Ben Horowitz - Backing America’s Future - [Invest Like the Best, EP.457]

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This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at Colossus.com. Patrick O'Shanacy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests

are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit PSUM.VC. My guest today is Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andrews and Horowitz. Since his founding in 2009, A16Z has grown into one of the most influential firms in venture capital

reshaping how technology companies are funded and how power and ideas move through Silicon Valley and around the world. This conversation focuses on sides of Ben's stories you don't often hear. Ben reflects on the state of America, the people who shaped him, including Nas, Andy Grove, and his father, and shares why he chose to personally fund new technology for the Las Vegas Police Department. We also talk about how he thinks about A16Z's responsibility in shaping the trajectory

of America, the scale of his ambition for the firm, and what he sees as the biggest risk factor facing the country. Please enjoy this great conversation with Ben Horowitz.

“I think a fun place to begin Ben would be your take on the state of the country. What does it”

feel like to you in 2026? I know part of your mission is to directly impact the trajectory of the country. We'll talk about that a lot. But begin with what does the landscape the playing feel feel like to you today? I think the tech sector is very, very healthy. The America's competitiveness is very, very good. The entrepreneurship culture is how it's standing. And that's the main thing I like it for my lens. If you look at, then I go kind of all over the world and

everybody wants Silicon Valley. How can we have Silicon Valley in the UK? How can we have it in France? So they have a lot of the ingredients, right? They have great talent. They've got great universities. They have like a definitely a worse regulatory environment and EU increasingly bad regulatory environment for entrepreneurship. But there's a cultural challenge where it's exceeding doing something larger than yourself, making the world a better place. Like those aren't things that

young people feel like society values. And so the likelihood, if you're building a company of getting people to work for you and dedicate their life to a mission like that, it's just not that

“great. Whereas in the US, it's amazing. I think the economy is in much better shape than people”

realize. We've done a lot of kind of things to stimulate it. We've got lower energy prices. We've got much less regulation. We've got more user-friendly tax code. And that's all starting to kick in now. From our perspective, I think the bigger thing is AI is going to impact everything. There's

with AI. What were the big problems in the US, Autodesk? Well, we got an AI solution for that cancer.

We have an AI solution for that. The fact that we've got a technology where we can address everything is a real new phenomenon. And all that's, I think in a kick-in, like in a fairly major way, over the next 12 to 24 months. Why do you think 12, 24 months is a time frame worth mentioning that some of this stuff will start to be felt more broadly? It's all starting to take effect now. You know, it's got to roll out, get to plight, deployments of technology in particular in the past

to take a long time. But you had to build out the infrastructure to do it. For cars, you need

“things like roads, traffic lights and all that kind of thing. And for the internet, you need to”

fiber in the ground and people have smartphones. And you need to do a lot just to get going. The internet is here. So if you want to use AI, if you want to apply it to your business, you just do it. There is no infrastructure that needs to be built to adopt the thing. What could most interrupt this good trajectory that America is on where we are building solutions using technology? Like, what are the biggest risks? Policy. One of the things my father said,

"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 thing." Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world. And then the communism and that's that. If you look at how little comes out of so many of these countries in Europe that have so many smart people. And then, you know, the ones that went into communism and there's so many

genius Romanian entrepreneurs. John Von Neumann and the number of great genius scientists that came out of Hungary like this little country. And then it was just gone once a communist took over

“is completely like nothing from inventing everything to nothing overnight. And I think that that”

can absolutely happen here. We could outlaw AI. They were like pretty aggressive proposals. The last Biden administration executive order said that you could not sell a GPU without federal government approval. That was a real executive order and I got reverse, but like we were that close

to being basically out of the global chip game. It is fragile. Technology solutions

work much better than policy solutions. That's the other thing like policy solutions. It's very hard to make anything work. So if you think about COVID, we could tell everybody to stay in their house. Well, that's got some like extremely bad side effects turned out not to work that well. Or we could invent a drug that curious it or like a vaccine that works. It's just hard to have or a policy solution like, you know, all the policy stuff on climate change. And Europe actually

reduced emissions and all that, but it didn't do anything because China didn't reduce emissions. But if you build a technology, the safe nuclear efficient or nuclear fusion facility, that would have a big effect. And I think in general, that's true. Defund the police did not make anybody safer. But technology does. If you really want to change the world, if you really want to make

“a better place, I think you can build a solution for darn anything. If you want to change the world”

for the better, it's never been a better time to be an entrepreneur. I was with a 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 restaurant business. How do you think about the way all of this is changing this sort of potentially large of attractive businesses that you want to invest in because many great companies that have been built in and around restaurant software businesses? It seems like this restaurant owner is going to be able to have his own

spun up operating systems specific to him, not going to need any of that stuff. How does this changing the way in which you view investment opportunities? On the positive, everything is up for grabs. I think people are kind of overreacting to that in the stock market and so forth and that if you like existing software companies, people think, oh, they're all dead. Well, some of these guys are extremely hard targets. It's not that easy to take out sales for a CSAP. You would be

surprised even with AI. How much heavy lifting that is. Having said that, it is true that, you know, a lot of these things. You can just make your own, you can do it yourself. It's going to be a lot easier. The number of possible interest in companies, I think, went up a lot. The other thing we're seeing is the products work so much better than any technology products we've seen in the past revenue growth is so much faster for these AI companies. And there's many such cases of companies

coming out cursor, which is ostensibly an IDE like what's the biggest ID before cursor? I don't know, but it wasn't big. And it took probably 12 or 15 years to get to that revenue level. And

say though from an investing standpoint, the laws of physics of company building changed, which is

“going to an effect investing in what's currently I would say in unknown way. The one thing you knew”

if you'd ever built a software company is you cannot throw money at the problem. What's a man year, 700 IBMers before lunch? That phenomenon, everything was built on because you knew if somebody built a great product and it took them three years and they did it with a small team, Google's not going to hire 2000 engineers and catch them. It's just not going to happen. That was a law of physics. Now, if you have the data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve them, there anything. And kind of

we've seen that with Elon catching the big models in no time. He just took a lot of money and a really

good data center design and some smart engineers. He got in the game very fast. That would have never

happened in the past. The markets are also seem to be much, much, much bigger than anything we've ever seen. It would cause you to think about valuations and kind of long-term value and other sorts of things in a different way than we have in the past. On the one hand, well, when you calculate the long-term value, but if this market wasn't $50 billion, what if it was $5 trillion on the other end, what if somebody could catch you? These are concepts we've not dealt with.

So, how would the conversations feel different to me if I came in? You've got all these great investors working at Andrews and Horowitz? The nature of the conversation amongst your teammates says they're debating this stuff versus four years ago or something. Where does it feel most materially different internally? I would say one of the most different things is when you look at AI researchers, it is really a different kind of thing. If you haven't been at Google or Facebook or

OpenAI or Anthropoc and somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to try and build a giant model and you weren't one of the main people, then you probably don't know how to do it because you can't learn it in school. You can't learn it in school because it's a little bit

alchemistic in nature. It's a little bit of an art and so if you've never done it before the chance

of on your very first try of building some kind of large model that it's going to work. Well, isn't that great? People are coming up to speed more, there's more companies, people are learning it, but that's kind of why you got to this, which from the outside world probably like to absolutely bananas, that why is somebody paying a hundred million dollars for a billion dollars for an AI researcher? That's the craziest thing I've ever heard. Well, what if they're only 40 of them

“in the world? Then it kind of changes the math on it a little bit and I think that's where we”

were because it's kind of the first time we've had a need for a technologist that academia can produce. That is probably one of the bigger things that change in the conversation is like who are all these people like we track all of them and know what they're doing, but that's very different. Everyone talks in venture about the parallel. The thing underneath the parallel is a sort of inequality. It seems like so many of the things that are happening are just massive multipliers on the trend

of inequality in every way. The billion dollar researcher, the size of the biggest companies,

the wealth of the people, creating those companies, I would argue that inequality is a feature not a bug of the American system, but I'm curious for you to riff on the nature of growing inequality and the good and the bad associated with that. What's happening in the AI is I would just say an extension of the Kobe Bryant effect which is a basketball player. There was a limited amount of money you could make because you basically played the game in front of the people who could show up for the

game and that was it. That's a whole market. Whereas once you had television and the global audience and some of these kinds of things, you can be LeBron James. You can become a billionaire and that was

“not at all possible before. I think that we kind of first saw that with the internet where okay,”

now I can build a product. I can get to the global distribution very fast than all the Sunday can become extremely rich. AI is another layer on top of that and that, okay, now take that same product and make it just more a valuable thing. Whoever invents that is whatever the internet company was plus plus plus and so that's going to make them even richer. That's like bad part of it. I think the good part of it is it's starting out day one completely democratized.

Anybody gets access to very powerful AI. Most people in the world at this point have smartphones and now you've got super intelligence in your phone. So that's a big equalizer of the opportunity in a lot of ways that I don't think we've ever seen a bigger opportunity equalizer than AI.

So I think it's an equalizing technology and there's some drive in inequality. There's this is another thing I learned from my father when I was very young. He said, "Look, some life isn't fair." That's extremely good advice because it's just not going to be fair.

No matter what government or anything tries to do, it's not going to be fair. 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 happens. Don't stall on that's”

what happened with Chocesco. That's what happened with Pol Pot. That's what happened with Mao. Not an accident that every single system like that went bad because it really ends up just being a power transfer. When you think about, well, what do you want? You'd like everybody to have a chance. Don't give me no chance. Give me some chance. It may not be as big a chance to use the other guy. It may not be a perfect chance. But if I have the desire, if I've got some capability,

give me a chance to be something, to make my imprint on the world. A system like that is going to end up with a lot of inequality. By the way, all systems end up with a lot of inequality. But you can try systematically to give everybody an opportunity. I think AI does a really good job of that. As your business scales up, everything gets more complex, especially your compliance and security needs. With so many tools offering band aids and patches, it's unfortunately far too

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today is that you have a couple of years to get some capital, or you're going to be a part of the permanent underclass as the phrase that is used on Twitter. I certainly agree that now everyone has

the best lawyer or accountant advisor in their pocket and that's amazing. What do you think about

this notion that because of that we need less labor? It's going to be harder if you don't have some capital to begin with to accumulate capital and break in. I don't necessarily believe that I'm just curious what you think about the challenges we'll face because of AI, societally. I do really think that's right. I don't think the door is going to close behind you.

“I think the opportunity is sent to multiply when you kind of open up a new door and open up”

a new way of doing things. So many people who made money on crypto were like people who literally didn't have much to start with. They just got into the technology early and they kind of parlaid it up and so if you have something that grows really fast, that's actually the opportunity for somebody with a little bit of capital to make a lot of money because it doesn't take much if you bought Bitcoin for a nickel. You did really well and all you needed was a nickel.

That's the nature of these things that go hyperbolic and particularly if you create something. I also think the labor market stuff people are acting as though it's very predictable and when it's not at all predictable. If you look at kind of the history of the world and automation, and this is what it is. It's a kind of like an automation technology. We've been automating things since the agricultural days and in those days, I think 95 or 96% of all jobs in the

US were agriculture. Almost all those jobs have been eliminated and the jobs we have now, the people doing agriculture wouldn't even consider jobs. The idea that we could imagine all the

“jobs that are going to come sitting here that AI is going to enable. I think as low, I think the”

need for more creativity jobs is going to go way up and need for jobs to process work for the creative so probably go down in some ways. But I'm not even sure about that. We've had AI going image net was 2012 and then natural language stuff and Burton all that was 2015 and then Apache BT was 2022 and where's all the job destruction? Why hasn't it happened yet and why are you so fucking sure it's going to happen next and why are you so short? No job so I'm going to be created.

I don't think it's nearly as predictable as people are. How would you describe the

by the name Andy Grove and he was the CEO of Intel and he famously did the major pivot of them

out of the memory business into the micro-processor business. Maybe the greatest tech CEO we've had

“and one of the things that he said that in a way is very obvious but I think is also profound is”

if you're the leader in the industry then the growth of the industry is dependent on you. It's up to you to expand the market. Nobody else is going to do it. When I think about the firm, I think a little lot in those terms. The reason America is America and there's many narratives on this but the factual one is we won the Industrial Revolution. We had Henry Ford and we had Thomas Edison, we had like great entrepreneurs, they built great technology that technology lead,

let him military lead, let to economically let to cultural dominance. None of that was by accident. Had we not had all those inventions, had all those companies which let to you know everything from like winning World War II, we'd be some other thing. We wouldn't be America. So we're there again. Like this is the equivalent change of the Industrial Revolution in terms of how everything works government society's businesses and we're either going to be 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 the economic superpower, the military superpower, the cultural influence, the standard of the world that we are now. I think that would be bad. I think America's been good for the world and good for giving people a chance like we talked about before and so our role in that from a policy standpoint, from a funding standpoint, from helping people build standpoint to make sure that that next set of

great companies comes out of America or allied nations. The core ambition is to do our part and helping that. I want to ask about some of the ingredients to do that well, but just a quick sidebar on Andy Grove. His book is incredibly, everyone should read high-up with management. What's very specifically, did you learn from him? Like what did you see him do that impacted the way that you think were behave? I'm so overly influenced by him. It's hard to even pin it down, but I actually wrote

“the new forward for it. I actually think that's the best thing I've ever wrote was the forward”

to high-up management. But the reason I wrote that forward was it was my favorite book and I wrote

the hard thing about hard things was basically intended to be the updated version of it. The thing

in high-up-put management that he did so well that I tried to do my own version of is the concepts of management are easy. You need an eighth grade education, maybe, to kind of understand management. It's not like physics. It's pretty simple, but the psychological part of it is extremely difficult, particularly for a young person to be able to do. It's super confrontational. You're having to look through the conversation you're having to the entire organization. You really have to

be confusion at times. The good of the whole supersedes the good of the individual. And all these things are complicated to do. His big influence on me was me trying to not only absorb that, but then 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 manager of the year for the Santa Clara facility of Intel. And it was from 1992. I'm like handy. You really like the biggest CEO in the world. Why did they give you the manager of the

year award for the Santa Clara facility? As I've been, he's like Santa Clara. It was the lowest quality scores, the lowest fucking score on everything at Intel. And so I was just like I'm going over there and talked to them. So I go over there. And he said, I brought a roll at toilet paper and I put under my desk. I said, "Why are you going to get this facility up to code?" And they just started in with all this bullshit. Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. And I fucking reached

under my chair and put off the toilet paper. I said, "Clean up your bullshit and tell me when

the fuck you're going to be up to code." And in two months they were up to code and they were always

the highest rated facility there after. So they gave the manager the year for that. 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 taste of it?”

They can't just read about it obviously. What happens to founders is you invent something. Now I've got to build a company. You don't know what you're doing and you make mistakes.

leads you to hesitate. That hesitation is what causes the failure mode. So then the companies in the

“size of where they get very open, all these guys got so open to input from their team and their”

executives, the team doesn't have the full context. Only the leaders got the context. So even if they're smarter than you, you still likely can have better judgment because you have all the knowledge. But they defer and then if you defer to people who work for you, then that creates a weird political situation because people jump into the vacuum of you're not making a decision. I'll make the decision. And then that feels political to everybody else. So that's the pattern people run into. 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 re-org because re-org is basically your redistributing power to make the company work better, to like have communication be better to not have as much conflict. But what's going to happen is somebody who's really good, who you've had for a long time, is going to lose power. And they're going to be fucking pissed. So then if you compromise the organization so they can maintain

their power, then you just redistributed power from the people doing all the work to the executives.

And that's a catastrophe. So it's always that thing where people don't want to have

that confrontation. They don't want to tell that person like the organizations here, you help us till here. But you either have to be happy in this new role or it's going to be a wrap. When you're young and inexperienced, you know it's going to hurt to tell him that. But I don't know it's going to help me to do this re-org. I'm not experiencing enough to know that. I've never done that before. I'm going to go with the known avoid hurt to the theoretical avoid hurt. And that's when you

wreck your company. You were lucky that when you started the industry in Horowitz, you and Mark had both had tons of operating experience, both together. Yeah, I still don't know what I was doing a CEO though. Fair enough. And he didn't know what he was doing either. If you asked Mark about management now, like he's so different than how he actually did it. And it actually makes him mad if you talk about it too much because he's like, I got such bad fucking advice, Ben.

“They told me to hire all these guys. I think he's most different. Like, what would he say is”

what do you observe to him to be the most different? Mark is super emotional person. And he's just way more in control of it than he was than in terms of just like the personality. He used to be like zero or a hundred. So he would be like full emotion. What the fuck are we doing? Or like, I'm just not going to say anything. Nothing in between. Something I know the least about your firm is like the first, I don't know what period of time,

three days, three months, three years. And I'd love to hear about how you thought about the business right as it was getting started. I'm going to come back to what it's now. And

those ingredients you mentioned for having the impact you want to have. But this is an incredible

part of the world. So can Valley Wall Street. These are institutions that make America great. Lots of people listening have ambitions to do this sort of thing. And I'd love to hear like the very, very early primordial case study of what it was like and what kind of conversations you were having and what your initial ideas were. Venture capital, first of all, you kind of have to understand the context of it was there hadn't really been new top tier venture capital firms.

The last one before we started that you would say is top tier was probably benchmarked, which ostensibly started in 1995. But it didn't really because all those guys came from another firm called Merrill Pickard. That firm was from the 80s. There hadn't really been a new one from the 80s. And if you looked at why every VC was reputation based. And so to be top tier, you had to have invested in Apple and Cisco and Google and Yahoo and all the great companies.

And you couldn't from a standing start get to that. And then if you're not top tier in VC, you're not going to last because in a super hot period, everybody makes money. But the best

“entrepreneurs will only work with the top tier firms because that's how you're going to recruit”

great engineers. That's how you're going to get follow on money like everything comes out of that.

So you'd never take money from a tier two. And so that's why the tier ones always have

better returns. So we knew we had to be tier one. But we had that problem. The idea that we had was venture capital is a great product for LPs. But it's not a great product for entrepreneurs. And so if we could build a better product for entrepreneurs, we could win. And that was the original framework. And the idea that we had for the product for entrepreneurs was because we had been entrepreneurs was around what you and I had been talking about, which is if you're a founder who wants to run their

own company, you're not getting much. You need so much. You don't have the confidence. You don't have

was designed to give you enough confidence, power, network reach advice that you could actually be a

CEO. And so that was the whole idea behind the firm originally. The second idea we had 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. Why say anything? Like keep that a secret. And they weren't talking.”

And so when we went out and talked, everybody covered it. And suddenly everybody knew we had this product. Where did the germ of that specific idea come from? Let's be fairly loud, relative to what others do from the period of getting. Well, it's funny because you know, Mark and I were talking about it. He said to me, why don't VCs market? The original thing went all the way back to kind of the first class of VCs. The industrial revolution VCs were JP Morgan, Rothschild, Goldman Sachs, etc.

They were the ones financing these things. And it turned out that these guys were financing both sides of World War II. So they really didn't want any publicity because that would have been like an extremely fucking bad thing. The large extent that just carried over all the way through Arthur Rock and then the reputation thing clicked in it was working. So there was no need to do it.

“And we got a lot of criticism when we did it. Our LPs would say, you know, like the other VCs,”

you guys are ego maniacs. You named the firm after yourself. You're marketing it like this. And it was so funny because the reason we named the firm after ourselves is we raised money in 2009, which is right on the edge of the financial crisis. And the big objection from LPs was, 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 fund. And we couldn't get them off of that. So then I

had the idea, what was his name with our names and then they knew it. And that worked. If you think about the period of takeoff of the firm in 2009, up until you reach, let's call it like cruising altitude. When was cruising altitude? And what was the most difficult part about getting

it from takeoff to that point? The first thing is we really didn't know that much about investing.

Mark and I had done some angel investing, but neither was it any venture capital experience. Credits is quite a credit to Greylock and Kleiner and all the guys who were around at that time. They just had years and years of doing it. We made more than our fair share of investing. Mistakes missing things we should have done and doing things that we shouldn't have done. But missing things that we should have done was probably the bigger one. And then the other

thing is how we thought about the profile of the investor was wrong. We so over indexed on our idea that we had to help the founder become a CEO that we made it a requirement that you couldn't be an investor at entry some hardwits if you hadn't founded and/or run a company. And that was very good attitude and set the culture of the firm in a lot of ways and had good things that came from it. But most CEOs aren't as interested in investing as they think they are.

Also most CEOs aren't as good at helping somebody else learn the job. So those two things ended up being not quite correct. So we made some adjustments. Fun one just went really well because we hit the scene hard. It was a small fun. We did Skype. We did Slack. We did Octa. Stripe. It was in there. There were just too many good things in a $300 million fund for that thing that blew the doors up. Fun two wasn't as good as one. By the time we got to three, that's when we had

contention among like, oh, we really don't have the right profile for GP here. And there was a while where we thought that was going to be a terrible fun. And I'm about being a great fun because we had Coinbase and Databricks and Lift and GitHub. But that one was scary for a while. But coming

“out of that, we kind of knew what the firm needed to be. So I think it was settled down after that.”

Wasn't such a like startup. We got across that, Kazum. The bigger thing was we always had this idea

about software, is eating the world. Mark articulated really well in his 2011 piece. We always felt venture capital firms needed to be able to scale. And that the other firms would have trouble scaling because of the way they worked, the way they shared control. So that could be an opportunity for us. But we hadn't figured out how to do it yet. And then I'd say starting with the bio and the crypto fund, I started to get to the organizational picture of how we would be able to dress every

market of technology. But with investing teams that weren't 20 people, that doesn't work. So you need

So you have to have multiple teams. Having multiple teams in a venture capital firm is this little bit of a novel idea, particularly when each team has a platform that helps the founder

“build the company. We began it really in earnest with the crypto fund, I think, around 2018.”

And then now the whole firm is kind of organized that way. If we zoom now to today, and back to what you said, which is the scope of your ambition is big as the leader be the ones that are expanding market. What are the components of doing that? What is the system need that it doesn't currently have that you might be able to provide? One is the capital markets have changed dramatically

with not much help. So I went public at 18 months old with $2 million in trailing revenue. That

wasn't a good idea. But companies used to go public routinely with $50 million from revenue. It was fine. Now, nobody's going public. 500 million. You get to go public or something like that. And you're kind of small. If you don't have that, you kind of need a lot more out of the private markets than VCs are built to do. That's one of the things we have to think about. Another one is the companies in the portfolio, they'd leave you at 100 million revenue. They're going

public. They're out to the racist. Well, that's not true anymore. What do you need when you

“get to be 200 million, 300 million in revenue? Well, you need to be multi product. You need to be”

multi channel. You need to be multi geography. So as a venture firm, we need to help them as a

venture industry. We need to help them do that. How do I get to Japan? How do I get to South America? Most venture firms don't provide much along those lines. So we have to step up to those ideas if we're going to have companies in the portfolio at that state. Do you hope that over time you are forming maybe some others like it that have become these big institutions in venture go on to be sort of like the Blackstone Apollo type companies that are big publicly traded

during businesses? The big huge wave among venture capitalists is private equity AI rollups. It's a good business idea. Just like the spreadsheet created the original private equity business. AI is creating a new private equity business where you can buy any existing company, optimize it with AI and it'll be more valuable. That's a good idea. It's a good thing to invest in. It's not something we're going to do for two reasons. One, it's like the cultural opposite of who we are.

So we are about the creation of new technology companies. Growth, believing in the entrepreneur, price doesn't even matter as long as the thing succeeds. You're going to do well.

“Private equity is entry price is key. I had a great dinner with Mark Rowan who's a super genius”

runs Apollo and he was like entry price entry price. We think about it, but it's not.

First and foremost, thinking about containing costs and this and that and the other that's just

not what a good venture capital frame of mind is. Culturally, I didn't want to mix those two things. But more than that, I just didn't want to be in a business where the way you make money is you figure out how to optimize and existing thing and lay off people and that kind of thing. We're about new technology companies building the future, taking things forward and I'll leave that to the other smart guys in the industry. Your finance team isn't losing money on big mistakes.

It's leaking through a thousand tiny decisions nobody's watching. ramp puts guardrails unspending before it happens. Real-time limits, automatic rules, zero firefighting. Try it at ramp.com/invest. As your business grows, Vantage Scales with you. Automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth for security and risk. Learn more at vantage.com/invest. Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process. Rogo does. It's an AI platform

built specifically for Wall Street, connected to your data, understanding your process and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.au/invest. What if any trade-offs feel like they might exist at this scale as you continue to scale? As you consider all these different people you're trying to serve well, investors internally, the LPs, the founders, nothing's perfect. What are the trade-offs to the path that you've chosen? With any scale of organization, you really have to

overpay attention to culture or the culture will drift. We probably spend more work on that than any venture capital firm. I'm going to like you're not allowed to join unless you sign the culture document. I spend an hour with every single employee teaching them the culture. We really try to enforce it hard when we can. We have pretty good consistency but that is hard to maintain as you grow. Can you teach people more about culture? You've written a book about it. You've studied

some very interesting cultures that you wrote about in the book. If you had to teach a seminar or

are, then how to make sure people live by it. Let me give you a small but probably the most important

insight which is from Beshito the way of the warrior from the samurai. A culture is not a set of ideas. It's a set of actions. If you define your culture as a kind of set of ideas, integrity, do the right thing. We have each other's backs or any corporate values. It's actually just a bunch of fucking platitudes that doesn't mean anything. The culture has to be defined in terms of the exact

“behavior that you want. That support that idea. What do you have to do to actually be that”

thing that you want to be? It's the little things. How responsive are you to your colleagues? What's the SLA on returning a slack message or an email? Do you show up to meetings on time? Not everybody

has those ideas but if you want that idea, you've got to manifest it through something else.

We have an idea about you have to respect the entrepreneur. What is that behavior? Well, like one, you can't ever be fucking late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. I used to find people 10 dollars a minute in the beginning of the firm to reinforce it. And then you have to get back to an entrepreneur. If you say no, you have to say no. You have to explain why you're not investing and we're going to survey that entrepreneur after you say no to make sure that you said no and that they had a good

experience. That's a behavior. If you try to make yourself look good by making entrepreneur like bad, you're fired. You get on x and say, he's selling dollars for 85 cents. I don't know. We're dream builders. We're not dream killers. Fuck that. Somebody wants to do something larger than themselves. Build a company. Make the world a better place for for that. We're going to fuck what the idea is. Or if Sequoia funded them or whatever, we'd love that. That's who we are.

And so the behavior is the culture is the actual thing and that gets you the idea as opposed to the idea and then figure out how you're going to behave. That's probably the main thing on culture.

“Can you say more about the influencer dad? Had any of you mentioned that lesson of nothing's fair?”

Your life isn't fair. Tell me about your dad. He was what's known as a red diaper baby. My grandparents were communists. They went to secret meetings. They had cards. My grandfather was fired during the MacArthur era from being junior high school teacher. For being a communist. And he grew up a communist and he started out on the left. He was editor of a very famous new left banks. He called the ramparts banks. He was editor of

and he was involved in the Black Panthers with Huey Newton and you know in the Oakland chapter. He'll just leave for the dropped out of politics and he re-emerged eight years later on the right. He really understood the ills of communism and socialism which helped me a lot.

One of the things that he said to me that always stuck with me. He's like, "Son, go to the library.

Pick any book on socialism. There's hundreds of books." And in that book, I guarantee you, you will find pades upon pades, chapter upon chapter of how to divide the wealth. You will not find single sentence on how to create wealth. And I was like, "Oh, wow." That's not a very good system. I learned a lot about systems thinking from that. He wasn't this new age father. Meldays, your father, like they wouldn't even talk to you,

telling you to be like 12. And you get these little snippets of wisdom. And one of the ones I actually put in the hard thing about hard things. But I had three kids. I was young. And I remember this like 102 degrees air condition was broken. The kids were going crazy. Like one of them poured a whole bottle of apple juice. Like a gallon of apple juice into the rag and apple juice is steaming out of the carbon. I'm just sitting there. I was like, "I was going to die." And my father

looks at me and he goes, "Son, you know what's cheap?" I said, "What?" He goes, "Flower is a cheap." I said, "Okay." He said, "You know what's expensive?" I said, "No, what?" He said, "Devores." He had been married four times. 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 have such an interesting perch you get to see so much. What's going on in coding now is quite phenomena. We kind of went through

this period where, "Okay, AI can write code, cool, okay, you can write code stuff, a lot of security,

“calls fine." But I think over the winter break, it turned a corner where really good programmers were”

going, "Whoa, this helps me." I just became a hundred times more productive. And I can't remember any technology where like just all of a sudden you wake up and everything the whole world just changed like that. That's happening on a pretty regular basis, I would say. We spent a bunch of time with people in Hollywood who are using AI. I think AI will help you make movies both better and

scene. That's very, very good. If you're an actress, you have to shoot a scene like 15 or 20 times or something. You want to be nice to shoot at three times. And then you just take the pieces you

“like and make of what you want. It's a little underestimated as a tool for creatives. I think”

that's true in music too. I was a young person when hip-hop started in the huge criticism, like this is not music. They're just taking music and they're remixing it and they're wrapping over it and it's a bunch of bullshit. It's a novelty. It was postmodern art and I think we're going to get into post-postmodern art with what people will be able to do with AI and music. And that was one of the most exciting times in music. The invention of the new art form is when it gets

really exciting. What people in hip-hop is specific people have had the largest impact on you personally and how? Nas is a very good friend of mine. He's definitely had a big impact just the lens at which he sees the world is so different and interesting for me. We're both like very big fans of Ra Kim who is kind of like the John Coltrane of Ra. So Ra Kim, when his first big song was the song called "My Melody." Nas and I are listening to my melody. The first line

is turn up the bass pull up a chair, hand out a cigar, I'm letting knowledge be born. I'm my name's R. And so he puts it on, hands out a cigar and he pauses it and he goes, Ben, why is he handing out a cigar? And I go, I don't know, then he plays an excellent. I'm letting knowledge be born. He's like, it's a birth bin. He's passing out cigars at the birth of knowledge.

And I'm like, oh shit, it's like a thousand times I never heard that. I can't tell you how many times

he sees or hears something that's there that I don't see. So having somebody that I can talk to who has just like a completely different perspective of all things in life. And it was interesting. We did the Coinbase deal together and he had called me like two weeks prior to us really seeing that because he wanted to learn about Bitcoin. So I explained to him how it worked. He was very interested when I was talking to Chris Dickson. It was work on the deal. I was like, tell me about

the guys and he's like, well, one of them Fred is like really into hip hop. I was like, okay, I brought Nas over to my, he's like, haven't come over to my house. He's a boxing match on Saturday.

“He had Nas come over and that's how we got that deal. But he's a big influence on me personally.”

I think he's one of the great storytellers of all time. Just a super genius on that. Is there a CEO comparable to Nas where there's this class of guys in the 90s where Jay-Z, you know, not just the business man, I'm a business man. There are these just massive franchises that got born. These guys all became incredibly successful in the business world. It felt more industrialized almost like the whole process. Even just his album that just came out.

It feels like it could have come out then or now it's like this weird timeless quality. He still has that somehow and like premier or same thing. Do you know anyone else like that in another domain? It seems like such a unique person relative to his peers. Maybe Jensen. Jensen has this very defined view of who he is, what the company is, and so forth. That's kind of gone across errors. But it's still the same thing.

It played in gaming. It played in Bitcoin. It plays an AI, but it's still in video.

He never thought he had to change the name of the company. He's gotten better over the years.

In a weird sense, it never felt like he's trying to be current. Nas never feels like he's trying to write a hit. The best AI and software companies from OpenAI to cursor to Proplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight, not in months. Visit workOS.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product. Ridgeline is redefining asset management technology as a true partner, not just the software vendor. They've helped firms 5x and scale

enabling faster growth, smarter operations and a competitive edge. Visit RidgelineApps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. 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 an interesting different kind of example of what the application of this constellation of new technologies might allow for in terms of improvement efficiencies. It's just

such an interesting case study. A couple of things about the Las Vegas police for us were intriguing to me. The biggest one was they were different than other police forces in the country because they're a big metropolitan area that's not run by the chief of police but run by the sheriff.

“And the reason that's important is the sheriff is an elected official and does not report to the mayor.”

So they never got caught in the big political movement and defund the police. One of the

they're also interestingly the one that I knew that never militarized and they do community

“policing and you can see it in the numbers. So the murder clearance rate in Las Vegas is the highest”

murder clearance rate, meaning they solve the murder. 94%. San Francisco was like 75% and then Chicago's like in the 30s and the national average is below 60. And I asked why is your murder clearance rate so high? And the sheriff, Kevin Mayhill said Ben, when somebody is murdered, there's always somebody who knows who did it. They just don't talk to the police. So but they talked to us because we're part of the community. They know us. So I was like wow that's a great

environment to see if this new technology worked. And I knew about all the public safety technology because we invested in through American dynamism. So I was like like we're going to become the highest tech police force in America. Hopefully the world, I'm just going to find it. We've got a drone program and we've got prepared 911 and we've got Flax Safety AI cameras. If a 911 call comes in or if a gunshot goes off, there will be a drone deployed in there within

90 seconds. And then that drone video feed will be in every police officer's phone in the

“vicinity instantly. Since we started the program, I think crime is down over 50%. And then shooting”

of suspects by police is down close to 75%. But everybody's safer. And I think this is the thing that was the most surprising to me on the technology deployment is that when you talk to the

police, they go look, the problem is the descriptions cause half the violent confrontations.

So I'm like, well what do you mean? So somebody jacks a car. There's a baby in the back seat. We get a description of the car. It's a 2004 Hyundai. That's blue. Well, it's really a 2008 Hyundai that's green, but we pull a guy over in a 2004 Hyundai that's blue. That person has said bad experiences with the police. Now he's got a gun in the car and all the sudden we've got an incident and like an innocent citizen gets hammer. Police get shot with AI camera. We know that's

“the car. That's it. And we know there's a baby in the car. So we're not sending one guy with a gun”

to see if that's the guy who we're sending a whole squad and we're apprehending them safely. Policeing is inherently dangerous, but intelligence makes it dramatically safer. And so I'm a huge believer in this technology for making everybody safer. Suspects, criminals, citizens, police, everybody. The other not kind of fact is it's put the pride back into policing. We used to have a big problem in Vegas where because nobody wanted to be a police officer, we were lowering

the standard. But now the standard is really high. So between the drone center, which is like supersetity art, and then you have these cyber trucks that look so amazingly futuristic and cool driving around, everybody wants to be a police now. Las Vegas happens to have the highest concentration of veterans in the country. Plenty of super qualified people to choose from, they'll want to be police. That's all gone really well. The last question I ask everyone is the same. What is the

kind of thing that anyone's ever done for you? There is a mentor might have a fellow by the name of Kent Coleman, who was a big executive at Silicon Graph, so when I was a sophomore in college, I got an introduction into him and he gave me a job as a summer intern. Without that job, I don't know that I ever get to Silicon Valley. That was the highest impact he didn't have to do that thing that anybody did for me. It may interesting that that is the most common form of

answer across 500 of these. Someone that like took a bat when they didn't need to. Ben,

pleasure to finally do this with you after a couple of years of watching you and learning from you,

so thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Patrick. Let's go. , you know how small advantages compound over time. That's true in investing and just as true in how you run your company. Your spending system is your capital allocation strategy. Ram makes it smarter by default, better data, better decisions, better economics over time. See how at ramp.com/invest. As your business grows, vantis scales with you,

automating compliance and giving you a single source of truth, for security and risk. Learn more at vantis.com/invest.

They've helped firms 5x in scale enabling faster growth, smarter operations, and a competitive edge.

“Visit RidgelineApps.com to see what they can unlock for your firm. The best AI and software”

companies from OpenAI to cursor to perplexity use WorkOS to become enterprise ready overnight,

not in months. Visit workOS.com to skip the unglamorous infrastructure work and focus on your product.

“Every investment firm is unique and generic AI doesn't understand your process.”

Rogo does. It's an AI platform built specifically for Wall Street,

connected to your data, understanding your process, and producing real outputs. Check them out at rogo.au/invest.