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a16za16z Podcast | Talent, Tech Trends, and Culture -- with Ben, Marc, and Tyler Cowen
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At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Andreessen and Horowitz on Talent, Technology, Culture, and Software's Reach
- Andreessen and Horowitz trace their partnership from Ben's 1995 Netscape interview through Loudcloud to founding a venture firm in 2009 built on the idea that great founders should keep running their companies.
- Horowitz says the firm treats venture as a talent business, borrowing from Michael Ovitz's idea of long-term, relationship-based networks, while Andreessen argues founders are becoming ever more extreme people.
- Andreessen forecasts that retail will largely disappear, that audio and body sensors will be the big wearables, and that VR will end up far larger than AR, while Horowitz frames blockchain as a platform whose defining feature is trust.
- The pair describe the firm's Cultural Leadership Fund and note that Silicon Valley and Hollywood have begun to cross over, with the Valley now decoding culture and media companies taking tech seriously.
- Asked about technology policy and what software will never eat, Horowitz argues that tech is inevitable and the debate should be how to make it great, and Andreessen says picking and organizing small teams to do something new is the hardest thing to automate.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasFounders should keep running great companies
Horowitz says the biggest tech successes were run by their founders for a long time, yet venture convention was built to replace them, so the firm was designed around supporting founders through later product cycles.
Talent is a long-term network business
Inspired by Michael Ovitz and CAA, Horowitz says the firm invests in real, non-transactional relationships over a long horizon to build a network that is hard for others to match.
Blockchain's edge is trust
Horowitz compares blockchain to the early smartphone, which was worse than the PC in most ways but had GPS and a camera; blockchain is slower and harder but lets people rely on math instead of institutions, enabling programmable money, contracts, and digital property.
Retail will shrink while wearables grow
Andreessen argues third-party retail is over-levered and consumers want delivery, and he picks audio and medical-grade body sensors as key wearables, citing predicting heart attacks as an example.
VR may outgrow AR
Andreessen's contrarian view is that because very few people live in places with interesting surroundings, synthetic VR worlds will be more compelling to most people than overlays on reality.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesBlockchain is like that. It's slower. It's harder to use. It's harder to program. But it has a new feature, and that feature is trust.
— Ben Horowitz
If you take a long view of relationships, you can build a network that's so powerful that nobody will ever be able to match it.
— Ben Horowitz
the kinds of people who start these companies are not normal.
— Marc Andreessen
Let's not have that debate. Let's have the debate how to make it great.
— Ben Horowitz
a useful principle of product design, which is let the users innovate.
— Marc Andreessen
High quality AI-generated summary created from speaker-labeled transcript.
