How To Lead | Ben Horowitz on My First Million

You kind of strive to get to a point of honesty, true honesty, where you're not lying to yourself. That's hard. To show you what a, like, great CEO he ended up being, he created this two month boot camp for, like, everybody in product management, every engineer who entered Facebook had to go through this thing, learn everything and so forth. He's like a phenomenal student of management. I see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is gonna be fair.

Like, nothing about life is fair. And so the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation.

Today's episode is a bit different. A sixteen z cofounder Ben Horowitz recently went on the My First Million podcast, and we found the conversation so valuable, we wanted to share it here with you. You'll hear Ben get into how he thinks about wartime versus peacetime leadership, building culture, and making hard calls as a founder. We hope you enjoyed the episode as much as we did.

Alright. Today, we're hanging out with Ben Horowitz, the cofounder of a sixteen z. These guys manage 46,000,000,000 in assets. They've invested in Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI, a bunch of the big hit tech companies. But today, we're talking about stuff that you don't usually get to hear from Ben.

So things like, how do you actually have a high confrontation conversation? The advice he actually gives his founders. Things like when he met Mark Zuckerberg and he was really young, what he noticed about Mark that was different, and what makes him such a great CEO that you can kinda steal or copy from Mark Zuckerberg's playbook. Sam, what else have we got?

Dude, we also just hung out with him, which is like the best part. And so he tells the story about how he helped catch Tupac's killer. And we also asked him what interests him right now. What books is he reading? What content is he consuming?

What rabbit holes is he going down? And it was incredibly interesting.

Awesome conversation with Ben Horwitz. Enjoy.

Okay. So I have a good Tupac story for you.

Oh my gosh. Alright. I'm incredibly excited to hear it.

So my wife is like the biggest Las Vegas evangelist in the world, and she was talking to Quincy Jones' son, QD three, and said, you know, you need to move to Vegas. And he's like, fuck that. I'll never move to Vegas. They didn't solve the Tupac murder. Yeah.

And, you know, his sister, Kidada, was dating Tupac. I was like, let's have dinner with the Vegas PD and see what happened. And so me and QD3 and Nas sit down to dinner with the Las Vegas Police Department, and they bring the whole case file. And it turns out the LAPD really filed the case, like, almost on purpose, it looks like. So at the end of the dinner, I say to the chief of police, Mike Gennaro, I'm like, Mike, you ought to reopen the Tupac case.

And he goes, I'll talk to the sheriff. And the next day I called him, I said, What did the sheriff say? He said, If Ben wants us to open the case, we're opening the case. And they reopened the Tupac case, and they caught the guy.

That's insane. So should Sean, like, the I don't know, Sean, if you know the story, but, like, basically, like, you know, Pac and Suge got in a fight at a at a Tyson Mike Tyson fight. And then, like, thirty or forty minutes later, he was shot right in the strip on Las Vegas, and it was a cold case for years. But everyone know knew who did it. They knew it was this guy named Orlando Anderson.

Like, that was, like,

the rumor. Orlando pulled the trigger. Keefe D told him to shoot him. Yeah. And so

And, like, everyone knew this, but for some reason, like, it didn't happen. And Orlando ended ended up dying a handful of years later. And the with the craziest thing ever is there's this guy named DJ Vlad who does these interviews with all these gangsters, and he got him to, like, tell the story of Yeah. The murder. And this idiot, like, went on a podcast and just said, yeah.

Here's what happened.

So here's why he did that. He thought he had immunity because the LAPD proffered him, which means basically in exchange for testimony, we grant you immunity. But they granted him immunity in LA. Not in Vegas. What in Vegas?

SPD were like, oh, that doesn't count here.

And little do we know that beds behind the scenes getting it all done. That's pretty awesome. I like, I filed that case religiously. I I thought it was riveting. I did not know that you you were involved.

That's pretty cool.

Alright. Well, I don't know where we wanna start, but I just thought you know, usually, Ben, you don't know this, but we have a little tradition here. We we'd like to typically start with our intro music, but for some reason, stop playing. I'm trying to get this cassette to play, but it's just not playing. What are we looking at here?

Oh, boy. That is that's the blind and deaf crew. So my friend Seth Clark, this was back in '87 or '88 or maybe '86, got got shot and was blind. So we formed a rap group called the blind and deaf crew, d e f. And, you know, we had all kinds of rhymes about being blind and being deaf.

You know?

I have one here. It's like

The blind, deaf crew, you know where fly. Three of us, but we got four eyes. You know? Like, that that type of assess. You know?

Where did you grow I mean, like, your dad was like a I know who your dad is, and he was like a he was like a a well known academic. But where were you growing up where you were around guys who got shot and rapping?

Well, so I grew up in Berkeley, California, which, you know, kind of is either like an academic town or part of Oakland, depending on, you know, where you are. And I was in that kind of more part of Oakland, Berkeley. And then, you know, I went to school in New York. And so I got into rap in New York, and then Seth got shot back in the Bay Area. And he was very, very depressed because he's blind.

He was only he's a kid. So I sent him these DJ Red Alert, Chuck Chill Out mixtapes, tapes

that

I taped off the radio show, which had the brand new hip hop, which was really new at the time. And that kind of cheered him up, and so that's how we got into rap when we came around. We didn't succeed, but we tried real hard.

Well, we wanted to just hang out with you because you've done 50,000 podcasts. I think A16Z now has 50,000 podcasts. So I could sit here and be like, Hey, is AI a bubble? We can kind of do that, and I will probably ask you something about AI. But I think more than anything, what we try to do on the podcast is give people a sense of what it's like to hang out with Ben Horowitz.

Right? Like, what is it if they could just be a fly on the wall hanging out. And, obviously, we come from a business and tech background, so we got a bunch of questions around that. But I think for me and Sam, the most interesting part that I feel like you've co you've contributed to the collective wisdom of founders, right, is your stuff on leadership. So you've written two books.

I feel like that really, I don't know, like, top shelf on how to be a leader. And I think it started with a general philosophy. So tell me why most management books are terrible. Let's start with that.

The problem with management generally, I would say, is it's very kind of situational and emotional. And so it's like, oh, here's a book to teach you how to play NFL quarterback. And you can read that 20 times. You go out on the field, like, things are extremely different. If there's a two ninety pound guy running at you extremely, very fast, I'm going to kill you.

What you feel, what you think, how you process that is just different. And I think management tends to be like that in that it really has to do a lot with your situation and the feeling you have at the time it happens. And so these management books are written like at some step by step, like anybody with a basic eighth grade education can understand the principles of management. They're not that They

could get the cookbook, and you could just follow the rest

of it. Yeah, it's like, Oh, here are the five steps for building a strategy, or the three steps for setting objectives. It's not actually very useful at all because that stuff is so simple. So I always thought, well, difficult thing, you know you're either going to run the risk of renting completely out of money if you don't fire half the company, but you don't want to have that conversation because you promised all these guys that the company was going be success when you hired them. So, the level of inconsistency that you're going to have to go through, the level of, I was completely wrong about everything and now I'm going to fire half of you because of the mistakes I made.

It'll just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself. And how do you get over that? And then what do you actually say? And how do these conversations work? All this kind of thing is the actual thing that people need to really kind of get an understanding of.

Like, what are the words that get me out of this thing, at least temporarily? And nobody had been writing like that. The last guy who kind of I thought wrote a book like that was Andy Grove back when he wrote High Output Management. And that book was really old at the time. So I was like, well, somebody ought to write the sequel.

We're now It's been thirty years.

When it comes to leading, do you think that it's mostly just getting your mindset right? Is that what you're saying, where it's like

No, no, no. It's more complicated than that. You kind of strive to get to a point of honesty, like true honesty, where you're actually being true like, you're not lying to yourself. That's hard. You know?

That it's almost like you know? Like, if you're you guys are kind of creatives on the pod. But, like, to be, like, a great creative, at some point, you have to get all the way to that very vulnerable point where you've exposed yourself in all your issues and weaknesses and everything. And leadership is a little bit like that in that you're kind of pushing and pushing and pushing to get all the way to what's true. So, that's part of the process.

But the other thing is just you don't really necessarily completely know what you're doing, particularly when you start and you're building a company. And so you have to kind of have like it's a confidence game where you have to talk yourself into, okay, I think I know enough to do this. It can be very little things. I had a conversation with an entrepreneur. He's like, Ben, I need your help.

And I was like, Why do you need my help? He says, My CTO is an asshole. And I said, Well, okay. But he's a good CTO. I know that from talking to you before.

I said, You're not even asking me, Sid, you fire him, are you? And he's like, No, I'm not asking you that. And I said, Well, tell me why he's an asshole, and maybe I can help. And he goes, Well, he made a young woman on our finance team cry yesterday. And I was like, okay.

Yeah. That's kind of mean spirited for a CTO to do that. And I said, well, so you're really kind of asking me not how to fire him, but just how to have a conversation with him about his behavior without him quitting. That's what you're saying? And he's like, Yeah.

And I said, Well, look, here's what I would say to him. I would say, Hey, you're a fantastic director of engineering, but you're not an effective CTO. And if you want to be a director of engineering forever, we can just run just like this, and it's no problem. You do a great job in managing your team. You get stuff done on time.

You're great. But you're not effective with the rest of the organization. And that's what a CTO is. The CTO has got to marshal the resources of the whole company to get what he needs to get the job done. And if you go to a junior person, you're five levels below you and make her cry, you're probably right, but you're never going to get what you want out of her.

So, you can't even be effective with her. How are you going to be effective with execs? So, if you want to learn how to do that, let's learn how to do that. And if not, no problem. But just know that at some point I've to bring in the CTO.

That's the way I would have the conversation with him. That kind of got him to an, Okay, now I can talk to him. And so, so much of the mistakes that CEOs make are they just don't even know how to have the conversation. And so it's a little bit like the mindset part is correct in that there is a confidence part about it, where you have to be able to kind of do things when you're not sure that you're right. But there's techniques, and there's ideas, and there's things in there that it's just harder than it looks.

And the problem is the mistakes, like not talking to him, is going to multiply. Because now you're going to isolate engineering, and nobody's going to like them, and you're going have politics in the company, and like, and, and, and, and, and then pretty soon people don't even want to work there, and you have high attrition. And then, you know, well, why the fuck do we have high attrition? And this and that and the other. And then the board's all upset.

So, it kind of snowballs on you if you can't deal with these sexes.

Man, this is so cool because I just read this book called The Motive, and the whole book is how to have a conversation like that. So basically, like someone showed and it's like small stuff. So it's like someone shows up too late for a meeting, they're not prepared, they made someone cry. And I remember reading this, and I was like, I don't wanna talk about this on the pod maybe because I think I feel stupid that I'm having to learn like a script on how to, like, find someone. It's so cool.

And then I hear you talking about this, and I'm like, alright. I feel a little bit better because why why is this conversation hard for me? I feel like this should be easy. I I don't know what to say. I literally don't know what words to use to for this to be the effective confrontation.

And so I had to read a book. And so it's actually really cool to hear you describe that other people I think you even said I saw in other interview about Zuck, and I think you referenced Sam Altman. You're like, I've seen inside these companies, they all face these challenging situations, but they just don't know how to communicate.

Yeah, yeah. No, people get stuck. And there's no way to learn how to be CEO of a big company without kind of being CEO. And so you found a company, and it starts growing. You don't know what you're doing, you make mistakes, and it's very scary.

It's easy to lose your confidence. And if you lose your confidence, you hesitate. And if you hesitate as CEO, then somebody's got to step into that vacuum. And then that's when it becomes very political and dysfunctional. You've

said before having confrontation the right way is super important. And I nodded my head, and then I was like, cool. I really don't know how to do that, though. So, okay. So what is the right way to have confrontation?

Hannah, it's complicated, but the first thing is you've got to stop thinking about yourself, right? And it could be anything. It could be like firing somebody or getting them to change their behavior or whatever. You're going to be saying something that they don't want to hear. And so, I think people get caught up in, Well, either I need to be a tough guy, or I need them to like me, or some other thing that's about you.

But really, you have to go, Okay, what am I going to say to them that isolates it to this thing that I'm really talking about? So, if I need them to change this behavior, how do I get them to hear that in a way they can actually act on it without getting in their feelings? In order to do that, you just have to be very straightforward, and you have to be open with how you feel about it. If you think they're a shitbird, then you're probably going to have to fire them anyway. But if you think they're otherwise good, then you kind of have to let them know that, but in a way where you're not clearly setting them up.

You're not giving them a shit sandwich. You're the greatest person in the world, but this is all fucked up, and I love you. People are onto that. It's just too simple. So, you have to get to a very honest place with them and say, We're working together on this.

You're doing this. It's not working. It's not effective. I can help you get it to be effective, but I need you to get it to be effective. You have to get that message across.

A lot of it People will accept things from you if they feel like you're basically telling them the truth. I'm completely open and honest about this shit. I'm not telling you it's worse than it is, and I'm not telling you it's better than it is. I'm telling you what it is. This is when I said earlier about a lot of leadership is getting all the way to the truth.

You have to sit with yourself and say, What do I really think about this? Not what motherfuckers were complaining about him, or this happened, or it hurt my feelings the way this went down, like he's doing that in my company. You kind of have to get beyond that and go, What's really true? Why did they do it? Can it be corrected?

If it can be corrected, what would motivate them to correct it? You have to get all the way to that. Otherwise, what happens is they're just going to get upset and defensive, or they're not going to hear it because it's too soft. And it's like, Well, yeah, Ben kind of doesn't like that, but he doesn't really care. So how do you get into that meaningful place where people can hear what you're talking about?

You've invested in and known for a long time a lot

of the biggest tech CEOs. And I would say the stereotype of the most successful tech founders is this sort of, like, slightly autistic, very high IQ, lower EQ sort of persona, but that's not really what would be good at the thing you're talking about. And so what is it that that stereotype is just wrong and that's not what you've seen when you've kind of been you guys, I think, invested in Facebook early on, stuff like that. Like, is it that the stereotype is wrong? Is it that they learned these things?

Is there, like, some are they taking touchy feely at Stanford? Like, what what's helping them be able to do this?

Yes. I think some of these guys have much higher people understanding than you might think. The ones who truly can't read people and understand people don't get they don't become Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg his mom, by the way, is like a psychiatrist or a psychologist. And he's actually pretty insightful.

And you can see it in the deals he's negotiated, the moves he's made. Guys who are processing information at that rate of speed, you know, it's a little weirder. Like, you always feel like, okay, what the fuck is wrong with my clock? Like, this guy's thinking faster than me. So my very first conversation I had with Zak was I think in 2007.

And at that time, if you guys recall, the Facebook traffic had flattened, and the current the executive staff that he had at the time was trying to run a coup to force him to sell to Yahoo. So they they were leaking all this stuff to Valley at the time, and Valley Rag was, you know, calling for Zach to be fired and the, know, that whole stupidness.

That was like that famous story where you didn't sell. Right?

Whether or not you can succeed without them is at least a question mark to let you know you're going to die with them. And I said, But let's talk about why they're doing this. Why has traffic been flat? And he said, Look, we doubled the size of the engineering team this year. We went from 400 to 800 engineers.

And the way the product is architected, we had MySQL layer and then an API, and then the applications are built on the API. But a lot of the new engineers just wrote straight to MySQL, and they worked up the whole thing. And now it takes ten seconds to log in, and so traffic flattened because of that. And I was like, Well, how do you train these guys? And he said, Train these guys?

And I never forget that. And I was like, Oh, shit. I said, Zach, when you're 10 people, there's no knowledge in the company. Everybody just comes on, and they jump in, and they start working, and so forth. But you get to 800 people, 1,000 people.

Do you have a lot of knowledge that's in your company about how the product works, how you check and code, everything? You actually have to teach people that because they don't know who to ask or how to learn that on their own, and so you have to do that. And just to show you what a great CEO he ended up being, he created this two month bootcamp for everybody in product management. Every engineer who entered Facebook had to go through this thing, learn everything, and so forth. He's like a phenomenal student of management.

Before he became like he's I wouldn't call him a student. He's a great CEO. But a lot of these guys can figure out the people part pretty fast, I would say. Like I said, the ones who truly don't understand people don't actually turn out to be good CEOs. Don't get to that level.

You can make fun of Larry Page or Elon or Zuck or so forth, but they are actually very smart about people, all three of them.

You you have these great stories. That's a great story. One, I think that's in your new book, is a story that I feel like is relevant to kinda any business size. So some of these are it's like, oh, well, my company's never gonna be 20,000 people, so, like, I don't really I can't really relate to this. But one, I thought it was it was about collections.

It was about collecting money, which I think is a you know, whether you're, like, an accountant and you have to do this for your clients or your your 10 clients or your big business. I think it's the CEO of Nation Yeah. Billy

Can you

tell this story? I thought this was a phenomenal story.

Yeah. So, you know, they're kind of living on the edge. You know, they need every kind of thing collected possible. And she was just like, Cash collections would just be And there were all this dumb stuff that would happen, like they sent out the wrong kind of email or this and that, and they didn't get the thing and so forth. And I said, I learned this technique actually from Andy, Andy Grove, where if a project was off track, he would just go, okay, eight a.

M. Every day, we're going to meet on it, and I'm going to be in the meeting, and I'm going to want answers. And what that meeting actually turns into is every dumb thing going on, you can just resolve very, very fast because people don't know who to ask, how to resolve it, whether it's a problem, and so forth. So I said, Leah, just like every day, 8AM, get everybody in the cash collection team together and start the meeting by saying, Where's my money? Why haven't we collected it?

Make them explain to you why they haven't collected it, and you'll be shocked at why they haven't collected it. And sure enough, it's like, Well, we didn't know we could edit the email. It's just like, you didn't know you could edit the email. But those kinds of things start popping up. Oh, I didn't know that I could do this because this is what we ought to be doing, but we're not doing it because I don't think I'm allowed to do it.

And it's like, Well, no, I'm the CEO. You're allowed to do it. And then that can unstick a dumb project that's way off track or a process that's off track or so forth. So it's kind of like a different idea about management where enemy, as you grow, communication becomes your biggest challenge. And so, it's just a way to go like, Okay, I'm going to manually, unscalably fix communication in this organization right now.

And the amazing thing about it is it does tend to be very long lasting, where once they get that, then it sustains.

I had an experience with a founder you invested in. Do you know Sui Ali? He's one of

my good

buddies, and you guys invest in tiny Yeah.

Yeah. Of course. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. He does this exact thing. The founder emailed us and was like, hey. Would you know, we're gonna start raising money.

You know, we really need to raise money, so it's important, and I would just love to pick your brain on whatever. It like a very, Yeah. Can I pick your brain? Would you like to go get coffee for this? My house is on fire.

And we were like, wait. Wait. Just to clarify, is the house on fire? He's like, yeah. Yeah.

The house is on fire. So we said, okay. Well, let's meet, like, now. Why are you emailing me? Let's just talk right now.

And so he jumps on the call and, like, okay. What do you have so far? You know? Let's raise the money. And he's like, here's the pitch deck.

And, basically, in the first thirty minutes, we just gave him, like, hey. Here's three things. Let's go. Like, these are the three most important things you gotta change. This is this part of the story is broken.

You're missing this information, and, you know, you're not you're framing it the wrong way. You gotta frame it this way. And he's like, okay. This is so helpful. Wow.

Thank you, guys. Would love to touch base again next week. And Sully was like, next week, how long do you think it'll take you to make those three changes? He's like, well he's like, how about we meet today at 3PM? And you show me and we did two a days with it.

And I I it kinda broke my brain a little bit because there was, like, this invisible wall as a business person. Like, you don't meet twice in a day. Like, that would be a faux pas. You know? Like, it's like bad manners.

It's like fuck your manners when it's like, was this a big problem or not? Like, just clarify that for me. Because if it is a big problem, then I'll just keep showing up and saying, okay. Now what? Okay.

Now what? And okay. And if you just do that for three days, the like, all of the excuses get squeezed away is what I found. Like, all the excuses suddenly disappear, and you get to the brass tacks about what's going on. It was amazing.

That's definitely right. No. No. That's know, Zia, Suley and I actually had a lot of conversations about it. He went through a lot of crises in that, so he he

he knows. Can I ask you about confidence? Gave a talk with a bunch of your portfolio companies about I think I saw you say that they don't fail due to lack of confidence, but a lack of confidence.

I would say the number one reason why a founder fails at the CEO job is some kind of lack of confidence, crisis of confidence, whatever it is, that causes them to hesitate, basically. Okay, I should do this, and I can see that I should do this, but I'm not sure I should do this, so I'm going

to wait. If you had to teach a class on how to improve someone's confidence, do you have a framework or some bullet points that you would stand by?

It ends up being, at the end of the day, confidence is personal, and you have to feel it yourself to have it. It's like the Wizard of Oz. It's like I can give you a clock and tell you it's a heart or whatever, but at some point you've got to believe that. And the thing that causes the crisis in confidence is, okay, you invent something, you hire a bunch of people, you make a decision, it's wrong, people really suffer from it. You feel horrible because you're like, Wow, I don't know what I'm doing, and I made a mistake, and it had real consequences.

Most people in life don't have a situation like that until they become CEO. And so then it's like, well, how do I recover that? And so a lot of the idea of the firm is like, well, what if you could call anybody? How would that make you feel? What if you could call anybody in the White House, in Congress, in any executive, any kind of big company CEO, and be able to have a conversation?

What if we could build that network for you? So, that was kind of the idea behind the platform. And then we would do I used to have this event, which I should probably bring back, but I ran out of room in my backyard called the CEO BBQ, where we would bring all the CEOs for the portfolio, and then we would just put very famous people around them. So we had Zach and Larry Page and Kanye all at a barbecue, and they're at the barbecue. And there's no talks, there's no business agenda.

There's no nothing. There's no even toast. Right? Like, it's just a barbecue. And so it was just to make them feel like, oh, shit.

Like, I know Kanye hit. Like, I'm I I have to be somewhat important. Like so so you're trying to, like, imbue this feeling that, like, I may not totally know what I'm doing, but I should be CEO. You know?

What about a barbecue with Kanye? Everybody's Yeah. So I can't be too dumb.

Yeah. What about what about the inverse? When you look at a CEO and you're like, oh, they have just, like, hit this fork in the road. Now confidence is gonna go horribly is gonna go down, and it's gonna be their demise. What decisions do those people make?

Like, what are the commonalities between the people who lose it that way?

Sort of like the Charlie Munger, tell me where I'm gonna die so I know not to go there. Right? What would be the decisions I would make to to take me off the path?

I would say the big thing is it's almost like a lack of decision. It's a hesitation. In football, always say, have to trust your eyes, because you could be really fast, but if you don't start running when you see the thing, if you wait, then you're not fast. And that's kind of what it's like for CEOs. You could be really, really smart, but if you wait too long before you pull the trigger, you're not smart anymore.

And there's all kinds of excuses people tell themselves to not make a decision. So, for example, one of the biggest ones on an executive is, Well, if we made such a big deal when we hired him, what is the press going to say? Or what are the people in the company going to say? Or I don't have time to hire a new person to do the job that this guy's fucking up There's all these reasons not to make the decision, and they're all just if you think about them for more than five minutes, you go, Well, that doesn't make any fucking sense because this guy's fucking up the whole org. Like, who gives a fuck what the press says?

Like, can you just get rid of him? Like, start rebuilding now? You know? Like, it's not if he's doing a bad job, like, no job is better than a bad job. Like, I think we all know that.

And everything kind of ends up like that. I don't know enough to make the decision. I didn't give them enough of a chance, this and that and the other. So it's kind of that lack of confidence that generally causes a no decision where there really needs to be a decision is the main I would say that's the common pattern.

Yeah. So in the two examples you gave, the first one was like, ah, the CTO, blah blah blah. That's kind of like avoiding the conversation would be the mistake there. And then in this one, like, avoiding the decision would be the mistake.

Yeah. You have to you know, I wrote a post a long time ago. So I called, you know, run out the pain and darkness. You have to run out the pain and darkness. You can't run away from it.

If you run away from it, it's all bad.

You're pretty good at titling blog posts and books. I think, you know, the hard things about the hard things are, like, badass. But I think you said that I think in the in the publishing industry, typically, author's book title is not the winning title, and I think you were, like, bragging that you're like, that's my title. I came up with it.

Well, I well, yeah, because I didn't need a book. Like, I didn't actually wanna write the book. They asked me to write the book, the the publisher, so I felt like I could do what I wanted, so I I called it what I wanted. Yeah.

What what do you what excites you? So this you know, a lot of the stuff we talked about is, like, the hard stuff, the pain. And but nobody gets into this for just the pain. Right? Nobody gets into this to do no.

The pain is just a sort of necessary that we we go through to to do the good stuff. I'm just curious. What are you really excited about right now? Like, what are either, you know, rabbit holes are going down, cool stuff you've seen that you can't haven't been able to forget? Like, what's really cool and interesting to Ben Horowitz?

Well, so one of the most exciting things that's going on now is, you you know, like, kind of it's well known that The United States has kind of fallen behind in defense, manufacturing, rare earth minerals, all these kinds of things. But what's been very exciting is there are startups that are like, oh, I'll solve that for America. And so we have a company that we just funded recently, Periodic Labs, which is using AI to do novel material science to enable better design of everything from rockets to missiles to all sorts of things. And then we have a company, COBOL Metals, that is basically using AI. So, they take a dirt sample and they use AI to analyze the dirt sample, they can tell you, Oh yeah, there's going to be copper below that, whatever, a mile down into the earth.

And kinds of techniques where you're kind of using tech to go, Oh, no, we're going to catch up fast, has been very, very exciting, I would tell you.

My view as a founder on the ground is just that sometimes you see something, and like I said, it it breaks like an imaginary wall you had. And and sometimes things become cool. And cool although we try to not, like, follow trends, sometimes you could use your psychology for you rather than against you. And so the idea you know, seeing what Elon has done where it's like, oh, he goes into these really hard spaces and does these, like like, hardware, hard tech, literal literal rocket science, right, and sort of unafraid of that or, you know, Anderill going in and doing, you know, weapons and defense tech and making that cool to be kinda patriotic in that way. Is that what it was?

Is that what it took, or was there something else to it?

You know, there's a lot they're very challenging companies to build in some ways. But on the other hand, it's a good time to do that because people God bless Elon for showing that it was possible. So now, whereas only Elon could have financed Tesla, Normal people can start to finance these things now because Elon has shown that it's possible. So it's a little bit like a four minute mile in that way, I would say. But, yeah, I mean, like, you know, the things that yeah.

And even in, like, public safety, you look at something like flock safety. In a way, technologically, it's not nearly as complicated as some of the others, like an androle or something like that. But it's very, very powerful. I mean, they really make both kind of policing, being a citizen, and even being a criminal more safe because all of a sudden you're using AI to provide real intelligence. For example, in Las Vegas where we deployed it, a huge problem in police violence, police getting killed, are traffic stops.

And a big reason for that is somebody reports there's a 1998 Honda Acura that's driving, that's brown, that kidnapped a baby. Okay. So that's a real situation. But that description is usually wrong. The description of the actual car is usually wrong.

So you have flock safety. You have the exact match. So the difference between a cop going into a situation where they may have the wrong guy, and if they have the wrong guy, the guy could get very agitated, and then you have a bad situation. Or they know 100%, this guy is in a car that we know is the car, and there's a baby in the back that's not his. Okay, you're going in with a whole you're not sending a single person in there with a gun coming off their motorcycle.

You've got a whole team that's going to make sure that that person is apprehended safely and correctly and the baby is saved.

I've heard I've heard flocks this amazing thing. Is it drones? Is it cameras? What do

they do? Yeah. So so it's it's primarily like a camera system where AI will basically somebody does something. You know, they grab the car on the camera. That car shows up on another camera anywhere in the city, and they're like, oh, there it is.

And actually, that's how they caught, interestingly, the Tesla terrorist who set the Tesla ship on fire in Las Vegas, was he came in earlier to case the place. Flock safety pick up the car. They saw the car come back at night, and they were like, oh, we know whose car that is, and they just went and arrested him.

Did you guys see that ad? I think it was like two weeks ago. I was trying to find it. It went viral on Twitter, but it was basically, I believe it was a solar company. Was it a solar company where they're recruiting employees, and they had a whole website just dedicated to the recruitment aspect of just they needed more staff.

And they bought an ad in the New York Times, I believe, or some newspaper, and it was like an old man sitting with, like, what it looked like his grandson overlooking a mountain.

I saw this.

And and

they were, like, overlooking I think it was solar panels. I'm not exactly sure. But it was like, do you really wanna tell your grandkids that you spent your entire thirties and forties building just b to b software? It was great. And it like, and there's this whole trend amongst young people on Twitter of, like, being more traditional and things like that.

And I think that to answer your question, Sean, about Androle and and Elon, I think that it's kinda been like a perfect spiral or a perfect mix of, like, people seeing Elon and and Palmer do these interesting things. And also just, like, getting sick of just building b to b software or something, you know, that's just a stereotype for what's boring. That may or may not be true. But, like, you know, like, seeing this, like, there could be more out there.

I think that the software had to get good enough to, of course, make these other things possible, and it's amazing that we're at that time where you can really imagine changing the world in all kinds of ways.

You you get to see a lot of pitches of the smartest people in the world telling you what the future's gonna look like in five years. And so you have this, like, element of your job that's a little bit like a time traveler. So you you probably have a better sense of what the world look nobody has a perfect sense, but you have a better sense of what the world looks like, you know, five, seven, ten years from now. You don't know exactly when.

You don't

know who's gonna do it. What's broken your brain either from a demo or a a story pitch that you've heard, you know, sometime in the last year or so that that the rest of us will experience sometime in the future?

Yeah. So I think one of the things that I mean, everybody's talking about embodied AI and robots and so forth and rightly so. But I would say in the creative space, I'm starting to realize this AI video and so forth, it's not making the old thing more efficient. It's a new medium. It's an actual new thing.

In the same ways that movies weren't plays, AI video is not video. The stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just without a $200,000,000 budget you had had no chance of doing, and now it's like no problem. And I think that's gonna be very, very, very interesting. And then how well it's working on existing stuff. So, the people who are on the cutting edge of the movie industry are now they're able to do whole movie scenes or edit or change their movie, have the AI actor do the third cut at a level of quality that even the actor doesn't know it wasn't them doing the acting and that kind of thing.

So I think it's going to change dramatically again. And there's going to be kind of white space for not only new creatives, but new entertainment entrepreneurs and so forth that nobody is really imagining now.

Is there any AI content that you consume as a fan?

Yeah. No. No. Well, like, you know, I I we've been watching that the one with the cat was pretty good over the over the weekend, the cat playing all the instruments and the lady coming out. Unfortunately, I'm like, you gotta get that racket out.

Do you guys see that one?

Was that on Sora?

That was Friday. Good. Yeah. I think it's the Sora video.

Ben, do you mess around on Suno at all with AI music?

Yeah. Suno and, you know, eleven Labs has a model, and Yudios got a very good model. So there there's there's a few different really good models. Like, I feel like I could have a music career again. That's going to be very, very interesting to me because it's sort of like, one thing that hip hop showed was so people don't really realize this, but this is something Quincy Jones pointed out to me before he passed.

He said, You know, Ben, hip hop started exactly when they canceled all the music programs in schools. It was the exact same time when people didn't learn to play instruments in schools. That is exactly when hip hop began. And hip hop kind of freed you as somebody who was a musical talent from actually having to learn to play an instrument. And even for the producers, you had a drum machine, you had samples, So you could hear what you liked and play it, but you didn't need to be a virtuoso.

And that kind of opened up a world that we didn't have before, and I think AI music is kind of that on steroids.

I don't know if you guys know. The number one song in the country now is an AI country artist. It's called Walk My Walk. Oh, yeah. And the first I think the first AI artist that got a record deal recently.

Like, you know, so this is definitely what the future Yeah. Looks like is people who nonmusicians it's just like, you know, Replit and others make it so that you don't have to be a coder to make apps.

Yeah. Yeah.

And now you don't have to be a musician to make music. And I don't think people really understand how big of a deal that is. Like, my my personal trainer who's been in the fitness world his whole life Yeah. Has been in a rabbit hole making he's probably in the top point 1% of AI creators in the world right now

Oh, that's amazing.

Music. And he's, like, got, like, a full band. He's, his own record label, and every day he's up till two in the morning. And he knows these programs inside and out, and because it wasn't really accessible to somebody who didn't have, you know, musical talent before to be able to make music.

Right. There's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuoso violinist. Those don't necessarily have to be the same thing. And it's great that people, whatever, practice violin for three hours a day and get amazing at it and all that kind of thing. But it's pretty neat to have a world where like, okay, if you can just do this part, you can still play.

Sean, can you ask? You have this really cool light about the rules of culture and making them memorable.

Well, yeah. So when I'm doing the research, one thing that stands out is, like, you talk about culture. You talk about, like and it which is normally culture is like, I just fall asleep because it is so overtalked about in the business world. You're just like, you gotta really tell me something new.

Over talked about without anybody saying anything.

Exactly. Culture. Culture. Right.

And it's like, oh, so cool.

Tell me your values. Like, integrity. Like, alright. Great. Glad to hear it.

I'm I was worried it was gonna be the opposite. Right? Like, it doesn't really tell you anything. And, you know, when you go walk into the company, the stuff on the wall doesn't match the stuff you see happening within the four walls. So it's just you you get sort of disillusioned in a way.

When you see somebody doing something interesting or you or somebody actually pulling it off, which, of course, there are examples, I get interested. And so one thing that I thought was cool, a nuance that I hadn't really heard before was you were talking about how at a 16 z, you kind of take time to drive the culture. Like, I think in the new onboarding, you, like, I do a culture session one hour. They sign something at the end. And one of the nuances I thought that was interesting was you said, my rule for writing the kind of, like, the culture rules is it has to have some shock value.

It has to give the other person a what the hell are you talking about type of reaction if it's going to be memorable. I think the idea was if it's not memorable, it's never going to be remembered or used, so you have to do something to make it memorable. Can you talk about your theory around this?

Yeah. So, I mean, it kind of comes down to what you do every day. It's a daily habit. So, this idea that you put cultural values on the wall, and then once a year in a performance retreat, you say, Do you follow the culture? It's like, That means absolutely nothing.

It's nothing. And so it's like, Well, what do you do every day? And so one of the things we do every day is we meet with entrepreneurs. So what's a rule that sets the culture around that? So it's like, well, if you're late for that meeting, it's $10 a minute.

And it's like, well, dollars 10 a minute? Well, if I have to go to the bathroom? Owe me $50 I don't care. What if I had an important phone call? You owe me $100 I don't care you had an important phone call.

Well, why am I paying to work here? Well, because building a company is extremely hard, and culturally, we want to have the ultimate respect for that, and we don't want to waste any entrepreneur's time. And so that's your most important thing. So you have to plan to do that.

You guys have a fine now. You're talking this is a real A16C?

Yeah. So every time I have to go to the meeting, I have to think about that because I've got to be on time. I got to fucking plan my day so I'm not back to back on that one. I got to be on time. Otherwise, I'm going to be embarrassed and all that kind of thing.

Well, am I doing that? And then that, okay, if you do that, that's a habit that makes you go, Okay, no, I'm going to respect what this is. I know how hard it is to build a company. I may not even know how hard it is, but I know that somebody here thinks it's hard enough that I have to show up on time. So,

you tell some more of those interesting, like the tardiness paying thing, that's pretty cool. What are some other Yeah.

So, well, a second one is if you talk smack about an entrepreneur on X, you're fired. It doesn't matter if they're in the portfolio or not. You're just that's it. And why is that? Well, culturally, first of all, we're dream builders, we're not dream killers.

If want to do something bigger than yourself and make the world a better place, I don't care what it is. I don't care if I think it's stupid. I'm for that. I'm not against that. I am for that.

And I don't care if Sequoia funded you or Benchmark funded you, I'm for that. Go get it. We're a pro entrepreneur. And then kind of related to that, I don't want to give anybody credit for making themselves look smart by making somebody else look stupid. Like, I don't wanna give anybody, like, a gold star for saying that guy's, you know, making selling dollars for 85¢.

Oh, I'm so clever. You know? Like, fuck you. Like, nah. We're not doing that here.

And so, it's that kind of thing where it's like, Oh, that seems like a harsh punishment, but I get it. I get it because I've heard it and I understand it. And so, then that's a way to kind of show up behaviorally daily, as opposed to, here's the problem with integrity. What does that mean? Integrity only matters when it's tested.

Everybody has integrity. Everybody's honest until it's tested. And then when it's tested, very few people are. When it costs you money, when it costs you a deal, when it costs you your marriage, are you honest then? Because that's the actual thing.

And so you can't just have it in the abstract. You have to say, What behaviors do you have to have to work here? How responsive do you have to be? These things end up making the culture much more so than a value. Thing I really like is the samurai called them virtues.

They didn't call them values. It's like, these are the virtues. This is your way of being. This isn't like some fucking It's not a set of ideas. It's a set of actions.

A culture is a set of actions.

Listen to this, Sean. So if you go to a16z.com/about, you'll see their values. And I just want to read like, I've never seen this before, so I'm just going to read a couple of them. But the six out of seven, it's we play to win. Our culture only matters if we're important.

And in order to be important, we must win. We are the best firm in the world, so we expect to win. It's just like, that's fantastic. I love that. And that's I don't know if controversial is the right word, but it's polarizing, right?

Not a lot of people are into that, but that's badass. And then you say you have another one that I really like. We only do we only do first class business and only in a first class way. I think that's a really that's a

I actually stole that phrasing from JPMorgan. It's so cool. He said it in court. They were accusing him of some kind of, like, crazy, like, market manipulation.

He was I know the JP.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

James Spearman. JP Morgan. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I think that was I think I read about that line in the Andrew Sorkin's got that, like, 1928 or '29 book, and and I think he says that. But that's great.

So but okay. So but, like, when I go to this site and I see these, I'm like, okay. This is kind of like these are, like, the high level principles. But you what you were saying just now is a little bit different. You were like, hey.

Look.

Well, there's gotta be behaviors that support the principles. Yeah.

Yeah. So you you you basically were like, what are the daily situations and actions where we have a choice? We either show up this way or we show up this way. And we're gonna show up this way and sometimes with a a penalty, a punishment, or a praise based on, like, the extreme version of that behavior with a no tolerance policy. Right?

Like and I think there's this great military quote that you have in your book.

Oh, yeah. Well, hey. If you if you see something below standard and you don't correct it, you set a new standard. And that's very true. And that's why they have to be specific, because if they're not specific, you can't enforce it.

How do you enforce you don't have integrity? That just gets weaponized. It's like, that guy doesn't have integrity. He's not following the cultural value. Why does he have integrity?

Well, he lied to me. Well, let's go talk to him. Oh, no, I didn't lie to you. So it's not that. Whereas, Oh, you just put out that tweet?

Like, that's clearly against the cultural value. Like, uh-uh. There's no backing off that.

So, like, you know, Facebook famously had move fast and break things, which I

think That was really good, by the way.

Hall of fame. Yeah. That's a that's a Hall of Famer, but, like, that's kind of the know, one of

the few I I I thought about that for months. Like, I'm like, Move Fast and Break because it's so counterintuitive. It's like, well, you know, you want me to break things? I'm an engineer. I make things.

I don't break things. But was just his way of saying, There is no excuse for not fucking shipping. We're going fast. But

they don't have that anymore, do they? Is that something?

Well, they got bigger, and you know, I think speed wasn't their main thing that they were trying to achieve.

I think they literally changed it to, like Yeah. Move fast

It's move fast.

Stability and stable like, with stable infrastructure and reliable

Yeah. Exactly.

Somehow lost its edge. Yeah. Yeah. So have you seen anything like that move fast and break things or just a behavior when you walked into the Airbnb office and you noticed something?

Yeah. I mean, so and, you know, Amazon had this thing where they used to make the desks out of, like, doors and two by fours. And so I

tried doing that, by the way. It's it's way cheaper to get a desk.

It's way cheaper to get a desk. But, like, I think the idea back in, whatever, the late nineties when they did that was, like, like, we're not wasting any money. And that kind of thing. Those markers are very, very powerful. One of my favorite ones was actually from the Haitian revolution when Toussaint Louverture basically made a role.

He's like, You can't shoot on your wife, which was so absurd because here they are, they're in a colony, a French colony. The British, the Spanish, the French, they're all raping and pillaging and doing all this stuff, all these armies. And these guys can't cheat on their woks. But that little cultural idea that said, Look, this is about trust. I got to be able to trust you.

And the people have to be able to trust you ended up basically really influencing the war. So, one of the things that was very surprising, I think, to people who read about the Haitian Revolution was here's the slave army taking on these European colonies, and the white women in the colonies supported Toussaint against the French. And you go like, Well, why'd they do that? Because they didn't rape. They didn't pillage.

Toussaint, these guys were half naked soldiers or slaves, and they weren't doing any of that. They were super polite. They behaved in a certain way. And the legend is, so he was Toussaint L'Ouverture, but slaves didn't have last names. So where did L'Ouverture come from?

And so the story is Napoleon, who really was pissed at him, brought his generals together, it's like, How in the fuck can you not get this slave? How can you not defeat this slave? And they're like, Well, we get them backed up. We get them surrounded, and then all of a sudden, there's an opening. And he became Toussaint L'Ouverture, Toussaint the opening.

And the opening, a lot of people say, was created by these townspeople, these women who were just like, oh, fuck. We're for him. We're for that army. I don't give a fuck about your army. We're for that army.

So, like, the culture can be, like, super influential.

That's a great story. That's really cool.

Ask. You mentioned Amazon. Did you see Jeff Bezos got a new startup?

Oh, I did see. Yeah. Jeff got a new startup.

Alright. You you didn't see this announcement?

They they No. I don't even realize it.

Prometheus hit they raised an initial seed round of 6,000,000,000. Oh. $22,000,000,000? Is that true?

They called it a

seed round? Oh, yeah. That's the first round of funding. Yeah. So $6,000,000,000 raised, and they got a 100 people, and they're building AI for, like, the the physical world.

So it's not just robots, but basically, like, the manufacturing of airplanes and ships and things like that. So they're basically saying, how do we use AI Yeah. In, like, sort of advanced manufacturing, I think is the I think is the idea, but, obviously, there's a little title details. But that's pretty cool. He's, like, back in a operational role for the first time, which is cool.

Yeah. No. I think that by the way, how great is it that the logistics genius of our time is back at it and gonna help us get back in the manufacturing game? Those things are just incredible to me. And I think all of us were a little sad when Jeff was just living his best life just because he is so talented.

So this is very great news.

I loved it. I was like, this guy's having fun. He's getting jacked. He's showing a different a new North Star also, which has kind of also taken over the tech industry.

By the way, people always make you into cartoon when you get to that level. He is for sure a top two or three best CEO in the last forty years.

A bit surprising to me because I've read all your books. I know about your background. Basically, like, you have, like, guided the people who have shaped destiny. You have also shaped destiny yourself, but, like, you're you've done all these amazing things, and you're a shockingly fun hang. Normally, I think and, like, you know about hip hop and all this stuff.

Normally, the people who have outsized results typically have very strange personalities. And they're like a little quirky. And I'm sure you have your quirks, but you just seem shockingly well balanced for how not normal your success is. Is there anything in your day to day life that you think that would surprise probably the average person? Or are there any tendencies that you

have that you recognize probably aren't at all normal? Well, I would say probably the thing that my daughter always says that is unusual about me, and I think it came from the beginning of my I am different than the modern people. I was married when I was 22. I had three kids by the time I was 25. I kind of had to grow up fast.

Then I had the company. I was trying to raise the kids and the company, and I didn't have money for nannies or anything. So it was a lot of that. But what she says to me is she's like, Dad, you're at the top of Maslow's hierarchy. You're very zen with all this.

And I take things for what they are. I'm pretty good at not being unemotional but not letting my emotional reaction control my behavior.

Were you always that way, or did you become No.

No. No. No. No. It was definitely not.

I think it was just all the trauma that forced me to learn that. What made you

calm down? Was it age? Was it kids? Was it success? Was it like, look, I've made it.

Everything else is just icing on the cake. I don't care.

Well, I think it was the combination of the kids and the The first company I founded, Loud Cloud, which then became Opsware, was so difficult that I never In life since then, we've had difficulties building a firm, whatever, but they never got a rise out of me that could compare what I'd already been through. So it's almost like I feel like it's almost like, I know guys my friend Oliver Stone was in Vietnam.

And you

could tell everything about him was, I'm not in Vietnam anymore. So much of his life is defined by not being in Namph. And I do feel like, hey. I don't want to compare it to war because people always criticize me for my war metaphors. But it is kind of like that feeling where it's like, okay.

I've been through that. I'm just looking at the world differently now.

And I bet it. And and and, like, I'm sure you had some sense of, alright. I've accomplished something. Like, I feel good. Maybe I'm playing with house money a little bit with with everything else.

Yeah. It's a little house money, and then it's a little like all you can do is deal with the thing that it is. You can't stop it from having happened. It happens, and that now you have to deal with it.

Were there any other sort of wisdom accelerators? So you have these formative experiences. Right? You you got three kids in three years or whatever, and you're 20 by time you're 25, and then you're trying to build a startup and everything. You face kind of, like, the back against the wall moments.

Were there any other formative things? Like, you know, for example, in my life, I went to, like, a Tony Robbins seminar. It's like, you know, I sort of got five years of wisdom in a weekend type of type

of Yeah. Yeah. No. He's very good at, like, dealing with your own psychology. He's Yeah.

Or he's very

smart doing something, or you read a book at the right time, or you get the right message at the right time, and you have a moment where you just decide, like, from now on x. I guess, like, I'm just curious. Was there any if I just think about, like, formative moments besides the kids and besides Loud Cloud, what what else would there have been?

Okay. So when I was a kid, I was in this relay race. And it was it was a very big deal for me. It was whatever the track meet. And we came in second in the relay race.

My father wasn't at the race, but we came in second because and the team that came in first dropped the baton and didn't pick it up. The guy just ran without the baton, and they gave him first place, and they didn't penalize him. And so I was you know, my father said, how'd you do in the race? And I was like, well, we came in second, but it wasn't fair. And I was going to explain to him why.

And he said, Stop right there. He said, Life isn't fair. And that shocked me so much at the time, but it really stuck with me. And it's the single best lesson that I ever got in my life was life isn't fair. And I see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is going to be fair.

Like, nothing about life is fair. It's not fair where you're born. It's not fair what race you are. It's not fair like what your parents did. It's not fair like the job interviews aren't fair.

Like nothing. The tests aren't fair, nothing is fair in life. And so, the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation. You just deal with it as it is. And I think that everybody who tries to or who thinks, Well, I wasn't treated fairly, or This isn't fixed, that is devastating.

For sure, I mean, the whole time when cloud and the.com crashed and how far customers went out of business, I never crossed my mind to go, This isn't fair. It was just like, Okay, I have to deal with it. And that is, I would say, the single best piece of advice and way of looking at life that you can have is just it is what it is. And now do what you can do with it being as it is. It was very important.

You've referenced a lot of really cool stuff. The the Haiti story, I've heard you talk about history a lot. Outside of work work related stuff, what interests you right now? You know, Sean and I, we like to talk about just, like, just fun stuff that you were into. I'm I'm constantly reading about World War II.

I like that. What about you? Is there anything that you're kind of being obsessed about?

Yeah. So I do have this I'll give a plug for it. So I have this charity that I created with my wife called the Paid in Full Foundation, which basically is kind of this idea on a whim, but we give pensions to the old hip hop guys. So, they get $100,000 a year, and then we have this award show for them, where we name them grandmasters and so forth. So, the first winners were Rakim and Scarface, and then we had grandmaster Kaz and Shantay and Kumo D and so forth, and then Grand Poohba and Koji Rap.

And this year, we added this thing, the Quincy Jones Award to the guys who got sampled the most, and we gave it to George Clinton. And the event was so I'm still thinking about it. It was so amazing because So George Clinton knows all the words to follow the leader. And so he's on stage, and Quincy Jones says, Can you rap? And he raps follow the leader.

And Rakim came out and rapped it with him. So it got George Clinton and Rakim. And then Doctor. Dre bought a table to the event, and he couldn't help himself. He goes up on stage just to say, Look, I have no career without George Clinton.

And it was just so amazing to have all these guys that were so important, that influenced so many people, just being that appreciative of each other. Hip hop, of course, is so competitive, and they're always going at each other and so forth. But for them to be at that point where they could just go, man, you guys meant so much to me, and that kind of thing was it was just very special.

That's so cool. Yeah. That that idea of tensions for for for the OGs is is so great. What did that just come on a whim? Were you just at lunch one day, and you're like, why don't they you know?

How does that because that one liner gives you the clarity. Right? It gives you the clarity of where to go.

So I was listening to the H to the Izzo Jay Z song where he says, I'm overcharging for what they did to the cold crush. And it got me to this like, who was the cold crush? And it turns out, right, it's Grandmaster Kaz. And Grandmaster Kaz wrote Rapper's Delight, basically, and they stole it from him. And they stole it from him so nasty that they didn't change the word.

So Big Bang Handcraft, if I'm the G R A N D, right right, N D E M A S C E R, that's Grandmaster Kaz. He's rapping about his name, not Big Bang Hank. Big Bang Hank is the not named Grandmaster. Why is he calling himself Grandmaster? Because he stole his fucking rhyme.

And he never got paid, and he never got credit for it. And everybody in hip hop knows this. And grandmaster Kaz, by the way, if you meet him, he's a stoke. He's the coolest guy in the room. He dresses amazing.

He's super articulate. He can still rap like crazy today. He's 66 years old or 65, something like that. And I was like, wow, we ought to go back and fix that. And then Rakim was on tour at these little clubs and so forth.

I was like, That's Rakim. How are people treating him like that? So that was the idea. I was like, We ought to just do it. Getting it set up with the IRS and all that stuff is extremely complicated.

But, yeah, it's really, really, I would say, amazing. And just an unbelievable epilogue. So Kaz, at the last one, tells me he's like, Ben, I bought a house. I was like, oh, that's amazing, Kaz. You've got a house.

He's like, no, Ben. It's the first time in my life I haven't lived in the projects. Grandmaster Kaz, the guy who wrote the first great hip hop song, has never not lived in the projects. How crazy is that? And now here he is with the house in Pennsylvania.

And he's got berries in his backyard and the whole thing.

Yeah. He's got berries in his backyard.

It is pretty nuts. The people who are, like, invent the shit don't get it. Like, for example, Sean and I love UFC, and, like, we see, like, the early UFC events.

These guys

are badass.

Anything. Yeah.

And they're getting $2,000 to show up. Yeah. And they still come to, like, the legends awards, and they still are talking. And you're like, damn, dude. This guy probably is selling insurance or something like that.

Like, he like, you know, he probably got made $15,000 that year.

No doubt. No doubt.

Yeah. Acceptance of the NBA too. This is why, like, the culture gets kinda messed up. The because the old heads keep criticizing all the new players. Yeah.

And it's like, wow. Why are you doing that? It's like because they make

too much more money on us.

$70,000,000 a year, and that guy didn't make 7 in his whole career. And he's like, I'm better than that guy. And that guy you know? So the this resentment, and then they get on and then they're the the guys doing the halftime shows, and it's bad bad for the product. Right?

Like, it's bad for the lineage. Right? Because everything is a creative lineage, like, on top of what was before. Right? So it's really cool to kind of almost like economically fix the you know, or try to improve that ecosystem because

the It's whole thing was funny. It's also kind of this thought I have about capitalism, which is capitalism is definitely the system that lifted the world out of poverty and kind of created the modern world we live in. It's incredibly powerful, but over time it does get corrupted and so forth. And even if it wasn't corrupted, it's not perfect. And certain things happen like, oh, you create a musical art form, and are the guys who actually made it happen, and it becomes the biggest musical art form in the world, and you never got paid.

Kabbalism shouldn't work like that, but it's just kind of the way it works, and it's somebody's fault. And so if you can go back and say, Well, we'll just correct those things.

I think that I think you are so cool. Like, you're on one hand, you're like a pretty, like, hard hitting capitalist where you're getting after it, and you're you're talking about making really tough decisions of having to fire people, whatever. But then you're also like, but also we can we can do good by doing all this other stuff. And I think that, like, particularly in tech, I don't think that people's interests are are particularly that wide.

Yeah. Well, I think people get very into tech. Yeah. Like, tech is so deep and fast that, like, people can get stuck in it for sure. Yeah.

Well, Ben, we thank you for coming on, man. I know you you got a lot of things going on, but this was this was a lot of fun. I appreciate it.

Yeah. I know. It's a good time. Thanks, guys. Definitely.

Alright. Appreciate you. That's it. That's the pod.

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