In this thought-provoking debut episode of Turpentine VC, Erik sat down with Ben Horowitz, Co-Founder of Andreessen Horowitz, to explore the evolving landscape of venture capital, leadership, and the future of innovation. Ben shares his insights on navigating market cycles, building resilient companies, and the role of culture in long-term success. This conversation, recorded live at a16z’s Menlo Park offices in 2023, is packed with practical wisdom and candid stories from one of Silicon Valley’s most influential investors.
Full Episode
Today, we're excited to share an episode of Turpentine VC, a podcast about the art and science of building venture capital firms hosted by Eric Tornberg. Guests on the show include Vinod Khosla, Alfred Lin, Sarah Tavel, Mike Maples, and more top GPs of the world's top venture firms.
Unlike other shows in the space, Turpentine VC digs into the nuts and bolts of firm building, covering fund construction, governance, talent, strategy, and decision-making. Up ahead is Eric's interview with Ben Horowitz, general partner and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz.
Ben, we're just talking off camera. There's some firms that are great for 10 years and then struggle. There's some firms that are great for 30 years, multi-decades. What separates the firms who could do that and what enables them to be great?
Yeah, I think it's a combination of kind of the lasting parts like the culture and then the parts that change like the leadership. And so I think that, you know, if you just have a couple of smart investors but no culture to speak of, then you're probably not going to do a great generational handoff. And, you know, that's probably 10 years. Is it kind of 10 years is a...
pretty good run for investors, you know, like maybe you stretch that out. Then, you know, if you can transition it, like, you know, Sequoia transitioned it from Don Valentine to, you know, Mike Moritz and Doug Leone and Jim Goetz. And that worked, you know, that transition worked well.
So they were able to kind of take the original culture and build on it and kind of grow it, you know, 20 years for the original guys, 20 years for the successors and that kind of thing. So yeah, That goes pretty well. You guys are no spring chickens. You're almost 15 years. Yeah. How do you think about it for your firm?
Yeah, so we're a little different in that we are organized in such a way where it's not like Mark and I can have very significant contributions without picking the investments. Because we have, I would just say, more scale and more job functions at Andreessen Horowitz because we're kind of... a product first and then a team of investors second, whereas every other firm I think is the opposite.
Product meaning the product to entrepreneurs. So like what are we offering is where we start. And then the team of investors is kind of goes with that as opposed to we're a team of investors and then like we'll figure out what our product is as we go. So it's very kind of different orientation.
I've always thought of Y Combinator as another example of a product firm in the sense that you could replace a lot of the investors they have over time, and yet it still seems to work to some degree. I think that's right. I think they're probably the closest analog to us kind of spiritually.
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