Ben Horowitz

And can we get their numbers?

And we would call those companies and we would have them come to our briefing center.

And we'd just show them all the startups.

So it would be like, you know, and we'd have everything they like, all the donuts and all that stuff, you know.

So it was like very un-venture capital-like.

But, you know, the corporations loved it.

So all of a sudden, we knew more big companies than VCs who had been around 50 years because we had this hack.

through the HP Enterprise Briefing Center.

Yeah, well, it was funny because...

And every time we'd meet with our investors, our LPs, they would say, every time we meet with another venture capital firm, all they want to do is talk about you and say mean things.

And I'm like, well, that's fantastic.

That's great.

They used to call us AHO.

That was their nickname, the other VCs.

You know, they hated us.

Some of it was my fault, though.

Because when we started, I was coming from enterprise software, which was like a very competitive, bare-knuckle kind of... There's no such thing as coopetition in enterprise software.

It's just like kill or be killed.

So I did a...

I did it, like, I wrote this blog post called Four Things That VCs Do That I Don't Like, where I just, like, attacked them all.