Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz is a co-founder and general partner of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). He previously co-founded and served as CEO of Opsware, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007, and held senior product and engineering roles at Netscape and AOL. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. He holds a BA from Columbia University and an MS in computer science from UCLA.
“so much of a SaaS company's capital investment is actually getting to all the customers. And so if you've gotten to all the customers and then you make... the software, like, way, way better. That's a hell of a thing.”
Source→“he said, I finally canceled my New York Times subscription.”
Source→“We're building a new school for the AI era, and that means redesigning everything.”
Source→“everything that we've built to train you was built for a world that is soon to no longer exist.”
Source→“The profit motive forces us to deliver to the customer. And our job at the end of the day is to make sure that young people who attend the institution go off and do great things because that creates the brand, that creates the flywheel, that allows us to continue to stay in business.”
Source→“You can ban it. And by the way, that won't work. Or you can make the problem so hard that you can't solve them without AI... he's seeing... students solving things that no student in history could have ever solved.”
Source→“I don't think that this idea is limited to technology. Like, as I said, I think it's very interesting for music. It may be interesting for medicine.”
Source→“I got in at a company, Silicon Graphics, which had all kinds of innovation. And I saw what that was and how you can really change things... that kind of built a foundation for the rest of my career.”
Source→“Ben Horowitz — a16z co-founder. Praised for writing 'the first emotionally honest book about business that was ever written' (Hard Things).”
Source→“Prior to AI, there was always this battle between Eric Ries and Ben Horowitz, right? So lean startup and then Mark and Ben wrote like the art of the fat startup, which basically you argue, raise the money and go for it.”
Source→“Ben Horowitz at RSA this year gave a really great talk on some work we had done internally at A16Z where we were using OpenClaw. And we found that with OpenClaw, the guardrails, at least for Opus 4.6, kind of disappeared.”
Source→“Certainly the biggest check I ever written. [00:14:17]”
Source→“When they start going, 'oh yeah, it's easy, it's going so well,' I'm like, bro, check yourself for wounds. Cause I assure you, you're bleeding. [00:12:53]”
Source→“Adam's only had one idea. Yeah, this is the idea... he's been following this idea for his whole life now. And so... it's the thing that makes it so powerful.”
Source→“A big mission of our firm is kind of trying to preserve that special thing that is America. And that means America has to be a leader. It has to be a leader economically. It has to be a leader culturally. It has to be a leader militarily. And to do that, we have to be a leader technologically.”
Source→“The third one, which is a combination of everything in a way, is: is the culture such that young people, the most capable young people, willing to make the biggest contribution — do they get social status reward? Is it cool to either start or join a new company? And almost no, very few countries have that.”
Source→AI-extracted from podcast / newsletter / paper summaries. May contain errors.