I caused a lot of antagonism between us and the other firms in those days.
Your filter is like, you're going to get the deal or I'm going to get the deal.
You die or I die.
And they're not exactly shrinking ballots themselves.
They hated that cover story.
Look at him on the cover of the magazine.
That's not supposed to be him.
That's supposed to be the entrepreneur.
What the hell?
I mean, they just like lost it.
We didn't have any entrepreneurs at the time.
VC was like a big secret.
And then actually building companies was a big secret.
And so just kind of talking about it was a big differentiator.
We don't have products.
Yeah, and we didn't have products.
We have people and ideas.
That's it.
In 2009, at the bottom of the financial crisis, two entrepreneurs decided to raise 300 million for a venture capital firm.
They had never been VCs before, and they planned to do everything differently.
Marketing aggressively, building a platform, putting themselves on magazine covers.
Every established VC told them it was a terrible idea.
16 years later, Andreessen Horowitz has fundamentally changed how venture capital works.
Today, Ben and Mark talked to the person who architected that transformation from behind the scenes, Margit Wenmachers, who joined as head of marketing when the firm was literally operating out of a restaurant booth.
This is a conversation about breaking cartels, about why secrecy stopped working as a business strategy, and the moment when Mark Andreessen wrote Software is Eating the World in a single draft after an offhand comment to a reporter, and about a profound shift happening right now.
All right,
Welcome to the A16C.
What are we on?
The Mark and Ben show.
Welcome to the Mark and Ben show.
Today we've got Margaret Wenmachers, the legendary head of marketing for A16Z for the last 16 years.
And she is going to tell us the story of all that.
You've heard snippets of it from me and Mark over the years, but now we're going to hear the real thing from the real person.
Margaret, welcome.
Thank you so much for having me, guys.
I'm thrilled to be here.
But between the legendary and the 15 or 16, I feel kind of ancient.
Wise.
Wise.
Wise.
Wise.
It's getting us all.
It's very rough.
I know.
Age is a bitch that way.
So maybe we could start with when we met.
I'd love to hear it from your perspective.
Where were we at?
Hobie's?
I think it was the Creamery.
The Creamery.
The Creamery.
Which at that point was your office.
Yeah.
I forgot yet.
The firm started at the Creamery.
That's right.
Right.
Exactly so.
A certain someone, who shall go nameless, tried to hire Outcast and Facebook invoked a conflict of interest.
You know exactly who that is, right?
And so that certain someone called Mark and said just call Mark Zuckerberg, and I think you have better things to do than pull a favor for Mark Zuckerberg to go like why don't you like this?
Whatever.
Anyhow, but I think you asked for my email address.
And so that's how we were introduced.
Ah-ha.
And then I was told to go to the creamery, the waiter at the creamery.
He's like, go meet here.
They're meeting with some Democratic functionaries or something like that.
So I wait there with my little capabilities presentation.
And I had met you like years before, but no recollection.
I had not met you.
I'd heard about you a little bit.
So I go there with my capabilities presentation.
I sit down.
The Democrats left the booth.
And I sit down.
You basically were just looking straight ahead.
You were just like I don't know what you were thinking about, but it was not that.
Probably how we get the firm off, how we raise the money.
And then Mark grabs the capabilities business, which was generic because I had no idea why I was there.
Right.
So and you go okay, so how do you pick the clients?
And here are the clients and why those clients are not these clients.
And we're like teams whatever, like detailed questions.
So I got a little groaning and then you both said, thank you.
And I left.
And I concluded that it was probably because you were angel investing at the time and you had just left HP.
I was like maybe they just want to have somebody they can recommend to their angel portfolio, whatever.
And then a few months later, we met at the Rosewood, I think.
No, it was not.
Was it the Rosewood?
We were there a lot.
So anyhow, and then you guys met.
Okay, so we're going to start this firm.
And top secret, blah, blah, blah.
I'm going to start this firm and it's going to be the two of us, $300 million.
And this is at a certain time where money was kind of tight.
Yeah, 2009.
The end of the world.
Right.
There was no liquidity.
The last end of the world.
And I looked a little quizzical and I said, you know, it's not a great time.
And you said, Mark said...
Let's assume success, shall we?"
And then you had already had the idea of well, we wanted to say something, but we couldn't be out talking to press or be on Twitter at the time or whatever else, and raise money.
Be viewed as soliciting money, right.
So...
Mark then went, he had a standing invitation, I think, on Charlie Rose.
And you went on Charlie Rose and you had a very nice chat.
And at the very end, he was like, well, by the way, we're going to start a VC firm.
And then we all went quiet.
So that was that.
That's my recollection.
I don't know what you guys thought.
I remember thinking, yeah, like I was just so distracted with how do we raise money?
Like we had never met LPs until then. every VC that we had been meeting with.
And we, at the same time, we were meeting with lots and lots of VCs, trying to understand the industry.
And they all said, that's a dumbass idea for a fund.
You should definitely not do it.
They just wanted to give you jobs, I'm assuming.
Yeah well, one of them said that we'd never raise it from the LPs, so we should just raise the money from VCs and give the VCs who invested half the carry.
That was...
Interestingly.
Yeah.
That was one strategy.
And then the whole platform thing.
That was really dumb because it had been tried before and proven.
You know QED, that it could never work.
Actually, who tried it for real?
I don't know.
So I think the main thing that they were thinking about was the incubators.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, sort of the Bill Gross.
It was the late 90s, exactly.
And you know actually in retrospect like it's actually very, very like.
So there's this Bill Gross Idea Lab.
Yeah.
This incubator created, I think, a lot of companies.
I mean, among the companies you created, turned out to be the company that created basically the Google search model um, as well as like a bunch of other like super interesting companies.
So i think the good ones work better than people remember.
But yeah, and the incubators in those days went for like a 50 equity split right as contrasted to like y combinator, which is famously like seven percent.
And so, to justify the 50, they provided your office space and your services and your legal services, and so right exactly, and we had been entrepreneurs, and so we just had a very different perspective on what we actually needed from our venture firms, and so we just had a very different view than the incubators had.
And then the existing VCs just yeah, for whatever reason, couldn't put themselves in that, I think because they hadn't been entrepreneurs.
They hadn't been customers of the VC product, so they weren't looking at it through that lens.
They were looking at it from the provider.
By the way, those businesses were all great businesses, so they sort of earned the right to be arrogant in that sense.
Yeah.
And I remember the...
Bill Gross, when he was talking and I met him, it was all like, okay, I have all these ideas.
And there was that.
And you guys had come from a completely different lens, where you had the ideas and believed that, Larry Ellison, those people had the ideas, not the financial machinery, right.
And then obviously you had absorbed the Ovitz playbook, right?
So it's a very different version of a platform approach.
Yeah, I mean, that's basically what we did.
When we had to find a historical model for what we were doing, it turned out to be CAA, because that just mapped much more to what we had in mind, because there hadn't been a precedent like that applied in the Valley.
Yeah, and at that time it was before Ovitz's book came out, so that whole strategy was basically a secret.
Nobody knew it.
Like, you had to know Ovitz to know it.
And...
Ovitz was very secretive.
We had several conversations before we could actually get it out of him, even though he was out of CAA for many years.
It was like a very secret formula he had come up with, and it was an amazing thing.
But it ended up being a genius thing to have him on your board.
It was a very unorthodox pick, looking in from the outside, and it led to all kinds of useful connections and useful thinking right.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah, it was controversial at the time, even amongst our own board.
I won't name names, but it was different to have them.
We actually met them through Ron Conway, right?
Yeah, years ago.
The human router of all time.
The human router, yeah.
That was a great intro from Ron.
What an interesting friendship that's been.
So the next thing that happened we're going to raise the money and we decide that we're going to talk to the press, which was very different for VCs to actually be aggressive about that.
Usually the VCs would want to talk to the press, and some of them had been clients, at the IPO time.
Right.
So they wanted to basically have no risk.
But then when the company goes public, it's like, hey, I did that, right?
So we did it backwards, if you will.
Yeah, you're right.
With nothing in hand, we just went for it.
So as soon as we raised the funds?
Yeah, we must have had to raise the fund to do the press tour because of the gun jumping.
And so how did you think about it?
I guess it was very kind of magical from our point of view, other than when Wyatt slammed the door in my face.
Well, that was a useful signal.
We realized, oh, we have to even the playing field here a little bit.
Yeah, that was a little bit of a problem.
So tell us about that.
So the way...
I used to think about this when this was all working so magically.
Is that okay?
So if you read any article and you just dissect the headline, the paragraphs, like how it unfolds, and then so you take a client like you guys or a product company, you go okay, how do I fill that?
How do I write that story from a reporter's point of view?
And do you actually have it, right?
And so if the story is, oh, $300 million and two people who have never actually done this before.
That's not a great story.
But we did have the column inches to fill, if you will, because you had the idea for the platform, right?
You had been proven successful entrepreneurs.
You had credibility with the core audience, right?
And taking a step back.
The thing that we all decided is we're just going to aim all of our communications at the entrepreneurs, at the entrepreneurs versus the LPs.
Because we have their numbers.
We're not a column and you guys got great introductions to people, but it all needs to be very entrepreneur-friendly.
And so we sort of set out like we have this platform and it's all in service of the entrepreneur, who is the genius, and then hopefully the idea works right.
And then how can we add value?
And that was different enough to me, having met like most of all the other VCs.
And then, you know, the tall guy over here had co-created the browser.
So that was not a VC credential, but it was an incredible entrepreneur credential, right?
Like, so, you know, and then, and then you, the turnaround, like the save of all time.
I mean, I'm not so good with sports analogies, but there's, there's gotta be 17 in there, right?
Like having turned that around and it sold it to HP and like for like money, money.
It was just spectacular.
So I think the two people who were behind it were very entrepreneur-friendly.
They had really good credentials both on the tech side and a category creation side and on the sort of like how does one execute one of those companies?
And then you had the money.
And you had the money at a time when there was no money, right?
Like there was nobody really raising.
And like the other people, they could just sit and wait, right?
Until times got better.
And then I think, if I remember correctly, you had done it in three months, which at the time seemed very spectacular, because there was no money.
So I could then pitch and it's like, okay, like it's those two guys and it did in three months.
And have you read the news?
And then they have all these ideas.
Well, actually one of the funny things that happened while we were raising money, that upset Mark much more than it upset me, because I just thought it was weird.
But we went to see an LP who we knew and the LP
Walks into the meeting, you know, and here we are, like you know, and it really kind of brought us back to raising money in general, which is a good kind of thing to go through if you're going to be investing in companies, because you need to know what that feels like.
So, you know, we're like practicing the pitch where you got it all lined up.
We're like, okay, this is a big meeting.
It's a big LP.
And we go in and the guy comes in and he goes oh yeah, you know.
Yeah, I hear what you guys are doing.
I think at best you could raise it in 18 months, but it'll be very hard.
But I got to go.
I'm going to go talk to some ex-NFL players.
Quote, quote.
I have to go over to Stanford to talk to a room full of NFL players on how to manage their money now that their NFL careers are over.
That was the thing that was more important than talking to us, which was a very yeah, that was a level-setting experience.
Yeah, we were like... That was extremely motivating.
Yeah.
As you can tell.
It was.
Mark was like super pissed.
And I just remember going, wow.
Like, that's so disrespectful.
It's just, like, so crazy that he would do that.
I just made a little angel investment and like this entrepreneur is trying to raise money and like literally she's been told by an investor, I think people like you just basically shouldn't exist.
Guess how motivated she is.
Just because they're so that motherfucker.
This is the thing.
The nuclear fire that you get on the inside of that is, yes.
It's like, I can't believe people actually say that out loud.
And they're not like they're 95 and they don't have a filter anymore.
I mean there was all these stories from this time, but I mean there have been obviously many great VCs before us, but I mean we went out and we basically met all the top VCs, you know, kind of because one of them knew we were doing it.
And you know a different guy, one of the VCs at the time.
I remember him saying he's like oh yeah, Venture's a great business.
Venture's like running, it's like going to a sushi boat restaurant.
It's like it's fantastic.
It's a sushi boat restaurant.
It's like it's fantastic.
You could just sit at the counter and like the startups just like come drifting by and you're just like hmm, oh.
He's like every once in a while.
You know, whenever you want, you just reach out and you just like pluck a piece of sushi.
Oh, Jesus.
I agree.
And I remember thinking, you know what?
I'm not sure that this is going to be as hard as we thought it was going to be.
You mean the competing part.
The competing part, exactly.
Yeah, it was very formative in how we thought about competing.
We were like and still to this day, when we think about the culture of the firm, it's like don't be that.
Yes, yes, yes.
You know, don't be, Mr Smarty Pants.
Like sitting in your Sandhill shoes road office waiting for the sushi boat to come by.
Like, don't do that.
And yet I mean look yeah, maybe the competition isn't that hard, but it felt like to me when I was on the outcast side.
It felt like to me the top five firms never changed.
Like, never, ever changed, right?
And you guys hadn't peeled off from a VC firm, and therefore, you didn't have a track.
I mean, you had made some angel investments, but, like, basically...
Not so much, not to be insulting.
We hadn't done it professionally, yeah.
The angel fund was, what, like $2 million?
Yeah, we had no training.
Right, and then you know all like.
There are exceptions, but all the important companies they're just like the top five firms invest.
So like the conundrum was like okay, how did you break into that list without the substance, right?
Just with the ideas.
One more story.
This is one I love to tell the LPs.
Another guy said, oh, he's like LPs.
He's like LPs.
You guys are going to hate dealing with LPs.
They're just the worst.
It's a good thing to tell the competitor.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And he said the key is.
He said I realized after a long career I realized the key is you want to treat the LPs like mushrooms.
Yeah, like mushrooms.
And we were like, magic mushrooms?
What are you talking about?
So they treat mushrooms.
You put them in a cardboard box.
You put the lid of the cardboard box and you put it under your bed for two years.
And then you don't take the box out until the next time you need to raise money.
Wow.
That's rich.
It was so funny because the whole time we're thinking wow, you know, we're coming out of running a public company, we're meeting with investors who are shorting our stock.
And these guys have very nice universities.
They were just super pleasant to talk to when we went out there.
They had interesting things to say.
I was like, wow, you guys are living in a weird, perceptive world.
One of the surprising things to me I had not ever met LPs because I wasn't on that side of the business.
But like, it's a really great community.
And a lot of them are super, super mission driven.
Like if you talk to Russ, like how they, what they do with their proceeds, right?
Like they're not financiers.
They're just, they're very cool people.
Very long time horizons.
Yes.
Very patient.
Very devoted to their institutions.
Very smart.
I mean, they spend all their time thinking about All these topics, we have incredible discussions.
Great investors and very patient and want to understand the strategy, care about the strategy plan, to be in it a long time with us all that kind of thing.
It was just very interesting.
Well, it goes through the stories, because it is so indicative of so many of these things.
There are certain industries at certain times where they just get wedged.
They get locked into patterns.
And, you know, the most uncomfortable thing in the world is to, like, break the pattern.
And if you don't have to, you know, if you don't have to, you don't.
And if you think of it as a sushi situation or a mushroom situation, why would you ever do marketing?
Exactly right.
Why would you ever?
Black box.
Some mystique, some like mystical fairy creature, is way better if there's no pressures on it, right?
Yeah, and it was a very good strategy, which is why, you know, we went out with the marketing.
And then, of course, so we do the press tour, and you get Mark on the cover of Fortune, which was...
That was amazing to me because you know we had been running a company all these years and I remember you saying do you want to be on the cover of Fortune, Forbes or Businessweek?
And I was like, who do you get a choice?
Yeah, this is like, yeah, being in the, I don't know, Vatican Museum or something.
It's just like the most important thing you can possibly have happen.
In those days those magazines, particularly the covers, were like incredibly important, tough to get.
And then the thing that like really blew my mind was I said fortune, and then you got Mark on the cover of Fortune.
And for the series, nobody was going to put me on the cover of anything in those days.
No, but you got to be on the cover of Fortune when you did your book.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, I did, I did.
But we had to make me famous first, yeah.
Look, the thing is, you never get what you don't ask for, right?
And then it's a At the time, the publications mattered, really.
Now it's just the writer who matters.
And also now they're downstream from the entire internet.
They come in at the end, basically.
But Kevin Maney was a really good writer.
He had a really strong track record. you know, followed him forever.
And he would write substantive, curiosity-driven stories, right?
And he was great.
The worst part about that whole thing was the damn photo shoot.
Because Mark hates stuff.
And I remember when you did that finger thing, I want you.
I was like, that's going to be it.
It's just not even a question.
But that was the worst part about it.
Yeah.
It was good.
It was a scary picture.
It was good.
It was some fun.
But that kind of set off kind of really positioning us.
At that point, we knew we weren't going to be friendly with the industry.
So we were not only not going to be in the cartel, we were going to be against the cartel because they hated that cover story.
Oh, my God.
I mean, they went.
They called every LP, they're like, these guys, they're egomaniacs.
Look at him on the cover of the magazine.
That's not supposed to be him.
That's supposed to be the entrepreneur.
What the hell?
I mean, they just, like, lost it on that.
We didn't have any entrepreneurs at the time.
No, that's bananas.
I think that comes from them viewing having to do any of those kinds of outbound activities as beneath them, beneath them and kind of unseemly.
And here we were like unashamed about, like advertising ourselves and our wares, if you will right.
So I was kind of like, what?
We're doing what now?
And it worked, I think.
And I think it got sort of.
I think that.
But like, mostly I think the writing got us in with the entrepreneurs because, like I remember I think it was you, Mark told me that an entrepreneur said like I kind of feel like I know you guys a little bit.
That's right.
Having not even met you yet.
Yeah, so they hadn't been in our offices, they hadn't met anybody, but they had some idea of like who are these people and what do they care about?
And then, from then on, every time a GP would come on board, we're like okay, What do you want to invest in?
Therefore, we're going to write about these things.
Because that becomes the magnet for the entrepreneurs in that corner of the internet, or AI infrastructure, whatever it is right.
And I think that was really powerful, particularly with the entrepreneurs.
Yeah, it was kind of one... In those days, VC was like a big secret.
And then actually building companies was a big secret.
And so just kind of talking about it was a big differentiator.
What you would learn.
Right, because you'd hear as an entrepreneur.
You'd hear all these horror stories you know from other entrepreneurs of like things that have gone wrong and the relationship with the VC and all the problems.
But you didn't know, like if you didn't know who any of the people were when you walk in the door like, who do you trust?
How are they going to behave under pressure?
You know, what are they going to do?
And so I mean yeah, like it's a great If you can get away with having nobody know who you are and still, you know, be on top of the industry.
It's great.
But, like, if somebody actually... does it the other way.
It causes a permanent change, which is, I think, what we catalyzed.
It does.
And to me.
I don't know the latest numbers, but the blog posts that you would write or the other GPs would write that are sort of like, Like I remember the good product manager, bad product manager.
Like, that is one of the most successful blog posts.
And you know how many blog posts a firm has put out?
Like, a gajillion, right?
But like the ones that have depth that the entrepreneurs can like take something from, and that is somewhat timeless, way more important than are we in a bubble, or are we not in a bubble?
And that was kind of fun and that was like chatter.
But like the substantive pieces on like how do I construct a company?
How do I manage a person?
How do I think about promotions?
Like all that kind of stuff.
Like, I think that that was really valuable to the entrepreneurs.
And I think it also showed our LPs like okay, they actually are very passionate about all the details of the stuff that they invest in.
Well, that was one of the interesting things is the LPs were like reading all the content.
I mean, which is so different than, uh, a public market investor, just say.
And not only did they read the content, but we have many LPs that Reddit would call up say hey, in managing my little organization, this is what I'm running into, and so forth.
So they're real partners in a way that...
Yeah, that's been probably one of the best parts of the firm is to get to have investors like that.
Yeah, we did one incredibly controversial blog post.
Turns out like a few LPs.
Really hated the headline.
And it was was in the Bio and Health team and it said, fuck cancer.
Which I thought wasn't very controversial.
These are so nice.
They were like, did you have to put it that way?
I mean, there are better ways to put this.
I'm like, all right, fuck.
Screw cancer.
Right.
Yes.
For the record, we're very anti-cancer.
Yeah, we're very anti-cancer.
Yes, we are.
And we're willing to say so.
But they deeply care about everything that we put out, which I think is...
Quite flattering, even though they may hate some of it.
So one of the things in the early days that I wanted to ask you about is because we came out and because we caused that reaction with the other VCs, I kind of felt like maybe I took it too far in terms of just the VC, competitiveness and the anti-VC stuff.
Like, we really went hard in the early days.
Since you brought this up.
Over the line, yeah.
So since you brought this up, you have to, your thing with, was it the Sara Lacy?
The peak of this was, your peak moment of this was in the Sara Lacy thing.
Okay, you have to refresh my memory.
Okay, so remember Sara Lacy?
Of course.
At her peak, by the way, she was a great, great journalist.
And then she had this thing, Pando Daily, that she started.
And then she had these big events.
And I spoke at the event.
And she said to me, and it just like, it popped out.
She said, you know, you kind of like have a lot of conflict with the other VCs.
And I said, well, I said, I come from enterprise software.
And so, like when I see another VC coming at me And I quoted Lil Wayne with the peace sign, all I see is a trigger and the middle finger.
So my answer was going to be that.
You have an inner enterprise sales dude in you.
You can't get it out.
I think when it comes to other firms, which is horseshit, because we co-invest.
We don't actually compete. all that much, right?
No, no, no.
We should be partnering.
But basically, your filter is like, you're going to get the deal or I'm going to get the deal.
You die or I die.
It's like, that's sort of the... that happens to you in any sort of competitive situation.
And God help you if you're in the way of that.
I think we overdid it because, like I said, you guys have joined board seats.
Our teams will call people and say, hey, we've got this company.
Would you like to do follow-on investment?
All that stuff.
Here you are pissing them off.
And we caused a lot of I cause a lot of antagonism between us and the other firms in those days, which I think we've, you know, at this point, like we're more friendly.
And they're not exactly shrinking ballots themselves.
Also true.
They've risen to the occasion.
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
Yeah.
I think we're past that.
Maybe.
Maybe now.
Yeah, I think we're a bunch more user-friendly now, for sure, in terms of our many VC partners that we have.
So then tell us.
You know, one of the big pieces that came out was when Mark wrote Software is Eating the World.
And how that came about was very interesting because it was a really busy time for us.
It was like, what, 2011?
So I think we had just raised a second fund maybe.
And the way it came about was entirely random, if you will.
So at the time there was a guy You know, The Economist has these reporters and they send them to new regions and new beats, like for 25 years, and they go from Hong Kong to Silicon Valley, whatever.
At the time, there was a guy called Martin Giles, and he was covering... Very nice guy.
Yes, very nice guy.
Great guy.
And he would cover Silicon Valley, who's British, and...
Every so often, I forget what the cadence is, they do a special report.
And they were doing a special report on the state of tech and where it was going.
And we were sitting, remember my first office?
Was it this office?
I think it was next door.
Yeah, that's right.
It was like the three of us were sitting there and Martin is visiting and he's asking all these questions.
And Mark was like, well, it's basically like software is eating the world.
And then he explains the whole thing.
And I'm like, this is really interesting.
And I was like, we should write this down.
And Mark's like, sure, maybe later.
And then I placed it with this guy, Ryan, I forget his last name, at the Wall Street Journal.
And he's like, if I had an op-ed like that, would you run it?
And he's like, yeah, sure, I would run it.
And then Mark wrote it when you could schedule things like that.
And Mark wrote exactly one draft, and it's still that same draft.
And I'm sure you're torturing yourself because you would change all kinds of things this and that and the other.
And then just for kicks... to bookend that story when you wrote, was it, It's Time to Build?
It's Time to Build, yeah.
Wrote It's Time to Build.
Like, you caved for a minute and said, like, all right, we'll place it.
Maybe we'll place it.
And nobody took it.
Nobody.
Oh, yeah, that's right.
I called Ryan, who has since gone on to bigger and better things.
I'm like, Ryan, can I ask you a hypothetical, that thing?
Like, you've been at the journal, and it's like, of course, like, it's a joke.
That's not even a question.
Times had changed, so nobody ran it.
Good thing we had a good audience at the time.
And I think I forget.
I don't want to malign people, but somebody said I think it was a may have been the FT.
Somebody said it's angry.
And I'm like, you know, we're in a pandemic.
And we don't, we're wearing ponchos.
Yeah, the whole point of it was just what was actually happening in the pandemic, with literally the inability to get like surgical gowns for first responders was like the catalyst for it.
Yeah.
It's interesting.
It read angry and I was like, really?
Software is Eating the World is probably more famous, but I'd say Time to Build is more influential in that people read Software is Eating the World and then they didn't do anything.
They were like, wow, that's very interesting.
And then that was it.
But with Time to Build, like the number of people in, like Washington and the entrepreneurial community and so forth, that are like Yeah, we're taking this.
This is the blueprint.
We're moving on it.
I mean in a way like the whole, like abundance movement on the Democratic Party came off of that.
Which is a great development, I think.
A great development, yeah.
But I think that I have a theory on why that is.
Software's eating the world.
It's like, to our people, our community, duh.
Hello, that's happening.
And they were all building against it.
They didn't need to read the thing.
And the people who needed to do something were going to get flattened by the software eating the world movement.
And they didn't know what to do.
Like, how do you retool into... Like, remember all the car companies that came to visit us, right?
And you take them through Autonomous and does the brand even matter and whatever.
It just did not register.
They weren't going to become a software company.
Therefore, nobody who needed to do something with it did.
Because it's just rather difficult.
Yeah, so you know, one of the very interesting things uh, that we've learned as a firm is how unusual it is for a company that's been around a long time um, and where the founders are no longer there, to change anything anything.
Yeah, even in like, i mean, it's been a huge blessing for us in venture capital and that many of the firms that were extremely powerful when we started just never changed.
They're exactly as they were.
Like, it's almost like frozen in time.
It reminds me of, if you've ever been to Havana in Cuba.
It's frozen in time.
It's all 1959.
Like, the cars in 1959, the buildings, everything.
It's, like, just frozen.
And, you know, whole industries freeze like that.
The auto industry for sure did.
And, you know, it was...
You know, Elon came along for, what, how long?
When did he start Tesla?
Early 2000s.
And, you know, had been going and going and going.
And then like, when the car comes out and is awesome, everybody is just like sitting there going.
What do we do?
I mean look, I just saw this on X, I think like the layoff numbers from the German car companies, my home country.
Like, every sixth job in Germany is somehow related to the auto industry.
It's a Disaster.
Yeah.
But they're not going Like a genius software engineer is not going to.
They're going to want to work for Elon Musk.
Like you can say about Elon Musk whatever you want, but like a suave, well-manicured executive from the car industry is like not really like a talent magnet for software engineers, right.
And then you know, one of the things that happened early was I got a from Harper Collins saying that I should write a book.
And, you know, I did not have time to write a book.
You made it.
Yeah, you thought, well, you thought it was a good idea to write the book.
Why did you think it was a guy?
It seemed, one, it seemed crazy because the blog was doing so well.
So, like, aren't books passe?
At least to us, I mean.
And then, yeah, and then I didn't have time.
So, like...
Why did you think that made sense?
I guess it wasn't something that VCs did either, right?
Well, I do think we needed to even out the brand a little bit because, like otherwise, any entrepreneur with leverage was going to go like well, I want him to be on my board right.
And that was just going to get successfully worse with every other GP.
So that was like we needed a plan for everybody, right?
And you were the other at the time.
The other.
I thought the book was good because... And there is another.
There is exactly, which is why you wanted to call it Horowitz Andreessen.
I remember which It does sound.
Horowitz Andreessen is a cool-sounding name.
It sounds a little law-firm-ish.
And then you could never... A16Z would...
Like, H16N is not nearly as good.
No, it is good the way it is.
I do still think there is value in a book of, like, having a definitive theory on something.
I think with all the blog posts and all the X posts and all that, I think there is value.
People read books.
People consume books.
Long-form podcasts is sort of a different version of the same flavor.
But more importantly, I thought you had something to say.
Like the actual theory of, like how one builds a company and like all the stuff that goes sideways.
And, as you always said, most books like whoever the guy was from this and that GE, whatever they were, all kind of fancy resumes and victory laps.
They weren't really where you could learn something, particularly for our audience, that like it's so rough and tumble to be in a startup and to be in the trenches and to lose the deal and like not be able to raise the money and you have this magical person walk out the door and all that kind of stuff.
So having an honest book that I think you I was expecting you to write I thought was really valuable.
And then, you know, the little hack that we had is you had written all the blog posts, right?
And so then it was... I had a little built-in audience.
Right.
And then it's telling the dramatic story of like, what went down, you know, including with Felicia being sick and all of that right.
Like, that then made the book.
But, like, you kind of had the lessons in your head.
And, like, I actually think that book...
Like, I like the title.
I've been living by What You Do Is Who You Are forever.
I like that title better, but I think this is a more important book and it's way more kind of usable for people.
It's much more broad-based.
I think the What You Do Is Who You Are is, it's actually, it's more useful for me.
And you know, when I talk to like Ted Sarandos or somebody like that, they're like oh yeah, that's a book I like.
But you have to run a very large organization and you have to have gotten beyond the things.
The hard thing about hard things to start to think about.
Okay, how do you program the culture of the whole organization and this kind of thing?
But I remember the Navy wanting to buy the book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think people actually think it's much more applicable than you might think.
Well, oh, no, no.
So it's very.
The Hard Thing About Hard Things is, I would say, in retrospect, was very broadly applicable.
Like pastors bought it and you know people you'd never think.
But you know, like to me, everything in the hard thing about hard things is like easy, whereas I had to think a lot more about what you do is who you are.
It's just like a—but, you know, it's one of those things.
It's like, you know, how many people need to learn—
Algebra versus quantum physics.
It's a thing like that.
Yeah, that's a good point.
No, I actually thought the book was valuable to your brand and a good equalizer.
And also, I think it raised the ambition.
Like when we then hired new GPs, it was just understood that they were going to be out in the world.
And then it was a matter for... for my team to go, like, okay, so what are your thoughts?
Hopefully you have some, right?
And then what are you good at?
And then matching the format.
Not everybody should write a book, right?
And not everybody should do podcasts.
Some people are good with decks and all of that.
But, like, it was a given that the bar is high.
Well, that's such a good point, because one of the things that we always get asked because Grace did such a nice job of marketing the book is well like how do you market your book?
And I'm like well look, you can do.
There's like well-known marketing ideas and so forth and you can do a lot of things and you can get yourself even on like the bestseller list, but then the book's going to disappear unless it's a great book.
Like it has to be good.
Like that's the fundamental thing.
And so like, if you don't write something that's good, if you're completely focused on, like how you promote it before you've written it, Like that's probably a bad sign.
That's backwards.
Yeah, that is backwards.
You have to actually believe that you have an idea that's worth putting a book, Like a book has to stand the test of time.
You know what I mean?
It has to be an actual thing versus a tweet.
Well, so many people in business take a blog post idea, a blog post-length idea, and they try and turn it into a book.
And...
Some things are just a snack.
Yeah, they're snacks.
And snacks should be snacks, yeah.
Exactly.
Yeah, I know.
I thought the book served you well, and I think it made everybody in the firm go like, oh.
Like I don't know that Andrew, would he have thought automatically walking in here, it's like well, maybe I should write a book.
Yeah.
Like, and it just made it open up the thinking, I think, for everybody else.
Yeah, yeah.
And, you know, a good thing about, you also learn a lot when you write a book, so...
I think everybody's—it set the standard of you can't just have an idea here.
You have to be able to really think it through, be able to articulate it, be able to write it, be able to publish it.
And otherwise, like, your idea doesn't count.
And that, I think, has helped us a lot as an organization.
Yeah, I mean, look at—
Catherine Boyle.
I mean, she came in with the pitch of like, if I work here, I'm going to do American dynamism.
And here's what that is.
And like, she also happens to be a gifted communicator.
And now it's, you know, it was a deck.
Now it's a movement and a fund.
And like, it's helping really change the way people think about defense tech.
It's all of a sudden allowed.
Remember back in the day, Diane Greene was ousted from Google for a very innocent contract to look at pictures as satellites, right?
And Catherine is playing a really big role in turning that around, right?
And that's an idea.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, for sure.
I hadn't actually thought about it that much, but it's a very important part.
It's how, like our original marketing ideas, turned into kind of a very important cultural point of the firm, which is, you know, like this is how we work.
This is how we think.
I mean, sometimes it was so overdone.
Like, a new person comes in.
First thing they want to do is meet with marketing.
I'm like, do you know where you're sitting?
And then I was like I literally have had people say like you should really think about me, like you should think about Marc Andreessen.
Yeah.
And I was like, what are your thoughts?
I know exactly who that was, but I'm not going to say the name.
No, no, no.
And it's all malintentioned.
But, like, you do have to test the actual idea, right?
Like, is that a snack?
Is that a book?
Is it just a conversation?
Like, they need to be calibrated properly, right?
And sometimes young people who are incredibly ambitious.
That was me.
Still is like you just want to go right for the win, but you need to make sure you have the goods to do it.
Yeah well, this kind of gets into a conversation Mark and I have been having, which is, you know, the marketing of companies has changed so much, because you're really now marketing a person.
And that's a lot what we did at the firm now because the firm had our name.
It was a natural.
Also, we don't have products.
Yeah, and we didn't have products.
We have people and ideas.
That's it.
But that's extended now to...
Oh yeah.
Is it Tesla or is it Elon?
Is it Palantir or is it Alex?
And in order to be able to do that, you can be an extremely accomplished person.
Who is not interesting.
Those don't necessarily go together.
And I think that's a little bit unfair from the press or like it creates this perception that Silicon Valley is staffed entirely with weirdos.
They're more interesting to write about.
Somebody who goes to work every day and drives an Audi and is a good father and drops kid off at school.
That's all nice.
Like I'll pick on someone, right?
Like Dylan Field, most amazing guy, built an incredible company.
I hosted dinners with him.
He's just normal. well-adjusted.
The weirdest thing about him is he did the Thiel Fellowship.
But, like, those don't get written up as much.
The weirdos, like, the weirder, the better, right?
And it's gotten to an extreme where it's like, this is actually not reflecting Silicon Valley.
It's just a slice of it.
Well, it's an interesting marketing conundrum though, because you can't market a company if you don't have a character.
Right.
Like...
No, you used to Look.
There used to be companies and it was fine.
Where all you do is you report your financial results, you announce your new products.
And that kind of started to end with Steve Jobs because it was a show.
Yeah, that's right.
Yeah.
And he made you want a product.
That's right.
And like it became almost like politics adjacent.
Like you can't vote for a party, you're voting for a person.
And if you have the company, but not a character or a sense of character, it just doesn't work.
And then, you know, the corporate ex-accounts and all of that, those are all fine.
And like, but like at the end of the day, it's the identity of the person.
And do they actually sound like, Tweet sound like Mark, right?
Like, does the LinkedIn post sound like DG or whatever it is, right?
Like, you cannot disconnect it anymore.
And that places a premium on people who are willing to play character or be character.
I'm not sure that's always the healthiest thing for a company at every stage, right?
Or in every situation.
Like there are some downsides to it, but the upside beats the downside sometimes, like ten to one or whatever the right number is.
Well, it requires a lot of discipline, I think from the founder, because it turns you into, like this, mini-celebrity.
And so, as a mini-celebrity, can you, like, be out there and not act like an actual celebrity?
Because those aren't great organizational dynamics.
Just having been around, you know many celebrities, although and the thing is now it's not withstanding he's a very regular uh person and uh and that kind of thing.
Yeah, he's surprising, but he's he's very surprising, he's very unusual, but also he has an amazing product.
Yeah, it's hard to argue uh, so like being able to be like this interesting character on the outside and then come in and you know, be normal.
Well, just be somebody who you can have an actual conversation with, where you can get information, and not be this thing that you put yourself on a pedestal to the point where people won't tell you anything, and that kind of stuff is very destructive in a company.
Yeah, I think there's some downside along those lines.
And the other part is, like, you can't really fake that stuff.
If you have a public persona and it's not real and it's all manicured, just... does not work.
It won't work over time, right?
So you kind of have to lean like this is what I always try to do is lean into like who is this person?
And what are they good at that they can sustain over time?
Like you make anybody do a TED talk if you really, really are hellbent on doing it.
But like, that's not an actual marketing campaign.
That's not a personal brand.
You have to really figure out, okay, Who is this person?
What are their dynamics?
What are their talents that they can actually be?
Not act, but like actually be.
I think it's hard to actually be a character and a TED Talk.
You know, like the people who do TED Talks aren't characters and vice versa.
You've never done a TED Talk.
I've never done a TED Talk.
I think it's hard to do both.
I've never watched a TED Talk.
You've never watched a TED Talk.
I've never watched a TED Talk.
Oh, man.
You're missing out on a very beautifully packaged, it's almost like a Pop-Tart.
But that was my point.
My point is, that is exactly my point.
TED Talks are these very manicured things that, like, work for a minute.
But, like, anybody who's seen so many TED Talks is like, this is all the same.
It's all the exact same plastic, right?
Maybe you think it's platinum, but it's the exact same formulaic thing.
That's not an actual brand.
That's maybe an event, that if you really care about it because some people really care about that shit, but that's not actually who you are.
They read to me as religious sermons.
And I have an aversion to fake religions.
They're all a little morality place.
They're all morality stories.
They've all got a message.
It's like the very special episodes of TV shows in the 1970s.
They're the very special episodes where you learn about drug addiction.
And the thing is, I'm in marketing, and I find them saccharine.
Like, they're just too perfect in a way, right?
And they train you like crazy.
And then, you know, they're the teams that peel off of TED, and then they help executives be great.
And you can.
Just I've talked to them and I'm like, like you've been invited to podcasts that are produced that way and they literally are trying to script what you're going to say.
And I'm like, we don't do that.
And that's why, by the way, that's why I'm saying, that's why I'm riffing on it a little bit, is because my instincts are to the exact opposite of that, as you know, which is like authenticity and rawness.
Well, you could do a TED Talk.
I think you'd be fine at it, but it's actually not you.
And therefore, it wouldn't accrue to the brand.
He could not do a TED Talk because, in order to do a TED Talk, they have to review what you're going to say.
And they have to edit it.
There's no chance.
No, what I'm saying is if he decided he wanted to Like, if I edit something Mark writes like, I take one sentence and I give him one word and then that's as much as he likes to be edited.
This is why I find it so hilarious when you send around like when you used to do that, when you send around the blog posts and then everybody is so eager to edit them and I'm like this is such a waste of time.
This is like, it's not you.
It's like, not you, so... That actually reminds me of my favorite thing that Larry David said.
The rule on Seinfeld was no hugs and no lessons.
No hugs and no lessons, exactly.
That's right.
That's right.
That's right.
A very special episode.
And that's what made that show so distinctive, is they never did that.
It was never Marlon or Sakura.
Never.
And it was almost unique in that way.
Yeah.
It's a very, very good show.
Yeah.
It's kind of the opposite of Ted.
Yeah, and look, that is great.
I'm not trying to malign it, but it's very manufactured, and I don't think that's an actual brand.
As a person, you can't be that brand.
Yeah, the thing that works and a lot of this just has to do with the shifting technological environment, media environment but the thing that works in this media environment is much more authenticity and transparency.
If you think about it, if you look at... Authenticity and originality, right?
Interestingness.
Which is interesting, because the old world...
Like our media.
Training in the old world was all like much.
It's the opposite.
It's conformist.
Stay on message.
Discipline, discipline.
Discipline, yeah.
And that's what's out the window.
And the thing that I think what's interesting to media and that's what media has to figure out is they used to set the tone and now they're at the very end.
At the very end of all the stuff that's been said on Twitter or Reddit or Tumblr or all that.
Like, it eventually spills out, and then media is like, oh, what is this thing?
Yeah, well, comment on the Rogan show.
But, like, it's at the very end, right?
And that, like for media, it must be total out-of-body experience where it's like wait, like I was the, I was the beginning, right.
When you were unveiling something, that's where you would go, right?
And now you can go any frickin' place that like you have 50,000 choices, right?
And then it gets enough steam and then it gets reviewed by media almost, right?
It's just that the order has flipped completely.
It makes it very tricky to speak to the media because when they're on that end and they have to turn you into news, Anything you say can and will be used against you.
It's a very Miranda-type world.
My new version of this.
The new test I think is happening is what we might call the GPT test, which is okay if what somebody says is indistinguishable from chat.
GPT output like not going to make it right.
And then the more advanced version of the test is like is it indistinguishable from like chat?
GPT 35.
Which is like the earlier version that sounds good.
And the number of public figures in various domains who continue to speak in public or put out crafted, you know, whatever, and literally, you're just like, this is indistinguishable from... what the LLM could do, or by the way, columnists, people who write columns for a living.
Like there's a lot of people who don't pass that test.
And so, and I just say that of like there's gonna be a big turnover there, and then begs the important question like okay, what does it take to pass that test?
While it's changing all the time.
Also true, right, exactly.
But who is actually... I had a version of this conversation with Tyler Cohen one time.
So Tyler Cohen and his partner Alex have been blogging daily for over 20 years on Marshall Revolution, which is amazing.
They do a great job.
And they're leaders of these influential movements and they're incredibly important, influential and all these things, and they're in all these rooms that they They will say this like it's put them in all these incredibly important rooms.
And I was like, wow, it's worked so great for you guys.
It's like, why don't, you know, why don't more people do this?
And Tyler just like laughs and he's like, Mark, how many people have something to say every day?
Yeah, that's a lot of talking.
Genuinely, like how many people have that?
And then you know every day for 20 years is like maybe the highest bar, but how many people have you know?
Three interesting things to say, or one interesting thing to say.
This is my beef with some of these platforms, or actually it's the humans, it's not the platforms.
It's always the humans, right?
Does every thought that you have need to go on X or wherever it needs to go?
I would beg to differ.
But like a lot of people no, a lot of people were like okay, it's a new day.
I got to say something.
Yeah.
And I'm like, I don't know.
Let me ask you this, though.
Would you agree that the difference is if they have an interesting thought every day.
That's one thing.
Fantastic.
Right, right, right.
The more the merrier.
Right, right, right.
But, yeah, most people don't.
But, like, most people don't.
And I sort of feel like they would be better.
Even the people who write every day don't always.
They would be better served to like pop up when they have a thought or contribute something to the conversation.
That's interesting.
I don't know.
I just don't think that everybody has interesting things to say every day.
I mean, if I look at X, I see proof.
Well, the reason I go through this is because my theory at least is the nature of leadership has changed.
Because of everything you guys have discussed, the nature of leadership is changing.
And the leaders, who have a large number of interesting things to say and know how to communicate it, are going to do disproportionately well in the years ahead.
And the leaders who don't even if they're professionally skilled, I think are going to have a harder and harder time.
And their companies are going to have a harder and harder time, because it's just the old methods are just not working as well anymore.
Well, particularly on the marketing front.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And, you know, like, but people are changing.
Like it's been interesting to watch our friend Mark Zuckerberg kind of change his public persona so much, so fast.
So great.
Yeah.
I mean... So he's kind of...
I mean running a gigantic social media company.
You would think he would figure it out, but I guess, but it's still very difficult to do.
And it actually mapped to internal change, right?
Like he himself changed.
Yes.
It wasn't like a synthetically generated message.
Everything of like Mark Zuckerberg in public now is 100% wholly authentic.
He used to try to calculate what he was going to say through the lens of all his many, many constituents.
And now he's just saying what he thinks.
And as you know, he was trained to do that.
He received the A-plus grade version of that training from people who were world-class at that.
And it worked for a while, and then the environment changed.
But I also think he, whoever, overdid it.
I remember being in your office and I was like, that man has the wrong beer somewhere.
It's a scandal.
Because it was so perfected.
And I was like...
Chill out a little bit.
Well, you know what it was.
And then he did, now that he's doing the, like, this is me deal with it, it's working great.
And again, the people who trained him are like super geniuses and they were fantastic.
But they themselves were trained in what I would describe as like 1980s, 1990s style politics.
They came out of a political background, right?
Which is an even more intense version of everything that we're talking about.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so they got trained the way politicians got trained in the 1990s, which was extremely scripted and controlled.
Maximally so.
And so, and then just the, as we've discussed, just this massive shift in the environment since then has basically rendered, I mean, you see this playing out.
I think he's done a great job.
All over the world, right?
Everything we're talking about is also playing out politically.
Yes.
And maybe even more so politically.
Yeah.
Yeah, and even, like, the subtle things have been the most interesting to me.
So he used to be known for like, he's always wearing a hoodie, which was the most conformist thing in the world in Silicon Valley, right.
And now, like he's got like the gold chains and this hair all over the You know, and it's kind of like.
He's expressing himself on all fronts.
It's really awesome.
It's exactly what he looks like in private.
Now it all matches.
It's been great to kind of see him flower like that and be able to fully express himself.
Yeah, I think it's great.
And still people are like, well, what's with the gold chain?
So I'm like, well, here's an executive.
The main one that he wears has a real, it's important with his faith.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
There's a guy who runs a ginormous company that's in the spotlight all the time and like.
This is what you're picking on.
And it's like, hello?
Also true.
But I think when people from the old world see that, it makes them very uncomfortable, right?
Okay, one of the guys who was doing what we wanted him to is no longer, he's off the leash.
He's not on the program, that's right.
He's liberated.
We go all the way back to when, what's his name?
Dennis from Foursquare?
He got yelled at because he went to a press meeting with a hoodie on, like all the way at the beginning.
That was controversial.
No, I remember that.
I remember that, yeah.
He was like, I think, and he had a banana or something like that.
It was, like, apparently entirely unacceptable.
Right, right, yeah.
It almost makes it nostalgic.
Very interesting.
So I think companies, I mean look, I think all this stuff.
My view is, all this stuff's going to intensify.
I think every successful company in the future, I think every successful company in the future is going to need this kind of personality.
They're going to need somebody who can do this.
And it's a different leadership profile.
Do you think it has to be the CEO?
I think it's really hard for it not to be.
I mean, maybe, maybe.
It could be another founder, I think.
Yeah, a co-founder can do it.
Yeah, a co-founder.
For sure, if you're a consumer brand, I think it's very difficult to not have...
A person like that.
I think you know, if you're less marketing like, if you are like if the I mean there are historically businesses that are all sales.
I think if you're in a competitive situation and on the other side there's somebody who's really good at it,
Yeah.
It still sucks.
If you sell security stuff.
Palantir is as enterprise, you know, government as it gets.
Oh, yeah.
No.
He's killing it.
He's perfect for that kind of thing.
And imagine being a competitor to Palantir and not having an Alex, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Even just the stock market valuation alone, like, how can you possibly keep up?
Yeah, it's basically, can you sell?
And the way you're selling today is entirely different.
Yeah.
Right?
Like, it's not, you know, having features and a Gartner report.
I think it's great.
I think it's leading to a more honest world.
Like, more transparent, more authentic.
Yeah, more honest, more interesting things being discussed, more interesting issues getting surfaced, people actually getting to know each other.
Yeah, it's a much less sanitized world.
Yeah, that's right.
And, of course, it's uncomfortable, because if you're used to the walled garden, if you're used to a sanitized environment, if you're used to Disneyland, entering the real world is traumatic.
Very traumatic.
But we do live in the real world, right?
Yeah.
And as always, it's the transition that's the toughest part.
It's going like, oh...
This is all different now, right?
And I think we're in a really big transition.
And the transition is transitioning.
We're still in the middle of it.
It's not over yet.
It's definitely going to keep moving.
All right.
Well, we're going to keep going.
Awesome.
Fantastic.
Thank you for joining us on the Mark and Ben show.
This has been a lot of fun.
Thanks, you too.
Hope you enjoyed it.
Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast.
If you liked this episode, be sure to like comment subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family.
For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify.
Follow us on X and A16Z and subscribe to our sub stack at a16z.substack.com.
Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.
As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.
Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.
For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a16zcom forward slash disclosures.
