It's conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists are not the best of buddies, and you guys were both entrepreneurs, were operating entrepreneurs several times over before starting your firm. And so, the first question for you Mark is, why were you interested in becoming a venture capitalist at all? [ COUGH ]. At a certain point in your career, I mean, part of the answer, it's a personal answer, which is that at a certain point in your career, it becomes more satisfying to help entrepreneurs than to be one. That's the introspective side of things, which I'm terrible at, and so I'll just like, I just, I'll refuse to talk about that going forward in this interview. The other answer though, the, the more sort of objective answer, is we saw the opportunity to create the venture capital firm that we would have wanted to take money from had it existed. Mm- hm. And so it's sorta the classic case of we were a customer venture capital for 15 years. So while we hadn't been VC's, we had a very good idea of what it was like to be on the other side of the table and to actually be the consumer of the product, if you will. You took a purposefully different approach to venture capital. Explain Ben. Right, well, we had a couple of different ideas, that led to that, and the first was, founders make the best CEOs. And that was like at the time, like real counter- programming in that we had looked at all the really great companies, and they were typically run by their founders. And we really believed there was a reason for that, having been entrepreneurs, that the founder has the knowledge. They've got the commitment. They've got the passion. That's very hard to implant into the company. And then we designed the firm rather than being a firm for a, to replace a founder with a professional CEO, we became the firm to teach the founder how to be the CEO and enable the founder to be the CEO. And once we did that, there was a whole set of things that changed. So, the first thing was the partners needed to have experience running companies. By partners, you mean your partners? The venture capitalists. The investing partners. The guy, if somebody's going on your board and you're going to be CEO, it will help if that person knows how to be CEO, who has done it before. So that we can help the founder get the skill set. And then the second thing was, professional CEOs have these incredible networks. They, you know, you know, people in the press and customers, and, you know executives, and all these guys they can bring into the company. So we thought, you know, the firm ought to build the definitive network for Silicon Valley, so that when a founder comes in, we can give em a network that's better than any professional CEO. And those two things really ended up differentiating the firm in a big way. And so it may come as a surprise to people that as a professional service firm, one of your role models is a completely different kind of professional services firm, a talent agency. Is that right? I would say we have kind of three firms that we really consider role models, so one is CAA, the talent agency, CAA. And a particular, CAA in the time period between 1975 and 1990 where it basically went from a complete upstart to being, you know, by far the market share leader in an industry that actually was 80 years old at that point. So, you know, or, or for Micheal Olvelson a profound entrepreneurial accomplishment. We've learned a ton from him. The other two firms we really, aspire to be like, in addition to that or draw inspiration from is Allen Company which, you know, has been actually has had a continuous operating model itself in, in it's case, its actually existed since the 1920's. This is the Boutique Investment Bank. Boutique Investment Bank, and its gone through generations of leadership, and its evolved its strategy, but its culture and its way of operating and its value system have been, you know, sort of shockingly continuous, especially in the context of Wall Street. And we worked with them very closely and very much admire them. And then the third is, is our, is the original, the old, the, you know, the, the 1910s, 1920s era JP Morgan, which played such a fundamental role in helping to finance, basically, to build up out of industrial America. Most people would agree that Andreessen Horowitz is now among the very top firms that entrepreneurs want to work with. Although you're too young to have a long term track record to say that you have among the, the top returns. It was rather audacious of you given this track record to say we're going to be one of those firms, right? Yeah, it was, and this was probably the biggest hurdle that we had to get over before we started the firm, which was exactly that. There have only been a couple of firms in the last 30 years that, that had been able to punch in and so that's what took us the most time. And what we thought we had figured out was a clearly different model and set of theories around how to attract the best entrepreneurs. That part of it does seem, I think objectively, that part of it is working. You know, we still have to demonstrate, as you say, this sort of long term financial returns that form from that.

Venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz talk about how they modeled their firm after CAA and JPMorgan.

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