Ben Horowitz

very memorable and intriguing pitches.

Well, one of the most memorable was actually Databricks because it was so bad.

So the pitch was Jan Stojka, who is a professor at Berkeley, presented the company.

And the slides he made, it was like going to a computer science lecture that you couldn't understand in college.

That's what the Databricks pitch felt like.

It was memorable because of that, and then it was memorable because of what it turned into.

Well, the whole reason I had him come into pitch is because Scott Shanker, who was another professor at Berkeley who I knew, had called me and said, Ben, I have the best distributed systems guy that we've seen in the last 10 years in academia.

His name is Matej Zaharias.

You know, do you want to meet him?

And I knew as soon as he said that to me, I was going to invest in the company.

But that pitch kind of scared my partners.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yes, it's funny.

So the question is about Cluley and, you know, what do I think about it now in terms of momentum and this and that and the other.

Look, I think that...

An easier way to think about it is we invest in founders.

And, you know, you want founders who are original thinkers and have kind of breakthrough thinking on whatever it is they're working on.

And I think those guys, you know, had a bunch of breakthrough ideas, including marketing.

Like, I think, you know, they...

or kind of marketing geniuses in a sense, and that, like, you know about them.