Investing Billions - E155: Ben Horowitz: "The Classic VC Model Is Done”

Episode Date: April 15, 2025

In this thought-provoking debut episode of Turpentine VC, Erik sat down with Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder of Andreessen Horowitz, to explore the evolving landscape of venture capital, leadership, and the future of innovation. Ben shares his insights on navigating market cycles, building resilient companies, and the role of culture in long-term success. This conversation, recorded live at a16z’s Menlo Park offices in 2023, is packed with practical wisdom and candid stories from one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors.

Today, we're excited to share an episode of Turpittown BC, a podcast about the art and science of building venture capital firms hosted by Eric Thornburg. Guests on the show include Vinod Khosla, Alfred Lin, Sarah Tavill, Mike Maples, and more top GPs of the world's top venture firms. Unlike other shows in the space, Turpittown BC digs into the nuts and bolts of firm building, covering fun construction, governance, talent, strategy and decision making. Up ahead is Eric's interview with Ben Horowitz, general partner and co-founder of Andreessen

Horowitz. Ben, we were just talking off camera. There's some firms that are great for 10 years and then struggle. There's some firms that are great for 30 years, multi decades. What separates the firms who could do that and what enabled them to be great? Yeah, I think it's a combination of kind of the lasting parts like the culture and then the parts that change like the leadership. And so I think that, you know, if you just have a couple of smart investors, but no culture to speak of, then you're probably not going to do a great generational handoff. And, you know, that's probably 10 years is a kind, you know, if you can transition it like, you know, Sequoia transitioned it from Don Valentine to, you know, Mike Moritz and Doug

Leone and Jim Getz and that worked, you know, that transition worked well. So they were able to kind of take the original culture and build on it and kind of grow it, you know, 20 years for the original guys, 20 years for the successors and that kind of thing. So that goes pretty well. You guys are known as Spring Chickens, almost 15 years. Yeah. How do you think about it for your firm? Yeah, so we're a little different in that

we are organized in such a way where it's not really like, Mark and I can have like very significant contributions without picking the investments because we have, I would just say more scale and more job functions at Andreessen Horowitz because we're kind of a product first and then a team of investors second, whereas every other firm I think is the opposite product, meaning the product to entrepreneurs. So like, what are we offering is where we start. And then the team of investors is kind of goes with that as opposed to we're a team of investors and then like, well, figure out what our product is as we go.

So it's very kind of different orientation. I've always thought of Y Combinator as another example of a product firm in the sense that you could replace a lot of the investors that they have over time and yet it still seems to work to some degree. I think that's right. Like I think they're probably, you know, the closest analog to us kind of spiritually.

Yeah. So they're spiritually close to you, but they're much earlier and they dominate kind of like a company creation. Whereas you, you know, you do a lot of seed, of course too, but you've played all stages. Have you thought about going after that space like pretty hardcore? How have you thought about where you situate in the ecosystem? Yeah, you know, it's funny because we, Paul and us started, you know, around the same time. He started a little earlier.

And you know, we talked to him quite a bit during that phase when he was running Y Combinator out of his house with Jessica. And, you know, I have to say, we never really thought about kind of being Y Combinator. And I think like a lot of it has to do, my philosophy of business is you have to start with, okay, what can you contribute that's gonna be important in the world that nobody can do better than you? And for us, a big thing that we had done is

we had scaled companies built into very large size. That wasn't really kind of Paul's experience. But he had thought super deeply about the very initial kind of part of it. So I think that was the right thing for him to do and we did the right thing for us to do. And I think the world was better with us doing our thing and him doing his thing, but he's got a great business. Totally.

And so you're a product. He and his success. Yes. Totally. The most venture firms are a collection of investors. So you're a collection of venture firms in some way, where you have these distinct American dynamism, and bio, and crypto, and games, and these different practices. Should other firms think, are you guys ahead of a curve,

and other firms will follow you? Talk about the evolution to that structure and why that made so much sense. Yeah, so it's interesting. So when we started the firm, there's a lot of conventional wisdom in venture capital. There are only 15 deals a year that are ever going to make it to $100 million. It's a cottage industry done by, you can only learn it through apprenticeship and all the a lot of concepts, which I think we're probably correct at the time, but the thing that we believe then and Mark kind of encapsulated a PC wrote in 2011, called software the software industry was going to grow a hundredfold. And so 15 companies can be 150 companies and like things were going to change.

And so in order to kind of be the preeminent venture capital firm, you're going to have to be a lot bigger. So we kind of saw that from the outset. And so we set ourselves up to be able to kind of organize, reorganize, evolve. And if you look at the firm now, what it is, is it's a collection of the original Andreesen Horowitz, where every market has a platform that's appropriate to that market and an investing team that is focused on that market. And I think that that's the future of venture capital.

Like when we think about who's really an interesting competitor, it's the pure crypto firm, the pure games firm, the pure AI firm, more than the generalist firm that's trying to cover all of that with the old structure. I think that's gonna be harder for them. Speaking of the future of venture, will venture firms consider going public

or should they consider like a YC or like you guys or firms that achieve such level of scale? Let me tell you about a conference I'm very excited about, Alpha on the Delta, which is coming up in late April during Jazz Fest in New Orleans. Unlike some of the larger conferences, Alpha on the Delta is limited to 150 allocators

and 30 niche managers on an invite-only basis. It's an authentic and different kind of event with some really great people. If you'd like to learn more and request an invite, visit www.howinvest T A dot com. I hope to see you there. Yeah, so there's a real interesting alignment problem with going public if you're a venture capital firm, and it's as follows. So if you look at Apollo, or, you know, Blackstone or any of these guys, private equity companies that have gone public, the public markets value them on their

fee stream much more than on their investment returns. I think that's a safer alignment between the investors and the firms in private equity than it is in venture capital. I think in venture capital, that can get super dangerous because even at 100X, what it used to be, the entire venture capital market is not that big and is like the amount of capital versus the amount of great ideas. We already have more capital than great ideas. And as we saw, I think with both SoftBank and Tiger Global, if you try to change that demand supply imbalance,

you just end up creating a mess. And so if you were public, you'd have a strong incentive to create a mess. So they went big and created a mess, but you guys went as big in some ways, right? Your volume was very high, your funds raised is very high, you went big in a much better way.

Do you disagree with that? We didn't go 100 billion dollars big. And then I think Tiger was raising 12 billion a year. So they were bigger than us just technically. So yeah, look, we've scaled to basically size our funds to the market opportunities. Yeah, look, we've scaled to basically size our funds to the market opportunities. So the way we look at it is like, in a two to three year time frame,

how many great deals will we see in a category and then try to size the fund to basically cover that time period is kind of roughly how we do it. And that's certainly increased fund sizes, both fund sizes and the number of funds over the years. But it's still really contained compared to what you do if you're just scaling assets.

Like so we, I think it's still like way smaller than like what Apollo or Vista or somebody would do in that kind of business. So yeah, so I think that misalignment is pretty tricky for venture capital to overcome. Like I haven't figured out a way where you would overcome that yet. Right, so a firm that's stayed diligent, like a USV, or diligent on fund size,

a benchmark, or kind of stays at 500 or 250, respectively. They believe that they can get better multiples on that, you know, much smaller fund size. What do you believe that they don't believe that, in terms of justify, why it goes so much bigger? Yeah, so I think the market's just gotten bigger. So I think the way to think about it is, if you believe the market was fixed at 15 companies,

then that's the exact right strategy. And we don't believe that, and I think that, I'm not allowed to talk about our fund returns because we're in RIA, but if you look at our funds, I think our larger funds have, at times, like way outperformed our smaller funds. And that's just kind of a function of, look, if there were 15 companies and now there's 150, then if you had a $400 million fund, then maybe you need a $4 billion fund to do

the same deals, if you win the same percentage of them. And that's just a simple math. And I think that there are different beliefs. I think benchmark believes what they believe, we believe what we believe. And again, our mission isn't necessarily fun turns. We have a mission to kind of help the best entrepreneurs in the world build the best companies that they can.

And so we generally come at the whole structure of what we do from that perspective. I think also we could all get much higher salaries if we didn't organize the firm the way we did. But our mission isn't to maximize the number of money per partner, our mission is to kind of be the resource for building great technology companies. So it's just like a different point of view.

And so how do you recruit such amazing partners if at other firms, because they don't have these resources, maybe they can get higher salaries, or, you know, there's certain perks of being at one of those firms. How do you think about recruiting the best talent? Yeah, well, I think that people here, it's actually helpful that we kind of pay lower salaries to me because we get people who are on mission.

You're aligned. And, you know, like there's a lot that goes into that. You know, like there's a, for example, there's this kind of thing in venture capital that a lot of venture capitalists will say, well, spend all your time with your winners. Like, we don't believe in that at all. Now, like, if you look at a spreadsheet, that's the exact right thing, right? Like, because the whatever three winners are going to produce all the returns.

But the way we look at it is, you know, several. One, we're not so confident that we know who the winners are for a long time. The other thing is that you know we kind of have the philosophy is like we knew the job was dangerous when we took it. If we're gonna if you're gonna take us as your partner we're gonna be there till the bitter end and like that's you know having been very close to the bitter end myself from time to time like you really do need kind of support, or at least somebody to talk to

when you're in that situation. And because of, you know, just from a competitive standpoint, our whole idea is that we sell on reputation. Yep. That's fundamentally important to our competitive advantage is to have the best reputation. So all those things kind of cause us to behave differently. And if you're not into that, if you're into the spreadsheet view of venture capital, then

you would hate that idea. So it actually works for us in that sense. And because you've spent the last decade plus building this brand reputation, there's lots of other things that you could do. You can get into things beyond venture, right? Some firms get into sort of more public investing, get into things beyond venture, right? Different firm, you know, some firms get into sort of more public investing, get into wealth management,

they get into other products that serve, you know, kind of adjacent customers or sort of their customers in adjacent ways. How do you think about what makes sense to get into versus what doesn't make sense to get into given that your brand enables these opportunities? Yeah, so our, the way to think to think about what we've done so far and what we'll do in the future is the customer

is the founder for us, so we start with the founder. And the initial promise is we're gonna help you raise money, we're gonna help you develop into a CEO, we're gonna build you a network that's as good as Bob Iger's. We're going to help you, train you into the job. And we're going to support you in every way that we can through our financial network to help you build this company.

And in our view, we'd like to extend that through the founder's entire life, from the time they found the company to the time they become a philanthropist. And so anything in that realm we feel like is kind of things that we ought to at least consider doing. And which ones we do, in which order, we'll see depending on where the gaps in the market are and what makes sense for us.

There's one investing category that's outperformed major US and world stock markets over the past three years, private infrastructure. Private infrastructure is expected to double over the next 10 years with the continued development of AI, increased demand for power generation, and the modernization of supply chains. This asset had previously only been available to large institutional investors, but now you can invest in it exclusively through a public partnership with Hamilton Lane, whose I think we've talked about off camera is that one thing that enables you to take such big c.com slash h l p i f to invest today. The thing we've talked about off camera is that

one thing that enables you to take such big swings or make these changes when the market changes is your unique approach to sort of governance or control. Why don't you talk about that relative to other venture firms? Yeah, it's interesting. It's kind of a concept that we got from a couple of people. One was

Herb Allen, who you know, I think, and then the other was Mark's father-in-law. And they both kind of gave us the same idea, which... So traditionally in venture capital, I think it looks a little like a law firm or kind of a lot of these partnership structures where you have shared economics and shared control. And like from a partner standpoint, there's a lot... That makes a lot of sense in a lot of ways. We have a different structure where we're shared economics, but we've kind of centralized control. And that enables us, by not having shared control,

we can change the structure of the firm very easily. And if you want to grow, so if you want to grow, like so, you know, if you want to go, you know, in an integrated way, like you could have, though that's the Chinese subsidiary or whatever, and that's a whole other entity, and we talk to them, you know, once every six months, that's not what I'm talking about. But if you want to grow in an integrated way with a kind of single culture, single offering, then you have to be able to change the organizational structure as you get bigger.

So like the structure that you had of 50 people is just not going to work at 500, and that's for any organization. But in order to do that, somebody's got to be able to make that decision with no politicking, no arguing, no, you know, like there'll be tears, because whoever loses power is gonna be upset about it, but you have to be able to make those tough decisions to get to the structure that you need to be maximally effective, and that's just really hard to do, I think.

I don't know how you would do it with shared control. Let's get back to the future of venture. Let's say we're having this conversation 10 years from now or 15 years from now. Does venture kind of look, does the trends that are happening now continue to happen where there's just this bifurcation, multi-stage firms become even more multi-asset firms that just get bigger and bigger and bigger and this sort of solo GP or small specialists kind of this barbell or do new models come into play like venture studios really take

off or do emerging technology like Web3 or AI really change how venture works, or say more about the future of venture. Yeah, no, like all possibilities. I mean, look, I think the kind of classical venture firm that is just like a collection of smart investors, like I think that's probably run its course. So I think you have to be like a top end,

like serious brand that can marshal resources and money and considered smart money and people wanna follow, I put us in that category Sequoia, there's that class of thing. And then there's people who are very specialized in a very kind of specific part of the market and know that network and have really great specific expertise, and they'd probably be, you know, more early stage, I would think. And those two things seem pretty solid,

at least for the next five, 10 years. Everything else a little more questionable. I think with the studio model, to me the big problem with that historically, and I think Bill Gross was probably the greatest practitioner of that historically, is that it's not idea, it's an idea maze. And so it's very hard to run through the idea maze if it's not your idea. And so I think that tends to be problematic. That's kind of, it's a little bit of a design for the head of the studio's lifestyle

and kind of capabilities as opposed to what's gonna make a great company. And so I don't know that that's ever gonna work. And I thought Paul's genius was the ideas weren't his. And that was the difference between an incubator and an accelerator. And that I think just proved an incubator and an accelerator. And that, I think, just proved to be the right model. And the reason it's the right model is because

whoever's building the company, it better be their idea. Yeah, when you identify an emerging trend, whether it's Web3, whether it's AI, whether it's companies that get big and it's really big really fast and it's during the pandemic, let's say, and some people are more prudent about it. Some people are more bullish.

And I put you guys more in the bullish camp. Smart bullish, but bullish. And is the logic there that hey, not everything's gonna work out, but the things that work just work so much that it just really makes sense to be extremely bullish? Or I guess when you reflect on the past few years and things that you went really hard on,

if you were to do versions of, again, going forward and future, now this AI wave, of course, how do you think about writing trends and how hard to write them? If you look at the history of technology, almost everything eventually worked. Yeah. Right? All this stuff, go back to 1999, 2001, all everything eventually worked. Right? All the stuff.

Go back to 1999, 2001, all the dot bombs. That's the dumbest, ha ha ha, pets.com, how stupid. Like all that stuff. And then diapers.com sells for $800 million later. It was just a little ahead of its time. And I think the beauty of venture capital is you can make the bet and if you're too early, you can make the bet again. And you learn a lot.

If the clean energy craze happened again, if you guys were around during that time, do you think you would have bet big there and just say, hey, we're 10 years earlier? Well, that one is a little different in that that was like a politically motivated market, which is a different kind of a thing. I mean, I think so we're big believers in software.

And if there's like a massive software breakthrough that has new applications or new models or these kinds of things, and we'd certainly be on that anything like AI or crypto or, you know, or like, you know, what's going on in games. We bet that every time. I think climate was a little difference. It wasn't software, it was material sciences, which has a different market dynamic. So it's like there eventually became a small number of auto companies.

There never eventually became a small number of software companies, despite what Larry Ellison and all those guys said that there were only going to be three software companies and all that thing, because it's kind of like, it'd be like there's only going to be three novelists. It's a creative art form. It's got a very big design space. And so, you know, we think there there is a big change in how you can write software, which AI is probably the biggest change we've ever had, that's gonna, yes, that's gonna produce things.

And we bet that all day, all the time, every day. And I think that's also the kind of value of being able to evolve the firm is people who knew smartphone network effects may not be the ones who really get AI, may not be the ones who really get crypto, et cetera. I know Mark is spending a bunch of time in AI right now. Talk about the AI strategy, how you're approaching AI in terms of this both how you think about it from an investing perspective,

but also does it change things at the firm more broadly? Yeah, well, it does change things at the firm broadly. From an investing perspective, it's kind of like, oh my God, we have non-deterministic computing. Like, holy cow. Every problem we couldn't solve with deterministic computing is now for grabs. And that's like, you know,

we've never seen anything like that. So from a firm perspective, I think, you know, we end up needing, okay, different expertise. We need kind of access to different networks. We need kind of different networks. We need different help for entrepreneurs. It's amazing. So many of the AI entrepreneurs are actually, they're not even engineers, they're like researchers. Yeah.

So this is a totally different type of cat to be starting a company. And what do they need to succeed and that kind of thing. So it's a very big tidal wave running through the firm and running through the industry. But we can be more excited about it. The other thing is we're in this phase where it's such a profound change that anything you do will work, at least for a while.

And so it's kind of hard to pass on any deal in that way. So it's exciting. Thank you for listening. To join our community and to make sure you do not miss any future episodes, please click the follow button above to subscribe. That was true also of Web3 for a moment. When you think about Web3, do you think, hey, it's just in a momentary lull, partly sponsored by markets,

and developer activity is higher than ever? I've been struck just by how far ahead AI is of Web3 just on terms of use cases and products, and yet I've been ignoring AI up until the last year or so, and I was spending more time with it. What did I, was the financialization distraction? I just reflect on that a little bit, or what's your perspective on that?

Yeah, so there's a few things. So one is AI happened overnight. This AI model started in 1943. So it was a long time coming. And it was finally working really well. I think with crypto, it started in earnest in 2008. That was the 1943 moment. It's a lot younger than AI.

I think in fact, there have been a variety of use cases. Some of them have been, so there's this what we call Web 3 and a new way to build networks that's fair and doesn't tend towards these very dangerous monopolies that control all information and all these kinds of things. But there's also kind of like a because you can create money, there's a casino aspect which needs regulation. And we've been working with the US government to try and get the correct regulation. And so in its current state, I would say there's two things.

One is we need performance to improve a lot, and gas fees to lower, and performance to improve, so usability can improve, and that kind of thing. And that we're really on the verge of. I mean, I think we're going to see 100x improvement of the kind of base infrastructure in the next turn in the next year. So that's awesome.

The other thing, though, is the kind of regulatory regime and what's possible and can we get clarity and so forth. And we're working on that both domestically and internationally. But those are things that in order to get very broad adoption, that's going to have to overcome. AI is already getting broad adoption because it works.

Now the regulators are now moving in. And very ironically, oddly, bizarrely, talking about trying to ban open source, which is probably the safest thing that could possibly happen in AI, because the last thing, if AI is this all-powerful thing, then the last thing you want is it in the hands of one person or one company,

like that would be horrible and dangerous. Whereas if it's open source, universities can work on it, we can understand it, it can be deployed. I mean, like I often remind people, like the last nuclear bomb that was launched was when only we had the nukes. Like that's a dangerous world with one person having the nukes.

And now everyone has nukes, or a bunch of people have nukes, and we haven't had. Yeah, and we haven't had any nuclear activity. And there's a very, very specific reason for that, because everybody's has nukes and a bunch of people have nukes and we haven't had yeah we haven't had any nuclear activity and there's a very very specific reason for that because everybody's got nukes and nobody wants to get nuked and I think that AI is you know to the extent that AI is a super weapon that will also be true there and so if you believe that then I think what you want is open source and I think if you want regulatory capture or

monopoly for yourself you want wanna shut that down. You mentioned earlier that you consider your peers as the best kind of specialist firms and you compete with those firms. Do you also see your peers or competitors, firms, other multi-asset firms that are not even adventure, like as you get bigger and bigger AUM, are there firms that you see yourself

as veering into their space or? No, so like, No, so it's funny, because I've spent some time with both kind of the folks at BlackRock and at Apollo just trying to understand their structure and why they're public and these kinds of things. And I would say they are culturally, philosophically, operationally the opposite of us. So like they're very very price-focused, they're optimizers, they're you know efficiency

experts. Like we don't care about any of that. What we care about is like is it a real breakthrough and how big can we help make it? Can it win the market? Like those are the things that drive us. So there's nothing about what they do that would make them good at what we do, and there's nothing about what we do that would make us good at what they do. So like I think we'll never get into that realm.

Yeah, and when people focus so much on returns, it also is important to think about just the LP product. Like my understanding of the SoftBank thesis was that this is a place that LP could plow a ton of capital and get some consistent return, and there's not that many places where you could just plow all that capital into one place and get that kind of diversification. How do you think about the LP product that you're offering? We think about LPs differently. We think about LPs, or the way we like to think about them

is the same way a company would think about its VC. So one, so we're not building a product for them. We're building a product for founders. And they can invest in that product. And then there's a couple of things we think about there. One is we want to have the kind of investors that we want to be in business with for a very long time. So we choose them very carefully.

And two, we want to treat them like investors. And I think sometimes venture capitalists make the mistake of not doing that. What does that mean? It means, well, you shouldn't have them invest if you don't respect their opinion, aren't interested in what they have to say, don't want to keep them up to date on what you're doing.

Like, then you're not treating them like investors if you don't do that. And I think what we're gonna find out in this kind of particular interest rate change environment is that the VCs who didn't treat their LPs like investors are going to be in for what that means in bad times. Does macro inform your firm strategy? No.

I think we've got to be very careful about that, in fact. One, macro, in our view, is highly unpredictable. Right. So that's the first thing. And so we don't try to predict it. Yep. And then secondly, we have a 10-year horizon on exit. So if we invest in a company today, we're expecting it to come out in the environment in 2033. And so in 2033, the idea that we could predict that macroeconomic environment is like pretty absurd to me back even to talk about it sounds weird. So like getting caught up in that I think is really dangerous. And we saw a lot of so there were a

lot of hedge funds that, you know, attempted to do venture capital in 2021. And I think all of them had massive reactions to the macroeconomic environment. I think that's really really dangerous You know particularly for the early sage stuff that they did were there now You know like now you may not doing the follow-ons like they want to return the call And so you get into that kind of situation It's like that's not even smart for you. Like, you know, it's kind of like you're a bad person for not calling back somebody you invested in, but like, that's not even smart for you.

Like, what are you doing? Like, you don't know what's gonna happen in 2033. Right, makes sense. When you started the firm, people like Mike Lovitz and others gave you advice on how to think about the firm in a different way based on the market at the time. I'm curious for the next Ben Horowitz and Mark Andresen out there who are 20 years or 30 years younger,

whatever, they're just starting out, but want to build the next A16Z, but they're looking at the market at 2023. Let's say they're coming to you guys for advice and you wanted to give them advice. How would you think about creating the next A16Z starting in 2023, given where the market is today. There already is A16Z.

That's the Uber for X is Uber. Now, if they wanted to create a Hollywood talent agency, then I would have plenty of advice for them, maybe. Fair enough. You've coined the term, you know, wartime CEO, peacetime CEO. I'm curious if we could think about, you know, wartime VC, because right now it's a tough time in markets,

tough time to get a firm off the ground. People are more skeptical about venture, people are skeptical about tech more broadly. It's an anti-time of anti-tech. What it's like to be a wartime VC or to be techno-optimist in a world that is increasingly pessimistic. Yeah, so I think the biggest kind of war kind of issue that we have is

actually probably with the regulatory environment and some of the ideas of the kind of current administration where they have become anti innovation and look, we've already seen like a pretty large percentage of the crypto venture capital go overseas. So the idea that the United States would forfeit the internet of property rights and money at such an early stage in its life, it just feels so absurd. It doesn't even feel like America in that way.

And that literally fake things that they're blaming it on, like, oh, feel like America in that way. And like the literally fake things that they're blaming it on, like, oh, crypto's funding fentanyl. I read that today. I was like, what the hell are you talking about? It's literally the most transparent form of payment that there is in the world, like more than Visa, more than dollars, more than anything. And for somebody, a senator, to come out and say some just

completely, something that she no doubt knows isn't true, to push innovation overseas is like that's a real wartime situation for us in innovation land. I think we're seeing the same thing in AI. We certainly have struggles for a different reason in bio, and that kind of technology. But like, so I'll just give you, on bio though, the FTC recently sued to break up a deal

between a bio startup and a kind of big pharma company. It's pretty impossible to do drug, to fund drug development if there's no M&A market. So it's literally like outlaw new science for health, new financial technology, new kind of property rights in the virtual world is like a really hard stance for us to understand. So we are working with policymakers and trying to understand, okay, you know, because it's not all like, you know, bananas, like some of it is, you know, certainly makes sense. But to kind of shape that for like a future that's prosperous for America is like a big effort from the

firm. And we're working hard on that. But that feels like wartime. That feels like, okay, now we have an actual threat, existential threat to innovation in America. In terms of being a tech optimist, I always like to go back to a quote from Andy Grove, which I absolutely love, which he said in the 90s. And somebody asked him, they said, Andy, is the microprocessor good or bad? And he said, well, that's not even the right question. That's like asking is steel good or bad.

It is. And so it's our job to make it good. And that's a lot how I feel about kind of all these technologies is they are going to exist. Like you cannot, you can't get rid of the wheel now, like it's over, like it's here. You can't get rid of AI now, it's over, it's here. Like you can't outlaw math.

You can't, like the paper's already out there, like you're not gonna stop it. Like the whole idea that you're gonna stop people from doing it is just so crazy. So then the real question is like, okay, what do we have to do to make it good and positive for society and so forth? And by the way, without new technologies, like, how are we going to deal with pandemics or climate change or any of the real, you know, issues facing the world?

Like, it's not even possible without technology. Like,'s like lockdowns didn't work. None of the policy stuff worked. You know what works? Pax Lovid. That works. You have COVID, you take that, like you're good. That works. So we need technological solutions to these very, very daunting problems that we have with more and more populous earth and all these kinds of things.

So that's how we remained optimistic. Yeah. And maybe gearing towards closing here, as I mentioned to you, you guys have been very helpful to us. You know, we're seeking to create this new kind of tech media company that's more driven by insiders that has more of a pro tech approach. What advice would you have for us? Or when you look at the kind of media ecosystem? What? What more do you want to see?

Yeah, well, I think you're on like a really good track, which is, you know, what I want to see is, okay, I'm a young person and I want to understand where the world is going and what's happening and how I can get involved and make my contribution. What do I need to know? And I think that's, you know, like, how does AI work? What is this new computational model of the universe? How can I learn about it?

How can I kind of push things forward? Which is like largely absent. I would say, I mean, I think you're walking into a vacuum is the good news. But you know, that, when I was a kid, there used to be like Dr. Dobs, you know, and Wired magazine was that way for a long time.

But now it's just like these weird politically charged, whatever criticisms of how things are run or how things are built or what they're going to do or every negative consequence of everything. The internet had so many negative consequences, but I don't think, if we got rid of it, then if you're in Bangladesh, you now have no access to any of the information that people in the rich world have, it's done amazingly great things. But yes, there's cybercrime, yes, there's porn,

yes, there's a lot of things that probably are not general positive for a society. I think people over abstracted from the Elizabeth Holmes or Theranos situation identified, hey, I could make a career or finding more of these and there's gotta be more of these thinking that over abstraction and then other over abstraction was around sort of defending democracy because Facebook somehow,

people's minds contributed to Trump. Well, the funny thing was, if you go back to 2008, all the stories on how Obama got elected, well, Facebook, he mastered Facebook, he got elected on Facebook, Facebook's the greatest thing, it's making the world more democratic, Arab Spring, wow, this is so awesome, and then Trump gets elected and it's like, this is a threat to democracy,

we're all screwed, gotta shut down the social network, so it's interesting, when things get political, they get very weird, very fast, I think. And what's funny now, AI is, it's now coming from within the house in terms of some of the people who are most active are within tech in terms of, and maybe it's regular capture,

or maybe it's something else. I think it's regulatory capture. I mean, I. Some people are true believers. It's either Google guy, or some people are. It's really early. Yeah, I agree. Look, there are people who are genuinely worried

about how powerful the technology is. And I think those are good worries. But the idea that the way you deal with the powerful technology is you put it in the hands of a few is the most craziest idea. Well, like, look, power in the hands of the few has never turned out well. Right, like, with the best intentions.

Right, people love Karl Marx's intentions, but Stalin pulled pot, you know, Mao, like everybody died. That's what happened. Everybody died. And like all those guys didn't start out to be like singularly uniquely evil people, but they had too much power because you take all the power of the private sector and put it in the hands of a few guys in the government, it doesn't matter what the political philosophy is, that's bad. And similarly, if you take all the power of the private sector and put it in the hands of a few guys in the government, it doesn't matter what the political philosophy is, that's bad. And similarly, if you take all the power of the industry and you put it with two companies, that's going to be bad. I can guarantee you that.

I don't know what else is going to be bad, but I know that's bad. I think it's a great place to wrap on the uplifting note of power to the people and decentralizing power. Ben, thanks so much for coming to the podcast. Yeah, great, Eric. This is good. And great luck and best of luck. We're all excited about what you're doing and its impact on the world.