60 Minute Business Masterclass (worth more than your Stanford MBA)

- December 1, 2025 (3 months ago) • 01:10:22

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Alright — today we're hanging out with Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of a16z. These guys manage $46,000,000,000 in assets. They've invested in Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI, and a bunch of other big-hit tech companies. But today we're talking about stuff you don't usually hear from Ben. Topics include: how you actually have a high-confrontation conversation, the advice he actually gives his founders, and stories like when he met Mark Zuckerberg when Mark 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 from Mark Zuckerberg's playbook. Sam, what else do we got?
00:29	Sam Parr	Dude, we also just hung out with him, which is, like, the best part. He tells a story about how he helped catch Tupac's killer. We also asked him what interests him right now: what books he's reading, what content he's consuming, and what rabbit holes he's going down. It was incredibly interesting.
00:44	Shaan Puri	Awesome conversation with Ben Horowitz. Enjoy.
00:53	Ben Horowitz	Okay, so I have a good Tupac story for you.
00:55	Sam Parr	"Oh my gosh. Alright, I'm incredibly excited to hear it."
00:59	Ben Horowitz	So my wife is like the biggest Las Vegas evangelist in the world, and she was talking to Quincy Jones' son, QD3, and said, "You need to move to Vegas." He's like, "Fuck that — I'll never move to Vegas. They didn't solve the Tupac murder." And, you know, his sister Kidada was dating Tupac. I was like, "Let's have dinner with the Vegas PD and see what happened." So me, QD3, and Nas sit down to dinner with the Las Vegas Police Department. They bring the whole case file, and it turns out the LAPD really filed the case like almost on purpose — it looks like. At the end of the dinner I say to the chief of police, Mike Genaro, "Mike, you ought to reopen the Tupac case." He goes, "I'll talk to the sheriff." The next day I called him and asked, "What did the sheriff say?" He said, "If Ben wants us to open the case, we're opening the case." They reopened the Tupac case and they caught the guy.
02:00	Sam Parr	That's insane. So should Sean—like, I don't know, Sean, if you know the story—but basically Pac and Suge got in a fight at a Mike Tyson fight. Then, thirty or forty minutes later, he was shot on the Las Vegas Strip. It was a cold case for years, but everyone knew who did it: they suspected a guy named Orlando Anderson. That was the rumor.
02:20	Ben Horowitz	Long Orlando pulled the trigger. Keefe D told him to shoot him. Yeah, exactly. </FormattedResponse>
02:24	Sam Parr	And like, everyone knew this, but for some reason it didn't happen. Orlando ended up dying a handful of years later. The craziest thing ever is there's this guy named DJ Vlad, who does these interviews with all these gangsters.
02:37	Shaan Puri	He got him to tell the story about the murder, and this idiot went on.
02:43	Sam Parr	[On] a podcast, [they] just said, "Yeah, here's what happened."
02:46	Ben Horowitz	So here's why he did that. He thought he had immunity because the LAPD proffered him, which basically means, "in exchange for testimony, we grant you immunity." But they granted him immunity in L.A., not in Vegas. The Las Vegas PD were like, "Oh, that doesn't count here."
03:04	Shaan Puri	And then the little do we. </FormattedResponse>
03:05	Sam Parr	I know that beds [unclear: "beds"] is 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.
03:15	Shaan Puri	Alright. Well, I don't know where we want to start, but I just thought—usually Ben doesn't know this—but we have a little tradition here. We'd typically start with our intro music, but for some reason it's stopped playing. I'm trying to get this cassette to play, but it's just not working. What are we looking at here?
03:33	Ben Horowitz	Oh boy — that's the Blind and Deaf Crew. My friend Seth Clark, this was back in 1987 or 1988 or maybe 1986, got shot and was blinded. So we formed a rap group called "The Blind and Deaf Crew" (D.E.F.). And, you know, we had all kinds of rhymes about being blind and being deaf.
03:57	Shaan Puri	You know, I, I have one here. It's like...
03:58	Ben Horowitz	The blind, deaf crew. We're fly. Three of us, but we got four eyes — like that type of stuff.
04:08	Shaan Puri	Where did you grow?
04:09	Sam Parr	I mean—your dad. I know who your dad is. He was a well-known academic. But where were you growing up? Were you around guys who got shot in rapping? [Do you mean “in the rap scene”?]
04:18	Ben Horowitz	Well, I grew up in Berkeley, California, which is kind of either an academic town or part of Oakland depending on where you are. I was in that more "part of Oakland" side of Berkeley. I went to school in New York, and that's where I got into rap. Then Seth got shot back in the Bay Area, and he was very, very depressed because he was blind — he was only a kid. So I sent him these "DJ Red Alert / Chuck Chillout" mixtapes — tapes I taped off the radio show that had the brand-new hip hop, which was really new at the time. That kind of cheered him up. That's how we got into rap and became rappers. We didn't succeed, but we tried real hard.
05:08	Shaan Puri	Well, we wanted to just hang out with you, because... you've done so many podcasts. I think a16z now has 50,000 podcasts, and so...
05:17	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, yeah, yes.
05:18	Shaan Puri	You know, I consider it—like, hey, is AI a bubble? We can kind of do that, and we'll probably ask you something about AI. But 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. What is it—if they could just be a "fly on the wall" hanging out? Obviously, we come from a business and tech background, so we have a bunch of questions around that. But I think for me and Sam, the most interesting part—where I feel like you've contributed to the collective wisdom of founders—is your work on leadership. You've written two books that I feel are really, I don't know, top shelf on how to be a leader. I think it started with a general philosophy. So—tell me, why are most management books terrible? Let's start with that. </FormattedResponse>
05:59	Ben Horowitz	You know, the problem with management, generally, I would say, is it's very kind of situational and emotional. It's like: here's a book to teach you how to play NFL quarterback. You could read that 20 times, but when you go out on the field things are extremely different if there's a 290-pound guy running at you extremely fast. You're thinking, "I'm going to kill you" — what you feel, what you think, and how you process that is just different. I think management tends to be like that. It has a lot to do with your situation and the feelings you have at the time it happens. Yet these management books are written as some step-by-step guides. Anybody with a basic eighth-grade education can understand the principles of management — they're not that complicated.
06:51	Shaan Puri	"It's a cookbook, and you could just follow the rest."
06:53	Ben Horowitz	"Of yeah — it's like, 'here are the five steps for building a strategy' or 'the three steps for, you know, setting objectives.' It's not actually very useful at all, because that stuff is so simple. So I always thought the difficult thing is this: you're either going to run completely out of money if you don't fire half the company. But you don't want to have that conversation, because you promised all these people the company was going to be a success when you hired them. The level of inconsistency you're going to have to go through — the level of, '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. How do you get over that? What do you actually say? How do these conversations work? That is the actual thing people need to really understand: what are the words that get me out of this thing, at least temporarily? Nobody had been writing like that. The last person who, I thought, wrote a book like that was Andy Grove, back when he wrote High Output Management. That book was really old at the time, so I thought, well, somebody has to write the sequel — now it's been thirty years."
08:14	Sam Parr	Do you think that, when it comes to leading, it's mostly just getting your mindset right? I mean, is that what you're saying—where it's like...
08:22	Ben Horowitz	No, no, no — it's more complicated than that. You kind of strive to get to a place of honesty, true honesty, where you're actually being true and not lying to yourself. That's hard. It's almost like, you know — if you guys are kind of creatives in the pub — to be a great creative at some point you have to get all the way to that very vulnerable place where you've exposed yourself and all your issues and weaknesses in everything. Leadership is a little bit like that, too. You're pushing and pushing to get all the way to what's true. That's part of the process. The other thing is that you don't necessarily completely know what you're doing, particularly when you start and you're building a company. So it becomes a confidence game where you have to talk yourself into, "Okay, I think I know enough to do this." It can be very small things. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur. He's like, "Ben, I need your help." I said, "Why do you need my help?" He says, "My CTO is an asshole." I said, "Well, okay, but know that he's a good CTO — I know that from talking to you before. So you're not even asking me, 'Should you fire him?,' are you?" He's like, "No, I'm not asking you that." I said, "Well, tell me why he's an asshole and maybe I can help." He goes, "Well, you know, he made a young woman on our finance team cry yesterday." I was like, "Okay — yeah, that's kind of mean-spirited for a CTO to do." I said, "So you're really kind of asking me not how to fire him, but how to have a conversation with him about his behavior without him quitting — that's what you're saying?" He's like, "Yeah." I said, "Well, here's what I would say to him: 'Hey, you're a fantastic director of engineering, but you're not an effective CTO. If you want to be a director of engineering forever, we can just run like this and it's no problem — you do a great job managing your team, you get stuff done on time. But you're not effective with the rest of the organization, and that's what a CTO is. The CTO has to marshal the resources of the whole company to get the job done. If you go to a junior person five levels below you and make her cry, you might be right about the technical thing, but you're never going to get what you want out of her. You can't be effective with her; how are you going to be effective with execs? If you want to learn how to do that, let's learn how to do that. If not, no problem — but just know that at some...'" [End of excerpt]
11:09	Ben Horowitz	I gotta bring in the CTO. That's where I would have the conversation with him, and that kind of got him to an "okay, now I can talk to him." So much of the mistakes that CEOs make are that they just don't even know how to have the conversation. It's a little bit mindset — there is a confidence part to it where you have to be able to do things when you're not sure you're right. But there are techniques and ideas; it's just harder than it looks. The problem is the mistakes multiply. Not talking to him is going to multiply: you're going to isolate engineering, nobody's going to like them, you'll get politics in the company, and pretty soon people just don't even want to work there. You get high attrition, and then it's like, "well, why the fuck do we have high attrition?" The board's all upset, and it kind of snowballs on you if you can't deal with these issues. </FormattedResponse>
12:04	Sam Parr	Man, this is so cool, because I just read this book called The Motive, and the whole book is about how to have a conversation like that. Basically, someone shows up and it's small stuff—like someone shows up too late for a meeting, they're not prepared, they made someone cry. I remember reading this and I was like, "I don't want to talk about this on the pod," maybe because I feel stupid that I'm having to learn a script on how to... send someone. [unclear]
12:24	Ben Horowitz	It's so cool.
12:25	Sam Parr	And then I hear you talking about this, and I'm like, yeah—alright. I feel a little bit better because why is this conversation hard for me? I feel like this should be easy. I literally don't know what words to use to make this an effective confrontation. I had to read a book. It's actually really cool to hear you describe that other people — I think you even said you saw another interview about Zuck, and I think you referenced Sam Altman. You're like, "I've seen inside these companies; they all face these challenging situations, but they just don't know how to communicate."
12:51	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, you know, people get stuck. There's no way to learn how to be CEO of a big company without kind of being the CEO. So you found a company, it starts growing, and you don't know what you're doing. You make mistakes. It's very scary. It's easy to lose your confidence, and if you lose your confidence you hesitate. If you hesitate as CEO, somebody's got to step into that vacuum — and that's when it becomes very political and dysfunctional.</FormattedResponse>
13:26	Sam Parr	Alright. A few episodes ago I talked about something, and I got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper and explain — that's what I'm about to do. I told you how I use ChatGPT as a life coach or a thought partner. What I did was upload all types of information: my personal finances, my net worth, my goals, books I like, and issues going on in my personal life and businesses. I uploaded so much information that the output is a GPT I can ask questions about problems I'm having in my life — like, "How should I respond to this email?" or "What's the right decision, knowing my goals for the future?" — and things like that. I worked with HubSpot to put together a step-by-step process showing the software I used to make this and the information ChatGPT asked me for. It's super easy for you to use. Like I said, I use this 10 to 20 times a day — it literally changed my life. If you want that, it's free. There's a link below: just click it, enter your email, and we will send you everything you need to set this up in just about 20 minutes. I'll show you how I use it again 10 to 20 times a day. Alright, so check it out — the link is below in the description. Back to the episode.
14:40	Shaan Puri	"You've said before that having confrontation the right way is super important. I nodded my head, but I was like, 'Cool — I really don't know how to do that, though.' So, what is the right way to have confrontation?"
14:56	Ben Horowitz	Hannah's complicated, but the first thing is: stop thinking about yourself. This could be about anything—firing somebody, getting them to change their behavior, or whatever. You're going to say something they don't want to hear. People get caught up thinking they need to be a tough guy, or that they need the person to like them, or some other thing that's about you. Instead, you have to ask: what am I going to say that isolates this one issue I'm really talking about? If I need someone to change a behavior, how do I get them to hear that in a way they can actually act on it without getting in their feelings? To do that you have to be very straightforward. You have to be open about how you feel. If you think they're a shitbird, then you're probably going to have to fire them. But if you think they're otherwise good, you need to let them know that—without clearly setting them up. Don't give the obvious "shit sandwich"—"you're a great person, but this is all fucked up and I love you." People see through that; it's too simple. Instead, get to a very honest place and say something like: > "We're working together on this. You're doing this, and it's not working—it's not effective. I can help you get to being effective, but I need you to get to being effective." A lot of people will accept things from you if they feel like you're basically telling them the truth—if you're completely open and honest. Don't make it worse than it is, and don't make it better than it is. Tell them what it is. This ties into what I said earlier: a lot of leadership is getting all the way to the truth. Sit with yourself and ask: what do I really think about this—not "motherfuckers were complaining about him" or "this happened and it hurt my feelings"—but what's really true? Why did they do it? Can it be corrected? If it can, what would motivate them to correct it? You have to get all the way to that. Otherwise they'll get upset and defensive, or they won't hear it because it's too soft and it seems like you don't care. So, how do you get to that meaningful place where people can actually hear what you're talking about?
17:55	Shaan Puri	And you've invested in, and known for a long time, a lot of the biggest tech CEOs. I would say the stereotype of the most successful tech founders is this sort of—slightly autistic, very high IQ, lower EQ—persona. But that's not really what would be good at the thing you're talking about. So what is it? Is that stereotype just wrong? That's not what you've seen when you've been involved. You guys, I think, invested in Facebook early on, and stuff like that. Is the stereotype wrong? Did they learn these things? Are they taking touchy-feely classes at Stanford? What's helping them be able to do this?
18:31	Ben Horowitz	Yes. I think some of these guys have much higher people-understanding than you might think. The ones who truly can't read people and understand people don't become Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg—his mom, by the way, is a psychiatrist or a psychologist—and he's actually pretty insightful. You can see it in the deals he's negotiated and the moves he's made. Guys who are processing information at that rate of speed... it's a little weird. You always feel like, "Okay, what the fuck is wrong with my clock? This guy's thinking faster than me." My very first conversation with Zach was, I think, in 2007. At that time, if you recall, Facebook's traffic had flattened. The executive staff he had then was trying to run a coup to force him to sell to Yahoo. They were leaking stuff to Valleywag, and Valleywag was calling for Zach to be fired—just all that stupidity.
19:40	Sam Parr	That was that famous story where you didn't sell, right?
19:43	Ben Horowitz	Yeah. And then he didn't sell, but right at that time his first question to me was: "If I fired my executive team for the second time, would the board be nervous?" I said, if you're asking that question, then you kind of have to do it, because you can't succeed with them. Whether or not you can succeed without them will at least tell you—you'll know whether you're going to die with them. We talked about why they were doing this—why traffic had been flat. He said, "We doubled the size of the engineering team this year. We went from 400 to 800 engineers. The way the product is architected, we had a MySQL layer, then an API, and the applications are built on the API. But a lot of the new engineers just wrote straight to MySQL. They rewired the whole thing, and now it takes like ten seconds to log in." So traffic flattened because of that. I asked, "How do you train these guys?" He said, "Train these guys." I never forget that. I said to Zach, when you're ten people there's no institutional knowledge—everybody just comes on, jumps in, and starts working. But when you get to 800 or 1,000 people, you have a lot of knowledge in the company about how the product works, how you check in code—everything. You actually have to teach people that, because they don't know who to ask or how to learn it on their own. To show you what a great CEO he ended up being, he created this two-month boot camp for everyone in product management. Every engineer who joined Facebook had to go through it, learn everything, and so forth. He was a phenomenal student of management. Before, he was like me—now, I wouldn't call him a student; he's a great CEO. A lot of these founders can figure out the people part pretty fast. The ones who truly don't understand people don't actually turn out to be good CEOs—they don't get to that level. You can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zuckerberg, but they are actually very smart about people, all three of—[sentence trails off].
22:18	Shaan Puri	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 is relevant to kind of any business size. Some of these are like, "Oh, well my company's never going to be 20,000 people, so I can't really relate to this." But one I thought was about collections — about collecting money — which I think is relevant whether you're an accountant and have to do this for your clients, whether you have ten clients, or you're a big business. I think it's the CEO of Nation.
22:48	Ben Horowitz	Nation Billy Elliot.
22:49	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, can you tell this story? I thought this was a phenomenal story."
22:52	Ben Horowitz	Yeah. They were kind of living on the edge — they needed every kind of thing collected possible. She was like, cash collections would just be... there were all these dumb things that would happen: they sent out the wrong kind of email, they didn't get the thing, and so forth. I said I learned this technique from Andy Grove. If a project was off track, he would say, "8 a.m. every day we're going to meet on it, I'm going to be in the meeting, and I'm going to want answers." What that meeting turns into is every dumb thing going on being resolved very quickly, because people don't know who to ask or how to resolve it. So I told Leah: every day at 8 a.m., get everybody on the cash-collections team together and start the meeting by saying, "Where's my money? Why haven't we collected it?" Make them explain why they haven't collected it, and you'll be shocked at the reasons. Sure enough, things like, "We didn't know we could edit the email," would come up. People would say, "I didn't know I could do this" — because they thought they weren't allowed. You say, "No — I'm the CEO; you're allowed to do it." That can unstick a dumb project that's way off track, or a process that's off track. It's a different idea about management. As you grow, communication becomes your biggest challenge. This is a way to manually, unscalably fix communication in the organization right now. The amazing thing is it tends to be long lasting: once they get that, it sustains.
25:05	Shaan Puri	I had a good experience with a founder you invested in. Do you know Sui Ali? He's one of my good buddies, and you guys invest in Tiny.
25:13	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
25:14	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah.
25:14	Ben Horowitz	Of course. Yeah, yeah.
25:16	Shaan Puri	Yeah, he does this exact thing. The founder emailed us and was like, “Hey, we're gonna start raising money. We really need to raise money, so it's important, and I would just love to pick your brain on what it was like.” Very like, “Can I pick your brain? Would you like to go get coffee for this? My house is on fire.” We were like, “Wait — just to clarify, is the house on fire?” He said, “Yeah, the house is on fire.” So we said, “Okay, let's meet — like, now. Why are you emailing me? Let's just talk right now.” He jumps on the call and asks, “Okay, what do you have so far? Let's raise the money.” He sends the pitch deck, and in the first thirty minutes we gave him three things: - These are the three most important things you have to change. - This part of the story is broken; you're missing this information. - You're framing it the wrong way — you have to frame it this way. He responded, “Okay, this is so helpful. Wow, thank you guys. I'd love to touch base again next week.” Sully said, “Next week? How long do you think it'll take you to make those three changes?” He replied, “How about we meet today at 3pm and you show me?” We did two-a-days with it. It kind of broke my brain a little because there was this invisible wall as a business person — you don't meet twice in a day; that would be a faux pas. It's like bad manners. But the point is: fuck your manners when it's a big problem. Just clarify that for me. If it is a big problem, then I'll keep showing up and saying, “Okay, now what? Okay, now what? Okay, now what?” If you just do that for three days, all of the excuses get squeezed away. All the excuses suddenly disappear and you get to the brass tacks about what's going on. It was amazing.
26:48	Ben Horowitz	That's definitely right. No, no — that's, you know, Zia Suley and I actually had a lot of conversations. He went through a lot of crises in that, so he knows.
26:59	Sam Parr	Can I ask you about confidence? You gave a talk with a bunch of your portfolio companies about... I think I saw you say that they don't fail due to a lack of confidence, but a lack of [unclear—transcript repeats "confidence"].
27:09	Ben Horowitz	I would say the number one reason why a founder fails at the CEO job is some kind of lack of confidence — a crisis of confidence, whatever it is — that causes them to hesitate. Basically: "Okay, I should do this. I can see that I should do this, but I'm not sure I should do this, so I'm gonna wait."
27:33	Sam Parr	If you had to teach a class on how to improve someone's confidence, do you have a framework or some bullet points that you would stand by?
27:42	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. I can't—it's like The Wizard of Oz. I can give you a clock and tell you it's a heart or whatever, but at some point you've got to believe that. The thing that causes a crisis in confidence is this: you invent something, you hire a bunch of people, you make a decision that's wrong, and people really suffer from it. You feel horrible because you're like, "Wow, I don't know what I'm doing," and you made a mistake that had real consequences. Most people in life don't have a situation like that until they become CEO. So then it's like, how do I recover from that? A lot of the idea of the firm was: what if you could call anybody—how would that make you feel? What if you could call anybody in the White House, in Congress, any executive, any big-company CEO, and be able to have a conversation? What if we could build that network for you? That was kind of the idea behind the platform. We used to do an event—I should probably bring it back, but I ran out of room in my backyard—called the CEO barbecue, where we would bring all the CEOs from the portfolio and then put very famous people around them. We had Zach and Larry Page and Kanye all at a barbecue. There were no talks, no business agenda, nothing—even no toast. It was just a barbecue. It was meant to make them feel, "Oh shit, I know Kanye—I'm... I have to be somewhat important." So you were trying to imbue this feeling that I may not totally know what I'm doing, but I should be CEO.
29:42	Shaan Puri	What about a barbecue with Kanye?
29:44	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, so...
29:45	Shaan Puri	It can't be totally dumb.
29:46	Sam Parr	Yeah — what about the inverse? When you look at a CEO and you think, "Oh, they have just hit this fork in the road. Now confidence is going to go horribly; it's going to go down and it's going to be their demise." What decisions do those people make? Are there commonalities between the people who lose it that way?
30:02	Shaan Puri	Sort of like the Charlie Munger line: "Tell me where I'm going to die so I know not to go there," right? What decisions would I make that would take me off the path?
30:09	Ben Horowitz	I would say the big thing is it's almost like a lack of decision. It's a hesitation. In football they always say, "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. That's kind of what it's like for CEOs. 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. There are all kinds of excuses people tell themselves to not make a decision. For example, one of the biggest ones an executive has is: "Well, we made such a big deal when we hired him — what is the press going to say? What are the people in the company going to say? I don't have time to hire a new person to do the job this guy's fucking up." There are all these reasons not to make the decision. If you think about them for more than five minutes, you go, "Well, that doesn't make any fucking sense," because this guy is fucking up the whole org. Who gives a fuck what the press says? Can you just get rid of him and start rebuilding now? If he's doing a bad job, no job is better than a bad job. I think we all know that. Everything kind of ends up like that: "I don't know enough to make the decision," "I didn't give him enough of a chance," this and that. So it's that lack of confidence that generally causes a no-decision when there really needs to be a decision. That's the main—I would say that's the common pattern.
31:54	Shaan Puri	Yes. 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. That, yeah, would be the mistake there. And then in this one, like, avoiding the decision would be the mistake.
32:06	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, you have to. I wrote a post a long time ago called "Run Out the Pain in Darkness." You have to run out the pain in darkness; you can't run away from it. If you run away from it, it's all bad. </FormattedResponse>
32:18	Sam Parr	"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 publishing industry, typically the author's book title is not the winning title. And I think you were kind of bragging, like, 'that's my title — I came up with it.'"
32:35	Ben Horowitz	Well, yeah. I didn't need a book. I actually wanted to write the book—the publisher asked me to write it. So I felt like I could do what I wanted, and I called it what I wanted, yeah.
32:46	Shaan Puri	> "What excites you? A lot of the stuff we talked about is the hard stuff—the pain. But nobody gets into this for just the pain, right? Nobody gets into this to do the pain. The pain is just a sort of necessary thing we go through to do the good stuff. > > I'm just curious: what are you really excited about right now? What rabbit holes are you going down? What cool stuff have you seen that you haven't been able to forget? What's really cool and interesting to Ben Horowitz?"
33:10	Ben Horowitz	Well, one of the most exciting things going on now is—it's well known that the United States has fallen behind in defense manufacturing, rare earth minerals, and similar areas. What's been very exciting is that there are startups saying, "I'll solve that for America." For example, we just funded a company recently, Periodic Labs, which is using AI to do novel materials science to enable better designs for everything from rockets to missiles and other systems. We also have a company, Cobalt Metals, that is using AI to analyze dirt samples. They can tell you, "Yeah, there's going to be copper below that, a mile down into the earth," and so on. These kinds of techniques—using tech to say, "No, we're going to catch up fast"—have been very, very exciting, I would say.
34:19	Shaan Puri	My view as a founder on the ground is that sometimes you see something and, like I said, it breaks an imaginary wall you had. Sometimes things become cool — and cool. Although we try not to follow trends, sometimes you can use your psychology for you rather than against you. So the idea, you know, seeing what Elon has done — where it's like, "oh, he goes into these really hard spaces and does hardware or hard tech, literal rocket science" — and he's sort of unafraid of that. Or, you know, Anduril going in and doing weapons and defense tech and making that cool, being kind of patriotic in that way. Is that what it was? Is that what it took? Or was there something else to it?
34:57	Ben Horowitz	You know, there are a lot—these are very challenging companies to build in some ways. On the other hand, it's a good time to do them because, well, Elon has—God bless Elon—for showing that it was possible. Now, whereas it used to be that only Elon could have financed Tesla, normal people can start to finance these things because Elon has shown it's possible. It's a little bit like the four-minute mile in that way, I would say. Even in public safety, look at something like Flock Safety. Technologically, it's not nearly as complicated as some of the others, like an Anduril or something like that, but it's very powerful. They really make both policing, being a citizen, and even being a criminal more safe because suddenly you're using AI to provide real intelligence. For example, in Las Vegas, where we deployed it, there was a huge problem: police getting killed at traffic stops. A big reason for that is when someone reports "a 1998 Honda Acura that's brown that kidnapped a baby"—that's a real situation. But that description is usually wrong. The description of the actual car is usually wrong. With Flock Safety, you have the exact match. The difference is between a cop going into a situation where they may have the wrong person—if they have the wrong person, he could get very agitated and then you have a bad situation—versus when they know 100% this is the guy, he is in a car that we know, and there's a baby in the back that's not his. You're not sending a single officer in there with a gun, coming off their motorcycle. You've got a whole team that will make sure the person is apprehended safely and correctly and the baby is saved.
37:17	Shaan Puri	"I've heard... I've heard 'Flocks' — this amazing thing. Is it drones? Is it cameras? What are they doing?"
37:20	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, no. So it's primarily a camera system where AI will basically—if somebody does something, they grab the car on one camera. That car can then show up on another camera anywhere in the city, and they're like, "Oh, there it is." Interestingly, that's how they caught the Tesla terrorist who set the Tesla shop on fire in Las Vegas. He had come in earlier to case the place. Fox Safety picked up the car, saw it come back at night, and were like, "Oh, we know whose car that is," and they just went and arrested him. </FormattedResponse>
37:56	Sam Parr	Did you guys see that ad? I think it was about two weeks ago. I was trying to find it — it went viral on Twitter. I believe it was a solar company recruiting employees. They had a whole website dedicated to recruitment; they needed more staff. They even bought an ad in [The New York Times or another newspaper]. The ad showed an old man sitting with what looked like his grandson, overlooking a mountain and, I think, solar panels — I'm not exactly sure. The copy was something like: > "Do you really wanna tell your grandkids that you spent your entire thirties and forties building just B2B software?" It was great. There's this whole trend among young people on Twitter of being more traditional and things like that. To answer your question, Sean, about Andrew and Elon: I think it's been a kind of perfect spiral — a mix of people seeing Elon and Palmer do these interesting things and also getting sick of building just B2B software. That's a stereotype of what's boring; it may or may not be true, but seeing this makes it feel like there could be more out there.
39:03	Ben Horowitz	I think that the software had to get good enough to, of course, make these other things possible. It's amazing that we're at a time where you can really imagine changing the world in all kinds of ways.
39:19	Shaan Puri	You get to see a lot of pitches from the smartest people in the world telling you what the future's going to look like in five years. So you have this element of your job that's a little bit like being a time traveler. You probably have a better sense of what the world will look like. Nobody has a perfect sense, but you have a better sense of what the world looks like five, seven, ten years from now. You don't know exactly when, and you don't know who's going to do it. What's blown your brain—either from a demo or a story pitch that you've heard sometime in the last year or so—is something that the rest of us will experience sometime in the future.
39:51	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, so I think one of the things—everybody's talking about embodied AI and robots and so forth, and rightly so. But I would say, in the creative space, I'm starting to realize that AI video and so forth isn't just making the old thing more efficient; it's a new medium. It's an actual new thing in the same way that "movies weren't plays." AI video is not just video. The stories you can tell are completely different because you can do things that, without a $200,000,000 budget, you'd have had no chance of doing. Now it's no problem. I think that's going to be very, very, very interesting. And then there's how well it's working on existing stuff. People on the cutting edge of the movie industry are now able to do whole movie scenes, or edit and change their movie, and have the AI actor do the third cut at a level of quality so convincing that even the actor doesn't realize it wasn't them doing the acting. That kind of thing. So I think it's going to change dramatically again, and there's going to be white space for not only new creatives but new entertainment entrepreneurs—opportunities that nobody is really imagining now.
41:20	Sam Parr	"Is there any AI content that you consume as a fan?"
41:24	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, no. Well, like, you know, we've been watching that. The one with the cat was pretty good over the weekend — the cat playing all the instruments and the lady coming out. Unfortunately, I'm like, "You gotta get that racket out." Do you guys see that one?
41:40	Sam Parr	"Was that on Sora?"</FormattedResponse>
41:41	Ben Horowitz	That was Friday. Good. Yeah, I think it's a Sora video.
41:44	Shaan Puri	Do you mess around on Suno at all with AI music?
41:47	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, Suno — and, you know, ElevenLabs has a model, and Yudios got a very good model. So there are a few different really good models. I feel like I could have a music career again. That's going to be very, very interesting to me because it's sort of like one thing that hip-hop showed. This is something Quincy Jones pointed out to me before he passed. He said, "Ben, hip hop started exactly when they canceled all the music programs in schools." It was the exact same time — when people didn't learn to play instruments in schools, that's when hip-hop began. Hip-hop kind of freed you, as somebody who was a musical talent, from actually having to learn to play an instrument. And even for the producers, right — 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. That opened up a world that we didn't have before. I think AI music is kind of that on steroids.
43:02	Shaan Puri	I don't know if you guys know, but the number-one song in the country right now is by an AI country artist. It's called "Walk My Walk."
43:07	Ben Horowitz	Oh, yeah.
43:07	Shaan Puri	And the first—I think the first AI artist that got a record deal recently. Like, you know, this is definitely what the future looks like: people who are non-musicians. It's just like Replit and others making it so that you don't have to be a coder to make apps.
43:22	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, yeah.
43:23	Shaan Puri	And now, you don't have to be a musician to make music. I don't think people really understand how big of a deal that is. My personal trainer — who's been in the fitness world his whole life — has been in a rabbit hole making [AI creations]. He's probably in the top 1% of AI creators in the world right now. </FormattedResponse>
43:38	Ben Horowitz	Oh.
43:38	Shaan Puri	That's for music, and he's got a full band. He's like his own record label, and every day he's up till two in the morning. He knows these programs inside and out. And because it wasn't really accessible before to somebody who didn't have, you know, musical talent — to be able to make music.
43:53	Ben Horowitz	Right, there's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuoso violinist. Those don't necessarily have to be the same thing. It's great — yeah, I know people who, you know, practice violin for three hours a day and 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.
44:25	Sam Parr	"Sean, can you ask? You have this really cool light about the rules of culture and making them memorable."
44:32	Shaan Puri	Well, yeah. So when I'm doing the research, one thing that stands out is you talk about culture. You keep talking about it—which, honestly, usually makes me fall asleep because it's so overtalked in the business world. You really have to tell me something new.
44:45	Ben Horowitz	"Over-talked about without anybody saying anything. Culture, culture, right? It's like, 'Oh, cool.'"
44:50	Shaan Puri	"Tell me your values." It's like, "Integrity." Alright, great — glad to hear it. I was worried it was going to be the opposite. It doesn't really tell you anything. When you walk into the company, the stuff on the wall doesn't match the stuff you see happening within the four walls, so you get sort of disillusioned. When you see somebody doing something interesting, or somebody actually pulling it off — which, of course, there are examples of — I get interested. One thing I thought was cool, a nuance I hadn't really heard before, was you were talking about how at a16z [Andreessen Horowitz] you kind of take time to drive the culture. In the new onboarding you said, "I do a culture session — one hour. They sign something at the end." One of the nuances I thought was interesting was you said: "My rule for writing the... culture rules is it has to have some shock value. It has to give the other person an 'Oh — what the hell are you talking about?' type of reaction if it's going to be memorable." 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?
45:48	Ben Horowitz	Yeah. So it kind of comes down to what you do every day. It's a daily habit. This idea of putting cultural values on the wall and then, once a year at a performance review, asking "Do you follow the culture?" — that means absolutely nothing. The question is: what do you do every day? One thing we do every day is meet with entrepreneurs. So what's a rule that sets the culture around that? For example: "If you're late for that meeting, it's $10 a minute." People push back: "What if I have to go to the bathroom? You owe me $50." Or, "What if I had an important phone call — can you owe me $100?" The answer is: I don't care. You had an important phone call. "Why am I paying to work here?" Because building a company is extremely hard, and culturally we want to have the ultimate respect for that. We don't want to waste any entrepreneur's time. That's the most important thing, so you have to plan to do it.
46:47	Sam Parr	You guys have a fine. Now you're talking. This is a real A-16C.
46:51	Ben Horowitz	Yeah. So every time I have to go to the meeting, I have to think about it because I’ve got to be on time. I gotta fucking plan my day so I’m not back-to-back on that one. I have to be on time; otherwise I’m going to be embarrassed and all that. And then — why am I doing that? Well, if you do that, that’s a habit that makes you go, “Okay, no — I’m going to 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 who — somebody here thinks it’s hard enough that I have to show up on time.
47:26	Sam Parr	So, can you—can you tell some more of those interesting... you know, the "tardiness-paying" thing? That's pretty cool. What are some other ones?
47:33	Ben Horowitz	So, as well—the second one is: 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. Why is that? 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 don't care if Sequoia funded you or Benchmark funded you. I'm for that. Go get it. We're pro-entrepreneur. Related to that, I don't want to give anybody credit for making themselves look smart by making somebody else look stupid. I don't want to give anybody a gold star for saying, "That guy's making selling dollars for 85¢—oh, I'm so clever." Fuck you. Nah—we're not doing that here. That seems like a harsh punishment, but I get it. I've heard it and I understand it. That's a way to show up behaviorally every day, as opposed to abstract talk. Like, here's the problem with "integrity": what does that mean? Integrity only matters when it's tested. Everybody has integrity, everybody's honest—until it's tested. And when it's tested, very few people are right. When it costs you money, when it costs you a deal, when it costs you your marriage—are you honest then? That's the actual thing. So you can't just have it in the abstract. You have to say: what behaviors do you have to have to work here? How responsive do you have to be? These things end up making the culture much more than a value statement. One thing I really like is that the samurai called them virtues; they didn't call them values. "These are the virtues—this is your way of being." It's not a set of ideas—it's a set of actions. A culture is a set of actions.
49:57	Sam Parr	Listen to this, Sean. If you go to a16z.com/about you'll see their values, and I just want to read — I've never seen this before, so I'm going to read a couple of them. The sixth one (six out of seven) is: > "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. We expect to win." 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 badass. And then you have another one that I really like: "We only do first-class business, and only in a first-class way." I think that's a really... </FormattedResponse>
50:36	Ben Horowitz	I actually stole that phrasing from J.P. Morgan. Oh — it's so cool. He said it in court. They were accusing him of some kind of crazy market manipulation. He... you're...
50:46	Sam Parr	Talking about the JP.
50:48	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, yeah, yeah.</FormattedResponse>
50:49	Shaan Puri	Yeah, James Spearman — J.P. Morgan. Yeah.</FormattedResponse>
50:50	Sam Parr	Yeah, yeah. I think that was... I think I read that line in Andrew Sorkin's—he's got that 1928 or '29 book, and I think he says that. But that's great.
50:59	Shaan Puri	So... okay. When I go to this site and I see these, I'm like, "Okay, these are kind of the high-level principles." But what you were saying just now is a little bit different. You were like, "Hey, look—"
51:08	Ben Horowitz	Well, there have to be behaviors that support the principles, yeah.
51:11	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so 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 that way. We're going to show up this way, and sometimes there's a penalty, a punishment, or praise based on the extreme version of that behavior, with the no-tolerance policy, right? And I think there's this great military quote that you have in your book.
51:33	Ben Horowitz	Oh yeah. Well, hey — if you see something below standard and you don't correct it, you set a new standard. And right, that's very true. That's why they have to be specific. Because if they're not specific, you can't enforce it. How do you enforce something like "you don't have integrity"? That just gets weaponized. It's like, "That guy doesn't have—he's not following the cultural value." You know, "He doesn't… why doesn't he have integrity?" "Well, he lied to me." "Well, let's go talk to him." "Oh no, I didn't lie to you." So it's not that. Whereas, "Oh, you just put out that tweet" — that's clearly against the cultural value. Uh-uh. There's no backing off that.
52:11	Shaan Puri	So, like, you know, Facebook famously had "Move fast and break things," which I...
52:14	Ben Horowitz	"Think that was really good, by the way."
52:16	Shaan Puri	Hall of Fame. Yeah, you know, that's a— that's a Hall of Famer. But... that's kind of the— no, one of...
52:20	Ben Horowitz	I thought about that for months. I'm like, "Move fast and break things," because it's so counterintuitive. It's like, well, 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, "There is no excuse for not fucking shipping." Like, we're going fast, but they...
52:38	Sam Parr	Don't have that anymore, do they? Is that something... you know?</FormattedResponse>
52:40	Ben Horowitz	They got bigger, and then... you know, I think speed wasn't their main thing that they were trying to achieve.
52:46	Shaan Puri	I think they literally changed it to, like, "Move fast." It's move fast, stability, and stable — like, with stable infrastructure and reliability.
52:53	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, exactly.
52:54	Shaan Puri	Somehow lost its edge. Yeah, yeah. So, have you seen anything like that — "move fast and break things" — or was it just a behavior? When you walked into the Airbnb office, did you notice something?
53:02	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, I mean, Amazon had this thing where they used to make desks out of doors and two-by-fours.
53:12	Sam Parr	"I tried doing that by..."
53:13	Shaan Puri	The way it is, it's way cheaper to get a desk.
53:15	Ben Horowitz	It's way cheaper to get a desk. But I think the idea back in the late 1990s, when they did that, was like, "We're not wasting any money."
53:23	Shaan Puri	Yeah.
53:24	Ben Horowitz	You know, those markers are very, very powerful. One of my favorite examples was actually from the Haitian Revolution, when Toussaint L'Ouverture basically made a rule. He said, "You can't cheat on your wife," which was so absurd because they were in a French colony — the British, the Spanish, the French — all raping and pillaging and doing all this stuff, all these armies. And yet his men "couldn't cheat on their wives." That little cultural idea — "Look, this is about trust; I have to be able to trust you, and the people have to be able to trust you" — ended up really influencing the war. One surprising thing for people who read about the Haitian Revolution was that the slave army was taking on European colonial forces and the white women in the colonies supported Toussaint against the French. You wonder, "Why'd they do that?" Because Toussaint's men didn't rape or pillage. These guys — half-naked soldiers or slaves — weren't doing any of that. They were super polite; they behaved in a certain way. The legend goes that slaves didn't have last names, so where did "L'Ouverture" come from? The story is that Napoleon, who was really angry at him, brought his generals together and said, "How in the fuck can you not get this slave? How can you not defeat this slave?" The generals replied, "We get them backed up, we get them surrounded, and then, all of a sudden, there's an opening." He became Toussaint L'Ouverture — Toussaint "the opening." Many people say that the opening was created by the townspeople, the women, who were basically 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, culture can be super influential.
55:23	Sam Parr	That's a great story. That's really cool.
55:25	Shaan Puri	You mentioned Amazon. Do you see Jeff Bezos got a new startup?
55:28	Ben Horowitz	"Oh, I did see Jeff got a new startup."
55:31	Shaan Puri	Alright — did you see this announcement? They—alright. Project Prometheus hit: they raised an initial seed round of 6,000,000,000 [currency not specified]. Oh—$22,000,000,000? Is that...?
55:40	Sam Parr	True — they called that.
55:41	Shaan Puri	Alright — a seed round, which is the first round of funding. They raised $6 billion and have about 100 people. They're building AI for the physical world. It's not just robots, but AI applied to the manufacturing of airplanes, ships, and similar things. They're basically asking, "How do we use AI in advanced manufacturing?" I think that's the idea, though there are a few title details. That's pretty cool. He's back in an operational role for the first time, which is also cool.
56:09	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, no — I think that, by the way, how great is it that the logistics genius of our time is back at it and is going to help us get back in the manufacturing game? That is just incredible to me. I think all of us were a little sad when Jeff was just "living his best life," because he's so talented. So this is very great news.
56:36	Shaan Puri	I loved it. I was like, "This guy's having fun — he's getting jacked. He's showing a different, you know, a new north star, which has kind of taken over the tech industry."
56:45	Ben Horowitz	Like... you know, people always make you into a cartoon when you get to that level. He is, you know, for sure a top two or three best CEO in the last 40 years.
56:59	Shaan Puri	So... mm-hmm.
57:00	Sam Parr	You're a bit surprising to me because I've read all your books. I know about your background. Basically, you've guided the people who have shaped destiny, and you've also shaped destiny yourself. You've done all these amazing things, and you're a shockingly fun hang. Normally, I think that's insane, and you know about hip hop and this stuff. Usually, people who have outsized results have very strange personalities and are a little quirky. 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 would surprise the average person? Are there any tendencies that...
57:42	Ben Horowitz	You have things you recognize that probably aren't at all normal. Well, you know…I would say the thing my daughter always says that's unusual about me—and I think it came from the beginning of my life—is that I'm different than modern people. I was married when I was 22 and had three kids by the time I was 25. I kind of had to grow up fast. Then I had the company. I was trying to raise the kids and run the company, and I didn't have money for nannies or anything, so it was a lot. But what she says to me is, "Dad, you're like at the top of Maslow's hierarchy — you're very zen with all this." I take things for what they are. I'm pretty good at not being unemotional, while also not letting my emotional reaction control my behavior.
58:37	Sam Parr	Were you always that way, or did you become—no?</FormattedResponse>
58:39	Ben Horowitz	No, no, no, no — definitely not. I think it was just all the trauma that forced me to learn that. </FormattedResponse>
58:44	Sam Parr	What age did—what made you calm down? Was it age? Was it kids? Was it success? Or was it like, "I've made it; everything else is just icing on the cake — I don't care"?
58:52	Ben Horowitz	Well, hey. I think it was the combination of the kids and the company. The first company I founded, Loudcloud — which then became Opsware — was so difficult that I never, in my life since then, felt the same kind of response. We've had difficulties building the firm, whatever, but they never got a rise out of me that could compare to what I'd already been through. So it's almost like... I feel like, almost like — no, guys — my friend Oliver Stone was in Vietnam, and you could tell everything about him was, "I'm not in Vietnam anymore." So much of his life is defined by not being in Nam. I do feel like — I don't want to compare it to war because people always criticize me for my war metaphors — but it is kind of that feeling where it's like, "Okay, I've been through that; I'm just looking at the world differently now."
59:54	Sam Parr	And I bet it... I'm sure you had some sense of, like, "Alright, I've accomplished something. I feel good. Maybe I'm playing with house money a little bit with everything else."
01:00:04	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, it's a little house money, and then it's a little... all you can do is deal with the thing that it is. You can't stop it from having happened. It happens, and now you have to deal with it.
01:00:14	Shaan Puri	Were there any other sort of "wisdom accelerators"? You have these formative experiences, right? You got three kids in three years or whatever, and you're 20 by the time you're 25. Then you're trying to build a startup, and everything you face are kind of back-against-the-wall moments. Were there any other formative things? For example, in my life I went to a Tony Robbins seminar. I sort of got "five years of wisdom in a weekend" type of thing.
01:00:36	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, no — he's very good at dealing with your own psychology. He's very...
01:00:40	Shaan Puri	Sometimes you're just in the right moment — you're doing something, or you read a book at the right time, or you get the right message at the right time. Then you have a moment where you just decide, "From now on, X." I'm just curious: was there any—if I think about formative moments besides the kids and besides Loudcloud—what else would there have been?
01:00:55	Ben Horowitz	When I was a kid I was in this relay race. It was a very big deal for me — the track meet and everything. We came in second in the relay because the team that came in first dropped the baton and didn't pick it up. The guy just ran without the baton and they gave him first place; they didn't penalize him. My father wasn't at the race. He asked, "How'd you do in the race?" I said, "Paul, we came in second, but it wasn't fair," and I was going to explain why. He said, "Stop right there. Life isn't fair." That shocked me at the time, but it really stuck with me. It's the single best lesson I ever got. I see young people wreck themselves so much because they expect something about life to be fair. 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 what your parents did, job interviews aren't fair, tests aren't fair. Nothing is fair in life. So the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation. You just deal with it as it is. For example, when cloudandthe.com crashed and half our customers went out of business, it never crossed my mind to say, "This isn't fair." It was just, "Okay — I have to deal with it." That mindset — it is what it is — and then doing what you can with the situation as it is, is, I would say, the single best piece of advice and way of looking at life.
01:03:07	Sam Parr	"You've referenced a lot of really cool stuff — 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 like to talk about just fun stuff that you're into." "I'm constantly reading about World War II. I like that. What about you? Is there anything that you're kind of — like — obsessed about?"
01:03:27	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, so I do have this—I'll give a plug for it. I have a charity that I created with my wife called the Paid in Full Foundation, which basically was an idea on a whim. We give pensions to the old hip-hop guys. They get $100,000 a year, and then we have an award show for them where we name them Grandmasters and so forth. The first winners were Rakim and Scarface. Then we had Grandmaster Caz, Shanté, Kool Moe Dee, and so forth, and then Grand Puba and Cool G Rap. This year we added the Quincy Jones Award to honor the guys who got sampled the most, and we gave it to George Clinton. The event was—I'm still thinking about it—it was so amazing because George Clinton knows all the words to "Follow the Leader." He's on stage and Quincy Jones says, "Can you rap 'Follow'?" and he raps "Follow the Leader," and Rakim came out and rapped it with him. So we had George Clinton and Rakim together on stage. Then Dr. Dre bought a table at the event and he couldn't help himself—he went up on stage just to say, "I have no career without George Clinton." It was just so amazing to have all these guys who were so important and who influenced so many people being that appreciative of each other. Hip hop, of course, is so competitive and they're always going at each other, but for them to be at that...
01:05:08	Ben Horowitz	"Where they could just go, 'Man, you guys meant so much to me,' and that kind of thing. It was just very special."
01:05:19	Shaan Puri	That's so cool. Yeah, that idea of pensions for the OGs is so great. What—did that just come on a whim? Were you just at lunch one day and you're like, "Why don't they..."? You know, that one-liner gives you the clarity, right. It gives you the clarity of where to go. </FormattedResponse>
01:05:34	Ben Horowitz	So I was listening to the "H to the Izzo" Jay‑Z song where he says, "I'm overcharging for what they did to the Cold Crush," and it got me wondering: who was the Cold Crush? It turns out it's Grandmaster Caz. Grandmaster Caz wrote "Rapper's Delight," basically, and they stole it from him. They stole it so nastily that they didn't change the words. Caz was rapping about his name — not Big Bank Hank. Big Bank Hank is the one not named Grandmaster, so why is he calling himself Grandmaster? Because he stole his fucking rhyme and he never got paid and he never got credit for it. Everybody in hip‑hop knows this. And Grandmaster Caz, by the way — if you meet him, he's the coolest guy in the room. He dresses amazingly, he's super articulate, and he can still rap like crazy today. He's 66 years old or 65, something like that. I was like, "Well, we ought to go back and fix that." You know, getting it set up with the IRS and all that stuff is extremely complicated. But yeah, it's been really, really — I would say — amazing. Just an unbelievable epilogue. Caz at the last one tells me, "Ben, I bought a house." I was like, "Oh, that's amazing, Caz, you've got a house?" He was like, "No, Ben, it's the first time in my life I haven't lived in the projects." Grandmaster Caz — the guy who wrote the first great hip‑hop song — has never not lived in the projects. How crazy is that? Now here he is with a house in Pennsylvania, he's got berries in his backyard, and the whole thing.
01:07:33	Shaan Puri	He's got berries in his backyard.
01:07:37	Sam Parr	It is pretty nuts — the people who invent the shit don't get it. For example, Sean and I love the UFC, and we saw the early UFC events, yeah.
01:07:46	Ben Horowitz	Make anything.
01:07:47	Sam Parr	"Yeah, and they're getting $2,000 to show up. They still come to the Legends Awards and they still are talking. You're like, 'Damn, dude — this guy's probably selling insurance or something.' You know, he probably made $15,000 that year."
01:08:00	Ben Horowitz	No doubt, no doubt.
01:08:01	Shaan Puri	Yeah, this happens in the NBA too. This is why the culture gets kind of messed up: the old heads keep criticizing all the new players. And it's like, "Why are you doing that?"
01:08:10	Ben Horowitz	It's like, "make too much more money than..."
01:08:12	Shaan Puri	$70,000,000 a year, and that guy didn't make $7 million in his whole career. He's like, "I'm better than that guy." And that guy, you know... so there's this resentment. Then they get on, and they're the guys doing the halftime shows, and it's bad—bad for the product. It's bad for the lineage, because everything is a creative lineage built on top of what came before. So it's really cool to kind of, almost, economically fix the—you know—or try to improve that ecosystem, because </FormattedResponse>
01:08:37	Ben Horowitz	Like, the whole thing is hard. You know, it's funny — it's also kind of this thought I have about capitalism, which is: capitalism is definitely the system that lifted the world out of poverty and kind of created the modern world we live in. It's incredibly powerful, but over time it does get corrupted and so forth. Even if it wasn't corrupted, it's not perfect. Certain things happen. For example: you create a musical art form, you're the guys who actually made it happen, it becomes the biggest musical art form in the world, and you never got paid. Capitalism... shit works like that. But it's just kind of the way it works, right? It's somebody's fault, and so if you can go back and say, "Well, we'll just correct those things..."
01:09:25	Sam Parr	I think you are so cool. On one hand, you're a pretty hard-hitting capitalist — you're getting after it. You're talking about making really tough decisions, like having to fire people, whatever. But then you're also saying, "we can do good by doing all this other stuff." I think that, particularly in tech, people's interests are not particularly that wide.
01:09:44	Ben Horowitz	Yeah. Well, I think people get very into tech. Tech is so deep and vast that people can get stuck in it for sure.
01:09:52	Shaan Puri	Ben, well, we thank you for coming on, man. I know you've got a lot of things going on, but this was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.
01:09:58	Ben Horowitz	Yeah, I know. It's a good time. Thanks, guys — definitely.
01:10:01	Sam Parr	Alright, appreciate you. That's it — that's the pod.

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