David George

We get to sit and spend time with the entrepreneurs who are building the most interesting companies in the world right now.

We get to learn about the most cutting edge technology stuff that if you were in the public markets or just in a job, you would never get a chance to learn about.

So I love to learn and I love to be around great founders as they're exploring really interesting things.

So that part of it is really, really attractive.

There's another part that plays to a totally different side of me, which is this business is a scoreboard business.

And I convey this to our team all the time.

There's a scoreboard in this business and our expectation is that we win.

Now it's a very long dated scoreboard, especially in the venture side, but on the growth side even.

It's a pretty long dated scoreboard.

But at the end of the day, we have to put up returns.

Our customers are founders and are LPs.

And on the founder side, we need to make sure we do a great job with them.

And there's a virtuous flywheel if we do.

On the LP side, it's pretty simple.

Are we doing a good job generating returns?

A16Z, we're known as running ourselves a little bit differently as a firm.

Mark and Ben really drive that.

We do things like Ben runs every new employee onboarding and he runs through our culture document.

When you sign an offer letter at our firm, you sign your offer letter, but you also have to sign our culture document, which lays out our cultural principles.

I also created a subset of principles that I wanted to convey for our growth fund.