Ben Horowitz

Co-Founder and General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

investorfounderexecutiveauthor@bhorowitz ↗LinkedIn ↗a16z.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

Horowitz co-founded and served as CEO of Opsware, leading it to a $1.6 billion acquisition by Hewlett-Packard in 2007. In 2009, he co-founded the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz alongside Marc Andreessen and authored bestselling business books.

17statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 4.47/5average certainty → 2.29/5average debate potential → ≈4.0/5argument clarity, estimated → 4said about them ↓

1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 assertion · 1 opinion · 9 insights · 6 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertion are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Ben argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: speaking style how? →

293 words/min while actually speaking · 19.1 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Ben Horowitz: only 6 usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 6 raw tape exchanges is ≈4.0/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 7,289 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

What they said17 What others said4 Episodes1

Everything Ben Horowitz said on the MAD Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight

Horowitz: Hiring through separate diversity initiatives fails at real inclusion

“So if you hire somebody on race and gender through the urban talent department, instead of through the normal talent department, through the fucking side door instead of through the front door, because you can't see the talent, then you're never going to be go…”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 26:45 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Disclosure

a16z operates without a head of diversity or diversity program

“But we don't have a head of diversity. We don't have program. We just have, like, criteria that's wide, where we can see talent that we ourselves might not have.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 23:20 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Founders who lie in pitches also lie to employees

“If you have a founder who's, like, say, telling you, like, some pretty aggressive, not true things in the pitch, then, you know, that's gonna be a tricky founder to work for, because it's very rare to have a person who, you know, lies only to investors and not…”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 29:25 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Disclosure

Horowitz: a16z employees who publicly trash startups on Twitter are fired

“One of the things I tell everybody at New Employee Orientation is if you get on Twitter, like some VCs, and start shitting all over somebody's company, you know, saying, oh, they'll never make any money, that's a dumb idea, I can't believe they called it bodeg…”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 33:36 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Annual performance reviews fail to drive company culture

“That's not how you move culture through an annual performance review. Like, this is a daily thing. People have to face it daily.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 2:17 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Opinion

Horowitz: Uber had a 'very compelling culture' under Travis Kalanick

“Uber had a very compelling culture under Travis with a very bad issue.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 3:18 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Culture is defined by who gets promoted, not posted values

“You can't say, okay, people are going to behave according to the values on the wall. They're going to go, oh, that person who just got promoted, lobbied the CEO for six months, took credit for her work, did those things. That's your culture. That's how that ge…”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 6:47 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Disclosure

Ben Horowitz fined a16z team members $10 per minute for late meetings

“So, you know, I was determined, ok, how do we set the culture so that doesn't happen, and so the, you know, one of the first rules I put in place is, if you're late to meeting with an entrepreneur, 10 dollars a minute fine.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 9:46 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Enterprise sales teams must be compensated with commissions

“I was like, Stuart, we have to pay commissions. Like, we're not, like, this is sales. It's a prize fight. No prize, no fight.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 15:19 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Horowitz: a16z is 52% female with seven female general partners

“We're a 180 people, we're 52% women we're, And we have like seven women general partners, something like that”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 23:03 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Company culture must support strategy, not copy Jeff Bezos

“Whatever your culture is should support your business strategy. It shouldn't be what you borrowed from Jeff Bezos, because he built a different company than you're building.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 32:00 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Culture is defined by actions, not beliefs

“A culture is not a set of beliefs. It's a set of actions.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 0:25 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Ben Horowitz: Shocking rules enforce culture by forcing employees to ask why

“And I call that that type of rule a shocking rule, which is a rule that you have that everybody wants to know why do we have that rule.”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 11:04 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Disclosure

a16z surveys rejected founders to measure if they were treated respectfully

“We measure, we do a customer satisfaction survey of entrepreneurs we rejected to measure whether we treated them with, because that's kind of, to me, the litmus test of, are you treating people with respect?”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 32:42 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Insight

Horowitz: Evaluate startup culture by asking about specific behaviors, not general questions

“If you say, is this a good culture? Nobody's gonna say that the culture is bad if they're trying to hire you so you kind of have to get into specific behaviors that you might think are indicative, or that you have experience in a bad culture and just see if th…”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 37:48 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Disclosure

Horowitz invested in Databricks the day it incorporated

“When Databricks came to me, like I invested the day they incorporated the company”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 29:09 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

Disclosure

Quincy Jones, P Diddy, and Kevin Durant are a16z fund LPs

“One of the reasons we started the Cultural Leadership Fund is we wanted a partnership with people who knew how to move culture in the general sense. And if you look at the LPs in that fund, Quincy Jones P Diddy Kevin Durant, so forth, they're all people who ha…”

Ben Horowitz Feb 20, 2020 ▶ 35:47 Fireside Chat Part II: Ben Horowitz (a16z) on Culture with Matt Turck (FirstMark) at Data Driven NYC

The other half of the tape: Ben Horowitz's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 3 episodes on the MAD Podcast. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Martin Casado 1 Dev Ittycheria 1