Ben Horowitz on Venture Capital and AI
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If you share control, it becomes very, very difficult to change the organization because everybody's got to agree. I quoted little Wayne. I said, when I see another VC coming at me with the peace sign, all I see is the trigger in the middle finger. You know? And everybody hated me for that. There would only be 15 technology companies that would ever get to a $100,000,000 in revenue, and we really thought that was gonna change because, look, at that time, we thought software was gonna eat the world, and every new company was gonna be a technology company, and therefore, there were gonna be more
The rules of venture capital were built for different era. Recorded live at Stanford for CS one fifty three Frontiers, this conversation explores how Ben Horowitz helped rethink the structure of venture capital as software expanded what startups could become. From network effects and firm design to leadership and culture, it traces how the system evolved and why it may be changing again. Now AI is shifting the equation once more. Code is less of
a moat.
Capital matters more. And the bottlenecks are moving toward compute, energy, and organizational design. Anjini Midha, founder of AMP PBC, speaks with Ben Horowitz, founder of a sixteen z. Please
join me in welcoming Ben Horowitz. Thank you. How many of you heard the song that was playing right before? Does anyone know the name of that song? Are The World. Yes. That's correct. We Are The World is a 1985 single by a super group of musicians that all came together to raise it's a it was a charity single that was produced to help raise funds for the famine in Ethiopia, I believe, in 1985.
Yeah. Lilo Ritchie made a good documentary on it, you're interested.
Correct. The reason I'm bringing it up is because Ben is known for many things. He's the founder of Andreessen Horowitz, co founder of Andreessen Horowitz. I'm very lucky to have called him my boss for a few years. He's also been a founder or CEO. He's built several technology companies. He's behind one of the reasons venture capital still exists today after many moments when it there were times when it got threatened, including the SVB financial crisis. But the thing I've learned most about Ben is from a documentary that Ben told me to watch about a year and a half ago.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Triple O G. Yeah.
It's called The Greatest Night in Pop. And I would really recommend folks who haven't read it sorry, watched it to go watch it. We're gonna put it in the in the reading assignment for this class. It's on Netflix. Anyone can go watch it. But it is the documentary about the making of that song you just heard, We Are The World. And there's somebody in the documentary that come, that you'll observe if you watch it by the name of Quincy Jones. How many people have heard of Quincy Jones? Okay. About 30%. So we need to school the kids a little bit on it.
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