Ben Horowitz

“You can throw money at the problem. And you can throw money at almost any problem. And that works. And so that is just completely different than anything we've ever lived through.”

“He had this startup called TrialPay. He was trying to sell his services to Facebook. And Dan Rose said, Alex, that sounds great, it sounds like you can collect a lot of silver bricks, but I have so many gold bricks I can't even pick them all up.”

“Meta's got a whole program to train people up... It's like a new job corps where they train people for free to do this job.”

“Remember the dark fiber? Basically every GPU that's being created is already pre-sold... This is like we're flat out and people are reselling GPUs for four times what they bought them for.”

“He bought a whole rubber tree plantation in the Amazon jungle... he wanted to own like the complete vertical thing.”

“What he built was kind of a pure software AI thing... Michael could probably do that, you know, 10 years from now. But today, that would have been hard.”

“Dan Rose, who was the head of CorpDev at the time, said, Alex, that's great. It sounds like you can collect a lot of silver bricks, but I'm like, I have so many gold bricks, I can't even pick them all up.”

“It's specifically interested in the firm's directorates at Databricks (Ben Horowitz) and Fivetran (Martin Casado).”

“Ben Horowitz, Mark and Ben had started LoudCloud. It was still in stealth. And Ben gave me an offer to be his assistant.”

“What companies should do — I think Ben Horowitz wrote about this once — basically do a pre-planned once a year board meeting where the discussion topic is in a non-emotional way: should we consider exiting this next six months period?”

“Raised $1.7B led by Andreessen Horowitz with Ben Horowitz joining the board. Bain Capital and Fifth Wall also participating.”

“Travis is totally correct. It's not humanoids, it's specific purpose robotics. I actually think he's correct. I think we'll look back on the humanoids and go, we got way ahead of ourselves.”

“Anthropic just paid $1.5 billion for stealing everybody's books, including mine, by the way. They trained on my book and I joined that class action lawsuit.”

“Years ago when I was at Netscape they tried to ban cryptography. The math is out there. You're not going to ban it.”

“We started the fundraise, and Ben remembers this because I gave him a preview at first in Vegas... he's like, I just want the whole freaking trench coat... I want the things that you're doing. And let's be partners for all the things you do.”

“So we got to 375 million pre with A16Z. Yuri almost came in at 400, but he was like, no, I can't do it.”

“There's like a dozen video models out there and there's not one that's the best at everything or even close to the best at everything. There's like literally a dozen that are all the best at one thing.”

“"It was an interesting secret because it was something that probably everybody in the world knew at one point, but they had all forgotten. Everybody had forgot why we had hotels."”

“"They were talking about how he had proven that if you built a machine that was what he called a Turing machine, that it was theoretically impossible to build a machine that was computationally more powerful... It just melted my mind when I heard it."”

“"If you came to me and said, hey, I've got an idea to make batteries and cell phones last longer, I would go, well, that's a pretty good idea, but I'm not going to fund it because everybody thinks that's a good idea."”

“"Those are the only things — things that you believe that everybody around you doesn't believe, when you're right — that create real value in the world. Everything else people already know. There's no value created. It's just business as usual."”

“One of the things that Mark and I used to do a lot in the early days was basically try and convince the entrepreneur to do what we wanted. And then if they did that, we would not invest because they didn't — they want to tack over to the market and that's false...”

“I did this amazing series with Michelle Del Buono of A16Z Perennial, which is Mark and Ben's multifamily office. We did two episodes so far and it's all centered on the major wealth creation event that's happening right now.”

“There is no way to get to anything resembling a story that you're going to like through the traditional media anymore. Like, it's just basically not possible. Every once in a while you can land a story, but you can't run a strategy.”

“Everybody just naturally thinks inside out, me and my company and my product out into the world. Don't think that way. Think in terms of like, what are the most interesting things happening in the world? And then how do those things relate to us?”

“"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.”

“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.”

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

“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 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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“"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."”

“Participants: Balaji Srinivasan, Ben Horowitz”

“"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”

“"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."”

“"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”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”