Invest Like The Best: Ben Horowitz Interview Transcript — a16z Co-founder

Guest: Ben Horowitz — Co-founder of a16z (Andreessen Horowitz) Host: Patrick O’Shaughnessy — Host of Invest Like The Best Show: Invest Like The Best Duration: 62 minutes Source: YouTube Analysis: Deep Analysis & Commentary

Table of Contents

1. America’s Tech Competitiveness in a Golden Age 00:01:03
2. Policy Risk: The Difference Between Good and Bad Government 00:04:13
3. How AI Is Changing the Investment Landscape 00:06:58
4. Inequality Is a Feature, Not a Bug 00:13:10
5. America’s Mission and Andy Grove’s Vision 00:20:03
6. The Psychology of Management: From Andy Grove to Founder Struggles 00:22:34
7. Founding a16z: Breaking Venture Capital’s Unwritten Rules 00:29:32
8. Early Investing Mistakes and Organizational Evolution 00:34:57
9. Capital Market Shifts and Resisting the PE Temptation 00:39:09
10. Culture Is Actions, Not Slogans 00:42:52
11. A Father’s Communist Past and Life Lessons 00:46:36
12. The AI Coding Revolution, Hip-Hop, and Nas 00:49:13
13. The Las Vegas Policing Tech Experiment and Farewell 00:55:27

1. America’s Tech Competitiveness in a Golden Age

Time: 00:01:03 - 00:04:13

Patrick: I think a fun place to begin, Ben, would be your take on the state of the country. What does it feel like to you in 2026? I know part of your mission is to directly impact the trajectory of the country. Begin with what the landscape, the playing field feels like to you today.

Ben: I think the tech sector is very, very healthy. America’s competitiveness is very, very good. The entrepreneurship culture is outstanding. And that’s the main thing I look at from my lens. I go all over the world and everybody wants Silicon Valley. “How can we have Silicon Valley in the UK? How can we have it in France?” They have a lot of the ingredients right — great talent, great universities. But they have a worse regulatory environment, and the EU has an increasingly bad regulatory environment for entrepreneurship. But the bigger thing is a cultural challenge: succeeding, doing something larger than yourself, making the world a better place — those aren’t things that young people feel society values. So the likelihood of getting people to dedicate their life to a mission like that is just not that great. Whereas in the US it’s amazing.

I think the economy is in much better shape than people realize. We’ve done a lot to stimulate it — lower energy prices, much less regulation, a more user-friendly tax code. All that’s starting to kick in now. And from our perspective, the bigger thing is AI. It’s going to impact everything. There’s almost no problem you can think of where you can’t go, “Well, we have a real shot at solving that with AI.” Education? We’ve got an AI solution. Cancer? We’ve got an AI solution. The fact that we’ve got a technology where we can address everything is a real new phenomenon. All that’s going to kick in in a fairly major way over the next 12 to 24 months.

Patrick: Why do you think 12 to 24 months is a timeframe worth mentioning that some of this stuff will start to be felt more broadly?

Ben: It’s all kind of starting to take effect now and it’s got to roll out, get deployed. Deployments of technology in the past have taken a long time — you had to build out the infrastructure. For cars you needed roads and traffic lights. For the Internet you needed fiber in the ground and people to have smartphones. But the Internet is here. If you want to use AI, if you want to apply it to your business, you just do it. There is no infrastructure that needs to be built to adopt the thing.

2. Policy Risk: The Difference Between Good and Bad Government

Time: 00:04:13 - 00:06:58

Patrick: What could most interrupt this good trajectory that America is on, where we are building solutions using technology? What are the biggest risks?

Ben: I think policy. One of the things my father said to me was: a bad government, no matter how many smart people you have, no matter how great a culture you have, no matter how great the country is, can ruin the whole thing. Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world.

Patrick: Crazy.

Ben: And then communism, and that’s that. If you look at how little comes out of so many countries in Europe that have so many smart people — and the ones that went into communism. There are so many genius Romanian entrepreneurs, John von Neumann and the number of great scientists that came out of Hungary, this little country. And then it was just gone once the communists took over. Completely — from inventing everything to nothing overnight.

That can absolutely happen here. We could outlaw AI. The last Biden administration executive order said that you could not sell a GPU without federal government approval. That was a real executive order. It got reversed. But we were that close to being basically out of the global chip game. So it is fragile.

Technology solutions work much better than policy solutions. Policy solutions — it’s very hard to make anything work. Think about COVID: we could tell everybody to stay in their house. Well, that’s got extremely bad side effects and it turned out not to work that well. Or we could invent a drug that cures it or a vaccine that works. All the policy stuff on climate change — Europe actually reduced emissions, but it didn’t do anything because China didn’t reduce emissions. But if you build a really safe nuclear fusion facility, that would have a big effect.

Police — defund the police did not make anybody safer. Technology does. If you really want to change the world, if you really want to make it a better place, you can build a solution for darn near anything. It’s never been a better time to be an entrepreneur.

3. How AI Is Changing the Investment Landscape

Time: 00:06:58 - 00:13:09

Patrick: I was with a local restaurateur yesterday here in New York, one of the best, for a couple of hours having him describe how he is planning on using AI tooling to improve everything about his restaurant business. There’s been great companies built in and around restaurant software — Toast and others. It seems like this restaurant owner is going to be able to have his own spun-up operating system specific to him. How is this changing the way in which you view investment opportunities?

Ben: On the positive side, everything is up for grabs. I think people are kind of overreacting in the stock market. If you look at existing software companies, people think they’re all dead. Well, some of these guys are extremely hard targets — it’s not that easy to take out Salesforce or SAP. You would be surprised even with AI how much heavy lifting that is.

Having said that, it is true that a lot of these things — yeah, you can just make your own, it’s going to be a lot easier. The number of possible interesting companies went up a lot. The products work so much better than any technology products we’ve seen in the past that revenue growth is so much faster for these AI companies. Cursor, which is ostensibly an IDE — what was the biggest IDE before Cursor? It probably took 12 or 15 years to get to that revenue level. They went over a billion dollars in revenue in no time. That’s super interesting.

But from an investing standpoint, the laws of physics of company building changed, which is going to affect investing in what’s currently an unknown way. The one thing you knew if you’d ever built a software company is you cannot throw money at the problem.

Patrick: Yeah, yeah.

Ben: What’s a man-year? 700 IBMers before lunch. That phenomenon — everything was built on it because you knew if somebody built a great product with a small team in three years, Google’s not going to hire 2,000 engineers and catch them. That was a law of physics. Now if you have the data and enough GPUs, you can solve damn near anything. We’ve seen that with Elon catching the big models in no time. He just took a lot of money and a really good data center design and some smart engineers. He’s in the game very fast. That would have never happened in the past.

The markets also seem to be much, much bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. So it would cause you to think about valuations and long-term value differently. On the one hand, what if this market wasn’t $50 billion — what if it was $5 trillion? And on the other hand, what if somebody could catch you? These are concepts we’ve not dealt with.

Patrick: How would the conversations feel different internally at your firm versus four years ago? Where does it feel most materially different?

Ben: One of the most different things is when you look at AI researchers, it’s really a different kind of thing. If you haven’t been at Google or Facebook or OpenAI or Anthropic, and somebody gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to try and build a giant model and you weren’t one of the main people — then you probably don’t know how to do it because you can’t learn it in school. It’s a little bit alchemistic in nature, a little bit of an art. So if you’ve never done it before, the chance of your first try working well isn’t that great.

That’s why you got to this situation which from the outside probably looked absolutely bananas — why is somebody paying $100 million or a billion dollars for an AI researcher? Well, what if there are only 40 of them in the world, and —

Patrick: You have a $4 trillion company?

Ben: Yeah. Then it kind of changes the math. It’s the first time we’ve had a need for a technologist that academia couldn’t produce. That is probably one of the bigger things that changed in the conversation.

4. Inequality Is a Feature, Not a Bug

Time: 00:13:10 - 00:20:03

Patrick: Everyone talks in venture about the power law. The thing underneath the power law is inequality. So many things happening now are massive multipliers on the trend of inequality — the billion-dollar researcher, the size of the biggest companies, the wealth of the people creating them. I would argue that inequality is a feature, not a bug of the American system. But I’m curious for you to riff on the nature of growing inequality and the good and the bad.

Ben: What’s happening in AI is an extension of what I’d call the Kobe Bryant effect. When James Naismith invented basketball, there was a limited amount of money you could make because you basically played in front of whoever could show up. Once you add television and the global audience, you can become LeBron James, you can become a billionaire. That wasn’t at all possible before.

We first saw that with the Internet — I can build a product, get to global distribution very fast, and become extremely rich. AI is another layer on top of that: take that same product and make it more valuable. Whoever invents that is whatever the Internet company was, plus plus plus. That’s going to make them even richer. That’s the bad part.

The good part is it’s starting out completely democratized. Anybody gets access to very powerful AI. Anybody has a phone. Most people in the world have smartphones now. You’ve got super intelligence in your phone. It’s an equalizer of opportunity in ways I don’t think we’ve ever seen. Every child can have a super advanced amazing tutor. Great education is accessible to all now.

I learned this from my father. He said, “Look, son, life isn’t fair.” And that’s extremely good advice, because it’s just not going to be fair. No matter what government tries to do. And the problem is, if you create a system that tries to correct that, it doesn’t make things more fair. It just transfers all the power to the person running the system. That’s what happened with Stalin. That’s what happened with Ceausescu. That’s what happened with Pol Pot. That’s what happened with Mao. Not an accident that every single system like that went bad — it really ends up being a power transfer.

What do you want? You’d like everybody to have a chance. Don’t give me no chance — give me some chance. It may not be as big as the other guy’s. But if I have the desire, if I’ve got some capability, give me a chance to make my imprint on the world. A system like that is going to end up with a lot of inequality. But you can try systematically to give everybody an opportunity. AI does a really good job of that.

Patrick: One of the memes that’s very popular today is that you have a couple years to get some capital or you’re going to be part of the permanent underclass. I certainly agree that now everyone has the best lawyer, accountant, advisor in their pocket. But what do you think about this notion that because of AI we’ll need less labor, and it’s going to be harder if you don’t have some capital to begin with?

Ben: I don’t really think that’s right. I don’t think the door is going to close behind you. The opportunities tend to multiply when you open up a new door. We saw that with crypto. So many people who made money on crypto literally didn’t have much to start with. They got into the technology early and parlayed it up. If something grows really fast, that’s actually the opportunity for somebody with a little bit of capital to make a lot of money. If you bought Bitcoin for a nickel, you did really well, and all you needed was a nickel.

The labor market stuff — people are acting as though it’s very predictable, and it’s not at all predictable. Look at the history of automation. In the agricultural days, 95 or 96% of all jobs in the U.S. were agriculture. Almost all those jobs have been eliminated. The jobs we have now, the people doing agriculture wouldn’t even consider jobs.

AI has been going since ImageNet in 2012, natural language stuff around 2015, ChatGPT in 2022. Where’s all the job destruction? Why hasn’t it happened yet? And why are you so fucking sure it’s going to happen next? And why are you so sure no jobs are going to be created? I don’t think it’s nearly as predictable as people are saying.

5. America’s Mission and Andy Grove’s Vision

Time: 00:20:03 - 00:22:34

Patrick: How would you describe the nature and scope of your ambition over the next 10, 20 years?

Ben: I had a mentor — a great, great CEO by the name of Andy Grove, the CEO of Intel. He famously did the major pivot from the memory business into the microprocessor business. Maybe the greatest tech CEO we’ve had. One of the things he said, which is very obvious but also profound, is: if you’re the leader in the industry, then the growth of the industry is dependent on you. It’s up to you to expand the market. Nobody else is going to do it.

When I think about the firm, I think of it a lot in those terms. The reason America is America — there are many narratives, but the factual one is: we won the Industrial Revolution. Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, great entrepreneurs who built great technology. The technology lead led to military lead, led to an economic lead, led to cultural dominance. None of that was by accident. Had we not had all those inventions, had all those companies which led to winning World War II, we just wouldn’t be. We’d be some other thing. We wouldn’t be America.

We’re there again. This is the equivalent change of the Industrial Revolution in terms of how everything works — governments, societies, businesses. We’re either going to be the leader of that technology, the provider of that technology, or we’re not. And if we’re not, we’re not going to be the economic superpower, the military superpower, the cultural influence, the standard of the world that we are now. I think America’s been good for the world and good for giving people a chance.

Our role — try to be humble with the role — from a policy standpoint, funding standpoint, helping people build standpoint, is to make sure that next set of great companies comes out of America or allied nations. The core ambition is to do our part in helping that.

6. The Psychology of Management: From Andy Grove to Founder Struggles

Time: 00:22:34 - 00:29:31

Patrick: Just as a quick sidebar on Andy Grove — his book is incredible. Everyone should read High Output Management. What very specifically did you learn from him? What did you see him do that impacted the way you think or behave?

Ben: I’m so overly influenced by him, it’s hard to even pin it down. I actually wrote the new foreword for High Output Management, which I think is the best thing I ever wrote. The Hard Thing About Hard Things was basically intended to be the updated version of it.

The thing in High Output Management that he did so well, and that I tried to do my own version of, is: the concepts of management are easy. You need maybe an eighth-grade education to understand management. It’s not physics, it’s pretty simple. But the psychological part of it is extremely difficult, particularly for a young person. It’s super confrontational. You’re having to look through the conversation you’re having to the entire organization. You really have to be Confucian at times — the good of the whole supersedes the good of the individual.

I went to visit him, and he had this award on the wall — Manager of the Year for the Santa Clara facility of Intel, from like 1992. I said, “Andy, you were the biggest CEO in the world, why did they give you the manager of the year award for the Santa Clara facility?” He goes, “Oh man, Santa Clara always scored the lowest on everything at Intel. So I went over there and said, when are you going to get this facility up to code? And they started with all this bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. I reached under my chair and pulled out a roll of toilet paper. I said, clean up your bullshit and tell me when the fuck you’re going to be up to code. In two months they were up to code. And they were always the highest-rated facility thereafter.” That’s why they gave him the award.

Patrick: When did you first experience this confrontational, psychologically difficult aspect of management yourself? How would you encourage other people to get a taste of it?

Ben: Obviously what happens to founders is you invent something, and now you’ve got to build a company. You don’t know what you’re doing and you make mistakes. Those mistakes really cost the company, and you lose confidence. That leads you to hesitate. And that hesitation is what causes the failure mode.

So then either the company is indecisive, or they get very open — all these guys get so open to input from their team and executives. But the team doesn’t have the full context. Only the leader has the context. So even if they’re smarter than you, you still likely have better judgment because you have all the knowledge. But they defer. And if you defer to people who work for you, that creates a weird political situation — you’re not making the decision, someone else jumps into the vacuum, and that feels political to everybody else.

The hardest version of this is the reorg, because you’re redistributing power to make the company work better. But what’s going to happen is somebody really good, who you’ve had for a long time, is going to lose power, and they’re going to be pissed. If you compromise the organization so they can maintain their power, you’ve redistributed power from the people doing all the work to the executives, and that’s a catastrophe. People don’t want that confrontation. They don’t want to tell that person, “Look, the organization is here. You helped us get here. But you either have to be happy in this new role, or it’s going to be a wrap.”

When you’re young and inexperienced, you know it’s going to hurt to tell them that. But you don’t know it’s going to help to do the reorg, because you’ve never done it before. So you go with the known “avoid hurt” over the theoretical “avoid hurt.” And that’s when you wreck your company. I always do my best to lend them my experience on that.

Patrick: You were lucky that when you started Andreessen Horowitz, you and Marc had both had tons of operating experience.

Ben: Yeah, I still didn’t know what I was doing as CEO.

Patrick: Fair enough.

Ben: And he didn’t know what he was doing either. If you ask Marc about management now, he’s so different than how he actually did it, and it actually makes him mad if you talk about it too much — “I got such bad fucking advice, man. They told me to hire all these guys.”

Patrick: What is he most different in?

Ben: I just think he’s way more in control of himself. Marc is a super emotional person and he’s just way more in control of it than he was then. He used to be like 0 or 100. So he would be full of emotion — “What the fuck are we doing?” — or “I’m just not going to say anything.” Nothing in between.

7. Founding a16z: Breaking Venture Capital’s Unwritten Rules

Time: 00:29:32 - 00:34:57

Patrick: Something I know the least about your firm is like the first three days, three months, three years. I’d love to hear about how you thought about the business right as it was getting started.

Ben: First of all, you have to understand the context: there hadn’t really been new top-tier venture capital firms. The last one before we started that you’d say is top tier was probably Benchmark, which ostensibly started in 1995, but all those guys came from another firm called Merrill Pickard from the ’80s. And there hadn’t really been a new one since.

Every VC was reputation-based, so to be top tier you had to have invested in Apple and Cisco and Google and Yahoo. You couldn’t from a standing start get to that. And if you’re not top tier in VC, you’re not going to last. In a super hot period everybody makes money, but the best entrepreneurs will only work with top-tier firms because that’s how you recruit great engineers, that’s how you get follow-on money. You’d never take money from tier two if you could get tier one. So the tier ones always have better returns.

We knew we had to be tier one, but we had that problem. Our idea was: venture capital is a great product for LPs, but it’s not a great product for entrepreneurs. If we could build a better product for entrepreneurs, we could win. Because we had been entrepreneurs, the idea was: if you’re a founder who wants to run your own company, you’re not getting much. You need confidence, knowledge, network. What if we built a firm designed to give you enough confidence, power, network, reach, and advice that you could actually be a CEO? That was the whole idea behind the firm originally.

The second idea was that VCs didn’t ever market themselves. If everything is based on your investing track record, it’s best that it’s just magic — why say anything, keep it a secret? So they weren’t talking. When we went out and talked, everybody covered it. Instantly everybody knew we had this product.

Patrick: Where did the germ of that specific idea come from — to be fairly loud relative to what others do from the very beginning?

Ben: Marc said to me, “Why don’t VCs market?” The original thing went back to the first class of VCs, which were the Industrial Revolution VCs — JP Morgan, Rothschild, Goldman Sachs. They were financing both sides of World War I. They really didn’t want any publicity because that would have been extremely bad. That just carried over all the way through. And the reputation thing was working, so there was no need to do it.

We got a lot of criticism when we did it. Our LPs would say, “The other VCs say you guys are egomaniacs. You named the firm after yourself. You’re marketing it.” The funny thing is, the reason we named the firm after ourselves was that when we raised money in 2009 — right on the edge of the financial crisis — the big objection from LPs was: “You guys are really good entrepreneurs. You’re just going to leave and build another company and we’re going to be stuck with the fund.” We couldn’t get them off of that. So I had the idea: why don’t we just name it with our names? Then they know we’re staying.

8. Early Investing Mistakes and Organizational Evolution

Time: 00:34:57 - 00:39:09

Ben: The first thing is we really didn’t know that much about investing. Marc and I had done some angel investing, but neither of us had any venture capital experience. Credit to Sequoia, credit to Greylock and Kleiner and all the guys who were around at that time — they just had years and years of doing it. We made more than our fair share of investing mistakes. Missing things we should have done was probably the bigger one.

The other thing was that our investor profile was wrong. We so over-indexed on our idea that we had to help the founder become a CEO that we made it a requirement — you couldn’t be an investor at Andreessen Horowitz if you hadn’t founded or run a company. That was a very good attitude and set the culture of the firm in a lot of ways. But most CEOs aren’t as interested in investing as they think they are. And most CEOs aren’t as good at helping somebody else learn the job. Those two things ended up being not quite correct. So we made some adjustments.

Fund one went really well because we hit the scene hard. It was a small fund. We did Skype, Slack, Okta, Stripe — there were just too many good things in a $300 million fund for that thing not to blow the doors off. Fund two wasn’t as good as one. And then by fund three, that’s when we had the contention: “We really don’t have the right profile for GP here.” For a while we thought it was going to be a terrible fund. It ended up being a great fund because we had Coinbase, Databricks, Lyft, and GitHub. But that one was scary for a while.

Coming out of that, we knew what the firm needed to be. It wasn’t such a startup anymore — we got across that chasm. But the bigger thing was we always had this idea about software eating the world, which Marc articulated in his 2011 piece. We felt venture capital firms needed to scale, and other firms would have trouble scaling because of how they worked and shared control. So that could be an opportunity for us.

Starting with the bio and crypto funds, I started to get the organizational picture of how we could address every technology market — but not with investing teams of 20 people. You need teams of four or five. But you can’t address the whole technology market with five people. So you need multiple teams. Having multiple teams in a venture capital firm was a novel idea, particularly when each team has a platform that helps founders build companies. We began it in earnest with the crypto fund around 2018. Now the whole firm is organized that way.

9. Capital Market Shifts and Resisting the PE Temptation

Time: 00:39:09 - 00:42:52

Patrick: If we zoom to today and back to what you said about the scope of your ambition to expand the market — what are the components of doing that? What does the system need that it doesn’t currently have?

Ben: One is the capital markets have changed dramatically. I went public at 18 months old with $2 million in trailing revenue. That wasn’t a good idea. But companies used to go public routinely with $50 million in revenue. Now nobody’s going public unless they’re $500 billion. You need a lot more out of the private markets than VCs are built to do.

Another thing: the companies in the portfolio used to leave you at $100 million in revenue — they’re going public, they’re out to the races. That’s not true anymore. What do you need at $200 million, $300 million in revenue? You need to be multi-product, multi-channel, multi-geography. As a venture firm, we need to help them do that. How do I get to Japan? How do I get to South America? Most venture firms don’t provide much along those lines.

Patrick: Do you hope that over time your firm and maybe some others become the Blackstone, Apollo-type companies — big, publicly traded, enduring businesses?

Ben: A big, huge wave among venture capitalists is private equity AI roll-ups. It’s a good business idea — a really good business idea. Just like the spreadsheet created the original private equity business, AI is creating a new one where you can buy any existing company, optimize it with AI, and it’ll be more valuable. That’s a good idea, it’s a good thing to invest in.

It’s not something we’re going to do, for two reasons. One, it’s the cultural opposite of who we are. We’re about building new things, growth, believing in the entrepreneur. Price doesn’t even matter — as long as the thing succeeds, you’re going to do well. Private equity is entry price, entry price, entry price. I had a great dinner with Mark Rowan, who’s a super genius running Apollo, and he was like, “Entry price, entry price, entry price.” We never even think about that. Containing costs and all that — that’s just not what a good venture capital frame of mind is. Culturally, I didn’t want to mix those two things.

But more than that, I just didn’t want to be in a business where the way you make money is figuring out how to optimize an existing thing and lay off people. We’re about new technology companies building the future, taking things forward. I’ll leave that to the other smart guys in the industry.

10. Culture Is Actions, Not Slogans

Time: 00:42:52 - 00:46:36

Patrick: What, if any, trade-offs feel like they might exist at this scale? Nothing’s perfect. What are the trade-offs to the path you’ve chosen?

Ben: With any scale of organization, you really have to over-pay attention to culture or the culture will drift. We probably spend more work on that than any venture capital firm. You’re not allowed to join unless you sign the culture document. I spend an hour with every single employee teaching them the culture. That level of investment — and then we really try to enforce it hard. We have pretty good consistency, but that is hard to maintain as you grow.

Patrick: Can you teach me more about culture? You’ve written a book about it. You’ve studied some very interesting cultures. If you had to teach a seminar on what a culture is, how to design one, and how to make sure people live by it?

Ben: Let me give you probably the most important insight, which is from Bushido, the way of the warrior from the samurai. A culture is not a set of ideas, it’s a set of actions. If you define your culture as a set of ideas — integrity, do the right thing, we have each other’s backs — or any kind of corporate values, it’s actually just a bunch of platitudes. It doesn’t mean anything. The culture has to be defined in terms of the exact behavior that you want.

It’s the little things. How responsive are you to your colleagues? What’s the SLA on returning a Slack message or an email? Do you show up to meetings on time? If you want that idea, you’ve got to manifest it through something.

We have an idea about respecting the entrepreneur. What’s the behavior? One, you can never be late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. I used to fine people $10 a minute in the beginning of the firm to reinforce it. You have to get back to an entrepreneur if you say no — you have to say no, you have to explain why you’re not investing, and it has to be clear. We’re going to survey that entrepreneur after you say no to make sure you said no and they had a good experience.

If you try to make yourself look good by making an entrepreneur look bad, you’re fired. You don’t get on X and say, “Oh, he’s selling dollars for 85 cents.” No. We’re dream builders. We’re not dream killers. Somebody wants to do something larger than themselves, build a company, make the world a better place — we’re for that. We don’t care what the idea is, or if Sequoia funded them. That’s who we are.

Culture is the actual thing that gets you the idea — as opposed to the idea, and then figure out how you’re going to behave. That’s probably the main thing on culture.

11. A Father’s Communist Past and Life Lessons

Time: 00:46:36 - 00:49:12

Patrick: Can you say more about the influence your dad had on you? You mentioned that lesson of nothing’s fair, life isn’t fair. Tell me about your dad.

Ben: He was what’s known as a red diaper baby. My grandparents were communists. They went to secret meetings, they had cards. My grandfather was fired during the McCarthy era from being a junior high school teacher for being a communist.

He grew up a communist and started out on the left. He was editor of a very famous new-left magazine called Ramparts. He was involved with the Black Panthers — Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver in the Oakland chapter. Then he dropped out of politics and reemerged probably eight years later on the right. He really understood the ills of communism and socialism, which helped me a lot.

One of the things he said to me that always stuck with me: “Son, go to the library, pick any book on socialism. There’s hundreds of books. In that book, I guarantee you, you will find page upon page, chapter upon chapter, of how to divide the wealth. You will not find a single sentence on how to create it, how to make it.” I was like, oh wow, that’s not a very good system, is it? I learned a lot about systems thinking from that, which ended up being very helpful to me as CEO.

He wasn’t a new-age father. In the old days, your father wouldn’t even talk to you until you got to be like 12, and then you get these little snippets of wisdom. I put this story in The Hard Thing About Hard Things. I had three kids, I was young. It was 102 degrees, the air conditioning was broken. The kids were going crazy. One of them poured a whole gallon of apple juice into the rug. Apple juice is steaming out of the carpet. I’m just sitting there looking like I was going to die.

My father looks at me and goes, “Son, you know what’s cheap?” I said, “What?” He goes, “Flowers. Flowers are cheap.” I said, “Okay.” He said, “You know what’s expensive?” I said, “No. What?” He said, “Divorce.” And he had been married four times, so he knew what he was talking about.

12. The AI Coding Revolution, Hip-Hop, and Nas

Time: 00:49:13 - 00:55:27

Patrick: As you look out today in the world, what things are captivating you most, maybe even most inspiring you? You have such an interesting perch, you get to see so much at the frontier.

Ben: What’s going on in coding now is quite phenomenal. We went through this period where AI can write code, cool. You can vibe-code stuff with a lot of security holes, fine. But I think over the winter break, it turned a corner where really, really good programmers were going, “Whoa.”

Patrick: Oh, God.

Ben: This is — this helps me. I just became 100 times more productive, and I can’t remember any kind of technology where all of a sudden you wake up and the whole world just changed. That’s happening on a pretty regular basis.

We’ve spent a bunch of time with people in Hollywood who are using AI. AI will help you make movies both better and at much lower cost. You can shoot a scene and then have the AI do a variation that’s very, very good. You don’t have to shoot a scene 15 or 20 times — shoot it three times and take the pieces you like. I think it’s a little underestimated as a tool for creatives. That’s true in music too.

I was kind of a young person when hip-hop started, and the huge criticism was: this is not music. They’re just taking music and remixing it and rapping over it, it’s a bunch of bullshit, it’s a novelty. But it was postmodern art. I think we’re going to get into post-postmodern art with what people will be able to do with AI and music. The invention of a new art form is when it gets really exciting.

Patrick: What people in hip-hop have had the largest impact on you personally?

Ben: Nas is a very good friend of mine and he’s definitely had a big impact. The lens through which he sees the world is so different and interesting for me. We’re both very big fans of Rakim, who is kind of the John Coltrane of rap. Rakim had one of his first big songs, “My Melody.” The first line is: “Turn up the bass, pull up a chair, hand out a cigar. I’m letting knowledge be born. My name’s Hara.”

Nas puts it on, hands out a cigar, pauses it, and goes, “Ben, why is he handing out a cigar?” I go, “I don’t know.” Then he plays the next line: “I’m letting knowledge be born.” He’s like, “It’s a birth, Ben. He’s passing out cigars at the birth of knowledge.” I was like, oh shit. I listened to that song a thousand times. I never heard that. I can’t tell you how many times he sees or hears something that’s there that I don’t see. Having somebody with a completely different perspective is invaluable.

We did the Coinbase deal together. He’d called me two weeks prior because he wanted to learn about Bitcoin. I explained how it worked, he was very interested. Then when I was talking to Chris Dixon, who was working on the deal, Chris said one of the founders, Fred, was really into hip-hop. So I had Nas come over to my house — there was a boxing match on Saturday — and that’s how we got that deal.

He’s one of the great storytellers of all time. As a leader and a writer, storytelling is important to me, and I think he’s a super genius at it.

Patrick: Is there a CEO comparable to Nas? There’s this class of guys in the ’90s — Jay-Z, “I’m not a businessman, I’m a business, man” — these massive franchises. But Nas still has this weird, timeless quality. His new album feels just like Illmatic, like it could have come out then or now.

Ben: Maybe Jensen. Jensen has this very defined view of who he is, what the company is, that’s gone across eras — gaming, Bitcoin, AI — but it’s still Nvidia. He never felt he had to change the name of the company. He’s gotten better over the years, but in a weird sense it never felt like he’s trying to be current. Nas never feels like he’s trying to write a hit.

13. The Las Vegas Policing Tech Experiment and Farewell

Time: 00:55:27 - 01:01:00

Patrick: Can you tell the story of the work you’re doing with the Vegas Police Department? I’m asking because it’s super interesting, but also because it’s such a different kind of example of what the application of new technologies might allow for.

Ben: A couple of things about the Las Vegas police force were intriguing to me. The biggest one: they were different than other police forces because they’re a big metropolitan area that’s not run by the chief of police but by the sheriff. The sheriff is an elected official and does not report to the mayor. So they never got caught in the defund the police movement. They were one of the only cities that didn’t reduce the police budget. They also never militarized — they do community policing.

You can see it in the numbers. The murder clearance rate in Las Vegas is the highest in the country — 94%. San Francisco is like 75%. Chicago’s in the 30s. The national average is below 60. I asked why it’s so high. The sheriff, Kevin McMahell, said, “Ben, when somebody is murdered, there’s always somebody who knows who did it. They just don’t talk to the police. But they talk to us because we’re part of the community. They know us.”

I thought: that’s a great environment to test new technology. I knew about all the public safety technology because we invested in it through American Dynamism. I said, “We’re going to become the highest-tech police force in America, hopefully the world, and I’m going to fund it.”

We’ve got a drone program, Prepared 911, Flock Safety AI cameras. If a 911 call comes in or a gunshot goes off, there’ll be a drone deployed within 90 seconds. That drone video feed will be in every police officer’s phone in the vicinity, instantly.

Since we started the program, crime is down over 50%. Shooting of suspects by police is down close to 75%. Everybody’s safer.

The most surprising thing about the technology deployment was this: the police told me descriptions cause half the violent confrontations. Somebody jacks a car, there’s a baby in the backseat. They get a description: “2004 blue Hyundai.” It’s really a 2008 green Hyundai. But they pull over a guy in a 2004 blue Hyundai. That person has had bad experiences with the police and has a gun in the car. All of a sudden there’s an incident. With the AI camera, we know that’s the car. We know there’s a baby. We’re not sending one guy with a gun to check — we’re sending a whole squad and apprehending them safely.

Policing is inherently dangerous, but intelligence makes it dramatically safer. Suspects, criminals, citizens, police — everybody.

The other knock-on effect is it’s put the pride back into policing. We used to have a problem where nobody wanted to be a police officer, so they were lowering the standard. Now the standard is really high. The drone center is state of the art, you have Cybertrucks driving around looking amazingly futuristic — everybody wants to be a cop now. And Las Vegas has the highest concentration of veterans in the country, so there are plenty of super-qualified people to choose from. It’s all gone really well.

Patrick: The last question I ask everyone is the same. What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?

Ben: A mentor of mine, a fellow by the name of Ken Coleman, was a big executive at Silicon Graphics. When I was a sophomore in college, I got an introduction to him and he gave me a job as a summer intern. Without that job, I don’t know that I ever get to Silicon Valley. He didn’t have to do that.

Patrick: It may interest you that that is the most common form of answer across 500 of these — someone that took a bet when they didn’t need to. Ben, pleasure to finally do this with you after a couple of years of watching you and learning from you. Thank you so much for your time.

Ben: Thank you, Patrick. It’s been great.

Source: Invest Like The Best — YouTube Transcription: AssemblyAI Editorial note: This transcript has been edited for readability — filler words removed, fragmented sentences merged, punctuation added — while preserving the original meaning and conversational flow. Ad segments have been omitted.