Ben Horowitz

So you have a great invention.

You may have built a great technology, but you don't have kind of the power to call anybody.

You don't have the power to kind of get the right meeting necessarily with the right people in Congress to kind of help get the regulation correct.

you know, you don't have the power to get an audience with the right CEO to buy your product and that kind of thing.

So power is sort of a feature of our offering is the way I think about it.

And that's very different than the culture that we want to have and want to project internally.

And as you know, kind of our

very first kind of cultural idea is first-class business and only in a first-class way.

And what that means when it comes to entrepreneurs is the ultimate respect for what they're doing.

You know, it doesn't mean we're always their best friend or anything like that, but we...

We show up on time.

We get back to them in a timely fashion.

We're honest.

We do all the little things to make sure that our overall behavior isn't we're the powerful and you're the weak because, you know, that obviously would be a short ride for our firm at the top.

Yeah, so this is something that we've seen coming for a long time and that we kind of prepared for.

So if you go back to when we started the firm, there was a study that was done that showed that in any given year, there were basically approximately 15 companies that would be started that would ever achieve $100 million a year in revenue.

And so the whole idea of venture capital was that you had to get in as many of those 15 as possible, and you really didn't want to be in anything that wasn't one of those.

And so the way venture capital firms were constructed were as these partnerships in both economics and control that were small, because, you know, why have...

you know, 100 or 500 or 600 people like we do now, if you're only going after 15 companies, it doesn't make sense.

But what we saw back then was, well, even though that had been true for decades, it wasn't going to be true anymore because, as Mark wrote, my partner, your partner, software is eating the world.