Scott Kupor
Director, United States Office of Personnel Management. On 4 shows, 16 appearances, plus 1 compilation re-air not counted. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
investorexecutiveauthoroperator
Scott Kupor joined Andreessen Horowitz as its first employee at inception in 2009, serving as Managing Partner. He oversaw its expansion from a $300 million fund to tens of billions in assets and currently serves as Director of the United States Office of Personnel Management.
4shows
16appearances
181statements
42resolved
34supported
0contradicted
81%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Scott Kupor said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Kupor: Federal workforce will shrink by 300,000 employees due to DOGE
“We've done a lot of work over the course of this year, a lot of which was catalyzed by Elon and the Doge team. As a result, we expect probably that we'll end up with somewhere around 2.1 million employees at the end of the year, so roughly about a 300,000 redu…”
Kupor: OPM Is Implementing Forced Curve Ratings Across Federal Government
“We're doing this in our, in the, across the government is you have to kind of effectively legislate you know, effectively a force curve in order to change this behavior. So you have done that at senior levels of the organization. Yeah, we're doing it. We're do…”
Kupor: OPM introduces forced distribution, capping top executive ratings at 30%
“So one of the things that we're doing, we just put out guidance on this, at least with respect to what are called the SES, which are the most senior level people in government, is we are effectively doing a modicum of a forced distribution. And so we put out g…”
Kupor: 70-80% of Federal Employees Receive Top Ratings, Only 0.2% Fail
“In the government, if you look across, you know, government for long periods of time, about, like, you know, 70, 80% of people get ranked a four or five, meaning, like, 70, 80% of the people are well above, like, average, basically, and Literally, like, 0.2% o…”
Kupor: OPM successfully dissolved 42-year federal hiring test consent decree
“And literally that consent decree existed until about three months ago when we kind of went back to the original plaintiff in that case, actually, who was still alive. And we were able to actually get to a resolution where we got ourselves out of that consent …”
Kupor: Federal government relied on self-attestation without skill tests for 42 years
“Literally for like 42 years basically the government did away with any form of test, not just like that pace test, which was kind of a, an aptitude test and a leadership test, but also any kind of like Functional tests... We literally relied on self-attestatio…”
Kupor: OPM Is Eliminating Degree and Tenure Requirements in Federal Job Classifications
“And so if we, and we're doing this, by the way, we're going to go eliminate all those requirements in the job classifications so that we can at least hire people at the level that's appropriate for their skills.”
Scott Kupor: U.S. government is unprepared for rapid technological advancement
“Technology continues to advance rapidly and, you know, just to be blunt, the government is nowhere near prepared for it. We just don't have the right talent here.”
Kupor: Federal culture treats risk as binary while ignoring upside
“We've kind of just embedded in the culture, this idea that risk is like this pass fail thing. Like you either have risk or you don't have risk. And if you have risk, God forbid, like, you should ever go there, basically, and so that to me was like the most eye…”
Kupor: Political weaponization of failure prevents a portfolio approach to innovation
“There's no concept I would say of a portfolio. Everything is a one-off project. And when a one-off project fails, then whichever party didn't sponsor it says, those guys are idiots.”
Kupor: 99.7% of federal workers receive performance ratings of three or higher
“So fours and fives, so the very, very top, is roughly 65 to 70% of people get a four or five. 90, when you add threes, fours, and five, that's 99.7%, ok? So 99.7% are a three or higher. 0.3%, therefore, is a one or a two.”
Kupor: Government tech roles fail to attract engineers by focusing on contractors
“The other problem we have with getting, you know, engineers here is many jobs in, in the engineering organizations are managing contractors. Right. And so if you're some like, you know, super smart person, you know, whatever coming out of, you know, MIT comput…”
Kupor: Silicon Valley recruits resorted to using ChatGPT on their personal phones
“The people on my team who, you know, came from Silicon Valley who are working in my department, What they were doing was just, they would just, you know, on their personal phone, they were using ChatGPG to help them do stuff”
Product Visionaries Should Be CEOs to Control Resource Allocation
“And so we said, look, because these are product companies, we love the idea that the person who is the product visionary also is the CEO and therefore controls resource allocation and strategy and all this other stuff.”
Sequoia's 2008 'Rest in Peace' Doomsday Presentation Was Incorrect
“If you were around here in the valley at the end of oh eight, Sequoia, who's a very well-regarded and has been a very successful firm, Put out this presentation called Rest in Peace, and it had a skull and crossbones and a tombstone on the front of it, and the…”
a16z Rejects Consensus Voting to Avoid Reversion to the Mean
“We are decidedly not a consensus organization, so When we started, and Mark and Ben have been very true to this over time, is we said, look, we worry that if you go around the table and you ask people to vote, you end up with reversion to the mean type thinkin…”
a16z's Post-Investment Platform Team Dwarfs Its Closest Competitor
“Nobody's certainly done it at the scale that we're doing it at, so a big change in the industry over the last 10 years has been that there are more firms that are adding to their post-investment teams, which for a long time was really never part of the makeup …”
Mega-Rounds Transfer Asset Appreciation From Public to Private Markets
“I think really most of this is really just a wealth transfer of appreciation from the public markets into the private markets, and many of these people have lower costs of capital, right?”
Companies Staying Private Longer Actively Hurts the United States
“I think it's a bad trend for our country. Selfishly, it's very good for people who are investors in or who have access to private capital because I think more and more of that appreciation will accrue there, but it's not a good thing for our country.”
Biology Mirrors the State of Computer Science in the Late 1960s
“Biology is kind of where computer science was like late sixties, early seventies, which is we're about to see like this whole new set of technologies that will dramatically change the costs and the automation and the price curves for a lot of these things.”
Venture Economics Breakdown at $100 Billion in Annual LP Commitments
“You know, if we go back to 60, 70, a hundred billion, which is where we got to at the peak of 2000, then I think you get to the point where the economics of the business unfortunately probably just can't support that little activity.”
Rolling SAFEs cause founders to accidentally over-dilute their equity
“In some respects, because number one, it's so easy to raise money on a safe, you often find people do what are called rolling closes, which is, you know, usually on a priced round, we're like, this is your date, right? Get your money in by June 30th or else yo…”
Kupor: Most startup bridge rounds are simply bridges to nowhere
“I would agree with Mike that unfortunately a lot of them are bridges to nowhere. You know, most of the time, in my experience, it's pretty clear, though, whether that's the case or whether you are bridging to something.”
Kupor: Founders Are Often Relieved When VCs Suggest Winding Down
“When I started this business, when we started, we thought these would be incredibly difficult conversations, and there's no doubt sometimes they are, but oftentimes we find actually exactly the opposite, which is sometimes the founders are relieved after those…”
The other half of the tape: Scott Kupor's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 6 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ben Horowitz 2Michael Copeland 1Harry Stebbings 1Frederic Kerrest 1David George 1Benedict Evans 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the a16z Podcast 4
20VC 3
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 4 mentions in 4 episodes 1 per episode
- 20VC: Plaid's Zach Perret on Why You Have To Hire For Spikes and What That Really Means, Fintech Predictions From Incumbent Entrants To The Rise of Europe & The 2 Big Questions That CEOs Should Ask Themselves
- 20VC: Okta Founder Frederic Kerrest on Why You Want To Be A Monopolist In A Small Market, The Biggest Challenges in Scaling Okta To IPO and Being a16z's First Ever Fund Check
- a16z Podcast | Good Bubbles, Bad Bubbles -- and Where Unicorns Come from
- a16z Podcast | The Topic That's Lasted the Entire History of Computing -- Bundling and Unbundling
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Scott's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| a16zLEDGER | Director, United States Office of Personnel Management | 13 +1 | 115 | 86% 24/28 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Director, United States Office of Personnel Management | 1 | 31 | 100% 4/4 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Director, United States Office of Personnel Management | 1 | 22 | 25% 1/4 | full record on 20VC → |
 AMERICAN OPTIMISTLEDGER | Director, United States Office of Personnel Management | 1 | 13 | 83% 5/6 | full record on American Optimist → |