are either, you know, rabbit holes, you're going down, cool stuff you've seen that you haven't been able to forget. Like, what's really cool and interesting to Ben Horowitz?
- [32:54]
Ben Horowitz
Well, so one of the most exciting things that's going on now is, you know, I kind of. It's well known that the United States has kind of fallen behind in defense manufacturing rare earth minerals, all these kinds of things. But what's been very exciting is like, there are startups that are like, I'll solve that for America. And so, like, we have a company that we just funded recently, Periodic Labs, which is using AI to do, like, novel material science to kind of enable better kind of design of everything from like, rockets to missiles to, you know, all sorts of things. And then we have a company, Cobalt Metals, that is basically Using AI, so they take a dirt sample and they use AI to analyze the dirt sample and they can tell you, oh yeah, there's going to be like, you know, copper below that, you know, whatever, a mile down into the earth. And so, you know, these kinds of techniques where you're kind of using tech to go, oh no, we're going to catch up fast. Has been like, very, very exciting, I would say.
- [34:04]
Sean
My view as a founder on the ground is just that sometimes you see something and like I said, it breaks like an imaginary wall you had. And sometimes things become cool and cool. Although we try to not like follow trends, sometimes you could use your psychology for you rather than against you. And so the idea, you know, seeing what Elon has done, where it's like, oh, he goes into these really hard spaces and does these like, like hardware, hard tech. Literal, literal rocket science. Right. And sort of unafraid of that, or, you know, and real going in and doing, you know, weapons and defense tech and making that cool to be kind of patriotic in that way. Is that what it was? Is that what it took or was there something else to it?
- [34:42]
Ben Horowitz
You know, there's a lot. They're very challenging companies to build in some ways, but on the other hand, you know, it's a good time to do them because people, because Elon has, I mean, you know, God bless Elon for showing that it was possible. So now, whereas, like only Elon could have financed Tesla, normal people can start to finance these things now because Elon has shown that it's possible. So it's a little bit like the 4 minute mile in that way, I would say. But yeah, I mean, like, you know, the things that. Yeah. And even in like public safety, you look at something like, you know, flock safety in a way. Technologically, it's not nearly as complicated as some of the other as like a, as an Andrew or something like that, but it's very, very powerful. I mean, you know, they really make both kind of policing being a citizen and even being a criminal more safe because all of the sudden you're using AI to provide real intelligence. So, you know, for example in Las Vegas, where we deployed it, a huge problem, a huge problem in like police violence, police getting killed are traffic stops. And a big reason for that is somebody reports there's a, you know, a 1998 Honda Acura that's driving, that's brown, that kidnapped a baby. Okay, so that's a real situation. But like, that description is usually wrong. Like the description of the actual car is usually wrong. So you have flock safety. You have the exact match. So the difference between a cop going into a situation where they may have the wrong guy, and if they have the wrong guy, the guy could get very agitated. And then you have a bad situation, or they know 100% this guy is in a car that we know is the car, and there's a baby in the back that's not his. Okay, you're going in with a whole. You're not sending a single person in there with a gun coming off their motorcycle. Like, you've got a whole team that's going to make sure that that person is apprehended safely and correctly and the baby is saved.
- [37:01]
Sean
I've heard. I've heard flocks this amazing thing. Is it drones? Is it cameras? What are they doing?
- [37:04]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, you know, so. So it's. It's primarily like a camera system where AI will basically. So somebody does something, you know, they grab the car on the camera, that car shows up on another camera anywhere in the city, and they're like, oh, there it is. And actually, that's how they caught, interestingly, the. The. The Tesla terrorist who set the Tesla ship on fire in Las Vegas was. He came in earlier to case the place, Flock safety, pick up the car. They saw the car come back at night, and they were like, oh, we know whose car that is. And they just went. Arrested him.
- [37:41]
Sam
Did you guys see that ad? I think it was, like, two weeks ago. I was trying to find it. It was. Went viral on Twitter, but it was basically. I believe it was a solar company. Was it a solar company where they're recruiting employees? And they had a whole website just dedicated to the recruitment aspect of just. They needed more staff. And they bought an ad in the New York Times, I believe, or some newspaper. And it was like an old man sitting with, like, it looked like his grandson overlooking a mountain. And they were like, overlooking. I think it was solar panels. I'm not exactly sure, but it was like. Do you really want to tell your grandkids that you spent your entire 30s and 40s building just B2B software? It was great. And it, like. And there's this whole trend amongst young people on Twitter of, like, being more traditional and things like that. And I think that to answer your question, Sean, about Andrew and. And Elon, I think that it's kind of been like a perfect spiral or a perfect mix of, like, people seeing Elon and Palmer do these interesting things. And also just like, getting sick of just building B2B software or something, you know? That's just a stereotype for what's boring. That may or may not be true. But like, you know, like seeing this and like there could be more out.
- [38:47]
Ben Horowitz
There, I think that the software had to get good enough to of course make, make these other things possible, which is, you know, and it's amazing that we're at that time where you can really imagine changing the world in all kinds of ways.
- [39:03]
Sean
You, you get to see a lot of pitches of the smartest people in the world telling you what the future is going to look like in five years. And so you have this like element of your job that's a little bit like a time traveler. So you, you probably have a better sense of what the world looks. Nobody has a perfect sense, but you have a better sense of what the world looks like, you know, five, seven, ten years from now. You don't know exactly when, you don't know who's going to do it, what's broken your brain either from a demo or a story pitch that you've heard, you know, sometime in the last year or so that the rest of us will experience, you know, sometime in the future.
- [39:35]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. So I think, you know, one of the things that I mean, you know, and everybody's talking about embodied AI and robots and so forth, and rightly so, but I would say like in the creative space I'm starting to realize like this AI video and so forth, it's not like making the old thing more efficient, it's a new medium, it's an actual new thing. In the same ways that like movies weren't plays, you know, AI video is not video. The stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just, you know, without a 200 million dollar budget, you had had no chance of doing and now it's like no problem. And I think that's going to be like very, very, very interesting. And then the, how well it's working on like existing stuff. So people, you know, the people who are on the cutting edge of the movie industry are now, you know, they're able to do like whole movie scenes or edit or change their movie. Have the AI actor do the, do this, do the third cut at a level of quality that even the actor doesn't know. It wasn't them doing the acting and that kind of thing. So I think it's going to change dramatically again and there's going to be kind of white space for not only new creatives, but new entertainment entrepreneurs and so forth that nobody is really imagining.
- [41:04]
Sam
Now is There any AI content that you consume as a fan?
- [41:09]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. No, no. Well, like, you know, I. I've been watching that. The one with the cat was pretty good over the. Over the weekend. The cat playing all the instruments and the lady coming out on force going, like, you got to cut that racket out. Do you guys see that one?
- [41:25]
Sam
Was that on Sora?
- [41:25]
Ben Horowitz
That was pretty good. Yeah, I think it's a Sora good. Yeah.
- [41:28]
Sean
Ben, do you mess around on SUNO at all with AI music?
- [41:31]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, SUNO and well, you know, 11 Labs has a model and Udo has got a very good model. So there, there's. There's a few different really good models. Like, I feel like I could have a music career again. That's going to be very, very interesting to me because it. It's sort of like one thing that hip hop showed was so people don't really realize this, but this is something Quincy Jones pointed out to me before he passed. He said, you know, Ben, like, hip hop started like, exactly when they canceled all the music programs in schools. Like, it was the same. The exact same time when people didn't learn to play instruments in schools. That's when. That is exactly when hip hop began. And hip hop kind of freed you as a somebody who was like a musical talent from actually having to learn to play an instrument, which, you know, and. And even for the producers, right. Like, you had a drum machine, you had samples so you could hear what you liked and play it, but you didn't need to be a virtuoso. And that kind of opened up a world that we didn't have before. And I think AI music is kind of that on steroids.
- [42:46]
Sean
I don't know if you guys know the number one song in the country right now is an AI country artist. It's all Walk my walk. Oh, yeah. And the first. I think the first AI artist that got a record deal recently, like, you know, so this is definitely what the future.
- [42:59]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah.
- [42:59]
Sean
Looks like, is people who. Non musicians. It's just like, you know, replit and others make it so that you don't have to be a coder to make apps. And now you don't have to be a musician to make music. And I don't think people really understand how big of a deal that is. Like, my. My personal trainer who's been in the fitness world his whole life.
- [43:16]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah.
- [43:16]
Sean
Has been in a rabbit hole making. He's probably in the top.01% of AI creators in the world right now creating music. And he's like, got Like a full band. He's like his own record label, and every day he's up till 2 in the morning. And he knows these programs inside and out. And because it wasn't really accessible to somebody who didn't have, you know, musical talent before to be able to make music.
- [43:37]
Ben Horowitz
Right. There's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuoso violinist. Right? Like, those. Those don't necessarily have to be the same thing. And it's great that, you know, people, you know, whatever, practice violin for three hours a day and, like, get amazing at it and all that kind of thing. But it's pretty neat to have a world where, like, okay, if you can just do this part, you can still play.
- [44:09]
Sam
Sean, can you ask. You have this really cool light about the rules of culture and making them memorable.
- [44:16]
Sean
Well, yeah. So when I'm doing the research, one thing that stands out is, like, you talk about culture, you talk about, like, and. Which is. Normally culture is like, I just fall asleep because it's so over talked about in the business world. You just like, you gotta really tell.
- [44:28]
Ben Horowitz
Me something new over talked about without anybody saying anything. Exactly. Culture. Culture.
- [44:33]
Sean
Right.
- [44:34]
Ben Horowitz
So cool.
- [44:35]
Sean
Tell me your values. Like, integrity, like, all right, great. Glad to hear it. I was worried it was gonna be the opposite.
- [44:40]
Ben Horowitz
Right.
- [44:40]
Sean
Like, it doesn't really tell you anything. And, you know, when you go walk into the company, the stuff on the wall doesn't match the stuff you see happening within the four walls. So it's just. You get sort of disillusioned in a way. But when you see somebody doing something interesting or you or somebody actually pulling it off, which, of course, there are examples, I get interested. And so one thing that I thought was cool, a nuance that I hadn't really heard before, was you were talking about how at a 16Z, you kind of take time to drive the culture. Like, I think in the new onboarding, you, like, I do a culture session, one hour, they sign something at the end. And one of the nuances, I thought that was interesting was you said, my rule for writing the kind of, like, the culture rules is it has to have some shock value. Like, it has to give the other person, like a what the hell are you talking about? Type of reaction. If it's going to be memorable. I think the idea was, if it's not memorable, it's never going to be remembered or used. So you have to do something to make it memorable. Can you talk about your theory around this?
- [45:32]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. So, I mean, it kind of comes down to what you do every day, right? Like, it's a daily habit. So you know this idea that you put cultural values on the wall, and then once a year in a performance review, you say, do you follow the culture? It's like that. That means absolutely nothing, right? It's nothing. And so it's like, well, what do you do every day? And so, like, one of the things we do every day is, like, we meet with entrepreneurs. So, like, what's a rule that sets the culture around that? So it's like, well, if you're late for that meeting, it's $10aminute. And it's like, well, $10aminute. Like, well, what if I have to go to the bathroom? You owe me $50. I don't care. What if I had an important phone call? You owe me a hundred dollars. Like, I don't care. You had an important phone call. Well, like, why am I paying to work here, you know? Well, because building a company is extremely hard, and culturally, we want to have the ultimate respect for that, and we don't want to waste any entrepreneur's time. And so that's your most important thing. So you have to plan to do that.
- [46:31]
Sam
You guys have a fine. Now you're talking. This is a real. A 16Z.
- [46:35]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah. So every time I have to, like, go to the meeting, you know, like, I have to think about that because I've got to be on time. I got to fucking plan my day. So, like, there's not. I'm not back to back on that one. I gotta be on time. Otherwise, you know, I'm gonna be embarrassed and all that kind of thing. And so, well, why. And why am I doing that? And then that, okay, if you do that, that's a habit that makes you go, okay, like, no, I'm gonna respect what this is. I know how hard it is to build a company. I may not even know how hard it is, but I know that, like, somebody here thinks it's hard enough that I have to show up on time.
- [47:10]
Sam
So can you keep. Can you tell some more of those interesting. Like, you know, the. The tardiness paying thing? That's pretty cool.
- [47:16]
Ben Horowitz
What are some other so as well. Second one is, like, if you. If you talk smack about an entrepreneur on X, you're fired. It doesn't matter if they're in the portfolio or not. You're just. That's it. And why is that, you know? Well, culturally, first of all, we're dream builders. We're not dream killers. If you want to do something bigger than yourself and make the world a better place. I don't care what it is. I don't care if I think it's stupid. I'm for that. I'm not against that. I am for that. And I don't care if, like, Sequoia funded you or Benchmark funded you. I'm for that. Like, go get it. Like, we're a pro entrepreneur. And then, you know, kind of related to that. I don't want to give anybody credit for making themselves look smart by making somebody else look stupid. Like, I don't want to give anybody, like, a gold star for saying, that guy's, you know, making, selling dollars for 85 cents. I'm so clever, you know, like, fuck you. Like, nah, we're not doing that here. And so it's, it's that kind of thing where it's like, oh, that seems like a harsh punishment, but I get it. I get it because I've heard it and I understand it. And so then that's like a way to kind of show up behaviorally daily as opposed to, you know, like, look, here's the problem with integrity. What does that mean? Right? Like, integrity only matters when it's tested. Everybody has integrity. Everybody's honest until it's tested. And then when it's tested, very few people are. Right? Like, when it costs you money, when it costs you a deal, when it costs you your marriage, are you honest then? Because that's the actual thing. And so you can't just have it in the abstract. You have to say, like, what behaviors do you have to have to work here? You know, how responsive do you have to be? These things end up making the culture much more so than, like a value or like, one thing I really like is the, the. The samurai called them virtues. They didn't call them values. It's like, these are the virtues. Like this. This is your way of being. This isn't like some. It's not a set of ideas. It's a set of actions. A culture is a set of actions.
- [49:41]
Sam
Listen to this, Sean. So if you go to a16z.com about, you'll see their values. And I just want to read like, I've never seen this before, so I'm just going to read a couple of them. But the six one, the six out of seven, it's, we play to win. Our culture only matters if we're important. And in order to be important, we must win. We are the best firm in the world, so we expect to win there. It's just like, that's Fantastic. I love that. And that's. I don't know if controversial is the right word, but it's polarizing. Right? Not a lot of people are into that. But that's, that's badass. And then you say you have another one that I really like. We only do. We only do first class business and only in a first class way. I think that's a really.
- [50:21]
Ben Horowitz
I actually stole that phrasing from J.P. morgan. So cool. He said it in court. They were accusing him of some kind of like, crazy, like, market manipulation.
- [50:30]
Sam
And you're talking about the J.P. yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. J.P. morgan. Yeah, yeah. I think that was. I think I read about that line in the Andrew Sorkin's got that like 19, 28 or 29 book. And I think he says that. But that's great.
- [50:43]
Sean
So, but okay, so. But like when I go to this site and I see these, I'm like, okay, this is kind of like these are like the high level principles. But you, what you were saying just now is a little bit different. You were like, hey, look, well, there's.
- [50:53]
Ben Horowitz
Got to be behaviors that support the principles.
- [50:55]
Sean
Yeah, yeah. So you, you basically were like, what are the daily situations and actions where we have a choice? We either show up this way or we show up this way, and we're going to show up this way and sometimes with a penalty, punishment, or appraise based on like the extreme version of that behavior with the no tolerance policy.
- [51:14]
Ben Horowitz
Right.
- [51:14]
Sean
Like, and I think there's this great military quote that you have in your book.
- [51:17]
Ben Horowitz
Oh, yeah. Well, if you, if you see something below standard and you don't correct it, you set a new standard. And, and that's. That's very true. And that's why they have to be specific. Because if they're not specific, you can't enforce it. How do you enforce. Like you don't have integrity. That just gets weaponized. It's like that guy doesn't have integrity. He's not following the cultural value, you know, he doesn't have. Why does he have integrity? Well, he lied to me. Well, let's go talk to him. Oh, no, I didn't lie to you. Did it? Like, so it's not that. Whereas. Oh, you just put out that tweet, like, that's clearly against the cultural value. Like, there's no backing off that.
- [51:55]
Sean
So like, you know, Facebook famously had move fast and break things, which I.
- [51:58]
Ben Horowitz
Think that was really good, by the way.
- [52:00]
Sean
Hall of Fame. Yeah, you know, that's a, that's a hall of Famer. But like, that's kind of the, you know, one of the.
- [52:04]
Ben Horowitz
I mean, I thought about, I thought about that for months. Like, I'm like, move fast and break. Because it's so counterintuitive. It's like, well, you know, you want me to break things? I'm an engineer. I make things. I don't break things. But it was just his way of saying, like, there is no excuse for not fucking shipping. Like, we're going fast.
- [52:22]
Sam
But they don't have that anymore, do they? Is that so fun?
- [52:24]
Ben Horowitz
Well, you know, they got bigger and then, you know, I think speed wasn't their main thing that they were trying to achieve.
- [52:30]
Sean
I think they literally changed it to like, move fast. It's move fast ability and stable. Like with stable infrastructure and reliability.
- [52:38]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, exactly.
- [52:38]
Sean
Somehow lost its edge. So have you seen anything like that move fast and break things or just a behavior when you walked into the Airbnb office and you noticed something?
- [52:46]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, I mean, so. And you know, Amazon had this thing where they used to make the desks out of, like doors and two by fours.
- [52:56]
Sam
And so I tried doing that. By the way, it's way cheaper to get a desk.
- [53:00]
Ben Horowitz
It's way cheaper to get a desk. But like, I think the idea back in whatever, the late 90s when they did that was like, like, we're not wasting any money. Yeah. You know, and that kind of thing, which is, you know, those markers are, are very, very powerful. Like, one of my favorite ones was actually from the Haitian Revolution when Toussaint Lovature basically made a rule. He's like, you can't cheat on your wife. Which was like, so absurd because here they are, they're in a colony, you know, a French colony. They're, you know, the British, the Spanish, the French, they're all raping and pillaging and doing all this stuff. All these armies and these guys, like, can't cheat on their walks. But that little cultural idea that said, look, this is about trust. I gotta be able to trust you. And like, the people have to be able to trust you ended up basically really influencing the war. So one of the things that was like, very surprising, I think, to people who read about the Haitian revolution was here's a slave army taking on these European colonies. And the white women in the colony supported Toussaint against like, the French. And you go like, well, why'd they do that? Because they didn't rape, they didn't pillage. Like, Toussaint. Like, these guys were like half naked soldiers or slaves and they weren't doing any of that. They were super polite. They were. They. They behaved in a certain way. And the legend is. So he was Toussaint l'. Ouverture. But slaves didn't have last names, so where did l' Ouverture come from? And so the story is Napoleon, who really was pissed at him, brought his generals together, and it's like, how in the fuck can you not get this slave? Like, how can you not defeat this slave? And they're like, well, we get him backed up, we get him surrounded. And then all of a sudden, there's an opening, and he became Toussaint l'. Ouverture. Toussaint. The opening. And the opening, a lot of people say, was created by these townspeople, these women who were just like, oh, fuck, we're for him. We're for that army. I don't give a fuck about your army. We're for that army. So, like, culture can be, like, super influential.
- [55:07]
Sam
That's a great story. That's really cool.
- [55:09]
Sean
You mentioned Amazon. Did you see Jeff Bezos got a new startup?
- [55:13]
Ben Horowitz
Oh, he did see. Did Jeff got a new startup?
- [55:15]
Sean
Yeah. You didn't see this announcement? Project Prometheus. They raised an initial seed round of 6 billion to.
- [55:24]
Sam
Is that true? They call that a seed round?
- [55:26]
Sean
Yeah, it's the first round of funding. So $6 billion raised, and they got 100 people, and they're building AI for, like, the. The physical world. So it's not just robots, but basically, like the manufacturing of airplanes and ships and things like that. So they're basically saying, how do we use AI? Yeah, and like, sort of advanced manufacturing, I think, is the. I think is the idea. But obviously there's little title details, but that's pretty cool. He's like, back in a operational role for the first time, which is cool.
- [55:53]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, no, I. I think that I. By the way, like, how great is it that the logistics genius of our time is back at it and going to help us, like, get back in the manufacturing game like that? Yeah. You know, those things are just incredible to me. And I think all of us were a little sad when Jeff was just living his best life, just because he is so talented. Um, so this is very great news.
- [56:20]
Sean
I loved it. I was like, huh? This guy's having fun. He's getting jacked. He's showing a different, you know, a new North Star also, which, like, has. Has kind of also taken over the tech industry.
- [56:29]
Ben Horowitz
And by the way, like, what? Whatever. Like, you know, people always make you into cartoon when you get to that level. He is, you know, for sure like a top two or three best CEO in the last 40 years.
- [56:43]
Sam
So you're, you're, you're a bit surprising to me because I've read all your books. I know about your background basically, like you have like guided the people who have shaped destiny. You've also shaped destiny yourself. But like you're, you've done all these amazing things and you're a shockingly fun hang normally I think, and like, you know about hip hop and all this stuff. Normally the people who have outsized results typically have very strange personalities and they're like a little quirky and I'm sure you have your quirks, but you just seem shockingly well balanced for how not normal your success is. Is there anything in your day to day life that you think that is, would, would surprise probably like the average person or are there any tendencies that you have that you recognize probably aren't at all normal?
- [57:30]
Ben Horowitz
Well, yeah, you know, I would say probably the thing, the thing that my daughter always says that is unusual about me and I think it came from like the beginning of my, you know, like I had, I am different than the modern people. Like I was married when I was 22, I had three kids by the time I was 25. Like I kind of had to grow up fast and you know, and then I had the company. I was trying to raise the kids and the company and you know, I didn't have money for nannies or anything. So like it was a lot of that. But what she says to me is she's like, dad, like you're like at the top of Maslow's hierarchy. Like you're very Zen with all this and like I take things for what they are. I, I don't like, I'm pretty good at not being unemotional but not letting like my emotional reaction control my behavior.
- [58:21]
Sam
Were you always that way or did you become.
- [58:22]
Ben Horowitz
No, no, no, no, no, no. Definitely not. Like, I think it was just all the trauma that like forced me to learn that.
- [58:28]
Sam
What age, what made you calm down? Was it age? Was it kids? Was it success? Was it like, look, I've made it. Everything else is just icing on the cake. I don't care.
- [58:37]
Ben Horowitz
Well, I think it was the combination of the kids and the company. You know, the, the, the first company I founded, Loud Cloud, which then became Opsware, was so difficult that I never, I like in life since then, like we, like, we've had difficulties building the firm, whatever, but like they never got like a rise out of Me that could compare to, you know, what I'd already been through. So it's almost like. I feel like. It's almost like I know guys. My friend Oliver Stone was in Vietnam, and, like, you could tell everything about him was, I'm not in Vietnam anymore. So much of his life is defined by not being a Nam. And like, I do feel like I don't want to compare it to war because people always criticize me for my war metaphors. But it's kind of like that feeling where it's like, okay, I've been through that. I'm just looking at the world differently.
- [59:38]
Sam
Now, and I bet it. And like, I'm sure you had some sense of, like, all right, I've accomplished something. Like, I feel good. Maybe I'm playing with house money a little bit. With. With everything else.
- [59:48]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, it's a little house money, and then it's a little, like, all you can do is deal with the thing that it is. You can't stop it from having happen. It happens, and that now you have to deal with it.
- [59:58]
Sean
Were there any other sort of wisdom accelerators? So you have these formative experiences, right? You got three kids in three years or whatever, and you're by the time you're 25, and then you're trying to build a startup and everything, you face kind of like the back against the wall moments. Were there any other formative things? Like, you know, for example, in my life, I went to like a Tony Robbins seminars. Like, you know, I sort of got five years of wisdom in a weekend type of.
- [60:20]
Ben Horowitz
Type of. Yeah, yeah. No, he's very good at, like, dealing with your own psychology.
- [60:24]
Sean
Yeah. Or you spend a summer doing something, or you read a book at the right time, or you get the right message at the right time and you have a moment where decide, like, from now on X. I guess, like, I'm just curious.
- [60:33]
Ben Horowitz
Was there any.
- [60:33]
Sean
If I just think about, like, formative moments, besides the kids and besides Loud Cloud, what. What else would there have been?
- [60:39]
Ben Horowitz
Okay, so when I was a kid, I was in this relay race and it was like, it was a very big deal for me. You know, like, it was whatever. The track meet, and we came in second in the relay race. My father wasn't at the race. Um, but we came in second because then the team that came in first dropped the baton and, like, didn't pick it up. The guy just ran without the baton and they gave him first place and they didn't penalize him. And so I was, you know, my father said How'd you do in the race? And I was like, well, we came in second, but it wasn't fair. And I was going to explain to him why. And he said, stop right there. He said, life isn't fair. And, and that shocked me so much at the time, but it really stuck with me. And it's the single best lesson that I ever got in my life was life isn't fair. And I see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is going to be fair. Like nothing about life is fair. It's not fair where you're born, it's not fair what race you are. It's not fair. Fair like what your parents did. It's not fair. Like the job interviews aren't fair. Like nothing. The tests aren't fair. Nothing is fair in life. And so the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation, you just deal with it as it is. And I think that everybody who tries to or who like, thinks, well, life I wasn't treated fairly or this is in fact like that is devastating, you know, like for sure. I mean, the whole time, you know, when Loudcloud and the.com crashed and half our customers went out of business, I never crossed my mind to go, this isn't fair. It was just like, okay, I have to deal with it. And that is, I would say, the single best piece of advice and way of looking at life that you can have is just it is what it is and now do what you can do with it being as it is. It was very important.
- [62:51]
Sam
You've referenced a lot of really cool stuff. The, the Haiti story. I've heard you talk about history a lot outside of work, work related stuff. What interests you right now? You know, Sean and I, we like to talk about just like, just fun stuff that you were into. I'm, I'm constantly reading about World War II. I like that. What about you? Is there anything that you're kind of like being obsessed about?
- [63:12]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, so I do have this. I'll give a plug for it. So I have this charity that I created with my wife called the Paid in Full foundation, which basically, you know, is kind of this idea on a whim. But we give pensions to the old hip hop guys. So you know, they got a hundred thousand dollars a year and, and then we have this award show for them, you know, where we name them grandmasters and so forth. And you know that. So the first winners were Rakim and Scarface. And then, you know, we had Grandmaster Kaz And Shantae and Kumo D and so forth. And then Grand Poobah and Koji Rapp. And this year, you know, we added this thing, the Quincy Jones Award, to the guys who got sampled the most. And we gave it to George Clinton. And the event was so. I'm still thinking about it. It was so amazing because. So George Clinton knows all the words to Follow the Leader. And so he's on stage and Quincy John says, can you rap? Follow? And he's. Raps Follow the Leader. And Rakim came out and rapped it with him. So we've got George Clinton and rakim. And then Dr. Dre brought a table to the event and he, like, couldn't help himself. He goes up on stage just to say, look, I have no career without George Clinton. And it was just so amazing to have, like, all these guys that were so important, that influenced so many people. Just being that appreciative of each other was. I was like, you know, and it's kind of. And, you know, hip hop, of course, is so competitive and. And, you know, they're always going at each other and so forth, but for them to be at that point where they could just go, man, you guys meant so much to me. And. And that kind of thing was. It was just very special.
- [65:03]
Sean
That's so cool. Yeah, that idea of tensions for the OGs is so great. What, did that just come on a whim? Or you're just at lunch one day and you're like, why don't they. How does that. Because that one liner gives you the clarity, right? Gives you the clarity of where to go.
- [65:18]
Ben Horowitz
So I was listening to the H to the ISO Jay Z song where he says, I'm overcharging for what they did to the Cold Crush. And it got me through this, like, who was the Cold Crush? And it turns out, right, it's Grandmaster Kaz. And Grandmaster Kaz wrote Rapper's Delight, basically. And they stole it from him. And they stole it from him so nasty that they didn't change the word. So Big Bang handcraft up I'm the GRA A N D Ray ray N D E M the A S C E R that's Grandmaster Kaz. That's his. He's rapping about his name. Not Big Bang Hank. Big Bang Hank is not named Grandmaster. Why is he calling himself Grandmaster? Because he stole his fucking rhyme. And he never got paid and he never got credit for it. And everybody in hip hop knows this. And Grandmaster Kaz, by the way, like, if you meet him, he is a star. Like, he's the coolest guy in the room. He dresses amazing. He's, like, super articulate. He can still rap like crazy today. 66 years old or 65, something like that. And I was like, well, like, we ought to go back and fix that. And then, you know, Rakim was, like, on tour at these little clubs and so forth. I was like, that's Rakim. Like, how are people treating him like that? So that was the idea. I was like, we ought to just do it, you know, and, like, getting it set up with the IRS and all that stuff is, like, extremely complicated. But, yeah, it's been. It's been really, really, I would say, amazing. And, like, just like an unbelievable epilogue. So Cass at the last one tells me he's like, ben, I bought a house. I was like, oh, that's amazing, Cass. You've got a house. He's like, no, Ben. It's the first time in my life I haven't lived in the projects. Like Grandmaster Cass, the guy who wrote the first great hip hop song, who's never not lived in the projects. Like, how crazy is that? And now here he is with the house and Pennsylvania here, and he's got berries in his backyard and the whole thing.
- [67:17]
Sean
Yeah, he's got berries in his backyard.
- [67:21]
Sam
It is pretty nuts. The people who are, like, invent the. Don't get it. Like, for example, Sean and I love ufc, and, like, we see, like, the early UFC events.
- [67:31]
Ben Horowitz
Anything. Yeah.
- [67:31]
Sam
And they're getting $2,000 to show up, and they still come to, like, the Legends Awards, and they still are talking, and you're like, damn, dude, this guy probably is selling insurance or something like that. Like, he, like, you know, he probably got. Made $15,000 that year.
- [67:44]
Ben Horowitz
No doubt. No doubt. Yeah.
- [67:46]
Sean
This happens in the NBA, too. This is why, like, the culture gets kind of messed up, because the old heads keep criticizing all the new players.
- [67:52]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah.
- [67:53]
Sean
And it's like, oh, why are you doing that?
- [67:54]
Ben Horowitz
It's like, they make too much more money.
- [67:57]
Sean
$70 million a year, and that guy didn't make seven in his whole career. And he's like, I'm better than that guy and that guy, you know, so that. This resentment, and then they get on, and then they're the. The guys doing the halftime shows. And it's bad. Bad for the product. Right. Like, it's bad for the lineage. Right. Because everything is a creative lineage, like, on top of what was before. Right. So it's really cool to kind of almost like, economically fix the, you know, or like, try to improve that ecosystem. Because the whole thing was kind of.
- [68:22]
Ben Horowitz
Like, you know, it's funny, it's. It's also kind of this thought I have about capitalism, which is capitalism is, is definitely the system that lifted the world out of poverty and like, kind of created the modern world we live in. You know, it's incredibly powerful, but right. Over time it does get corrupted and so forth. And even if it wasn't corrupted, it's not perfect. And like, certain things happen. Like, oh, you create a musical art form and are the guys who actually made it happen and it becomes the biggest musical art form in the world. And you never got paid. Like, capitalism shouldn't work like that, but it's just kind of the way it works. Right? Like, and it's nobody's fault. And so, like, if you can go back and say, well, we'll just correct those things.
- [69:09]
Sam
I think that, I think you are so cool. Like, you're on one hand you're like a pretty like hard hitting capitalist where you're getting after it and you're talking about making really tough decisions of having to fire people, whatever. But then you're also like, but also we can, we could do good by doing all this other stuff. And I think that, like, particularly in tech, I don't think that people's interests are particularly that wide.
- [69:28]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, well, I think people get very into tech. Yeah. Like, tech is so deep and vast that, like, people can get stuck in it for sure. Yeah.
- [69:36]
Sean
Well, Ben, we thank you for coming on, man. I know you got a lot of things going on, but this was, this.
- [69:41]
Sam
Is a lot of fun.
- [69:41]
Sean
I appreciate it.
- [69:42]
Ben Horowitz
Yeah, no, it's a good time. Thanks, guys. Definitely.
- [69:45]
Sam
All right, appreciate you. That's it.
- [69:47]
Ben Horowitz
That's the pod.
- [69:50]
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