Podcasts about Opsware

ABOUT WADE CHAMBERSWade Chambers will be leading Engineering at Amplitude. Amplitude is the leading digital analytics platform that helps companies unlock the power of their products. Wade has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Included Health, Twitter, TellApart, Proofpoint, Yahoo, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams, leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth. Build AI Voice Agents with ElevenLabsElevenLabs is the leading Voice AI platform for developers with thousands of ultra-realistic, human-like voices across 32 languages.Developers use ElevenLabs to build life-like, conversational AI voice agents to handle customer support queries, appointment scheduling, and even offer personalized 1-1 tutoring.Get started for free at elevenlabs.io/elc SHOW NOTES:Why empowering engineering teams to own their mission matters (3:16)Common traps that prevent eng leaders from empowering teams (5:15)Understanding the “why” behind ownership & systemizing individual ownership (7:09)Systems change for empowerment: Aligning company vision, outcomes, competencies & behaviors (9:48)How to bring someone from low ownership back to high ownership (13:49)Developing trust & having tough conversations around ownership (15:17)Nonobvious factors to that erode ownership over time (17:42)Empowering teams through meaningful missions, clear expectations, defining success, & ongoing check-ins (20:55)Identifying engineers w/ competencies & behaviors that align w/ your org's vision & goals (24:00)When having too much ownership becomes a problem (27:22)Wade's process for officially transferring ownership (28:47)Coaching and navigating conversations around ownership (32:01)Impactful questions to ask during the coaching / check in process (34:08)Closing gaps in leadership competencies & behaviors (37:27)Coaching leaders to align personal growth with org goals (39:25)Rapid fire questions (41:34)This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In this episode, Ben, Peter, and Salim discuss recent tech, AI, robotics, and crypto news and what the new administration means for tech enthusiasts.   Recorded on Jan 23rd, 2024 Views are my own thoughts; not Financial, Medical, or Legal Advice. Ben Horowitz is a prominent businessman, investor, author, and technology entrepreneur who has played a pivotal role in shaping Silicon Valley. In 1999, he co-founded Loudcloud, which evolved into Opsware, an enterprise software company acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. In 2009, Horowitz co-founded Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a leading venture capital firm that has invested in groundbreaking companies like Airbnb and Coinbase. He is the author of two bestselling books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are, offering practical insights into building businesses and shaping culture. Known for his expertise in technology entrepreneurship, venture capital, and thought leadership, Horowitz also established the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders with the tech industry and promote diversity.  Salim Ismail is a serial entrepreneur and technology strategist well known for his expertise in Exponential organizations. He is the Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO.  Learn more about a16z: https://a16z.com/  Join Salim's ExO Community: https://openexo.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/salimismail  ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are,  please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:  Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter  Get 15% off OneSkin with the code PETER at  https://www.oneskin.co/ #oneskinpod _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today's and tomorrow's exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now:  Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots

Dr. Jordan B. Peterson sits down with entrepreneur and software pioneer, Marc Andreessen. They discuss the timeline of the woke institutional takeover, the ruinous effects it has had on Western ideology and business, the ways in which AI will shape society, and the immense responsibility we have to instill the future with an ethos and morality that serves human flourishing. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a B.S. in computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, Samsara, Simple Things, and TipTop Labs. He is also on the board of Meta. This episode was filmed on December 18th, 2024.  | Links | For Marc Andreessen: On X https://x.com/pmarca?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor Substack https://pmarca.substack.com/ “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto” (Book) https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/ 

Episode 361 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Phil Pergola, CEO at CloudZero. Phil has a tremendous track record and we talk about a lot of great companies that he's helped build throughout his career, but I need to highlight one of these companies in this intro and that is BladeLogic and the lasting impact the company has made. If you've ever read the famous startup book by Ben Horowitz called The Hard Thing About Hard Things… the competitor to his company Opsware was BladeLogic which is absolutely classic. BladeLogic went on to become a public company and was subsequently acquired by BMC Software. Another fascinating point about BladeLogic is the people and how many have gone on to become C-level sales executives or advisors at some of the most successful companies out there like MongoDB, AppDynamics, Snowflake, Wiz, Okta, and others. There is even a podcast called Hunters + Unicorns which interviews a bunch of them. CloudZero is the leader in proactive cloud cost efficiency. They enable engineers to build cost-efficient software without slowing down innovation. The company announced a $32M Series B round of funding last year. In this podcast, we cover: * The importance of building a successful pre and post-sales organization, plus the details of the LAYR model (Land Adopt Expand Retain). * Phil's background and the story of his initial interest in pursuing a career path as an actuary. * A trip down Boston tech memory lane across multiple companies like Eggrock Partners which was acquired by Breakaway Solutions, BladeLogic, enerNOC, and CloudHealth Technologies. * All the details about CloudZero - how they found product market fit, why he joined as CEO, and the latest at the company today. * Advice on raising venture capital funding. * Lots of great advice on being a first time CEO - his lessons learned, what you should think about in the first 90 days, and advice on how to get on the radar for CEO positions. * And so much more. Episode Sponsor: As a longtime champion of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank supports innovative companies with the solutions and financing they need through every stage of growth. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors, and $42B in loans as of Q2 2024 – SVB delivers the right people, service and resources to support your entire financial journey. Learn more at SVB.com.

In today's episode, THE MENTORS RADIO host Dan Hesse talks with Marc Andreessen, the outspoken technology visionary who believes that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will save the world. In this episode, Marc shares his advice for entrepreneurs, talks about how new fields such as cryptocurrency and The Metaverse will impact our lives. After co-creating the influential Mosaic Internet browser and co-founding Netscape, Marc led a remarkable career building new companies. As co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz (also referred to as “a16z”), he continues to mentor many of today's most successful tech entrepreneurs. A lifelong innovator and creator, Marc is one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion (BILLION!) people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Andreessen co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which, as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Listen to this episode below or on ANY podcast platform (from Apple to Google to iTunes etc )— Just type in “THE Mentors RADIO” … even easier, Subscribe HERE & listen on any podcast platform!!! (click here).  And don't forget to give us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!! SHOW NOTES: MARC ANDREESSEN: BIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen ARTICLES: Why AI will save the world, by Marc Andreessen Why Software Is Eating the World, by Marc Andreessen It's Time to Build, by Marc Andreessen VIDEOS/Other Interviews with Marc Andreessen: Marc Andressen on His Intellectual Journey the Last 10 Years An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World Woke Capital with Marc Andreessen

Vandaag bespreken we het boek The hard thing about hard things van Ben Horowitz. Ben is de medeoprichter en beherend vennoot van Andreessen Horowitz, een durfkapitaalfirma uit Silicon Valley die investeert in ondernemers die de volgende generatie toonaangevende bedrijven. Het bedrijf investeert onder andere in Airbnb, GitHub, Facebook, Pinterest en Twitter.  Daarvoor was hij medeoprichter en CEO van Opsware, voorheen Loudcloud, dat in 2007 werd overgenomen door Hewlett-Packard voor $1,6 miljard dollar in 2007.  Horowitz schrijft over zijn ervaringen en inzichten uit  zijn carrière als student computerwetenschappen, software-ingenieur, medeoprichter,  CEO en investeerder in een blog die door bijna tien miljoen mensen wordt gelezen. Ik weet niet zo goed wat ik van dit boek vind. Typisch Amerikaans. Focus op financieel succes. Het boek heeft een focus op de startup wereld die willen verkopen of naar de beurs. Anglo Amerikaanse wereld. Opschalen. Focus op oorlog in de markt, Winner takes all omgevingen. Hij noemt regelmatig bekende Amerikaanse succesvolle CEO's en sport coaches als voorbeeld. Alles geven als oprichter. Wat hij verder doet is niet alleen de rooskleurige kant beschrijven, maar ook alle lastige dingen die op je pad komen als CEO. 1 Van communist tot durfkapitalist 2 ‘I Will Survive' 3 Deze keer met gevoel  4 Wanneer alles instort  5 Zorg voor je mensen, je producten en je winst – in die volgorde  6 Over de zorgen van weggaan 7 Leidinggeven zelfs als je niet weet waar je naartoe gaat  8 De eerste regel van ondernemerschap: er zijn geen regels  9 Het eind van het begin  1 Van communist tot durfkapitalist 2 ‘I Will Survive' 3 Deze keer met gevoel  4 Wanneer alles instort  5 Zorg voor je mensen, je producten en je winst – in die volgorde  6 Over de zorgen van weggaan 7 Leidinggeven zelfs als je niet weet waar je naartoe gaat  8 De eerste regel van ondernemerschap: er zijn geen regels  9 Het eind van het begin Holacracy in times of crisis - Tom van der Lubbe (video) Peace time CEO - War time CEO A16z.com Disclaimer - heb je problemen neem contact met (zelfmoordlijn) Opvallende lessen uit het boek voor ons: 00:00 intro - korte indruk van het boek door Erno 03:25 korte indruk van Tom - het belangrijkste boek voor de ondernemer. 4:35 Vergelijk tussen een succesvol boek en dit boek - in dit boek staan de echt lastige situaties en keuzes voor ondernemers. 5:45 Ondernemen is heel eenzaam en dat je niet weet wat je de volgende week moet doen. Ondernemen is een nachtmerrie. 08:00 Je betaald privé een hele hoge prijs omdat je denkt dat je het beter weet en ondernemer wordt. 16:00 De meest gelezen management en ondernemersboeken zijn niet door echte ondernemers geschreven. 17:45 The war time CEO - niet leuk maar enorm belangrijk in tijden wanneer het niet goed gaat met het bedrijf. 26:25 Een CEO in oorlogstijd is niet uit op consensus, maar tolereert ook geen onenigheid. 27:20 Wees bij je mensen, vooral in een moeilijke tijd. 27:50 Leiding geven, zelfs als je niet weet waar je naar toe gaat. 28:45 De lastigste vaardigheid die hij als CEO moest leren. 29:50 Type 1 en type 2 CEO. 33:00 Praktische tips voor goede feedback naar medewerkers. 40:20 Sluit je aan bij een ondernemersnetwerk zoals EO, IDG Entrepreneurs network of werk met een coach. Bronnen die we genoemd hebben Mark Andreesen Ben Horowitz Andreessen Horowitz Blog Ben Horowitz Peter Thiel Reid Hoffman - Masters of Scale Only the paranoid survive - Andrew Grove Teal Around the World 2023: Tom van der Lubbe - 'Holacracy in Times of crisis' Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO - Ben Horowitz VanMoof en Lightyear Luister naar deze aflevering Beluister hier ons gesprek over het boek The hard things about hard things In een halfuur delen wij dit boek met jou.

In this Screaming in the Cloud Summer Replay, we revisit our conversation with Scott Johnston, CEO of (the church) of Docker. Docker's community and their fervor is well known, and Scott has much to say about it! Join the discussion as Scott goes into how he left Puppet after some exposure to Corey to become the CEO at Docker. Scott tells us what exactly Docker is, and where it starts, which is the community around it. Scott talks about the reset that Docker went through in November of 2019, where they decided to make the developer the focus of their mission. He also dives into Docker Desktop, which Scott goes into the details of. Check out this episode for more!Show Highlights:(0:00) Intro(1:15) Duckbill Group sponsor read(1:48) What is Docker?(4:03) Returning to being a developer tool(5:56) Docker's pricing changes and Docker Desktop(11:47) Community reaction to the pricing change(13:57) Building customer confidence(18:52) Duckbill Group sponsor read(19:36) Putting trust into user(22:04) Docker's monetization strategy(29:28) Embracing change(32:16) Where to learn more about Scott and Docker About Scott JohnstonScott first typed ‘docker run' in 2013 and hasn't looked back. He's been with Docker since 2014 in a variety of leadership roles and currently serves as CEO. His experience previous to Docker includes Sun Microsystems, Puppet, Netscape, Cisco, and Loudcloud (parent of Opsware). When not fussing with computers he spends time with his three kids fussing with computers.Links:Docker: https://www.docker.comTwitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnstonOriginal Episode:https://www.lastweekinaws.com/podcast/screaming-in-the-cloud/heresy-in-the-church-of-docker-desktop-with-scott-johnston/Sponsor:The Duckbill Group: https://www.duckbillgroup.com/

In today's episode, we're highlighting one of our favorite past conversations, featuring Wade Chambers, CTO & SVP of Engineering @ Included Health. We cover tools for increasing your capacity to win as an eng leader, getting unstuck in your career / moving forward, and applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity principles to the career. Wade shares stories of success – and failure – as an eng manager, best practices to measure success as an eng leader, and how to increase your team's performance & potential.ABOUT WADE CHAMBERSWade Chambers (@wadechambers) is the CTO and SVP of Engineering at IncludedHealth, a company that provides technology solutions to improve the way patients get healthcare matched to their needs. He has over 25 years of engineering leadership experience, both advising companies and being hands-on in key leadership positions at companies such as Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, Proofpoint, and Opsware. He is a deep technical expert with a proven track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth.“The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable...' and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward.”- Wade Chambers   Join us at ELC Annual 2024!ELC Annual is our 2 day conference bringing together engineering leaders from around the world for a unique experience help you expand your network and empower your leadership & career growth.Don't miss out on this incredible opportunity to expand your network, gain actionable insights, ignite new ideas, recharge, and accelerate your leadership journey!Secure your ticket at sfelc.com/annual2024And use the exclusive discount code "podcast10" (all lowercase) for a 10% discountSHOW NOTES:Wade's background in building a habit of conscious growth & digging deeper (4:14)Overcoming early failures as a first-time manager (8:11)Why it's hard to unhear the truth & how to incorporate feedback as a manager (13:08)How understanding neuroplasticity impacts career development (18:11)Moving along the spectrum of unconscious incompetence to unconscious competence (19:30)Align your growth to impact your company AND move your career forward (24:37)Why eng leaders need to truly understand their org's business needs (29:49)Strategies for both winning & increasing your capacity to win (35:30)How to increase the potential of individuals & your overall team (40:52)Factors that are keeping you stuck in career growth (44:39)Turning to books to maximize learning / growth (52:11)How to identify core principles & why they drive your behavior (55:37)Final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are & where you want to be (58:54)This episode wouldn't have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-HostJerry Li - Co-HostNoah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan's also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/

In the first Origins episode of the year, ⁠Nick Chirls⁠ (Notation Capital) and ⁠Beezer Clarkson⁠ (Sapphire Partners) host Scott Kupor, a Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. In his role as managing partner, Scott invests in growth-stage companies building in the bio and healthcare industries, manages the firm's investor relations team, and is responsible for the firm's growth initiatives.  Scott was the first employee at Andreessen Horowitz and managed the firm's growth from $300 million in AUM to more than $30 billion. Prior to joining the firm, Scott worked as vice president and general manager of software-as-a-service at Hewlett Packard. Before that, he held numerous executive management positions at Opsware, including senior vice president of global field operations, vice president of financial planning and vice president of corporate development. Scott is also the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, and serves on the boards of Cedar, Headway, Foursquare, Labster, Ultima, and SnapLogic. He also served as chairman of the board for the National Venture Capital Association. In this episode we discuss:  - The evolution of Andreessen Horowitz as the firm approaches its 15th anniversary - Reflections on how Scott's role has changed since becoming the first hire at a16z - The state of venture today with AI as an inflection point + valuation corrections - Managing LP/GP expectations in the current environment (e.g. markdowns) - a16z's decentralized business model and keeping important cultural values - How to think about (and debate) fund size and what is the TAM today …and much more Follow us: ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/nchirls⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://twitter.com/beezer232⁠⁠ https://twitter.com/skupor

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin ✓ Claim Key Takeaways  The more technology and capitalism we get, the better things are going to get Fundamentally, whether or not a startup succeeds depends on whether it is building a product that people want Great people want to be around other great people; most companies are too tolerant of mediocrity In the long run, even the most innovative companies eventually become boringTall Poppy Syndrome: Due to humanity's tribal inclinations, the Tall Poppy – the person trying to do something new – tends to get cut When something in tech is successful, it tends to change the status structures and hierarchies of societyThe Law of Crappy People: The quality of any level in the company will degrade to the worst person at that level “More companies die of indigestion than of starvation.” – Marc Andreessen  The best companies can think in the long term despite the pressures to prioritize the short-term New things in the world are not going to show up predictably By 2030 or 2035, you will be able to have the equivalent of 1,000 AI programmers writing code for you Most people who are opposed to technological change are not opposed to the given technology but are opposed to how that technology may diminish their status and power Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMarc Andreessen is a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer best known for his key role in the development of the early internet. In the early 90s, Marc co-created Mosaic, a pioneering web browser, while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1994, he founded Netscape, launching the popular Netscape Navigator browser. After selling Netscape to AOL in 1999 for $4.3 billion, Marc founded Opsware, selling it later for $1.6 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has backed, among others, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and SpaceX. Known for his insights into technology, Marc's early work with Mosaic and Netscape significantly shaped the internet's growth, and his ongoing contributions continue to influence the tech industry. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin ✓ Claim Key Takeaways  The more technology and capitalism we get, the better things are going to get Fundamentally, whether or not a startup succeeds depends on whether it is building a product that people want Great people want to be around other great people; most companies are too tolerant of mediocrity In the long run, even the most innovative companies eventually become boringTall Poppy Syndrome: Due to humanity's tribal inclinations, the Tall Poppy – the person trying to do something new – tends to get cut When something in tech is successful, it tends to change the status structures and hierarchies of societyThe Law of Crappy People: The quality of any level in the company will degrade to the worst person at that level “More companies die of indigestion than of starvation.” – Marc Andreessen  The best companies can think in the long term despite the pressures to prioritize the short-term New things in the world are not going to show up predictably By 2030 or 2035, you will be able to have the equivalent of 1,000 AI programmers writing code for you Most people who are opposed to technological change are not opposed to the given technology but are opposed to how that technology may diminish their status and power Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMarc Andreessen is a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer best known for his key role in the development of the early internet. In the early 90s, Marc co-created Mosaic, a pioneering web browser, while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1994, he founded Netscape, launching the popular Netscape Navigator browser. After selling Netscape to AOL in 1999 for $4.3 billion, Marc founded Opsware, selling it later for $1.6 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has backed, among others, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and SpaceX. Known for his insights into technology, Marc's early work with Mosaic and Netscape significantly shaped the internet's growth, and his ongoing contributions continue to influence the tech industry. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin ✓ Claim Key Takeaways  The more technology and capitalism we get, the better things are going to get Fundamentally, whether or not a startup succeeds depends on whether it is building a product that people want Great people want to be around other great people; most companies are too tolerant of mediocrity In the long run, even the most innovative companies eventually become boringTall Poppy Syndrome: Due to humanity's tribal inclinations, the Tall Poppy – the person trying to do something new – tends to get cut When something in tech is successful, it tends to change the status structures and hierarchies of societyThe Law of Crappy People: The quality of any level in the company will degrade to the worst person at that level “More companies die of indigestion than of starvation.” – Marc Andreessen  The best companies can think in the long term despite the pressures to prioritize the short-term New things in the world are not going to show up predictably By 2030 or 2035, you will be able to have the equivalent of 1,000 AI programmers writing code for you Most people who are opposed to technological change are not opposed to the given technology but are opposed to how that technology may diminish their status and power Read the full notes @ podcastnotes.orgMarc Andreessen is a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer best known for his key role in the development of the early internet. In the early 90s, Marc co-created Mosaic, a pioneering web browser, while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1994, he founded Netscape, launching the popular Netscape Navigator browser. After selling Netscape to AOL in 1999 for $4.3 billion, Marc founded Opsware, selling it later for $1.6 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has backed, among others, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and SpaceX. Known for his insights into technology, Marc's early work with Mosaic and Netscape significantly shaped the internet's growth, and his ongoing contributions continue to influence the tech industry. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra

Marc Andreessen is a prominent entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer best known for his key role in the development of the early internet. In the early 90s, Marc co-created Mosaic, a pioneering web browser, while a student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1994, he founded Netscape, launching the popular Netscape Navigator browser. After selling Netscape to AOL in 1999 for $4.3 billion, Marc founded Opsware, selling it later for $1.6 billion. In 2009, he co-founded Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm that has backed, among others, Airbnb, Facebook, Instagram, and SpaceX. Known for his insights into technology, Marc's early work with Mosaic and Netscape significantly shaped the internet's growth, and his ongoing contributions continue to influence the tech industry. ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra ------ House of Macadamias https://www.houseofmacadamias.com/tetra ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra

Chapter 1 What's The Hard Thing About Hard Things"The Hard Thing About Hard Things" is a 2014 business book written by Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the former CEO of software company Opsware. The book offers practical advice and insights on entrepreneurship, leadership, and building a successful business. It addresses the challenges and difficult decisions that leaders face, providing guidance on managing tough situations and making the right choices to navigate through difficult times. It is considered a valuable resource for aspiring entrepreneurs and business leaders.Chapter 2 Why is The Hard Thing About Hard Things Worth ReadThe Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz is worth reading for several reasons:1. Practical Advice: The book provides practical advice for entrepreneurs and leaders facing difficult challenges. Horowitz draws from his personal experiences as the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz and as a CEO of several tech companies. He shares valuable insights, tools, and strategies for navigating through tough situations, making difficult decisions, and developing a strong company culture.2. Raw and Honest: Horowitz does not shy away from discussing the brutal realities of running a business. He shares stories of failure, layoffs, and tough conversations, highlighting the emotional and mental toll that being a leader can take. This rawness makes the book relatable and helps readers understand that they are not alone in their struggles.3. Real-World Examples: The book is filled with real-world examples and anecdotes, making it easier for readers to understand and apply the concepts. Horowitz presents a mix of success stories and failures, explaining the lessons learned from each situation and providing actionable takeaways for readers.4. Focus on Leadership and Management: The Hard Thing About Hard Things goes beyond providing generic business advice and delves deep into the challenges faced by leaders and managers. Horowitz discusses topics like hiring and firing, building a strong executive team, handling crises, and managing the emotional aspects of being a leader. These insights are invaluable for anyone in a leadership position or aspiring to be one.5. Inspirational Tone: Despite the book's focus on the "hard things" in business, it maintains an inspirational and motivational tone. Horowitz emphasizes the importance of perseverance, resilience, and continuous learning. He shares stories of successful turnarounds and offers encouragement to those facing their own challenges.Overall, The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a practical, honest, and inspiring book that provides valuable insights for entrepreneurs, leaders, and anyone facing difficult business situations.Chapter 3 The Hard Thing About Hard Things Summary"The Hard Thing About Hard Things" is a book written by Ben Horowitz, co-founder of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and former CEO of software company Opsware. The book serves as a guide for entrepreneurs and executives facing difficult decisions and challenges in their careers.Horowitz shares his personal experiences and lessons learned from leading a company through various crises and difficult times. He acknowledges that running a business is challenging and often requires making tough decisions that can have a significant impact on both the company and its employees.Throughout the book, Horowitz discusses different aspects of leadership, including managing layoffs, hiring and firing executives, and dealing with employee morale. He emphasizes the importance of being transparent and honest with employees during difficult times, while also recognizing the value of...

(0:00) Intro(1:20) The Qualified Sales Leader(9:57) Sales basics in building an efficient and scalable sales org(16:53) Carlo Carelli - Greatest Salesperson in the World(20:55) Product market fit(26:07) The medic qualification process(36:35) Difference between a champion and a coach(42:51) Best interview questions when hiring(53:49) The hardest part of transitioning to sales management(1:03:06) On firing(1:10:06) The process of letting someone go(1:11:30) Accidental sales leader(1:17:25) John McMahon as a sales rep early on(1:21:24) Blade Logic and Opsware(1:26:37) The most common misconception about sales Mixed and edited: Justin HrabovskyProduced: Rashad AssirExecutive Producer: Josh MachizMusic: Griff Lawson 

Welcome to Hunters and Unicorns: The Playbook Universe. Today we welcome Dan Miller! Key takeaways from this episode are: • What it took to close a deal worth just short of $100m • Why he never missed his number • Why allies and mentors in GTM community are essential Dan Miller is a GTM Advisor at Loft Lab sand Observable, focusing on revenue strategies. In this Hunters and Unicorns podcast, Dan reflects on his career-defining moments at prestigious companies such as Splunk, Nimble Storage, Sumo Logic and SignalFX. He shares his experience when transitioning from an IC to a Leadership role and the challenges he faced. Dan is a force of nature within the playbook space. His list of achievements is extensive and includes; • Exceeding 100% every year • Closed the larges deal in Splunk's history • Exposed to the playbooks of both John McMahon and Mark Cranny We loved understanding more from Dan about identifying early-stage companies and the right strategies needed for implementation. How can champions really be identified consistently? What are the real impactful metrics when it comes to sales? Dan shares with us his insight pertaining to sales as a science as opposed to an art. He also shares the inspirational story of Mark Cranney and his journey including competing with the Bladelogic team at Opsware and driving a $1.6 billion sale to HP. Dan gives us real insight to the SignalFX story! This episode is not to be missed!

In today's episode, The Mentors Radio host Dan Hesse talks with Marc Andreessen, the outspoken technology visionary who believes that Artificial Intelligence will save the world. In this episode, Marc shares his advice for entrepreneurs, talks about how new fields such as cryptocurrency and The Metaverse will impact our lives. After co-creating the influential Mosaic Internet browser and co-founding Netscape, Marc led a remarkable career building new companies. As co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreesen-Horowitz (also referred to as "a16z"), he continues to mentor many of today's most successful tech entrepreneurs. A lifelong innovator and creator, Marc is one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion (BILLION!) people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Andreessen co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which, as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Listen to this episode below or on ANY podcast platform (from Apple to Google to iTunes etc )— Just type in “THE Mentors RADIO” … even easier, Subscribe HERE & listen on any podcast platform!!! (click here).  And don't forget to give us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!! SHOW NOTES: MARC ANDREESSEN: BIO: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen ARTICLES: Why AI will save the world, by Marc Andreessen Why Software Is Eating the World, by Marc Andreessen It's Time to Build, by Marc Andreessen VIDEOS/Other Interviews with Marc Andreessen: Marc Andressen on His Intellectual Journey the Last 10 Years An Interview with Marc Andreessen about AI and How You Change the World Woke Capital with Marc Andreessen

Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the future of artificial intelligence (AI). They discuss the primary importance of intelligence, possible good outcomes for AI, the problem of alienation, the significance of evolution, the Alignment Problem, the current state of LLMs, AI and war, dangerous information, regulating AI, economic inequality, and other topics. Marc Andreessen is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Coinbase, Dialpad, Flow, Golden, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara. He is also on the board of Meta. Twitter: @pmarca Website: https://a16z.com Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to Hunters and Unicorns: The Playbook Universe. We're here to showcase leaders within the Playbook Community and explore their formulas for success. We aim to uncover: · The Evolution of the Playbook · Leading indicators that are proven in SaaS to create sustained success · The changing landscape of sales cycles Today we are joined by Chris Singletary, RVP-East at Coralogix. In this episode, we dive into Chris' impressive sales career which began after his time with the US military – an experience which has shaped him profoundly. Chris has worked at many industry powerhouses including; Oracle, Opsware, BMC, Cisco, AppDynamics, Lacework and Coralogix. His career trajectory has always been aligned to the Playbook community – join us in listening to his experience and lessons learned! Chris shares with us his perspective on the Playbook Mindset and MEDDIC principles – at a time where buyers and sellers' needs may have changed, the principles of the Playbook Mindset still ring true today. On the theme of today's changing landscape, Chris also shares the challenges involved with remote working, the ever-evolving length of sales cycles and how to curate successful sales executions in today's market for the individual, team and organisation. Chris places huge importance on empathy and making genuine connections within the sales space. He also shares the characteristics of strong leaders. At what point does support and guidance become rigid oversight? How does accountability feed directly into account progression? Chris also discusses the importance of leaders spending time with their reps to nurture progression not revenue. Chris distils the core principles of identifying pain and hunting for champions. As a keen advocate of following the playbook fundamentals, Chris also shares why research is a critical pillar in the sales process. He shares his insight in how to launch a great sales campaign. Understanding what's changed in this software sales space, as well as what still stands strong, Chris offers views and phenomenal insight into the Playbook universe.

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.This week we're joined by Scott Kupor, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. Scott was the first employee of the firm alongside Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. He has been instrumental in the firm's growth to now having north of $35B in AUM. Scott also authored a Wall Street Journal bestselling book called Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, and previously also served as chairman of the board of the NVCA. Scott goes through the history of a16z and the learnings along the way in building the multi-product investment company it is today.Frank, Rimerman + Co.'s history is closely intertwined with that of Silicon Valley. With humble beginnings similar to so many start-ups, Frank, Rimerman was formed with a desire to serve the entrepreneurial and venture communities of the Valley and the determination to think outside-the-box.When it comes to venture funds, we work with almost 500 VC groups from over 20 states across the USA. We have worked with over 400 fund groups during their first year of operations, making us one of the leading providers in the country to emerging managers.No one wants to be bored at work. That's why we chose to work with some of the most innovative and creative people – people who are changing the world around us every day. Their excitement fuels our passion and determination to grow and serve this special community.Frank, Rimerman + Co, Passion Works Here.www.frankrimerman.comAbout Scott Kupor:Scott Kupor is Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, focused on growth-stage companies building in the bio and healthcare industries, manages the firm's investor relations team, and is responsible for the firm's growth initiatives. Scott was the first employee at Andreessen Horowitz and managed the firm's growth from $300 million in AUM to more than $30 billion. Prior to joining the firm, Scott worked Hewlett Packard, Opsware, and represented startups through M&A processes. Scott is the author of the Wall Street Journal bestselling book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, and serves on the boards of Cedar, Headway, Foursquare, Labster, Ultima, and SnapLogic. He also served as chairman of the board for the National Venture Capital Association.Scott earned a bachelor's degree and a JD from Stanford University.In this episode, we discuss:(02:24) Scott's journey to a16z(04:52) Lessons from the dotcom bubble (08:29) Why the original thesis for a16z was so different(12:33) How Mike Ovitz and CAA inspired them(16:44) Early days building the firm and recruiting the team(20:26) Running the firm like a startup(25:58) Challenges of building and maintaining a culture(30:01) Building cohesion with a global workforce and work from home(33:18) What “founder-friendly” means at a16z(36:34) Advice for new managers(40:49) Where we are in the current market cycle(44:59) The advice Scott would give e himself as a new graduate.I'd love to know what you took away from this conversation with Scott. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you'd like to be considered as a guest or have someone you'd like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.Podcast Production support provided by Agent Bee This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit ventureunlocked.substack.com

In the latest episode of The Crafty Show podcast, we delve into the world of Jordan Breslow, a seasoned former General Counsel whose expert advice and timely intervention saved his CEO from potential jail time. Jordan talks to us about his experience working in California's flowering ecosystem of innovation and tech in the past decades. This conversation takes a focused look at Jordan's time with Opsware and the role he played in preventing his CEO and one of the most important venture capitalists, Ben Horowitz, from facing prison. Jordan reflects on this experience - including the responsibility of the General Counsel in saying “no” when necessary, the question reporting lines for General Counsel, and building a culture grounded in transparency where people can speak up.Subscribe to The Crafty Show wherever you get your podcast. Find comprehensive show notes for this episode (and more content) on the Crafty Counsel website. Join the Crafty Counsel Community to discover a space where in-house legal professionals can find joy, insight, and connection. Register on the Crafty Counsel website for free.

This week we're rereleasing a previous episode with Marc Andreessen, originally released on August 16, 2021. He is co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. Earlier in life, he was the co-founder of Opsware, Ning, and Netscape. Marc joins the podcast to talk about what's gone wrong with science, the prerequisites for progress, and how tech has changed our lives and has the potential to disrupt stagnant institutions. Topics also include how the internet has influenced dating, what venture capitalists actually do, and whether there is too much – or too little – money in politics.For a transcript of the conversation, see here. Get full access to Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology at www.cspicenter.com/subscribe

My guest today is Marc Andreessen. Marc is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and software engineer. Marc co-founded Mosaic, which was the first widely used Internet browser, as well as Netscape. He also co-founded Opsware and Ning. He is on the board of Meta, and his most important achievement is that he's the first billionaire to ever appear on this podcast.  Marc and I talk about venture capital as a whole and why VC firms on average fail to outperform the stock market. We talk about the role of hierarchy in companies and the possibility of having a truly flat structure where every employee is of equal rank. We talk about George Orwell's book "Homage to Catalonia". We talk about why corporations go woke and why Marc resists that trend. We talk about the maladaptive qualities that have helped him succeed in the VC world and we talk about his long-term vision for his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. #Ad Visit Indeed.com/CONVERSATIONS to start hiring now. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

My guest today is Marc Andreessen. Marc is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and software engineer. Marc co-founded Mosaic, which was the first widely used Internet browser, as well as Netscape. He also co-founded Opsware and Ning. He is on the board of Meta, and his most important achievement is that he's the first billionaire to ever appear on this podcast. Marc and I talk about venture capital as a whole and why VC firms on average fail to outperform the stock market. We talk about the role of hierarchy in companies and the possibility of having a truly flat structure where every employee is of equal rank. We talk about George Orwell's book "Homage to Catalonia". We talk about why corporations go woke and why Marc resists that trend. We talk about the maladaptive qualities that have helped him succeed in the VC world and we talk about his long-term vision for his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.#AdVisit Indeed.com/CONVERSATIONS to start hiring now.

My guest today is Marc Andreessen. Marc is an entrepreneur, venture capital investor, and software engineer. Marc co-founded Mosaic, which was the first widely used Internet browser, as well as Netscape. He also co-founded Opsware and Ning. He is on the board of Meta, and his most important achievement is that he's the first billionaire to ever appear on this podcast. Marc and I talk about venture capital as a whole and why VC firms on average fail to outperform the stock market. We talk about the role of hierarchy in companies and the possibility of having a truly flat structure where every employee is of equal rank. We talk about George Orwell's book "Homage to Catalonia". We talk about why corporations go woke and why Marc resists that trend. We talk about the maladaptive qualities that have helped him succeed in the VC world and we talk about his long-term vision for his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.#AdVisit Indeed.com/CONVERSATIONS to start hiring now.

My podcast with the brilliant Marc Andreessen is out!We discuss:* how AI will revolutionize software* whether NFTs are useless, & whether he should be funding flying cars instead* a16z's biggest vulnerabilities* the future of fusion, education, Twitter, venture, managerialism, & big techDwarkesh Patel has a great interview with Marc Andreessen. This one is full of great riffs: the idea that VC exists to restore pockets of bourgeois capitalism in a mostly managerial capitalist system, what makes the difference between good startup founders and good mature company executives, how valuation works at the earliest stages, and more. Dwarkesh tends to ask the questions other interviewers don't.Byrne Hobart, The DiffWatch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Read the full transcript here. Follow me on Twitter for updates on future episodes.Similar episodesYou may also enjoy my interview of Tyler Cowen about the pessimism of sex and identifying talent, Byrne Hobart about FTX and how drugs have shaped financial markets, and Bethany McLean about the astonishing similarities between FTX and the Enron story (which she broke).Side note: Paying the billsTo help pay the bills for my podcast, I'm turning on paid subscriptions on Substack.No major content will be paywalled - please don't donate if you have to think twice before buying a cup of coffee.But if you have the means & have enjoyed my podcast, I would appreciate your support

Meet Ben Horowitz:Ben Horowitz is Co-founder and General Partner Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm. He is the author of “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and “What You Do Is Who You Are.” Prior to a16z, Ben was Co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud). When Opsware was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, he became their Vice President and General Manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software. Ben received a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA.Key Insights:Software is eating the world. It is a disruptive force in healthcare and other industries.The Power of Software. Software is disrupting all industries. From Amazon, to Netflix, to Uber, good software can increase efficiency, profitability, and customer satisfaction. To Ben, there is no business that wouldn't be improved with world-class software. Going Against Nature. As humans, we naturally want people to like us. However, telling people what they want to hear is a bad quality for leaders. As a founder of CEO, you may need to make tough calls that are necessary but will cause others to be upset.Follow Your Contribution. Passions can change, but talent tends to be more persistent. Ben recommends following your contributions, go where you think you can make the biggest impact with your unique skills and background. This episode is hosted by Gary Bisbee Ph.D. He is a member of the Advisory Council for Day Zero and is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of Think Medium.Relevant Links:Learn more about a16zRead Ben's most recent article “a16z is Moving to the Cloud”Check out Ben's books

Meet Ben Horowitz:Ben Horowitz is Co-founder and General Partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). He is the author of “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” and “What You Do Is Who You Are.” Prior to a16z, Ben was Co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud). When Opsware was acquired by Hewlett-Packard, he became their Vice President and General Manager of Business Technology Optimization for Software. Ben received a Bachelor's in Computer Science from Columbia University and a Masters in Computer Science from UCLA.  Key Insights:The vision for Andreessen-Horowitz derives from Ben's own experience as a software founder. Lessons For CEOs. Ben has two main leadership lessons. One is to seek the truth: about the product, company, and everything you do. Two is to remember you are always talking to the whole company. Every brainstorming session, conversation, and raise can impact the politics and culture of your organization because you speak for and as the company.Are CEOs Made? Ben posits that CEOs are more made than born. Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos are so different from each other, yet are the CEO-founders of successful companies. Truth starts with being true to yourself and your own leadership style.What a16z Does Different. Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm designed to help the founder become an effective CEO, rather than replacing them. This is done by providing founder-CEOs with a network of powerful industry experts, executives, and advisors. Additionally, a16z is transparent about their investing decisions by publishing articles on their website.  Relevant Links: Learn more about a16zRead Ben's most recent article “a16z is Moving to the Cloud”Check out Ben's books

Mike Smerklo, co-founder and managing director at Next Coast Ventures, shares his journey and lessons learned through his experiences as an entrepreneur and now an investor. Mike gives practical examples of how founders can prudently build a relationship with investors right from the first meeting.In this episode, you'll learn:[7:14] Learning to silence “Mr.Monkey” in order to succeed as an entrepreneur[12:48] Why going after a bad market doesn't work even for great entrepreneurs[18:11] Are you obsessed about your idea but are always ready to take feedback?[20:43] Doing a bit of research on investors before meeting them can help a founder to avoid getting unnecessary no's.The non-profit organization Mike is passionate about: Mr. Monkey and MeAbout Guest SpeakerMike Smerklo is a Co Founder & Managing Director at Next Coast Ventures. Formerly, Mike was CEO of ServiceSource (SREV) and prior to that served as Director of Business Development at Opsware. He's also the author of “Mr. Monkey And Me,” a book which looks into the psychology and mental rigor of starting, growing and operating a successful business. About Next Coast VenturesNext Coast Ventures is an Austin-headquartered venture capital firm. Next Coast's thematic investing approach targets Texas and other emerging technology hubs. As one of the fastest-growing venture capital firms in Texas, the firm has invested in several standout technology companies across the U.S. Next Coast's portfolio companies include Navegate, Everlywell, Bridgespan, Tenfold/Callinize, Submittable, Brain Check, among others. Subscribe to our podcast and stay tuned for our next episode. Follow Us:  Twitter | Linkedin | Instagram | Facebook

Only the first 48 minutes of this episode are available on the paywalled podcast version (the BLACK podcast logo). If you’d like to hear the full 1 hour and 53 minutes of this episode and gain access to all full-length episodes of the podcast, you’ll need to SUBSCRIBE here. If you’re already subscribed and on the private RSS feed, the podcast logo should appear RED. In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Marc Andreessen about the current state of Internet technology and culture. They discuss Marc's background in tech, the birth of the Internet, how advertising became the business model for digital media, the three stages of the Web, the blockchain, how successful technology reorders status and power in society, the Bitcoin white paper, the mystery surrounding the identity of Satoshi Nakamoto, the importance of distributed consensus, Bitcoin as digital gold, how society has performed during Covid, James Burnham and managerial capitalism, the principal-agent problem, negative externalities, risk and regulation, trust in institutions, WTF happened in 1971, regulatory capture, banning Trump and Alex Jones from social media, perverse incentives in philanthropy, and other topics. Marc Andreessen is a co-founder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is an innovator and creator, one of the few to pioneer a software category used by more than a billion people and one of the few to establish multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic internet browser and co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. He also co-founded Loudcloud, which as Opsware, sold to Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion. He later served on the board of Hewlett-Packard from 2008 to 2018. Marc holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Marc serves on the board of the following Andreessen Horowitz portfolio companies: Applied Intuition, Carta, Dialpad, Honor, OpenGov, and Samsara Networks. He is also on the board of Meta. Website: a16z.com Twitter: @pmarca Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

In this podcast episode, you will learn:According to Insik, what are the values, skillsets and dynamics of a great team? What should be the ideal size of a founding team?What are some things that the startup founders don't understand about VCs?When should startups think about forming a board, what is the role of the board and who should be a part of it?What is the role of a board member and an advisor?How does Insik assess a company that works with data; for example, a company working on data security for the cloud?What is an investment thesis and how do you come up with it? Do investors really need an investment thesis?What is the reason for the current VC funding winter and why a correction like this is needed for the startup ecosystem?AboutInsik is a General Partner at Vertex Ventures US and is a former founder of Loudcloud and Kiva Software, companies that helped shift enterprise technology categories. At Vertex US, he works with founders who are pursuing advancements in data science and machine learning, enterprise process automation, and real-time infrastructure.Prior to Vertex US, Insik served as General Partner at Rembrandt Venture Partners where he led investments in A Bit Lucky (acquired by Zynga), CloudOn (acquired by Dropbox), and Ooyala (acquired by Telstra). Before that, he was a Partner at Accel Partners, here investing and advising companies including Cloudera, Couchbase, Facebook, Mochi Media (acquired by Shanda), and Terracotta (acquired by Software AG).As the Co-founder and Chief Tactician of Loudcloud, which later was renamed Opsware, Insik helped create the cloud computing paradigm and the data center automation software category.Loudcloud IPO'ed and then was acquired by HP in 2007. His first company, Kiva Software created the Application Server Market market. Enterprises such as E*Trade, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo developed their first online sites using Kiva. Netscape acquired Kiva in 1997 for $180 million.He is currently on the boards of Testlio, Interana, Zepl, Cyberhaven, Evisort and Upsolver and holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley and currently serves on the university's Executive Advisory Board for the College of Engineering. 

Ian Andrews, CMO of Chainalysis, joins to share his experience as a buyer from organizations like Chainalysis, Pivotal, Teradata, and Opsware. Topics include: 1) What separates a good email from one that gets instantly deleted? 2) How to do effective research on your prospect before reaching out. 3) What should you know about the company before your first conversation? 4) Why coming into a meeting with a hypothesis is better than a blank page. Follow the Bowery Capital Startup Sales Podcast for more like this.

Episode 223 features Mike Smerklo, an entrepreneur and professional investor in early-stage technology companies. He is the co-founder of a venture capital firm in Austin, Texas called Next Coast Ventures.Find Mike Online:Website: https://www.mikesmerklo.comLinkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikesmerklo/Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mikesmerklo/Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikesmerkloYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC61Mtr5kAat0Wu6RCFE_9iQFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/smerklo.mike/About Mike:Michael Smerklo is an entrepreneur and professional investor in early-stage technology companies. He is the co-founder of a venture capital firm in Austin, Texas called Next Coast Ventures. Prior to this, he bought a small technology services company, ServiceSource, and ran it for twelve years, taking it from a small startup to a public company with over 3,000 employees worldwide. Michael was also one of the first employees at a pioneer cloud services company called Opsware (then Loudcloud), which also went public. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he had (and thoroughly hated) jobs in investment banking and public accounting. Mike splits his time between Austin and the San Francisco Bay Area and is married with four children.........Thank you for listening! If you wanted to learn more about the host, Brian Ondrako, check out his “Now” Page - https://www.brianondrako.com/now or Sign up for his Weekly Newsletter and 3x a Week Blog - https://brianondrako.com/subscribe/ See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Today on That Tech Pod, Laura and Gabi speak with Peter Barbosa. Peter is a leader and expert in the data privacy space. Currently he serves as the CEO of Opsware, where he helps growth companies build trust with their customers by demonstrating compliance and assurances for modern privacy laws around the globe.Follow That Tech Pod: Twitter-@thattechpodLinkedIn: LinkedIn.com/thattechpod website: thattechpod.com

Tim Howes is a software executive, entrepreneur, investor, and computer scientist who has been at the forefront of many of the most important waves in the technology industry since the 1990s. During his PhD work in computer science, Howes co-created the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), which has become the industry standard means of managing directory information services. In the late 1990s he worked at Netscape on the server side of their business. After Netscape was acquired by AOL, he joined Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in founding Loudcloud, one of the first companies to sell cloud services, predating Amazon Web Services by nearly a decade. Loudcloud would transform into Opsware and be purchased by HP in a successful exit. Later in his career, Howes would co-found Rockmelt, the developer of an innovative web browser, which was later purchased by Yahoo. Howes has held engineering management and technology leadership positions at HP, Yahoo, AOL, and Facebook. He now does angel investing and advises early stage technology companies. In this episode, I interviewed Tim about his career and his advice for people just starting their journeys in the industry. The interview was recorded in-person on February 12, 2022 in my office at Champlain College. Champlain has a mask-mandate, so apologies about how my voice sounded a little muffled. Show Notes Tim Howes on Twitter Tim Howes on LinkedIn Tim Howes via Wikipedia Loudcloud/Opsware via Wikipedia Follow us on Twitter @KopecExplains. Theme “Place on Fire” Copyright 2019 Creo, CC BY 4.0 Find out more at http://kopec.live

In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, venture capitalist Ben Horowitz recounts lessons he learned about how to run a Silicon Valley startup, largely from his time as the CEO of Loudcloud, which later became Opsware. Horowitz provides specific advice about hiring, firing, managing emotions, handling growth, deciding whether or not to sell, and everything in-between. His thoughts are sometimes unconventional and often punctuated by relevant anecdotes from his experience as a CEO or venture capitalist. Show Notes The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz via Amazon Follow us on Twitter @BusinessBooksCo and join our Amazon book club. Edited by Giacomo Guatteri Find out more at http://businessbooksandco.com

My guest today is Mike Smerklo, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Next Coast Ventures and author of Mr. Monkey and Me. Next Coast is investing in a new generation of entrepreneurs building disruptive companies in big markets. We discuss why Mike invests in consumer when his operational experience is in enterprise as well consumer trends he's passionate about, How he organized a search fund and purchased a company and ran it, and his SHAPE formula and how entrepreneurs could think about mental toughness. Here are the questions I ask him: What was it like being recruited by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz at Opsware? How did you end up purchasing ServiceSource? Why did you? So you have all this software and enterprise experience, when and why did you become interested in consumer? How did Next Coast Ventures start? I know you believe that in order to win today you have to build a community over relying on social media. What does community mean to you? What brands are building amazing communities that should serve as case studies? Do you need to stand for something to win in consumer? What is the future of retail in your mind? What are some of your investment themes? What has been your reaction to the pandemic as you think about new consumer behaviors and opportunities? What's your diligence process? What's some of the most common mistake you see entrepreneurs make? Would love to learn about your SHAPE formula and how do you think about mental toughness for entrepreneurs? What's one thing you would change about VC? What's one book that inspired you personally and one book that inspired you professionally? What's one piece of advice you have for founders?

Scott Kupor is a Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). A16z is a leading venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, with more than $18B AUM, focusing on early stage tech companies. Scott Kupor is the Managing Partner of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), one of the world's top venture capital firms. He has overseen the firm's rapid growth to more than 300 employees and more than $18 billion in assets under management. Prior to joining a16z, Scott worked for 8 years in a variety of roles at Opsware, an early SaaS company, before its sale to Hewlett Packard. Besides his role at a16z, Scott is the author of the Wall Street Journal best-seller, Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. He serves on numerous corporate, nonprofit, and education boards. In today's episode, Ross and Scott discuss Scott's early journey from finance into the world of start-ups, venture capital, his role growing a16z from the founding with Marc Andreesen and Ben Horowitz, and his advice for anyone looking to be successful as early stage investors.

About ScottScott first typed ‘docker run' in 2013 and hasn't looked back. He's been with Docker since 2014 in a variety of leadership roles and currently serves as CEO. His experience previous to Docker includes Sun Microsystems, Puppet, Netscape, Cisco, and Loudcloud (parent of Opsware). When not fussing with computers he spends time with his three kids fussing with computers.Links: Docker: https://www.docker.com Twitter: https://twitter.com/scottcjohnston TranscriptAnnouncer: Hello, and welcome to Screaming in the Cloud with your host, Chief Cloud Economist at The Duckbill Group, Corey Quinn. This weekly show features conversations with people doing interesting work in the world of cloud, thoughtful commentary on the state of the technical world, and ridiculous titles for which Corey refuses to apologize. This is Screaming in the Cloud.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by Liquibase. If you're anything like me, you've screwed up the database part of a deployment so severely that you've been banned from touching every anything that remotely sounds like SQL, at at least three different companies. We've mostly got code deployments solved for, but when it comes to databases we basically rely on desperate hope, with a roll back plan of keeping our resumes up to date. It doesn't have to be that way. Meet Liquibase. It is both an open source project and a commercial offering. Liquibase lets you track, modify, and automate database schema changes across almost any database, with guardrails to ensure you'll still have a company left after you deploy the change. No matter where your database lives, Liquibase can help you solve your database deployment issues. Check them out today at liquibase.com. Offer does not apply to Route 53.Corey: This episode is sponsored in part by something new. Cloud Academy is a training platform built on two primary goals. Having the highest quality content in tech and cloud skills, and building a good community the is rich and full of IT and engineering professionals. You wouldn't think those things go together, but sometimes they do. Its both useful for individuals and large enterprises, but here's what makes it new. I don't use that term lightly. Cloud Academy invites you to showcase just how good your AWS skills are. For the next four weeks you'll have a chance to prove yourself. Compete in four unique lab challenges, where they'll be awarding more than $2000 in cash and prizes. I'm not kidding, first place is a thousand bucks. Pre-register for the first challenge now, one that I picked out myself on Amazon SNS image resizing, by visiting cloudacademy.com/corey. C-O-R-E-Y. That's cloudacademy.com/corey. We're gonna have some fun with this one!Corey: Welcome to Screaming in the Cloud. I'm Corey Quinn. Once upon a time, I started my public speaking career as a traveling contract trainer for Puppet; I've talked about this before. And during that time, I encountered someone who worked there as an exec, Scott Johnston, who sat down, talked to me about how I viewed things, and then almost immediately went to go work at Docker instead. Today's promoted episode brings Scott on to the show. Scott, you fled to get away from me, became the CEO of Docker over the past, oh what is it, seven years now. You're still standing there, and I'm not making fun of Docker quite the way that I used to. First, thanks for joining me.Scott: Great to be here, Corey. Thanks for the invitation. I'm not sure I was fleeing you, but we can recover that one at another time.Corey: Oh, absolutely. In that era, one of my first talks that I started giving that anyone really paid any attention to was called, “Heresy in the Church of Docker,” where I listed about 10 to 13 different things that Docker didn't seem to have answers for, like network separation, security, audit logging, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a fun talk that I used to basically learn how to speak publicly without crying before and after the talk. And in time, it wound up aging out as these problems got addressed, but what surprised me at the time was how receptive the Docker community was to the idea of a talk that wound up effectively criticizing something that for, well, a number of them it felt a lot of the time like it wasn't that far from a religion; it was very hype-driven: “Docker, Docker, Docker” was a recurring joke. Docker has changed a lot. The burning question that I think I want to start this off with is that it's 2021; what is Docker? Is it a technology? Is it a company? Is it a religion? Is it a community? What is Docker?Scott: Yes. I mean that sincerely. Often, the first awareness or the first introduction that newcomers have is in fact the community, before they get their hands on the product, before they learn that there's a company behind the product is they have a colleague who is, either through a Zoom or sitting next to them in some places, or in a coffee shop, and says, “Hey, you got to try this thing called Docker.” And they lean over—either virtually or physically—and look at the laptop of their friend who's promoting Docker, and they see a magical experience. And that is the introduction of so many of our community members, having spoken with them and heard their own kind of journeys.And so that leads to like, “Okay, so why the excitement? Why did the friend lean over to the other friend and introduce?” It's because the tools that Docker provides just helps devs get their app built and shipping faster, more securely, with choice, without being tied into any particular runtime, any particular infrastructure. And that combination has proven to be a breakthrough dopamine hit to developers since the very beginning, since 2013, when Docker is open-source.Corey: It feels like originally, the breakthrough of Docker, that people will say, “Oh, containers aren't new. We've had that going back to LPARs on mainframes.” Yes, I'm aware, but suddenly, it became easy to work with and didn't take tremendous effort to get unified environments. It was cynically observed at the time by lots of folks smarter than I am, that the big breakthrough Docker had was how to make my MacBook look a lot more like a Linux server in production. And we talk about breaking down silos between ops and dev, but in many ways, this just meant that the silo became increasingly irrelevant because, “Works on my machine” was no longer a problem.“Well, you better back up your email because your laptop's about to go into production in that case.” Containers made it easier and that was a big deal. It seems, on some level, like there was a foray where Docker the company was moving into the world of, “Okay, now we're going to run a lot of these containers in production for you, et cetera.” It really feels like recently, the company as a whole and the strategy has turned towards getting back to its roots of solving developer problems and positioning itself as a developer tool. Is that a fair characterization?Scott: A hundred percent. That's very intentional, as well. We certainly had good products, and great customers, and we're solving problems for customers on the ops side, I'll call it, but when we stood back—this is around 2019—and said, “Where's the real… joy?” For lack of a better word, “Where's the real joy from a community standpoint, from a product experience standpoint, from a what do we do different and better and more capable than anyone else in the ecosystem?” It was that developer experience. And so the reset that you're referring to in November 2019, was to give us the freedom to go back and just focus the entire company's efforts on the needs of developers without any other distractions from a revenue, customer, channel, so on and so forth.Corey: So, we knew this was going to come up in the conversation, but as of a couple of weeks ago—as of the time of this recording—you announced a somewhat, well, let's say controversial change in how the pricing and licensing works. Now, as of—taking effect at the end of this year—the end of January, rather, of next year—Docker Desktop is free for folks to use for individual use, and that's fine, and for corporate use, Docker Desktop also remains free until you are a large company defined by ten million in revenue a year and/or 250 employees or more. And that was interesting and I don't think I'd seen that type of requirement placed before on what was largely an open-source project that's now a developer tool. I believe there are closed-source aspects of it as well for the desktop experience, but please don't quote me on that; I'm not here to play internet lawyer engineer. But at that point, the internet was predictably upset about this because it is easy to yell about any change that is coming, regardless.I was less interested in that than I am in what the reception has been from your corporate customers because, let's be clear, users are important, community is important, but goodwill will not put food on the table past a certain point. There has to be a way to make a company sustainable, there has to be a recurring revenue model. I realize that you know this, but I'm sure there are people listening to this who are working in development somewhere who are, “Wait, you mean I need to add more value than I cost?” It was a hard revelation for [laugh] me back when I had been in the industry a few years—Scott: [laugh]. Sure.Corey: —and I'm still struggling with that—Scott: Sure.Corey: Some days.Scott: You and me both. [laugh].Corey: So, what has the reaction been from folks who have better channels of communicating with you folks than angry Twitter threads?Scott: Yeah. Create surface area for a discussion, Corey. Let's back up and talk on a couple points that you hit along the way there. One is, “What is Docker Desktop?” Docker Desktop is not just Docker Engine.Docker Desktop is a way in which we take Docker Engine, Compose, Kubernetes, all important tools for developers building modern apps—Docker Build, so on and so forth—and we provide an integrated engineered product that is engineered for the native environments of Mac and Windows, and soon Linux. And so we make it super easy to get the container runtime, Kubernetes stack, the networking, the CLI, Compose, we make it super easy just to get that up and running and configured with smart defaults, secured, hardened, and importantly updated. So, any vulnerabilities patched and so on and so forth. The point is, it's a product that is based on—to your comments—upstream open-source technologies, but it is an engineered commercial product—Docker Desktop is.Corey: Docker Desktop is a fantastic tool; I use it myself. I could make a bunch of snide comments that on Mac, it's basically there to make sure the fans are still working on the laptop, but again, computers are hard. I get that. It's incredibly handy to have a graphical control panel. It turns out that I don't pretend to understand those people, but some folks apparently believe that there are better user interfaces than text and an 80-character-wide terminal window. I don't pretend to get those people, but not everyone has the joy of being a Linux admin for far too long. So, I get it, making it more accessible, making it easy, is absolutely worth using.Scott: That's right.Corey: It's not a hard requirement to run it on a laptop-style environment or developer workstation, but it makes it really convenient.Scott: Before Docker desktop, one had to install a hypervisor, install a Linux VM, install Docker Engine on that Linux VM, bridge between the VM and the local CLI on the native desktop—like, lots of setup and maintenance and tricky stuff that can go wrong. Trust me how many times I stubbed my own toes on putting that together. And so Docker Desktop is designed to take all of that setup nonsense overhead away and just let the developer focus on the app. That's what the product is, and just talking about where it came from, and how it uses these other upstream technologies. Yes, and so we made a move on August 31, as you noted, and the motivation was the following: one is, we started seeing large organizations using Docker Desktop at scale.When I say ‘at scale,' not one or two or ten developers; like, hundreds and thousands of developers. And they were clamoring for capabilities to help them manage those developer environments at scale. Second is, we saw them getting a lot of benefit in terms of productivity, and choice, and security from using Docker Desktop, and so we stood back and said, “Look, for us to scale our business, we're at 10-plus million monthly active developers today. We know there's 45 million developers coming in this decade; how do we keep scaling while giving a free experience, but still making sure we can fund our engineers and deliver features and additional value?” We looked at other projects, Corey.The first thing we did is we looked outside our four walls, said, “How have other projects with free and open-source components navigated these waters?” And so the thresholds that you just mentioned, the 250 employees and the ten million revenue, were actually thresholds that we saw others put in place to draw lines between what is available completely for free and what is available for those users that now need to purchase subscription if they're using it to create value for their organizations. And we're very explicit about that. You could be using Docker for training, you could be using Docker for eval in those large organizations; we're not going to chase you or be looking to you to step up to a subscription. However, if you're using Docker Desktop in those environments, to build applications that run your business or that are creating value for your customers, then purchasing a subscription is a way for us to continue to invest in a product that the ecosystem clearly loves and is getting a lot of value out of. And so, that was again, the premise of this change. So, now to the root of your question is, so what's the reaction? We're very, very pleased. First off, yes, there were some angry voices out there.Corey: Yeah. And I want to be clear, I'm not trivializing people who feel upset.Scott: No.Corey: When you're suddenly using a thing that is free and discovering that, well, now you have to pay money for it, people are not generally going to be happy about that.Scott: No.Corey: When people are viewed themselves as part of the community, of contributing to what they saw as a technical revolution or a scrappy underdog and suddenly they find themselves not being included in some way, shape or form, it's natural to be upset, I don't want to trivialize—Scott: Not at all.Corey: People's warm feelings toward Docker. It was a big part of a lot of folks' personality, for better or worse, [laugh] for a few years in there. But the company needs to be sustainable, so what I'm really interested in is what has that reaction been from folks who are, for better or worse, “Yes, yes, we love Docker, but I don't get to sign $100,000 deals because I just really like the company I'm paying the money to. There has to be business value attached to that.”Scott: That's right. That's right. And to your point, we're not trivializing either the reaction by the community, it was encouraging to see many community members got right away what we're doing, they saw that still, a majority of them can continue using Docker for free under the Docker Personal subscription, and that was also intentional. And you saw on the internet and on Twitter and other social media, you saw them come and support the company's moves. And despite some angry voices in there, there was overwhelmingly positive.So, to your question, though, since August 31, we've been overwhelmed, actually, by the positive response from businesses that use Docker Desktop to build applications and run their businesses. And when I say overwhelmed, we were tracking—because Docker Desktop has a phone-home capability—we had a rough idea of what the baseline usage of Docker Desktops were out there. Well, it turns out, in some cases, there are ten times as many Docker Desktops inside organizations. And the average seems to be settling in around three times to four times as many. And we are already closing business, Corey.In 12 business days, we have companies come through, say, “Yes, our developers use this product. Yes, it's a valuable product. We're happy to talk to a salesperson and give you over to procurement, and here we go.” So, you and I both been around long enough to know, like 12 working days to have a signed agreement with an enterprise agreement is unheard of.Corey: Yeah, but let's be very clear here, on The Duckbill Group's side of things where I do consulting projects, I sell projects to companies that are, “Great, this project will take, I don't know, four to six weeks, whatever it happens to be, and, yeah, you're going to turn a profit on this project in about the first four hours of the engagement.” It is basically push button and you will receive more money in your budget than you had when you started, and that is probably the easiest possible enterprise sale, and it still takes 60 to 90 days most of the time to close deals.Scott: That's right.Corey: Trying to get a procurement deal for software through enterprise procurement processes is one of those things when people say, “Okay, we're going to have a signature in Q3,” you have to clarify what year they're talking about. So, 12 days is unheard of.Scott: [laugh]. Yep. So, we've been very encouraged by that. And I'll just give you a rough numbers: the overall response is ten times our baseline expectations, which is why—maybe unanticipated question, or you going to ask it soon—we came back within two weeks—because we could see this curve hit right away on the 31st of August—we came back and said, “Great.” Now, that we have the confidence that the community and businesses are willing to support us and invest in our sustainability, invest in the sustainable, scalable Docker, we came and we accelerated—pulled forward—items in our roadmap for developers using Docker Desktop, both for Docker Personal, for free in the community, as well as the subscribers.So, things like Docker Desktop for Linux, right? Docker Desktop for Mac, Docker Desktop for Windows has been out there about five years, as I said. We have heard Docker Desktop for Linux rise in demand over those years because if you're managing a large number of developers, you want a consistent environment across all the developers, whether they're using Linux, Mac, or Windows desktops. So, Docker Desktop for Linux will give them that consistency across their entire development environment. That was the number two most requested feature on our public roadmap in the last year, and again, with the positive response, we're now able to confidently invest in that. We're hiring more engineers than planned, we're pulling that forward in the roadmap to show that yes, we are about growing and growing sustainably, and now that the environment and businesses are supporting us, we're happy to double down and create more value.Corey: My big fear when the change was announced was the uncertainty inherent to it. Because if there's one thing that big companies don't like, it's uncertainty because uncertainty equates to risk in their mind. And a lot of other software out there—and yes, Oracle Databases I am looking at you—have a historical track record of, “Okay, great. We have audit rights to inspect your environment, and then when we wind up coming in, we always find that there have been licensing shortfalls,” because people don't know how far things spread internally, as well as, honestly, it's accounting for this stuff in large, complex organizations is a difficult thing. And then there are massive fines at stake, and then there's this whole debate back and forth.Companies view contracts as if every company behaves like that when it comes down to per-seat licensing and the rest. My fear was that that risk avoidance in large companies would have potentially made installing Docker Desktop in their environment suddenly a non-starter across the board, almost to the point of being something that you would discipline employees for, which is not great. And it seems from your response, that has not been a widespread reaction. Yes of course, there's always going to be some weird company somewhere that does draconian things that we don't see, but the fact that you're not sitting here, telling me that you've been taking a beating from this from your enterprise buyers, tells me you're onto something.Scott: I think that's right, Corey. And as you might expect, the folks that don't reach out are silent, and so we don't see folks who don't reach out to us. But because so many have reached out to us so positively, and basically quickly gone right to a conversation with procurement versus any sort of back-and-forth or questions and such, tells us we are on the right track. The other thing, just to be really clear is, we did work on this before the August 31 announcement as well—this being how do we approach licensing and compliance and such—and we found that 80% of organizations, 80% of businesses want to be in compliance, they have a—not just want to be in compliance, but they have a history of being in compliance, regardless of the enforcement mechanism and whatnot. And so that gave us confidence to say, “Hey, we're going to trust our users. We're going to say, ‘grace period ends on January 31.'”But we're not shutting down functionality, we're not sending in legal [laugh] activity, we're not putting any sort of strictures on the product functionality because we have found most people love the product, love what it does for them, and want to see the company continue to innovate and deliver great features. And so okay, you might say, “Well, doesn't that 20% represent opportunity?” Yeah. You know, it does, but it's a big ecosystem. The 80% is giving us a great boost and we're already starting to plow that into new investment. And let's just start there; let's start there and grow from there.This episode is sponsored by our friends at Oracle Cloud. Counting the pennies, but still dreaming of deploying apps instead of "Hello, World" demos? Allow me to introduce you to Oracle's Always Free tier. It provides over 20 free services and infrastructure, networking databases, observability, management, and security.And - let me be clear here - it's actually free. There's no surprise billing until you intentionally and proactively upgrade your account. This means you can provision a virtual machine instance or spin up an autonomous database that manages itself all while gaining the networking load, balancing and storage resources that somehow never quite make it into most free tiers needed to support the application that you want to build.With Always Free you can do things like run small scale applications, or do proof of concept testing without spending a dime. You know that I always like to put asterisks next to the word free. This is actually free. No asterisk. Start now. Visit https://snark.cloud/oci-free that's https://snark.cloud/oci-free.Corey: I also have a hard time imagining that you and your leadership team would be short-sighted enough to say, “Okay, that”—even 20% of companies that are willing to act dishonestly around stuff like that seems awfully high to me, but assuming it's accurate, would tracking down that missing 20% be worth setting fire to the tremendous amount of goodwill that Docker still very much enjoys? I have a hard time picturing any analysis where that's even a question other than something you set up to make fun of.Scott: [laugh]. No, that's exactly right Corey, it wouldn't be worth it which is why again, we came out of the gate with like, we're going to trust our users. They love the community, they love the product, they want to support us—most of them want to support us—and, you know, when you have most, you're never going to get a hundred percent. So, we got most and we're off to a good start, by all accounts. And look, a lot of folks too sometimes will be right in that gray middle where you let them know that they're getting away with something they're like, “All right, you caught me.”We've seen that behavior before. And so, we can see all this activity out there and we can see if folks have a license or compliance or not, and sometimes just a little tap on the shoulder said, “Hey, did you know that you might be paying for that?” We've seen most folks at the time say, “Ah, okay. You caught me. Happy to talk to procurement.”So, this does not have to be heavy-handed as you said, it does not have to put at risk the goodwill of the 80%. And we don't have to get a hundred percent to have a great successful business and continuing successful community.Corey: Yeah. I'll also point out that, by my reading of your terms and conditions and how you've specified this—I mean, this is not something I've asked you about, so this could turn into a really awkward conversation but I'm going to roll with it anyway, it explicitly states that it is and will remain free for personal development.Scott: That is correct.Corey: When you're looking at employees who work at giant companies and have sloppy ‘bring your own device' controls around these things, all right, they have it installed on their work machine because in their spare time, they're building an app somewhere, they're not going to get a nasty gram, and they're not exposing their company to liability by doing that?Scott: That is exactly correct. And moreover, just keep looking at those use cases, if the company is using it for internal training or if the company is using it to evaluate someone else's technology, someone else's software, all those cases are outside the pay-for subscription. And so we believe it's quite generous in allowing of trials and tests and use cases that make it accessible and easy to try, easy to use, and it's just in the case where if you're a large organization and your developers are using it to build applications for your business and for your customers, thus you're getting a lot of value using the product, we're asking you to share that value with us so we can continue to invest in the product.Corey: And I think that's a reasonable expectation. The challenge that Docker seems to have had for a while has been that the interesting breakthrough, revelatory stuff that you folks did was all open-source. It was a technology that was incredibly inspired in a bunch of different ways. I am, I guess, mature enough to admit that my take that, “Oh, Docker is terrible”—which was never actually my take—was a little short-sighted. I'm very good at getting things wrong across the board, and that is no exception.I also said virtualization was a flash in the pan and look how that worked out. I was very anti-cloud, et cetera, et cetera. Times change, people change, and doubling down on being wrong gains you nothing. But the question that was always afterwards what is the monetization strategy? Because it's not something you can give away for free and make it up in volume?Even VC money doesn't quite work like that forever, so there's a—the question is, what is the monetization strategy that doesn't leave people either resenting you because, “Remember that thing that used to be free isn't anymore? Doesn't it suck to be you?” And is still accessible as broadly as you are, given the sheer breadth and diversity of your community? Like I can make bones about the fact that ten million in revenue and 250 employees are either worlds apart, or the wrong numbers, or whatever it is, but it's not going to be some student somewhere sitting someplace where their ramen budget is at risk because they have to spend $5 a month or whatever it is to have this thing. It doesn't apply to them.And this feels like, unorthodox though it certainly is, it's not something to be upset about in any meaningful sense. The people that I think would actually be upset and have standing to be upset about this are the enterprise buyers, and you're hearing from them in what is certainly—because I will hear it if not—that this is something they're happy about. They are thrilled to work with you going forward. And I think it makes sense. Even when I was doing stuff as an independent consultant, before I formalized the creation of The Duckbill Group and started hiring people, my policy was always to not use the free tier of things, even if I fit into them because I would much rather personally be a paying customer, which elevates the, I guess, how well my complaints are received.Because I'm a free user, I'm just another voice on Twitter; albeit a loud one and incredibly sarcastic one at times. But if I'm a paying customer, suddenly the entire tenor of that conversation changes, and I think there's value to that. I've always had the philosophy of you pay for the things you use to make money. And that—again, that is something that's easy for me to say now. Back when I was in crippling debt in my 20s, I assure you, it was not, but I still made the effort for things that I use to make a living.Scott: Yeah.Corey: And I think that philosophy is directionally correct.Scott: No, I appreciate that. There's a lot of good threads in there. Maybe just going way back, Docker stands on the shoulders of giants. There was a lot of work with container tech in the Linux kernel, and you and I were talking before about it goes back to LPAR on IBMs, and you know, BS—Berkeley's—Corey: BSD jails and chroots on Linux. Yeah.Scott: Chroot, right? I mean, Bill Joy, putting chroot in—Corey: And Tupperware parties, I'm sure. Yeah.Scott: Right. And all credit to Solomon Hykes, Docker's founder, who took a lot of good up and coming tech—largely on the ops side and in Linux kernel—took the primitives from Git and combined that with immutable copy-on-write file system and put those three together into a really magical combination that simplified all this complexity of dependency management and portability of images across different systems. And so in some sense, that was the magic of standing on these giant shoulders but seeing how these three different waves of innovation or three different flows of innovation could come together to a great user experience. So, also then moving forward, I wouldn't say they're happy, just to make sure you don't get inbound, angry emails—the enterprise buyers—but they do recognize the value of the product, they think the economics are fair and straight ahead, and to your point about having a commercial relationship versus free or non-existing relationship, they're seeing that, “Oh, okay, now I have insight into the roadmap. Now, I can prioritize my requirements that my devs have been asking for. Now, I can double-down on the secure supply chain issues, which I've been trying to get in front of for years.”So, it gives them an avenue that now, much different than a free user as you observed, it's a commercial relationship where it's two way street versus, “Okay, we're just going to use this free stuff and we don't have much of a say because it's free, and so on and so forth.” So, I think it's been an eye-opener for both the company but also for the businesses. There is a lot of value in a commercial relationship beyond just okay, we're going to invest in new features and new value for developers.Corey: The challenge has always been how do you turn something that is widely beloved, that is effectively an open-source company, into money? There have been a whole bunch of questions about this, and it seems that the consensus that has emerged is that a number of people for a long time mistook open-source for a business model instead of a strategy, and it's very much not. And a lot of companies are attempting to rectify that with weird license changes where, “Oh, you're not allowed to take our code and build a service out of it if you're a cloud provider.” Amazon's product strategy is, of course, “Yes,” so of course, there's always going to be something coming out of AWS that is poorly documented, has a ridiculous name, and purports to do the same thing for way less money, except magically you pay them by the hour. I digress.Scott: No, it's a great surface area, and you're right I completely didn't answer that question. [laugh]. So—Corey: No, it's fair. It's—Scott: Glad you brought it back up.Corey: —a hard problem. It's easy to sit here and say, “Well, what I think they should do”—but all of those solutions fall apart under ten seconds of scrutiny.Scott: Super, super hard problem which, to be fair, we as a team and a community wrestled with for years. But here's where we landed, Corey. The short version is that you can still have lots of great upstream open-source technologies, and you'll have an early adopter community that loves those, use those, gets a lot of progress running fast and far with those, but we've found that the vast majority of the market doesn't want to spend its time cobbling together bits and bytes of open-source tech, and maintaining it, and patching it, and, and, and. And so what we're offering is an engineered product that takes the upstream but then adds a lot of value—we would say—to make it an engineered, easy to use, easy to configure, upgraded, secure, so on and so forth. And the convenience of that versus having to cobble together your own environment from upstream has proved to be what folks are willing to pay for. So, it's the classic kind of paying for time and convenience versus not.And so that is one dimension. And the other dimension, which you already referenced a little bit with AWS is that we have SaaS; we have a SaaS product in Docker Hub, which is providing a hosted registry with quality content that users know is updated not less than every 30 days, that is patched and maintained by us. And so those are examples of, in some sense, consumption [unintelligible 00:27:53]. So, we're using open-source to build this SaaS service, but the service that users receive, they're willing to pay for because they're not having to patch the Mongo upstream, they're not having to roll the image themselves, they're not having to watch the CVEs and scramble when everything comes out. When there's a CVE out in our upstream, our official images are patched no less than 24 hours later and typically within hours.That's an example of a service, but all based on upstream open-source tech that for the vast majority of uses are free. If you're consuming a lot of that, then there's a subscription that kicks in there as well. But we're giving you value in exchange for you having to spend your time, your engineers, managing all that that I just walked through. So, those are the two avenues that we found that are working well, that seem to be a fair trade and fair balance with the community and the rest of the ecosystem.Corey: I think the hardest part for a lot of folks is embracing change. And I have encountered this my entire career where I started off doing large-scale email systems administration, and hey, turns out that's not really a thing anymore. And I used to be deep in the bowels of Postfix, for example. I'm referenced in the SVN history of Postfix, once upon a time, just for helping with documentation and finding weird corner cases because I'm really good at breaking things by accident. And I viewed it as part of my identity.And times have changed and moved on; I don't run Postfix myself for anything anymore. I haven't touched it in years. Docker is still there and it's still something that people are actively using basically everywhere. And there's a sense of ownership and identity for especially early adopters who glom on to it because it is such a better way of doing some things that it is almost incomprehensible that we used to do it any other way. That's transformation.That's something awesome. But people want to pretend that we're still living in that era where technology has not advanced. The miraculous breakthrough in 2013 is today's de rigueur type of environment where this is just, “Oh, yeah. Of course you're using Docker.” If you're not, people look at you somewhat strangely.It's like, “Oh, I'm using serverless.” “Okay, but you can still build that in Docker containers. Why aren't you doing that?” It's like, “Oh, I don't believe in running anything that doesn't make me pay AWS by the second.” So okay, great. People are going to have opinions on this stuff. But time marches on and whatever we wish the industry would do, it's going to make its own decisions and march forward. There's very little any of us can do to change that.Scott: That's right. Look, it was a single container back in 2013, 2014, right? And now what we're seeing—and you kind of went there—is we're separating the implementation of service from the service. So, the service could be implemented with a container, could be a serverless function, could be a hosted XYZ as a service on some cloud, but what developers want to do is—what they're moving towards is, assemble your application based on services regardless of the how. You know, is that how a local container? To your point, you can roll a local serverless function now in an OCI image, and push it to Amazon.Corey: Oh, yeah. It's one of that now 34 ways I found to run containers on AWS.Scott: [laugh]. You can also, in Compose, abstract all that complexity away. Compose could have three services in it. One of those services is a local container, one of those services might be a local serverless function that you're running to test, and one of those services could be a mock to a Database as a Service on a cloud. And so that's where we are.We've gone beyond the single-container Docker run, which is still incredibly powerful but now we're starting to uplevel to applications that consist of multiple services. And where do those services run? Increasingly, developers do not need to care. And we see that as our mission is continue to give that type of power to developers to abstract out the how, extract out the infrastructure so they can just focus on building their app.Corey: Scott, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me. If people want to learn more—and that could mean finding out your opinions on things, potentially yelling at you about pricing changes, more interestingly, buying licenses for their large companies to run this stuff, and even theoretically, since you alluded to it a few minutes ago, look into working at Docker—where can they find you?Scott: No, thanks, Corey. And thank you for the time to discuss and look back over both years, but also zoom in on the present day. So, www.docker.com; you can find any and all what we just walked through. They're more than happy to yell at me on Twitters at @scottcjohnston, and we have a public roadmap that is in GitHub. I'm not going to put the URL here, but you can find it very easily. So, we love hearing from our community, we love engaging with them, we love going back and forth. And it's a big community; jump in, the waters warm, very welcoming, love to have you.Corey: And we'll of course, but links to that in the [show notes. 00:32:28] Thank you so much for your time. I really do appreciate it.Scott: Thank you, Corey. Right back at you.Corey: Scott Johnston, CEO of Docker. I'm Cloud Economist Corey Quinn and this is Screaming in the Cloud. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, whereas if you've hated this podcast, please leave a five-star review on your podcast platform of choice, along with a comment telling me that Docker isn't interested in at all because here's how to do exactly what Docker does in LPARs on your mainframe until the AWS/400 comes to [unintelligible 00:33:02].Scott: [laugh].Corey: If your AWS bill keeps rising and your blood pressure is doing the same, then you need The Duckbill Group. We help companies fix their AWS bill by making it smaller and less horrifying. The Duckbill Group works for you, not AWS. We tailor recommendations to your business and we get to the point. Visit duckbillgroup.com to get started.Announcer: This has been a HumblePod production. Stay humble.

What do start-up founders and hip hop artists have in common? According to Ben Horowitz: a lot! Since his teenage years, Ben has been inspired by hip hop artists' ability to create something from nothing-- and he took that guiding ethos with him to Silicon Valley. So even when industry giants shrugged off what would become the internet as we know it, Ben always saw it for what it could be… and in his roles at Netscape and Opsware, Ben actualized it. Learn how at his VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, Ben is helping entrepreneurs actualize their big ideas. Plus, Bob and Ben travel in time to look at the future of some of today's biggest topics: remote work, video streaming platforms, biotech, and, of course, audio. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

Alright, backstory's out of the way, and Acquired is rolling three hours deep on the venture firm that changed the game for everyone — a16z. VC marketing? Check. "Founder-friendly?" Check. Platform services? Check. Huge valuations and massive fund sizes? Check and check. We dissect it all in glorious detail, right down to the famous office library (located next to the Rosewood on Sand Hill, natch). The story of modern venture capital starts here. Let's Go!!! If you love Acquired and want more, join our LP Community for access to over 50 LP-only episodes, monthly Zoom calls, and access for live events and discussions with episode guests. We can't wait to see you there. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/ Sponsors: Thank you to Pilot for being our presenting sponsor for all of Acquired Season 9! Pilot takes care of startups' bookkeeping, tax and CFO services so busy founders can focus on what matters. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos's AWS analogy: bookkeeping and tax don't make your product any better — so you should let Pilot handle them for you. Pilot is in fact backed by Bezos himself, along with other all-star investors including Sequoia, Index, and Stripe. They are truly the gold standard for startup bookkeeping, and many of the companies we work with run on them. You can get in touch with Pilot here: https://bit.ly/acquiredfmpilot , and Acquired listeners get 20% off their first 6 months! (use the link above) Thank you as well to Pitchbook and to Nord Security. You can learn more about them at: https://bit.ly/acquiredpitchbook https://bit.ly/acquirednord Links: Michael Mauboussin on persistence of returns across asset classes: https://www.morganstanley.com/im/publication/insights/articles/articles_publictoprivateequityintheusalongtermlook_us.pdf Tomorrow's Advance Man: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man Episode sources: https://docs.google.com/document/d/12jf9pwTdEuANtdOffUzSzvE0xEJptT0Or-gBSJgk8mg/edit?usp=sharing Carve Outs: Childhood's End: https://www.amazon.com/Childhoods-End-Arthur-C-Clarke/dp/110196703X MKBHD's Studio channel and tour: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkuxIy3kFZM The Godfather: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068646/ Who Got the Truth on Spotify!! https://open.spotify.com/track/03X7SwpsCjZIofK8RFPwch?si=649d93b2be7743d5

We kick off Season 9 with a classic: Part I of the a16z story. How did this brand new venture firm charge out of the gates in 2009, going from zero to disrupting the entire venture industry overnight? You probably know Marc & Ben's history with Netscape and Loudcloud/Opsware... but what about the Black Panthers, Nintendo 64, Al Gore, Doug Leone, Masayoshi Son, and an epic feud with Benchmark Capital that became Silicon Valley's version of the Hatfields and the McCoys? Buckle up, Acquired's got the truth. If you love Acquired and want more, join our LP Community for access to over 50 LP-only episodes, monthly Zoom calls, and live access for big events like emergency pods and book club discussions with authors. We can't wait to see you there. Join here at: https://acquired.fm/lp/ Sponsors: Thank you to Pilot for being our presenting sponsor for all of Acquired Season 9! Pilot takes care of startups' bookkeeping, tax and CFO services so busy founders can focus on what matters, which is building the company. To paraphrase Jeff Bezos's famous AWS analogy: bookkeeping and tax don't make your product any better — so you should let Pilot handle them for you. In fact Pilot is backed by Bezos himself via Bezos Expeditions, along with an all-star roster of other investors including Sequoia, Index, and Stripe. They are truly the gold standard for startup bookkeeping, and many of the companies we work with run on them. You can get in touch with Pilot here: https://bit.ly/acquiredfmpilot , and Acquired listeners get 20% off their first 6 months! (use the link above) Thank you as well to Pitchbook and to Nord Security. You can learn more about them at: https://bit.ly/acquiredpitchbook https://bit.ly/acquirednord Links: David Streitfeld's great NYT piece on the Horowitz family: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/technology/one-family-many-revolutions-from-black-panthers-to-silicon-valley-to-trump.html Marc on the Tim Ferriss Show: https://tim.blog/2018/01/01/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-marc-andreessen/ 2003 Marc in SF Gate: https://www.sfgate.com/business/ontherecord/article/OPSWARE-INC-On-the-record-Marc-Andreessen-2525822.php#photo-2684736 Carve Outs: Ben: The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life: https://www.amazon.com/Elephant-Brain-Hidden-Motives-Everyday/dp/0190495995 David: Resonant Arc Podcast / YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCFzWAEPDGiY34bGpwM_DWmA Episode Sources: [Google Doc link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DDb2nGfvnQ_XV4qs6qoHE084eS0J8cP74gTfdr736GE/edit# ] http://1997.webhistory.org/www.lists/www-talk.1993q1/0099.html http://allthingsd.com/20130125/go-west-young-geek-chris-dixon-on-why-he-became-a-silicon-valley-vc-at-andreessen-horowitz-and-more-video/ http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/1789/Marc-Andreessen/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/08/20-years-on-why-netscapes-ipo-was-the-big-bang-of-the-internet-era/ https://a16z.com/2011/05/09/microsoft-buys-skype/ https://a16z.com/2011/06/30/meet-our-new-general-partner-jeff-jordan/ https://a16z.com/2017/04/07/todd-and-freddy-okta/ https://a16z.com/2018/09/25/michael-ovitz-entertainment-culture-negotiation-talent/ https://a16z.com/2019/06/20/slack/ https://a16z.com/2019/11/20/brand-building-a16z-ideas-people-marketing/ https://a16z.com/2019/11/26/a16z-podcast-how-what-why-500th-episode-behind-the-scenes/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/andreessen-horowitz-hires-a-female-partner-from-outcast-communications/ https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/andreessen-horowitz-starts-second-fund/ https://books.google.com/books?id=zyIvOn7sKCsC&pg=PA15#v=onepage&q&f=false https://charlierose.com/videos/12907 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreessen_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Panther_Party https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Horowitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_H._Clark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Jordan_(venture_capitalist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Andreessen https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Ovitz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Betty_Van_Patter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ning_(website) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spyglass,_Inc. https://fortune.com/2011/07/12/skype-the-inside-story-of-the-boffo-8-5-billion-deal/ https://fortune.com/2021/01/20/tech-and-crypto-funder-andreessen-horowitz-wants-to-replace-the-media-that-might-be-bad-news-for-investors/ https://fortune.com/longform/jeff-jordan-vc/ https://greatness.floodgate.com/episodes/marc-andreessen-was-netscape-an-overnight-success https://money.cnn.com/2009/07/02/technology/marc_andreessen_venture_fund.fortune/index.htm https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2005/07/25/8266639/ https://newrepublic.com/article/162227/david-horowitz-profile-trump-propagandist-radical-leftist https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/ben-horowitz-02-25-20/id814550071?i=1000466601994 https://techcrunch.com/2009/02/20/andreessen-on-charlie-rose-i-am-creating-a-fund-full-video/ https://techcrunch.com/2010/06/20/andreessen-horowitz-celebrates-first-year-with-new-general-partner-john-ofarrell/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/03/27/andreessen-horowitz-raises-massive-new-1-5-billion-fund/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/andreessen-horowitz-has-a-new-crypto-fund-and-its-first-female-general-partner-is-running-it-with-chris-dixon/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/01/a16z-ushers-in-new-fund-strategy-with-2-75b/ https://techcrunch.com/2021/06/24/andreessen-horowitz-triples-down-on-blockchain-startups-with-massive-2-2-billion-crypto-fund-iii/?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAADZwBJIiwmoiePFPnoZk3s1WbLc0aUfwh4wj_nMnhEi5nYQ0Q1xfZfmYDhSbKEsY22uz29mILPEgwMe6RNf3pL8Jmpa6t8I3D19mTdP2c5zWv5jnGf2VNMFgB6UcS4o_5nTs2ymb7QON0OtJ4X4aiHWgNAW5auKjI6Hq65Unz0x8 https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/browser-wars/ https://tim.blog/2018/01/01/the-tim-ferriss-show-transcripts-marc-andreessen/ https://venturebeat.com/2009/08/19/first-andreessen-horowitz-investment-apptio-raises-14m/ https://web.archive.org/web/20110407235346/http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/06/andreessen-horowitz-has-a-new-200mm-co-investment-fund/ https://web.archive.org/web/20120212181829/http://www.engineer.ucla.edu/visitor-links/alumni/alumni-profiles-1/ben-horowitz-ms-201990 https://www.acquired.fm/episodes/episode-42-opsware-with-special-guest-michel-feaster https://www.amazon.com/Hard-Thing-About-Things-Building/dp/0062273205 https://www.businessinsider.com/benchmark-website-2012-11 https://www.coindesk.com/andreessen-horowitz-doubles-down-on-crypto-investments-with-new-515m-fund https://www.coindesk.com/andreessen-horowitz-rakes-in-2-2b-for-third-crypto-venture-fund https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2011/09/03/disrupting-the-disrupters https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/04/02/andreessen-horowitz-is-blowing-up-the-venture-capital-model-again/?sh=6f3cdbfc7d9f https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/atr/legacy/2006/03/03/20.pdf https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/03/brand-necrophilia-part-7/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffjordan1/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/mcopeland/ https://www.newcomer.co/p/the-unauthorized-story-of-andreessen https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/18/tomorrows-advance-man https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/10/us/with-internet-cachet-not-profit-a-new-stock-is-wall-st-s-darling.html https://www.nytimes.com/1995/08/10/us/with-internet-cachet-not-profit-a-new-stock-is-wall-st-s-darling.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/22/technology/one-family-many-revolutions-from-black-panthers-to-silicon-valley-to-trump.html https://www.quora.com/How-did-Netscape-Navigator-make-money https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1660134/000119312517080301/d289173ds1.htm https://www.sfgate.com/business/ontherecord/article/OPSWARE-INC-On-the-record-Marc-Andreessen-2525822.php#photo-2684736 https://www.statista.com/statistics/203734/global-smartphone-penetration-per-capita-since-2005/ https://www.theinformation.com/articles/these-guys-are-very-different-inside-andreessen-horowitzs-rise https://www.theringer.com/2017/6/8/16045766/jeff-jordan-andreessen-horowitz-vc-pickup-basketball-ab4e54928186 https://www.wired.com/1999/02/aol-names-andreessen-cto/ https://www.wired.com/story/andreessen-horowitz-new-crypto-fund-iii/ https://www.worth.com/a-decade-later-how-has-andreessen-horowitz-changed-silicon-valley/ https://www.wsj.com/articles/andreessen-horowitzs-returns-trail-venture-capital-elite-1472722381 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512250915629460 https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB984080550858322401 https://youtu.be/PbW-1k3ZOA4 https://youtu.be/k5pbximmZdI http://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~little/OldSites/CSE_Uptime/v4.7-8/xmosaic.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1999-09-11-9909110235-story.html https://www.wikiwand.com/en/List_of_web_browsers http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/01/mosaic/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/01/chapter-1-part-2-netscape-the-big-bang/ http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2014/02/chapter-1-part-3-netscape-the-big-bang/  

Ben Horowitz, the former CEO of Opsware and now world-renowned Venture Capitalist, once said: “By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology . . . very few people talk about it . . . In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face.” I suspect that almost all entrepreneurs and CEOs know exactly what he meant when he said this. My own experience taught me that unless you are deliberate about managing your own psychology as a leader, you risk becoming a sort of “victim” to the circumstances that happen to present themselves in your life at any given time. Against this backdrop, in this audio blog I share the five most meaningful lessons that I've learned over the years related to better managing my own psychology as a leader. Though many of these lessons are easier said than done, I suspect that any degree of time and effort that you dedicate towards them will likely yield meaningful results. They include 1) The perils of comparing ourselves to others, 2) Focusing only on what you can control, 3) The value of better understanding yourself, 4) The price of untethered levels of ambition, and 5) How to deal with "first world" problems. Though mastery of these subjects is something that will likely elude all of us, improvement is probably much easier to attain than you may think. ******************** If this episode provided you with value, would you mind leaving a rating and/or review wherever you access your podcasts? Ratings and reviews help me secure guests that would otherwise be difficult to obtain, and it is exactly these types of people that I want each of you to learn from. Any ratings and/or reviews would be much appreciated :)

The future is in the fringes. In this episode, Vlad sits down with entrepreneur, software engineer, and venture capitalist Marc Andreessen. Co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, and a16z, Marc is known for his uncanny ability to predict the future in Silicon Valley. He believes Western civilization has grown complacent in terms of innovation and that this inertia is leading to major social, public health, and economic issues. In this episode, they talk about where to go from here, where the future builders are, and what role the democratization of finance plays in rebuilding the West. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The Hard thing about hard things A valuable book for tech entrepreneurs, The Hard thing about hard things helps throw light at the challenges a CEO goes through. Ben Horowitz launched Loudcloud in 1999, just before the dotcom bubble. Their company offers enterprise SaaS to tech clients. Then the trouble began * Because of the dotcom bubble, many of their customers went out of business * Had to IPO to survive, during hard times * After going public, they pivoted to become OPSware, a radically different business * They got threatened to delist from NASDAQ * They had mass employee revolts In the end, he sold OPSware for 1,6B to HP

See my notes here on DX Circle!Audio Source: https://a16z-live.simplecast.com/episodes/a16z-infra-1-2iEyBTf5a16z on InfraIntroductions and Backgrounds [00:00:00]Martin Casado: [00:00:00] So this is the a16z infrastructure show. This is actually the very first one.  Where are we going to be talking about infrastructure companies investing in them, building them products? It just turns out that we're three GPS at a16z, and we all have a lot of experience in info.Like all of our companies were infrastructure companies. We do a lot of infra investing. So the way that we're going to structure this session is first, we're going to introduce, our backgrounds in context of that. Many of you know, us, many of you have worked with us. But we do want to give you a sense our relationship with infrastructure and how we went through it.So we'll and we each go through our own kind of bios that way and I'll orchestrate that. Okay. Th then we're going to talk about why infrastructure is different. This isn't B2B, this is an enterprise, this isn't vertical SAS. It's specifically infrastructure. And it's my it's my favorite topic and my favorite area.So we'll go through that. We've got a lot of great questions on Twitter, and so we're going to try and get through those. And then if we still have time, then we'll open up to questions. Uh, for everybody else. So that's rough, we plan to have this every two weeks and we want to cover everything as things go, we want to cover category creation and we want to cover open-source and we want to cover the shifts and go to market and the cloud and investing and everything else.So we're going to go ahead and start with our intros and just, yeah, very quickly. So for the, if you don't know, so I'm Martine I'm a GPN Andreessen Horowitz, and. I actually want to start by introducing Ben actually having him introduce himself, but I want to let you know how I met Ben. So I was doing my PhD at Stanford in the networking space, and we spun out and we started a company called this Sera.This is the software defined networking space. And we started it right before. Like the great recession, the nuclear winter had set in and we were struggling. And one of our investors who was also on our board was Andy Rachleff, who was actually a professor at Stanford at the time, but he's this super famous investor from benchmark.And we were at the, we were at the bottom of the recession and we're like, we had a professor as a CEO and he needed a new CEO and we were talking with Andy Rachleff and we're like, who would be the best person on earth? It's well, there's this guy that just sold the company to HP.And his name is Ben. And I had never heard of him at the time. And and we should talk to him. So this I, this was in 2008, so I got introduced in the band and he came in, of course, Ben's you have so insightful and he'd just done it. Like he just built a company at the same thing. And uh, so I asked Ben if he would be our CEO, actually.Ben, do you remember what you said in response to that? I don't. I don't. I said, no, you said I'm too rich.You're like to be CEO of a company like this. You gotta be piped in. And so instead, however, Ben and Mark invested Ben ended up joining the board. And so much of what I've learned has been with Ben. And so I thought it'd be great if Ben, most of you know him, but it'd be great if he just gave you a quick rundown of kind of his background with respect to infrastructure that we'll move on to David.So Ben, if you wouldn't mind. Ben Horowitz: [00:02:36] Yeah. Sure. And that, that did bring that a, man's got to know his limitations. If you know how hard a job is if you're going to give somebody a really, really hard, nearly impossible job, it's it really helps if they're not rich, I have to say, yeah, that's a good hiring tip as well.At some point, rich people are just like, this is too hard. I'm going to the Martin Casado: [00:02:54] beach. Things we learned multiple times, I think, in, in our Ben Horowitz: [00:02:57] careers. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah kinda my career, actually, my, probably my career in infrastructure, I started way back when I was an engineer at Silicon graphics and kind of the first.I was working on, we were, we had to put, we had an operating system called IRX or truss Unix-based and we were the first we had built the, the original multiprocessor machines. And so there was this task of having to. Put semaphores on all the Colonel processes and so forth so that they went collide and you wouldn't have all these weird race conditions, which was I would say probably the most complicated engineering job I ever had, but.Eventually then eventually went to a company called Netscape where I was in charge of kind of the web servers and then we needed a directory kind of project. And so we that's where we. I got the idea to  popularize LDAP and kind of make up the directory standard.And that was like my big infrastructure thing there. And then Mark and I founded a company called LoudCloud, which was one of the first or the original kind of cloud computing company started much too early. Ironically, because there wasn't enough infrastructure like principally, there was no virtualization, for example.And so you couldn't really do cloud computing in that way, but the tools that we had so we transformed that company into a company called Opsware and that's the one that I sell to HP, which made me to to rich, to take Martine stock. Martin Casado: [00:04:21] And since joining Andreesen, you've done a lot of infra investing actually so comfortable.It'd be great to just go through that a bit. Ben Horowitz: [00:04:28] Yeah, sure. Made a bunch of introduced structure investments. The first  investment I've made is on a company called Okta, which was very familiar to me from my directory days. And more recently I've invested in a company called Databricks.And then, most recently one called any scale and Databricks is infrastructure for AI and big data. And any scale is a new way to, how do you get the kind of processing power that you need, at the growth rate that you need. Now that Moore's law is definitely not going fast enough to support the hunger of AI and it can turn it can basically Make the cloud look like your laptop and make it very easy to program in parallel.Martin Casado: [00:05:10] Awesome. All right. Cool. So I was one of Ben's investments. He joined, we were definitely for a journalist Sarah networks. I was gonna say there was another one, sorry about that. Yeah we so very honestly I learned so much of what I know by having been on my board.We ended up selling the company to VMware where I ran that business. And when I left, there was about a $600 million business and end to end, that was about an 11 year journey. And then I joined Andreessen Horowitz where I also focus on core infrastructure. And as part of that, I'd always heard of DaveBut I met him and I don't know if you ever have these moments where you're like, I dunno, you meet someone new and it's like talking to a long lost brother, but I feel like he's lived this parallel life to me as far as the company he's built and what he's done. And so super happy he was able to join as well.And do you, if you're cool with it, it'd be great to get your personal journey through infra just to set the stage before we actually dive in. Sure, sure. David Ulevitch: [00:06:03] And this is great. This is a favorite topic. So. I was one of those people probably like you Martina and who fell into infrastructure early in my computing career.And I had an internship at a mom and pop ISP in Sydney, Diego because I had demanded to our family that we get real internet. Not like AOL or prodigy much to the dismay. I think of my sister because all her friends were, her prints were on like AOL, but when I wanted internet, so we got that. And then I was able to get an internship in eighth grade at this company and learned all about this.This is a company that's run on Sonos and later on a Solaris, which are just a slightly marginally better than IRX that Ben was talking about. But only marginally and So I learned all about routing and networking and Unix, and started my career as a mediocre or programmer there. It was great to understand how appearing works and how the internet worked.And I really, at that point fell in love with the internet and how it cross borders and how, you had this asymmetric opportunity to either write code or do something that could reach a whole bunch of people. And then there was sort of one technology in particular that I fell in love with, which was the DNS or the domain name system.And I started buying domain names. I would eventually went off to to college and built a domain name management sort of service because I started to own a bunch of domain names and all these other tech people started to use my free service. And we had the founder of Rackspace using my service.We had distinguished engineers at sun and chief scientist at Microsoft. And at that point we became big enough that we needed to build a network. And so I started to learn about things like any CAS networking and how the internet really started to come together from a commercial standpoint. And we got Rackspace that data centers, things you don't have to do any more.Cause we have AWS and GCP and Azure, but we started to build out a global network. We got IP addresses allocated to us, and I really had an incredible experience learning how to scale up and infrastructure. And that eventually paved the way to building a company called open DNS, which was a cybersecurity company that started out.As a consumer company to give people a faster and safer and better internet experience. Many, many millions of people wanted that none of those people wanted to pay for it. They'd rather go buy a cup of Starbucks once a month, instead of paying me three or four bucks a month for a better internet and safer internet.But it turned out a lot of businesses were using our product and the timing, this was We started the company at the end of 2005. And so by the 2007, 2008, the iPhone was out. People were bringing all kinds of wireless devices into the office devices, you couldn't install traditional end point security onto.And so a lot of it administrators were using open DNS to provide better protection as a network service, without having to install endpoint software, because we were delivering all of our security as a service using the DNS. And that was a novel innovation that we had. We'd come up with.And so all these businesses were using it. None of them were paying us and we needed to make money. And so in 2009, we went through a major transition to becoming an enterprise cyber security company and starting with all those millions of free users, eventually figuring out what two ones are businesses.And we'll talk about some of that today, but it started to go down that sort for enterprise, go to market and. That's what ended up becoming a decent sized enterprise cybersecurity company. We sold to Cisco. And like you said, we were you and I have a very mirrored career path. And in some ways I went on to run the security business at Cisco, which was a great experience working with really great people.We had about 240,000 customers. It was really an exciting opportunity to both operate and lead at scale, we did a bunch of acquisitions and I was very happy after three and a half years in Cisco to to get a call from someone that people that know a16z well know, Jeff stump is on our team here and talk to him and Ben and you, and a whole bunch of folks.And they've been here ever since now. It's two and a half years, and I invest in enterprise software, but a little bit of, a little bit of the infrastructure stuff. I think the one investment that we've announced in this space is is census, which sort of operated the, at the data layer. We can talk about that later.What is Infra? [00:09:51]Martin Casado: [00:09:51] So I think maybe for starters, especially since we've got a very varied audience, it's probably good to cover, like what infrastructure actually is. So what do we mean by infra? Why is it exciting? Why does it make sense to actually have a separate, talk around in for us?It for traditionally has meant that the stuff that apps are dealt on. And so it, traditionally has been compute network storage. These days is everything from dev tools to security, to API APIs. But think about it is the underlying layers that we use to, to build modern compute apps.And, it actually is quite different. Like companies and infra are, tend to be quite different than other, and that, they tend to be like quite technical. They tend to be horizontal. They they tend to have, complex insertions. They tend to be the product of. Real tactical work.They tend to be a little disconnected from business users. And so if you look at an infrastructure company, they often look quite different than, a typical app company. But they've really had a moment in the last couple of years. If you heard names like Okta and snowflake and GitHub and Databricks and do on MuleSoft and Datadog, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, these are all core infrastructure companies.Will Infra Ever Be Over? [00:10:56]And so I think, actually, it'd be interesting to hear your thoughts. Ben and David, which is, it's always been these underlying. The underlying technology, but you always have to wonder is is the day of infra ever over like steel? Are we ever done, like building like the concrete and like the rebar and whatever, and it's just about apps or is it going to continue to be a growth area?Because this year, last year just been phenomenal for infra. And if you have any opinions on that, it would be fun to talk through it. Ben Horowitz: [00:11:20] I think we're very far away from Infrastructure being over and it being done. And what happens is the needs of the applications change.And then the infrastructure has to change. The kind of, one of the first big shifts in our careers in infrastructure was the shift to cloud computing, which completely changed the requirement. As one of the brilliant things about Nycira networks is that networking got completely, just got devastated in terms of all of its architectural flaws. Once you move into the cloud environment. And, we used to talk about, okay, East West traffic versus North South traffic and. You know what Cisco could do and what kind of and so forth. And then, but that happened at every layer in the stack, storage was broken, the operating systems were broken every kind of piece of infrastructure wasn't built for that kind of an architecture.And so it has to be completely rebuilt and, and then as, things have scaled, then things have to be upgraded, on, on the other side, as we move from just procedural programming so AI, and now we're, the data is the program. There needs to be a whole tool chain to support that.And then, a lot of people are going, Oh, wow. Like this NFT thing is an amazing craze and it seems like it popped up overnight. But the, those of us who are infrastructure, people know that this thing has been, decentralized computing. And, trustless state, across machines is something that's been worked on since 2009.And and the first kind of cut at NFTs for things like crypto kitties blew up the infrastructure, so the infrastructure needed to be revamped. And so anytime there's a new important application need, I think, it ends up causing an evolution of the infrastructure. And that evolution of the infrastructure is, maybe the best thing to look at.If you're trying to understand. Stan what's going to happen in the future because, like I say, a lot of people are like shocked and amazed by NFTs and they just think it's some wackadoo thing. But, for those of us who have been like an infrastructure where Oh yeah, this is coming and we're surprised it took this long.And now that it's here, we know exactly what it is. So it's a a great way to fortune tell what's going to happen in apps world as well. Martin Casado: [00:13:32] Yeah. Yeah. I was, I always find it interesting to walk through like the major trends that we track and infra, particularly with respect to this, because it just drags on so much behind it, an early, I think an early lesson that I learned building an infra company as.It just seems like lower layers of the stack never go away, but there's always something that you build on top of them. And so it's almost like we're just gaining in complexity over time. And so I want to talk to a few of the trends that we track at a 16 Z and then, and then David, as I end up, it'd be great.Trends - Data [00:13:59]If you want to add any of them, but it'll just give you a sense of the disruptive power of infrastructure, how big the markets are, and how it, it opens up future potentials for say what's companies or investment. One of them, this is going to sound like a cliche.But but it, I, there is a lot deep there and that is that as data. And what do we mean by data? Data is just so central to how we build businesses, right? And again, like this is one of these cliches, which everybody has been saying. It we've been saying it for 20 years, but like we have these massive proof points recently of, large companies, large startups, snowflake Databricks, for example that are centered around data, but then applications and.And all of in front of is really to empower applications of using data for differentiation. In fact, actually, if you look at the application space, you're like okay, like what differs like three different SAS? Those let's look at three different, like whatever, three different SAS apps say that they're consumer apps.And you're like, okay, to build one of those things, Yeah, you have to understand distributed systems, but we know that yeah, you have to build a big cloud service. You have to know that, like these things are hard things to do. But they're pretty well understood, but to actually do good personalization and actually to do good prediction, to actually use data in a way that's differentiated, that's almost where a lot of the battle has moved to.And as a result, we're seeing this kind of explosion  of companies and tooling around data. And what they're trying to do is they're trying to enable those that are building SAS apps, the ability to to do, whatever on the business side they're wanting to do with kind of higher accuracy, whether this is wait time prediction, whether this is personalization, but this is pricing, whether this is fraud detection.And so from an investor standpoint, there's probably too many companies to track and you always have seems an infrastructure. You've got these kinds of explosions and then these contractions, right? Like you see an explosion of apps. Companies, and then they consolidate, we're seeing an explosion of data companies and they're going to consolidate.So if you look at data as as a market segment, it's growing about twice as fast, the cagar is the rest of infrastructure. So it's a major area, it's a major area of focus and investment. And again, you've got dozens of companies that underlie it. So that's one trend that we're very focused on.Trend - SaaS [00:15:59] Another trend that's quite interesting is, when David Ben and I got into the game decades ago, like software companies were actually software companies. Like they shipped software that's where I cut my teeth. There's you'd write code and you'd ship it. And you built companies around that.Like you built companies around having releases and getting them out and being able to debug remotely and supporting, complex HCLs Hardware compatibility lists. It's in different environments. And that was really what the companies looked like. These days it's very tough actually to find Harbor company or sorry, shipping software companies, almost every company is becoming basically a SAS company or an operations company.And it's just a very. Different type of company, right? The way that you write software, the way that you support the software. It all is becoming operations and there's huge impacts to infrastructure because rather than having something that I can give to somebody else, that's easy to debug and run.The question is how can I have high up times internally? And listen, we've seen massive increase in, or like changes in personnel. Like for example, SREs now are very much in demand. There's change in the programming style to do this change in development methodology, changing in the tool set and so forth.So this is also another kind of cross vertical area. That's very interesting. Do you mean be, want to talk a little bit about the pro-sumer ization of infrastructure or bottom up, because that's an area that you focus on quite a bit.Trends - Security Analytics, Billing, Metering [00:17:14]David Ulevitch: [00:17:14] Yeah, actually I was thinking, as I'm listening to you talk about these things, I was thinking that, all of these trends are talking about have the.These massive derivative sort of downstream effects, right? So when people talk about the massive amounts of data, that creates opportunities, not just for the storage companies and the database companies, but then it creates new opportunities for the analytics companies. It creates a new surface area for security companies to focus on data privacy and data governance and all this regulatory controls around data.And that all of those standalone, all of those derivatives, sorry. Sort of our categories of their own. When you talk about every company is becoming a SAS company and we don't ship perpetual license software anymore. One of the things I think you and I have heard over and over again, especially when we talk to infrastructure companies and I'm sure Ben sees this as well, is that all these companies are now dealing with major issues around billing and metering of their customers.And, AWS may have a major metering solution for being able to do billing and metering. But all of the SAS companies building on top of these platforms have almost nothing, right? There's, they're older tools around subscription billing, but not a lot around usage based billing. I'm sure companies like Twilio have had to build their own.Then, you mentioned the SREs and all this operational sophistication that companies need that creates whole new opportunities around management tools. Around, across cloud and private cloud sort of management tools that people need. And so all these major trends end up coming up with all these derivatives categories that ended up getting created that are brand new surface areas for new companies to be made.And many of them are just very large, even on their own. That's what I was thinking about as you were. Martin Casado: [00:18:46] I do think it's worth it. And just a moment, we'll get more in kind of the weeds and questions that are, I know, on, on many folks minds, things like, open source and so forth.Trends - Prosumerization of Tech [00:18:55]But I do think it's worth talking through what makes it infrastructure companies. Different like how we look at it on David Ulevitch: [00:19:02] the, on the bottom, on the bottoms up point, you were asking about, developers have way more power and control than they've ever had before in terms of the buying decisions of technology, especially for technology companies.And that has changed. I think the entire go to market for infrastructure companies. You're no longer a sales person reaching out to a CIO to arrange a golf game, to talk about. While your database is better or why your data center is better. Like all those days are gone. Now you're basically doing content marketing to get somebody excited about the technology that you've created.The developer is just going to download it. Maybe it's open source at the heart of it. They're going to download it and play with it. Or they're going to set up an account and start using it right away. They have to have time to value that's measured in minutes or hours. And then eventually you're going to start tracking all the analytics and data of how people use it.And that then eventually feeds over to a sales person who tries to go create a much larger opportunity, but that transformation has been, I think a, not a major shift in how every infrastructure company has ever gone to market before compared to how they're going to market today.And it's been a major re-imagining of even the stack and how sales teams and marketing teams come together inside of infrastructure companies. Martin Casado: [00:20:12] One thing that's super, I think maybe unique to infrastructure, which is you almost have this weird barbell construction with the team, which is most infrastructure companies require a kind of a deep understanding of the market or technology, right?Like you had to understand DNS, Ben had to understand the cloud. I had to understand the networking. And so the people that do it tend to be the, tend to be, technical founders, very focused on that. But at the same time at the same time, there's like actually tends to be a much more difficult go to market as well.Just because, often you're selling something that's low level, that's relatively technical. Normally you're actually somewhat removed from the business, value. You're like, yes, I get the case of software defined networking, yeah. makes things operationally more flexible or like whatever it is.It's very difficult to actually tie that to our revenue. And so I think one of the things that's tough about being a founder for an infrastructure and even an investor is you do need someone that, both has to be very good at go to market and has to be very good at tech and product.And and we see this in a lot of the founders and then everybody up here, and I don't know, Ben, I don't want to put you too much on the spot, but you saw, like my evidence. So I just, I just look how naive I was early on. I was just so tech focused and later I just had to learn, go to market and it took about 10 years and this and that.And I'm just wondering do you have any thoughts about how you bridge that gap either as a founder or as a board, or, how do you think through that? Because I think it is probably the broadest gap between technology and go to market in the industry. Ben Horowitz: [00:21:37] Yeah, that's a great lead up. I would say, one, it varies a little, so it depends where in the infrastructure stack you are. So in a Sarah was, I would say the worst case scenario in terms of go to market challenge, because it was infrastructure that.Was basically at the bottom of the stack. So if something went wrong with Nicera, then you basically get fired as the customer. And that's always a tough place to start with a new company. You really have to be. Comprehensively good at product marketing sales, lead generation story.Every everything's gotta be exactly perfect to get that off. These days, just no matter how compelling your value proposition or how great your technology is that ends up being a thing. But it is always. I would say challenging because you are going, you're the underpinning and if your stuff doesn't work and if your company doesn't last and all the things that people have to trust about, you have to be in place and, Oh, by the way, if you ever, God forbid have some kind of breach, you'd just die right there.A lot of the things that I look at are, most of what I do with the infrastructure companies that I'm on the board on are focused on and, helping the founders, CEO get the right kind of partners, I would say on the kind of sales and marketing side To do that product.And I always assume that the founder doesn't quite know what they're doing. And like really one of my favorite stories on this was, Okta has got off to a very rough start because of this go to market problem. And what happened was, they had come from salesforce.com and salesforce.com had a very kind of specific go-to market idea, which worked for an app, which was, Hey, we have.One 10th, the features of CBO, the on-premise product. So we're not going to go sell to those guys. We'll sell the guys. They can't get to because it's too heavyweight. And so they start at the bottom of the market and they work their way up. So Octa tried that, but it turns out. Little companies don't care that much about their security infrastructure.So it was a terrible place to start. And so just, me, a lot of the things we worked on is, okay, not only are we selling to the wrong customer, but because we're selling to the wrong customer, we have the wrong channel. We have the wrong pricing. We have the wrong marketing, like everything is wrong and we have to make that shift.And of course, once they made the shift, they went from being a company that looked like it. Wasn't going to make it to a very successful company, just highlight how important, go to market ends up being usually what makes an infrastructure company succeed or fail. Yeah. It's Martin Casado: [00:24:08] it's just so you would hope that this is the challenge for those that have spent, whatever their schooling to learn business.So they understand all the challenges, but in France almost, primarily product and tech founders, right? Like David  like DNS, and it's interesting when you see I remember when I first met David I'm like, listen, this guy is like a head of sales, right? All he thinks about as good a marketer you've talked with Ali or any of.Any of these founders for these companies is just, such a big focus. And even like D David, th just to pull you in really quickly, I remember you're like the last three years I've been like a student of go to market. Like, how did I. Did you know, and now as you take board seats, for example and you work with, infrastructure founders do you feel tempted to drag them into, go to market or focus on product or, David Ulevitch: [00:24:51] yeah, I think I look, I think there's different phases of the company journey.And I think, that when I think about my own experience and then. The companies that we work with, and then we spend time with people. Basically you have the technical founder hat, which is you need to have a technology that works. That's really good. It's differentiated at solving a real problem.And it really, 10 X way to what the world looks like in me, to Ben's point about Salesforce. I may not do everything that the incumbent solution does, but it does something else just in a dramatically better fashion that, so you wear that technical hat and product hat and you build that, but then eventually.Every founder sort realized. I was like, just because you build it does not mean that the customers will come. And so I found that out in multiple painful ways, because every time you solve that problem, then you want to Uplevel your company. Then you have to resolve that problem. And so figuring out and spending time with customers and really putting on that sort of sales CEO, hat, I think is one of the best ways to actually become a great CEO.Because it means that you're listening to your customers. It means you're understanding exactly what the market is telling you. People always ask questions, like how should I price my product? What, how should I package it up? A lot of those questions actually get answered just by being in the market.And you, as a CEO of, I think of an infrastructure company, you can't outsource that. Like you can get help from your product team, from your product marketing team, but you actually can't outsource it. You have to be out there with your customers, especially if you're aspirational and who you want your customers to be.You can spend time with your current customers. That's great. But if you want bigger customers or you want a different segment of the customer base or a different vertical to go after, you have to get out of there. So I was spending, this is like the period of my life, where, and I think, Ben and Martina and lots of people that are listening can relate to this.You ended up getting the, United global services and you realize that's actually a status you'd never want to get, because it means just spending too much time Martin Casado: [00:26:34] on the road, seven years, seven years of golden services, man. David Ulevitch: [00:26:37] It feels really good when you first get it for cancer.Yeah. Ben Horowitz: [00:26:41] Yeah. That's a. It's very bad for your health. It turns out. David Ulevitch: [00:26:44] Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Ultimate Pyrrhic victory and, and but, so I really enjoyed the experience of getting out in front of customers and recognizing that the software and the services we had built in the infrastructure we had built to deliver that service.Was powering some of the biggest companies out there are some of the companies I respected the most. And so that, and then we're actually one of the most interesting things about that journey is you actually find out your whole company really loves that experience too. Like engineers that are working on really hard engineering problems, love finding out that, you went from having your biggest deal, be like a hundred thousand dollar.Annual deal to closing a customer, that's paying you now a million dollars a year. And like the satisfaction of knowing that, the code that you write and the services you've stood up are now I'm getting paid for in that way, because people are finding that value. Like I found that really satisfying and exhilarating, but the only way to go through that journey is I think to be as close to the customers as possible then brought up like, 500 really important threads.You talking, he mentioned channels. He mentioned pricing. Like all of these things are things that you just have to spend a lot of time on. And the worst part about all of them is that once you actually get one working and get it right, it's only going to work for a while and you create more Slack somewhere else in the system where you dedicate your attention, but then once you then go, tighten up the Slack somewhere else, you have to come back to pricing.You have to come back to packaging. We have to come back to your channels and distribution strategy. And that, that for the, the right kind of founders, I think is really an exciting part of the company building process. Deplatforming and Decentralization [00:28:13]Martin Casado: [00:28:13] Awesome. Okay. Let's I'm going to, so I think we should get a little bit into the nuts and bolts now.There's one topic I want to go too into David. I actually, so this, we've had an amazing few years in infrastructure. Like many of the top enterprise companies are like core and for companies, it's data it's, whatever, but Going forward. There's also a lot of opportunity, both in frontier tech.Like whether it's satellites, but we're also just seeing like the traditional players being blown up. And I know one that you've been focused on is listen. There's a lot that's going on with kind of regulation and compliance. And when you see companies taking political stands and you and I hit this and I helped run a CDN, many years ago.And. You ran a DNS server and this has always been an issue. But often when you try and deep platform, infrastructure is what reshapes to provide hosting. And so love your thoughts on the current environment and what that might mean to infrastructure.And those in this audience that are thinking about building infrastructure companies. Oh, yeah. We'll call David Ulevitch: [00:29:10] this a leading question, but I know, my views on this, so I'll share them widely, which is that, I think companies have a right to operate. They want the way they want to operate.But when I looked at what was happening, around the election, when AWS kicked parlor off their services, like I, and I say this about actually any opinion about parlor or, and, I guess I've only seen AWS do it. They want what it really is to me signaled, it was like, this is a great.Infrastructure opportunity because for a long time, I think people felt like the lower layers of the stack were fully baked. There's no room for innovation, Azure GCP, and AWS have cornered the market on standing up hosting and infrastructure and services at those low layers. But, if you're running a service like parlor and you can just get thrown off by one of those services that, you just get thrown off by the other two as well.Then all of a sudden. There's going to be people that are now like fully invigorated and have been now catalyzed in action to go re-imagine. How do you build truly like Bulletproof globally, distributed, decentralized hosting and infrastructure solutions. And we know that in the crypto world we're seeing this across a number of of the crypto initiatives to create file hosting, file distribution content distribution, and all of these things now are going to, I think, start to get a ton of R and D effort because one of the great things about the internet has been that it's been decentralized and, as these Cod platforms of urgent and offered a lot of flexibility, they've also now centralized a lot of that control that the internet used to de-centralized.And so I, I get excited about the idea that, maybe parlor, which, good writtens are not good writtens, but it may end up being the greatest catalyst to re-imagining infrastructure that we thought was done fully baked in that no room left for innovation. And I'm sure someone's going to start to tie together new pieces of new ways.And I'm excited for that. Ben Horowitz: [00:30:56] Yeah, and really interesting on that, parlor, there's a lot of things that would be very hard to run on a decentralized service right now. Like Netflix kind of comes to mind as something you would rather not try, but parlor could definitely work. So that is a, like a really interesting idea.Like parlor is something that you could probably decentralize right now Martin Casado: [00:31:16] for sure. I just love the info when this whole thing went down or just funny to see the different personas and yours is definitely like the, I think the infrastructure founder view, which is, this goes down and some people like, this is good, parlor's a bad thing.Others are like, Oh, this is council culture. This is terrible. This shouldn't happen at central ship. But my reaction was yours, which is this is totally a failure and infrastructure. That's right. David Ulevitch: [00:31:38] Yeah. And we know it can be done the pirate failures than online the parent days, like two decades now.And this is a site that has been legally shut down so many times. It's it's still on there. Totally. And we know what can be done, but it can be done better in a more scalable way. And in a more general purpose Martin Casado: [00:31:52] way. So my sensibilities were totally offended just because I'm like, how is it possible that you can actually shut something like this down?Whether it's politically the right or the wrong thing to do, I was less concerned with, it's just, when we ran a set CDN back in the early two thousands, there were these sites that like, Interpol would show up, every couple of months asking to take it down and whatever, and they would just pop up somewhere else going for, and so in this day and age, especially with crypto, the fact that you actually could cancel something means that like it's time to rethink.The stack not by the way, because of any political agenda, positive or negative. It's just like infrastructure is meant to be ubiquitous in everywhere. And this is just, I think either a failure of imagination on the case of partner, or maybe we've gotten to a place where infrastructure, isn't what it used to be.And that's David Ulevitch: [00:32:35] exactly right. That's exactly right. There's still room for innovation Open Source is becoming Irrelevant [00:32:38]Martin Casado: [00:32:38] Let's talk opensource. I actually, so I have a bit of a, I think I'm a contrarian position on opensource. Ben, it'd be great. If you could backstop me on this one or contradicting or contradictory. Sorry.Here's the thing. For those that are listening, what is open source? So open source has been around for quite a while. It's the idea that, if you're writing code, the code should be, visible for. For everybody so they can look whether it's, to modify it, to build a community around it, to make sure that, it's correct to to address bugs, et cetera. This is a massive movement and, there's just been a lot of, focus on open source as the way to build these businesses. Yeah I can't help, but think that actually opensource. Is actually becoming a little bit irrelevant and not for the reasons, people say meaning it's fine to build an open-source company and it's fine to have open source, but in the era of SAS, Whether it's infrastructure satisfied in the era of you're actually running a SAS service, it's not super clear the role that open-source plays.Certainly not as clear as it did say 10 years ago. So if I'm shipping you software, if that's my business model, I'm shipping you software open source is something that people can get and like download and run. And it's a great kind of go-to-market channel. You get, the actual users of the open source become your customers.But if I'm building a SAS service, even if I open source the actual functionality of it, there's so much of the operations, which is actually really hard about this stuff, that is an open source, right? If you think about AWS as an open source, there's nothing open source about it. Get hub, isn't open source snowflake, isn't open source, but these are these kind of developer focused companies that are all very huge, that, and we had this question on Twitter and I think it's a great question. Like where does the source fit? It yeah. Going forward. I actually think, listen it's still like what it used to be. However I do think it's it's diminishing and relevance because the consumption model is becoming a service and listen, David, I know you've got an opinion on this.Would love to hear that. And Ben would love to hear yours as well. David Ulevitch: [00:34:28] I'll just say mine really quickly. Cause I, my view that people are conflating multiple things here, which is, I always view SaaS as basically a way of outsourcing IT. And so when you sign up for a SaaS service, you're effectively saying, I don't want to pay somebody inside my IT organization to run something, on-prem manage it, install patches and updates.And so it's a little bit orthogonal and I agree with you that. People are paying for SaaS, whether it's open-source underneath the hood or not, they're not paying for open-source, they're paying for it basically to not have to pay to manage something themselves. And in fact, they often pay a premium for that.I think the open source angle is often I'd go to marketing. What's a marketing way to get to build awareness to give people competence in your product. But I don't think that open source. Component isn't important at all. Like I'm agreeing with you, but it's really because of the framing to me is about outsourcing it.Not about whether they're paying for software or not paying Martin Casado: [00:35:22] for something. It's just, I've just felt like there's so much industry focused on open source. And this, I have a long personal history with open source, I've funded it, I've worked on it. I think it's fantastic. It's transformed the industry.It will continue, but if you look at a new company in the infrastructure space, It's most likely they're going to monetize with a SAS service. Not all the case and if that's the case, it's just not super clear how relevant open-source it's like you can have it and it's great. And yeah, it's great from maybe a marketing community standpoint, but it's not clear to me that going forward, like this is the thing to rotate on.Ben, did you have a comment?  Ben Horowitz: [00:35:51] it's funny when you think about the history of it, right? Because the thing that made open source destroy. Closed source were these big internet services because if you were running Facebook or Google, there's no way you can take a closed source piece of infrastructure and build Facebook on it.Because if there is a bug it's way, way, not okay to be dependent on some software company to patch it and ship it to you. That's just too long, a low. And so that moved everything to the thing that made everything open source was running these big services. But when the open source became services, Themselves then the kind of value of the open source went away.And I agree with David, it became a marketing tool. It actually is. Weirdly analogy is like an industry where, but when it went to streaming, then, the song is almost more of a marketing thing for building the brand of the artist than a way to make money. And. In a way open source is more, just a branding thing for the company and not how they make money.They make money on the service. Martin Casado: [00:36:54] Yeah. I mean it just, for everybody listening, we love open source. We're huge fans of it. I'm on the board of maybe seven open-source companies and they're all great. It's just, we used to hand ring as founders and investors so much about, Oh, can you do open source and still monetize it?And we just don't worry about that anymore. If you have an open-source company, great. Don't worry about monetizing it because we know you're going to most likely monetize as a, a SAS offering. And that just doesn't count isn't cannibalized because nobody wants to operate their own infrastructure.Infra Company Margins [00:37:22]So I actually want to take this moment to dovetail a little bit into another question on Twitter. Which is another thing that we actually obsess about a lot, which is the margin question. So yeah, I feel like so many of the, so many of the the way to think about software companies, the unit economics came from the days of like shippable software, right?You're like, Oh, 80% margins. Cause you ship it and people run it. But more and more in particularly for infrastructure, like we've mentioned. Like the companies are monetized as services. I think AWS, or whatever platform, any scale Databricks. And the thing about, a service, especially in infra is, the Mo the margin structure actually can start to matter.We've been doing this internal study, hopefully it'll turn into a blog post soon, but it's interesting if you take a an average. SAS company that's built on top of the cloud. The amount of contribution that cloud has to margin to the actual cogs is significant, right? It can be like double points of margin.And as long as the company is growing, that doesn't really matter. Especially in this macro economic time or debts, basically free, like these companies that get these great valuations cause they're growing very well. But while they're doing that, whether they're taking on VC funding or. Or whatever, they're writing all of this unoptimized code, that's running on these clouds.And then let's assume that at some point in time, the growth slows down then margin really starts to matter. And if you've got multiple points of margin, Like the impact to the market cap of the company is significant. So let's say you've got a $20 billion company that's doing this.The difference in 10 points of margin could be, billions of dollars in market cap. And when, and then, so you hit these very interesting situations where it totally made sense to use the public cloud early on hundred percent because you're growing very quickly. Then let's say, you saturate your market and you go public or whatever, then you slow down.Then all of a sudden, like it's hard to pay that margin tax. And then when you have actually pretty good arguments for repatriating like Dropbox, did you basically say, listen, it will never make sense from a cashflow perspective to build a data center, but this is probably 10 billion of dollars of market cap that we can save.Oh, sorry. I'm just, David wants to do a question. Oh yeah. So maybe, yeah. Yeah. So let me explain a little better. What I mean by this, which is if you're offering a SAS service. And let's say you're running it on AWS or you're running on the cloud. And let's assume that you're doing some level of compute while you're doing it.Like you're paying AWS. So you actually have a co like a cogs cost, like a cost of goods. So to bring on a new customer, it's expensive. On your AWS bill, for example, that hits your balance sheet as margins. And when you're a growth company, when you're invested like, by David or Ben or myself and your invest, when you're being investigated by a VC, you don't really worry about that as much because you're growing very fast and you're mostly valued on growth, but as soon as growth slows.It really matters and there's probably, tens of billions of dollars right now, trapped in kind of cloud margins. It's something that we're very focused on. And so I don't think that we fully rationalized how much margins are going to play a role going forward, but you have to believe with all these SAS companies, IPO, knowing that there's going to be a reckoning and Ben, I know, you've been watching the data space as well.There's been a lot of discussions around margin. I'm wondering if you think is there a big reckoning coming where this has to be reconciled? Can we just grow forever? Is this like a non-issue. Ben Horowitz: [00:40:34] I think that, it's funny, the data space is a little bit special with regards to your ability to get out of the monster clouds because of the data gravity problem in that let's say you're an analytics company, you have to be proximate to the data because the thing that's more expensive than the regular, storage and compute is bandwidth.And specifically been with. Out of the cloud. So if you are an analytics tool and you have your own data center and you're talking to say Databricks or snowflake or Redshift and another cloud that's going to be a very expensive proposition for your customers to move that data across. Whereas moving data within a cloud of course is nothing.So I think that's a special case, but I do think that. On the other hand for things that don't necessarily interact with a lot of other kind of components in the cloud yeah, like it's real, it is a gigantic amount of money at scale. So I do think that's going to. FIA thing for certain companies.Here's Martin Casado: [00:41:30] this thing I'm just kidding, just from an industry standpoint. And here's what I'm curious on. We're in this very special macro economic time where debt is very cheap, right? And the public markets are valuing. Companies based on growth. And then of course, on the private markets, we value companies a lot on growth because it's so hard to even calculate margin.It's just so early, and they're just mature. And so let's assume that there's this whole cohort of companies in the last five years that are funded by VCs. They get to scale, they go public, they all have great growth and then they start to slow down and then you find that.There's you know, 10 points of margin plus captured, by the cloud, this could be hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap, I just wonder if there's going to be a reckoning here. And does that mean that we're going to see a layer that optimizes that? Are we going to see repatriation or, it's a very open question in my mind.Ben Horowitz: [00:42:21] And so what is the thing that causes debt not to be cheapest? Also, that's a macroeconomic question. These countries are printing money, like crazy good. It would basically destroy the country to raise interest rates now. It's a very. Dangerous given how much money we owe, but Martin Casado: [00:42:39] I feel so much, it's an odd thing to say, but I feel so much of the current state of infrastructure is being dictated by exactly this, which is, it's a weird thing.It's basically yeah. We're printing money. And a lot of it's going to AWS because we don't care about margins. That's basically the collection of it because we're just focused on growth. Uh, but if the growth slows and or infrastructure interest rates go up, I do feel we're going to have Like a significant portion of the economy is going to be trapped in this layer.And I think it's very interesting to see whether, we can dig our way out of it. Are we going to see optimization companies? Are we going to see repatriation? This is going to blow up infrastructure yet again. I don't really know the answer. David Ulevitch: [00:43:14] I don't know the answer either, Martin. One thing I think people underestimate is that there is a level of competition in the infrastructure space and people forget that pretty, but it's easy. It's easy to actually remember it when you need to. So I think most of us who are on boards have gotten an email at one point or another from a company that we've invested in.It says, Hey, great news. We found out about these things called reserved instances. And all of a sudden we've lowered our Amazon bill by 25%. We're saving millions of dollars a month. And you're like, great. You figured this out now. It's fine. It's good. But the same thing happens when they say, wait a minute, we just got an incentive to move to Azure and we can save 30% on our bill.'cause like to use the Bezos quote, " your margin is my opportunity" that will eventually get used against all the major cloud players. And even the old school providers, like the Equinixes of the world are now starting to offer more and more sort of dynamic like services elastic like services.And I think that the margin issues and tends to solve as there's contraction in the market. And that people find ways, whether it's an overlay tools, the pride optimization, and as the virtualization to us continue to get better and better. You're just going to see more and more people be able to move more nimbly and that'll push pricing down.Martin Casado: [00:44:26] I think. I'm going to take the, I'm going to take the counterpoint on that, which I think is totally reasonable. A reasonable thing to say is it's not an issue right now. And once it becomes an issue, like we can move workloads around or optimize here's okay. Listen, you're all you all are hearing it now.Here's my prediction, which is there's so much money at stake. I think fractions of, a trillion dollars, right? So much money. If the macro economic environment changes that we're going to see a thermonuclear detonation on the cloud, it's just going to be like, Holy shit. We've got just, so much money in market cap trapped on this layer.And yes, we could do these 20% optimizations, but Oh, by the way, if I have a. Focused. If I built my own data center, for example, I can drop it by a factor of 10 and we're going to see just like the cloud kind of decimated PCs. I think there's a chance that we see it moving back. Who knows, but I do think we're talking of numbers of that size, right?David Ulevitch: [00:45:15] Yeah, but I'm okay with people building their own data centers. We, when you and I were having that discussion about parlor and infrastructure, I think that the more structure we have out there and the more choices, the better Martin Casado: [00:45:25] that was good, every section stays relevant.David Ulevitch: [00:45:27] There's a related point, Martine that in the discussion of sort of margin, which is that. Usually the cost of the company is incurring to run. Their service is not at all related to the way they price their offering. In fact, usually in the in fact, the best companies don't connect those things at all, because usually the customer has some axes of pricing that might be users or storage, but the actual cost of the service might be based on compute cycles or processes or something else.And th that's actually, I think where companies need to be a little bit more in tune with what their actual costs are and what the incremental cost of a customer is, and that they can certainly do independent of the macro environment. Martin Casado: [00:46:05] I dunno. I just think everybody talks about technical debt and we're like, Oh, it's bad  but like it's all fun and games until it's a $200 billion problem. And somebody looks like, literally somebody looks at the, like the U S economy. And it was like, Oh my God. Again, like some percentage of market cap is being owned by AWS or whatever.And then I think that people get very motivated to make big dramatic changes. And we'll just see. 

Former podcast host, Daniel McAuley, is joined by former podcast guest, Andy Rachleff — Co-Founder & CEO of Wealthfront, the only company that integrates banking and investing to automate your savings. We discuss: - Andy’s storied and career as both an investor and entrepreneur - His experience coming out of retirement to found Wealthfront - The ride of day trading app such as Robinhood - Whether payment for order flow is good for retail investors - The current crypto bull run - Market bubbles and what investors can do in today’s environment - Self-Driving Money™ and Wealthfront’s future Andy Rachleff Andy is Wealthfront’s co-founder and CEO. He serves as a member of the board of trustees and chairman of the endowment investment committee for University of Pennsylvania and as a member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on technology entrepreneurship. Prior to Wealthfront, Andy co-founded and was general partner of Benchmark Capital, where he was responsible for investing in a number of successful companies including Equinix, Juniper Networks, and Opsware. He also spent ten years as a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre (MPAE). Andy earned his BS from University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. About Wealthfront Wealthfront is the only company that integrates banking and investing to automate your savings. They provide all of the financial services you need like high-interest checking that offers an ATM/debit card, low-cost investment portfolios managed for you, one-click loans and free advice and planning tools all through a five-star rated mobile app. The company recently began implementing the first of its Self-Driving Money™ services to automate your savings plan so you don’t need to worry about monitoring accounts and moving money around. To learn more please visit wealthfront.com or download the app on the App Store or Google Play.

 Episode Summary In this episode of Masters of MEDDICC, Andy talks to Chief Revenue Officer at Imply, Travis Patterson, about hiring, sales, and recruiting. Travis has over 20 years of experience working in enterprise sales, having taken up roles at Opsware, Aviso, SignalFx, IronKey, PTC, BladeLogic, and Mesosphere. Today, we explore what makes a good seller, how Travis goes about finding these sellers, the importance of good leadership, and the emphasis on constantly learning. Key Takeaways “Through the course of your career, you're trying to over index for learning. I want to learn. I want to be in a situation where you're not the smartest person in the room.” “It only feels like it was a fun experience after it's over and you get to read the book, but when you're in it, it's a lot of work, stress, and focus.” “Bad people don't tend to stick together; only good people.” “Part of the pride of you getting to a certain point in your career is that you've worked with a lot of good people, and you've been able to help people further their career as well.” “We can go recruit all we want, but the really great sales people that we want to hire have to want to work with us.” “Intelligence allows you to be creative. It's a really important thing that you can't fix as a leader. If the person you hire doesn't have it, there's not much that you're going to be able to impart.” “If you're smart and you work hard, but you don't take feedback, it's going to be hard to grow in the way that we need you to grow.” “You want a competitive team. Everyone in your team wants to be number one, but they want whoever is in second place to be just $1 behind them.” Learn more about MEDDICC at https://www.meddicc.com .Subscribe, Comment, And Share: Website: https://www.meddicc.com Facebook: MEDDICC Facebook Twitter: MEDDICC Twitter Instagram: MEDDICC Instagram YouTube: MEDDICC YouTube Channel Podcast: MEDDICC Podcast Page Masters of MEDDICC is a show where the world's best sales professionals are interviewed about all things enterprise sales and in particular relating to the MEDDIC framework, including MEDDICC and MEDDPICC.

In this episode, my co-host Alex Patel and I talk to Andy Rachleff, the CEO of Wealthfront, about automated money management. We delve into topics like passive investing, the benefits of automation, financial advisory, and much more! Check out the episode to learn about automated money management in a simplified way! Andy Rachleff is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Wealthfront, a next-gen banking service for millennials. He serves as a member of the board of trustees and chairman of the endowment investment committee for University of Pennsylvania and as a member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on technology entrepreneurship. Prior to Wealthfront, Andy co-founded and was general partner of Benchmark Capital, where he was responsible for investing in a number of successful companies including Equinix, Juniper Networks, and Opsware. He also spent ten years as a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre (MPAE). Andy earned his undergraduate degree from University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business. Follow Andy Rachleff on Twitter here! Follow StreetFins on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook here, and follow me on Twitter @rohaninvest! Find and subscribe to Finance Simplified on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, and Anchor.fm! Want to learn more? Check out some StreetFins articles and videos relating to topics mentioned in the episode: Intro to Day Trading Intro to Automated Money Management Intro to Passive Investing --- This episode is sponsored by · Anchor: The easiest way to make a podcast. https://anchor.fm/app

Your job as an engineering leader is to win and increase your capacity to win. In Part 2, Wade Chambers discusses how to measure success for engineering leaders, what great looks like, AND how to increase your team’s performance and improve their potential! You’ll also hear how to get unstuck and move your career forward. "And the more that you can come up with, well, what does it mean to be a great manager? Or what does it mean to be a great leader? Answering those questions for yourself and actually getting to the point where you have confidence and are willing to stand behind it because it's well-reasoned and like it's a principled point of view... will help you improve" - Wade Chambers Wade oversees all aspects of engineering and technology innovation as the CTO & SVP of Engineering at Grand Rounds. With more than 25 years of engineering leadership experience, he has deep technical domain expertise and a successful track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth for companies of all sizes including Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, and Opsware. Before Silicon Valley, Wade served in the military and the White House Situation Room. SHOWNOTES How to measure success, “win, and increase your capacity to win” (2:32) How to increase the potential of people on your team (8:24) How to get unstuck in your career (12:31) The 3 “buckets” to help identify where your career growth is stuck (16:53) How to maximize learning and growth from the books you read (21:23) How to get to the core principles that drive your behavior (25:52) Wade’s final thoughts on closing the gap between where you are and where you want to be (29:38) Takeaways (31:41) ANNOUNCEMENT Nominations for the 2020 Inspiring Leadership Award are now open! We created this award to recognize role models of engineering leadership, for the work they do every day to make a difference in their teams and organizations. Share their story with us and submit a nomination at: SFELC.COM/SUMMIT2020/AWARD Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

Wade Chambers discusses how to learn anything by applying “conscious growth” and neuroplasticity to your career. You’ll learn how to get unstuck, and move your career forward. Plus Wade also shares stories about his early failures as an engineering manager, and what he wished he knew when he first became a manager. "The more that you can recognize that, ‘Oh, I feel uncomfortable’ and you can just sit with it a minute. As opposed to react to it. There's always a feedback mechanism in that. That willingness to be in the discomfort a little bit longer. You're actually going to learn so much about yourself in that moment. And if you can act on that, that's what unlocks you to move forward." - Wade Chambers Wade oversees all aspects of engineering and technology innovation as the CTO & SVP of Engineering at Grand Rounds. With more than 25 years of engineering leadership experience, he has deep technical domain expertise and a successful track record of scaling teams and leaders, market-defining technology innovations, and business growth for companies of all sizes including Twitter, TellApart, Yahoo, and Opsware. Before Silicon Valley, Wade served in the military and the White House Situation Room. SHOWNOTES How Wade formed the habit of being conscious, thoughtful and digging deeper (4:37) Wade’s early failure as a first-time manager (8:25) Neuroplasticity as the foundation for conscious growth and getting unstuck in your career (15:01) How to learn and become competent in almost anything with conscious growth (23:06) How to align your growth to both impact your company AND move your career forward (28:54) How to predict your company’s needs by applying an anthropological perspective (36:06) Takeaways (41:12) ANNOUNCEMENT Nominations for the 2020 Inspiring Leadership Award are now open! We created this award to recognize role models of engineering leadership, for the work they do every day to make a difference in their teams and organizations. Share their story with us and submit a nomination at: SFELC.COM/SUMMIT2020/AWARD Join our community of software engineering leaders @ https://sfelc.com --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/engineeringleadership/message

The Hard Thing About Hard Things By Ben Horowitz This book flection is written and narrated by Leigh Martinuzzi My father once said to me, “Leigh J, life wasn’t meant to be easy!”, or something along those lines. If life was easy, we’d all be living our dream life… the reality is that for many of us, we are not. This book isn’t a book to help us navigate the difficulties of life although I am sure some of the ideas shared are transferable, no, this book is about the complexities and challenges of running a start-up business. Ben Horowitz is considered one of Silicon Valley’s most experienced entrepreneurs and respected by many. I for one have never heard of the guy, and that’s ok, why should I have. According to Wikipedia, Ben is the co-founder along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and previously co-founded a software company called Opsware. This guy has some experience running business and that becomes clear as daylight as

In which I shamelessly draft off Marc Andreessen’s It’s Time to Build essay and suggest an approach to how, what, and where to do the building. I also have a framework I call the builder’s cone to think about it in a useful historical context.1/ If you’re in tech, you’ve probably read Marc Andreessen’s essay It’s Time to Build (ITTB). It’s the first serious public thing he’s written in nearly a decade, after his 2011 WSJ op-ed, Software is Eating the World (SWEW). 2/ As most of you know this site and newsletter, Breaking Smart, came out of work I did with a16z on that idea, so obviously this new essay from Marc is of high personal interest to me, since it is in some sense, an important sequel.3/ I thought I’d do this episode partly because a new generation of people in technology seems to have no idea who Marc is, and assumes he is just another VC, and that this is just another shallow take from the VC thought leader crowd that you can dismiss casually. Whether you agree or disagree with Marc, dismissing this essay casually is honestly just not a smart thing to do, so I want to try and give you a bit of an appreciation for it before diving into what I want to add to it.4/ For those of you unaware of the history, Marc developed the first graphical web browser back in 1992, Mosaic, which later turned into Netscape. Later he also founded one of the first cloud computing companies, Opsware, with Ben Horowitz who later became his cofounder in a16z. This is basic history which I personally think everybody working in tech or reporting on it should just know.5/ Something I don’t expect everyone to know is, he’s also a huge reader, and as you’ll know if you’ve talked to him, or follow him on Twitter. For every seemingly casual thing he says, he usually has 3 books and 10 papers he can cite. So even if you don’t agree with things he says — and I often don’t — it’s worth taking him seriously. He tends to present his thinking in a deceptively casual way, but there’s always more depth behind it than you would guess from a quick glance.6/ Now for this essay. Like most things Marc says, I agree broadly with his argument. If you’re an engineer, with any experience at all in building things, it’s kinda hard to see this essay as anything other than tautological. I mean of course building is good. That’s the starting point if you’re in technology. The devil is in the details.7/ I do tend to have somewhat different ideas from Marc about what aspects of building/doer culture are the important ones, and in general trust markets a little less, and state institutions a little more. He and I have had a productive ongoing conversation about this stuff for almost 7 years now.8/ There’s a lot you can argue with in the essay, for example, his characterization of right and left attitudes towards building, but I’m not going to get into that, since plenty of others are doing that. And if you want critical views of the essay, there’s no shortage out there, and of course some of them make good points, while others are just shallow bits of the techlash. It’s what you’d expect for an essay like this in 2020.9/ What’s interesting to note is that unlike the SWEW, ITTB has had a very divided reception, which to me is an indication of the stage of the historical building cycle we’re in more than the specifics of what Marc is arguing. 10/ In particular, In 2011, when he wrote the SWEW essay, we had just moved from what I call the alternatives stage to the disruptions stage. Now we’re moving from the disruptions stage to the macro-rebuilding stage. Marc has offered an answer to the question when to build on a grand scale, which is obviously now, or very soon, after the first response to Covid19 is behind. What I want to do is build on what Marc wrote, no pun intended, and talk about how, what, and where to build. 11/ So here’s the theory. Building goes through cycles, with different kinds of building required at each stage of the cycle. Carlota Perez’s Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital is a good framework for thinking about these.12/ As it applies to building, the Perez model can be thought of as 4 stages. In the first stage you build tools, in the second stage, you build alternatives to existing things. In the third stage, you disrupt existing things via a bunch of isolated disruptions. In the last stage, you do a whole sale macro-rebuilding from foundations on up.13/ Somewhere along the way, there’s usually a big disaster, so you can link each complete building cycle to its disaster. The last two were linked to World War I and World War 2, this one is obviously linked to the pandemic. 14/ The disaster doesn’t always happen at a set phase of the cycle. For example, in WW1 it happened late in the disruption phase, when the macro-rebuilding was just starting. For example, asphalt roads being built for cars, which were disrupting horses. 15/ For WW2, it happened a little earlier, towards the end of the alternatives phase. For example, Chevrolet had pioneered an alternative to the Ford style one-size-fits all inflexible mass manufacturing. Disruption continued through the war, and the macro rebuilding happened in peacetime, with the Marshall Plan as part of the war reconstruction for example.16/ For the Covid19 pandemic, the disaster has hit in roughly the same part of the cycle as it did in World War I, just as the disruption wave was going to give way to the macro rebuilding stage anyway. 17/ So what’s happened is: what I called the dessert course of software eating the world has coincided with a big disaster, and accelerated the process. I covered this in passing, in last week’s article on Pandemic Time, but I want to get at it more directly here.18/ There’s two other things to think about in relation to this building cycle. The first is how individuals change, and the second is how society as a whole changes. I like to think in terms of 4 degrees of change depending on the phase of the building: reorient, revalue, resituate, and regenerate, that apply to both individuals and society.19/ In reorienting, you change your mental models, for example realizing that digital media tools can do what paper printing can. So you wrap your mind around different tools. Like the graphical web browser, which Marc invented, rather than the printed book.20/ In the revaluing phase you start valuing different things, for example, you value instant publishing and live conversations with readers more than the cachet of a brand-name publisher behind your book. So you build an alternative: blogs instead of books.21/ In the resituating phase, you change how you exist in the world. For example, calling yourself a blogger instead of an author. You’ve created a new role in the world.22/ And finally, in the regeneration phase, you change on the inside, you internalize the external label/role you’ve taken on. Like Doctor Who.23/ Now here’s the thing, entire societies can go through this same kind of transformation. For example, in the WW1 cycle, the identity of the typical American changed from farmer to factory worker as the country urbanized, and America itself went from thinking of itself as an agrarian backwater playing second fiddle to Europe to a technological superpower. The self-image of the entire nation changed. Subjective transformation.24/ Now what’s the upshot of all this. Here’s the thing, if you make a graph with x-axis being how deeply you as an individual are changing, and the y-axis being how deeply society is changing, it gives you a two-dimensional space where individuals can be ahead or behind society, and being matched with the times, or not. 25/ The ideal case is when the two are somewhat balanced, or when the individual is changing slightly faster, but not too fast, relative to the rest of society. The balanced case is the diagonal line, x=y. So for example, you and society are reorienting at the same rate, or revaluing at the same rate.26/ Below that line, the individual is changing faster. The sweet spot is a cone slightly below the diagonal, which I like to call the builder’s cone. If you are too far ahead of society, too far ahead of the curve, you might be too early, and turn into a frustrated visionary. 27/ Or worse, you might end up going to the dark side and using your ahead-of-the-curve status to exploit others through profiteering, because it’s easier than building. Being too far ahead of that curve creates that tempation.28/ Above the diagonal line is of course much worse, which is why I have represented it as a red zone. If you’re changing much more slowly than society as a whole, you get this left-behind feeling, and develop a deep sense of being exploited. Like people left behind in the 80s by Reagan’s deregulation. You develop resentment and what political scientists call ressentiment.29/ So putting it all together, the sweet spot for builders is to be changing slightly ahead of society at large, and working at the right phase of the building cycle. So right now, we’re obviously in a macro-rebuilding phase that’s gone way past simple disruption.30/ You should be thinking at that scale of ambition. Like Marshall plan scale, or foundational rebuilding phase, based on the logic of software eating the world. You should be reading about those periods of history to get an idea of how to proceed.31/ I’m going to close with a bit of personal advertising. For those of you who want to take up Marc’s call to build, as you may know, the original essays of Breaking Smart were based on his software eating the world essay, and you can read them online or as an ebook. 32/ I also have an online recorded workshop based on those ideas, that you can sign up for. It’s based on live workshops I conducted in 2015 and 2016, plus some extra material. I’m thinking of adding a new recorded session on these ideas about building in the next few weeks.So that’s it for this free episode/issue of Breaking Smart. For those of you just signed up for this newsletter, or had it forwarded to you, Breaking Smart is a weekly subscription newsletter where every week I send out either a free or a paywalled issue exploring some aspect of technology and the future. The free issues are podcast episodes or short essays on a current topic, and the paywalled ones are either an installment of one of my longer projects, or a stand-alone special topic essay. Right now, I’m working on two such longer projects, a book about time called The Clockless Clock, which has one chapter already published, and an essay collection called The Great Weirding, the first essay of which will go out next week, hopefully. Get full access to Breaking Smart at breakingsmart.substack.com/subscribe

On this episode of The Built in Seattle Podcast, I talked with Michel Feaster, CEO and Co-Founder at Usermind. Before Usermind, Michel was VP of Products at Apptio.Highlights:Michel's learnings from her famous mentor, Ben Horowitz.Mistakes and learnings in making the transition from operator to founder. Michel's journey building enterprise software for 20 years at places like Mercury, HP, and Apptio. Why "running toward fear" is now baked into Michel's philosophy. How she sees the job of founder to build a learning machine and how she's learned to let go of fear and inner shaming to make that possibleThe mechanics of category creation and why it's important to "set your price" in enterprise software. Learnings from Apptio to Usermind - two category creation success stories.The path from $15K deals to $1M+ deals at Usermind.Guest Bio:Michel Feaster is the Co-Founder and CEO of usermind, responsible for company vision, strategic direction, planning and execution. Michel’s enterprise software career spans almost 20 years with roles in sales, products, strategic marketing and general management. Before founding usermind, Michel was VP of Products at Apptio, where she drove product strategy, defined the category and discipline of Technology Business Management and helped grow the company from 30 to almost 400 employees. Michel led the acquisition of Opsware by HP Software for $1.6B, managed the combined Opsware, Radia and AppIq product teams and defined the Service Automation category. She also spent almost 8 years at Mercury Interactive learning how to build world class products like LoadRunner and QualityCenter which made customer’s lives better. She aspires to do the same at usermind.Books & blog posts mentioned:Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate MarketsThe Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy AnswersWhy way do your run? (Blog post by Ben Horowitz)Where to follow Michel:michel@usermind.comhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/michelfeaster/Where to follow Adam:https://www.linkedin.com/in/adamschoenfeld/https://twitter.com/schoenyFeedback? Suggestions on who to interview? Email me anytime - adamseattlepodcast@gmail.com

In another riveting episode, Scott Kupor, the managing partner of one of the highest-profile VC on the planet over the last decade, Andreessen Horowitz, joins us today to discuss startups, how to get funded and a lot more! He is also the author of the book called Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. “Inside Baseball” Scott addressed the common issue of "inside baseball" between entrepreneurs and VCs. He shares that there is no reason why questions shouldn’t be answered and that VCs should reach out to entrepreneurs. “People don’t understand why decisions are made. I think that just leads to mistrust quite frankly between VCs and entrepreneurs.” - Scott Kupor Moreover, Scott shares the reason why he wrote the book. He wanted to bridge the gap between VCs and entrepreneurs. Through this book, he answers several entrepreneur questions that previously were assumed to be understood, since they have done a lot of deals in the past.  Information Asymmetry Scott discusses the idea about information asymmetry and how it results to one party benefitting at the expense of the other in those types of scenarios. “Capital is scarce and VCs have it. There was definitely a very different balance of power between entrepreneurs and VCs. There’s probably less incentive quite frankly for the VC. The biggest change, I think,  in the last 10 yrs is, its as competitive as its ever been.” - Scott Kupor  Money clearly a commodity in this business. For Scott, if VCs and entrepreneurs can level the playing field, he would enter into a relationship on a basis of actually understanding one another, knowing what motivates one another as it would definitely be a good place better place to start. More From Scott Aside from talking about Silicon Valley, Startups and how entrepreneurs could get funding, he shares his thoughts on the overall VC backed industry.  “My personal view is—I’ve talked about this with people in DC publicly—the idea that more and more growth is happening in the private markets, while beneficial, selfishly for people like me, who get to, kind of monetize that growth. I don’t think its good for the country. I don’t think its good to not have companies going public at a reasonable stage where a broader cross-section of public market investors can actually enjoy the appreciation there.” - Scott Kupor To hear more about Secrets of Sand Hill Road Venture Capital and more information about Scott Kupor, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, download and listen to the episode. Bio: Scott Kupor is the managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he is responsible for all operational aspects of running the firm. He has been with the firm since its inception in 2009 and has overseen its rapid growth, from three employees to 150+ and from $300 million in assets under management to more than $10 billion. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Scott worked as vice president and general manager of Software-as-a-Service at Hewlett Packard. Scott joined HP in 2007 as part of the Opsware acquisition, where he was senior vice president of Customer Solutions.  In this role, he had global responsibility for customer interaction, including professional services, technical pre-sales, and customer support. Scott joined Opsware shortly after the company’s founding and held numerous executive management positions including vice president, financial planning and vice president, corporate development.  In these roles, he led the company’s private financing activities as well as its initial public offering in 2001. Scott also started the company’s Asia Pacific operations and led the execution of the company’s multiple acquisitions. Prior to Opsware, Scott represented software companies in both financing and mergers and acquisitions transactions at Credit Suisse First Boston and Lehman Brothers.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy with honors and distinction.

In another riveting episode, Scott Kupor, the managing partner of one of the highest-profile VC on the planet over the last decade, Andreessen Horowitz, joins us today to discuss startups, how to get funded and a lot more! He is also the author of the book called Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. “Inside Baseball” Scott addressed the common issue of "inside baseball" between entrepreneurs and VCs. He shares that there is no reason why questions shouldn’t be answered and that VCs should reach out to entrepreneurs. “People don’t understand why decisions are made. I think that just leads to mistrust quite frankly between VCs and entrepreneurs.” - Scott Kupor Moreover, Scott shares the reason why he wrote the book. He wanted to bridge the gap between VCs and entrepreneurs. Through this book, he answers several entrepreneur questions that previously were assumed to be understood, since they have done a lot of deals in the past.  Information Asymmetry Scott discusses the idea about information asymmetry and how it results to one party benefitting at the expense of the other in those types of scenarios. “Capital is scarce and VCs have it. There was definitely a very different balance of power between entrepreneurs and VCs. There’s probably less incentive quite frankly for the VC. The biggest change, I think,  in the last 10 yrs is, its as competitive as its ever been.” - Scott Kupor  Money clearly a commodity in this business. For Scott, if VCs and entrepreneurs can level the playing field, he would enter into a relationship on a basis of actually understanding one another, knowing what motivates one another as it would definitely be a good place better place to start. More From Scott Aside from talking about Silicon Valley, Startups and how entrepreneurs could get funding, he shares his thoughts on the overall VC backed industry.  “My personal view is—I’ve talked about this with people in DC publicly—the idea that more and more growth is happening in the private markets, while beneficial, selfishly for people like me, who get to, kind of monetize that growth. I don’t think its good for the country. I don’t think its good to not have companies going public at a reasonable stage where a broader cross-section of public market investors can actually enjoy the appreciation there.” - Scott Kupor To hear more about Secrets of Sand Hill Road Venture Capital and more information about Scott Kupor, Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, download and listen to the episode. Bio: Scott Kupor is the managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he is responsible for all operational aspects of running the firm. He has been with the firm since its inception in 2009 and has overseen its rapid growth, from three employees to 150+ and from $300 million in assets under management to more than $10 billion. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Scott worked as vice president and general manager of Software-as-a-Service at Hewlett Packard. Scott joined HP in 2007 as part of the Opsware acquisition, where he was senior vice president of Customer Solutions.  In this role, he had global responsibility for customer interaction, including professional services, technical pre-sales, and customer support. Scott joined Opsware shortly after the company’s founding and held numerous executive management positions including vice president, financial planning and vice president, corporate development.  In these roles, he led the company’s private financing activities as well as its initial public offering in 2001. Scott also started the company’s Asia Pacific operations and led the execution of the company’s multiple acquisitions. Prior to Opsware, Scott represented software companies in both financing and mergers and acquisitions transactions at Credit Suisse First Boston and Lehman Brothers.  He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy with honors and distinction.

Episode #4 Newton Series Classic episode featuring renowned Entrepreneur and Venture Capitalist Ben Horowitz. Andreessen Horowitz Co-Founder Ben Horowitz gave this Newton Lecture Series talk on campus at Berkeley on November 3rd, 2009, just four months after starting his new venture firm. In this episode, he shares his entrepreneurial journey, along with what his new firm was looking for in terms of entrepreneurs and companies in which to invest. 00:30 - Episode Introduction 01:30 - Ben Horowitz introduction 02:40 - How to play Quarterback in the NFL 04:10 - Controversial Computer Science degree 05:35 - Are you studying the right thing? 06:07 - The hilarious Warren Buffett 07:03 - Words of wisdom from the King of Pop, Michael Jackson 09:05 - What you need to build a new technology company 10:45 - Apple's Steve Jobs 14:17 - Story of Bernard Hopkins 15:10 - The second thing you need to build a new technology company 16:39 - How I became a CEO 20:30 - Story of America Online (AOL) to Loudcloud to Opsware 27:49 - Bill Clinton & Lesson from Colin Powell 29:10 - Is it too late to start a tech company? 33:12 - How can someone from Harvard write something so stupid? 35:12 - Would you like to know why smart people are so stupid? 39:34 - All the value in tech companies & who VCs want to invest in 41:48 - Quality of the team 42:40 - Megalomaniacs 43:59 - Great opportunities 45:31 - The biggest challenge for entrepreneurs 46:43 - Even William from Twitter and Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook 48:02 - The biggest thing to building a company

In today's world, the success or failure of a company is often attributed to its company culture. But what defines culture? That's the question Ben Horowitz sets out to answer in his new book, What You Do Is Who You Are—drawing on key lessons from history and his own experience co-founding Opsware (which sold to HP for $1.6 billion) and venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (which counts Airbnb, Lyft, and Slack in its portfolio). Ben shares the two things he looks for in founders before backing them, why culture is how people behave when you're not there, and what prison culture has to do with corporate culture. Make sure to follow Ben on social at @bhorowitz0 and @andreessenhorowitz.

Ben Horowitz is a Co-Founder and General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the leading and most prestigious venture firms of the last decade with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Github, Slack, Lyft, Coinbase and many more incredible companies. Ben is also the author of the New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29. Prior to a16z, Ben was Co-Founder and CEO of Opsware, acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How did Ben make his way into the world of venture having previously co-founded Opsware? What was the original thinking for a16z? How did seeing the booms and busts of the market as an operator, impact how Ben thinks about investing today? 2.) In the book Ben says, "If soldiers trust the general, communication will be vastly more efficient". What have been Ben's biggest lessons on how to create an environment of trust quickly? As a board member, how does Ben create an environment of trust for the founder? What is Ben's advice to Harry having just gained his first board seat last year? 3.) Ben has said before of the importance of creating "shocking rules". What are the rules for creating these shocking rules? What are the best rules composed of? Given their shocking nature, how does one instil them in the organisation? What does Ben think is the most shocking rule he has implemented at a16z? 4.) What does ben believe that founders can take away from the rituals of the Samurai? Why does Ben believe that "meditating on company downfalls will enable you to build your culture the right way". Why is the negativity so helpful in forming the right culture? How does ben advise founders when their company is struggling, the team knows it and morale is low? What happened at Okta? How did they turn the culture and business around? 5.) Ben has previously spoken about bringing in external leadership from the cultures you want to master. How does one know when is the right time to bring in this external influence? What can we learn from observing Google Cloud's strategy? How does one retain the old culture but augment it with the new? What were some of Ben's biggest hiring lessons when operating? How does Ben get employees to "feel a sense of urgency", when a change needs to occur? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Ben’s Fave Book: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Ben on Twitter here!

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways  “To be a good CEO, and to be liked in the long run, you must do things that upset people in the short run” – Ben Horowitz“If you make decisions that everybody likes all the time, then those are the decisions they would have made without you. You’re not actually adding any value.”As an entrepreneur, avoid thinking in terms of probabilitiesInstead, think in terms of: “How do I do this?”You have to have the mindset: “Okay, I’ve got one bullet in the gun. I’ve got to hit the target. I’m going to do whatever I can to get as close as possible… If somehow we don’t make it, we don’t make it. But we’re going to die trying.”Sharpen your contradictions“In an organization, you’ll often see little disagreements between people, and a lot of your inclination is to smooth things over, but the right answer is to sharpen the contradictions” – Ben HorowitzWhat you DO is who you are – not your values, not what you tweet, but what you DOA company culture isn’t a shared set of beliefs, it’s a shared set of actions/behaviorsRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.org"One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions." — Ben HorowitzBen Horowitz (@bhorowitz) is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29th. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.Ben has an MS and BA in Computer Science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.This episode is also brought to you by Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, LinkedIn's podcast now in its second season, and it is full of advice you can start using today.Each week, Jessi sits down with featured guests to investigate the role work plays in our lives, and how to make it work for us. This season, one of the first episodes I recommend checking out is with Jerry Colonna. I've worked with Jerry in the past, and he is one of the start-up world's most in-demand executive coaches. In the episode, Jerry shares his approach to meetings, explains how to ask good open-ended questions, and he also goes through his approach to daily journaling.Whether you're starting your first job or gearing up for retirement, Hello Monday helps you tackle Monday — and the rest of the workweek — with tactics and strategies you can use. Find Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Podcast Notes Key Takeaways  “To be a good CEO, and to be liked in the long run, you must do things that upset people in the short run” – Ben Horowitz“If you make decisions that everybody likes all the time, then those are the decisions they would have made without you. You’re not actually adding any value.”As an entrepreneur, avoid thinking in terms of probabilitiesInstead, think in terms of: “How do I do this?”You have to have the mindset: “Okay, I’ve got one bullet in the gun. I’ve got to hit the target. I’m going to do whatever I can to get as close as possible… If somehow we don’t make it, we don’t make it. But we’re going to die trying.”Sharpen your contradictions“In an organization, you’ll often see little disagreements between people, and a lot of your inclination is to smooth things over, but the right answer is to sharpen the contradictions” – Ben HorowitzWhat you DO is who you are – not your values, not what you tweet, but what you DOA company culture isn’t a shared set of beliefs, it’s a shared set of actions/behaviorsRead the full notes @ podcastnotes.org"One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions." — Ben HorowitzBen Horowitz (@bhorowitz) is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29th. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.Ben has an MS and BA in Computer Science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.This episode is also brought to you by Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, LinkedIn's podcast now in its second season, and it is full of advice you can start using today.Each week, Jessi sits down with featured guests to investigate the role work plays in our lives, and how to make it work for us. This season, one of the first episodes I recommend checking out is with Jerry Colonna. I've worked with Jerry in the past, and he is one of the start-up world's most in-demand executive coaches. In the episode, Jerry shares his approach to meetings, explains how to ask good open-ended questions, and he also goes through his approach to daily journaling.Whether you're starting your first job or gearing up for retirement, Hello Monday helps you tackle Monday — and the rest of the workweek — with tactics and strategies you can use. Find Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

"One of the key insights from Bushido is that a culture is not a set of beliefs, it's a set of actions." — Ben HorowitzBen Horowitz (@bhorowitz) is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of The New York Times bestseller, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, and the upcoming Harper Business book, What You Do Is Who You Are, available October 29th. He also created the a16z Cultural Leadership Fund to connect cultural leaders to the best new technology companies, and enable more young African Americans to enter the technology industry.Prior to a16z, Ben was cofounder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard for $1.6 billion in 2007. Previously, Ben ran several product divisions at Netscape Communications, including the widely acclaimed Directory and Security product line.Ben has an MS and BA in Computer Science from UCLA and Columbia University, respectively.This podcast is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, "If you could only use one supplement, what would it be?" My answer is, inevitably, Athletic Greens. It is my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body and did not get paid to do so.As a listener of The Tim Ferriss Show, you'll get a free 20-count travel pack (valued at $79) with your first order at athleticgreens.com/tim.This episode is also brought to you by Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel, LinkedIn's podcast now in its second season, and it is full of advice you can start using today.Each week, Jessi sits down with featured guests to investigate the role work plays in our lives, and how to make it work for us. This season, one of the first episodes I recommend checking out is with Jerry Colonna. I've worked with Jerry in the past, and he is one of the start-up world's most in-demand executive coaches. In the episode, Jerry shares his approach to meetings, explains how to ask good open-ended questions, and he also goes through his approach to daily journaling.Whether you're starting your first job or gearing up for retirement, Hello Monday helps you tackle Monday — and the rest of the workweek — with tactics and strategies you can use. Find Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Please fill out the form at tim.blog/sponsor.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss

Welcome to the History of Computing Podcast, where we explore the history of information technology. Because by understanding the past, we're able to be prepared for the innovations of the future! Today we're going to look at the emergence of the web through the lens of Netscape, the browser that pushed everything forward into the mainstream. The Netscape story starts back at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana where the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (or NCSA) inspired Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina to write Mosaic, which was originally called xmosaic and built for X11 or the X Window System. In 1992 there were only 26 websites in the world. But that was up from the 1 that Internet pioneer Tim Berners-Lee built at info.cern.ch in 1991. The internet had really only been born a few years earlier in 1989. But funded by the Gore Bill, Andreessen and a team of developers released the Alpha version of the NCSA Mosaic browser in 1993 and ported it to Windows, Mac, and of course the Amiga. At this point there were about 130 websites. Version two of Mosaic came later that year and then the National Science Foundation picked up the tab to maintain Mosaic from 94 to 97. James Clark, a co-founder of Silicon Graphics and a legend in Silicon Valley, took notice. He recruited some of the Mosaic team, led by Marc Andreessen, to start Mosaic Communications Corporation, which released Netscape Navigator in 1994, the same year Andreessen graduated from college. By then there were over 2,700 websites, and a lot of other people were taking notice after 2 four digit growth years. Yahoo! and EXCITE were released in 1994 and enjoyed an explosion in popularity, entering a field with 25 million people accessing such a small number of sites. Justin Hall was posting personal stuff on links.net, one of the earliest forms of what we now call blogging. Someone else couldn't help but notice: Bill Gates from Microsoft. He considered cross-platform web pages and the commoditization of the operating system to be a huge problem for his maturing startup called Microsoft, and famously sent The Internet Tidal Wave memo to his direct reports, laying out a vision for how Microsoft would respond to this thread. We got Netscape for free at the University, but I remember when I went to the professional world we had to pay for it. The look and feel of Navigator then can still be seen in modern browsers today. There was an address bar, a customizable home page, a status bar, and you could write little javascripts to do cutesy things like have a message scroll here and there or have blinked things. 1995 also brought us HTML frames, fonts on pages, the ability to change the background color, the ability to embed various forms of media, and image maps. Building sites back then was a breeze. And with an 80% market share for browsers, testing was simple: just open Netscape and view your page! Netscape was a press darling. They had insane fans that loved them. And while they hadn't made money yet, they did something that a lot of companies do now, but few did then: they went IPO early and raked in $600 million in their first day, turning Marc Andreessen the poster child into an overnight sensation. They even started to say that the PC would live on the web - and it would do so using Netscape. Andreessen then committed the cardinal sin that put many in tech out of a job: he went after Microsoft claiming they'd reduce Microsoft to a set of “poorly debugged device drivers.” Microsoft finally responded. They had a meeting with Netscape and offered to acquire the company or they would put them out of business. Netscape lawyered up, claiming Microsoft offered to split the market up where they owned Windows and left the rest to Netscape. Internet Explorer 1 was released by Microsoft in 1995 - a fork of Mosaic which had been indirectly licensed from the code Andreessen had written while still working with the NCSA in college. And so began the “Browser Wars” with Netscape 2 being released and Internet Explorer 2, the same year. 1995 saw the web shoot up to over 23,000 sites. Netscape 2 added Netscape Mail, an email program with about as simple a name as Microsoft Mail, which had been in Windows since 1991. In 1995, Brendan Eich, a developer at Netscape wrote SpiderMonkey, the original JavaScript engine, a language many web apps still use today (just look for the .jsp extension). I was managing labs at the University of Georgia at the time and remember the fast pace that we were upgrading these browsers. NCSA telnet hadn't been updated in years but it had never been as cool as this Netscape thing. Geocities popped up and I can still remember my first time building a website there and accessing incredible amounts of content being built - and maybe even learning a thing or two while dinking around in those neighborhoods. 1995 had been a huge and eventful year, with nearly 45 million people now “on the web.” Amazon, early search engine Altavista, LYCOS, and eBay launching as well. The search engine space sure was heating up… Then came 1996. Things got fun. Point releases of browsers came monthly. New features dropped with each release. Plugins for Internet Explorer leveraged API hooks into the Windows operating system that made pages only work on IE. Those of us working on pages had to update for both, and test for both. By the end of 1996 there were over a quarter million web pages and over 77 million people were using the web. Apple, The New York Times, Dell.com appeared on the web, but 41 percent of people checked AOL regularly and other popular sites would be from ISPs for years to come. Finally, after a lot of talk and a lot of point releases, Netscape 3 was released in 1997. Javascript got a rev, a lot of styling elements some still use today like tables and frames came out and forms could be filled out automatically. There was also a gold version of Netscape 3 that allowed editing pages. But Dreamweaver gave us a nice WYSIWIG to build web pages that was far more feature rich. Netscape got buggier, they bit on more and more thus spreading developers thing. They just couldn't keep up. And Internet Explorer was made free in Windows as of IE 3, and had become equal to Netscape. It had a lot of plugins for Windows that made it work better on that platform, for better or worse. The Browser Wars ended when Netscape decided to open source their code in 1998, creating the Mozilla project by open sourcing the Netscape Browser Suite source code. This led to Waterfox, Pale Moon, SeaMonkey, Ice Weasel, Ice Cat, Wyzo, and of course, Tor Browser, Swiftfox, Swift Weasel, Timberwolf, TenFourFox, Comodo IceDragon, CometBird, Basilisk, Cliqz, AT&T Pogo, IceCat, and Flock. But most importantly, Mozilla released Firefox themselves, which still maintains between 8 and 10 percent marketshare for browser usage according to who you ask. Of course, ultimately everyone lost the browser wars now that Chrome owns a 67% market share! Netscape was sold to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion, the first year they dropped out of the website popularity contest called the top 10. At this point, Microsoft controlled the market with an 80% market share. That was the first year Amazon showed up on the top list of websites. The Netscape problems continued. AOL released Netscape 6 in 2000, which was buggy and I remember a concerted effort at the time to start removing Netscape from computers. In 2003, after being acquired by Time Warner, AOL finally killed off Netscape. This was the same year Apple released Safari. They released 7.2 in 2004 after outsourcing some of the development. Netscape 9, a port of Firefox, was released in 2007. The next year Google Chrome was released. Today, Mozilla is a half-billion dollar a year not-for profit. They ship the Firefox browser, the Firefox OS mobile OS, the online file sharing service Firefox Send, the Bugzilla bug tracking tool, the Rust programming language, the Thunderbird email client, and other tools like SpiderMonkey, which is still the javascript engine embedded into Firefox and Thunderbird. If the later stage of Netscape's code in the form of the open source Mozilla projects appeal to you, consider becoming a Mozilla Rep. You can help contribute, promote, document, and build the community with other passionate and knowledgeable humans that are on the forefront of pushing the web into new and beautiful places. For more on that, go to reps.mozilla.org. Andreessen went on to build Opsware with Ben Horowitz (who's not a bad author) and others. He sold the hosting business and in 2005 continued on with Horowitz founded Andreessen Horowitz which were early investors of Facebook, Foursquare, GitHub, Groupon, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Twitter, Jawbone, Zynga, Skype, and many, many others. He didn't win the browser wars, but he has been at the center of helping to shape the Internet as we know it today, and due to the open sourcing of the source code many other browsers popped up. The advent of the cloud has also validated many of his early arguments about the web making computer operating systems more of a commodity. Anyone who's used Office 365 online or Google apps can back that up. Ultimately, the story of Netscape could be looked at as yet another “Bill Gates screwed us” story. But I'm not sure that does it justice. Netscape did as much to shape the Internet in those early days as anything else. Many of those early contributions, like the open nature of the Internet, various languages and techniques, and of course the code in the form of Mozilla, live on today. There were other browsers, and the Internet might have grown to what it is today. But we might not have had as much of the velocity without Andreessen and Netscape and specifically the heated competition that led to so much innovation in such a short period of time - so we certainly owe them our gratitude that we've come as far as we have. And I owe you my gratitude. Thank you so very much for tuning into another episode of the History of Computing Podcast. We're lucky to have you. Have a great day!

Scott Kupor is Managing Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most renowned venture funds with a portfolio including the likes of Facebook, Airbnb, Github, Lyft, Coinbase, Slack and many more. As for Scott, he has been with the firm since its inception in 2009 and has overseen its rapid growth, from three employees to 150+ and from $300 million in assets under management to more than $7 billion today. Before a16z, Scott was a VP @ HP where he managed a $1.5 billion (1,300 person) global support organization for HP Software product portfolio. Scott joined HP as a result of his prior company Opsware, being acquired, where he served as a Senior VP across numerous roles across an incredible 8-year journey.  In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Scott made his way from the world of law to startups to being Managing Partner at one of the world's most renowned venture firms in the form of a16z? 2.) How did seeing the boom and bust of the dot com bubble and 2008 impact Scott's operating mindset today? Why does he argue that those times are so drastically different to today? How do public markets fundamentally diffferent? How do teams approach to capital efficiency and scaling differ significantly? 3.) What does Scott believe entrepreneurs get most wrong when pitching VCs? Why does Scott argue that product is not the core when pitching VCs? Does Scott agree with Fred @ Okta in weighing it: 70% market, 20% team, 10% product? What is Scott's weighting? Why does Scott believe that the compression of fundraising timelines is a problem? What pitch sticks out to Scott above all others? What made it so memorable? 4.) How does Scott advise founders on determining the right amount to raise for? Does Scott believe that founders should ask for a specific number or a range? Why does Scott believe raising for "runway" is the wrong mindset? Does Scott believe that most bridges are bridges to nowhere? If so, what is the next step? How does one relay that information to the founders? 5.) What have been some of Scott's biggest learnings from building the firm with Marc and Ben? What does Scott believe have been the biggest inflexion points in the public status of a16z? What have been the biggest challenges for Scott in the scaling of the firm? How does he foresee that changing in the future? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Scott’s Fave Book: Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Scott on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

Scott Kupor is the managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz where he is responsible for all operational aspects of running the firm. He has been with the firm since its inception in 2009 and has overseen its rapid growth, from three employees to 150+ and from $300 million in assets under management to more than $7 billion. Prior to joining Andreessen Horowitz, Scott worked as vice president and general manager of Software-as-a-Service at Hewlett Packard. Scott joined HP in 2007 as part of the Opsware acquisition, where he was senior vice president of Customer Solutions. In this role, he had global responsibility for customer interaction, including professional services, technical pre-sales, and customer support. Scott joined Opsware shortly after the company’s founding and held numerous executive management positions including vice president, financial planning and vice president, corporate development. In these roles, he led the company’s private financing activities as well as its initial public offering in 2001. Scott also started the company’s Asia Pacific operations and led the execution of the company’s multiple acquisitions. Prior to Opsware, Scott represented software companies in both financing and mergers and acquisitions transactions at Credit Suisse First Boston and Lehman Brothers. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in public policy with honors and distinction. Scott also holds a law degree with distinction from Stanford University and is a member of the State Bar of California. Scott is chairman of the board of Genesys Works; cofounder and co-director of the Stanford Venture Capital Director’s College; co-founder and co-director of the Stanford Rock Center’s Guide to Venture-Backed Board Membership; Executive in Residence at Haas School of Business and Boalt School of Law; and a Lecturer at Stanford Law School. He is vice-chair of the investment committee of St. Jude’s Children’s Cancer Research Hospital and also serves as a member of the investment committees for Stanford Medical Center, the Silicon Valley Community Foundation, and Lick Wilmerding High School. Scott served as Chairman of the Board of the National Venture Capital Association (2017-2018). He is the author of the forthcoming book (June 2019), published by Portfolio, a division of Penguin, on Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It. https://a16z.com https://a16z.com/book/secrets-of-sand-hill-road https://twitter.com/skupor

Scott Kupor joins Ryan on this episode to talk about his new book, Secrets of Sand Hill Road. Scott is Managing Partner at Andreessen Horowitz and has been at the firm since it was founded. He has a long history with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, including working alongside them at Opsware in the early 2000s. Ryan and Scott talk about... How venture capital has changed over the past decade “The biggest shift has been the massive amount of seed funding growth that has happened. Something like five hundred new firms focusing on seed have been formed in the last ten years in the US alone.” Scott also points out that even though there has been an explosion in seed funding, it's still the case that less than 10% of all venture capital dollars are deployed at the seed stage. “You’ve got this interesting dichotomy, which massive new company formation happening at the seed stage but a winnowing down of the opportunities and increasingly more capital going to winners in particular ecosystems as they mature.” They also discuss the fact that companies are taking much longer to IPO now than they did in the past, and why that trend is here to stay. Advice for founders in the new investment landscape Scott talks about how founders need to adapt to the new investment landscape and walks through some of the biggest mistakes that founders make when they are trying to raise money. “It’s cheaper than ever to start a company today and we’ve got incredible amounts of seed funding but it’s also more expensive than ever to actually scale the businesses because the markets you can go after are much bigger and people realize they have to look at international markets in parallel.” The future of venture capital Ryan asks what the biggest potential disruptor to venture capital could be in the next five to ten years. “Capital is definitely no longer a scarce resource and therefore if you’re relying on capital to differentiate yourself in the market, that’s not a good place to be. Whether [the future] is ICOs or crowdfunding, I think we’ve permanently gone into a place where you have to provide something other than money to be competitive. I think we’re also going to see more blending between the private markets and the public markets.” How to think about the long-term relationship between your company and your investors “It turns out that most VC relationships will last longer than the average marriage in the US, which unfortunately only lasts about eight years. Sometimes you’ll be involved with VCs for ten to twelve years, so it really goes to this fundamental question of understanding the VC’s incentives but also being very clear as an entrepreneur what you expect from your VC.” “We think about these financing rounds as though they’re episodic because they are, but they’re a part of a continuum and anything you do that doesn’t play well for subsequent investors is probably the biggest mistake I see on both the investor side and the entrepreneur side.” How a VC thinks and how to understand their incentive structure Scott pulls back the curtain on VC to explain how an early-stage investor thinks about evaluating your company. “The question ultimately for an early stage VC is, imagine if this company worked — what could it become? And then the real question that follows from that is, why would I want to back this team versus any number of other teams that might have the same idea.” Ryan also tells the story of walking into Andreessen Horowitz in sneakers and a Product Hunt kitty t-shirt to pitch the company and finding himself speaking to nearly twenty people. We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Big thanks to Monday.com and Embroker for their support.

Michael Smerklo is the Co-Founder and Managing Director of Austin-based venture capital firm Next Coast Ventures. NCV provides early-stage capital to high-growth startups in ‘Next Coast’ markets, using macro trends and themes to guide their investment strategy.     Michael has been in the technology industry for almost 20 years as an operator, investor and board member/advisor. Michael currently sits on the board of NCV portfolio companies Tenfold, Navegate, LeanDNA and AlertMedia. He serves as a board observer for NCV portfolio companies EverlyWell, Stoplight and Cloverpop. Previously, he served on the board of OnRamp (acquired in July 2018) as well as SPS Commerce (NASDAQ: SPSC).       Prior to founding NCV, Michael was an investor and advisor to emerging growth companies in Silicon Valley and Austin, Texas from 2014-2015 via his personal entity, True North Ventures LLC. From 2003 to 2014, Michael served as CEO (and Chairman from 2008-­2015) of ServiceSource International, a company he acquired via a search fund, at a time when the company had one office, 35 employees and a few million dollars in revenue. Under Michael’s direction, ServiceSource grew from a groundbreaking idea into a publicly-traded company that is the market leader in Recurring Revenue Management (NASDAQ: SREV). Michael was named Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® Award Finalist in Northern California in 2010. Michael retired as CEO in 2014 and from the Chairman role in 2015 as part of his planned relocation to Austin. Prior to ServiceSource, Michael was an early employee at Loudcloud (renamed Opsware), working closely with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz in Business Development. He previously worked at Morgan Stanley (Silicon Valley Technology Investment Banking), Lehman Brothers (M&A) and Ernst & Young (Audit, CPA).    Michael received his MBA from the Kellogg School at Northwestern (with distinction) and a BS in Accounting from the Miami University (Ohio). Michael is an active member of Young President Organization (YPO) in Silicon Valley. He is also an active blogger, focused on the Entrepreneur’s Journey, on his personal site www.mikesmerklo.com.

Frank Chen is a Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most prestigious venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Coinbase, Github, Lyft, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Frank, prior to joining the world of venture, he was a VP of Products & UI Design at HP Software and before that held the same title at Opsware. Before that, even cooler, Frank was Director of Product Management @ Netscape where he led a cross-functional team that defined, shipped, and marketed Netscape's award-winning LDAP directory and security products.  In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Frank made the move from the world of operations with Opsware and HP to being a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz? 2.) How does Frank view the current state of play for AI and machine learning? How does the rise of automation shift the economy as we know it? What does it do to class distinctions? How does Frank view it's impact on the labour market? How does Frank think about the value of truly large datasets? Where is the asymptotic moment where the utility value of data is realised? 3.) With the rise of self-driving, how does Frank perceive the future of car ownership? Who will fundamentally own and operate the vehicles? Will it be a horizontal play or a vertical play? In terms of adoption, why is Frank negative towards a driver assisted transition phase and believe in a more binary transition? 4.) How does Frank perceive the rise of automation and self-driving cars impacting public infrastructure? How will the layout of our cities change over time? How does Frank believe urban real estate could be optimised in a more efficient manner? Which nations does Frank believe will be the first to innovate here? 5.) What is the most challenging element of Frank's position as Partner @ a16z? How does Frank think about the right way to say not to an entrepreneur? How does Frank look to scale the learning curve rapidly when investigating new industries? What are the challenges here? What advice would Frank give to someone looking to scale learning curves? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Frank’s Fave Book: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings Frank’s Most Recent Investment: Branch As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Frank on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.

On this episode I'm visiting Benchmark Capital, one of the world's most renowned venture capital firms, at their offices in the heart of the Tenderloin in San Francisco to chat with two of its general partners, Sarah Tavel and Eric Vishria. Sarah Tavel has a unique background as an investor, then operator, and back to investor. In the mid-2000s she joined Silicon Valley-based Bessemer where she led an investment in Pinterest and others. She went on to join Pinterest back when they were only a few dozen people before returning to venture three and a half years later. She's now a GP at Benchmark and on the board of Hipcamp and Chainalysis. Eric Vishria started his career as an operator, working at Opsware and HP before founding Rockmelt, a social take on the web browser, back in 2008. Later the company was acquired by Yahoo where Eric joined as a VP before making a leap into venture at Benchmark. Over the past four-plus years he's lead investments in Confluent, Contentful, Amplitude, and others. In this episode we talk about: What it's like to go from operating to investing and the different skillsets involved in those jobs, and why Benchmark has bucked the trend of venture firms expanding both in headcount and fund size. What Sarah and Eric are looking for in an investment, which spaces they're most excited about (hint: they say that contrary to reports of its death, consumer is very much alive), and why each partner at the firm only does on average one or two investments in a year. The importance of starting a company in Silicon Valley (or not) and why we're seeing more startups build outside the Valley. We also discuss some of her favorite products, including a couple apps that are enabling new forms of communication on mobile, an “Airbnb for campsites,” and why Sarah has been playing Fortnite for “research purposes.” We’ll be back next week so be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Breaker, Overcast, or wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts. Also, big thanks to AngelList and FreshBooks for their support.

Eric Vishria is a General Partner @ Benchmark, one of the world’s leading VC funds with a portfolio including the likes of Twitter, Uber, Snapchat, eBay, WeWork, Yelp and many more revolutionary companies of the last decade. At Benchmark, Eric has led deals and sits on the board of the likes of Confluent, Amplitude, and Bugsnag. Prior to being in VC, Eric was the Founder & CEO @ Rockmelt, the startup that sought to re-imagine the browser for the way people use the web today, the company was ultimately acquired by Yahoo in 2013. Prior to Rockmelt Eric held numerous different roles including VP of Products @ HP and VP of Marketing @ Opsware. In Today’s Episode You Will Learn: 1.) How Eric came to be one of the 5 GP's at Benchmark following operational success with Rockmelt, HP and Opsware? 2.) Why does Eric believe the pendulum has swung too far to the operational route into VC? What are the under-appreciated benefits of career VCs and the perspective they bring? How does Eric expect the pendulum to swing in the coming years? 3.) What makes the best-performing venture partnerships? How does Benchmark think about partner composition and career pre-VC? How does Benchmark structure investment decision-making? Why do they favor advocacy over unanimity? 4.) What does Eric mean when he says we are at the beginning of an infrastructure renaissance? What opportunities does this create in the venture landscape? How does this lead Eric to consider the current state of the consumer landscape? 5.) How does Eric view multi-stage investing? Why does Eric and Benchmark favour stage specifity when it comes to investing? What are the dangers of larger stage funds investing in earlier rounds for optionality? Items Mentioned In Today’s Show: Eric’s Fave Book: Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage To The Antarctic Eric's Most Recent Investment: Confluent  As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Eric on Twitter here! Likewise, you can follow Harry on Snapchat here for mojito madness and all things 20VC. If you are an early stage startup, the right infrastructure and support systems are critical, that is where First Republic is so good. First Republic’s resources network and expertise allow entrepreneurs to customise a solid foundation for their business. Why First Republic, well you get to leverage their incredible network of VC firms to prepare you for future fundraising events, you get to count on a single point of contact that will be there for you and your employees, you get access to exclusive events and networking opportunities. Their clients include the likes of Instacart, eShares and Wish just to name a few. Check it out by heading over to innovation.firstrepublic.com Segment allows you to collect data from every platform (mobile, web, server, cloud apps) and load it into Segment. Segment then sends the customer data to your tools and destinations where it can be used most effectively, destinations include email, analytics, warehouses, helpdesks and more. With over 200 sources and destinations on the Segment platform that can empower your team, Segment really is the last integration you will ever do and that is why the world’s best companies use segment to drive growth and revenue including Atlassian, New Relic and Crate & Barrel. Simply head over to segment.com to find out more.

Join the Acquired Limited Partner program! https://kimberlite.fm/acquired/ (works best on mobile)   Acquired dives into the legendary acquisition of Ben Horowitz & Marc Andreessen’s “second act” software company Opsware, from a perspective never before heard—HP’s side of the story! Our heroes are joined by Michel Feaster, who led both the acquisition for HP and then the Opsware product as part of the integrated company afterward under Ben Horowitz. Today the tables have turned: Michel is the Co-Founder and CEO of Seattle-based startup Usermind, and Ben Horowitz sits on her board on behalf of A16Z. This episode is not one to miss!   Topics covered include: Opsware’s early history and origins as Loudcloud, the “second act” of internet wunderkind Marc Andreessen and Netscape product manager Ben Horowitz Ben’s first person telling of the Loudcloud/Opsware history in The Hard Thing about Hard Things, as well as the great Wired "period piece” covering Loudcloud’s launch in August 2000 The importance of timing, and Loudcloud’s too-early vision of—essentially—AWS before AWS (including eerie parallels between the metaphor Andreessen used to describe Loudcloud during the company’s first press briefing, and Jeff Bezos’s description of AWS at YC nearly a decade later) Creation of the “Opsware” tool inside of Loudcloud to automate deploying and configuring servers within Loudcloud’s data centers Loudcloud's meteoric rise, crash following the burst of the internet bubble, and hard pivot as a public company into Opsware—now an enterprise software company selling datacenter tools  Michel’s role in HP’s evaluation of the company as an acquisition target, and process leading to its $1.6B acquisition in July 2007 Integration of the company into HP’s culture and sales channel The creation of Ben & Marc’s “third act”, the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and what it’s like for Michel now having Ben as an investor on her board at Usermind    The Carve Out: Ben: StarStaX star trail photography software David: Jimmy Iovine on the Bill Simmons Podcast

Andy Rachleff is Wealthfront's co-founder, President, and Chief Executive Officer. He serves as a member of the board of trustees and vice chairman of the endowment investment committee for the University of Pennsylvania and as a member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on technology entrepreneurship.   Prior to Wealthfront, Andy co-founded and was a general partner at Benchmark Capital, where he was responsible for investing in a number of successful companies including Equinix, Juniper Networks, and Opsware. He also spent ten years as a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre (MPAE). Andy earned his BS from the University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.   Andy’s Challenge; Stop sitting on the sidelines and start investing in a diversified portfolio of index funds. Get an emergency fund.   Further Reading Innovator’s Dilemna by Clayton Christensen Innovator’s Solution by Clayton Christensen A Random Walk down Wall Street by Burton G. Malkiel Howard Marks, OakTree Capital Letters   Never miss one of our best episodes by subscribing to the newsletter.   Connect with Andy Twitter Website   Get an Additional $5,000 Managed for Free Wealthfront.com/andy   If you liked this interview, check out all my other finance interviews. Subscribe on iTunes | Stitcher | Overcast | PodBay

Christophe Williams (MBA '18) chats with Andy Rachleff, co-founder and CEO of Wealthfront. Andy discusses a wide range of topics in FinTech, investing, and how to grow tech companies. He goes in-depth on Wealthfront's competitive advantages in automated investing and how he approaches product/marketing strategy to grow sustainably. Also covered are Andy's background in venture capital, the process of founding Wealthfront, and how he sees disruptive innovation affecting financial service incumbents. As a bonus, we have a special Wealthfront sign-up link for our listeners. To get your first 15,000 dollars managed for free, sign up using: http://www.wealthfront.com/whartonfintech Andy Rachleff is Wealthfront's co-founder, President and Chief Executive Officer. He serves as a member of the board of trustees and vice chairman of the endowment investment committee for University of Pennsylvania and as a member of the faculty at Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he teaches courses on technology entrepreneurship. Prior to Wealthfront, Andy co-founded and was general partner of Benchmark Capital, where he was responsible for investing in a number of successful companies including Equinix, Juniper Networks, and Opsware. He also spent ten years as a general partner with Merrill, Pickard, Anderson & Eyre (MPAE). Andy earned his BS from University of Pennsylvania and his MBA from Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Our Guest this week: Sanjay Puri, Co-founder & Partner at 9Mile Labs 9Mile Labs is a high-tech accelerator based in Seattle, WA, focused on Enterprise / B2B software and cloud technologies.Are there fewer start ups in the B2B space?If so, why?Consumer side startups sometimes have good crazy and some bat-poop crazy ideas - that's what innovation and entrepreneurship are about. The ideas flow freer with B2C.Enterprise level B2B start ups usually started out in the industry for year seeing the pain experienced and wanted to solve those pain points.It has to do with a vision around a product. But what is lacking is the customer conversation and intimacy to take the initial idea and taking it to a bankable product or service.It has to be incessant customer conversations involving insights as to how this idea will be shaped moving forward.You need to listen to this show for the insights and experience by 9Mile Labs and Sanjay directly.Sanjay started his career building database applications at Oracle. Sanjay co-founded thinkIndia.com in 1999 which exited successfully in 2001. As a products executive at startups (iConclude, Opsware, Edifecs) and large companies (Microsoft and HP), Sanjay has helped companies achieve successful exits and exceptional revenue growth. Sanjay holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and an MBA.Listen in on our lively discussion. 

Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) is a legendary figure in Silicon Valley -- and worldwide. Even in the epicenter of tech, it's hard to find a more fascinating icon. Marc co-created the highly influential Mosaic Internet browser, the first widely used graphical web browser. He also co-founded Netscape, which later sold to AOL for $4.2 billion. Then he co-founded Loudcloud, which sold as Opsware to Hewlett Packard for $1.6 billion. He's considered one of the founding fathers of the modern Internet, right alongside pioneers like Tim Berners-Lee, who launched the Uniform Resource Locator (URL), Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP), and early HTML standards. This all makes him one of the few humans ever to create software categories used by more than a billion people. He's also one of the few who's established multiple billion-dollar companies. Marc is now co-founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, where he's quickly become one of the most influential and dominant tech investors in the world. In this interview, we dig into some fun things Marc has not discussed in many places, including: His epic debate vs. Peter Thiel Rules for investing The future of bitcoin Artificial intelligence Favorite books, documentaries, and movies And much, much more We had an extremely detailed and rich conversation, and I hope you enjoy it. Please do say hi to Marc -- he's very active on Twitter at @pmarca. Enjoy! Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast. This podcast is brought to you by Audible. I have used Audible for years and I love audio books. I have two to recommend: The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman Vagabonding by Rolf Potts All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is go to Audible.com/Tim. Choose one of the above books, or choose between more than 180,000 audio programs. That could be a book, a newspaper, a magazine, or even a class. It's that easy. Go to Audible.com/Tim and get started today. Enjoy This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs. I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I've also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you're happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss