Ben Horowitz on the Next Technology Era

As AI and other frontier technologies reshape the global landscape, the question is no longer just what to build, but how to ensure those systems strengthen the broader society around them. The states extend beyond any single company or sector. Countries compete, how innovation spreads, and who gets the opportunity to contribute. A16Z co founder Ben Horowitz speaks with general partner David Yulevich about betting on America and building for the

But here I am. Here we are. Right. And I think for us you have to take a step back and say, Okay for the technology industry and particularly for kind of new technology companies, what does it need to be? And you have to think about it on a large scale. And th the way we've been thinking about it is, well, if you go all the way back to humanity, like w what's important for humanity, what advances humanity?

And it really kind of comes down to do people have a chance to contribute? Because when people have a chance to contribute, then they can have an impact and then they can kind of advance the state of things for everybody. And there's really been no country in the world that comes close to America at giving people a shot, giving them a chance to succeed. And it's not

a completely equal chance. Some people are born rich, some people are born poor, some people have better genetics, some people live in dysfunctional families and so forth. But a chance. And most countries People don't have a chance, or they have a very small chance, a very slim chance. And so that ends up being really important. And then if you think about why does America have the influence it has today from a military standpoint, from an economic standpoint, from a cultural standpoint.

it comes back to, well, we won the industrial revolution and we did that because we had superior technology, and here we are on the dawn of a new technological revolution, the AI revolution, and are we gonna win? And are we gonna have that influence? And are we gonna be able to give people a shot and kind of t continue to advance humanity? And I think that's an open question right now. And so when I think about our role in the industry it's what can we do

to help America win technologically. And that's everything from what we invest in to how we integrate into the government and make it accessible to all the citizens. and integrate with our allies and so forth. And so it's a big mission. It's a lot of work and you know, it's why we American dynamism and the conference and everything. Yeah.

They're truths, they are self-evident. They came from a higher thing. They came from God. We didn't make these rules. We didn't give you these rights. We didn't give you this freedom. It came from something else. And that's really, really important because it means if I'm the President, if I'm Congress, no matter who I am, I can't change it. No matter how much I want to change it. And there are many who would like to change some things, who think they know better.

We're gonna talk about that in a minute. Yeah. Yeah. And then you know, like that is a thing. But because of that, the freedoms that you have in America are really, really protected to a degree that they're not in any other country. and they're very hard to lose. And we've seen this there's just a great talk about free speech. We've seen this with free speech where countries are like, well, maybe that's not such a good idea anymore.

But if it can't be taken if it didn't come from people, it can't be taken away from people and that's been very, very powerful and very persistent I think over the entire history of the country. And it's really unique. There aren't other countries who have quite a strong a version of that.

about investing at these intersections of national security and venture capital. Along with it came a big presence in Washington. What's been the most surprising? What do you think the biggest learning has been?

And so when we started we were coming from I would say very far behind, you know, in that idea. The thing that's been surprising though is like how fast we've been catching up. And I think that that's been really kind of heartening from both the number of entrepreneurs that want to help and then the willingness of the US government to say, hey,

We're interested in these new technologies, we're interested in these new companies. We're not stuck in our ways. We'll change the rules if we have to. And that's been amazingly fruitful. And I think that, you know, we're seeing it in the kind of current conflicts that we have. And it gives me great hope that if we keep at it that we'll be very strong going forward.

talking about anthropic over the last week. But this isn't an issue. It may have bubbled up to the mainstream news in the last week, but this has been an ongoing issue. Let's just actually talk about anthropic and AI that's directly head on right now. Yeah. And then we'll talk broader about policy in Washington.

And you know that because they had all the leverage. They were already deployed. We were about to go to war. Nobody's ever had more leverage than that in a software deal. So anything reasonable that they would have asked for, they would have gotten, even probably beyond what they should have. But the fact that they found something they could walk away on and then didn't return Emile's calls for whatever, the three calls and then the call to the admin or all those things that happened.

It's just why would you not return the call if you want it in the deal? You they just want it out of the deal. Now, I don't know why they want it out of the deal, whether it was an employee thing or a Dario thing or what have you, but you know, that's what happened and I think the fact that it's getting reported on like there's some ethical conflict, I don't think there is. And in fact, if you wanted somebody to use your AI safely

Nobody has more rules than the US government, you know, particularly the Department of War. And nobody is more by the way, and then and since I'm speaking to a Washington crowd, you know this. If you were to break those rules, there is a 100% it's gonna 100% chance it's getting leaked to the press immediately. Yeah, like there are no secrets in Washington. So uh you know, that th the whole thing was a little bit surreal to me to watch at at least at this point.

Yeah. Uh but you you and I have been in Silicon Valley long enough to know that these issues tend not to come up and go away. They tend they tend to they tend to stick around. What would you say to the founders that want to build for the national interest, but

you know, still are coming from a Silicon Valley mindset, what do they need to think about? How should they talk to their teams? You know, how how can they build the the products that are needed for our government to effectively have the best and and most capable technologies?

everybody has agreed on peace worldwide. And it's not as if everybody's agreed not to commit crime ever. Uh so like we do have crime, we do have war, we have these things. And then you have to think about Okay, the people that we grew up with who have gone into the military, risked their lives to save our lives.

you are making the call because you are better ethically and you know more about geopolitics than the people in the State Department and the people running the Department of War and the people running the intelligence agencies. You're gonna decide that those people who are sacrificing their lives, putting their lives on the line to protect us, don't get the best technology? Like I'm not doing that. I'm not doing that. So like you don't have to work here if you want to do that.

That would be crazy.

You know, I have some employees that don't think we should do business with this country or this country. And it's like, are are you the State Department? Do you know better? That's crazy. And by the way, what a slippery slope to go down. Don't you don't like y you don't want to be in that position.

A lot of foreign leaders come to you and they say, you know, we want a startup culture, we want American dynamism, uh, we want to, you know, reinvigorate a startup community, do manufacturing, build for defense. You know, how do you think about w how can we export uh our capabilities, our advantages, our culture?

uh to these other countries, especially ones that we may have supply chain dependencies on and who are our allies, especially ones that are that are connected to us, like Mexico, Canada, you know, Latin America. How how can we take America American dynamism abroad?

uh you really have to believe that the government isn't just gonna arbitrarily take it away from you at any point. And there are very few countries that have that going for it. So we are um reasonably unique. There are there are a couple of places uh that have great technology entrepreneurship. Sweden is one, Israel's one, um, but but it's pretty rare around the world. Um, having said that, you know, there are there there is great expertise in things that um

you know, we need help with, particularly to industrialize. So in Mexico, uh, they are they do have really good, you know, high quality manufacturing expertise. In some ways, you know, I think the cars that come out of Uh the American cars that come out of Mexico are better than kind of uh the kind of Chinese manufacturing on on many fronts. So yeah, they do have talent. They are partners. Um they want to work with us.

we need to help secure that country because uh you know, th it's a border but it's not a thick border, it's a thin border. You know, we have a lot of people vacationing down there and and whatnot and and so that's a real thing. Um, you know, similarly Japan You know, they've always loved robots and they're really good at manufacturing and you know, we have a big deficit on the kind of robot supply chain, so

Uh you know, we're working with them at the same time. Uh they just went from zero percent of GDP to three percent of GDP spent on defense. We have a lot of defense companies. Their interests and our interests are very aligned when it comes to China. So I think there are some great opportunities, um, you know, both kind of for us as a firm, our companies, and then the country and working uh with allies around the world.

In a in a recent uh deep dive, you know, Packy McCormick did this long deep dive on the firm, thought it came out pretty well. Uh he described the firm as a power broker using capital and networks to shape markets and influence.

How do you view that and balance that power with the need to remain authentic to our founders, uh, to institutions? How do we leverage that power? How you know, obviously we're here in DC. Um how do you think about that responsibility and how do we use it to to advance uh the state of the art?

Um, you know, th y you d you don't have the power to uh get a an audience with the right CEO to buy your product and that kind of thing. So power is sort of a feature of our offering is the way I think about it. And that's very different than the culture that we wanna have and wanna project internally. And as you know, kind of our very first kind of cultural idea is first class business and only in a first class way.

And what that means when it comes to entrepreneurs is the ultimate respect for what they're doing. You know, it doesn't mean we're always their best friend or anything like that. But we um we show up on time, we get back to them in a timely fashion. We're honest. Um, we do all the little things to make sure that our overall behavior isn't we're the powerful and you're the weak, uh, because you know, that obviously would be a a short, uh, a short uh ride for our firm at the top.

And so the whole idea of venture capital was that you had to get in as many of those fifteen as possible, and you really didn't want to be in anything that wasn't one of those. And so the way uh venture capital firms were constructed whereas these uh partnerships in both economics and control um that were small because, you know, why have you know, a hundred or five hundred or six hundred people like we do now, if you're only going after fifteen companies, it doesn't make sense.

But what we saw back then was Well even though that had been true for decades, it wasn't gonna be true anymore because uh as uh Mark wrote, my partner, your partner, software is eating the world. And so what that meant is that there was gonna be no industry, no company that wasn't gonna be better um it if there was a if there was a great software team at its core.

And, you know, that that's even evolving now into AI. And so basically every interesting company that gets started is a technology company now. And so there are many, many more interesting companies. And so in order to reach it, you had to be able to scale Uh your organization.

Now, here's the problem. If you were one of those venture capital firms that started all those years ago, um you were likely set up, as I said, as a partnership with shared economics and shared control. If you have shared control it's very hard to reorganize. Um, because and and you know this, David, as a as a CEO, to reorganize you need a single decision maker. There is no way to reorganize Um, if everybody gets a vote, it's gonna be bad. Uh I could write a whole book

on just reorgs. But reorgs are essentially uh redistributions of power. When you do redistribute power, people are mad. If they get a vote, um, that they're gonna foul that that that reorganization. And you can't scale without reorging. So as a result, like we've been able to scale, uh, because we have centralized control. But

You know, most of our kind of competitors have not been able to scale, like a a very few have. And so I think what we have now is large firms um who can cover all the technological areas, and then specialized firms that are, okay, I'm a specialist in AI infrastructure, or I'm a specialist in bio, or I'm a specialist in crypto, or I'm a specialist in games, but I'm not doing all of that. And uh and the kind of firms in the middle I I think are getting squeezed out.

Um I think one of the other things that uh I think is interesting that people don't always realize about the firm is there's probably more CEOs In as as general partners inside the firm than it's gotta be than any other firm. And I think all of us recognize having a hierarchy and a benevolent dictatorship is really appealing. You don't

Uh yeah. To to his customers. Uh how d how do you think that that shift, it seems like we're seeing that shift in some ways in the government, Emile Michael going on X directly. Uh how would you coach founders uh and even maybe coach people that are in the government uh where narrative and trust is paramount uh in terms of communicating and thinking about media and communication.

have very strict formats. So if you're in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal you can get a few quotes in and then you'll be characterized on the rest of what you say. If you're on uh CNN, you get like a short and hostile conversation. uh with a bright light in your face and and so forth. And then y because there was a limited number of channels,

if you said something wrong, you couldn't erase it. It was kind of like on the permanent record. And there are kind of many cases of these old school gaffes like Howard Dean and so forth, where do you can never erase and you could never get over it and so forth. In the new kind of world, there's unlimited channels, there's unlimited formats. Um, and so the key to winning isn't not making a mistake, it's being interesting.

Like if you don't say anything that's interesting, it's not gonna get any pickup'cause there's too many other interesting things out there. So people like Alex Carp and Donald Trump and so forth, who are just like a entertaining show. Um like Alex was super entertaining. out here. I was like captivated. I didn't know what he was gonna say next. Uh

I I don't know if he knew what he was gonna say next, but it was really he he is very entertaining and that wins. And then like if you make a mistake, you just do ten podcasts tomorrow and flood the zone. And and and it doesn't matter like uh whether the channel is the Wall Street Journal or or a podcast or whatever, it's all the same thing now. Like because that's the w th you're overwhelmed with media and so to win you have to be interesting. Um and then

you know, y that doesn't mean y y you can just be all over the place and not be on message. Alex is always very, very, very consistently pro America. Like that's the thing that you can always count on him to be and that's his main message. Um and that's great. And he's interesting about it. He's got a great knowledge of history and all these kinds of things and so forth.

I would say that's that's that's all all ultimately even a core value of the firm is being optimistic about the future. Yeah. And uh but what keeps you up at night? What worries you? What uh what would you ask of the audience uh, some of whom are founders, some of whom are policymakers, uh, some of whom are implementers. What what worries you and keeps you up at night and what can we do to help?

all the bad things. You know, we're we're very focused on the dangers of AI here and not on the positive things. And it's interesting, I I just spoke to someone from Japan who was like, you know, the whole Japanese startup ecosystem is restarting'cause everybody's so fired up about AI. They're we're all very positive on it. We love robots. You know, we can't the Japanese love robots, uh by the way.

Uh and you know, I think we really need to focus. Somebody asked me the other day, well, what good can AI do? And I was like, well, we can, we're gonna, not just we can, we're gonna end traffic deaths. We're gonna cure cancer. Um, we're uh we're gonna end poverty as we know it. Like those are pretty good things. Like we need to think about that uh as much as we think about, um, you know, the AI overlords or um mass surveillance or or or any of these other things that we worry about. I think that

the the positive uses of the technology are extremely positive. The negative ones are there, but we can manage them uh in the same way we've managed, you know, kind of the negative of every technology, starting with fire. Which has very bad consequences. It can burn down your village. It's horrible. Uh but it does a lot of you know, it also heats the house and cooks your food and does some very wonderful things and and I think we have to get back to that.