Ben Horowitz

“"I spent a lot of time over the last two years visiting almost every country in the world, trying to put together our international strategy, and something you realize is that you need relationships with the governments. And we didn't have anybody in the firm who had those relationships at the level Anne does." — Ben Horowitz”

“You are the CIO of A16Z Perennial. I like to call this Mark and Ben's multifamily office — it is the wealth management fund of A16Z.”

“My partner Ben and his family have moved to Las Vegas. They are extremely happy.”

“My partner Ben and his family have moved to Las Vegas. They are extremely happy.”

“It used to be very well known that you cannot throw money at the problem... That's no longer true. You can throw money at the problem. If you have enough money and some good data, you can buy enough GPUs and solve basically anything in software.”

“Navon, right? Like they're travel. So obviously the SaaSpocalypse, like they're dead... But then you look under the covers and you go, well, it actually is a little more complicated than that because on travel, like you actually need explicit relationships to find providing your travel.”

“nobody wants to do, including OpenAI or Anthropic, is sell to the damn travel manager. Like nobody has a channel to the travel manager.”

“You want to keep advancing. You want to kind of do the things that Intuit is doing where like, okay, like turn ourselves into more of an AI company. And then kind of hold the customer.”

“Our first fund was $300 million... We just raised $15 billion, four of the seven funds... America's got to rebuild its entire infrastructure like right now... somebody's got to fund it.”

“NVIDIA will make enough chips. But then we won't have enough memory. And we won't have enough electricity.”

“We invested in a transformer company, not like an AI transformer, like an actual power transformer company. Because you need, you know, kind of better, easier to manufacture, more efficient transformers. And the transformer hasn't changed since really we invented electricity.”

“God bless Elon, the TerraFab. You know, that's the idea. He's going to just go deal with all the bottlenecks himself, which is how he does things, which is why we need him.”

“Fred Brooks called it the mythical man month and every engineering leader believed it. That rule no longer holds.”

“Our first fund was $300 million... We just raised $15 billion, four of the seven funds... America's got to rebuild its entire infrastructure like right now... somebody's got to fund it.”

“"You people are doing everything but your job. You're writing these requirements, you're pitching customers, this and that, you're doing all this stuff. It's a lot of work. But your job is right product, right time. And if you don't give me the right product at the right time, I don't give a fuck what you do." — Ben Horowitz”

“"We funded a company, which I never thought we would fund that's doing a new transformer, not like a model, but like literally a power transformer. Because there's like a massive shortage in power transformers."”

“"Chris Dixon has talked about the idea of navigating the idea maze, right? It's like you're sort of trying every potential." — Balaji Srinivasan / "Yeah, everybody is going through the idea maze. There are no ideas. There's only the idea maze." — Ben Horowitz”

“Participants: Balaji Srinivasan, Ben Horowitz”

“"How much model differentiation does OpenAI have at this point? You know, maybe they have negative differentiation in some areas. But they've got the most consumers, and that still matters."”

“Ben briefly lists a cascade of physical and digital scarcities — electricity, chips, tokens, cooling — as a structured investment theme... He is essentially articulating a supply-side bottleneck thesis for the AI era.”

“That's Stuart Butterfield. You know, he's a great entrepreneur. So, like, companies go through changes and this and that. If you've, you know, like, if you're a special founder and you don't run out of cash, I'm still for that and would bet on that.”

“A16Z was built on two compounding bets: that the number of companies reaching $100M in revenue would explode from 15 to 200 per year as every company became a tech company, AND that entrepreneurs deserved a better product than just a check.”

“Scott Schenker, who was another professor at Berkeley, who I knew, had called me and said, Ben, I have the best distributed systems guy that we've seen in the last 10 years in academia.”

“With AI, that's really changed, and that you can throw money at the problem. Because if you have enough GPUs and enough data, you can basically solve most problems right now.”

“To build a travel company, you actually need to have supply chain relationships with not every airline in the United States, but every airline in the world, every hotel in the world... Navon lost two-thirds of its value in the SaaSpocalypse. And it's, you know, accelerated revenue since then.”

“Slack was in dire straits before he figured it out. You know, he had built a game on Flash called Glitch, and Steve Jobs outlawed Flash on the iPad, and it was an iPad game. And, like, that's how dead he was, you know, and he had, like, $6 million left, and he turned it into Slack.”

“The pitch was that Jan Stoica, who was a professor at Berkeley, presented the company. And the slides he made, it was like going to, like, a computer science lecture that you couldn't understand in college... Scott Schenker... called me and said, Ben, I have the best distributed systems guy that we've seen in the last 10 years in academia. His name is Matej Zaharias.”

“He was the best at handling super talented, difficult to handle people of all times. No question.”