Ben Horowitz
349 statements across 81 episodes · 109 bullish · 98 bearish · 9 people on the record · first statement Jul 15, 2017 by Ben Horowitz · said 154 times in 72 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Ben Horowitz's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Marc Andreessen (25), Martin Casado (8), Scott Cooper (7), Margit Wennmachers (6), Brian Koppelman (6), Alex Rampell (6), Sonal Chokshi (5), J.D. Vance (4)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 26 mentions in 10 episodes 3 per episode
- Marc Andreessen's 2026 Outlook: AI Timelines, US vs. China, and The Price of AI
- Inside The Life of Silicon Valley's First Athlete Investor | Magic Johnson
- How AI Changes the Economics of Innovation
- The AI Opportunity that goes beyond Models
- The State of AI: Models, Moats, and the Consumer Renaissance
- The Opportunity for Global Founders
- How Whatnot's Live Shopping Beats Traditional E-Commerce
- How Decagon Runs 90% of Its Agents on Open-Source Models
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2026 →
2025 36 mentions in 18 episodes 2 per episode
- Marc Andreessen Reveals His Biggest Wins and Mistakes at a16z
- JD Vance on the Future of America
- Why Creativity Will Matter More Than Code | Kevin Rose and Anish Acharya
- The Person Who Runs HR For 2 Million Federal Workers
- The Little Tech Agenda for AI
- Sovereign AI: Why Nations Are Building Their Own Models
- The Unicorn Founder Who Delegated Everything.
- Robinhood CEO: Making Everyone An Owner
- 10 more episodes that year, every mention in 2025 →
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2023 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
2020 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 64 mentions in 32 episodes 2 per episode
- a16z Podcast | For the Billions of Creatives Out There
- a16z Podcast | Creating a Category, from Pricing to Positioning
- a16z Podcast | Startups and Pendulum Swings Through Ideas, Time, Fame, and Money
- a16z Podcast | Investing in (Business and Career) Change
- a16z Podcast | What Makes the Valley Work
- a16z Podcast | Managing Uncertainty -- Layoffs and Talent
- a16z Podcast | The Best Way To Be Smart ... Is To Not Be Stupid
- a16z Podcast | Raising Money and Valuing Startups -- What Happens When Things Don't Go As Planned?
- 24 more episodes that year, every mention in 2019 →
2018 16 mentions in 4 episodes 4 per episode
2017 4 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
Everything said about Ben Horowitz, oldest first
Jul 15, 2017 positive
Horowitz: Follow your contribution, not your passion
“What you take out of the world over time, be it, you know, whatever money, cars, stuff, accolades, is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be follow your contribution. Find the thing that you're great at, put tha…”
Jul 15, 2017
Jul 16, 2017
Jul 16, 2017
Horowitz: Unmanaged corporate culture spontaneously degenerates into toxic behavior
“If you don't make that explicit, it will just create itself. It'll just grow that way. It'll just do those things. People want to harass each other, they'll harass each other. You know, people want to lie to customers, they'll lie to customers. Unless you set …”
Jul 16, 2017
Jul 16, 2017 neutral
Jul 16, 2017 neutral
Jul 16, 2017
Jul 16, 2017 positive
Jul 16, 2017 negative
Jul 29, 2017
Horowitz: Stacking Multiple Skills Is Easier Than Being World-Best at One
“So, like, if you can put skills together, that's also a big thing. Like, it's really hard to be LeBron James. That's really hard. Like, you have to be the best basketball player in the world. Like, that's super tough. It's a lot easier to be me.”
Jul 29, 2017
Jul 29, 2017 negative
Jul 29, 2017 positive
Horowitz: Candidates With Both CS and Biology Skills Will Easily Find Jobs
“Having those two skill sets makes you, like, There's, you will have no problem getting started in the industry just because there are very few people who have both vocabularies and the kind of opportunities in it are so big, so I, like, I don't think you can m…”
Jul 29, 2017 bullish
Horowitz: Grid Battery Storage Can Yield 20x Energy and Emission Savings
“Battery technology is probably the most exciting thing going on, and if, you know, if I were to say, okay, why am I confident that we're not going to melt the earth probably the biggest thing is, You know, if we could just have batteries like in power grids an…”
Jul 29, 2017 neutral
Horowitz: Over-engineering early career trajectories hinders long-term success
“The people who I knew kind of over-engineered their future at this point tended not to have the most success, because you just can't ever know enough to do it, so there's a lot to be said by kind of figuring out what you're good at and Trying to just make a co…”
Jul 29, 2017
Jul 29, 2017 negative
Horowitz: Proprietary Deep Learning Breakthroughs Are Hard Due to Open-Source AI
“So everything out of academia is going into open source and then everything out of Google is being open sourced, and Facebook, and so forth. So it's really hard To do a proprietary breakthrough, like, you know, in, like, ok, I've got something that's, whatever…”
Jul 29, 2017 negative
Jul 29, 2017 bearish
Horowitz: First-Wave Clean Tech VC Failed Due to Distribution Bottlenecks
“There were two big mistakes by the clean tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists of the last era. One was there was a lot of investment in fuels, alternative fuels to oil. And the challenge with that is, one, only one was going to work, and then distributio…”
Jul 29, 2017
Horowitz: CEOs must prioritize decision speed, while investors prioritize quality
“As CEO, you kind of, like, your output is the speed and quality of decisions, and speed is actually more important than quality in a lot of ways, because you have to keep it moving. You've got to keep the company going, because if you wait on a decision, every…”
Jul 29, 2017 bullish
Aug 14, 2018 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Great recruiters rarely make great heads of HR
“Recruiters from a personality standpoint, to be a world-class recruiter, you have to be kind of a world-class salesperson, and generally, world-class salespeople tend to have a fairly self-centric view of the world, like that's what makes them good and, you kn…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Founders always believe their startups are inclusive, despite evidence otherwise
“One of the things that I think nobody ever believes that their company is not inclusive. Like, I've never spoken to a founder. Oh, no, you know, we're exclusive. We don't let anybody in who's a woman. Like, that never actually gets said, and nobody ever thinks…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Pronounced early startup culture can undermine later diversity efforts
“Oftentimes if you have a super pronounced culture and you all live in a house together and kind of have a unique style that, that can undermine your diversity efforts and can, and you can create an environment that doesn't feel inclusive to somebody who either…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Corporate innovation fails when original founders leave
“I think that people often think of big companies can't innovate, little companies can, but the real truth is new companies can innovate, and companies that are so old that the original inventors are gone have a lot of trouble doing it.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Andreessen recommends 'Lean Startup', 'Hard Thing About Hard Things', 'Zero to One'
“The Lean Startup book by Eric Reese is very, very good and that book should be read front to back. Second is, ah, Ben Horowitz's book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, I can't recommend too highly. And the third is Peter Thiel just wrote a book called Zero to…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Horowitz calls Mason's progressive equity concept ingenious
“This is one of these things where I get, ah, kind of emails all the time about new kinds of employee incentive plans and so forth, and like how the old ways of incenting people will never work, and there's a great better way, and usually they're just chock ful…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Low equity caps undermine recruiting against tech giants
“If you set it too low, then It's going to hurt your executive recruiting because, you know, with Google offering people like a hundred million dollars to stay at Google you know, if you're offering, if you say, okay, the threshold is ten million bucks, then ar…”
Jan 2, 2019
Andreessen: Nicira scrapped its OpenFlow tech immediately after a16z investment
“So we funded this here at NetWeQ's networking lab, and it was the OpenFlow. OpenFlow was the sort of protocol was the approach and Martine had, had, had been one of the main people doing that. And so they start in Asira, and we're all excited, because we're li…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz told Andreessen he could fire him without a formal conversation
“I'd say to Mark was on my board. I'd say, Mark, look, if you need to fire me, You don't even have to sit me down and tell me I'm fired. You just, like, tap me on the shoulder and, like, we don't have the conversation. Like, I'm done. If you think I'm not the b…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: People become passionate about work because they excel at it
“People who are super successful go, yeah, I'm totally passionate about my work, but it didn't start that way, right? They, they're passionate because they're successful. Like, they're great at it. They love doing it, you know, like, if they sucked at it, they …”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Leadership flaws get magnified across teams, requiring self-work for retention
“You kind of get the environment that you create. You get the people who will behave the way you do. And so, like, your flaws get magnified in a really horrifying way if you don't work on them. So, like, I think one of the most important things to get loyalty i…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: CEOs are paid to make unpopular decisions, not build consensus
“If, as a leader, everybody likes what you do, you're not, you're a politician. Like, you're running for president at that point. You get paid to make the decision that's unpopular, right? Like, if everybody knows the direction the organization should go in, th…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Management books are written almost entirely for peacetime environments
“Management books are written almost entirely from the perspective of peacetime, and so that, that was the thing that I was trying to get out. They're designed to make it look simple, and so then a lot of the things stylistically that come out of it, like one o…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Stanford and Berkeley grads often lack veterans' sense of purpose
“And a lot of people come out of Stanford or, you know Berkeley Computer Center don't understand what that means and don't understand what it means to do something bigger than yourself. But if somebody's been in the Marines or, you know, and decided to do that,…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Wartime CEOs must prioritize strict discipline over employee feelings
“It does get down to, look, there are times when you need so much precision that, like, if you're gonna lose somebody in the whatever war for talent because they got their feelings hurt, well, that's just gonna be how it's gotta be, because you need to Teach th…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: All-hands speeches fail; object lessons drive real behavioral change
“Speeches don't do anything, but like an object lesson like that, cut his head off. They're like, okay, like everybody learned that, and nobody's ever going to forget it. You give an all-hand speech, nobody's going to remember it tomorrow”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Horowitz: Okta won identity management by switching to top-down sales
“And so they ended up, although they started out with an inside motion, more of a bottoms up motion being much more of a top down motion generally as it went on. And that channel strategy actually is, I think in retrospect, what won them the market against the …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Eliminating sales commissions creates adverse selection for sales hiring
“If you go in and say, well, my philosophy is that you as a salesperson can't have commissions because other people don't, then if I'm the very best, best of the best salespeople and I can make a million dollars by delivering real value to the company at Compan…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Horowitz: Pre-2000s accounting laws forced 90-day startup option windows
“And the then accounting laws basically said that if you gave an employee more than, you know, a very short window to exercise, you would potentially create a very large accounting charge, which would make it impossible for the company to ever go public or be a…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: I lost my own startup options due to the 90-day rule
“Look, I have been an employee at a startup. I've lost options. Over the 90 day exercise window that I can afford, you know, like, you know, really can afford it. I got, you know, three kids and 26 years old and all that kind of thing. So I understand the issue…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Horowitz: The tech industry needs four or five standard equity compensation models
“So, you know, it really probably needs to not be one size fits all. I think that if every company had a different scheme, You do get into a weird thing for potential employees and recruiting, so I think we might do a disservice to the industry by doing that, b…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Startup failure is usually the founder's fault, not the employee's
“If we're just talking pure compensation, then I think cash is actually a better vehicle than stock, because one, like, stock is variant, and you may not get paid not because you can't invest, but because the thing goes to zero. And is that really your fault as…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Horowitz: Vertical SaaS in traditional industries is now venture-scale
“And then beyond that, you, now it becomes economical and very interesting to build vertical applications for industries. So to build an application that revolutionizes, say, the real estate industry or something like that, Or the construction industry is becom…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: CEOs cannot seek external validation for high-risk pivots
“The truth of this kind of decision is, you know, you make this one all alone because you're the only one in the position to synthesize the knowledge. And so if you ask somebody, should I take like a crazy risk and decommit everything I've committed to this poi…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Startup pivots fail due to lack of courage, not analysis
“The decision isn't actually that hard. It's the courage to actually make the decision that's nearly impossible and why nobody ever does it, because you're basically, if you continue going on your current route, you know, particularly if the company has got som…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Horowitz: Management and culture save startups when product falls short
“In Silicon Valley, there's this thing, all that matters is product. Whoever's the best product wins, and this and that and the other. If you're short on product and you, it's going to take you some time to get there, the thing that actually can make the compan…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: 1990s startups failed by expanding sales without product-market fit
“That's, you know, the kind of, the big mistake in the nineties was, All of us would go like, oh, we've got something that people want to buy, like, let's build a gigantic sales force and just blow it out, and then a lot of people didn't quite have the total pr…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Startup budgeting should be structured like a two-pass compiler
“Budgeting is very much like a two pass compile. So what you want to do is have like a very constrained Thing with, like, the goals that you want, and run everybody through it, and then, like, see how much they burst into tears, and like, where their problems r…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Horowitz: Multi-business expansion should only happen after the core business is profitable
“What Amazon is doing, I think, is a lot the right approach, which is, you get, you have one business. And you get it working, and it generates money, and then it can generate enough money for you to add another business, but you don't, like, have one business,…”
Jan 2, 2019 neutral
Horowitz: Startups should prioritize cash flow break-even over profit margins
“You can't over focus on margin, and that's why we talk a lot about like cash flow break even as a big thing, just because it means you don't have to raise money, but margin against incremental revenue is more complicated.”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: CEOs must formally re-articulate company strategy at least quarterly
“And what most CEOs do is they never actually kind of fully articulate out the updated strategy. So a very important discipline is to at least once a quarter just take whatever your old strategy is and re-articulate it with all the new things that you've added …”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Delaying CFO hiring during rapid revenue or headcount growth is dangerous
“I think as soon as you start spending significant money or getting, like, significant revenue, it's, gets to be dangerous not to have a CFO. So, like, if you're increasing headcount at any kind of, like, fast rate, or if you're generating revenue, particularly…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Growth planning should start from operational limits, not top-down targets
“If I had to go back and play it again, I would have thought more when I planned growth, starting with, well, what are the limits of my ability to operate this company, and keep communication where it needs to be, and know what people are doing, and so forth.”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Show CEOs the math of their plans instead of arguing
“What happens with most finance people is they back down at that point because they're like, well, fuck, he does know more than I do, even if he's wrong. Whereas going, okay, like, let's just draw out, like, here's all the things you want to do. Like, this is w…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Operating company executives must prioritize decision speed over decision quality
“So running a company, you try to be more structured in how you do this in some ways in that speed is really important. So if you're running a company, you're kind of, your output is decisions and you rate it on quality and speed. And if you have to make the tr…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Horowitz: Tech approval ratings reach 80 percent, dwarfing Congress and media
“So if you look at approval ratings of tech. They're incredibly high. Like they're the highest of any industry and like Amazon's approval raising, which is one of the biggest targets is like 80. Whereas Congress is like 20 and the press is like 20.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: The threat of AI superintelligence taking over is highly overblown
“Of the really scary things in technology, I would have that one pretty low on my list. I mean, I think that one, like, I think it's a little bit of a miss, you know, intelligence is a funny word, right? Like what is intelligence? And it's not one dimensional. …”
Jan 2, 2019
Ben Horowitz: Finding 'side doors' to VCs is an essential founder skill
“Venture capital works very much like that in that you hear people complain a lot, well, I don't know any VCs, so I can't get my company funded. Well, if you're going to be an entrepreneur and build a company, you know, Scrape and get customers and figure out h…”
Jan 2, 2019 positive
Horowitz: Hiring for strengths rather than lack of weakness builds great teams
“You hire for the strength, not the lack of weakness. And very few people do that, but it's a huge advantage if you can, because that's how you get greatness. You never get greatness if you look for, like, does the person not have any holes?”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Generic leadership advice does not work for founder-CEOs
“There's no real generic advice that works. You can't say it, you know, it's for that person in that situation based on what they're feeling, and so much of that job is so emotional, and so much of when they screw it up, they're so afraid of the dark place that…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Ben Horowitz: Evaluate investors and hires on crisis response, not good times
“When everything goes great, you don't actually need it. Anybody can be okay, like any investor will be okay, and you know, it's the same with executives. The real question is when things go wrong, and they always go wrong, who's gonna, one, not hide under thei…”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Startups built by whiteboarding market gaps almost never succeed
“It's very rare that somebody goes, just like, whiteboards out like a market and goes, oh, this is a good blank space in the market, I'll go build that company. But those almost never work. The ones that work are some kind of earned secret.”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Young founders face network, hiring, and fundraising disadvantages
“I think if you're very young, then you have mostly disadvantages in starting a company in that you don't have that big a network. It's gonna be harder for you to hire really great people. It's gonna be harder for you to raise money.”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Horowitz: Computing will expand to 100 devices per person via wearables
“But then, you know, it's kind of gotten to one-to-one where, like, everybody has a smartphone, so everybody's got a computer, and it's going to go to kind of the other way, like one-to-a-hundred, where you've got wearable devices, your car's got lots of comput…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Great startup ideas stem from solving specific hard problems
“Entrepreneurship is kind of like a mini-scientific discovery, so if you look at the history of science, like, most of the big discoveries weren't looking for what they found. They were trying to solve some hard problem, and then they stumbled into something el…”
Jan 2, 2019
Horowitz: Executive partners need constructive tension to challenge each other
“There has to be enough tension in the relationship that you're learning from each other, but not so much tension that you actually hate each other, and that's tricky. Like, if you're too friendly, then you never actually Ask, you know, a hard question to the o…”
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Warm VC intros demonstrate essential founder networking skills
“So if you get to the investor through somebody that they trust, that shows them something. Do you have a connect that's like real, that VC trusts, and I would try and go in that way, because that's going to mean something. They're going to take you more seriou…”
Jan 2, 2019 bullish
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019 negative
Horowitz: Bringing a hard-nosed CEO mindset home is detrimental to parenting
“That is the one thing that is so dangerous when you're a CEO. You have to be in this mindset that you're making decisions. You're hard-nosed. You have high expectations of everybody. Your standard has to be very high, or it'll slip for everyone. You take that …”
Jan 2, 2019
Jan 2, 2019
Jun 14, 2019
Sep 2, 2019 positive
Jun 14, 2023
Horowitz: New executives who spend a month only learning get fired
“I once had an executive came and he had read like the Stephen Covey, Seven Habits, a highly effective people. And he's like, well, what I'm going to do is first I'm going to seek to understand and then be understood. And I'm going to spend like a month, like j…”
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Horowitz withheld a department's equity to force an executive to write reviews
“So he didn't write the review, and I just, I withhold, held all the raises, equity, ups, everything for his organization. I was like, you can't, nobody can get any, everybody else in the company got their equity and their money.”
Jun 14, 2023 neutral
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023 negative
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Horowitz: Asking candidates to write a playbook exposes superficial executives
“Tell me what you did at your last company exactly. How was it built? How was it constructed to, okay, now imagine, like, you're here. How would you write this playbook? That'll screw people up if they've not done it, right? Like, if they only saw it It's a ver…”
Jun 14, 2023
Horowitz: CEOs learn executive excellence by interviewing many candidates
“The best way to know is actually to talk to a bunch of CFOs Ask them how they know what's good. What's the difference between a good CFO and a great CFO? How do you know that? How do you interview for that? Like all those kinds of things, that knowledge you on…”
Jun 14, 2023
Horowitz: Effective executives educate the CEO on expanding their function
“If you have somebody who's really doing the job, what you always find as CEO is they're kind of teaching you about how the function should expand, how should it grow, and if you're giving them a lot of ideas, like more ideas than you're getting out, then that'…”
Jun 14, 2023
Jun 14, 2023
Aug 2, 2023 neutral
Aug 2, 2023 positive
Aug 2, 2023 negative
Aug 2, 2023 negative
Aug 2, 2023
Sep 25, 2023 neutral
Oct 1, 2023 bearish
Horowitz: Audiences will always prefer human creators over superior AI
“Humans are obsessed with humans. Absolutely fucking, like, totally obsessed with humans. So, like, a cheetah's been able to run faster than a human forever, but we only watch humans run against humans. We never watch cheetahs run. The AI can destroy humans in …”
Oct 1, 2023 neutral
Oct 1, 2023
Oct 1, 2023 positive
Horowitz: AI will shift Hollywood economic power from studios to creatives
“The most likely is it's going to shift the economic power from the distributors and the kind of the studios to the creatives in a really major way that probably hasn't happened, you know, since the kind of rise of CAA and the kind of the bargaining power that …”
Oct 1, 2023 negative
Oct 1, 2023 neutral
Horowitz: AI will serve as creation components before generating full content
“I think that it'll probably show up as a component first. There's a kind of certain kind of genre of rap music where like okay there's a class of beats that are all very fungible like you know rap over the beat and then the thing that is kind of non-fungible i…”
Oct 1, 2023
Horowitz: High costs and legal hurdles artificially limit great movies
“You know, there aren't, there should be more great movies. There definitely should, you know, given the talent of humanity, but the bar to make a movie is so high and requires, you know, so much money and so much coordination and lawyers that, that is quite di…”
Oct 21, 2023
Oct 21, 2023 positive
Oct 21, 2023 positive
Oct 21, 2023
Oct 21, 2023 bullish
Horowitz: SF homeless have better information access than 1980 US President
“And now, you know, the, at least, you know, the kind of poorest people in America, the homeless in San Francisco have better access to information and knowledge than the president of the United States did in, you know, 1980”
Dec 5, 2023 positive
Horowitz: Open-source AI matters more than safety and alignment regulation
“And I think that, you know, that's probably the most important policy question that people are getting caught up in this other question of you know, safety and alignment, but the more important question I think is probably open source and decentralization.”
Dec 5, 2023 negative
Dec 5, 2023 negative
Horowitz: Regulatory ambiguity enables crypto scammers while hamstringing legitimate entrepreneurs
“And as a result, what happens is, you know, in the lack of clarity, you have these scamsters, casinos, criminals taking advantage of the kind of fuzzy nature of it. And then the real entrepreneurs who are trying to improve the world are kind of hamstrung by th…”
Dec 5, 2023
Horowitz: Abandoning the need for intellectual consistency increases intelligence and effectiveness
“To give up on the need for consistency. Like, once you let go of that, you become much, much smarter, I think which is you know, quite a big quite, quite a big advance in life is to, you know, at that point when you say, you know what, I believed that yesterda…”
Dec 5, 2023 positive
Dec 5, 2023 positive
Dec 5, 2023 bullish
Horowitz: AI will let anyone produce high-quality movies within several years
“I do think that that is coming and probably in the relatively short term, I would think in the next several years where anybody with a very interesting creative ideas will be able to basically produce a fantastic, movie, or a song, or a kind of piece of art an…”
Dec 20, 2023 positive
Horowitz: Tony Robbins is a top psychologist of the last 50 years
“Probably, you know, one of the great psychologists of the last 50 years and has done just incredible work and helped so many people, and he is, Kind of the person, the number one person that you call if you need to, you know, kind of improve your performance o…”
Jan 13, 2024 negative
Jan 13, 2024 negative
Horowitz: College is a scam for a huge percentage of students
“We as a society are running a scam and ripping off a huge percentage of our young people who are going to college with the clear expectation that they're going to get a higher quality job and being able to pay for college. But that's absolutely not the case.”
Jan 23, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Four-year university degrees make no sense for non-scholars
“And I think that with universities kind of, there's such a huge opening for, you know, different lengths of degrees. So like the four year degree Is really something that doesn't make much sense to me. So to adopt that as like what your degree length is given …”
Jan 23, 2024 bullish
Jan 23, 2024 bearish
Horowitz: VC backing of traditional four-year university clones is a long shot
“I would probably warn people away from that idea that, that it's the same bundle. Although, you know, like Today is probably the right time to come at that idea. I think from a venture capital standpoint, that is a very long shot.”
Jan 23, 2024
Feb 1, 2024 bullish
Horowitz: AI will disrupt laptop jobs but cannot replace physical trades
“I think if you're kind of just chinning above the bar and you go to four year college to become part of the laptop class, which was a huge employer that, that set of jobs is kind of under a pretty aggressive attack by technology. Interestingly you know, these …”
Feb 1, 2024 negative
Horowitz: University ideology has become an unarguable religious belief system
“I mean, I'm a little skeptical of that because I do think at least, you know, among a pretty big contingent in the university, it's a religion. It's not a it's not a point of view. It's a belief system that requires faith. And which is why it cannot be argued.…”
Feb 1, 2024 negative
Feb 1, 2024 positive
Feb 1, 2024 negative
Feb 1, 2024 positive
Horowitz: a16z encourages dropping college degree requirements in its hiring
“In our own hiring process, we encourage people not to have those kinds of requirements because, you know, like people can become extremely smart without ever going to college and very skilled, you know, particularly in computer science.”
Feb 1, 2024 neutral
Horowitz: University Reform Requires Systemic Overhaul, Not Just Good Leadership
“If you wanted to change it and you were hiring the president, you would want a president who was capable of basically tearing down and redesigning the entire system because it's not just good leadership that, that will not get it done.”
Mar 5, 2024 neutral
Horowitz: 90% of prison inmates are followers, not psychopaths
“Almost everybody there, easy 90% of them, are betas. I said, what do you mean betas? He's like, they're just guys who, like, literally were following their idiot friend, committed a crime, and ended up in jail for a long time. And, so, they're very shapeable p…”
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Tech lobbying failed due to arrogance and Democratic partisanship
“I think there are like a few kind of important issues around that. One is, you know, really arrogance in that I think, you know, we in tech and a lot of the people who went in are like, oh, we're the good guys. We're for the good and everybody will love us whe…”
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Warren Buffett was wrong on stock option accounting reform
“Actually the one issue we were united on was the stock option accounting, which you know, interestingly, and we were against Warren Buffett and, you know, Warren Buffett was absolutely wrong on it and won. And it's actually very much strengthened tech monopoli…”
Apr 2, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Apple aggressively abuses smartphone monopoly with 30% App Store fee
“I think that's happened on the smartphone now. You know, particularly with Apple, I think the kind of the Epic case and the Spotify cases are really great examples of that where, you know, I am fielding, you know, a product that's competitive with Spotify and …”
Apr 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: a16z supports regulation in crypto, drug development, and finance
“We're, you know, in representing little tech, we're not a pure libertarian, anti-regulatory kind of You know, force here. We think we need regulation in places. We certainly need it in drug development. We certainly need regulation in crypto and financial serv…”
Apr 24, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Government advance procurement is the best tech policy model
“The model that seems to work the best in the U S anyway, is the model we used in the space program which kind of created the chip industry, which was okay. If you can build this chip, then we will become a giant customer. And that's sort of what they did with …”
May 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Early Facebook growth success hinged on low team turnover
“One of the keys to Facebook at the time's growth team was that they had the exact, not just that they had a growth team, but they had the exact same people on it for years and years and years. The reason was the work they were doing was fairly alchemistic in n…”
May 2, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Executing a fixed plan is more effective remotely than in-office
“Like you have a plan. Now let's go execute it. And we're all executing to the plan, and we're not really planning to change the plan much. That can be done more effectively, probably remotely than putting everybody in the same office, because you're not, you k…”
May 2, 2024 neutral
Horowitz: Employee implicit memory far exceeds stored knowledge in corporate systems
“Historically companies have been pretty bad at kind of retaining knowledge systematically. So like there's what's in your people's heads and then there's, you know, what's in your systems and the kind of former is much bigger than the latter in terms of just a…”
May 9, 2024 neutral
Horowitz: Only researchers can tell top AI models apart
“I think if you look at the very top models you know, Claude and OpenAI and Mistral and Lama The only people who I feel like really can tell the difference as users amongst those models are the people who study them. You know, like they're getting pretty close.”
May 9, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Misguided AI regulation will cede US leadership to China
“With kind of misguided regulation You know, we could actually force our way from something that, you know, is open source, open weights. Anybody can build it. We'll have a plethora of this technology. We'll be like, use all of American innovation to compete, o…”
May 9, 2024 bearish
May 9, 2024 positive
Horowitz: a16z raised $7.2B and created LP AI assistant
“So we just raised 7.2 billion dollars. And it's not a huge deal, but we took our data And we put it into an AI system, and our LPs were able, there's a million questions investors have about everything we've done, our track record, every company we've invested…”
May 9, 2024 bullish
May 9, 2024 bearish
Horowitz: AI boom will cause massive investor losses and chip gluts
“Something like that's probably pretty likely to happen in AI where like, you know, every company is going to get funded. We don't need that many AI companies. So a lot of them are going to bust. There's going to be a huge, you know, Huge investor losses. There…”
May 13, 2024 bearish
Horowitz: AI Will Suffer Infrastructure Overbuilds in Boom-and-Bust Cycle
“And that doesn't mean there's no like boom and bust and all that, because that's just the nature of technology. You know, people get too excited and then they get too depressed. So there'll be some of that, I'm sure. There'll be over build outs, you know, pote…”
May 16, 2024
Horowitz: Hardware startups cannot operate with typical Silicon Valley perks
“You can't just, you know, build things, you know, fat and happy the Silicon Valley way. You can't have, you know, like you can't focus on free lunches and organic juice and all that stuff. You really have to focus on cost.”
May 16, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Public boards should prioritize major equity owners over professional directors
“And as a shareholder, I'd rather have somebody on the board who owns a lot of the company and has skin in the game with me and is representing me than somebody who owns no shares. And it's like literally a professional board member that, you know, sits on eigh…”
May 16, 2024
May 16, 2024
Horowitz: Hardware CEOs must be world-class fundraisers to survive cash valleys
“The CEO has to be, as one of the things that they do, has to be like a world-class fundraiser. Like, they can't be, you can't be, you know, like, I don't like to raise money. You know, like, look, we have a lot of software CEOs who are like, I don't like to ra…”
May 16, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Promoting an operational 'number two' to CEO is a trap
“The problem with that model is when you get to succession, that person does not have the qualifications to run it. And, you know, like people, it's hard to get people who are good at running the company enthusiastic about working for a person like that, becaus…”
May 16, 2024
May 16, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Venture firms are better off avoiding public company board seats
“It's actually the only reason that I ever end up on public boards because, you know, like as a venture capital firm, we're kind of better off not being on the public board. But what keeps happening to me is the CEO will go, But then we kind of need you because…”
May 20, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Excusing October 7th violence reflects a return to tribal morality
“You can kind of see some of that tribalism coming back. Back in America where people like, well, you know, it's kind of a race. Well, we see it a lot right now in the Israel-Palestinian conflict where they think there's a certain set of people that say, oh, Oc…”
May 20, 2024 positive
Ben Horowitz: Property rights were the original foundation of American freedom
“The original inalienable right was to the pursuit of property right? Not the pursuit of happiness. And that just sounded a little too capitalistic, but I think property is more accurate because it's an expression of freedom.”
May 20, 2024 positive
May 20, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Environmental reviews act as corrupt fee extractions blocking housing construction
“I don't know who requires the environmental study, but the environmental study turns out to be a real corruption in the sense that Whether or not they're doing the study, whether or not they find anything, they're going to kind of slow down the project and pot…”
Jun 28, 2024 bullish
Horowitz: Ideas experts dismiss as scams are almost always worth studying
“If somebody's super dismissive about something, that's a great thing to study, because it's almost surely not a dead zero, right? Like, it may not work, but there's no way it's as bad as they're, you know, saying it. If somebody says something is like A scam, …”
Jun 28, 2024
Jul 16, 2024
Jul 16, 2024 negative
Jul 16, 2024
Jul 16, 2024
Horowitz: a16z met with Trump and White House, but Biden declined
“Mark mentioned we met with President Trump. We did meet with White House, many White House officials including Jeff Zeitz, the Chief of Staff and Jake Sullivan, the National Security Advisor, Gina Raimondo, the Commerce Secretary, and so forth. We have not met…”
Jul 16, 2024 negative
Horowitz: A radical faction controls the Biden administration's tech policies
“These policies are from kind of the radical side, which is, you know, like it's a significant side of the Biden administration but it is, it's a powerful side, and they really are in charge I would say, you know, kind of much more than the moderates.”
Oct 22, 2024 neutral
Oct 29, 2024
Horowitz: Next-gen military technology will include autonomous soldiers and robotic weapons
“And then, of course, we've seen you know, this also, it's very, very important geopolitically because the kind of next generation of weapons and you know, drones and autonomous aircraft, autonomous submarines, and so forth are all kinds of, some kind of robot.…”
Oct 29, 2024 bullish
Nov 5, 2024 negative
Nov 5, 2024 negative
Nov 5, 2024 positive
Nov 5, 2024 bullish
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Grand theft auto is no longer a felony in major cities
“Grand Theft Auto, Is not actually a crime in any major city anymore, unless like it's a crime if it's, you know, some huge auto ring, but like if it's just stealing a car, like if I steal a car and I just like ride it around, smash it into the wall or whatever…”
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Dozens of a16z portfolio companies were debanked under Choke Point 2.0
“And we had, you know, dozens of companies kicked out of the banking system simply for In a very legally compliant way trying to build a company, you know, that would, you know, employ people and, you know, make the country strong.”
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Horowitz: Regulators targeted compliant crypto firms while ignoring fraudulent meme coins
“One of the really remarkable things about the whole crypto crackdown was, you know, the claim, the lie, and it was clearly a lie, and I'll explain why, was that, oh, we have to protect consumers. But as they were, you know, basically terrorizing every complian…”
Nov 12, 2024 negative
Nov 18, 2024 positive
Nov 18, 2024 positive
Nov 18, 2024 positive
Horowitz: Donating to Las Vegas police aims to build safest US city
“There's been a little controversy lately about donations that I've made to the police department, and it's really a collaboration. You know, we've been working together to kind of make Las Vegas both kind of the safest city in America and the best police, the …”
Nov 18, 2024 negative
Nov 18, 2024 bullish
Jan 31, 2025 positive
Apr 29, 2025
Apr 29, 2025
Horowitz: a16z founders took zero management pay from $300M Fund 1
“We rather than paying the partners a lot of money or in our case, we didn't pay ourselves any money. What if we took all that money? Cause it was a lot of money. Cause, you know, we're like, even on a three hundred million dollar fund, it was a really a lot of…”
Apr 29, 2025
Horowitz: a16z Fund I required both co-founders under a key-man clause
“I think we're the only firm in Silicon Valley who has this. We have A two person key man thing where like so normally if like you know, as long as one person is intact, you know, the fund is, you know, there's no vote on the fund or whether the fund continues,…”
Apr 29, 2025 neutral
Apr 29, 2025
Horowitz: Building a small boutique company takes as much effort as a giant
“So the thing that Mark and I knew from like our experience in starting companies was It is just as hard to start a small boutique thing that means nothing in the world and build it as it is to build the world-dominating monster. Like it's no more amount of wor…”
Apr 29, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Building products impacts the world more than political activism
“Maybe the single best thing that you can do to improve the world is to build a company that, you know, Deliver some product or something that, that improves the world. Like that is actually, that's the thing. It's actually better than has a better impact than …”
Apr 29, 2025
Horowitz: I am the CEO of a16z; Andreessen collaborates on strategy
“We're co-founders and we work very, very closely together on the strategy and the direction of the firm, but like the CEO position is a chain of command position and, you know, to, you know, that's me. I'm the CEO of the firm in that sense. You know, Mark does…”
Apr 29, 2025 positive
May 28, 2025 neutral
Ben Horowitz reveals early a16z rejected founders who yielded to their ideas
“One of the things that, that Mark and I used to do a lot in the early days was Basically try and convince the entrepreneur to do what we wanted. And then if they did that, we would not invest because they didn't, you know, they're coming in with their beliefs.”
Jun 12, 2025 negative
Jun 12, 2025 bullish
Jun 12, 2025 positive
Jun 12, 2025 bullish
Horowitz: Flow achieves unprecedented returns and higher rents on identical spaces
“The thesis of the value of the community, the technology everything that Adam's talked about, the design. Is proven out like before, you know, the product is maybe five percent done but it's already able to kind of generate, you know, kind of much higher deman…”
Jun 12, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Flow software toggles property types with a button press
“The other kind of capability of the software that's amazing is because it's so flexible. Yes, this could be Multifamily living, or this could be condos, or this could be a hotel, or this could be office space, and it can change literally with the press of a bu…”
Jun 12, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Venture investing should focus on world-class strengths, not weaknesses
“Philosophically, very kind of early on in the firm, always felt that what we're looking for is great strength. And like every person has a weakness or has weaknesses. And some of them show up in like crazy ways. But that doesn't even matter because everybody's…”
Jun 12, 2025 neutral
Jun 23, 2025 bullish
Jun 23, 2025
Jul 14, 2025 positive
Levie: Box scaled aggressively using Ben Horowitz's 'Fat Startup' playbook
“And we let's just say we very much took that to heart. And we basically like deployed every single lesson. Which was, like, the name of the game is you get big fast, you scale aggressively, and that was a very important kind of period in our company's journey.”
Jul 25, 2025
Jul 25, 2025 negative
Horowitz: Founders should avoid political involvement unless strictly necessary
“Politics would be the number one thing I would say don't try at home in that it's so, it's almost always, you know, and I'm saying this as a kind of firm that's gotten very involved in politics but it was, unless it's necessary It's very tough.”
Jul 25, 2025 positive
Jul 25, 2025 positive
Jul 25, 2025 negative
Aug 23, 2025
Horowitz: VC firms without strong culture fail at generational handoffs
“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. It's a kind of, 10 years is a pretty good run for investors”
Aug 23, 2025 bearish
Horowitz argues the venture studio model is fundamentally flawed for founders
“With the studio model, the, to me, the big problem with that historically and, you know, I think Bill Gross was probably the greatest practitioner of that historically is that it's not idea. It's an idea maze. And so and it's very hard to run through the idea …”
Aug 23, 2025 bullish
Horowitz says Paul Graham's Y Combinator succeeded by requiring founder-owned ideas
“And I thought Paul's genius was the ideas weren't his. And that's was the difference between an incubator and an accelerator. And that I think, you know, just proved to be the right model. And the reason it's the right model is because whoever's building the c…”
Oct 8, 2025 positive
Oct 15, 2025 positive
Oct 15, 2025 negative
Oct 15, 2025
Horowitz: Big company partnerships fail without massive financial commitments
“Look, you got to get them to put enough, they're such a big company that they're going to lose interest many times. So if you don't have them write you such a big check that somebody in there is going to get fired if it doesn't go well, you're, it doesn't matt…”
Oct 15, 2025
Horowitz: Engineering comprehension is a poor criterion for hiring sales leaders
“That's probably the number one mistake is you just go, okay, well, like I'm an engineer, so I want a sales guy who can talk to me and understands engineering, and that's like, well, that's not a really good criteria for sales.”
Oct 15, 2025 negative
Oct 15, 2025
Horowitz: Daily immediate feedback normalizes criticism and prevents shock
“I think the mistake a lot of, particularly engineers make, is they just don't say what they think when they think it, because they're afraid of hurting someone's feelings, but that's how you save their feelings, because they're used to you.”
Oct 15, 2025 positive
Horowitz warned Ghodsi that selling Databricks early would cause lifelong regret
“Hey, you can do whatever you want. You can sell. You're going to make a lot of money and you'll be super successful in life. But you know, if you're like me, you're going to look back the rest of your life thinking, you know, I missed that one shot. That was t…”
Oct 15, 2025
Oct 15, 2025
Horowitz: Bad organizational structure destroys motivation regardless of leadership
“If you're in some kind of weird three-legged race that the CEO has constructed where everybody's got dependencies on everybody else, It just doesn't matter. You know, like you'll, you'll just have a lot of people go like, I know if I work hard, it's not going …”
Oct 31, 2025 negative
Oct 31, 2025 positive
Horowitz: AI is a fantastic creative tool for hip-hop artists
“Particularly the hip-hop guys are interested because it's almost like a replay of what they did, right? They just took other music, and they kind of built new music out of it, and I think that, you know, AI is A fantastic creative tool for them. It, like, way …”
Nov 3, 2025 negative
Nov 3, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Specialized AI startups thrive despite threat from foundation models
“Ideas that we thought would for sure get subsumed by the big models are becoming amazingly differentiated businesses just because the fat tail of the universe is very fat and you need really kind of specific understanding of certain scenarios to build an effec…”
Nov 3, 2025
Nov 3, 2025 negative
Nov 19, 2025 negative
Horowitz: Legacy Defense Suppliers Lag Far Behind Commercial Tech Curve
“We kind of knew the companies that we were investing in and we knew the companies that we were buying you know, missiles and aircraft carriers from, and like, they weren't of the same caliber in terms of the, where they were on the technology curve, and so we …”
Nov 19, 2025 neutral
Nov 26, 2025 neutral
Nov 26, 2025 positive
Ideas at a16z don't count unless partners write and publish them
“I think everybody's, it set the standard of, You can't just have an idea here. You have to be able to really think it through, be able to articulate it, be able to write it, be able to publish it, and otherwise, like, your idea didn't count. And that, that, I …”
Nov 26, 2025 neutral
Nov 26, 2025 positive
Nov 26, 2025 neutral
a16z built partner brands so founders wouldn't only demand Marc Andreessen
“I do think we needed to even out the brand a little bit because like, otherwise any entrepreneur with leverage was going to go like, well, I want him to be on my board. Right. And that was just going to get success. It'll be worse with every other GP. So that …”
Nov 26, 2025 negative
Nov 26, 2025 neutral
Culture-programming books are only useful for leaders of mature, scaled organizations
“Is, it's actually, it's more useful for me. And you know, when I talk to like Ted Sarandos or somebody like that, they're like, oh yeah, that's a book I like. But you have to run a very large organization. And you have to have gotten beyond the things, the har…”
Dec 17, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Las Vegas Hope for Prisoners program has near-zero recidivism
“The Vegas prosecutor will, if you're like an eighteen-year-old kid, and you commit a first-time offense, and it's not violent, they'll send you, they won't prosecute you, they'll send you to Hope for Prisoners, and you go through the rehab. They are close to z…”
Dec 17, 2025 negative
Dec 17, 2025 negative
Dec 17, 2025 negative
Horowitz: LAPD corruption and rogue officers protected Tupac Shakur's killers
“Well, in that case, the LAPD was corrupt, and the, well, there were literally criminals in the police force protecting the criminals who killed Tupac, and, you know, thankfully, we kind of reopened the cold case, and we caught the guy, but it's,”
Dec 17, 2025 negative
Horowitz: Prosecutors and judges are funded to avoid convicting criminals
“There's a huge push to not criminal, to decriminalize crime, essentially, in this country. And, like, it's still going on, and it's, you know, there are still these, you know, prosecutors and judges that are funded basically for the purposes of not convicting …”
Dec 17, 2025 positive
Horowitz: Funding amenities for Las Vegas 911 dispatchers drastically cut wait times
“So we had a tremendous attrition problem in the nine one. Nine one one's a very stressful job. It takes 12 months to train somebody. It's all this kind of thing. And, you know, they, everybody was quitting. They, five minute call waits for nine one. Imagine wa…”
Dec 17, 2025 negative
Horowitz: San Francisco's shoplifting policy enabled organized crime, not hungry residents
“In San Francisco, right, like, the whole political movement was, people are hungry, you can't arrest them for shoplifting and so forth, so as soon as we did that, what happened was massive gangs took everything out of the stores. They ended up, right, shutting…”
Jan 13, 2026 positive
Horowitz: a16z maintains 20% or higher equity ownership in recent investments
“So I think that like what we've seen is we're getting pretty good ownership. So if you look at a lot of the recent investments where You know, at 20% or better there are ones that we're not, we're, you know, we don't get to that level of ownership, but those c…”
Jan 13, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Investment teams should not exceed five members to maintain debate
“An investing team, like, shouldn't be too much bigger than a basketball team. You know, a basketball team is like five people who start And the reason for that is the conversation around the investments really needs to be a conversation.”
Jan 13, 2026 negative
Jan 13, 2026 negative
Jan 13, 2026 bullish
Jan 13, 2026
Horowitz: Waiting 10-15 years to evaluate VC partners is dangerous
“So like, I think it's dangerous to in VC kind of wait for the outputs because they're so far up you know, to kind of wait and see, okay, does somebody have a great portfolio after 10 years or 15 years before kind of deciding what to do with them? It's just suc…”
Jan 13, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Winning deals with Mira Murati or Ilya Sutskever proves investor capability
“How great an entrepreneur is Mira, or how great an entrepreneur is Ilya. Well, like, Those are pretty special people. So if you can win that deal like that, that means something, whether or not those companies work.”
Jan 13, 2026 positive
Jan 13, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Invest in Founders World-Class at One Specific Skill
“What you're really trying to find is, are they literally the best in the world at a thing? And that's always the thing that's worth investing in, as opposed to they're pretty good at a lot of things and I can't figure out what they're not good at.”
Jan 13, 2026
Horowitz: a16z replaces venture partners who lose touch with deep tech
“Investing in technology you really have to be in deep in the tech to be good at it. And I think that it's very possible as, you know, people get older, you know, they get less into it sometimes. And so, you know, at that point we got to make a change.”
Jan 13, 2026
Jan 15, 2026
Jan 15, 2026
Jan 15, 2026 bullish
Jan 15, 2026
Jan 15, 2026 positive
Jan 15, 2026 bullish
Jan 15, 2026 neutral
Horowitz: One Bad Founder Interaction Undoes 10 Good Ones
“One mistake is much more powerful than, you know, one good deed. So, you know, one person being obnoxious who's in the firm or lying to an entrepreneur or doing something like that is causes much more damage than you can do by doing that correctly you know, fi…”
Jan 15, 2026 negative
Horowitz: Technical inventors usually receive bad advice from Silicon Valley advisors
“And that really Is a confidence game, for lack of a better word, in that, you know, it's very difficult to run an organization when you don't know what you're doing which nobody does when they're an inventor, and you get tremendous amount of advice, and advice…”
Jan 15, 2026
a16z Does Not Hire Group Leaders From Outside the Firm
“First of all, in order to lead one of those groups, you just have to have been here and performed for a long time. So that, that, that's kind of the first thing. So we just know you extremely well. We're not interviewing people for that job from the outside. L…”
Jan 15, 2026 bullish
Horowitz: AI Will Eventually Solve Virtually Every Major Human Problem
“There's not a problem that we can think of that you can't, that you won't be able to solve with AI. So like almost every problem in the world and you know, from cancer to transpiration, transportation to massive fraud in the U S you just name a problem in the …”
Jan 19, 2026 positive
Feb 2, 2026 bearish
Horowitz: Copyright restrictions on training data will weaken US AI against China
“China absolutely doesn't respect copyrights, even, they don't respect just copying it let alone building a statistical model, and we're gonna have kind of a weaker AI if we can't train on all the data, can't train on the complete data.”
Feb 2, 2026 positive
Feb 2, 2026 bullish
Feb 2, 2026 bearish
Horowitz: Restricting AI math modeling will forfeit US AI lead to China
“If you ban the technology, which some people are calling for, ah, or ban or kind of infringe people's ability to do mathematics, which is something that a lot of people are calling for then I think we're definitely gonna lose the AI rise to China, which has, l…”
Feb 2, 2026
Feb 2, 2026
Horowitz: AI breaks software history because capital and GPUs can buy product leads
“With AI, if you have data, you know, particularly proprietary data, and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, like, almost any problem. It is magic. But it means that you can throw money at the problem. And we've never had that in tech.”
Feb 2, 2026 negative
Horowitz: Patchwork of 50 state AI laws will cripple startup innovation
“Every state wants to have their own set of AI laws, which will basically make it impossible for new companies to innovate, because you can't comply with 50 different laws from 50 different states, so we're trying to get that done.”
Mar 18, 2026 positive
Mar 18, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Direct media prevents cancellations caused by media misinterpretation
“The things that people got in trouble for canceled for, fired for, et cetera, in the past that they said in the press, were all just misinterpretations. So they, you know, with somebody saying something, and because it was so narrow, and because you could neve…”
Mar 18, 2026 positive
Horowitz: a16z media strategy targets founders over mass market audience
“You know, for us, that's great, because the audience, our audience is founders not the world. And so, you know, having a way to talk to 90% of founders as opposed to four percent of the world is just a much better thing for us.”
Mar 18, 2026 positive
Apr 2, 2026 positive
Apr 2, 2026
Apr 14, 2026 positive
Apr 14, 2026 negative
Horowitz: AI agents will destroy traditional software moats like UI lock-in
“So it's very easy to replicate the code. It's very easy to move the data, and then it's not even going to be a human talking to your software. It's going to be an AI, and, you know, AIs are really flexible on how they use user interfaces, so That mode is gone.”
May 8, 2026 bullish
Horowitz: Employees who refuse to support US defense work can leave a16z
“You're gonna decide that those people who are sacrificing their lives, putting their lives on the line to protect us, don't get the best technology? Like, I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. So, like, you don't have to work here if you want to do that.”
May 8, 2026
Horowitz: Modern media success relies on being interesting, not avoiding mistakes
“In the new kind of world, there's unlimited channels, there's unlimited formats and so the key to winning isn't not making a mistake, it's being interesting. Like, if you don't say anything that's interesting, it's not going to get any pick-up, Because there's…”
May 8, 2026 neutral
May 8, 2026 positive
May 8, 2026 negative
Jun 19, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Proven audience building is the essential skill for new media hires
“The best thing on new media is have you done it? Have you kind of built some brand on something and some audience? Do you know how to build an audience? Because that's the core, core thing. And if you can't do that, then, you know, it doesn't matter if you've …”
Jun 19, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Washington politicians and insiders predominantly read Mark Halperin's newsletter
“So we were just in Washington, and so we were with, like, all, all the kind of Washington people senators and whatnot. And I was asking them, you know, what does everybody in Washington read? And it's the Mark Halperin newsletter which is new media.”
Jun 19, 2026 positive
Jun 19, 2026 neutral
Horowitz: Ben Horowitz is a16z CEO, but Marc Andreessen is the brand
“Like, us as a firm, like, technically, I'm really the CEO, but, like, Mark is more the brand, I would say, in terms of he just does way more media than I do. And that works, but it works because it's Andreessen Horowitz, and nobody knows the fucking difference…”
Jun 19, 2026 negative
Horowitz: Traditional PR professionals struggle to transition to new media
“Well, the first principle is if you're trained in old media, it's very, very, very hard to do new media. So you have to be a very exceptional person to make that transition because It's like, if you spent 10 years doing old media, there are laws of physics, th…”
Jun 19, 2026 neutral
Jul 3, 2026 negative
Horowitz: Expanding a startup to a new country is a massive expense
“To open a country, as a company is a very large expense. You have to set up an entity. You have to hire a team. You have to, like, localize the product. And, you know, that's gonna be, you know, depending on the country, depending on how committed you are to i…”
Jul 3, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Saudi Arabia is transitioning from a tribal society to a modern ally
“Saudi Arabia is going from this, ah, kind of tribal, ah, different kind of society, I would just say, to kind of a modern, you know, like, highly civilized, you know, player in the modern world and full ally of the United States.”
Jul 3, 2026 negative
Jul 3, 2026 negative
Jul 3, 2026 positive
Horowitz: TelevisaUnivision secured a Netflix deal using ElevenLabs AI dubbing
“Well, we've got this great company, 11 Labs. They can help you with it. We put them together. In a couple of months, he was in, you know, France and Poland and all over the world with this incredible technology that had his actors basically acting exactly as t…”
Jul 3, 2026 positive
Ben Horowitz: America is the best country for resource-poor entrepreneurs
“If you're, drop a person into any country in the world, and they don't have the culture, and they don't have money and capital resources yet, and they just have an idea of how to make the world a better place Their best shot is in America.”
Jul 22, 2026
Jul 22, 2026
Jul 22, 2026 neutral
Jul 22, 2026
Horowitz: Second-act founders cannot succeed starting at the top
“We've seen it so many times where somebody gets to the penthouse, and they're like, oh, I want to do a new thing. But they don't want to go all the way down to the ground floor, and start at the bottom, fucking putting the building together. Okay, now you're i…”
Jul 22, 2026 negative
Jul 22, 2026 neutral
Jul 22, 2026 negative
Jul 22, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Uber remaining highly valuable post-founder departure is exceptionally rare
“And so to build, you know, to build a company, you know, a great company, it's always a great entrepreneur, and so when we looked at it, we're like, there's a very few entrepreneurs, you know, in the history of the valley that built something like Uber and tha…”
Aug 13, 2026 bullish
Aug 13, 2026 negative
Aug 28, 2026 bullish
Aug 28, 2026 neutral
Aug 28, 2026 positive
Horowitz: Billions in compute can now instantly erase a startup's multi-year lead
“The one thing we all knew in startup world is that if I have a two-year lead on you, and you try and cast me by hiring a thousand engineers, you're gonna wreck your company. Like, that never works. It's a mythical man month. Nine women can't have a baby in a m…”