The worst thing that you do as a leader is you hesitate on the next decision. The thing that causes you to hesitate is both decisions are hard. Probably one of my bigger ones on that was we went public with two million dollars in failing 12 months revenue at 18 months old. That's obviously a bad idea. But the truth of it was the alternative was going bankrupt and that's a worse side. It's very difficult and painful to be a CEO, to be a founder. In spite of that, so many people want to start companies. The psychological muscle you have to build be a great leader is to be able to click in the abyss and go okay. That way is slightly better. We're going to go that way. If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't have any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like.
You are famous for writing one of the most popular pieces of literature for product managers. What I was trying to get out and good product manager, bad product manager was the job is fundamentally the leadership job and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. There's always this kind of sense that the PM is not the mini-CO, how dare you call yourself that. I actually think that's exactly what the PM is. It doesn't matter if you write a good spack or you have a good interview or you do this or do that. What matters is that the product works. Today my guest is Ben Horowitz. Ben is the Z in A16Z. The world's largest venture capital firm with over 46 billion dollars in committed capital. Their investors in OpenAI, cursor, andral, data bricks, Figma, basically every generational tech company. He's also the author of Tuneer Times Bessling Books. The hard thing about hard things and what you do is who you are.
Ben is endlessly fascinating. He started a rap group when he was younger. He started his career as a product manager and wrote the now famous good product manager, bad product manager piece. In our wide ranging conversation, we cover a ton of ground and Ben shares stories and insights that he's never shared anywhere else. A huge thank you to Shaka, Sanghor, Oli Goatsy, and Adam Newman for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoyed this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year-free of 15 incredible products, including a year-free of lovable, replete, bolt, and 8N linear, superhuman, de-script, whisperflow, gamma, proflexity, warp, granola, magic patterns, raycasts, chap here, d and mobbing. Check it out at Lenny's newsletter.com and click product pass.
With that, I bring you Ben Horowitz. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers, to thrive in the AI era. Organizations need to adapt quickly, but many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working? How are they being used? What's actually driving value? DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, booking.com, Adian, and Intercom, get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com slash Lenny. That's getdx.com slash Lenny.
This episode is brought to you by Basecamp. Basecamp is the famously straightforward project management system from 37 signals. Most project management systems are either inadequate or frustratingly complex, but Basecamp is refreshingly clear. It's simple to get started, easy to organize, and Basecamp's visual tools help you see exactly what everyone is working on, and how all work is progressing. Keep all your files and conversations about projects directly connected to the projects themselves so that you always know where stuff is, and you're not constantly switching contexts. Running a business is hard. Managing your projects should be easy. I've been a longtime fan of what 37 signals has been up to, and I'm really excited to be sharing this with you. Sign up for a free account at basecamp.com slash Lenny. Get somewhere with Basecamp.
Ben, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. All right, thank you Lenny. So I have to be here. I'm even more excited to have you here. I want to start with a question that a close friend of yours suggested I ask you, Shaka Singh Hor. So Shaka, he's like, we could do an hour just on how interesting this guy is in the 80s. He's very, very, very, so we're not going to do that. Just to give a glimpse, he was in prison for 19 years. He was in solitary for seven years. He led a huge prison gang. He wrote about him in your book as a great example or great culture in the prison gang that he ran. So interesting. But something that he learned from you that he told me I need to ask you about is about success and how to be successful and how it's not what people think. And he said that you learned this lesson from a pilot. What is that story? What is that lesson?
It's kind of, I mean, I'd say it's a long life lesson, but the pilot story is, I actually, I asked people silly questions sometimes when they meet them and so I met this gentleman who was a pilot and was right around the time JFK Jr. crashed his airplane and ultimately died. And I asked him, I was like, what happened? Because there's always the story in the press, and I know this from them writing about me or anything, it's always what's the best narrative, not what's true. So you can never kind of actually find out what happened. You just find the like the best story version of what happened.
And you know, the story in the press was all about, oh, he wasn't trained on instruments. Instrumentation was flying at night and I wanted to know was that right in the pilot. So well, he said really, it's like all plane crashes are a series of bad decisions. And none of the decisions by themselves is that bad, but when you add the muckets, so the first decision was he needed to get wherever he was going and that was the priority. And in flying, that can't ever be the priority. You know, because there are conditions, there are things that happen. And then the second one was, well, like his timing of when the sun would go down was wrong. So he thought he'd be flying in sunlight and he wasn't.
And then, you know, once he got up there, it was, you know, when the plane was, you know, going down, kind of making it go up was a bad decision because he was upside down. And like, you know, so it was, and I can't remember all the things, but this guy had like 17 steps, you know, 17 bad decisions in a row. And the big thing for me that I felt was really true is it's, you know, one decision leads to another. And so, you know, if you can break, you know, psychologically, you can take the sunk cost. Then that gets you out of a lot of bad pass.
And then, you know, a little good decision may be difficult, but you have to believe it's going to lead to the next one. And, you know, a lot of successes about that, you know, it's a small thing, a small thing that's hard to do that doesn't seem to have a high impact. But it leads to the next small heart to do thing. And then eventually, you get an outcome. So that was kind of the concept. So the lesson there is just successes, just a bunch of little things. It's not this like, who I got here in a big thing.
Yeah, when somebody were to write a story about me, they would be like, then bend it this really smart thing and blah, blah, blah, you know, happy ending. But, you know, it really wasn't like that. And I'm thinking it's like that for you or anybody. And, you know, I spent a lot of time with Shaka on, you know, how, because it's always your own psychology that, you know, gets you. One of the kind of most insightful things she said to me is, you know, excuse me, most people who are in solitary for seven years, that's it. You're insane.
Like, you're never coming back from that. It's just an impossible thing. But if you like study a story, he actually kind of really was massively self-improve coming out of solitary, which is, you know, like, and he wouldn't recommend that for anybody just to be clear, it wasn't solitary. But what it was, you know, is he changed in solitary. He was able to change a big set of beliefs that he had about himself that kind of got him out of that.
And the thing that his conclusion from it, which I thought was really interesting, he's like, like, I was in prison for 19 years, I was in solitary for seven, I come out, I can't run an apartment, I can't vote, you know, I can't get a gun, I can't do like like no rights. None of that was anything compared to what I did to myself. And I think that's very true for CEOs in general. And people in general is that like all the things that you perceive that are happening to you that are bad, you know, be it like the systems against you or somebody undercut you or racism or sexism or this or that or the other is very small compared to like, it means a lot if you believe it, you know, if you believe what people say about you, if you believe what they did to you. then that destroys you. But if you go like that's not me, you can overcome almost anything and that, you know, he's got a new book out on that anyway, that thing is very good because that's the you know, I say more than anything that's a key to success.
Something you like if you look at all the writing you've done, it's essentially about the struggle and pain and suffering of being a see out your heart, you know, your first voice, the hard thing about hard things. There's a lot of talk these days about just how important struggle is and how valuable it is to go through struggle, Jensen's big on this, you know, he talks a lot about just you have to go through pain and suffering to be a great leader. You don't really have a choice, you know, like that, that's sure. There's something that I saw you share that I love, which is running towards fear versus running away from fear. Something that you tell all your leaders to work on. Easy to hear, hard to do, we don't like doing things that are scary running towards things that are scary.
Why is this so important? Why is this something people need to learn to do? Well, so the biggest mistake that you made there, the worst thing that you do as a leader, like there's things in your control and there's things like how to your control and hesitation is, you know, that's generally the most destructive. And I go through all the ways that it's destructive, but it's extremely bad. And the thing that causes you to hesitate is, you know, both decisions are horrible, right? Like there is, like, it's not business school where like you're going through a case study. And if you don't know, then the company would have gone this way. But if you had done that, it's a great success. Like, that's not actually, you know, what happens to you, what happens to you, it's like, okay, if we rearch, you know, like this product is the architecture snack, actually get us where we need to go. I kind of know that.
But if we rearchitect it, like we're going to probably miss all the features, miss the quarter, have trouble raising money, you know, shatter it's out. So like, that's really bad. And then that rearchitecting is really bad. And so I'm just going to try to like, and avoid this subject because I don't, I don't even want to deal with either of those. And that's, that's the worst thing because if we are, you know, if action is the better choice, and, you know, that's good. And then if you don't make an explicit decision, then the whole company is going to get nervous because they know that the architecture is whack. And you got to fix it. And then you know, like probably one of my bigger ones on that was, you know, we went public with two million dollars in trailing 12 months revenue at 18 months old, right? Like in the Pua, like, that's obviously a bad idea. I mean, people like, there's no question that wasn't a bad idea.
But the truth of it was the alternative because of where the private markets were was going bankrupt. And that's a worse idea. And if you look at that time, you know, March of 2001, when we went public, you just look at the number of CEOs that hesitated on that and didn't do it and went bankrupt. It's a lot. And so that's, you know, that, getting good at making a decision that everybody's going to go, wow, that was insane. But like, you went, like the Wall Street Journal wrote a whole, like, long story about how stupid I was. And then business week wrote a story called the IPO from hell. That was the name of, like, our idea, the IPO from hell, which I like was accurate in a sense. But so like, that's really bad. But it wasn't as bad.
And this is why it's so scary to make that decision because you know that's going to happen. I knew those stories would get written. Like, there was no question. And, uh, yeah. And that's, that's the kind of muscle. So like, if you think about it, like, the psychological muscle you have to build to be a great leader is to be able to, like, look in the abyss and go, okay, we're going, that way is slightly better. We're going to go that way. And it's very hard to do. I don't know. It's a thing people struggle.
And it began something, should I fire the head of sales? So I don't want to have that conversation. Like, and then I'll have to replace them. And then like, there's going to be a bad PR story. And then, and, and, and, and, and, and you can kind of quickly calculate all the bad stuff that's going to happen if you do it. But if you don't do it, uh, that's probably going to be much worse. And, you know, kind of, that's why you have to run towards a pain and darkness.
What is the advice you share with founders? Because as you said, it's very hard to do this. Just like, what helps them actually get better at this? Is it just been being by their side telling them this is how it is? Is there anything else you can? No, no, no, no, no, no, like, I would say this is one where, you know, I can't really coach you to be good at this. Like, I can point it out. And like, so that you recognize that you were slower, whatever.
But it's kind of like, I always like them when I talk to them. It's like football, like, you know, you could have a really fast, great athlete, but if they don't trust their eyes, if they don't run to the ball, when they see it, I think, oh, maybe that was a fake. Then they're that step slower. And then they're not, they'll never be as good and CEOs are like that. You know, if you don't trust what you see, and you don't run at it, then like, you're just not going to be good.
And it's hard to get CEOs not to hesitate. But like, one thing, the thing that does help is, you know, they look at it, and I look at it, and, you know, and I kind of confirm, know that that is as it appears. And you know, sometimes they're afraid of the conversation. So that one I can help with. So, you know, a CEO might be afraid.
Like, they want to do something, but they don't know how to say, they don't know how to have the conversation with their play. So I can walk them through that. You know, I had an entrance where the CEO said, hey, you know, like, I need your help then, my CTO, he's an asshole. And I was like, okay, you know, like, great, I said, but you're not going to fire him because I know it's a good CTO, or are you asking me, should you fire him?
He said, no, no, I don't want to fire him. And I was like, so you're asking me what to do because you don't know how to have that conversation with him about being an asshole without him quitting. Like, that's what you're saying. And he goes, yeah, that's the problem. And so I go like, why is he an asshole? And he says, well, he's an asshole because, you know, the other day, he made like a very junior, young woman in our finance organization, cry.
And I was like, oh, that's kind of, yeah, I got you. I said, like, this is what I would say to him. I'd say, I just shut him down. I would say, like, you're a really good director of engineering, because you do a great job of managing with team, get the products out, all that. But like, you're not really a CTO because to be a CTO, you have to be effective with other parts of the organization.
You can't just be like, effective only with engineering. And so, you know, and making like somebody cry, like she's never going to do anything you want. You lost all effectiveness with all the findings by doing that. And so if you want to get it, I'll help you all work with you on it. But if you don't, I'm going to have to hire a CTO at some point because it's like obviously I need that.
And, you know, and then he's like, oh, okay, I can have that conversation. You know, I can't have the conversation hey, you're an asshole because I want them to quit. But I can have the conversation that's more specific and a lot of kind of getting people not to hesitate is just getting them over that.
And so, so often like, and I would say, you know, really in a CIO's career, a lot of it is just not knowing how to have the conversation. There's also, I imagine an element of I just want to be liked. I don't want people to hate me. You have this great line that you want to be liked and respected in the long run, not the short run.
Yeah, that's that's tricky because it's so, by the way, I have to deal with this in the firm too. And you know, like, you know, people wouldn't be entrepreneurial friendly. I'm like, that's not trendily, you know, respectful. But you got to be able to tell them the truth in a way that you probably don't tell most of your friends the truth. Because your friend, you know, like look, anthropologically, we want people to like us like it's just so that, you know, they don't throw us to the lion or whatever like that. That's just kind of a thing. So, you say, tell people what they want to hear.
But in dealing, you know, in a company level and a you know, context that you're on the board of somebody's company, you got to be able to tell them what they don't want to hear. That's the most important thing you're going to say. And yes, they're not going to like it when you say it. There's no question. But over time, like it could save the company. And, and, and all the most important things I've said are things that I've said to CEOs that they did not want to hear. You know, I don't know, like if that's what the leadership is about.
It's making, if everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like. And that's where leadership comes in because you know, that's where it's got to get to. And you know, that's, that's the thing that takes practice. I think you know, when Jensen talks about like you got to get to near death, to get yourself to do that, that's true.
You know, it's hard, it's hard to build that if everything's going great. And I would say you like the CEOs who kind of had an easy run of it, sure they're like, let's say they just watch a product that's an instant hit. It's very hard for them to develop that muscle compared to the ones built in company like Jensen where he like, you know, got it it out for multiple decades before they have big success. Clearly, it's very difficult and painful to be a CEO, to be a founder.
In spite of that, so many people want to start companies, so many people like Dream of having their own company, what do you, who's not right to start a company? Like what advice do you share with folks that are thinking about starting a company that may not understand just what they're about to get into? Yeah, so it's funny. So there's a couple things, you know, John Reed, who is the CEO of City Group, when I when I started as CEO, said to me something I never forget, he said, then the only reason to start a company is because you have an irrational desire to do so, because it's not worth the money.
And you know, I was like, wow, he doesn't even quantify how much money. And this guy's running cities, so he's a very numbers banking guy. And he didn't quantify it. And I remember when we sold Loud Cloud for $1.6 billion, I remember thinking, wow, that wasn't worth the money. So I think if you're doing it for the money, that's a very bad reason. And it'll be extremely difficult to get your outcome. You really have to have an irrational desire to do something larger than yourself to kind of improve the world in some way that, you know, somehow the like that is your purpose.
And if you don't feel that, then you'll never get through it. It just is too many, too many bad things happening along the way. So then how do you think of founders that are kind of looking around for ideas that kind of brainstorm, that look for, you know, market opportunities versus come from I have a mission, I got to do this thing in the world. If you have a, you know, in my business partner, Mark always talks about that.
So like, if you have a product that forces you to build a company, that is a great case of it, right? Like, okay, you built something and the world wants it and then you need a company to deliver it. That's going to, you know, you already have the right product. And so that's very helpful. I think there are cases of people, I think you'll have Packard was kind of built that way that their life, okay, like we got to build technology, you know, is that abstract?
We got built in technology for the world. And then they started with, well, like, what do you need? You know, they called it the next bench thing. What is the engineer sitting next to me need? The next engineer on the bench, so kind of, how they define the first set of products. So it can work the other way, but like I think the thing that is in common is like, it's just a very abstract idea that like you have to build something that's going to be important that like is going to, you know, people are going to like working there.
People are going to benefit from the products like you have to have some like weird concept other than, oh, this is going to be successful. And I remember a lot of money. I think that's I think your way better off taking sucks off or meta and just, well, doing that like, that's a way better deal. On these lines, something else, Shaka suggested ask you about it. Apparently, there's a story where the CEO of Databricks asked you for $200,000 in the early days. And you said, no, and it's not because you didn't want to, you know, invest in and it's more about helping him think bigger. How did what happened there?
So they were six, six of them. They're six HD students and while in Jan Stoika, who is their professor, in Jan, I was a super genius, but, you know, they, you know, when I went with them, they were like, you know, we need to raise $200,000. And I knew, you know, like I know at the time that what they had was this thing called Spark. And they had, you know, the competitor was something called Hadoop and Hadoop, you know, had very well-funded companies already running towards it and Spark was open source. So like the clock was kicking. And, you know, and then I think they didn't quite know what they had.
But I, and then there's also a thing always, although I wouldn't say Jan has his mentality, but professors in general, like it's a pretty big win if you start a company and you make $50 million, like you're a hero on campus, like that's a, that's a pretty cool thing to have done. And so I'm always a little nervous about kind of a company that comes out of academia thinking too small anyway. And so I said, like, I'm not going to write you a check for $200,000 or is already checked for $10 million. Because, like this company, you need to build a company. You need to really go for it if you're going to do this or the rice, like you guys should stay in school. And they were all graduating right then. So that was kind of that.
And Ali, Ali actually was VP of engineering at the time. And it was a while, you know, before I made him CEO. And that was very good luck on my part. Because I had no idea that they had a guy that good inside the company who could become CEO when I invested like, that that was just, you know, God smiled on me and gave me that one. So speaking of Ali, I actually asked him what to ask you about. And he immediately shared this story. I don't know if you remember this in your first one on one with him after you made a CEO. He was struggling with a bunch of low performers because he was coming in to lead the company.
And he was trying to turn things around, trying to coach them, trying to level them up. And your advice to him was, quote, you don't make people great. You find people that make you great, that make you the company great that you learn from, not the other way around. And there's something that he called managerial leverage. What is that all about with the lesson there? Oh, yeah. Yeah. So like, understand he had just to come CEO. So I was teaching him, he had been VP of engineering. And CEO is different. And I'll get into why him and what I mean by leverage.
So I actually wrote a post about this with a little Wayne quote where I think the quote was the truth is hard to swallow and hard to say to, but I graduated from that bullshit. Now I hate school. And that was always my feeling about this particular idea was, look, if you're VP of engineering, you can develop people. You can teach them to be better engineer as you can teach them to be better engineering managers. That's very doable. But if you're CEO, what do you know about being CFO? What do you know about being VP of HR or what do you know about any of these jobs? Except maybe VP of engineering.
And so the idea that you're going to take somebody who isn't world class at marketing and make them world class and you don't know anything about marketing is a dumb idea. It just doesn't work. And then the company can't afford for you to be spending time on that because they need you to make very high quality fast decisions and you do set the direction for the company. And they need you to have a world class team. And so like that, it's a very hard lesson if you've been VP of engineering because if you're a good VP of engineering, you do develop your people. But as a CEO, like, it's not like you don't do any of it. But it is very, very small compared to it.
So I like to make things just very stark. So you get what I'm saying. I don't like to hedge it. And then managerial leverage means just it is very simple. It's okay. If I have the ideas about what your department should do next, if I am kind of pushing you to kind of move your organization forward, then that's no leverage. What's leverage is if you're telling me what you should do and how you can push the company forward, that's leverage. Then I'm getting kind of more than I'd have if you weren't there. Otherwise, I could just man have fucking to. And that's the point when you feel like you're not getting leverage, when you got to go say, hey, why aren't we doing this? Why aren't we doing that? That's when you got to make a change.
And by the way, he's unbelievable at that. As good as anybody. I've seen as a guy who's not Calla says to see if he really cares about the people who work for him. He really wants them to have great careers and all that. But he does not hesitate. Like if he's losing leverage, he'll make a move. Kind of going back to the origin story of A16z, something you guys were really big on was helping founders. Stays, C.O.s become great C.O.s, not replace them with professional C.O.s.
I want to I want to flip this question on you. When does it actually make sense to replace S.E.O. when are people not going to make great C.O.s? It really, there's a very consistent thing that happens, which is, you know, when somebody doesn't make it. And it kind of starts with confidence is the way I would put it. So, when, like if you invent a product, you kind of recruit a team. So for all of a sudden you're C.O. But you haven't run a big organization. You don't know how to do that. Like most founders are like them. And so if you don't know what you're doing, you're going to make mistakes.
And they all make a lot of mistakes. And then when you make those mistakes, they're very expensive, you know, like they could cost you to do it down around or they could cost you to lose a company or they could cost your customer or you know, you scrub the product. Like they're very high impact. And not just on you, but everybody who you talked into joining you. And so that kind of motion can really cause you to lose confidence. And then if you lose confidence, what happens is you hesitate on the next decision.
And you know, as we talked about, like hesitation is very dangerous because one, like it locks up the company, but even worse, what happens is if you have senior people working for you, they get very nervous and they feel like they need to jump into that void and make the decision for you. And that's when it gets political, like very political, because people are like buying for power inside your little screwed up company. And so now you've got a political dysfunctional organization. And that, you know, like that's generally where like, okay, the founder probably can't run this thing anymore is, you know, that's how it happens.
So, you know, most of what we do as a firm is to try to help people with that confidence problem. And there's like a whole series of ideas that we have around that. But that's, you know, you kind of have to somehow climb the confidence and the competency curve together. It's very hard to do. And you know, particularly like if you're an engineer and you're used to getting things right, or if you've been a straight-age student or something like that, it's very disconcerting. Better to have like CEOs who are like C-minus students, you know.
Why is that? Yeah, the little physicist is like, well, like it's just good to be used to filling. So I think I wrote this, but like the median on the CEO kind of test is like 18. It's not like 90. And so you got to be comfortable getting a lot of D-minuses, because the D-minus is fine. You know, as long as you don't get the F, as long as you'll run out of cash, as long as you don't lose all the thing, you know, okay, like you've got through it. Keep going, you know, a match. That's a lot of the thing that we try to do. CEOs.
Yeah, it comes back to the, your core, I don't know, message through your first book is just how much you will fail and how much you will struggle and how much paid you'll go through a CEO. Yeah, yeah. And you know, like, I mean, a lot of why I wrote that book was just to analyze it. I think what happens is, you know, particularly, you know, when I wrote it, and I think it's come back and been true now, it's like the way the narrative gets written on all these successes is like, oh, they came up with a genius idea and then they built this company and they heard all these smart people and it was all great.
But like, that's not all how it happens. And you know, I've spent enough time with like, everybody from like, Mark Zuckerberg to Sam Alderman and so forth that like they all go through that same thing that you who has, you know, your struggling company go through like you screw a lot of things up and they have massive consequences. But you you have to kind of maintain your confidence.
Actually, I was at a storytelling event last night and I was chatting with someone that ran into there and told her I was chatting with you today and she said how meaningful your first book was to her as a founder exactly as you said, normalizing that it's very hard and painful and this is just no it is. Yeah. And the feeling like, I mean, you know, like, if you think about organizational design or the, you know, goals and objectives or okay, or whatever management technique, like you need like a, you know, a basic like eighth grade education to like do any of that. So it's not that complicated.
The difficult part is the feeling that you have when you have to do it is very like the hard thing of matter, a re-orgase, you're redistributing power. So you're going to have people really frickin' mad at you because somebody's losing power if you do it correctly. And that person may be like a really good employee. Dealing with that is the hard thing, like knowing how the organization should work to make communication better is not their complex.
Yeah. I think about I was at Airbnb for a long time and just the guy Brian who I don't know even if he had a job before Airbnb. Oh, yeah. I spent a lot of time with Brian and he, you know, after COVID, he at all kind of clicked for him. And then he did that, he and the good talk on founder, and so forth. But the reason that was so articulate is because he had screwed every one of those things up. You know, he hired LT and you know, all this stuff in the United, he's our very senior people and, you know, he didn't, he wanted us to defer to them, but you can't defer as the seat, you know, because you know what Airbnb should be doing.
He may know what fucking finance should do, but you know what Airbnb should do and this kind of thing. And then it gets really wild when you, like you can't defer decisions as to see, you gotta like understand what people are saying and God and God, now we're gonna do this. And this again comes back to the point of you have to go through the struggle and pain and failure to learn those lessons.
Yeah, no, like I mean, it's, they're really hard to learn without kind of doing and without often like without paying the consequence. And I, you know, like, even I like I make mistakes, I, I, I, I have a conversation with Ali the other day and I was like, he's like, how's it going, Ben? And I said, well, you know, like I'm finally dealing with something that I had put off for, you know, a very long time. And he said, why'd you put it off? I said, good things were going too good. I didn't have to deal with it.
And he's like, yeah, he said, I know that. Like I'd say, Ali is, you know, one of the, if not the kind of best private company CEO out there. And he's making a mistake and I'm making a mistake. So like it's just tough. You said that one of the, maybe the main reason founders fail CEOs is they lose confidence. And you had some ideas that you guys have to help founders work through that or their couple you can share how you help.
Yeah, yeah. So we do, we do a lot of things on that. So the kind of design of the firm is about confident. So the first thing is, well, what would it give you? Well, like if you can get stuff done. So what if I could give you a network that is good as Bob Iguers that were day one, like the day you stepped into the job. And so, you know, we have 600 people at the firm. And why is that? Well, most of them are building that network for you.
So you can call any CEO or anybody in Washington or you know, kind of any executive or that kind of thing and get them on the phone and they'll talk to you and you can kind of deal with that thing. And then that just makes you feel like a CEO. And then, you know, we have a lot of people in the firm like myself who you can talk to on like a CEO to CEO basis as opposed to an investor to CEO and just kind of feel that early in the firm days, we used to do this thing.
I think I'm going to bring back in some form this thing called the CEO barbecue. And it was like, you know, a lot of people have these events where like, you know, they bring in speakers and this and that and the other. And I always felt like those were one, they were too many days and then sometimes, you know, what they said wasn't really applicable and that kind of thing.
And so, what I said, why do we just have a barbecue? And like I would barbecue, we get everybody in my backyard. I was 500 people at the peak, which is why the kind of stuff. I couldn't get much food after that. And then, you know, we have Larry Page in Mark Zuckerberg in Kanye. West. And so you're a CEO in there, but you're like, wow, like I must be important. I'm here with all these guys. And we're just hanging out having a drink eating barbecue. And so then when I go back to my company, I like, I feel like I am somebody and like, okay, I might not be like perfect at all this, but I am really a CEO. I was at the CEO barbacus. We're crying out loud and that couldn't do. And so, you know, that's, but it's all the whole idea was always like, okay, do you feel like you can do it? Because that's, you know, that's half the battle.
And look, having been in, and you know, every CEO has been in a position where they feel like, well, maybe I shouldn't be the one running this thing. Maybe it's just too big for me. And that's a bad, you don't, you don't want to go there. And because as we said, founders can get to the next product. And that's something that, you know, almost no professional CEO is able to do like, they've been rare cases, but very rare. So clearly you've worked with a lot of companies, a lot of founders. Let me kind of zoom out a little bit and ask you this question. What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building companies that goes against common startup wisdom?
Well, you know, the common startup wisdom keeps changing. You know, like one of the early ones that, you know, was wrong and kind of brain articulated it. And then now I think a little bit of what people have gone to is also wrong. So the first idea that was wrong was like, okay, build a team of like senior executives, you know, what cities you get product market, as fast as possible, and they can scale the thing. And I think that you got to build that team slowly and deliberately kind of pace to your ability to integrate and then manage them. Because if you bring in a bunch of senior people and you don't know really how they match to your company or how that function works or so forth, then you're going to start deferring. And once you start deferring, it's going to get out of control very fast because they're going to build empires. They're going to get political. They're going to do all that kind of thing. So that was bad advice. You kind of have to do it in a measured way.
I think that founder mode, I think a lot of people have taken to never hire anybody with experience. And that's also bad advice in that. Look, somebody who knows how to do something can really accelerate your thing. So very early on, one of the founders, great Ursula at Databricks was running sales. And I'm like, Ollie, like, you're going to have to hire like somebody who knows sales. And because Ursula is PhD in computer science, like I like that, right? That's probably not where you're going to have to start if you're going to catch these guys before they take spark and like use it against you. And you know, and I sat down with Ursula and I explained why I said, like, you know, a lot of what sales, there's a lot of knowledge in how to build a worldwide sales organization. You need knowledge of customers, territories, tip territory, splitting, rip profiles.
Like, there's just like a litany of stuff that you really can only learn by doing trial and error. And you don't know any. And so like, you're phenomenal. Like, let's get you, you know, and he's still, he's a very senior executive in the company now. But we need somebody who knows that. And the idea that there are companies that go, okay, we're just not going to hire that because we're in gender mode. That's also a mistake. So then there's a lot of it's more subtle than you think. And it's more complex than you think. And so you kind of have to get all the way to the truth. And these little snippets of advice that BC's give, because they watch some fucking podcast are all fucking stupid.
Like, it's just, there's a lot of depth that he says. So you have to know the answer to the next question, the next question, and the next question. And it does drag be crazy. Like, one of the funny other things that happened along these lines, just to show you how little you know as an investor about what it means to be CEO, one of the, we were at a board dinner, one of the CEOs says to me, he goes, or one of my, we in one of our CEOs says, Hey, you know, Ben, like that thing you told me a while ago about, don't be CEO at home. He said, like I, I, I was doing that and I stopped and it really helped me. And then the other kind of VC said, yeah, you know, you got to unplug some time.
翻译成中文:
就像,他说的话真的很有深度。所以你得知道接下来的问题的答案,然后再接下来的问题的答案,还有再下一个问题的答案。这让我感到很烦。为了让你明白作为投资者对担任 CEO 的意义了解有多浅薄,我给你举个有趣的小例子。我们有一次在董事会晚宴上,我们的一个 CEO 对我说:“嘿,Ben,你之前跟我说过,不要在家里做 CEO 的事情。我以前一直在那样做,后来我停下来了,这真的对我很有帮助。”然后另一个风投的人也说:“是啊,你知道的,有时候你得放松一下。”
And I said, I was like, what the fuck are you talking about? He's CEO. He's not unplugging. Like, he's getting shit all the fucking time. Like, he's got to deal with that. Like, I was not what I meant. I was like, you can't go home and boss your family around. That's what I meant. You know, like, so, so it's, which you hear something from like somebody who, but if you happen to, you don't even know what that means. And so then you kind of then trying to transfer the advice to the next guy, I was like, oh, so anyway, so, but it's, you know, like he was very innocent. I don't want to kind of speak bad of him, but like, that's how it sounds, right? But that's something it is. That's an amazing story. So the advice partly here is just don't believe everything you see on Twitter and little sound bites of advice.
Yeah. I mean, like, and I think actual CEOs know it. And that's kind of how like people in my profession going to get a bad rep because like giving advice that that's not something that you know, but something that you heard is very dangerous. So I think so speaking of advice that you've shared that might be out of date now, you are famous for writing one of the most popular pieces of literature for product managers. There's a lot of pms that listen to this podcast called good product manager, bad product manager. And if you actually go to that post today at the top, you say this document was written 15 years ago, and it's probably not relevant today for pms.
I present this nearly as an example of a useful training document. Still people link to it. I actually just link to it as it is just like this is something every pm needs to read. What is it that you think people should maybe not take away from it? And what do you think people still should take away from that piece? Yeah. So the reason I wrote it when I wrote it was that I had a lot of product managers and one thing about product management is it's a job that's completely different at every company. And there is no training for it. So like everybody kind of figures it out as they go. And depending on what's being emphasized, they'll get wrapped around the axle on, if it's enterprise company, okay, well like pitching to customers or like I need to be really good with the press or I need to be really good at writing the product requirements document or that kind of thing.
And those are all like these tasks, but none of those were the job. And what I was trying to get out and good product manager, bad product manager was the job is fundamentally the leadership job. And it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you. So it's like this influence, how do I get people to do what I want? You know, even though I'm not paying them, I can't fire them, I can't promote them and so forth. And which is kind of the essence of like real leadership because if you start to rely on promotion firing and so forth for authority, then you're never going to be good at being CEO or anything.
So I wanted them to get into the mindset of okay, your actual job is to get a product into market that customers love that's better than anything that anybody else in the world puts in market. Like that's your job. And so to accomplish that job, you need engineering to understand you with clarity. You need to understand engineering with clarity. You need to have a really good view of the market and the competitors and the technology and so forth. And you need to kind of put that all together and deliver the thing. And all the other things are tasks that may or may or may not need to do. I don't know if you need to do it. But like the thing is, you have to be the leader. You've got to get the thing done.
And so what I think it's still good on is that like the mindset, like, you know, be the leader. I think the details of it, you know, of any kind of thing that was kind of tasks specific was like really for my group at Netscape in like 1996. Whenever I held I wrote it. So it was, you know, as a kind of document, I read out a frustration. But I am glad that the people so like it. And I think leadership in general is under undervalued, underestimated. It's the most powerful thing. And most of the great companies, Jensen, is a great example. Like what a phenomenal leader he is. Not just in video, but of the whole industry.
And he doesn't have authority over the industry, but like he drives it for and that's and that's why they good product management, bad product management is so important. That thing if you learn how to do it, that's the thing. I didn't realize he wrote that initially as just an internal document. And then he was kind of before blogging took off. So it's just an internal thing. And I probably should later. It was I was just getting so mad, you know, and by the way, by product management team at the time was like very good, very talented people. They just get, they just were not getting that concept. So you know, like David Wyden said, coastal ventures, Raghu Raguran, who was the one on the C.O. of the M. Where I mean, like the team was like that team. But they were driving me crazy. And so I just I was like, I can't yell at people anymore. I have to like explain to myself.
And so it's a good thing. If you find yourself yelling at people, like you probably haven't explained what you want. It was the other big take right from that. Do you ever think that piece would be so long lasting and so I don't know. I don't know. No, I didn't even know like I thought it was kind of like aggressive when I wrote it. Like you could tell I was mad because I called a good product manager, bad product manager. It's like bad dog. Bad product manager. That's the that was kind of the emotion I had. So yeah, you know, it's kind of shocking. Yes, some of the things that you write. I would say that that's, you know, I'm kind of creative and you probably know this. Like the ideas that you have, the things that you write in five minutes end up being much better than things you write in five weeks, you know, and I find in talking to, you know, musicians or writers or anybody has that same experience.
Like the thing that you've already synthesized so much that you just have to write it out is that's the best stuff. There's something that you mentioned there in your answer about the PM being the leader. There's always this kind of sense that the PM is not the mini CEO, how dare you call yourself that. I actually think that's exactly what the PM is. They're basically the closest to the CEO. Their kind of job is to think like the CEO within the team. Yeah, people get mad, you know, like because everybody, you know, like this is the whole challenge of management in general. Like people get jealous sort of a stupid shit. But like from the perspective of the PM, like it doesn't matter if you write a good spec or you have a good interview or you do this or do that.
Like what matters is that the product wrench and you have to get all the way to there and kind of work backwards for that. And you can't do that with that leadership because it is about, okay, we want to build that. And you're not necessarily the Christian comes up with every idea or this or that. I mean, you're just the keeper of the vision. You know, and that's true for CEOs too. Like, you don't mind every idea on a company coming from the CEO. Like that's I think it's a misunderstanding what a CEO is is why people don't like that. They don't know what a CEO is. But a CEO isn't the one who has every idea, it gives every order, it does have it. That's not the way it works. The way it works is there's somebody's got a consolidate, you know, get all the good ideas. Prioritizing decide which good ideas we're going to do and then get everybody on the same page that they are very high fit, alienics, standing of what that is.
And you know, so that it is a CEO kind of function. Now, it doesn't mean like I'm better than you. It just means it like that's what I'm doing. This episode is brought to you by Miro. Every day new headlines are scaring us about all the ways that AI is coming for jobs, creating a lot of anxiety and fear. But a recent survey for Miro tells a different story. 76% of people believe that AI can benefit their role. But over 50% of people struggle to know when to use it. Enter Miro's innovation workspace, an intelligent platform that brings people and AI together in a shared space to get great work done. Miro has been empowering teams to transform bold ideas into the next big thing for over a decade. Today, they're at the forefront of bringing products to market even faster by unleashing the combined power of AI and human potential.
Guests of this podcast often share Miro templates. I use it all the time to brainstorm ideas with my team. Teams especially can work with Miro AI to turn the unstructured data, like sticky notes or screenshots into usable diagrams, product briefs, data tables, and prototypes in minutes. You don't have to be an AI master or to toggle yet another tool. The work you're already doing in Miro's canvas is the prompt. Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check it out at miro.com slash Lenny. That's m-i-r-o dot com slash Lenny.
这个播客的嘉宾经常分享 Miro 模板。我经常用它来和团队一起进行头脑风暴。团队特别可以使用 Miro AI,将便签或截图等非结构化数据快速转化为可用的图表、产品简报、数据表格和原型。你不需要成为 AI 专家,也不需要切换到其他工具。你在 Miro 画布上已经进行的工作就是提示。通过 Miro 帮助你的团队出色地完成工作。可以在 miro.com/Lenny 查看。网址是 m-i-r-o 点 com 斜杠 Lenny。
Let's talk about AI. I'm very proud of us. It's been almost an hour. We haven't even mentioned AI. I think that's a record. Okay, so I asked Adam Newman. We work founder, now flow founder, someone you work closely with now what to ask you about. And he said he has some really interesting insights about how AI is impacting hiring. You know, Adam is probably the single most controversial investment that we ever made. We got called everything from stupid to sexist to racist to basin mat for like literally just funding that. And I think it's going to end up being one of the best investments we ever made. He's doing a phenomenal job there.
But there's an important principle in that which kind of we do as a firm which I think is not widely done but I would love it if people copied it, which is, and there's something I learned, you know, somewhat from Shaka, which is you don't judge a person by the worst thing that ever happened to him. Like we've all had bad things happen to us. We've all made bad decisions. Most of them, they don't make a mini series about it. Right? And so like to judge them on that, you want to judge people on what they do well, not what they screwed up. And yeah, because that's where you see the talent. If you look at what Adam did well, it's truly a attacker. You know, like we work, everybody knows how we work. It's like it's the name, more important commercial real estate brand than we work, like you can't. And so like what an accomplishment.
And then yeah, and there were so many things that went into that and yeah, so many things he did right. And then if you kind of look at really unravel the things that went wrong, most of it was like a combination of inexperience and nobody around him that would tell him the truth. And so like that. And you know, maybe he wasn't good at listening to the truth either at the time. But to throw away a guy on that, which is by the way, the world was so mad at us for not throwing him away for believing in him, it's just that it's a big mistake. And you know, I credit Mark, his mark is one who called him up originally and just said, Hey, Adam, what are you doing? Because like, you know, we watch what you did. We work and we thought it was pretty impressive.
And so I think that, you know, that that's probably the biggest secret there. It's not really about AI, but I think that like looking, you know, Judge Al Davis once said, you know, Coach Flaher is on what they can do. And I think that's very true. You know, Judge Flaher and what they can do, you know, coach people on what they can do, like help them take their strengths and use them as opposed to over focus on their weaknesses and just, you know, hand-raining about the one fucking thing they don't know how to do. Because like everybody's uneven.
What it's like, what you're describing essentially, this is the job of an investor is to find an underappreciated asset and invest or before something people don't see. Yeah. And I mean, I think that it's, you know, like venture capital is really about investing in people, right? Like, you know, that you have ideas as an investor, but like what you really are ultimately betting on as the entrepreneur and the entrepreneur's idea, because the initial ideas and where they end up usually yet changes a lot with everybody reinvesting. So, you know, you kind of had to make the judgment on the person.
And, you know, how would you do that is really, really important. One of the things we emphasize inside the firm is like, we're investing in strength, not lack of weakness. Like, I want to know like, how good are they world class? They have a world class strength. And, you know, can that be to anybody? And like, everybody's flawed. And so like, let's help them deal with the flaws and, you know, surround them with people who can handle that and put the right person on the board who can talk to them like, I go to all Adam's board, maybe, you know, Mark's on the board. I go to all his board meetings because I'm the one who's good at like killing a guy who's that confident when he's like, okay, that's not your best idea.
Like, that's a good role trip, me. But that's how you deal with that. You don't, you know, throw him away and go, okay, like, we don't want to be called names. So we're not going to invest in Adam Newman after we built rework. That's crazy. That's also why you guys invested in Klui, I imagine. Similar. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. Like, I mean, like, if you look at what those guys did, that was like some like high level market in genius too. Yeah. And, you know, that's really something plus the product is also.
I'm going to bring us back to AI. Something that a lot of people are talking about right now, while we're recording this is this potential huge bubble we're in with AI. Sam Altman said, we're in a big bubble, which is, you know, that's saying a lot. I'm curious just how you think that what, what is it saying? So you got to like, first of all, I should qualify this by saying, I'm an investor and Sam's a CEO. So CEOs have to have much more purpose when they talk.
Investors just have to be entertained. Well, so you got to give Sam credit for like, what is it his interest to set it up? Well, like if it's a bubble, then the one thing you should invest in is him and not all these guys chasing after. So that I would say like that's very smart. And then the other thing that's smart about it is there's nothing that you can say to the press that will make them love you more than saying all investors and like entrepreneurs chasing this already. It's like they love them because the press are generally haters.
And so it's just like red meat for the haters, which is also super clever. So I think whether even he believes that or not, that was a super smart thing to say. I'm so I'll just put it there. Whereas what I'm going to say won't be as smart, but it will I don't really have an axe to grind here. I mean, I could have an axe to grind and say, okay, like let's got all the other investors out. I'll say it's a massive bubble. But what I would say about that is so the first thing the one thing about bubbles is that if you're not sure what it is, it's not a bubble.
It's not a bubble. Because in order for it to bubble, you need capitulation. In that you need kind of everybody to believe it's not a bubble because then the price has really gone out of control. But as long as those people who think it's a bubble, then it's hard for that to happen. And it's funny. I had this debate in the economist, I think with Steve Blank in 2011 or 2012 when everybody thought it was a tech bubble, if you can imagine that. It absolutely was not.
But because there were like 1400 articles saying that we were in a tech bubble. And I mean, you know, we're prices were then to come to the real estate. But I knew because everybody was saying it was a bubble, a one-on-bubble. Like I knew that. The prices were higher. But the reason the prices were higher was we're getting to global market. AI prices are higher than prior prices. But if you look at the revenue growth and numbers, we would not see anything like it.
The products that worked, Chatchy DeSams product worked so amazing. We've never seen that before. Not even Google, not anybody. And so like that's real. And we have companies that went from 0 to 800 million in a year. And that kind of thing. And so it's not a, I would say there's a basis for the price that's going up, first of all. Now, will the, I think the thing that's right about kind of what Tam is saying is the landscape is early, really early.
那些成功的产品中,Chatchy DeSams 的产品表现得非常出色。我们以前从未见过这样的情况,甚至连谷歌等公司也没有做到过。所以这是非常真实的事情。我们有些公司在一年内从零增长到八亿。这种情况并不常见。我想说,首先,价格上涨是有依据的。然而,我认为 Tam 说得对的一点是,这个市场还处在非常早期的发展阶段。
The technology is very immature, is amazingly as it works. Yeah, there's a long way to go to improve it. So it's very possible, you know, when you have that much technological change that the positions that these companies have achieved with their high revenue isn't sustainable. And that, you know, there will be a competitive change that either kind of lowers prices or any number one emerges or that kind of thing. And so, yeah, that's possible.
But I, I, I went characterize that as being like a financial bubble. In that, like, if you go back to the great.com bubble that everybody is always waiting for it to happen again, which I was CEO during. The thing that happened there was very different, which is it was the internet and every smart investor knew that the internet was a big deal. Like, how could you not check and know that the internet was like, of course, it's a big deal.
But like, if you go back to 1996, at Netscape, we had 90% browser shit and we had 50 million users. So there were 55 million people on the internet in total and half those were on dial out. So, and then to build a product like E-vite, the greeting card company, had 300 engineers. That's how hard it was to build this stuff. And so the math didn't work. And the math didn't work on any of those ideas. And, but the investors kept pouring money in.
And then eventually, you know, everybody went bankrupt because there was no revenue coming in. And like, when they figured that out, then nobody would invest in anything. of course, then everybody realized, well, the internet was actually real. And Paul Krugman did no one he's talking about. And like, it was going to be a big thing. And then Facebook and Google and all these things emerged. But the thing that made it a bubble was like the unit economics didn't work, the businesses didn't work. Like these businesses are all working. And they're being priced appropriately for how they're grown. So that's not an effect. So the thing that you could say is they're not going to keep growing like that or like and so forth. And I'm not sure about that. Like the products, like I said, are working so much better than any technology product that we've ever built has worked. Like it's just mind-blower how good this stuff is. And so I don't know. If I had to bet, I would bet not a bubble.
Yeah, I think there'll be some dislocation. I think companies that I think they always invent your capital. If you've got like a run like this, then the great company and the crap company both get funded. But you know, that's just that's just venture capital. That's sound a bubble. Four founders starting companies these days when you look into the future of the AI industry say five, ten years. How do you think things will play out? Slash, where do you think the biggest opportunities remain? And where are you guys looking to invest most? In infrastructure, I think that like there is obviously like a real estate power cooling play. I think that's a little outside of you know kind of hardcore technology investment that we do.
But there's another layer which is like who can run, you know, take a given-o-consourced model, who can run it the cheapest with the kind of lowest latency. And that's going to be extremely valuable. Like whoever has that. And you know, Google has been historically very good at that and so forth. And I Sam was really trying to build that now a stargate. And so I think that's going to be a very important layer value. I think that you know on the foundation model side you have to be very selective as an investor. So in order to compete in foundational model world or basic rule of thumb is you have to be able to you know without much product progress for at least $2 billion because that's basically what it can cost you to train something that gets you competitive enough to make money.
And they're just very few founders like that. So Ilya is one of those, you know, Mirrors one of days. Faith A is one of those. But like that's the kind of class of person you need. And there's you know whatever they're certainly less than ten of those in the world. And so that's kind of like an important area but a small area. And then I think the application layer is going to be very very interesting. And I think that you know if you look at Sam like he's making most of his money off Chachy PT almost all his money off Chachy PT now. And Chachy PT is like you know I it looks like it's got a real like it or not. It's got a real mode. It's very hard to knock it off.
他们这样的创始人非常少见。比如说,伊利亚就是其中之一,米勒也是,Faith A 也是其中之一。但这就是你需要这种类型的人,而这样的在世界上肯定不超过十个。所以这是一个很重要但却非常小的领域。我认为,应用层将会非常有趣。如果你看一下 Sam 的情况,他如今几乎所有的钱都来自于 Chachy PT,几乎所有的收入都是靠Chachy PT。而 Chachy PT 看起来确实稳固,喜欢与否,它有一个强大的护城河,很难被模仿。
It's perched. There's a lot. You know everybody's taking a shot of it. People of great distribution like Google and you know Elon and in Zuckerberg and everybody and like that thing just keeps going like it is. So I think the applications are both more complex and kind of stickier than people thought they were originally like so the thing that people got very wrong is this whole thin wrapper around G.P.T. like that's really that. In fact here's how wrong it is. Back in the 80s they're that same phrase was used but it was thin wrapper around an RDBMS. With database.
Yeah yeah yeah so it met companies like sales forests were basically just a kin wrapper. And I think that that's kind of the mistake people made. So like we're in it this company cursor and if you look at the camera in the first year. They built like 14 different models to really understand how a developer works like a high end like a real developer and they have that those models have tons and tons of interactions with how people talk to their friend cursor about how they should design their programming so for it. And that's like real that's not that's not just a thin layer on a foundation model and I think there are many many applications like that.
And so I I think there's going to be a lot of opportunity at the application layer there's going to be some opportunity at the foundation model and of course you can invest in Sam you can invest in Anthropically and so forth and as well but there will probably be like a very small number of companies that set and then a almost unlimited number of companies have the application layer and then you know as the technology advances well of course the more things we can body day I mean already you know a time with cars are working like really well now. And after a long long long long time so it's like they think Sebastian when the challenge in 2006 when he drove the self-driving car across the country and we're here we are 20 years later and now they're deployed so that was a long time robots I think is a harder problem itself to drive from cars so we'll see how that goes but yeah there's certainly a lot in that world as well.
Wow okay there's a lot to this answer yeah something that now is exactly what I was looking for the crystal example it's something that comes up a lot on this podcast in the application layer specifically the thought that the way to win in this space and to build a mode is as you said build your own model slash proprietary data that you build through people using your product thoughts on that. Yeah I mean I think that's ends up just being what's required so it turns out that the universe is long tailed as you as is fat tailed and humans are very fat tailed in terms of human behavior, human conversation and so forth so to get to the real meaning of it and to get to the kind of essence of the problem you know in any domain turns out to be I think more complex than we thought and so I like like the early things and you know people were running around saying okay there's going to be one big brain to rule them all and these kinds of things that's kind of not played out yet.
And in fact like if you look underneath the covers you have LLMs which have generalized pretty you know like in fascinating ways but they've kind of also asymptoted in that you know we we have run out of data for the most part and so if you look at the GPT-5 LLM the GPT-4 one and how much more it costs to train and so forth like it's you know it's definitely not going linear anymore. Another hand reinforced learning side has been linear but it doesn't generalize so if you build a great programming model it may be an idiot it may and so that I think is just very different than what people would have said three years ago and I think that's a kind of you know that there's not something that's both scaling and generalizing yet and you know maybe we'll get there but that certainly opens to the door to something that's more user friendly that's more effective in any number of domains than just the basic foundation model infrastructure.
Now those models are incredibly important and they're and I think open AI is probably 80% of the revenue and AI are something like that now like it's massive. So that foundation model is really really important and then like that the basic consumer app is really really important that just answers whatever hell you want to know like those things are like very very real but I do think you know particularly and then if you get into like enterprise stuff and then it's no longer internet David's their data that becomes very different like Databricks is having a lot of success there because okay well once you're inside a company guess what like you care about access control and that's hard with an AI world you know it gets strained on some stuff how does it know who has access to that information who doesn't and so forth you have semantic issues.
So if you look at an enterprise fine 10 enterprises they all have a different definition of what a customer means like you would think customer is a basic thing well is that a department at H&T is it H&T is it like a person at H&T is like what the hell is the customer and it turns out to be very very very meaningful particularly if you're trying to figure out like important games like churn and this and that and third so like that kind of stuff matters so it's it I would just say like the problem spaces a lot bigger than you can just attack with a basic foundation model um and you know currently you know maybe that will change and like if that changes then certain prices will have in retrospect look way inflated and others will look you know too low but you know that that is TGBD.
So a big takeaway from this is that there's still tons of opportunity for founders to start companies building AI products. I think so, I mean he can solve so many everything that we couldn't solve a software we can solve now almost, so it's a really big world. And it's funny, you know, like it because we're investors in Waymo and one of the things when you get into like what took so long to make Waymo this is so safe like they are now it wasn't the things that everybody reported on the podcast. It wasn't the sleet and you know heavy rain and it was people. It was like the human who was driving 75 in the 25 zone; it was very hard for the AI to anticipate because it was rare but important. The number of rare important crazy shit that humans do is very high and I think that goes for all of AI.
So to make things work really well you have to understand this very kind of fat tail of human behavior along this AI thread. Something that is really important to you, clearly something you talk a lot about, is the US being successful in AI and being in leading the world in AI. Why is this so important? Why is something spent all at time on it? It starts with, I think, my view of the US and its role in the world. So my personal view is like it's very, very, very important not for society to be completely fair because it's not going to be completely sure or completely equal because we've never had one that's been completely equal. But it's important that everybody have a chance at life, you know, particularly, you know, kind of both culturally but also just like you can't advance the world if you know you can't tap into all of your resources.
要做到真正地成功运作,你必须理解在这条 AI 发展线上人类行为的这种明显的“肥尾”特征。这对你而言非常重要,很明显你常谈论美国在 AI 方面取得成功并引领全球的主题。为什么这如此重要?为什么值得花时间去研究?这始于我对美国及其在全球中角色的看法。就我个人而言,我认为确保社会完全公平并不是最重要的,因为社会从来没有完全平等过。但是,重要的是每个人都有生活的机会,无论是从文化上还是实际上,因为如果我们无法利用所有资源,我们就无法推动世界的进步。
If you kind of take away your motivation and these kinds of things, you get into trouble. If you look at the kind of every country today, this is by the way, so you want like the right amount of decentralized power and you know you don't want it to be completely concentrated. Concentrated power makes it very, very difficult for everybody to have a chance. This is the big kind of lesson of communism over the last hundred years; it turned out right. And you know, we still have politicians selling it this way today. It's like oh, it's power into the people, then I know it's power to you because you're removing all power from the private sector and installing it into the government, and then you're putting yourself in charge of the government; hence I become extremely powerful.
And this is why it didn't matter if it was Mao or Pol Pot or Chuchesku or Stalin; everybody died because when you give anybody that much power, nobody has a chance. There is no incentive, there's no carrot, there's only stick, and so you use that. That's with some nature; it's a systems problem, it's not a person problem. It's not that Stalin was evil or Chuchesku was evil, it was like that system is evil. And that's a check; saying the fastest, and maybe Hitler musically, it doesn't matter, like that level of power is evil. The US does the best job systematically, it's the best system; it's got all kinds of issues, it's got problems, people always trying to defeat it.
But you know, one of the things that you know if you look at kind of the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, the language is very important; you know it's we hold these truths to be self-evident. What does that mean? It means they're not my word, it's not the president's will, it's God's will. And so those rules are above the president, and then you work in that context, and that distributes power because you're under the law not under the person. We see that even now with Europe where Europe is kind of the leaders are going, well, I have a rule; you can't say certain things or I'll throw you in jail.
The kind of shield they hide behind is, well, like we have to keep the kids safe, but if you say something that I don't agree with and the kids hear it, they're not safe, right? The kind of transitive property of bullshit is going to override. So it's really important that we have at least like one society, and as flawed as we are, as flawed as the US is, it's still the best. You can see it by the number of new company creations, the number of new ideas that come out of here and so forth. It's really, really important that the US kind of stays important and powerful in the world.
And we know from the last century, if you look at the last century, who were the countries that had economic power, military power, cultural power? You were the ones that industrialized. Yeah, and the ones that industrialized first and best, and the ones that did, became counties, right? Like, you know, Russia, China; they were slow on industrialization and they fell into this very fricking dangerous system. Looking forward that's going to happen again, but it's going to be AI. So it is kind of fundamentally important not just to like America but to humanity that America succeeded at that. You know, like we don't have to be the one winner or adjust or that but we do have. to be like in that tier and you know as I go around the world and travel I can't tell you everybody and then everybody was getting by the way very very worried about us uh earlier and they say like we need you to succeed you know don't destroy the dollar don't like fall behind the AI don't overregulate it too early don't do these thanks please because we need you to win like because we're all like counting on that
uh and and I think it's um it's the most important work that we do it's why we're so involved in policy and and and so forth um I think this is also you know Jerry gonna be very very true with crypto which ends up being an incredibly important networking technology that compliments AI and uh and so that's yeah and that you know that work is I would say be on for the money to like that's you although like we will end up making a lot of money with the right policies like so I don't want to like seem totally philanthropic on this but but it's more important than that it's certainly more important than us succeeding or anything like that that that country succeed speaking of philanthropic and other passions if you're something that I don't think most people know about you and I think we'll give them another insight into how interesting you are you uh run an organization called paid in full which uh is incredibly cool talk about what that's about why this is so important to you well we kind of are ethos as a firm is um kind of uh whether it's something from nothing um you know like that this is a greatness of entrepreneurship you serve with nothing and then you you make something really important and um you know that that kind of that that is also how hip hop started where you have like a bunch of kids who didn't even have instruments um and they kind of created something out of nothing and the people in that world always talk about that
嗯,我认为这是我们所做的最重要的工作,这也是为什么我们如此积极参与政策制定等事务。我觉得这在加密货币领域也是非常真实的,最终它成为了一种极其重要的网络技术,能够补充人工智能的发展。我想说这项工作超越了金钱,尽管我们会通过正确的政策赚到很多钱,但我不想让这看起来完全是慈善行为,这件事比金钱重要得多,比我们成功或其他事情都重要得多,它关乎国家的成功。
说到慈善和其他兴趣,还有一件事我觉得大多数人不知道的,但可能会让他们更了解你的有趣之处,那就是你运营了一个名为“Paid in Full”的机构,这非常酷。能不能谈谈这个机构的内容,以及为什么它对你如此重要?
我们的公司理念就是无中生有,也就是说这是企业家精神的伟大之处,你从无到有创造出了一些非常重要的东西。嘻哈文化也是这样开始的,一群甚至没有乐器的孩子创造了从无到有的奇迹,并且这个圈子里的人总是谈论这一点。
and you know one of the really unfortunate things that happens is the people kind of who invent the art form and certainly in the case of hip hop don't get anywhere near the kind of proportional benefit of their invention and a lot of the guys uh you know people have forgotten about or you know are kind of struggling to make ends meet and so forth so what we created was this thing called the paid in full foundation named after uh the rock him Eric B. S.A.M. which I did call rock him and ask him for permission to use his name so read it just taken and what we do is we give essentially pensions to the older operas um that enable them to kind of continue their work uh and then we have a big event go to paid in full foundation dot org for tickets which is amazing where they kind of get the award and uh you know and they're celebrated by all their peers and so forth and it's really phenomenal but you know so some of the awardees have been uh rock him scar face uh from the ghetto boys um rock sand shantay grandmaster Kaz Kulmode this year we're honoring uh George Clinton for being sampled uh cool g rap and grand pruba and also uh jelliel from uh hudini
翻译成中文:
你知道,真不幸的是,许多创新艺术形式的人,尤其是在嘻哈音乐方面,他们的创造并没有给他们带来相应的好处。很多这样的艺术家现在已经被人遗忘,或者正在为生计奋斗。因此,我们创建了一个名为"Paid In Full Foundation"的项目,这名字来源于Rock Him和Eric B.的作品。为了使用这个名字,我真的有联系Rock Him并征求了他的同意。我们的项目主要是为这些老艺术家提供养老金,让他们可以继续他们的创作工作。
我们还举办了一场盛大的活动,大家可以在paidinfullfoundation.org获取门票。活动非常精彩,艺术家们会获得奖项并被同辈们庆祝和认可。真的是非常了不起。曾经获得过奖项的艺术家包括Rock Him、Scarface(来自Ghetto Boys)、Roxanne Shanté、Grandmaster Caz、Kool Moe Dee。今年,我们将表彰George Clinton因其作品被采样,以及Cool G Rap、Grand Puba和来自Whodini的Jalil。
um and it's just it's very i can't even describe how high impact it is on these guys i mean i think rock him was during close to two hundred nights a year and he got his award and came out with his first album in fifteen years and is doing amazingly well and all this son you know everybody's going oh yeah that's the greatest rapper of all time so like they're finally going back and remembering all the things he did uh rock sand shantay i mean nobody had mentioned her in years and years and years and i think six months after we gave her the award and the Grammys gave her a lifetime achievement award which is amazing so it's a super high impact it's a great thing you know it's a hip hop KMSA dream come true so it's not only built what is what's the origin story of you and hip hop i imagine many people look at you and wouldn't uh imagine you you see these records behind you naws gifted you you uh you're so deep into the community just how did this all begin well so there's i actually wrote a blog post on it called the legend of the blind mc
which i think would be uh if you're really interested it's worth reading but it this kind of a story of me uh becoming a rapper and um and like how that occurred and how it went and so forth but uh you know like i was adding very short story is you know i was in New York when it we were at the birthday hip hop and we're at the birthday when it really became big kind of 84th or 88 and yeah it's just the most exciting thing you know to see a new art form kind of pop out and the creativity and everything you know well the edge music kind of it becomes mainstream i would take it's very shaped by business and like in the early days there's no yeah everybody's just coming out with whatever idea they have and so forth then so there's the early days of rock and roll were like that the early days of jazz were like that.
so i see now even more why you guys uh brought on eric torneberg uh beyond as many talents he's also really big into rap himself yeah yeah yeah i need to that that's a good reminder i need to make sure i guess to pinfall not here Ben this was incredible yeah is there anything else that you want to leave listeners with or share before we get to our very exciting quick lightning round um yeah i mean i would just say on you know like if you're a CEO and listening to this then know that like how you feel about yourself is going to end up meaning as much as anything and show like take your time on that don't don't uh you know like self-evaluation is the one of my favorite quotes is um that when maro madruz saw me as selectlers no and there no from this day on no credit will be given for predicting rain only credit for building an arc and i think that's more true for a CEO's than anybody you know you have to build our like it doesn't matter like if you predict you're gonna fail you still fail it does it it gets you nothing.
um so what you have to do is to figure your way out of it and spend all your time on that well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round up we got five questions for you are you ready yes sir first question what are two or three books that you find yourself recommending most to other people not including your own books yes so two got um i learned a lot from one is the weirdest people in the world which um it's a kind of big history book but through an anthropological kind of cultural lens and it's really fascinating explains and awful lot about like how society works and how little changes in the rules completely change the culture um you know one of the things that he he basically endeavors to explain okay why did the west get ahead on the rest of the world and and it kind of comes down to like a weird anomaly with the Catholic church where they kind of enforced um monogamous marriage and it turns out that the natural state of humans is polygamy.
um but the problem with polygamy is there's no cooperation among men um which is a problem uh and as a result uh and then everything is secret so there's no shared there's no sharing of knowledge uh because it's all kept in the family and what he calls kin based culture at least it's something called kin based culture and like even recipes won't be shared if you're in a kin based culture because it's a secret um so you can't build science you can't build cities you can't build big companies um and you know so because the west kind of enforced broad monogamous marriage early it was able to kind of be involved in all these things and he kind of shows why and how he does these psychological tests today with people from kind of monogamous culture marriage culture kind of like western culture and kin based culture and the psychology is completely different and he gives examples like um yeah if a person murders another person is that still murder if that person who did the murder as your brother in western society yeah that's a murder in kin based culture it's not murder it's just not and so like that's really different and so like morality is different like everything kind of comes off of that so it's just a fascinating joss-imaving book uh so that's that's one.
um i take you know another book that i recommend a lot of shock his book uh his first book writing my lines he has a new book that i think is better which is called how to be free uh so i'm going to start it's not quite out i think or maybe it's for leasing it's releasing like next month so i recommend it so what it does it goes through like how did he work his way out of prison and solitary confinement to his current psychology and what are the techniques he used um it's um they're very powerful very powerful ideas so i think that like you know she always asks now like how do you deal with it like how do you deal with it you know and that's gonna like work like balance or like then it's like ready to talk about no work like balance for she's um particularly like entrepreneur CEOs like come on but like what do you do do you meditate you do this to that but he kind of goes through.
the things that we really ought to do so that that's what i would recommend of some of these wondering like how do you deal with all this pressure i love this uh just the whole idea of shock of being this uh help for CEOs someone that killed someone went to prison let a prison gang uh i just love that now what is left. First he brings turned out to be really complicated thanks to man man it's enough to it's very forgetting into this but the problem with running a prison gang is you're just dealing with people who all come from broken culture right like so in any organization like the fundamental thing is trust and so you're you you're bringing in a bunch of no trust people and so you can't and like and it's kind of like a military organization it's a gang and if you think about a military operation if you don't have trust people don't trust the order then you're completely dysfunctional.
so how do you build trust from zero is a very interesting problem and he's a genius at that by the way uh and you know i learned a lot uh from peniton to him about it so like that from a management standpoint it's a i would just say it's an important kind of a boundary case of how you build culture and uh so he is very very smart at that i mean just show and i've had to like i said you have to look at people about you know their greatness not not the worst thing they ever did i know there's a lighting around but uh can you just share one example of something he did that was like wow that's a really good lesson if someone trying to create a good culture that worked for him yeah so like one of the things that he did that that i thought was um really smart is well i did a couple thing one is just like a simple thing was he just made everybody he launched together in the game just to kind of build rapport relationship trust like it's all one thing we're all together in that and i think you know like particularly in like remote world and so forth people really underestimate how powerful like just that idea can be.
and then you know another thing he did is he he made kind of like morality you know he he had kind of very specific things about you know if you you you had to be good to your word internally and externally um and so normally again you went like you know like i said it's kind of like a kin based culture thing but it made it much more powerful when he said look like you you can't do devious like shit outside the gang either um and he had a bunch of examples of that that i went through in the book but it's a very um like it like i said because you're building it from zero you really have to take a hard line on things that i think people in companies don't even take a hard line like you know is it okay to lie internally probably not so okay to lie to a customer well in some organizations it is um but like in shock as organization like that's as big a kind of tea as lying internally.
and and these things I think I'm being really important we're gonna link to this book this is uh what you do is who you are this is your second book that fewer people know about and this is one of the stories you tell and just what the lessons are yeah it's kind of more advanced book you know like i think people don't you kind of have to survive to want to care about dealing with the cultural issues and so the survival book has bigger audience amazing okay uh we're gonna keep going with lighting around is there a favorite recent movie or tv show you have really enjoyed yes so on tv i really like slow for instance which is like uh the show about the m i six kind of castoffs um guys and then i you know i haven't seen a lot of movies lately but i watched centers i went to the uh the theater with centers and it's i mean just the cinematography is unbelievable and the story is really original and the acting is incredible and the costumes are amazing so it's just like a great kind of comprehensive piece of work like people have the craftsmanship on that thing is just a lot beyond what most people making movies are doing these days so i i really enjoyed that yeah i hate scary. movies but i i watched it and loved it wasn't that scary it wasn't that scary but still you know zombies popping out of corners yeah not not my jam usually yeah
is there a product you recently discovered that you really love it could be a gadget it could be closed could be something else i bought a coffee machine called the techno vorm mocha master which is freaking incredible in fact a friend of mine saw it i was like what is that and i just bought a pram too because it's so awesome like this thing makes coffee that it's just like pressure like there's no bitterness it's completely clean it's amazing like if you don't only calm with it is i can't drink coffee that it doesn't make anymore i know that's a good thing about them oh yeah might be i might come out someday in the a i future yeah
yeah uh two more questions one do you have a is there like motto that you often come back to find really useful in worker life the thing that i would say has had the biggest impact on me is something my father said to me years ago um which is life isn't fair and that that seems like really really simple but i think that um the thing that defeats people more than any other thing that i've seen just in life is the expectation of some fairness uh you know like it's just not fair and there are like all kinds of stuff that are going to happen to you that you know it and happens to everybody um that don't happen to other people that are completely unfair but it doesn't matter because that's the way it is and as soon as you get that idea out of your mind um then you can just deal with it like oh yeah of course it's not fair but what should i do now which is the real question not how do i go back and get people to be fair because nobody's going to be sure it's not fair it's the nature of it if you think about it from more than five seconds you'll realize that and i think a lot of uh you know and it's as an individual like if you want to make the world a better place whatever but for as an individual do not expect anything to be fair it'll only defeat
final question this comes from shock actually uh you gave me so many great suggestions i had to save this one for last okay so the question is if you had to build a business curriculum from two hip hop albums and one funk album what would they be and what i think probably follow the leader um by where i came i thought that was so and and and the reason is kind of uh what we had kind of gotten into earlier which is um leadership so when he came out with that song which he was like we know maybe the greatest hip hop song ever written you know he's telling people to like follow him um you know follow the leader uh and just to have the idea that he was the leader of the entire art form nijaysta you know his band well it isn't like an amazing idea um and and then the way he expressed it was incredible and then he's got uh he's got other great concepts of mayor um that would give you like it's hard to listen to that record not have confidence i think from a like competitive purely competitive standpoint still mad at um drum naz i mean that's one with the ether that's the one with uh get yourself a gun that's the one with you to man it's kind of like all of us like the idea of competition is kind of encapsulated in that in that album so that that would be the other one
最终的问题实际上来自于一个冲击。你给了我这么多出色的建议,我不得不把这个问题留到最后。那么问题是:如果你必须用两张嘻哈专辑和一张放克专辑来构建一个商业课程,它们会是什么?
我想可能是《Follow the Leader》来自Rakim。我觉得这张专辑很有代表性,原因在于我们之前讨论过的领导力。当那首歌推出时,它可能是被认为有史以来最伟大的嘻哈歌曲之一。他在歌中告诉人们要跟随他,要"追随领袖",并且表现出他是整个艺术形式的领袖的想法非常惊人。此外,他的表达方式也非常出色。他还有其他关于自信的精彩概念,听这张专辑很难不感到自信。
然后从纯粹竞争的角度来看,我会选《Stillmatic》来自Nas。这张专辑包括《Ether》、《Get Yourself A Gun》和《You're Da Man》等。竞争的概念在整张专辑中被很好地体现。因此,这会是另一张选择的专辑。
and then funk go for one nation under group for sure one nation under group because it's kind of like this is uh uh how do you initiate people into like a concept or an idea and and he write how do you infuse them like one nation under a group is all about joining the nation um and like it's so musically interesting and and kind of getting people to be part of that that does from like i don't know if you asked me tomorrow i probably have three other ones incredible i'm gonna go listen to these bed and final question we're huckin listeners be useful to you if you get something that makes you better please take it which you need kind of a word vice on it let me know but um like my job is to help everybody build something great so if you're if you're a notch for nerver thank you for that uh also check out paid in full paid in full foundation that or if you want to learn more about yes definitely we would love to have you amazing then thank you so much for being here all right awesome thank you Lenny bye everyone
翻译后的中文版本:
然后,放克音乐为了创造一个“群体之下的国家”,确实是这样。因为这就像是,你要如何把人们引入一个概念或想法。他写道,你如何让他们融入其中。所谓“群体之下的国家”就是关于加入这个国家。而且,这在音乐上是如此有趣,并且能让人们成为其中的一部分。
如果你明天问我,我可能会有三个其他不同的想法。真的太棒了。我现在要去听这些。最后一个问题,我们的听众如果能从中得到一些能让自己更好的东西,请务必使用。如果你需要关于它的任何建议,告诉我。我的工作是帮助每个人构建一些伟大的事情。所以,如果你是一个新手,非常感谢。同时,请查看 "Paid in Full" 基金会(Paid in Full Foundation),如果你想了解更多。是的,我们非常期待你的加入。
非常感谢你的到来,太棒了。谢谢你,Lenny。再见,各位。
thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on ample podcasts spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny's podcast.com see you in the next episode
非常感谢您的收听!如果您觉得这期节目有价值,可以在 Apple Podcasts、Spotify 或您喜欢的播客应用上订阅我们的节目。另外,请考虑给我们评分或留下评论,这真的有助于其他听众找到我们的播客。您可以在 Lenny's podcast.com 找到所有往期节目或了解更多关于节目的信息。我们下期节目再见!