August 12, 2021 • 44 mins
What do start-up founders and hip hop artists have in common? According to Ben Horowitz: a lot! Since his teenage years, Ben has been inspired by hip hop artists’ ability to create something from nothing-- and he took that guiding ethos with him to Silicon Valley. So even when industry giants shrugged off what would become the internet as we know it, Ben always saw it for what it could be… and in his roles at Netscape and Opsware, Ben actualized it. Learn how at his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ben is helping entrepreneurs actualize their big ideas. Plus, Bob and Ben travel in time to look at the future of some of today’s biggest topics: remote work, video streaming platforms, biotech, and, of course, audio.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart Radio.
When you're a leader of an industry, you gotta make
the industry. You know, it's not just enough to make
the company. You've got to make the industry work. I
am Bob Pittman, and welcome to matth and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing. Today, we have a guest
(00:23):
who brings us insights from decades of being at the
forefront of change in technology and all the products and
services that ride on that change. He's a mainstay of
the Silicon Valley world. Ben Horrowitz, the co founder and
general partner of venture capital firm Andreesan Horowits. Ben grew
(00:45):
up in Berkeley, so he actually started out on the
West Coast. He's described his young self as incredibly shy,
but he was also incredibly smart, with a strong math mind.
He was a computer science guy in both the undergrad
and grad world, and not surprisingly spent his early career
tech firms like Silicon Graphics, Lotus, and then at Netscape
(01:07):
when Netscape changed the world. He's always loved hip hop.
He's written to brilliant books. The most recent is The
Hard Thing About Hard Things. He's a coach and has
helped countless entrepreneurs and best of all, he's a really
nice guy. Welcome Ben, Thanks Bob. It's exciting to be
here and exciting to be working with you again. Exactly,
we're like going back in time before we jump into
(01:29):
that and the other good stuff. I want to start
off with exploring you in sixty seconds. Sound good? Yes, Okay,
here we go. Do you prefer early rising or night out? Well,
at this stage of my life, early rising. There was
a time when I tried to keep jazz hours, but
no longer. Berkeley or Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Cool DJ
(01:53):
red Alert or Chuck Chill Out, col DJ Red Alert,
Beach or Mountains Beach, Columbia or u C L A
call or text, text, coffee or tea coffee, Raiders or
forty Niners, Raiders. Cats are dogs, dogs, It's about to
get harder. Smartest person you know, I'll say Mattes Harris,
(02:18):
childhood hero, George Clinton, favorite rapper, nas secret talent making
grits and colored greens. Super good at both of those.
That's a hell of a talent. Favorite City, Florence, guilty pleasure,
maddened football. Let's jump into the real stuff alight. Netscape
(02:40):
changed the world. It was the first commercially viable browser
that opened up the Internet to mirror mortals, and of
course has been the foundation of what we have today.
You were there at that moment. Contrastper us where we
are today versus where you thought Netscape was gonna take us.
You know, so many of the things that we thought
(03:01):
we're gonna happen did happen on the good in the
bad side. So, you know, the world came online. People
have the Library of Congress in their pocket. People have
better access to information now the average person with a
with a phone than you know, the President of the
United States had in So it's like that has been amazing.
(03:23):
Video worked, audio worked, Um. All the industries, uh kind
of moved on to the Internet. We definitely thought all
that would happen. Uh. And on the bad side, we
did think there was going to be a lot of crime.
Although we did, we thought we'd have a better chance
at stopping it. There was a period where the entire
(03:43):
industry just decided not to take security on the Internet
seriously and started with a technology that Microsoft built called
active X, which you know everybody knew was going to
be problematic, but you know, it was competitive and they
did anyway and whatnot. And then after that, I think
we were really really kind of just went away from
(04:04):
the idea that we had to build things super safely
online and uh beast led to what it has um.
I definitely didn't anticipate all the implications of social media,
and in particular, you know what it meant for humanity.
So because we had kind of versions of it. We
had news groups, we had I R. C Chat, we
(04:28):
had things on the internet in the early days, and
it didn't quite happen the way it happened with Facebook
and Twitter and and you know, Instagram and these kinds
of things. But I think that humanity is not really
able to process everybody's opinion simultaneously at the same level
in a way that's quite spectacular. Did you anticipate that
(04:51):
really was probably social and more than anything else, would
replace news experts, that we would sort of be looking
to anyone who had a point of view as opposed
to these anointed experts that we trusted. We really thought
news was going to change. So Mark and Jim Clark
went to see all the big media guys and say, hey,
(05:13):
you know, you need to invest in Netscape because the
Internet is going to be a problem for you guys
got to get in front of it. And they all
basically laughed at them, like none of them wanted to
put by They They were like, you guys are idiots,
Like nobody's going to read news off a computer. What
are you talking about? All that kind of thing. And
I remember just as sitting there just being completely shocked
(05:35):
that they would think that, because we thought news was
never going to be the same, you know, it had
changed forever, and in fact, it would be more like
and you know, Mark used to talk about the origination
of newspapers in the United States, which was you know,
literally the founding fathers pseudonymously writing what we would call
a blog post today. So they all had their own
(05:56):
newspapers where they would write, sometimes under their own name
and sometimes under a pseudonym, and you know, they would
attack each other and write like very aggressive stuff and
so forth. But everything was an opinion. There was no
what we would call journalism in that sense. You know,
well it was very opinionated. I would just say, uh,
and we thought that's what was going to happen. And
(06:20):
in a lot of ways, you know, and particularly the
blogging era was a lot of that. I think social
media put it on steroids and that kind of idea
that there would be no kind of set of facts
that people agreed on. Also, by the way, I think
we knew enough to know that kind of centrally controlled facts,
you know, had been historically very wrong, very many times.
(06:44):
So you know, we didn't think that was such a problem,
although you know, it's got other problems. So let me
sort of continue on the society impact before we jump
into some other issues. You know, when I was growing up,
I left home at eighteen. I moved to thousand miles away.
My parents had no idea dea what was going on
in the town I moved to because there was no
way to get that information. Long distance phone calls were
(07:06):
very expensive back then. Yeah, and they didn't work on
Mother's Day exactly. And by exactly, I forget about that.
And and by the way, I called them about once
a week, once every two weeks. I was able to
afford a trip home about every six months or so.
And today my college age kids can't escape me. It's
like they're still living with me. I know where they are,
(07:28):
I know all the info about where they are living,
their friends, what's been going on. Some would argue, and
I'm gonna give you two contrasting views here. Some would
argue that we're denying our kids the chance to become
their own independent adults. Others say, no, this is what
life was like a hundred and fifty years ago, when
families lived together and created this tight community. It was
(07:49):
more about family and common goals. So where do you
come down on this? I actually think our era was
probably better because there was something about and you were
remember it, that that feeling that you're out there without
a net, you know, when away from home, like it
was like, Okay, you're gonna get it done or you're
(08:10):
just gonna be hungry. There was no I'm moving back
in with mom. She definitely that room in the house
for me, and you know, in my case and my
whole like wife and kids. So I think that feeling
of there's only one way out, up and out, and
you've got to get it done is very powerful because
(08:32):
there's so many things in life that make you want
to stop, or make you want to quit, or make
you want to kind of not press forward. And I
think that you know, kind of the lack of that.
You know, that kind of nest, that ever encompassing nest
is tough to deal with for today's kids, and that
one like there's just that feeling that you can return
(08:55):
home like your kids or my kids, you know, it's
almost like they have too many choices, you know, Like
like you and I had, Okay, whatever it was gonna
make us money, that's what we were doing. Like there
was no okay, should I do this or that, or
I'm not sure what I want to do with my career, Like, yeah,
we didn't have those thoughts. A lot of what you
get out of those early experiences is that you just
(09:18):
went hard and the things you learned by going hard
at something and giving it everything you have because you
have to to survive, Like, there's just tremendous value in that.
Let's continue a little bit on the idea of kids.
Let's go back in time to you as a kid.
You were a product of life in Berkeley, California in
the sixties, seventies and eighties. Can you paint a picture
(09:41):
of that time and place that you grew up in
that influenced you. I had a very weird childhood because
you know, my father was you probably remember Ramparts magazine,
which was kind of the magazine of the new Left
in the early seventies. He was the editor in chief, um.
And so he was super left, you know, basically a
(10:05):
Marxist uh. And you know, and one of the things early,
you know, when I was four or five, you know,
six eight years old as he was, he was very
involved in the Oaklant chapter of the Black Panthers. And
so like a lot of the people I met, the
adults I met when I was a kid were Panthers,
and that had a very big influence on me, not
(10:28):
politically at all, but just stylistically, you know, all the
things that I end up uh, you know, being music
or people ask meak, like Ben, why do you drink knyac?
Nobody drinks that. I was like, that was not the
Panthers drunk, you know, they would always talk about it
like they're gonna have a yak. I was like, that
sounds like the greatest thing ever. So, you know, that's
kind of just where I ended up. But then, you know,
(10:51):
my father's politics changed all the way as I got
to be a teenager. Um, and that just kind of
me to go, Okay, I should stay away from politics
because nobody knows what's going on. But Berkeley was, uh,
you know, very integrated place, which you know was a
great benefit to me, and that I kind of learned
(11:13):
so many cultures growing up. It was just such a
different place than every other place that I was in
my life that it kind of forced me to learn
how to adapt culturally, you know, first to like the
business world, because I had no no concept of what
like a corporate culture would would be like when I
(11:33):
was a kid. You know, we were always yelling at
each other because we were more a politics culture, and so,
you know, all those things you ended up being really valuable.
You were this smart math kid. I know that, but
I didn't know this. You also played football. How did
having a foot and in both of those worlds help you?
I mean those seems like pretty dimestrically opposed. It's funny,
(11:55):
you know, like my my ability was math um, but
I love ball. And then you know, because Berkeley was
such a hippie town, and you know, communists hate football.
I have no idea why, like what it is about
football that doesn't go with communism, Like they're fine with
basketball or gymnastics or you know, other things. But they
really hate football. Um. And you know, coming from like
(12:17):
a communist heritage, uh, you know, being a teenager, I
was like anything communist. Hey, I'm for and so I
want you know, football was great in that sense. And
so you know, like I just tried out for the
team and uh I made the team. And you know,
anybody who's played high school football, it's such an amazing
(12:37):
bonding experience. You get so much of that really tight camaraderie.
So you got football. Let's move to the other thing
that was an influence. Hip hop clearly had a huge
impact on you. It developed popped on the scene about
the time you were growing up. Why and how hip hop?
And why you and hip hop? It felt like a breakthrough,
(13:00):
like okay, here's something brand new. Uh, you know, my
parents don't know about this, nobody knows what this is.
I can imagine be like, you know if you grew
up when Rock and roll hit. It was that kind
of feeling where, oh my god, this is you know,
such a different feeling. And then the other thing about it,
(13:21):
you know, for me, was it was so aspirational. You know,
you had these kids who like literally they had so
much nothing, they would they would make songs about their
sneakers and their sweatsuits, like aspiration is a thing independent
of what you have, and you know, for me, it
(13:42):
was such a great kind of motivation attitude, you know,
like you can make something from nothing. The whole culture
of it had just tremendous appeal, and you know, I
I got very into it. Now. You know, along the
way that there was this crazy incident where a friend
that I grew up with, who you know, very very
his family friend, got shot and became blind and he
(14:04):
didn't speak for three months. He was so depressed for
being his only thirteen year old kid, and nothing could
kind of bring him out of it. Um. And I
was in New York at the time, you know, in college,
and I recorded Here's how It's Gonna Like naive I was.
I would record the DJ Red Alert and Chuck Chillout
shows because I thought like they were so exciting and
(14:27):
they were so aspirational that if I sent him these
tapes from these shows that he would snap out of it.
And sure enough, like all he wanted to talk about
was you know, DJ Red Alert and Check Chill Out.
And so, you know, he and I we started a
rap band UM called the blind and deaf grow d
ef so that you know, I would suck forever once
(14:48):
that happened. Well, let's talk a little bit about that tug,
because you you did form this rap group, the Blind
Deaf Crew, but you also worked one summer at Silicon
Graph Takes and you described it as a mind blowing
experience when those seemed to be two opposite paths that
you're going down. How did these different interests coexist with
(15:10):
you and how did they feed each other? Yeah, well,
you know, Silico Graphics was so exciting because these really
really smart people just created this company that made the terminator.
I mean it was it was like out of nothing,
and I was like, wow, like a new you can
just have an idea and do that, and that you know,
(15:33):
for me, that went perfectly with the hip hop idea
of something from nothing, and like if you believe in
yourself and like you can do anything, um and you've
got energy and creativity, then you can just go do it,
like let's go build something, let's go make something, let's
go change the world. Once I saw it, I can't
(15:56):
un see it. It was just that that that's what
I had to do. So you did Columbia. You decide
you're not going to be a hip hop star, you
go get your masters at U c l A. You
joined Silicon Graphics. I think briefly you were at net
Labs and Lotus and finally they takes you to net
Escape at the birth of the Internet for the masses.
(16:16):
How did you get there? Well, it's funny because you know,
I had been at Silicon Graphics. You know that is
you pay attention to the people you work with and
the people who you knew were great. And Jim clark Um,
you know, had this new company, net Escape, and I
immediately download the product and looked at it and I
was like, yeah, I mean everybody saw the browser in
(16:39):
those days who knew anything, was like, holy sh it,
nothing's ever going to be the same. They put they
literally put an interface on the Internet. Yeah, it was
just like, oh my god, this is definitely the thing.
You were there when Netscape went public, and for people
a lot younger than us, they don't remember this, but
(17:00):
it was the thing. Arguably it was the original Internet.
I p O. I think something every tech company after
that time wanted to follow. Certainly everybody was talking about it,
whether they were in tech or not. How did it
feel on the inside. Did you realize you were making
history and having that kind of impact. It was it
(17:20):
was really exciting in Silicon Valley. If you went to
the movie theater and you had a Netscape shirt on,
like it was almost like you were like a rock star,
rap star or something that people would go, whoa, you
work at Escape, that's crazy. Everybody knew that we were
at the center of the universe, and so there was
tremendous excitement and then just the feeling, you know, we
(17:44):
would run into these problems. So, you know, the first
thing that we ran into was, oh, the Internet will
never work. It's not secure. I mean, you know, Bill
Gates and Larry Ellison, we're like, oh, you guys, are
you know it's it's it's not a secure network. It
can never be used for commerce. You can't put security
into a pro to call after the fact, all this
kind of stuff. And literally in three weeks we came
(18:05):
out with SSL and we secured the whole Internet, and
we needed state and we invented cookies, and we needed
a scripting language and we invented Joba script. You know.
So it was tremendously exciting and then of course, as
you know, when you get really popular, the next thing
that happens is everybody wants to take you down. And
so we went through that whole cycle to which was
(18:25):
a great learning experience, although quite unpleasant. More a Math
and Magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to
Math and Magic. Now let's hear more from my conversation
(18:46):
with Ben Horowitz. What lesson from that early days of
Netscape do you still use today and that offered your entrepreneurs.
I try and take mostly the positive lessons. I think that,
you know, we made many mistakes. Of course, when you
have the tiger by the tail like that and it's
going so fast, But you know, some of the positive
(19:08):
things were like, you know, when you're a leader of
an industry, you've got to make the industry. You know,
it's not just enough to make the company, You've got
to make the industry work. And we really had that attitude.
And you know, you know, I talked to the guys
at coin base about this a lot. If there's something
missing in the crypto infrastructure, like you gotta build it,
(19:30):
don't wait for it, go do it. And then from
a marketing standpoint, you know, really just acting like you know,
walking to talk, you know, or talking the walk is
so to speak of of going, look, we're building the Internet.
That's what we're here to do. We're number one, and
we're going to market the industry and we're gonna push
(19:50):
it ahead. And those things I use all the time.
I mean, you know, Andrews and Horowitz. If we want
to change venture capital, then we change ut your capital.
That's our thing. We don't wait and try and rally
all our friends or do this. We just we make
the change. Well along that way, you know, I was
at A O L at that time, and we we
(20:12):
were on a similar mission of let's make the Internet
usable by mere mortals. And in nine we bought Netscape.
Mark became our CTO. You ran the e commerce platform,
but it was a it was an East Coast meets
West coast. I remember all the hand ringing we had.
(20:33):
It was like you know, in in Dulles, Virginia, the
A O L engineers had offices and they said it
was impossible to do their work without them. Yet Netscape
just had an open cubicle for everybody, including the CEO.
And when Steve Case and I flew out to meet everyone,
and through the town hall meeting. The first one, the
first question was, I don't know if you remember this.
(20:53):
Can we still bring our dogs into work? Um? And
I think that sort of exemplified the cultural difference. So
what lessons did you learn you talked about you know,
usually take the positives, but you know, we learned a
lot from mistakes. What did you learn from that mismatch
of cultures? Yeah? So you know, I wrote a whole
book on culture called what What You Do Is Who
(21:15):
You Are with some of those lessons in mind. You know,
culture is very subtle and nuanced in the sense that
you always have a main culture and then you have
subcultures there. You know, it's never a uniform across everything.
But you have to as an organization be like very
clear in your head, Okay, what parts of the culture
(21:37):
are essential to our competitive advantage, and make sure that
you assimilate people into those things and then the other things.
You know, you can let be different, but you've got
to mitigate it. Um. You know, that's the basic role.
But then you know, when you get into the east
coast West coast thing, you have this weird issue you
(22:00):
where people get constantly offended by the other side's behavior. Um,
And I think in that case it was more of
the West coast getting offended by the East coast. Uh.
And it's a bigger thing than it should be because
the meaning of what people say is different. You know,
like if somebody in the East Coast says, why the
(22:20):
funk are you doing that? It doesn't mean anything then
like explain it to me, Whereas on the West Coast
that might mean like, Okay, this guy hates me and
is out to get me funck him. Like that's a
bad miscommunication. And you do have to think about, Okay,
who are the you know who, who are the cross
cultural people who can deal with that, who can be
(22:42):
in in those spots and and and really make that work.
Talk about that, and I think you've hit it exactly.
I mean my view of that, it was a miserable
because of the culture clash. People sort of forget that
the financial performance of all time Warner far exceeded that
its rivals. It was actually as a company really performing,
(23:03):
but everyone was so unhappy and that became the headline
and ultimately drove the stock price down in spite of
superior earnings. So you're right, culture winds and culture will
both win and defeat, depending which way you go. Yeah,
when you evaluate companies, where does the examination of corporate
culture fit into that? When we invest, we usually invest
(23:26):
pretty early, so you know, we're usually at the point
where we're trying to help them shape it because as
you know, like I think, there's this myth among you know,
kind of certain hr consults that you kind of break
down your culture when you're five people and then that's
your culture. Like that's not at all how it works, right,
(23:48):
So it's kind of this thing where it takes you
a while to figure out. Okay, So in our industry,
you know, these are the things that are going to matter,
is it you know, is it creativity or respond sideness
or frugality or whatever the you know, whatever the elements
are that you've got to have to win. And then
you know, how do you program that into the organization.
(24:10):
So I think we spend kind of more time helping
people figure out who they are and then you know,
try and set enough mechanisms into place in how they
run the organization so that when new people come on,
they assimilate in rather than kind of pulling people their way.
Because what happens a lot in Silicon Valley is Okay,
(24:32):
I've got a company, and then I go, oh, you know,
Google's got some great engineers that are unhappy, so I'm
gonna hire twenty of them. Well, all of a sudden,
now your culture is Google's culture, and it's more of
that kind of thing than than I would say trying
to evaluate who they are, because you know, it's developing
you and Mark culture or something caused you to leave
(24:53):
and you started one of the pioneers of the cloud
loud cloud, and that's sort of morphed into opswhere, which
you eventually sill old HP. You and Mark started entries
in Horowitz in two thousand and nine. Why VC instead
of starting or running another company. Yeah, well, you know,
we uh, we were weirdly very passionate about the idea
(25:18):
of changing how venture capital worked. And I'm not sure
why he was so keyed up about it, but I
was definitely keyed up about it, And a lot of
it just had to do with our experience. Um, you
know a little bit at both Netscape and OPS where
you know, the the VC model was and they talked
(25:38):
about it, Oh, it's a cottage industry, it's an apprentice model.
It's you know, a few craftspeople who know how companies
get built, and we're going to tell you how to
do it, and we're likely to replace the CEO with
somebody who knows how to scale. And that was kind
of how it worked. And we're like, wow, this is
just dumb. Some of these vcs were great, like super
(26:01):
massively talented, very smart people who we work with. But
you know, we're like, well, why is the model to
replace the CEO when all the best tech companies historically
Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, you know, Amazon, we're all run
by their founders for a very long time. Like why
is that the model that didn't make saying? You know
in our experience and you know this, like you know,
(26:24):
when you start a company, you're the one who makes
all the mistakes, so it's easier for you to change
them to get it right right. Uh So, so we thought,
you know, there ought to be a model for that.
And then without like well why is it so hard
for a founder to build a company? And there was
really two things. You know, One is like like the
CEO skill set is really hard. It's not something that
people are born. Okay, I know how to manage a
thousand people that that takes practice. And then the other
(26:46):
thing was just a network. You know, you look at
somebody like Bob Eiger and you go, wow, that guy
can call anybody. And we thought, well, like you could
do that. You could build that network, you know, as
part of the firm if you had a great venture
capital form and then enable kind of every entrepreneur to
have a network like Bob Iger's where they could get
(27:07):
to anybody, Like how great would that be? And then
help that founder develop into a CEO. And so we thought, wow,
if we built that Silicon Valley, would be able to
build much better, much bigger companies. And you know, we
both got super excited about it. So that's what we
ended up doing. Does hip hop inform anything you do
today in venture capital? I think it informs the feeling
(27:32):
of what it means to kind of build something, compete,
run an organization. There are so many great insights in
the music over the years, um and you know, of course,
I you know, whenever I write anything, I incorporate that
in But so many of my ideas about like how
do you convey the emotion of something two a CEO?
(27:56):
Because as you know, like the actual mechanic of management.
The theory of it is not that complicated, but like
having the right feeling to be able to do it
is something that very few people can do because you're
going to make people unhappy. You know, people are gonna quit,
like every important decision you make people like some people
(28:18):
in the organization, but absolutely fucking hate And so how
do you how do you get your head around that?
The rap quote that I use as Rick Ross, which
is who the fund do you think you're fucking with?
I'm the fucking boss. And that's like, that's the emotional
side of it, like stop working with me, Like, no,
let's jump a little bit to business helping to make
(28:40):
a better world. What what's your philosophy on that? Yeah,
so much. I think that's kind of the purpose of
starting a new business. I do think, you know, there's
a different question when businesses get really old and you're
kind of protecting what's already built. But for new businesses,
every new business, the idea is always to make something
(29:01):
in the world better. You know, Can we build a
better way of paying for things? Can we build a
better way of taking a vacation? You know, can we
build a better way of getting from point A to
point B, Like that's always the idea. So, you know,
I'm I couldn't be more positive on people starting companies.
(29:22):
And you know, it's why I got a I got
a question from somebody in the press the other day
and they said, been, you know, like, aren't you upset that,
you know, the venture capital is getting ruined by these
high prices? And I said, well, I said, hold on,
you know, so too many high prices, too many things
getting funded there like, yeah, too many things getting funded,
(29:43):
you know, even things that shouldn't be funded. I'm like, well,
so you're against the transfer of wealth from like people
with too much money to people trying to build something new.
What's wrong with you? That's the greatest idea ever. That's perfect.
So I think, like, you know, I wish there was
money for everybody who ever had an idea to make
the world a better place to go give it a shot.
(30:05):
One of the greatest things about America is that it's
pretty easy to do that compared to other places in
the world. Look, you don't always know what all the
implications of what you built is going to be. When
Zach started Facebook, it was like a hotter not type
of idea in the beginning, you know how college kids
can meet each other, that kind of thing, so you
know how it gets from there to there, Like things
(30:28):
do happen, you know, as the population grows, we need
better ways of doing things. Are we're all going to
be in a lot of trouble And what advice do
you give your companies on the topic? Do you sort
of help them write that into their charter if you will, Well,
the original idea is always like this is broken, like
we can make this so much better, and so usually
(30:49):
that's there. I mean, I want to take credit for that.
I do spend a lot of time with CEO is
going Look, you know, at the end of the day,
when this is over, Like, the most import thing is
the impact you make, Like what is it like to
work here? What is it like for the people who
buy the product? What is it like for the people
you partner with? Like what is the impact that you
(31:11):
make on this world? That's all that's gonna matter. That's
the only thing you're gonna remember. So just make sure
you do that the way you want to, because when
you're running a business, there's pressure to do all kinds
of stuff just because you know, you've gotta in order
to continue to the endeavor, you've got to at some
point make money. But you know, I do think that
(31:31):
we don't see people in Silicon Valley starting businesses to
you know, to do the things that you see in movies.
People aren't like just trying to get rich. They're they're
usually they have some idea that that they're inspired about
for some reason. Let me get some of your quick
takes on some current topics. Return to office. What's the
future of the workplace. Yeah, so, look, I think it's
(31:53):
gonna be different. We learned a lot during COVID. We
didn't learn nothing. We learned a lot and we learned
you know, in particular, you know, some things work really
well on zoom and Slack and in all the tool sets,
and look, we also learned some things don't work well.
It is hard, Like culture is more complicated by a lot,
(32:14):
I think remotely and creative work is much more difficult.
And there's a bunch of things that I think you're
gonna want to be in person on. But there's a
lot of things you know, to to to make everybody
go to the office and then like be on email
and slack, not talking to each other is stupid, right,
(32:35):
you know. And you know, look, I'm a CEO. I
live eight minutes from the office. But you know, nobody
on my team does, right, you know, they're commuting an
hour or two hours. Uh, they've got kids. I don't
need to make them do that every single day. I
think we're just going to end up being a lot
more thoughtful about when we get together and when we're remote.
(33:00):
Of the things that really struck me as we had
a couple of off sites during COVID, you know, outside
when you know, we thought we weren't too nervous, and
those off sites were so much better than anything we'd
ever done pre COVID, because pre COVID, you know that
we had too much agenda and people were distracted on
(33:20):
their devices and this and then the other. And then
during COVID and I'm like, I, I you know, very
little agenda. Let's just talk to each other, let's just
you know, kind of have ideas, let's get to know
each other. And man, that was great and we got
so much out of that and so much better ideas
than I ever got my regular off site. So you know,
(33:41):
it was, you know, quite a thing. Yeah, We're in
a hundred and sixty locations around the country. We've talked
about how do you think about an office, and we've
come up with the office is a productivity tool. If
it can help you be more productive, use it. If
it can't, don't use it. It's all about productivity. It's
not prison. You're not being sent tense to the office. Yeah,
(34:01):
that's a very good that's a great metaphor. Talk about
podcasting for a minute. We're on a podcast right now. Um,
and uh, does this medium continue on this growth trajectory?
Does this eventually reaches many people's radio, which by the way,
now has the greatest weekly reach of any media in
the US. Is that where we're heading with podcasting? Does
(34:23):
it stop at all? I think that audio broadcasting is
a h a big deal and going to be around forever.
It's amazing. And you know, conversations are things that people
really value, you know, particularly in the age of social media,
(34:45):
where which is not a great medium for conversations, right, Like,
it's great for attacking each other, we're sharing little things,
but it's not good for something like this. And so
I think that you know, mu sick and conversations are
going to be around there's no question. And then how
you get them, you know, will change technologically. Streaming video services.
(35:10):
You know, I was in the cable business when the
great invention was we aggregated all these services together and
sold you a bundle. Then it went to a la
carte and boy, these streaming services are ala carte on steroids.
Are we going to go back the consumer beginning to
look for something aggregated in one place as opposed to
having to go from one service to another service to
(35:31):
another service. What do you think the future holds? The
value propositions of Netflix and Amazon and Disney are so
overwhelming that it's going to be pretty hard. These smaller
services is just you know, a relic of history. There
(35:53):
will be like some set of entertainment choices, but they'll
all be you know, you pay a month or whatever
and you get just an amazing amount of stuff. Would
be my guess, buying one show at a time that
you like on one channel. I think it's pretty unlikely.
Talk a little bit about quick take on bio investing
(36:16):
texts men super hot. You know the bio is looking
pretty hot too. How do you think about it? Yeah,
so bio is gone through this tremendous breakthrough um in
a change in the way we model biology. When you
and I were kids, we've had this chemistry model of
the human body, and you know that took you to
(36:38):
a certain place. But now we've got an information model,
you know, kind of based on the genome, the microbiome, epigenome.
And so if you have an information model of the
human body, then you can apply computer science techniques to it,
and you can apply AI to it, and that opens
(36:58):
up a world that is absolutely completely different. The example
that everybody is so grateful for on that is the
mRNA vaccine. So right in the old days, to make
a vaccine, we would try and conjure up like some
small amount of the disease. We would manufacture it by
(37:19):
like growing it in a chicken egg, and then we
inject you with it and hope you didn't get too sick.
But the mRNA vaccine, like we print a message, We
manufactured by printing a message that we send to yourself
that says, hey, build up this protein to defend against
this virus. And then that message has gone in two
(37:41):
weeks and all you have is what your body produced.
And they're amazingly effective. That difference in precision, like we
call it drug discovery. Like imagine you did bridge discovery
to figure out how to build a bridge, right, you
built a thousand bridges, the one that didn't collapse. That's it.
That's how we do drug you know, discovery. Now we
can do drug engineering. We can do so much more.
(38:03):
It's just tremendously exciting. One of the things that we
think about a lot is, you know, back when you
and I grew up, like we used to get lost, right,
Like you would have to call somebody, Hey, I'm at
this phone booth, I don't know how to get to
your house and stark, I don't where am I that
You never do that anymore. Like you have GPS, you
(38:25):
know where you are at all times. Ten years from now,
like we're not gonna wonder why we're sick. We're gonna
know why we're sick every single time because we're gonna
be able to sequence our blood, our microbiome. We're gonna
have so many signals, and then we're going to have
a I which can look at thousands of dimensions and
inputs very easily match us against everybody who's ever been
(38:48):
sick and say, okay, this is what you've got as
opposed to like a human being, you know, listening to
your heart, taking your blood pressure and trying to figure
it out. Who can only think in three dimensions. It's
really just an amazing time in biology right now. If
you could go back in time give some advice to
your twenty one year old self, what would that advice be?
(39:10):
It would probably be, you know, don't worry so much
because it's going to turn out okay. Because I used
to worry about everything. But then I I wonder if
I told myself not to worry, would it turn out okay?
Maybe the worry is what got me there. I always
loved that line. If I've known I was going to
be successful, I wouldn't have worked so hard. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
(39:30):
So we always end each Math and Magic episode with
a shout out to the greatest on the two sides
of marketing and business. That's what the podcast is about.
Math and magic, the analytical view of the math and
the creativity. Those people just just burst out of them
the magic. As you think about and boy, you know
a lot of them. Who would you give the shout
(39:50):
out to on the math side, and who would you
give it to on the magic side, on the creative side,
you know, I'm gonna give it to h a friend
of mine, Shaka Singre, who's got a new book coming out.
You know, he he spent nineteen years in prison and
seven and solitary confinement for a murder that he did
(40:11):
commit when he was nineteen years old, and he transformed
his life. Let I still can't understand how he did it,
but you know, he's come out and he's you know,
just become this like amazingly successful writer and so forth.
But he's got this new book called Letters to the
Sons of Society about his two sons, one which he
(40:36):
had right as he went into prison and who he
couldn't really raise because he was behind bars, and then
another who he had when he came out, and they've
had completely different paths as you would expect, and him
trying to reconcile that. I always think of that the
hardest thing about being creative is getting all the weight
of the truth, particularly when the truth is filled with pain,
(40:57):
and he's gone through so much pain to get to
the with it's just amazing. And on the on the
man side, I am going to give it to Jeff Bezos,
because where would we be without Amazon during the pandemic?
I mean, like, how miserable would that be without like
the greatest logistics company ever built right in our own country,
(41:20):
giving us every single thing we needed delivered to our
house through everything that went wrong all the time, and
by the way, keeping our entire computing infrastructure up and running.
I mean, that's like, what an amazing feat of accomplishment there, Ben,
you have made a huge impact on business and society.
(41:42):
You've seen things no one else has seen. I'm sure
you've got a lot more to see. Uh, and you're
giving us good lessons as you go. Thanks for sharing
with us today. Yeah, absolutely, it's great. Catching up of
this has been a tremendous amount of fun. There are
a few things I picked up in my conversation with Ben. One,
when you lead an innovative company, you aren't just leading
(42:05):
the company, but the industry itself. When Ben was at Netscape,
he and his team would run into challenges where the
only way to keep building was to invent a new tool.
Don't wait for problems to be solved by others. Instead,
be the solution to the founder of a company is
often the best person to chart the path forward. Traditional
venture capitalists often replace a company's founder with a seasoned
(42:27):
CEO who appears more prepared to scale the company. Ben
believes it's better to support the founders to develop their
skills and provide them with a network of support. Three.
The best entrepreneurs are driven by more than just the
bottom line. Ben said that most of the founders he
knows are passionate about identifying problems and building innovative fixes
(42:48):
for them. According to Ben, that kind of thinking is
one of the ways businesses can help make the world
better for company culture doesn't need to be rigid. Instead,
you should identify and then hold onto the elements of
your company culture that adds to your competitive at that agel.
Beyond that, it's okay of different departments, different offices, or
(43:08):
perhaps even different coasts, two things slightly differently. I'm Bob Pittman.
Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so
much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of
I Heart Radio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman.
(43:30):
Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our
wonderful talent, which is no small feat Marissa Brown for
pulling research, our editor Derek Clements, our producer Morgan Levoy,
our executive producer Nikki Etor, and of course Gayl Rahul,
Eric Angel, Noel and everyone who helped bring this show
to your ears. Until next time,
You're listening to Math and Magic, a production I heart Radio.
When you're a leader of an industry, you gotta make
the industry. You know, it's not just enough to make
the company. You've got to make the industry work. I
am Bob Pittman, and welcome to matth and Magic. Stories
from the Frontiers and Marketing. Today, we have a guest
(00:23):
who brings us insights from decades of being at the
forefront of change in technology and all the products and
services that ride on that change. He's a mainstay of
the Silicon Valley world. Ben Horrowitz, the co founder and
general partner of venture capital firm Andreesan Horowits. Ben grew
(00:45):
up in Berkeley, so he actually started out on the
West Coast. He's described his young self as incredibly shy,
but he was also incredibly smart, with a strong math mind.
He was a computer science guy in both the undergrad
and grad world, and not surprisingly spent his early career
tech firms like Silicon Graphics, Lotus, and then at Netscape
(01:07):
when Netscape changed the world. He's always loved hip hop.
He's written to brilliant books. The most recent is The
Hard Thing About Hard Things. He's a coach and has
helped countless entrepreneurs and best of all, he's a really
nice guy. Welcome Ben, Thanks Bob. It's exciting to be
here and exciting to be working with you again. Exactly,
we're like going back in time before we jump into
(01:29):
that and the other good stuff. I want to start
off with exploring you in sixty seconds. Sound good? Yes, Okay,
here we go. Do you prefer early rising or night out? Well,
at this stage of my life, early rising. There was
a time when I tried to keep jazz hours, but
no longer. Berkeley or Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley Cool DJ
(01:53):
red Alert or Chuck Chill Out, col DJ Red Alert,
Beach or Mountains Beach, Columbia or u C L A
call or text, text, coffee or tea coffee, Raiders or
forty Niners, Raiders. Cats are dogs, dogs, It's about to
get harder. Smartest person you know, I'll say Mattes Harris,
(02:18):
childhood hero, George Clinton, favorite rapper, nas secret talent making
grits and colored greens. Super good at both of those.
That's a hell of a talent. Favorite City, Florence, guilty pleasure,
maddened football. Let's jump into the real stuff alight. Netscape
(02:40):
changed the world. It was the first commercially viable browser
that opened up the Internet to mirror mortals, and of
course has been the foundation of what we have today.
You were there at that moment. Contrastper us where we
are today versus where you thought Netscape was gonna take us.
You know, so many of the things that we thought
(03:01):
we're gonna happen did happen on the good in the
bad side. So, you know, the world came online. People
have the Library of Congress in their pocket. People have
better access to information now the average person with a
with a phone than you know, the President of the
United States had in So it's like that has been amazing.
(03:23):
Video worked, audio worked, Um. All the industries, uh kind
of moved on to the Internet. We definitely thought all
that would happen. Uh. And on the bad side, we
did think there was going to be a lot of crime.
Although we did, we thought we'd have a better chance
at stopping it. There was a period where the entire
(03:43):
industry just decided not to take security on the Internet
seriously and started with a technology that Microsoft built called
active X, which you know everybody knew was going to
be problematic, but you know, it was competitive and they
did anyway and whatnot. And then after that, I think
we were really really kind of just went away from
(04:04):
the idea that we had to build things super safely
online and uh beast led to what it has um.
I definitely didn't anticipate all the implications of social media,
and in particular, you know what it meant for humanity.
So because we had kind of versions of it. We
had news groups, we had I R. C Chat, we
(04:28):
had things on the internet in the early days, and
it didn't quite happen the way it happened with Facebook
and Twitter and and you know, Instagram and these kinds
of things. But I think that humanity is not really
able to process everybody's opinion simultaneously at the same level
in a way that's quite spectacular. Did you anticipate that
(04:51):
really was probably social and more than anything else, would
replace news experts, that we would sort of be looking
to anyone who had a point of view as opposed
to these anointed experts that we trusted. We really thought
news was going to change. So Mark and Jim Clark
went to see all the big media guys and say, hey,
(05:13):
you know, you need to invest in Netscape because the
Internet is going to be a problem for you guys
got to get in front of it. And they all
basically laughed at them, like none of them wanted to
put by They They were like, you guys are idiots,
Like nobody's going to read news off a computer. What
are you talking about? All that kind of thing. And
I remember just as sitting there just being completely shocked
(05:35):
that they would think that, because we thought news was
never going to be the same, you know, it had
changed forever, and in fact, it would be more like
and you know, Mark used to talk about the origination
of newspapers in the United States, which was you know,
literally the founding fathers pseudonymously writing what we would call
a blog post today. So they all had their own
(05:56):
newspapers where they would write, sometimes under their own name
and sometimes under a pseudonym, and you know, they would
attack each other and write like very aggressive stuff and
so forth. But everything was an opinion. There was no
what we would call journalism in that sense. You know,
well it was very opinionated. I would just say, uh,
and we thought that's what was going to happen. And
(06:20):
in a lot of ways, you know, and particularly the
blogging era was a lot of that. I think social
media put it on steroids and that kind of idea
that there would be no kind of set of facts
that people agreed on. Also, by the way, I think
we knew enough to know that kind of centrally controlled facts,
you know, had been historically very wrong, very many times.
(06:44):
So you know, we didn't think that was such a problem,
although you know, it's got other problems. So let me
sort of continue on the society impact before we jump
into some other issues. You know, when I was growing up,
I left home at eighteen. I moved to thousand miles away.
My parents had no idea dea what was going on
in the town I moved to because there was no
way to get that information. Long distance phone calls were
(07:06):
very expensive back then. Yeah, and they didn't work on
Mother's Day exactly. And by exactly, I forget about that.
And and by the way, I called them about once
a week, once every two weeks. I was able to
afford a trip home about every six months or so.
And today my college age kids can't escape me. It's
like they're still living with me. I know where they are,
(07:28):
I know all the info about where they are living,
their friends, what's been going on. Some would argue, and
I'm gonna give you two contrasting views here. Some would
argue that we're denying our kids the chance to become
their own independent adults. Others say, no, this is what
life was like a hundred and fifty years ago, when
families lived together and created this tight community. It was
(07:49):
more about family and common goals. So where do you
come down on this? I actually think our era was
probably better because there was something about and you were
remember it, that that feeling that you're out there without
a net, you know, when away from home, like it
was like, Okay, you're gonna get it done or you're
(08:10):
just gonna be hungry. There was no I'm moving back
in with mom. She definitely that room in the house
for me, and you know, in my case and my
whole like wife and kids. So I think that feeling
of there's only one way out, up and out, and
you've got to get it done is very powerful because
(08:32):
there's so many things in life that make you want
to stop, or make you want to quit, or make
you want to kind of not press forward. And I
think that you know, kind of the lack of that.
You know, that kind of nest, that ever encompassing nest
is tough to deal with for today's kids, and that
one like there's just that feeling that you can return
(08:55):
home like your kids or my kids, you know, it's
almost like they have too many choices, you know, Like
like you and I had, Okay, whatever it was gonna
make us money, that's what we were doing. Like there
was no okay, should I do this or that, or
I'm not sure what I want to do with my career, Like, yeah,
we didn't have those thoughts. A lot of what you
get out of those early experiences is that you just
(09:18):
went hard and the things you learned by going hard
at something and giving it everything you have because you
have to to survive, Like, there's just tremendous value in that.
Let's continue a little bit on the idea of kids.
Let's go back in time to you as a kid.
You were a product of life in Berkeley, California in
the sixties, seventies and eighties. Can you paint a picture
(09:41):
of that time and place that you grew up in
that influenced you. I had a very weird childhood because
you know, my father was you probably remember Ramparts magazine,
which was kind of the magazine of the new Left
in the early seventies. He was the editor in chief, um.
And so he was super left, you know, basically a
(10:05):
Marxist uh. And you know, and one of the things early,
you know, when I was four or five, you know,
six eight years old as he was, he was very
involved in the Oaklant chapter of the Black Panthers. And
so like a lot of the people I met, the
adults I met when I was a kid were Panthers,
and that had a very big influence on me, not
(10:28):
politically at all, but just stylistically, you know, all the
things that I end up uh, you know, being music
or people ask meak, like Ben, why do you drink knyac?
Nobody drinks that. I was like, that was not the
Panthers drunk, you know, they would always talk about it
like they're gonna have a yak. I was like, that
sounds like the greatest thing ever. So, you know, that's
kind of just where I ended up. But then, you know,
(10:51):
my father's politics changed all the way as I got
to be a teenager. Um, and that just kind of
me to go, Okay, I should stay away from politics
because nobody knows what's going on. But Berkeley was, uh,
you know, very integrated place, which you know was a
great benefit to me, and that I kind of learned
(11:13):
so many cultures growing up. It was just such a
different place than every other place that I was in
my life that it kind of forced me to learn
how to adapt culturally, you know, first to like the
business world, because I had no no concept of what
like a corporate culture would would be like when I
(11:33):
was a kid. You know, we were always yelling at
each other because we were more a politics culture, and so,
you know, all those things you ended up being really valuable.
You were this smart math kid. I know that, but
I didn't know this. You also played football. How did
having a foot and in both of those worlds help you?
I mean those seems like pretty dimestrically opposed. It's funny,
(11:55):
you know, like my my ability was math um, but
I love ball. And then you know, because Berkeley was
such a hippie town, and you know, communists hate football.
I have no idea why, like what it is about
football that doesn't go with communism, Like they're fine with
basketball or gymnastics or you know, other things. But they
really hate football. Um. And you know, coming from like
(12:17):
a communist heritage, uh, you know, being a teenager, I
was like anything communist. Hey, I'm for and so I
want you know, football was great in that sense. And
so you know, like I just tried out for the
team and uh I made the team. And you know,
anybody who's played high school football, it's such an amazing
(12:37):
bonding experience. You get so much of that really tight camaraderie.
So you got football. Let's move to the other thing
that was an influence. Hip hop clearly had a huge
impact on you. It developed popped on the scene about
the time you were growing up. Why and how hip hop?
And why you and hip hop? It felt like a breakthrough,
(13:00):
like okay, here's something brand new. Uh, you know, my
parents don't know about this, nobody knows what this is.
I can imagine be like, you know if you grew
up when Rock and roll hit. It was that kind
of feeling where, oh my god, this is you know,
such a different feeling. And then the other thing about it,
(13:21):
you know, for me, was it was so aspirational. You know,
you had these kids who like literally they had so
much nothing, they would they would make songs about their
sneakers and their sweatsuits, like aspiration is a thing independent
of what you have, and you know, for me, it
(13:42):
was such a great kind of motivation attitude, you know,
like you can make something from nothing. The whole culture
of it had just tremendous appeal, and you know, I
I got very into it. Now. You know, along the
way that there was this crazy incident where a friend
that I grew up with, who you know, very very
his family friend, got shot and became blind and he
(14:04):
didn't speak for three months. He was so depressed for
being his only thirteen year old kid, and nothing could
kind of bring him out of it. Um. And I
was in New York at the time, you know, in college,
and I recorded Here's how It's Gonna Like naive I was.
I would record the DJ Red Alert and Chuck Chillout
shows because I thought like they were so exciting and
(14:27):
they were so aspirational that if I sent him these
tapes from these shows that he would snap out of it.
And sure enough, like all he wanted to talk about
was you know, DJ Red Alert and Check Chill Out.
And so, you know, he and I we started a
rap band UM called the blind and deaf grow d
ef so that you know, I would suck forever once
(14:48):
that happened. Well, let's talk a little bit about that tug,
because you you did form this rap group, the Blind
Deaf Crew, but you also worked one summer at Silicon
Graph Takes and you described it as a mind blowing
experience when those seemed to be two opposite paths that
you're going down. How did these different interests coexist with
(15:10):
you and how did they feed each other? Yeah, well,
you know, Silico Graphics was so exciting because these really
really smart people just created this company that made the terminator.
I mean it was it was like out of nothing,
and I was like, wow, like a new you can
just have an idea and do that, and that you know,
(15:33):
for me, that went perfectly with the hip hop idea
of something from nothing, and like if you believe in
yourself and like you can do anything, um and you've
got energy and creativity, then you can just go do it,
like let's go build something, let's go make something, let's
go change the world. Once I saw it, I can't
(15:56):
un see it. It was just that that that's what
I had to do. So you did Columbia. You decide
you're not going to be a hip hop star, you
go get your masters at U c l A. You
joined Silicon Graphics. I think briefly you were at net
Labs and Lotus and finally they takes you to net
Escape at the birth of the Internet for the masses.
(16:16):
How did you get there? Well, it's funny because you know,
I had been at Silicon Graphics. You know that is
you pay attention to the people you work with and
the people who you knew were great. And Jim clark Um,
you know, had this new company, net Escape, and I
immediately download the product and looked at it and I
was like, yeah, I mean everybody saw the browser in
(16:39):
those days who knew anything, was like, holy sh it,
nothing's ever going to be the same. They put they
literally put an interface on the Internet. Yeah, it was
just like, oh my god, this is definitely the thing.
You were there when Netscape went public, and for people
a lot younger than us, they don't remember this, but
(17:00):
it was the thing. Arguably it was the original Internet.
I p O. I think something every tech company after
that time wanted to follow. Certainly everybody was talking about it,
whether they were in tech or not. How did it
feel on the inside. Did you realize you were making
history and having that kind of impact. It was it
(17:20):
was really exciting in Silicon Valley. If you went to
the movie theater and you had a Netscape shirt on,
like it was almost like you were like a rock star,
rap star or something that people would go, whoa, you
work at Escape, that's crazy. Everybody knew that we were
at the center of the universe, and so there was
tremendous excitement and then just the feeling, you know, we
(17:44):
would run into these problems. So, you know, the first
thing that we ran into was, oh, the Internet will
never work. It's not secure. I mean, you know, Bill
Gates and Larry Ellison, we're like, oh, you guys, are
you know it's it's it's not a secure network. It
can never be used for commerce. You can't put security
into a pro to call after the fact, all this
kind of stuff. And literally in three weeks we came
(18:05):
out with SSL and we secured the whole Internet, and
we needed state and we invented cookies, and we needed
a scripting language and we invented Joba script. You know.
So it was tremendously exciting and then of course, as
you know, when you get really popular, the next thing
that happens is everybody wants to take you down. And
so we went through that whole cycle to which was
(18:25):
a great learning experience, although quite unpleasant. More a Math
and Magic right after this quick break. Welcome back to
Math and Magic. Now let's hear more from my conversation
(18:46):
with Ben Horowitz. What lesson from that early days of
Netscape do you still use today and that offered your entrepreneurs.
I try and take mostly the positive lessons. I think that,
you know, we made many mistakes. Of course, when you
have the tiger by the tail like that and it's
going so fast, But you know, some of the positive
(19:08):
things were like, you know, when you're a leader of
an industry, you've got to make the industry. You know,
it's not just enough to make the company, You've got
to make the industry work. And we really had that attitude.
And you know, you know, I talked to the guys
at coin base about this a lot. If there's something
missing in the crypto infrastructure, like you gotta build it,
(19:30):
don't wait for it, go do it. And then from
a marketing standpoint, you know, really just acting like you know,
walking to talk, you know, or talking the walk is
so to speak of of going, look, we're building the Internet.
That's what we're here to do. We're number one, and
we're going to market the industry and we're gonna push
(19:50):
it ahead. And those things I use all the time.
I mean, you know, Andrews and Horowitz. If we want
to change venture capital, then we change ut your capital.
That's our thing. We don't wait and try and rally
all our friends or do this. We just we make
the change. Well along that way, you know, I was
at A O L at that time, and we we
(20:12):
were on a similar mission of let's make the Internet
usable by mere mortals. And in nine we bought Netscape.
Mark became our CTO. You ran the e commerce platform,
but it was a it was an East Coast meets
West coast. I remember all the hand ringing we had.
(20:33):
It was like you know, in in Dulles, Virginia, the
A O L engineers had offices and they said it
was impossible to do their work without them. Yet Netscape
just had an open cubicle for everybody, including the CEO.
And when Steve Case and I flew out to meet everyone,
and through the town hall meeting. The first one, the
first question was, I don't know if you remember this.
(20:53):
Can we still bring our dogs into work? Um? And
I think that sort of exemplified the cultural difference. So
what lessons did you learn you talked about you know,
usually take the positives, but you know, we learned a
lot from mistakes. What did you learn from that mismatch
of cultures? Yeah? So you know, I wrote a whole
book on culture called what What You Do Is Who
(21:15):
You Are with some of those lessons in mind. You know,
culture is very subtle and nuanced in the sense that
you always have a main culture and then you have
subcultures there. You know, it's never a uniform across everything.
But you have to as an organization be like very
clear in your head, Okay, what parts of the culture
(21:37):
are essential to our competitive advantage, and make sure that
you assimilate people into those things and then the other things.
You know, you can let be different, but you've got
to mitigate it. Um. You know, that's the basic role.
But then you know, when you get into the east
coast West coast thing, you have this weird issue you
(22:00):
where people get constantly offended by the other side's behavior. Um,
And I think in that case it was more of
the West coast getting offended by the East coast. Uh.
And it's a bigger thing than it should be because
the meaning of what people say is different. You know,
like if somebody in the East Coast says, why the
(22:20):
funk are you doing that? It doesn't mean anything then
like explain it to me, Whereas on the West Coast
that might mean like, Okay, this guy hates me and
is out to get me funck him. Like that's a
bad miscommunication. And you do have to think about, Okay,
who are the you know who, who are the cross
cultural people who can deal with that, who can be
(22:42):
in in those spots and and and really make that work.
Talk about that, and I think you've hit it exactly.
I mean my view of that, it was a miserable
because of the culture clash. People sort of forget that
the financial performance of all time Warner far exceeded that
its rivals. It was actually as a company really performing,
(23:03):
but everyone was so unhappy and that became the headline
and ultimately drove the stock price down in spite of
superior earnings. So you're right, culture winds and culture will
both win and defeat, depending which way you go. Yeah,
when you evaluate companies, where does the examination of corporate
culture fit into that? When we invest, we usually invest
(23:26):
pretty early, so you know, we're usually at the point
where we're trying to help them shape it because as
you know, like I think, there's this myth among you know,
kind of certain hr consults that you kind of break
down your culture when you're five people and then that's
your culture. Like that's not at all how it works, right,
(23:48):
So it's kind of this thing where it takes you
a while to figure out. Okay, So in our industry,
you know, these are the things that are going to matter,
is it you know, is it creativity or respond sideness
or frugality or whatever the you know, whatever the elements
are that you've got to have to win. And then
you know, how do you program that into the organization.
(24:10):
So I think we spend kind of more time helping
people figure out who they are and then you know,
try and set enough mechanisms into place in how they
run the organization so that when new people come on,
they assimilate in rather than kind of pulling people their way.
Because what happens a lot in Silicon Valley is Okay,
(24:32):
I've got a company, and then I go, oh, you know,
Google's got some great engineers that are unhappy, so I'm
gonna hire twenty of them. Well, all of a sudden,
now your culture is Google's culture, and it's more of
that kind of thing than than I would say trying
to evaluate who they are, because you know, it's developing
you and Mark culture or something caused you to leave
(24:53):
and you started one of the pioneers of the cloud
loud cloud, and that's sort of morphed into opswhere, which
you eventually sill old HP. You and Mark started entries
in Horowitz in two thousand and nine. Why VC instead
of starting or running another company. Yeah, well, you know,
we uh, we were weirdly very passionate about the idea
(25:18):
of changing how venture capital worked. And I'm not sure
why he was so keyed up about it, but I
was definitely keyed up about it, And a lot of
it just had to do with our experience. Um, you
know a little bit at both Netscape and OPS where
you know, the the VC model was and they talked
(25:38):
about it, Oh, it's a cottage industry, it's an apprentice model.
It's you know, a few craftspeople who know how companies
get built, and we're going to tell you how to
do it, and we're likely to replace the CEO with
somebody who knows how to scale. And that was kind
of how it worked. And we're like, wow, this is
just dumb. Some of these vcs were great, like super
(26:01):
massively talented, very smart people who we work with. But
you know, we're like, well, why is the model to
replace the CEO when all the best tech companies historically
Hewlett Packard, IBM, Microsoft, you know, Amazon, we're all run
by their founders for a very long time. Like why
is that the model that didn't make saying? You know
in our experience and you know this, like you know,
(26:24):
when you start a company, you're the one who makes
all the mistakes, so it's easier for you to change
them to get it right right. Uh So, so we thought,
you know, there ought to be a model for that.
And then without like well why is it so hard
for a founder to build a company? And there was
really two things. You know, One is like like the
CEO skill set is really hard. It's not something that
people are born. Okay, I know how to manage a
thousand people that that takes practice. And then the other
(26:46):
thing was just a network. You know, you look at
somebody like Bob Eiger and you go, wow, that guy
can call anybody. And we thought, well, like you could
do that. You could build that network, you know, as
part of the firm if you had a great venture
capital form and then enable kind of every entrepreneur to
have a network like Bob Iger's where they could get
(27:07):
to anybody, Like how great would that be? And then
help that founder develop into a CEO. And so we thought, wow,
if we built that Silicon Valley, would be able to
build much better, much bigger companies. And you know, we
both got super excited about it. So that's what we
ended up doing. Does hip hop inform anything you do
today in venture capital? I think it informs the feeling
(27:32):
of what it means to kind of build something, compete,
run an organization. There are so many great insights in
the music over the years, um and you know, of course,
I you know, whenever I write anything, I incorporate that
in But so many of my ideas about like how
do you convey the emotion of something two a CEO?
(27:56):
Because as you know, like the actual mechanic of management.
The theory of it is not that complicated, but like
having the right feeling to be able to do it
is something that very few people can do because you're
going to make people unhappy. You know, people are gonna quit,
like every important decision you make people like some people
(28:18):
in the organization, but absolutely fucking hate And so how
do you how do you get your head around that?
The rap quote that I use as Rick Ross, which
is who the fund do you think you're fucking with?
I'm the fucking boss. And that's like, that's the emotional
side of it, like stop working with me, Like, no,
let's jump a little bit to business helping to make
(28:40):
a better world. What what's your philosophy on that? Yeah,
so much. I think that's kind of the purpose of
starting a new business. I do think, you know, there's
a different question when businesses get really old and you're
kind of protecting what's already built. But for new businesses,
every new business, the idea is always to make something
(29:01):
in the world better. You know, Can we build a
better way of paying for things? Can we build a
better way of taking a vacation? You know, can we
build a better way of getting from point A to
point B, Like that's always the idea. So, you know,
I'm I couldn't be more positive on people starting companies.
(29:22):
And you know, it's why I got a I got
a question from somebody in the press the other day
and they said, been, you know, like, aren't you upset that,
you know, the venture capital is getting ruined by these
high prices? And I said, well, I said, hold on,
you know, so too many high prices, too many things
getting funded there like, yeah, too many things getting funded,
(29:43):
you know, even things that shouldn't be funded. I'm like, well,
so you're against the transfer of wealth from like people
with too much money to people trying to build something new.
What's wrong with you? That's the greatest idea ever. That's perfect.
So I think, like, you know, I wish there was
money for everybody who ever had an idea to make
the world a better place to go give it a shot.
(30:05):
One of the greatest things about America is that it's
pretty easy to do that compared to other places in
the world. Look, you don't always know what all the
implications of what you built is going to be. When
Zach started Facebook, it was like a hotter not type
of idea in the beginning, you know how college kids
can meet each other, that kind of thing, so you
know how it gets from there to there, Like things
(30:28):
do happen, you know, as the population grows, we need
better ways of doing things. Are we're all going to
be in a lot of trouble And what advice do
you give your companies on the topic? Do you sort
of help them write that into their charter if you will, Well,
the original idea is always like this is broken, like
we can make this so much better, and so usually
(30:49):
that's there. I mean, I want to take credit for that.
I do spend a lot of time with CEO is
going Look, you know, at the end of the day,
when this is over, Like, the most import thing is
the impact you make, Like what is it like to
work here? What is it like for the people who
buy the product? What is it like for the people
you partner with? Like what is the impact that you
(31:11):
make on this world? That's all that's gonna matter. That's
the only thing you're gonna remember. So just make sure
you do that the way you want to, because when
you're running a business, there's pressure to do all kinds
of stuff just because you know, you've gotta in order
to continue to the endeavor, you've got to at some
point make money. But you know, I do think that
(31:31):
we don't see people in Silicon Valley starting businesses to
you know, to do the things that you see in movies.
People aren't like just trying to get rich. They're they're
usually they have some idea that that they're inspired about
for some reason. Let me get some of your quick
takes on some current topics. Return to office. What's the
future of the workplace. Yeah, so, look, I think it's
(31:53):
gonna be different. We learned a lot during COVID. We
didn't learn nothing. We learned a lot and we learned
you know, in particular, you know, some things work really
well on zoom and Slack and in all the tool sets,
and look, we also learned some things don't work well.
It is hard, Like culture is more complicated by a lot,
(32:14):
I think remotely and creative work is much more difficult.
And there's a bunch of things that I think you're
gonna want to be in person on. But there's a
lot of things you know, to to to make everybody
go to the office and then like be on email
and slack, not talking to each other is stupid, right,
(32:35):
you know. And you know, look, I'm a CEO. I
live eight minutes from the office. But you know, nobody
on my team does, right, you know, they're commuting an
hour or two hours. Uh, they've got kids. I don't
need to make them do that every single day. I
think we're just going to end up being a lot
more thoughtful about when we get together and when we're remote.
(33:00):
Of the things that really struck me as we had
a couple of off sites during COVID, you know, outside
when you know, we thought we weren't too nervous, and
those off sites were so much better than anything we'd
ever done pre COVID, because pre COVID, you know that
we had too much agenda and people were distracted on
(33:20):
their devices and this and then the other. And then
during COVID and I'm like, I, I you know, very
little agenda. Let's just talk to each other, let's just
you know, kind of have ideas, let's get to know
each other. And man, that was great and we got
so much out of that and so much better ideas
than I ever got my regular off site. So you know,
(33:41):
it was, you know, quite a thing. Yeah, We're in
a hundred and sixty locations around the country. We've talked
about how do you think about an office, and we've
come up with the office is a productivity tool. If
it can help you be more productive, use it. If
it can't, don't use it. It's all about productivity. It's
not prison. You're not being sent tense to the office. Yeah,
(34:01):
that's a very good that's a great metaphor. Talk about
podcasting for a minute. We're on a podcast right now. Um,
and uh, does this medium continue on this growth trajectory?
Does this eventually reaches many people's radio, which by the way,
now has the greatest weekly reach of any media in
the US. Is that where we're heading with podcasting? Does
(34:23):
it stop at all? I think that audio broadcasting is
a h a big deal and going to be around forever.
It's amazing. And you know, conversations are things that people
really value, you know, particularly in the age of social media,
(34:45):
where which is not a great medium for conversations, right, Like,
it's great for attacking each other, we're sharing little things,
but it's not good for something like this. And so
I think that you know, mu sick and conversations are
going to be around there's no question. And then how
you get them, you know, will change technologically. Streaming video services.
(35:10):
You know, I was in the cable business when the
great invention was we aggregated all these services together and
sold you a bundle. Then it went to a la
carte and boy, these streaming services are ala carte on steroids.
Are we going to go back the consumer beginning to
look for something aggregated in one place as opposed to
having to go from one service to another service to
(35:31):
another service. What do you think the future holds? The
value propositions of Netflix and Amazon and Disney are so
overwhelming that it's going to be pretty hard. These smaller
services is just you know, a relic of history. There
(35:53):
will be like some set of entertainment choices, but they'll
all be you know, you pay a month or whatever
and you get just an amazing amount of stuff. Would
be my guess, buying one show at a time that
you like on one channel. I think it's pretty unlikely.
Talk a little bit about quick take on bio investing
(36:16):
texts men super hot. You know the bio is looking
pretty hot too. How do you think about it? Yeah,
so bio is gone through this tremendous breakthrough um in
a change in the way we model biology. When you
and I were kids, we've had this chemistry model of
the human body, and you know that took you to
(36:38):
a certain place. But now we've got an information model,
you know, kind of based on the genome, the microbiome, epigenome.
And so if you have an information model of the
human body, then you can apply computer science techniques to it,
and you can apply AI to it, and that opens
(36:58):
up a world that is absolutely completely different. The example
that everybody is so grateful for on that is the
mRNA vaccine. So right in the old days, to make
a vaccine, we would try and conjure up like some
small amount of the disease. We would manufacture it by
(37:19):
like growing it in a chicken egg, and then we
inject you with it and hope you didn't get too sick.
But the mRNA vaccine, like we print a message, We
manufactured by printing a message that we send to yourself
that says, hey, build up this protein to defend against
this virus. And then that message has gone in two
(37:41):
weeks and all you have is what your body produced.
And they're amazingly effective. That difference in precision, like we
call it drug discovery. Like imagine you did bridge discovery
to figure out how to build a bridge, right, you
built a thousand bridges, the one that didn't collapse. That's it.
That's how we do drug you know, discovery. Now we
can do drug engineering. We can do so much more.
(38:03):
It's just tremendously exciting. One of the things that we
think about a lot is, you know, back when you
and I grew up, like we used to get lost, right,
Like you would have to call somebody, Hey, I'm at
this phone booth, I don't know how to get to
your house and stark, I don't where am I that
You never do that anymore. Like you have GPS, you
(38:25):
know where you are at all times. Ten years from now,
like we're not gonna wonder why we're sick. We're gonna
know why we're sick every single time because we're gonna
be able to sequence our blood, our microbiome. We're gonna
have so many signals, and then we're going to have
a I which can look at thousands of dimensions and
inputs very easily match us against everybody who's ever been
(38:48):
sick and say, okay, this is what you've got as
opposed to like a human being, you know, listening to
your heart, taking your blood pressure and trying to figure
it out. Who can only think in three dimensions. It's
really just an amazing time in biology right now. If
you could go back in time give some advice to
your twenty one year old self, what would that advice be?
(39:10):
It would probably be, you know, don't worry so much
because it's going to turn out okay. Because I used
to worry about everything. But then I I wonder if
I told myself not to worry, would it turn out okay?
Maybe the worry is what got me there. I always
loved that line. If I've known I was going to
be successful, I wouldn't have worked so hard. Yeah, exactly, exactly.
(39:30):
So we always end each Math and Magic episode with
a shout out to the greatest on the two sides
of marketing and business. That's what the podcast is about.
Math and magic, the analytical view of the math and
the creativity. Those people just just burst out of them
the magic. As you think about and boy, you know
a lot of them. Who would you give the shout
(39:50):
out to on the math side, and who would you
give it to on the magic side, on the creative side,
you know, I'm gonna give it to h a friend
of mine, Shaka Singre, who's got a new book coming out.
You know, he he spent nineteen years in prison and
seven and solitary confinement for a murder that he did
(40:11):
commit when he was nineteen years old, and he transformed
his life. Let I still can't understand how he did it,
but you know, he's come out and he's you know,
just become this like amazingly successful writer and so forth.
But he's got this new book called Letters to the
Sons of Society about his two sons, one which he
(40:36):
had right as he went into prison and who he
couldn't really raise because he was behind bars, and then
another who he had when he came out, and they've
had completely different paths as you would expect, and him
trying to reconcile that. I always think of that the
hardest thing about being creative is getting all the weight
of the truth, particularly when the truth is filled with pain,
(40:57):
and he's gone through so much pain to get to
the with it's just amazing. And on the on the
man side, I am going to give it to Jeff Bezos,
because where would we be without Amazon during the pandemic?
I mean, like, how miserable would that be without like
the greatest logistics company ever built right in our own country,
(41:20):
giving us every single thing we needed delivered to our
house through everything that went wrong all the time, and
by the way, keeping our entire computing infrastructure up and running.
I mean, that's like, what an amazing feat of accomplishment there, Ben,
you have made a huge impact on business and society.
(41:42):
You've seen things no one else has seen. I'm sure
you've got a lot more to see. Uh, and you're
giving us good lessons as you go. Thanks for sharing
with us today. Yeah, absolutely, it's great. Catching up of
this has been a tremendous amount of fun. There are
a few things I picked up in my conversation with Ben. One,
when you lead an innovative company, you aren't just leading
(42:05):
the company, but the industry itself. When Ben was at Netscape,
he and his team would run into challenges where the
only way to keep building was to invent a new tool.
Don't wait for problems to be solved by others. Instead,
be the solution to the founder of a company is
often the best person to chart the path forward. Traditional
venture capitalists often replace a company's founder with a seasoned
(42:27):
CEO who appears more prepared to scale the company. Ben
believes it's better to support the founders to develop their
skills and provide them with a network of support. Three.
The best entrepreneurs are driven by more than just the
bottom line. Ben said that most of the founders he
knows are passionate about identifying problems and building innovative fixes
(42:48):
for them. According to Ben, that kind of thinking is
one of the ways businesses can help make the world
better for company culture doesn't need to be rigid. Instead,
you should identify and then hold onto the elements of
your company culture that adds to your competitive at that agel.
Beyond that, it's okay of different departments, different offices, or
(43:08):
perhaps even different coasts, two things slightly differently. I'm Bob Pittman.
Thanks for listening. That's it for today's episode. Thanks so
much for listening to Math and Magic, a production of
I Heart Radio. The show is hosted by Bob Pittman.
(43:30):
Special thanks to Sue Schillinger for booking and wrangling our
wonderful talent, which is no small feat Marissa Brown for
pulling research, our editor Derek Clements, our producer Morgan Levoy,
our executive producer Nikki Etor, and of course Gayl Rahul,
Eric Angel, Noel and everyone who helped bring this show
to your ears. Until next time,
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