20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 25 February 2019
⏱️ 33 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Frank Chen is a Partner @ Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most prestigious venture firms with a portfolio including the likes of Airbnb, Coinbase, Github, Lyft, Slack and many more incredible companies. As for Frank, prior to joining the world of venture, he was a VP of Products & UI Design at HP Software and before that held the same title at Opsware. Before that, even cooler, Frank was Director of Product Management @ Netscape where he led a cross-functional team that defined, shipped, and marketed Netscape's award-winning LDAP directory and security products.
In Today’s Episode You Will Learn:
1.) How Frank made the move from the world of operations with Opsware and HP to being a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz?
2.) How does Frank view the current state of play for AI and machine learning? How does the rise of automation shift the economy as we know it? What does it do to class distinctions? How does Frank view it's impact on the labour market? How does Frank think about the value of truly large datasets? Where is the asymptotic moment where the utility value of data is realised?
3.) With the rise of self-driving, how does Frank perceive the future of car ownership? Who will fundamentally own and operate the vehicles? Will it be a horizontal play or a vertical play? In terms of adoption, why is Frank negative towards a driver assisted transition phase and believe in a more binary transition?
4.) How does Frank perceive the rise of automation and self-driving cars impacting public infrastructure? How will the layout of our cities change over time? How does Frank believe urban real estate could be optimised in a more efficient manner? Which nations does Frank believe will be the first to innovate here?
5.) What is the most challenging element of Frank's position as Partner @ a16z? How does Frank think about the right way to say not to an entrepreneur? How does Frank look to scale the learning curve rapidly when investigating new industries? What are the challenges here? What advice would Frank give to someone looking to scale learning curves?
Items Mentioned In Today’s Show:
Frank’s Fave Book: The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of The Rings
Frank’s Most Recent Investment: Branch
As always you can follow Harry, The Twenty Minute VC and Frank on Twitter here!
Likewise, you can follow Harry on Instagram here for mojito madness and all things 20VC.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The 20 minute VC is back for another week with me, Harry Stebbings, at H. Stebbings, 1996 with 2Bs on |
| 0:05.7 | Instagram. I would love to see you there where you see all things behind the scenes. But for the |
| 0:09.4 | episode today, we constantly discuss everything investing. But we don't often dive deep on the future |
| 0:14.2 | of innovation, entrepreneurship and society, really what we're fundamentally investing in. And so I |
| 0:19.4 | could not have a better person with me today to discuss just that. |
| 0:22.5 | So joining me in the hot seat, I'm so excited to welcome Frank Chen. |
| 0:25.7 | Frank is a partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the world's most prestigious venture firms, |
| 0:29.9 | with a portfolio including the lights of check this out, Airbnb, Coinbase, GitHub, Lyft, Slack, and many more incredible companies. |
| 0:37.6 | As for Frank, prior to joining the world of venture, he was a VP of products and |
| 0:41.2 | UI designer HP Software, and before that held the same title at Opsware. |
| 0:45.2 | Before that, even cooler, Frank was Director of Product Management at Netscape, where he led a |
| 0:49.6 | cross-functional team that defined, shipped, and marketed Netscape's award-winning L-Dap directory and |
| 0:54.9 | security products. And I want to say a huge thank you both to Majit and Myraud Andres and Horace |
| 0:59.5 | for all they've done to make this happen. I really do so appreciate that. And we mentioned some |
| 1:03.8 | incredible companies in the intro there and I want to spend a minute to talk about Brex. The first |
| 1:08.0 | corporate card for startups, Brexx founders Henrique and Pedro built a |
| 1:11.6 | payments business in Brazil, but found themselves rejected for a corporate card when they are in Y Combinator. |
| 1:16.6 | They decided to build Brex. With instant online sign-up, no founder liability required, and |
| 1:21.7 | limits 10 to 20 times higher than standard cards. Yes, pretty incredible, I know. And you can sign up |
| 1:26.9 | for Brex today |
| 1:27.7 | and get card fees waived by entering the code Harry during sign-up. Honestly, it really is such a |
| 1:32.8 | special service. And speaking of special, did you know that there are five job openings for every |
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