What It Takes to Win as a Founder | Ben Horowitz

You're not a great entrepreneur unless you feel like you don't have a choice but to build a company. You don't take out a competitor with an equally good product. You need something dramatically better. We went public on $2,000,000 in trailing revenue. 2,000,000 going to 75.

That was the forecast. That's clearly a bad idea. The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts. The worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you.

It's the ones that you put on yourself. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying it.

AI may make it dramatically easier to build a company, but it doesn't make being a founder any easier. In this episode, Andrew Chen sits down with a 16 z co founder Ben Horowitz to talk about what AI changes and what it doesn't about entrepreneurship. They discuss why AI companies can reach massive audiences faster than previous technology waves, whether billion dollar businesses can be built with tiny teams, and what actually creates defensibility when everyone has access to similar models. But they also get into the part of company building that technology can't automate: making hard decisions when you don't know if you're right, maintaining confidence through uncertainty, and continuing to bet on yourself when the doubts inevitably show up.

I don't know if you remember this, but, many, many years ago when I 1st met you. So I visited Ben at the, Loud Cloud turned then Opsware offices. Every conference room was named after a hip hop artist. I remember that, and I was like, alright. This is gonna be a unique a...

A unique eye, unique culture. And I remember asking you as... Since since you were about to to sell the company to HP, what you were gonna do next after. And I remember you told me that you were gonna retire next. That...

That's that's what you said. I was tired.

And so the funny thing is, of course, Ben has done exactly the opposite of that. Like, literally the opposite of that. So my 1st question is, yeah. What happened? You you you decided not to retire.

You decided to do the opposite. Like, how how did how how did that come about?

I had another idea. You know? Like, that's A lot of what life is about is getting your ideas out. So I had an idea. And think that's what makes an entrepreneur.

You have an idea and you believe in your idea and you want to get it out. As an entrepreneur, that's who I am. That's what I got to do. I don't have a choice at

that point.

So you're not a great entrepreneur unless you feel like you don't have a choice but to build a company. Because otherwise you're gonna quit anyway, so forget about it. You've seen so many stages of

the Internet. We've had desktop software, then the web, and then mobile and cloud, and then now this AI thing. What is unique and special about AI that makes it maybe similar or also just different to some of the other stuff?

So the thing that's very reminiscent of the early days of the Internet is when the Internet 1st happened, every day you would look out on the Internet and there would be some very new awesome thing that was going on. And that's definitely the case with AI. So that's what's really similar. Think everything else is kind of different, though, in that AI is so if you think about the history of computing, the history of the industry, it's always been networks and computers. And so we had microwaves and integrated circuits and mainframes and SNA and PCs and LANs and smartphones and the internet.

And they're very different technologically and have very different adoption curves. But then they really enhance each other. And I think in this era, AI is the new computer, like very clearly. It's a probabilistic computer where we previously had deterministic computers. And so in that way, it's very different than the internet, which is definitely a network.

And networks have these adoption curves that can get very high in the hype cycle too early because there's not enough people on the network. You can see where it's going, but until it gets there, it's not there. And so particularly with the internet, if you go back to the great.comcrash that led to the great telecom crash, what happened was every investor was like, oh, this is the biggest thing ever. I'm going to put all my money into it. But the truth was, at Netscape in 1996, we had 90% browser share, and we had 55,000,000 users.

And so the whole internet wasn't that big. And then 0.5 of those people were on dial up. So you could go build an internet app, and it would cost you a lot of money because you had to use some microsystem servers and EMC storage and all this. But you could get to 30,000,000 people or something, so good luck with that. That's not really a business.

And so the whole thing collapsed before it rebuilt. But eventually, was going to get there. Whereas with AI, when it works, instantly, almost instantly, you can get to a giant number of users. We've seen companies grow faster than any companies we've ever seen because you don't need more people on the network. You know, like, that's not a thing.

The Internet's already here. Everybody's on it, and all you have to do is put your thing up and they can get to it. So it's very different in that way.

1 of the amazing things that I think every... Everyone in the industry is so shocked by is is how good LLMs are at writing code. Yeah. And, you know,

who who who would have thought?

And so there's this idea that maybe building software or writing software becomes as easy as creating content on the Internet. There's the idea that maybe you end up with a bunch of billion dollar companies being built with much smaller teams. Maybe it becomes even further geographically democratized or maybe there's gonna be solopreneurs with billion dollar... All those variations. Do you agree with that?

What risks do you think come with that? Do you think that's a lasting trend, or do you need to still scale businesses ultimately?

Well, think we're gonna see. It's funny because I think Ray Kurzweil predicted everybody was going to be a solo entrepreneur. It could get to there. I would say Instagram was 13 people and sold for 1000000000 dollars, but Meta's got a ridiculous number of employees. Would Instagram have just been that many employees if they hadn't got bought by Meta?

Probably. And so I think you can get to a giant audience and a ton of money with a very few number of people. I think that that's for sure true. And then the question is, can you sustain it or will you get taken out by somebody who's kind of doing more things? I would tend to think just historically that people always want more.

The standard just goes up in terms of what people want. John Maynard Keynes had this very famous it was his worst paper, but he had this paper that he wrote in, I think it was 1934 and 'thirty 5, which basically said, as soon as people's needs are met, so once they had shelter, food, and clothes, people would start to work maybe no more than 15 hours a week. And that turned out to be spectacularly wrong because, of course, then all of a sudden, needed a car. And then everybody needed a car for everybody in the family, and everybody needed a television. Then everybody needed a television in every room in the house.

And now everybody needs a smartphone, everybody needs air conditioning. And none of that stuff even existed when he wrote that. And so now people are working like I'm sure nobody here is working 15 hours a week. I think what people need does tend to expand almost infinitely, so to fulfill that need, sometimes you have to build a bigger company, but we'll see.

Software gets so easy to build that you kinda have fast fashion SaaS. You kinda get copycats all the time that kinda get cloned. The other version that has kinda been predicted is sort of bespoke software. Maybe everybody uses a slightly different version of software that gets generated, that's instantiated at basically at runtime, that's personalized to you. I mean, is all very sci fi, but maybe we'll get there.

It's funny how humans are, though, because even in fashion, we do have fast fashion. I'm looking at it. Lot of people are wearing similar stuff. And so I'm not saying that that'll totally go. The other question on software is how much will be what we consider software today, and how much will just be like, Okay, we'll just use the AI differently, it won't even be an application.

Just ask the AI to do it. And so I think that's a little bit TBD, but I think the paradigm of an application may be the thing that fades the most. You organize your data, and then you have agents that you ask to do stuff against the data. And that's how business applications work and personal applications work too. How do

you think about defensibility in kind of... Especially for AI apps? There's sort of an argument that, hey, a lot of the products right now, they don't really have very much in the way of network effects. Maybe they're GPT wrappers. There's all these kind of critiques.

So what do you think of as kind of the durable advantages that founders should be?

GPT rapper thing was always a bit of a dumb idea in terms of... Not to build 1, but to call it that. So if you go back, if you're as old as me, you remember when relational databases came out. And relational databases, oh, you've got this declarative language, and then you just tell the database what to do, and then it does it. And so why the heck would you need SAP in those days, Siebel or Salesforce or whatever?

That's ridiculous. There's nothing there. It's just an RDBMS wrapper. But of course, that turned out to be wrong. And when I look at the applications that are built on LLMs today, they themselves have many models.

I think Cursor's 14 models now, like fairly sophisticated models on top of that kind of foundation model. And so I don't think they're I think they're pretty sophisticated kind of models and applications and so forth. And those models have a lot of data and understand. If you're talking to super high end programmers all day about how to design their program, that's a lot of information into your system and into your model that nobody else has. And so that becomes, I think, part of the differentiation.

And then possession is nineten of the law and competing on software. So if you get the customer how much better is ChatGPT than Grok right now? If you were starting from scratch, it's kind of marginal. It's not like a massive differentiator, and it's not a network effect yet. Just the fact that you're using that 1, I'm used to it.

It's not even a complicated interface. You're just talking to it. But it doesn't matter. If that's what you're using, that's very likely what you're going to continue to use. And to get you off that, you need something dramatically better.

So you don't take out a competitor with an equally good product or a slightly better it's like a 10 times better product. If you take the market, I think that's probably the most obvious, most significant thing. And then, of course, with AI, if you take the market, you do get more data about your particular kind of user.

Yeah. I mean, seems like maybe the market's just gonna naturally evolve in phases. And and, you know, we're kind of in this, like, land grab phase where it just... The the most important feature is the it works feature. Right?

And then we'll get to the unique UX innovations and to all the collaboration network effects features over time.

When you have a new computer and you can solve problems that nobody could solve before, then that's pretty interesting, regardless if there's a network effect. I think in the network era, which is the internet era, the network effect thing became super powerful for a lot of things. And then it probably will again. But yeah, I think for right now, it'll be interesting to see with the rise of crypto is probably a money network for AI. So how does an agent pay another agent or get money?

Because it turns out AIs aren't allowed to apply for credit cards. So how does that work? And so does that become a crypto network? Then do you have network effects from value exchange and that kind of thing? I think that'll start to emerge and other ideas like that.

Yeah. Think on the phases too, it's so interesting to see how the backgrounds of founders changes so much because for all the folks that were around then, it was like, when the web 1st came out, literally had Stanford PhDs building Yahoo, like a directory of links. Because you had to write your own web server. You had to write your own infra... The whole thing.

And then there was no such thing as... Yeah. I mean, in those days, there was no application servers, no load balancers. No, it was very hard to scale software to that size. And nobody ever had built like the biggest piece of software, like the audience, was however many employees they had at IBM.

And so nobody thought about, Okay, I've to build something that 500,000,000 people are gonna use. That's right. That's

right. And then it took like 10 years to get to the LAMP stack and kind of non CS major, just coders, and then eventually Airbnb, the kind of design dominant, UX dominant people sort of building the most interesting applications. So you could maybe make the argument that all these AI apps will follow some kind of a similar trajectory where you have tons of PhD CS talent right now, and then maybe years before. I mean, it's very interesting, obviously, these days, I think the mainstream developers are actually able to build AI apps in a way that was not true 5 years ago.

Yeah. And when do things plateau is a big question. So right now, and so the language models are plateaued quite a bit in terms of just the pure LLM. And then the reinforcement learning side is scaling. So code is getting better, but the regular chatbot is not that different.

How many more AI breakthroughs will we get? Every time there's a breakthrough, that's an architectural change that'll change the entire application layer, the whole infrastructure layer. When will those plateaus happen? When will those breakthroughs occur? And that's kinda

how the opportunities line up. You could kinda make the argument that as the tech landscape has changed, like having social media, having podcasts and the whole thing, that's really changed the VC industry, and maybe landscape and the way that you reach founders is kind of very intertwined. And so in this next phase of everything that'll happen with AI and maybe people being able to build big companies with small teams and that kind of thing, how do you think this might affect venture as an asset class or as sort of just the VC industry as a whole?

Yeah. So it's funny because the VC industry kind of was the same from 1970 to 2008, 2009. We started in 2009. Kind of a little bit the way VCs were set up, they were kind of built not to change. And that's just kind of how it rolled.

And so companies got easier to build with the internet. That was the 1st big change. If you're talking about building Sun Microsystems or Tandem Computers and so forth, before you even sold Product 1, you needed to build manufacturing. You needed to build professional services. You needed a direct sales force and so forth.

That was a pretty complicated corporation to build. And then if you fast forward to Twitter, 5 people with laptops and AWS, very different. And then, okay, with AI, there's kind of the next step of that. So I think that it's almost certainly going to change the VC landscape again. In the old days, you could only do so many.

Every bet was very expensive. It's hard to do. They were very likely to fail and so forth. And then the hit rate, at least for the promising companies, went up. So that's a big change.

And then a big value in a VC is, Okay, you have company A and company B, and they have both the exact same idea and both really good teams, which 1 wins? It turns out that you're traveling as an entrepreneur through this complex adaptive system, path dependent system. And so whoever gets more momentum ends up winning. And so a big role of a VC is to help you get that momentum. Oh, I raised money from the best VC, therefore smart engineers will join my company and not their company.

So then I have better engineers and I have better product. Then I pick up more customers. And then I have more money and I get raised the next round faster and away I go. That's how you win. If there are just dramatically more companies or they don't need as much money or that kind of thing, then 'll be an interesting change.

But I think a lot of it is still a lot of the function of VC is going to be, how do you give momentum? And that's momentum in how do you help them build a higher quality company? How do you make that company more attractive to customers and employees and follow on investors and so forth? And that part will be the same, but I think everything underneath the feature set is gonna be different.

Well, we often encounter companies that are wildly profitable or doing very well, but they still wanna work with VCs for all the reasons that you're

Yeah, because you have to win. Building, the greatest thing is kind of having a great idea that makes the world a better place and doing something larger than yourself and building a team and building a company. If that works, there's nothing better than that. It's so awesome. But if it doesn't work, that's very high degree of misery.

It's just tough. You hired all the smartest people you know. You went out and raised money. Your mom invested in the company. She's pissed.

You know, like, it sucks. It really does. So you you know, anything to kinda help you succeed at that, I think, is always gonna be attractive.

So most of the speedrun companies here in October, they're gonna be doing their demo day in front of 1000 investors in San Francisco, and they're gonna be kind of speed dating a ton of angel investors and seed funds and all that. Do you have any tips and thoughts on how to evaluate, you know, who who who the best partner might be at at that seed stage?

The thing that you always don't have is you don't know how to do that CEO job. No founders we work with who haven't been CEOs of giant companies, know how to do that. And it turns out to be a really complicated skill set because you have to select the right talent. Sometimes you're selecting talent for jobs. Had never been a CFO.

I didn't know what the hell that was. What's a control structure? How do you talk to Wall Street? How would I know any of that? But you still have to hire that person, which I always likened to.

It's like hiring a Japanese interpreter if you don't know Japanese. It's like, they all sound good. And so you have that problem, and then everybody's got their own career ambitions. And then Mark Zuckerberg's offering your people 1000000000 dollars. So it's a really hard job, and you don't know how to do it.

A lot of the times, when I watch founders who fail at doing that job, it always comes down to a crisis in confidence. So you know you don't know what you're doing. You know it's hurting the company, but yet you still have to make decisions. Having the confidence to make that decision when you don't know what you're doing and you don't know if that decision is right, but not hesitating. And then when you hesitate, it makes the company nervous.

It slows everything down. It creates politics because people try and fill that void. So how do you do that? How do you get to the right confidence level where you can make high quality decisions on time? If there's an investor that can help you do that, that's invaluable.

So those are probably the 2 things I'd look for, somebody who can really give you momentum in hiring and getting to the next round and all that, and then somebody who you can work with who goes, wow, like this person not only knows what they're doing, but is helpful. By the way, every angel investor, every VC will give you advice, even if they motherfuckers who have never been CEO. I see telling people how to be CEO, and they give them these crazy ideas. You have to build a whole executive team right now. And it's like, what are we talking about?

That's an erect company. But they have great confidence with their advice. My favorite piece of advice I got is and I got it 27 times. They're like, look, here's the key. Hire A players.

And I was like, Okay. My plan was to hire a bunch of fucking morons, but now I'm gonna hire 8 players. So, like, that's not a... It's just like the the level of, like, not good insight, that's out there is high.

Well... And and and I really think it's it's part of a strength of the Bay Area tech ecosystem that over the last 20 years, you kinda went from... You know, like, lot of VCs, especially out in out in Europe and other places, are often really, like, former finance, folks, and that's really their background. They're often coming in from maybe private equity, and so then they decide, oh, I'm gonna also do some VC. And 1 of the big strengths, I think, of the Bay Area is that you end up working with a lot of former operators, and the whole industry has kind of moved towards that model of of of trying trying to mostly get investors that that have done Mostly.

Mostly. Not...

Maybe not. Not and different levels. There are levels to the game.

For you, how has a16z changed and evolved the biggest beats of evolution, and what are you most excited to build at the firm over the next decade? I know it's a long time, but...

Yeah, mean, so when we started, the idea was very simple, which was the VC product we thought was very good for investors, but not nearly as good for entrepreneurs in that The kind of model was, Okay, you get a very smart person on your board. Not much more than that. They had a network, but it was that person's network. A lot of them were very smart at product, but product advice runs out really in the 1st 3 months because when you're doing the initial kind of product. And then once you get past that, the knowledge gap between you who's been working on it all day, every day, and a person showing up at a board meeting, be it once a month or once 0.25 or whatever, is just so vast that it's hard to get good advice in that way.

I had thought of it as like, Okay, as a founder who had tried to build a company and build a company, what did I actually need? And I was like, well, I could use a whole lot more than that. And the biggest thing and I go back to it is just confidence. And so what would make you feel like a CEO? And so we did a lot of things.

How do you make somebody feel like it's well? What if you could call any senior executive who might buy your product at FedEx or Citibank or wherever? Could you do that? So we built a whole team to make it easy to do that. And then how could you know how to hire an executive?

And what was the process for doing that? And so we built a team to help with that. How do we introduce you to 5 great CFOs? And you can just sit down with them and say, Hey, what would you hire in this position? And why would you do that?

And how would you test for it in an interview? That kind of thing. And kind of skill you up so you knew how to do the job. So that was kind of like the 1st idea. And then as we got into it, 1 of the things, and Mark wrote about it in, I think, 2011, he said, software is going eat the world.

Our takeaway from that was, okay, if that's going to happen, then VC up until that point was this idea that there were 15 companies in a given year that would ever get to $100,000,000 in revenue. And the whole idea of the firm would be to kind of get into as many of those 15 as you could. But we're like, well, if software is going eat the world, that's not going to be 15, that's going be 150. And so how do you actually scale a VC firm without losing all the things that make it a VC firm very, very personal but can scale up? And so that was the verticalization idea.

So we're like, well, can we build a firm that's better than Andreessen Horowitz original in infra, in apps, in crypto, in bio, in games, in defense and public safety and that kind of thing. That was, I would say, quite the major change in the firm. And then the kind of thing that we've run into now is companies are getting very big as private companies. And there's a whole other layer of stuff that they need how to do. How do you go international efficiently?

Can we walk you into Japan and get you your 1st 3 deals? You use our brand and enable you to lever off that so that you can win. How do you add channels? Because you have to be kind of multi country, multi channel, multi product as you go. How do you do all that?

And what can we as a firm do to enable that kind of thing? So we're playing with a lot of those ideas and other things that'll hopefully make us better.

Well, I think we have maybe 25 minutes to do some audience questions.

Yeah. So I think the biggest thing that I have concluded that I'm feeling pretty sure about is AI kind of video and entertainment and so forth as a new medium. So there was kind of like plays, and then there was film, and then there's going to be AI film. And I think it'll be as different from film film was from plays. So in the beginning of the movie industry, they would just film plays.

And they'd fix camera, do the play, and we'll record it. And that was the idea. And then it obviously changed dramatically over the intervening decades. And I think that's going to happen. I think that's like in the beginning, it'll just be using AI to generate certain scenes in movies and this kind of thing and so forth.

But I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a whole new set of creators using the new medium to do things. It's interesting. If you think about it in the context of social media, social media is like storytelling where the main character is always you. So that carves out a lot of people who are either less comfortable or less narcissistic, however you want to say, who doesn't want to be the main character all over social media, that kind of is a constraint. With AI, you can have characters that aren't you and be telling stories.

So it's a new storytelling medium is the way I would think about it. And so I think it's a mistake to try and just completely replicate the movie experience or the TV experience or that kind of thing and kind of move it. And it may start off being more interesting in podcasts and how do you jazz up podcasts or whatever. But I don't know exactly, but the 1 thing I'm pretty sure about that I don't think we really covered in that podcast was, this is a new thing. This isn't the same.

This isn't just generating the old thing automatically. This is a new thing. I think a lot of it for me, it was always like, can you bring the focus back to what you can do? Because the thing that overwhelms you is what you can't do and all the problems and everything. When I think about the decisions I made as CEO, the ones that I'm most proud of and would have cost us most weren't actually difficult decisions.

They were just difficult to make. And that was a psychological thing. So for example, when we went public, we went public on $2,000,000 in trailing 12 months revenue, dollars 2,000,000 IPO. Like dollars 2,000,000 going to $75 that was the forecast. That's clearly a bad idea.

And we were only 18 months old. 18 months from founding, dollars 2,000,000 trailing revenue, like We went public. The other choice and we had gone through we talked to literally every investor in the private markets was bankruptcy. So that was obviously a worse choice than going public. To be able to do such a bad choice like going public and not hesitate, just go, Okay, I'm going to do it, that was the magic of that decision.

By the way, I saw so many of I can't tell you how many companies went bankrupt at that point because they didn't go do that. A lot of it is like, Okay, just do the thing you can do. And it may look horrible, but you got to trust your eyes. You have to go do it and not hesitate. And I see this is where people really get into trouble with their psychology.

So they'll be like, Oh my God, I kind of know that we need to rearchitect the product, but that's going to make it very hard to raise money. We're going to miss our numbers. We're going to not have any features and this and that. But I know we're wrecked if we don't. So then they hesitate, and then they're going to be wrecked.

And so it's like all these really or something simple like, I really need to fire the head of sales, but I don't even want to have that conversation, so I'm going look this way. And that's running at the problem like, yeah, it's going to be bad. You're not going to have a head sales. You may whiff the 0.25. There's going to be nobody to blame but you, blah, blah, blah, blah.

All that is true, but it's not as bad as leaving that motherfucking place. So you got to go do it. And so I always came back to that, that what can I do? And I better do that right now. And that's a lot how you work your way through those very bad.

And the worst thing is you think about what are all the implications of it? It doesn't matter. It's like, is that the best choice I have? If that's it, I'm doing it. I think about all the things that are going to happen to me when I went public and they all did happen to me, by the way I would have just shot myself in the head.

That was a bad time. When you're a CEO, when you're a founder, you're the boss. So you do have to keep that in mind. So I do think that nobody's going to train you to be a CEO. There is no training for that.

And actually, the reason I wrote the book the way I did was it does tend to be very situation specific. I spent a lot of time on, like, this was my situation. And the reason for that was so that people could go, Okay, if you're there, then you do this, as opposed to here's the 5 steps for being a CEO. There are no 5 steps. I think that what you look for in a mentor is not it's not really instruction.

It's like somebody to have a conversation with who knows what they're talking about. When I talk to CEOs, I'm just like, okay, what's on your mind? What do you work on? That kind of thing. We get to something that they're stuck on.

And then the good thing is I've made all those mistakes before. So I can Okay, this is how it went. As an example, I had CEO, and he said, Well, I need your help on this. How would you think about this? My CTO is an asshole.

And I said, Okay. And there's a lot of ways you could react to that. You could imagine how many advisors react to that. And I said, Well, you're not asking me if you should fire him because he's a good CTO. Everything I've heard from you is he's executing way better than everybody you've had before.

He's like, yeah, yeah, I'm not going to fire him. So I said, you're, you're really asking me, how do you talk to him? And he goes, yep. And I said, well, because you don't want to lose him. So you don't want to like, say something is piss him off.

You're not going to fire him, but you don't want him to be an asshole. So how do you deal with that? And I said, well, tell me why he's an asshole. And he says, well, the other day, he was talking to a young woman in finance, and he made her cry. And I was like, Okay, that's kind of asshole ish.

And I said, look, here's the way I would have the conversation if I was you. I'd just sit him down. I would say, look, you're a great director of engineering, Amazing. Ship products on time and so forth. But you're not really effective as a CTO.

And at some point, I'm going to have to hire somebody who is an effective CTO until you can do that. By that, I mean, you can't just work with your own people effectively. You have to work with other functions. You've got to orchestrate the company to get the technology part of the company what they need. And if you go into a meeting and make a little kid cry, you're never getting what you want out of her or her boss or her boss's boss.

That's just totally ineffective. So if you want, we can work on helping you get more effective, or that's going to happen 1 day. And so that's the kind of conversation I know it's a lot of detail. But you kind of want somebody who can have a conversation like that where you can go, Okay, that's actually some functional advice that makes sense that I can use as opposed to just no asshole rule or some dumbass shit that they fucking heard at Harvard Business School. It's very situational.

Everything is situational. Everything is your company, your product, your people. How do they work? Can you get to that? And so I would like to just people who you know who you can talk to about that.

They could be a peer. It doesn't have to be like an old person like me. It could be like somebody who's just 1 step ahead of you. Yeah. So everything's so easy now compared to when I was building LoudCloud.

Pushing the company forward gets harder in some ways because you have a lot of people who've been there a long time who did a good job, a great job at 1 time, but maybe we're in a new era that's past their skill set. Venture capital is very like that. We don't invest in any consumer internet companies anymore, like mobile apps or SaaS companies. There's a whole category of experts that we've had in the firm that that expertise is no longer relevant. If they don't become world class experts in something else, that's a problem.

Whole way we did marketing originally, that doesn't really work well for most companies. And it definitely can't work for us because we're too big. Nobody's writing a puff piece about Andreessen Horowitz. Rupert Murdoch could be easier to get a puff piece than we could. It's that kind of thing.

And so that's not going to work. So how do we market? And that turns out to be a whole new skill set and going direct and building a massive podcast network and presence and so forth. And so making those changes and just going, look, you did a great job, but now we've got to go this way is probably the thing that I enjoy the least. But you've got to do it.

Too many times, I think people look at what the technology is as opposed to what it's going to be. That's tricky because sometimes you can extrapolate things that shouldn't be extrapolated. So a big example of that is when we looked at 3 d printers, everybody was like, oh my god, this is the future. You're going be able to print anything. But it turned out 3 d printers don't follow Moore's law.

So more compute power didn't make them better. You had to get into really complicated material science, which doesn't follow that trajectory. So actually, 3 d printers weren't going to change that fast or that much. So it was a little harder to build a new company that was going be giant in them. People looked at AI, and they're like, oh, well, fine, but it hallucinates on this and that.

And we're like, yeah, that's not that tough a problem to deal with. And sometimes the hallucinations are good. If you go, Okay, these things that seem like a problem aren't really a problem. Or with a smartphone, it's like, well, this thing, great. It's a bad phone.

If you look at the 2,007 reviews of the iPhone, it's a bad phone. It's a way worse computer than normal computer. The keyboard is much worse than a BlackBerry. And you can go through all the things it was bad at. There was a camera and a GPS in your pocket.

So you can't build Uber on a PC even now. So you only need 1 feature or 1 thing that kind of makes a breakthrough and creates a new future. It just has to be unbelievable at something. It doesn't have to be better than the last thing at everything. And so a lot of times when we think about it and we think about entrepreneurs, what I always say is we're not looking for lack of weakness.

There's something wrong with every entrepreneur, including all of you, including me. There's something horribly wrong. But that's not the question. The question is, are they world class at a thing? Are they the best in the world at something?

Do they have a secret that nobody else has? Do they have something really special? So you're always looking for what's really special? What's the magnitude of the strength? Not is there something wrong with them?

And I think the future is a lot like that. How strong is the strength? How different is this technology? Oh, we now have a computer that you can talk to in English? That's kind of important.

That's a hell of a thing. Any parting words of wisdom in many of the year 1 projects here?

I would just say this. Congratulations on betting on yourself because that's what this is all about. Your job is to make your bet pay off. So you believed in yourself enough to do it. There are going to be many times when you question that bet and you question that belief, but that gets you nothing.

Don't worry about it. It's a nothing. You just gotta do your thing and keep going and focus on what you can do and not worry about... The doubts are gonna be there. Ignore the doubts.

And the worst doubts aren't the ones people put on you, it's the ones that you put on yourself. Every entrepreneur has them. Like, there's nobody... I spent a lot of time with Mark Zuckerberg when he was like 22 years old and like he had tremendous doubt about whether he was going to make it. So that's not everybody has that.

It's not what you feel. It's like what you do. And so just focus on what you do. Like you're gonna feel scared. If your guts aren't boiling, you're not even trying at this thing.

Don't worry about it. Alright. What about you, Dan?

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