Ben Horowitz

And we really thought that was going to change because, look, at that time, we thought software was going to eat the world.

And every company that was going to be interesting, every new company was going to be a technology company.

And therefore, there were going to be more like 200 companies a year that would hit that bar, not 15.

And so we decided, you know, one of the things that I did as kind of the CEO of the operation,

was to say, okay, how do you scale this?

Because venture capital firms kind of notoriously didn't scale because they didn't have to.

It was, I remember Dave Swenson, who is the most famous LP, said, yeah, a good venture capital firm is like the size of a basketball team, you know, five guys and then a six man or something like that.

And that was not going to be enough to scale.

have a great product for entrepreneurs and then also invest in such a large number of companies.

And so to get to scale, there was a couple of ideas that we had that sound very, very simple, but ended up being important.

The first was normally in venture capital, it's a partnership and the partners share economics and control.

And the problem with that idea, and you experienced this in your career at other venture capital firms, is

If you share control, then it becomes very, very difficult to change the organization because everybody's got to agree.

And if you know anything about running an organization, the one thing about a reorg is some people are going to hate it because it's a redistribution of power.

And it's not necessarily the people who aren't good.

It's just like some people are just going to hate it because nobody likes to lose power.

And if people get a vote, then there's no way to effectively reorg a business.

And so our idea was like, you can't share control.

We'll share economics, but we'll centralize control.

And that ended up enabling us to reorganize and enabling us to get into many more kind of categories like American dynamism or crypto or bio or these kinds of things because we could change the organization and scale it and so forth.