Ben Horowitz

So the big era of networking kind of started with the internet.

And then people thought the internet itself was just like a unique network.

And it was weird, it was different because nobody, like people got value from things built on the internet, but the internet was not owned by anybody.

It was like the kind of first real decentralized network.

And so people didn't know what to make of kind of networks that like, I mean, Facebook early on had, you know, there weren't like a ton of people giving them money for the first round.

That's why Peter Thiel was able to do it at a really good price.

And then, you know, kind of the same thing with Twitter and so forth.

Like people just didn't know anything.

that basically how invincible those things got when you kind of got them up to strength.

So the bigger, you know, it's basically like an N squared value.

So every node you add kind of increases the value by, you know, kind of N squared.

So like if you have five people on the network, you know, that's 25.

But if you have six, that's 36 and so forth.

And the value, you know, if you get up to internet size, it's just invincible.

Like nobody's going to ever build a rival to the internet or very unlikely.

And so, you know, at that point, you know, us being involved in the internet and Twitter and Facebook and so forth, we had like a really good understanding of that.

And so, you know, we always thought of the firm as a network.

And so, you know, from the very beginning, we thought, okay, the more relationships that we have, the stronger our network effect.

And so we ended up doing things that other firms didn't do, like we –

try to build relationships with like every engineer in Silicon Valley and, you know, every executive and every everything.