Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz / Netscape / Loudcloud / Opsware

He majored in CS
4:15 - He wishes he had studied more biology. At the time he didn't realize it would connect with CS as soon as it did.
5:00 - What aside from tech skills can undergrads focus on?
- The big two skills are programming skills and people skills. Those are the big two. He thinks lack of people skills is often what undoes a company. (I should transcribe this.)
7:10-10:00 - How did you see the Internet was a big deal?
- He encountered the internet before he moved his career in that direction. He gives a very interesting history of what the area looked like at the time. It wasn't obvious the internet was going to be a thing
- This is very interesting, well worth transcribing.
10:50 - Is there value in working for a big company out of school instead of jumping right into trying to start a company?
14:50-18:00 - Where'd the title of your book come from?
- "I read literally every management book"
- This is very interesting.
- 16:50 - He hates the Jim Collins books.
18:30-22:00 - Peacetime vs. wartime CEO?
- It's a difference in the decision-making process.
- The management literature is almost entirely written for peacetime CEOs.
- In wartime the CEO needs to make a lot more decisions themselves
- He says he really likes Only the Paranoid Survive
22:30 - Are the skills to build a product the same as growing / selling it?
25:00 - Let's talk about a16z
- The realization that led them to start it was that they noticed all the dominant silicon valley companies are run by their founders, and yet the existing VCs tend to focus on replacing the founders with career CEOs.
- They decided all the VCs should have experience running a company
- What if the firm was the network? So they made the firm larger than most VC firms.
29:00 - How big was the firm when you started, and how big is it now?
- $300 mill to $4.7 bill. in 5 years
30:10 - Very important quote: It is just as hard to build a mediocre company as to build an important one. So if you're going to work your ass off, it may as well be for something important.
31:45 - What were the things you liked about VCs?
- All the returns were going to the same 5 firms for 30 years, and the reason was that the best entrepreneurs would only take money from the best VC firms.
- And 97% of the returns for any given year are concentrated
34:18 - One of their big differences from existing VCs was that they decided to market themselves aggressively, and they decided to be a lot more open.
35:20 - What are the companies you're excited about?
- Databricks / Spark
- TeaSpring - Converting social capital into money
38:15 - Q from audience: What do you think about Jawbone?
40:05 - Q: If you hold multiple roles, which do you delegate first?
- It's whenever you can find someone who can do the job better than you can.
- You only get leverage if the person you hire can do it better than you can.
42:35 - Q: What makes you so enthusiastic about bitcoin?
- It's a legitimate scientific breakthrough.
- It's the ability to transfer–not copy–a piece of digital property from one person to another.
- He gives a very interesting analogy between bitcoin and the Internet.
- If he was at Stanford he'd prob. be working on either cryptocurrency or biohacking
48:45 - Q: Do you think SF will continue to be the place to be?
- People have been saying it for a while, but its importance seems to be increasing rather than decreasing.
- The reason seems to be the network effect. If you're a very talented engineer and want to have amazing success, where are you going to go?
- He uses Hollywood as an analogy: you can make a movie outside of Hollywood, but you won't get the best people working on it.

My Thoughts on Various Topics

Ben Horowitz of Andreessen Horowitz / Netscape / Loudcloud / Opsware

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