a16z · Oct 10, 2026 · 51m · 42m saved
With Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a16z
By age 25, Ben Horowitz was married with three children and, by his own account, focused on keeping the lights on rather than starting a company.
Most venture investors look for what is wrong with a founder. Horowitz said a16z's analysts can find a flaw in any company or entrepreneur, and that the flaws are not what decide an investment.
"Every great entrepreneur has got something like horribly wrong with them. But that's okay."
Horowitz ran Loudcloud, later Opsware, through the dot-com crash and sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $1.65 billion in 2007. He then co-founded Andreessen Horowitz with Marc Andreessen and wrote "The Hard Thing About Hard Things," a management book about running a company in a crisis. He sat down for the first episode of a new interview series on the firm's channel.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 51 minutes of audio, 9 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 lessons that matter.
Key Takeaways
Horowitz invests in founders whose strengths are world class and overlooks the rest
He said every great entrepreneur has something seriously wrong with them, and pointed to Elon Musk as a founder whose strength outweighs his flaws
Many companies fail because the founders cannot handle the low point, he said
Investors rarely see how a founder behaves under extreme pressure before they invest
He built a16z as a product for entrepreneurs rather than for the pension funds and endowments that supply its money
The partners gave up much of their salary to fund recruiting, introductions and policy help for founders
a16z backed Trump after it could not get a meeting with the Biden administration over crypto and AI
He said a final Biden executive order would have required government approval to sell a graphics chip
The firm widens its hiring criteria instead of lowering them, and its staff is now about 54% women
Horowitz rejects the AI bubble argument because, for the first time, a company can spend its way to catching up
He said demand for Nvidia's chips is unlimited and that investors are now more pessimistic than euphoric
He replaced HubSpot with a tool he built himself in a week using Claude Code
Software companies trade at low multiples because customers can now write their own versions, he said
He expects the systems underneath AI, from chips to models, to be rebuilt the way cloud computing was
1. Hip-Hop as a Business Manual
Horowitz said his attachment to hip-hop dates to college in New York, when a close childhood friend named Seth was blinded in a gun accident and stopped speaking.
He recorded hip-hop radio shows on Saturday nights and mailed the tapes to his friend, who started talking again, at first only about hip-hop
"Like it's like the most like you can have nothing and you'll rap about your shoes and like my shoes are the best. And I'm like, he needs that feeling." — Ben Horowitz
The two later formed a group, the Blind and Deaf Crew, with Horowitz writing most of the lyrics. When he began writing about business, he said, many of his ideas came from early hip-hop songs, so he put the lyrics at the top of his blog posts to credit the source.
