SJ - on admitting needing help and top tips for new managers

America's got to rebuild its entire infrastructure like right now. We don't have enough rare earth minerals. We don't have enough electricity. We don't have enough manufacturing capacity. In video, we'll make enough chips, but then we won't have enough memory. Almost everything is a bottleneck. The China graph is like this in the US graph is like that. How do we make this seem less scary? The history of technology is things have always gotten better. Humans are kind of unbelievable in their ability to come up with new things that they need. Now 8 billion people that might have an idea in their head can get it out of their head. I do think what's going to happen is. For 50 years, one rule in technology was almost sacred. You cannot buy your way out of a software problem. Higher a thousand engineers and you still won't catch a faster competitor. Fred Brooks called it the Mythical Man Month and every engineering leader believed it. That rule no longer holds. With enough GPUs and the right data, companies can now compress years of development into weeks. But the disruption cuts both ways. The same forces that let startups move faster are dissolving the modes that protected incumbents. Customer lock-in, proprietary data, switching costs, all eroding at once. So in a world where the old defenses no longer work, what actually makes a company worth building, funding, or keeping. Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at A16Z speaks with A16Z general partner Alex Rampell at FinTech Connect Conference in Deer Valley. So you've been doing this for a long time and I thought maybe I'd start off and it's funny. We actually didn't rehearse this at all because I thought that way would be more real, right? But let's talk about. You have this book where you talked about how hard it is to be a CEO and everything that you went through at Loud Cloud and Opsware. That was a giant shift where it's like the market kind of collapsed, the financial market collapsed. Then you had a really pivot and just changed the company. And there are new age companies that are popping up right now. AI first, they hopefully have their shit together. They're off to the races building something new. But like a legacy company or five or ten years ago where there's this great opportunity but also great challenge, what does a five or ten year old CEO do where it's like they're pre-AI. They got to figure out what they do. They said the financial markets hate them. Yes. So there's the financial market hate. They don't have to. Yes. So they added a big riff on that. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Yeah. Well, I think the first thing you have to recognize in a kind of huge dislocation like this is some very basic, axiomatic, like laws of physics are different. And the two that are really different with AI compared to how companies have been built in kind of technology forever is one, it used to be very well known that you cannot throw money at the problem. So for example, if I had a product and I was two years behind, I could not hire a thousand engineers and catch my competitor like it's a mythical man month, nine women can't have a baby in a month. Everybody knows that. It never works. No problem. That's no longer true. You can throw money at the problem. If you have enough money and some good data, you can buy enough GPUs and solve basically anything and software. So that's gone. The second thing that we knew for sure is like in software, you know, possession is nine tens of the laws. So if you have the customer, you have multiple lock ins. You have the migration, pain lock in. You've got the data lock in. You've got the user interface lock in. Those are pretty much gone, right? So it's very easy to replicate the code. It's very easy to move the data. And then it's not even going to be a human talking to your software. It's going to be an AI. And you know, AI's are really flexible on how they use user interfaces. So that mode is gone. So I think that's just like the first thing you have to recognize as a CEO that like, okay, that's going away. So then what is it? Where is your value? What are you delivering? It turns out there are many things that are of value. But if you're trying to get good pricing through any of those things, you're going to be under tremendous pressure. Your price has to be a function of some other value that's much more distinct that you provide. Got it. And the other thing that we've talked about this a lot internally as a firm is that once upon a time, like if you have a good product, you might have ten years to run with that product, maybe five years. And now it might be like five weeks. Well we also talking about this like in terms of going public. So companies are staying private a lot longer, which probably is good. If you're going through an existential crisis, you'd much rather do that as a private company than a public company. But also the reason why the SaaS apocalypse is happening is because there are doubts on terminal value. Yeah. Right. So everybody who starts a company, they're doing it because they want to create economic value. And they're capitalists, they're trying to actually benefit from this equation financially. But if you wait too long, maybe your company is worth zero, that's kind of scary. And that was always a risk, but it would play out over decades. Yeah, it's not as fast as risk. So I guess if you were, I mean loud clouds around today, you're the CEO. And again, bad example. Sorry, sorry to give you a scary. I know. Although actually loud cloud would be awesome. It actually did us. Yeah, exactly. You would be very well positioned. But I guess what is it that a CEO should do potentially differently? I mean, obviously move faster, cut faster, be more efficient, throw money at the, like all these things that we've talked about, but it's like, shit, if I go public and I get disrupted, then I have this terrible life of I'm going to be a penny stock. If I just wait, there's this chance that I get eviscerated and this kind of like road killer success equation is kind of scary, right? I mean, it's always scary, but you would have a time. You would have time. And now it feels like you don't. Yeah, I think you do have to be honest with yourself. Like what it is you have really, like there are companies that get thrown under the bus correctly and once that don't. And then if you take a lot of these ideas to their logical conclusion, then you know, nothing is worth anything because there are no people at companies. And if there are no people who's going to buy your shitty software, so dead it it out. But like it is more like subtle and it just tends to take much longer than we think for some of these things to play out. So then the question is, are you getting stronger in that meanwhile or are you degenerating? So is what's happening? Nobody's buying like the money just shifted. The customers are buying other stuff. They're not buying yours. In that case, you have a huge problem. You probably have to cut deeply and pivot. On the other hand, look, there's companies that have been slaughtered in the valuation game, but are pretty strong. So I'm on the board of this company, Navon, right? Like in their travel. So obviously the SaaS apocalypse, like their debt, no way you're doing travel. But then you look under the covers and you go, well, it actually is a little more complicated than that because on travel, like you actually need explicit relationships to find providing your travel and you're any kind of company that's important at all, you need to travel globally. So now I need a relationship with every single airline in the world, every single hotel in the world, every train, everything. You've got to deal with that. You've got to kind of connect back to their budgeting systems and all these things. And then the second thing that's like nobody wants to do, including open AI or anthropic, is sell to the damn travel manager. Like nobody has a channel to the travel manager. It's not something like, and you can't even imagine that being a good idea, you want to keep advancing, you want to kind of do the things that intuit is doing where like, okay, like turn ourselves into more of an AI company. And then kind of hold the customer. And by the way, like the AI, like the agentic travel experience turns out to be much more complicated than one would think. And I don't know if it stays that way, but that's the way it is today. So I think it's very company dependent. Like I don't think it's all one thing. But I do think brave new world. And if you keep looking at it like the old world and it's got completely different laws of physics, you are definitely going to die. Yeah. Well, maybe let's talk about venture capital. There's a lot of cope going on now. Take it. You got to be careful with that. Well, that's the thing. It's like there are some things that really are features. And before it would take a long time to build a feature. So you might as well, you know, it's comparative advantage. You gave it Ricardo. I could weld my own seal. I could grow my own food, but I'm just going to not do that because I can do things that actually produce more economic value for me. But now it's just becoming not that hard. Yeah. You go create features, but features are not products or not companies. We've always had this distinction. There's feature product company, but it's a little bit confusing figuring out which one is which right now, just because the ability to create a feature and create a product. And even get all the data, my favorite saying the best companies have hostages, not customers, like even get some of the data out of the hostage company. Yeah. So it's a very, very confusing world in terms of figuring out which one is which is kind of maybe a good segwit to venture capital land. Yeah. So you think, I mean, when you started this firm in 2009, big financial crisis, actually, very, very big financial crisis, global financial crisis going on. The biggest. The world has changed a lot since then. I mean, how much of what's happening today kind of fits within the mental model of back then and how much is kind of brave new worlds? Maybe riff on that a little bit. Yeah. So it's really different. So our first fund was $300 million. And we raised it from all the traditional kind of LPs, endowments, charitable foundations, et cetera, fund funds. We just raised $200 million. $15 billion for the seven funds for the seven funds. So like not even the whole complex. And we raised it from very, very different kinds of investors. So we, basically none of our LP base was international when we started and we're at like 35% international money and it's from all kinds of places. And just tech has gotten more, tech has gotten so much more important. I think that we have to think in terms of the world in a way that we just didn't before. So for example, like with the why you raised so much money, which by the way, I'm kind of mad at myself because I don't even think I articulated internally well enough because we could raise even more money. Exactly. Yeah, we had more money on the table. But the way I was thinking about it is, look, America's got to rebuild its entire infrastructure like right now because we don't have enough, you know, we don't have enough rare earth minerals, we don't have enough electricity, we don't have enough manufacturing capacity. We don't have, we have the wrong chips like they take way too much damn power they were built for games. You know, we don't have the, we don't have enough anything kind of to be in this future world. But somebody's got to fund it and, you know, so clearly that's going to take a lot of money. So all that is brand new. And I would say it's like fairly overwhelming in a sense, but it is really, really important. Like we're pretty much out of electricity down. And you know, I'd say it's like not 12 months from now, like right now. But the China graph is like this in the US graph is like that. Yeah, it's not like that. Yeah, for these tokens is straight vertical, but the ability to kind of build that capacity is absolutely not vertical. So we need new environment like we need, we invested in a transformer company, not like a, an AI transformer like an actual power transformer company because you need, you know, kind of better, easier to manufacture, more, more efficient transformers. The transformer hasn't changed since really we invest, you know, we invent electricity. So like these kinds of things. Well, I guess how, so there's an old saying the cure for high prices is high prices. Yeah. But the problem is there's a lot of latency involved. So right now there are computers that show up with no RAM. Like if you buy, you go buy a server from Dell to like, sorry, we don't have any RAM to sell you because all of that has been gobbled up because yeah, they could build a new factory or you and I could decide to go build a D RAM factory. That would take us five years. So how do you, I mean, and we don't believe it. We gotta start now. You gotta start now. But this is, this is actually, if you remember, which you obviously do in 1999, it's like, well, we have to build more fiber, right? We have to build more capacity, but it's obviously very different because all the GPUs are hot. They're all lit right now. And back then most of the fiber was dark. Yes. But how do you get like, yeah, well, there were bottlenecks when we were building fiber, the bottlenecks were kind of in different places. So, you know, we, like the servers weren't capable of putting like bits out even fast enough to do video, right? And like this software was really, we didn't have load balancers, we didn't have application servers, we didn't have anything. And so you had all this fiber and all this bandwidth, but like you can actually build the applications. And then most of the end users weren't, it's a network too. So, you know, people weren't connected on the other end. So, it just didn't work and then we had the dot com crash and all these things. So now we're in a little different place because almost everything is a bottleneck. I do think what's going to happen is like, well, probably have enough chips long before we have enough electricity. So, Nvidia will make enough chips, but then we won't have enough memory and we won't have enough electricity. So, we're in that kind of situation now. So I think you really have to study where we are at each point in the supply chain and figure out how to alleviate those bottlenecks. And by the way, you know, God bless Elon, the tariff app, you know, that's the idea. He's going to just go deal with all the bottlenecks himself, which is how he does things, which is why we need him. Indeed. So, I feel like you're an expert in three things. Hip hop AI and crypto. And I don't know anything about hip hop, but I've got your, your, I've heard a lot from you, but let's talk about the other two. Yeah. In particular, crypto and AI. So I actually just wrote about this. I mean, you remember the origins of crypto was cash cash. Yeah. Yeah. And the scariest thing right now from my perspective is that everybody with clot or with chat GPT can actually like go super deep and personalize a phone call and email. Like, it seems like all communication is going to be completely unusable. Yep. I don't know if you agree with me. I 100%. Like normally I can just delete delete. I get some email yesterday, dear Alan at index ventures. It's like, well, I'm not Alan. I don't work in index ventures delete. Yeah. And I'm very grateful that this person messed up my name because I can just delete that. Yeah. Whereas if I get a thousand emails, like the best way of thinking about an email inbox is it's a to do list that has right access for the public. Yeah. Right. It's like anybody can get in. And now anybody can personalize same thing for phone calls. Like, what do we do? And then it seems like there's a lot behind crypto. That's why I mentioned hash cash because it was originally intended to stop spam. Yeah. So do you think there's overlap between AI and crypto? I know you do. So tell us about that. Yeah. So I do think it starts with the problems that AI causes. And actually one of the first thing I woke up in the middle of the night one day and I was like, oh my god, somebody's going to go on a Zoom. It's going to be AI me. And they're going to tell my finance team to wire like, you know, $500 million to Nigeria. And that's going to be a problem. So you know, and then we're like, okay, everything's hardware, root of access. Don't believe anything from me unless it's got my cryptographic key on it, all that kind of things. So I knew these problems were coming. They're coming so fast now. So I think there's kind of several categories of things. First is just, are you a human or are you a bot? Like I think everybody is going to really, really want to know that, be a social media, a dating app, a Zoom call, like anything you want to know, am I talking to an actual human? Like, okay, can I prove that I'm a human being? And then, you know, can I prove that I'm me? And then can I sign content? Like how do I know what's true? Like there needs to be a distinction between, I get so many AI videos. They need to be a good idea. And then, you know, I think that's the only way to get a good idea. And then, you know, you know, I think that's the only way to get a good idea. I don't know, it was like, depending on the numbers you read at somewhere around $450 billion got stolen. So what you really need is everybody needs an address where you can send them money. And so I think that's a crypto problem. And then, finally, how does an AI, you know, become an economic actor? Like, how do I make money as an AI? How does somebody send me money? Like, can I be a merchant? A credit card merchant? I'm not a human. I don't think so. Like, I think that's actually kind of hard. And, you know, and it's probably not the kind of right infrastructure anyway. And so you need a bearer instrument on the internet. You need internet money for these AI's to be economic actors. And I think that's very likely to be crypto. So I think there are many opportunities in the crypto space that have been generated by AI. Yeah. Because it feels like it's this old yogi bearer saying it's so crowded. And it goes here anymore. Like we're kind of entering that era because number one is, are you a real person? But the problem is that, you know, co-work is so good right now that, or, you know, open claw. I just say, you are a real person. You were a real person. But now your addresses are being used by a machine. Yeah. Right? So, caphes don't make any sense. Caphes and an app. What is a caphes? Right? It feels like the solution lies in kind of economics somehow in game theory. So, yeah, I'm mad too. Right, right. Are you going to just have to, oh, maybe like I think hash cash is kind of a relevant idea again. Yeah. No, totally. So maybe why don't we talk about where you think venture capital is going. And I mentioned this because Mark got some crap for saying, you know, all the jobs will go away except for one job of venture capital, which was seen as a self-serving comment. But in his defense, I will say it's partially because it's a non-deterministic problem. Yeah. Right. It's like, all right, you're betting on an entrepreneur first and foremost. And you want to know that this entrepreneur is, I like to say, can materialize labor, capital, and customers. And you can't just like, you know, run an algorithm on it. I mean, maybe you can, but there's just not a lot of data out there. It's very, very hard to do. So that's the logic by which it also just personal relationships in general will probably survive AI. Like, if there's a venture capitalist, then that kind of assumes there's an entrepreneur job. No. Yes. Yes. That is true. It takes it's kind of hard to be a venture capitalist without it. If you're very bad, you can just raise money and never allocate it, I guess. But I guess, what do you think the world of venture capital looks like kind of today? We've obviously done a lot of things internally as a firm to try to embrace AI very, very fully. But now five years, ten years from now, just given what's potentially going to happen to what color work. Yeah. It's really tricky because you kind of go back to the last transition like this, which was kind of the transition to the industrial revolution. So, you know, kind of the venture capitalists of the railroads and the automobiles and so forth, you know, ended up becoming JP Morgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, et cetera. So they ended up becoming banks. And, you know, some of the reason for that was just how, like, how fast that materialized. So I think in the 30s, like 20% of American workers work for the auto industry, which is like spectacular compared to what it is today. And so things in the industrial revolution kind of started out very much like we are today in venture capital where there were whatever 300 auto companies and so forth. And then it consolidated very hard into, you know, in the US, a big three and so forth. And then the kind of venture capitalists went upstream with the companies. I think that's one scenario where like, okay, there's going to be a small number of very gigantic companies and they're going on everything and so forth. There's another kind of future where it's like, okay, they got really big. And then we've kind of, we've kind of finally hit the asymptote on this intelligence idea. And like, there's smart is they're going to be or whatever. And we're either going to like nationalize the big labs and like, like their utilities, their electricity plus plus, like if you, if you're going to think you're going to collect all the money. And then everybody's just going to build on this utility set of things. And then that's a very different venture capital world. So I would say, you know, the, as I'll quote, Yogi Berra, like the problem with the future, you know, the problem with predictions, they're very hard, especially about the future. And I think this future is particularly hard because it's so dynamic and it's really hard. And then like, how does the electricity shortage play into? Does it make the big companies all powerful? Because they suck up all the electricity and nobody else can get it and nobody else can get any GPUs? Or does like that push all the computing out to the edge and then the models just get really good and small? And everybody's like, well, I got enough in my phone and what they're going to charge me for their mega GPU farm is just outrageous. And I'm just going to do that. Or like, so, so there's many ways it could go. And I don't know. I guess I, I don't know, but I could see venture capital being much bigger and much more exciting because everybody in the world is an entrepreneur. Or I could see it being like more like what happened in the industrial revolution and like new companies are just harder. Yeah, but it's kind of a good, it's a good follow up or a good parallel question, which is like, how do we make this seem less scary? Because I don't know if you saw it. It's a lot of change, you know, this well, but yes, I know. I mean, 98% of Americans for farmers, yeah, 1789. Yeah. I'm pretty sure they're not farmers right now. I mean, you made this interesting point where if you go to like a third or fourth world, if there is a such thing country, everybody's an entrepreneur. Yeah. 100% like the guy, like I sell bananas by buying them here and selling them there, everybody's an entrepreneur. There were no organized companies. Yeah. And the cool thing is that now 8 billion people that might have an idea in their head can get it out of their head. And maybe it's a bad idea. Probably is a bad idea. But there is no longer a gate for them. There's no capital gate. There's no like idea. It's just like boom, and it's not just for code. It's like, you know, I can write music. Right? I can make a movie. Like this is super exciting. So that feels like a very, you know, if you're trying to make this not look dystopian, I don't know if you saw Bernie Sanders interviewing Claude. Like this is literally old man yells at cloud. Yeah. Like, you know, metaphor, no metaphor, right? It's just like yelling at the cloud. And like that's the dystopian view. And it's wrong. I feel very passionate about that. That's wrong. But we need a better, we need a better narrative. So the history kind of, I would say if you look at a macro standpoint, right? Like, would you like to live in the world before electricity? You know, probably not. It doesn't sound that way. You can if you want. But like nobody seems to have to into that. And I think we're very much in kind of a period like that. But it is the transition is always scary because it's a different world. Like the jobs, everybody was a farmer. Like everybody was a farmer in like 1750. I think it was like 93 or 94% of America was farmers. And then like almost all those jobs are gone. Just like the, like the jobs that we think are jobs that they would have thought were ridiculous. Like ridiculous. If you were a farmer, you would think, but I do consider dumbest thing in the world or a product marketing manager, any of this stuff. It's like, that's not a job. You're not making any food. Like, you're not building a house. Like, how could that be a job? So like, I do think it's very hard to see to the other side of that. But I think it's very, very likely to be like way, way, way better for everybody. Just like electricity and being way better for everybody. And to me, like the biggest kind of the most salient, like wrong idea was from John Maynard Keane. So he wrote a paper that wasn't that famous. But, you know, the great economist of the of the depression where he said, look, things are going to be so abundant. And everybody's needs are going to be met. Everybody's going to have a house or like a shelter. And everybody's going to have enough food to eat. And then once you have your needs met, like, you're going to work way less, like 15 hours a week max because your needs are met. But like, what he didn't realize was, well, we're not just going to need one car. We're going to need a car for every person. We're going to need, you know, computers and television sets and this and that the other and awesome vacations and like food that takes, you know, like a chef 10 hours to prep and all this kind of thing, which did not exist then. Like there was no like whatever foodies and tasting menus and all that bullshit that we have now. But like, that's all a need. Like that, that want goes to a need very fast. And, you know, humans are kind of unbelievable in their ability to come up with new things that they need. And, you know, and then you have to make those and so forth. And I think it's going to be, you know, look, I think in 15 years of truth is everybody is going to an America and probably around the world is going to live better than, you know, the very best life, you know, from a just luxury access to information, et cetera, et cetera, than anybody did in 1980. So like that's, that's a, you know, that's the world that we're, we almost certainly are going to get to. So you shouldn't be so mad about it, but it is disconcerting. All right, well, especially if you're trying to teach a little kids, you know, they're like, what should I do? I don't know. That's a hard one. Well, on that note, Horowitz at, at Endless Horowitz, thank you very much. All right, thanks. All right, and thank you. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X, A16z, and subscribe to our substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only. Should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16z fund. Please note that A16z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the company's discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16z.com/disclosures. [Music]