"When Ben Horowitiz and his partner Mark Andre came into the venture capital industry, it was very different than it is today. You can argue that it is them more than almost anyone else that has reshap..."

"I think the tech sector is very very healthy. America's competitiveness is very very good. The entrepreneurship culture is outstanding. Uh which you know and that's the main thing I look at from my le..."

"I think the economy is in much better shape than people realize uh and start to see that. Well, we're getting, you know, we've done a lot of kind of things to stimulate it. You know, we've got lower e..."

"It's from, you know, what were the big problems in the US? Auto deaths. Well, we got an AI solution for that. Cancer, we have an AI solution for that. So, you know, the fact that we've got a technolog..."

"Why do you think 12 24 months is is a time frame worth mentioning that some of this stuff will start to be felt more broadly? >> It's all kind of starting to take effect now and you know it's got to r..."

"One of the things my father said to me was a bad government, no matter how many smart people you have, no matter how great a culture you have, no matter how great the country is, can ruin the whole th..."

"By the way, like technology solutions work much better than policy solutions. That's the that's the other thing. Like policy solutions is very hard to make anything work. Uh so if you think about um y..."

"I was with a uh local restaurant tour yesterday here in New York, one of the best, for a couple hours having him describe to us how he is planning on using AI tooling to improve everything about his r..."

"Uh one everything is up for grabs, right? I I think people are kind of over uh reacting to that in the stock market and so forth and that if you look at um existing software companies like people thin..."

"I think the other thing we're seeing is the products work so much better than any technology products we've seen in the past that revenue growth is so much faster for these AI companies and there's ma..."

"So if you look at the one thing you knew if you'd ever built a software company is you cannot throw money at the problem. >> Yeah. Yeah. >> Like you know what's a man year? you know, 700 IBMmers befor..."

"and kind of we've seen that with uh Elon catching the big models in no time. I mean, he just took a lot of money and a really good data center design and some smart engineers. He's in the game, you kn..."

"Everyone talks in venture about the power law. The thing underneath the power law is a sort of inequality. It seems like so many of the things that are happening are just massive multipliers on the tr..."

"But yeah, >> I'm curious for you to riff on like the nature of growing inequality and the the good and the bad associated with that. what's happening in AI is sort of, you know, I I would just say an ..."

"That's the kind of bad part of it. I think the good part of it is it starting out day one like completely democratized like the AI anybody gets access to like very powerful AI uh you know anybody who ..."

"In that every child can have like a super advanced amazing tutor teacher. Um so like education great education is accessible to all now. So I think it's an equalizing technology and uh you know there'..."

"And the problem is if you create a system that tries to correct that it doesn't make things more fair. It just transfers all the power to the person running the system. And that's what happened with S..."

"And a system like that is going to end up with a lot of inequality. All, by the way, all systems end up with a lot of inequality. But you can try systematically to give everybody an opportunity. And I..."

"So many people who made money on crypto were like people who, you know, literally didn't have much to start with. they just got into the technology early um and then they kind of parlayed it up. And s..."

"And in those days, I think 95 or 96% of all jobs in the US were agriculture. Almost all those jobs have been eliminated. Um and the jobs we have now the people doing agriculture wouldn't even consider..."

"You know, we've had AI going right imageet was what 2012 and then natural language stuff and Burton and all that was like 2015 and then you know chatbt was 2022 and like where's where's all the job de..."

"How would you describe the nature and scope of your ambition over the next 10 20 years? >> One of the things that I learned um so I had a mentor who's a a great great CEO by the name of Andy Grove. Um..."

"And so when I think about the firm I think of it a lot in those terms. The reason America is America and and there's many narratives on this, but like I think the factual one is like we won the indust..."

"And you know, we're either going to be uh the leader of that technology, the provider of that technology, or we're not. And if we're not, we're not going to be um the economic superpower, the military..."

"I want to ask about some of the ingredients to do that. Well, but just as a quick sidebar on Andy Grove, uh his book is incredible. Like everyone should read High Output Management. Um what was it abo..."

"The hard thing about the reason I wrote that forward was um I, you know, it was my favorite book and I wrote uh the hard thing about hard things was basically intended to be um the updated version of ..."

"Uh but the psychological part of it is extremely difficult particularly for a young person to be able to do. Uh you know it's it's super confrontational. You're having to kind of look through the conv..."

"His big influence on me was me trying to not only absorb that but then kind of tell it in a more up-to-date kind of modern way. I went to visit him. He had this award on the wall which was it was lite..."

"And he said, "I brought a roll of toilet paper and I put it under my desk, under my chair." And you know, I said like, "When are you going to get this facility up to code?" And they just started in wi..."

"When did you first experience the lessons that drove his success this confrontational psychologically difficult aspect of management yourself? How would you encourage other people to like get a get a ..."

"So then either like the company's indecisive or they get very open. All these guys got so open to input from their team and their executives and like but you know the team doesn't have the full contex..."

"And so that's the pattern people run into. And so, you know, you really kind of have to build up enough confidence in them to have that confrontation. The hardest version of this, by the way, is the r..."

"Um and so then if you compromise the organization so they can maintain their power then you've just kind of redistributed power from the people doing all the work to the executives and that's a catast..."

"I still didn't know what I was doing as CEO. >> Fair enough. >> And he didn't know what he was doing either. Like his ideas now, like if you ask Mark about management now, like he's so different than ..."

"How do you think he's most different? Like what would he say is or what do you observe to him to be the most different? >> I just think he's like way more um in control of his own. Like Mark is super ..."

"So it's hard to say. It was a hard ride to get here. If you think about the business right as it was getting started. Of course, we're I'm going to come back to what it is now and and those ingredient..."

"So venture capital, first of all, you kind of have to understand the the context of it was um there hadn't really been new top tier venture capital firms. So like the the last one before we started th..."

"And so we knew we had to be tier one, but we had that problem. And the idea that we had was, well, venture capital is a great product for LPs, um, but it's not a great product for entrepreneurs. And s..."

"And the idea that we had for the product for entrepreneurs was you know because we had been entrepreneurs was around what you and I had been talking about which is well if you're like a founder who wa..."

"And then the second idea we had, which was the other thing, like VCs didn't ever market themselves at all because if you're all based on your investing track record, it's best that it's just magic. Li..."

"Where did that where did the germ of that specific idea come from? like let's be fairly loud relative to what others do from the very beginning. >> Well, it's funny because you know Mark and I were ta..."

"To a large extent that just carried over all the way through Arthur Rock and >> and all these things and then, you know, the reputation thing clicked in and it was working, so there was no need to do ..."

"And the big objection from LPS was, well, like you guys are like really good entrepreneurs. You're just going to leave this thing and go build another company and then we're going to be stuck with the..."

"Um, if you think about the the period of takeoff of the firm in 2009 up until you reach, let's call it like cruising altitude, like when was cruising altitude and and and what was the most difficult p..."

"And like you know, credit to Sequoia, credit to, you know, Greylock and Kleiner and all the guys who were around at that time, you know, they just had years and years of of doing it. We made more than..."

"And you know and then the other thing is is that kind of how we thought about the profile of the investor was wrong. So we so overindexed on our idea that we had to help the founder uh become a CEO th..."

"But I would just say that like most CEOs aren't as interested in investing as they think they are. Uh and then also most CEOs aren't as good at helping somebody else learn the job. Uh and so those two..."

"It was a small fund. We did Skype, we did Slack, we did Octa. I mean, like, there were just too many good things in a $300 million fund for that thing not to blow the doors off."

"Fund two wasn't as good as one. Um, and then by the time we got to three, that's when we had uh the contention among like, oh, we really don't have the right profile for GP here. Uh, and there was a w..."

"It ended up being a great fund because we had, you know, Coinbase and Data Bricks and Lyft and GitHub, but that that one was scary for a while, but coming out of that, we kind of knew what the firm ne..."

"And so I think it was settled down after that, you know, it wasn't such a like startup. It was like, okay, we got across that chasm. But then the bigger thing was we always had this idea about softwar..."

"So we always felt like venture capital firms needed to be able to scale uh and that the other firms would have trouble scaling because of uh the way they worked, the way they shared control. Um so tha..."

"Uh and but with investing teams that weren't 20 people like that doesn't work. So you need an investing team of like four or five people but you you have to you can't address the whole technology mark..."

"If you think if we zoom now to today and back to what you said which is that the scope of your ambition is big as the leader be the one to help be the ones that are expanding the market. What are the ..."

"One is um the the capital markets are have changed you know dramatically with not much um help. So I went public at 18 months old with $2 million in trailing revenue. That wasn't a good idea. But comp..."

"And so you kind of need a lot more out of the private markets than VCs are built to do and so you know that's one of the kind of things we have to think about. Another one is the companies in the port..."

"Well, so as a venture firm, you know, we need to help them and as a venture industry, we need to help them do that. Like how do I get to Japan? How do I uh get to South America? Like most venture firm..."

"Do you hope that over time your firm and maybe some others like it that have become these big institutions and venture go on to be sort of like the Blackstone you know Apollo type companies that are b..."

"A big huge wave in among venture capitalists is uh private equity AI rollups. It's a good business idea like a really good business idea which is okay you know just like the spreadsheet kind of create..."

"It's not something we're going to do for two reasons. Um, one, it's like the cultural opposite of who we are. So, we're about building new things um growth believing in the entrepreneur, price doesn't..."

"Private equity is like entry price is key. like the I mean know I I had a great dinner with Mark Rowan who's a super genius uh runs Apollo and he was like entry price entry price entry price you know ..."

"So like culturally I didn't want to mix those two things but more than that like I just didn't want to be in a business where the way you make money is you figure out how to optimize an existing thing..."

"Huey Newton and um you know the Oakland chapter Eldrich Clever and he sort of dropped out of politics and he reemerged um I guess probably eight years later on the right. He really understood kind of ..."

">> Yeah. As you look out today in the world, I'm curious what things are captivating you most and maybe even like most inspiring you. You get you have such an interesting perch. You get to see >> so m..."

"And then you know you know we spent a bunch of time with uh people in Hollywood who are using AI. I think AI will help you make movies both better and at much lower cost because you can do you know yo..."

"And that was like one of the most exciting times in music. Like the invention of the new art form is when it gets really exciting. >> What people in hiphop specific people have had the largest impact ..."

"So having, you know, somebody that I can talk to who has just like a completely different perspective of all things in life. Um, and it was interesting, you know, uh, we did the Coinbase deal together..."

"Is there a CEO comparable to Nas where you know there's this class of guys in the 90s where Jay-Z you know I'm not just a businessman I'm a businessman. Um, and there were these just massive franchise..."

"Can you tell the story of the work you're doing with the Vegas Police Department? And I'm asking about this one because it's super interesting, but also because it feels like uh an interesting differe..."

"So the murder clearance rate in Las Vegas is the highest murder clearance rate meaning they they uh solve the murder 94%. >> And you know I think San Francisco is like 75% and then Chicago's like in t..."

"And so I bought, you know, we've got a drone program and we've got u, you know, prepared 911 and we've got flag safety, you know, AI cameras. If a an emergency call, if a 911 call comes in or if a gun..."

"But we pull a guy over in a 2004 Hyundai that's blue and you know that person has had bad experiences with the police and you know now he's got a gun in the car and all of a sudden we've got an incide..."

"So between the drone center, which is like super state-of-the-art, and then you have these um cyber trucks that look so like amazingly futuristic and cool driving around like everybody wants to be a p..."

"So I would say that's probably that that was the highest impact. Just he didn't have to do that thing that anybody did for me. >> It may interest you that that is the most common form of answer. uh ac..."