Ben Horowitz

America does give everybody a chance, and entrepreneurs can really count on that.

Everybody's in the same game, but the rules of the game have changed.

Yeah, so it's interesting.

My old mentor, Andy Grove, said to me, he said, Ben, when you're a leader in an industry, then the whole industry, the size of it, the ethics of it, the morality of it kind of depends on you.

And I remember thinking when he said that to me, he was running Intel at the time.

I thought, wow, I'm glad I'm never going to be the leader of an industry because that's a lot of responsibility.

But here I am, here we are.

And I think for us, you have to take a step back and say, okay, for the technology industry, and particularly for kind of new technology companies, what does it need to be?

And you have to think about it on a large scale.

And the way we've been thinking about it is, well, if you go all the way back to humanity, like what's important for humanity?

What advances humanity?

And it really kind of comes down to, do people have a chance to contribute?

Because when people have a chance to contribute, then they can have an impact and then they can kind of advance the state of things for everybody.

And there's really been no country in the world that comes close to America at giving people a shot, giving them a chance to succeed.

And it's not

a completely equal chance, some people are born rich, some people are born poor, some people have better genetics, some people live in dysfunctional families and so forth, but a chance.

And most countries, people don't have a chance, or they have a very small chance, a very slim chance.

And so that ends up being really important.

And then if you think about why does America have the influence it has today from a military standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from a cultural standpoint, it comes back to, well, we won the Industrial Revolution.

And we did that because we had superior technology.