Ben Horowitz

And that, and then every corporation that bought technology and so forth.

And we were in our minds creating kind of this network effect that would just make us the best place to raise money from because we were like an automatic, you could tap into that network and become extremely powerful, like right off the rip.

And, you know, I think a lot of people,

didn't understand, like, how hard that was to do, and then the bootstrapping of any network is always the most difficult thing.

So, like, yes, if you have a network with a billion people on it, it's going to be very valuable, but, like...

You know, how did Alexander Graham Bell sell the first telephone when there was nobody to talk to?

Like that part is actually really hard.

And so figuring that out and how to bootstrap the network effect, you know, kind of coming from behind in venture capital was the idea.

That's getting more important, by the way.

Exactly.

Well, the really simple idea was we knew like venture capitalists made a lot of money, right?

So they would take the fee money and then they pay themselves big salaries.

And so we were like, well, what if we didn't pay ourselves anything?

And we just took all the money and we basically spent it on building this network.

So we would hire people to like bring people in.

We, you know, with our kind of

How do you get relationships with every big corporation, FedEx and this and that and the other?

And the trick that we had there was we had sold the previous company to Hewlett Packard.

And so we knew the people in their enterprise briefing center.

And so we would call them every week and say, who's coming to the briefing center this week?