Hi everyone and welcome to the A16Z podcast. Today we're talking about how CEOs and CFOs work together

productively and balance it all from cash and growth to advance planning and changing strategy.

The conversation is based on an event from last year, which was moderated by A16Z partner Caroline Moon,

who was a CFO at a number of startups before joining the firm a few years

ago to run the financial operations practice on A16Z's corporate development team.

The discussion starts off with Ben Horowitz talking about his classic blog post on cash flow

and destiny, and Scott Cooper joins in to provide a perspective from the finance and operational

side of what it takes.

The topic today centers around what founders and CEOs can and should do to drive their

companies for profitability and things that CEOs deal with on a day-to-day basis.

Ben, I was reading one of your blog posts, cash flow and destiny.

And when you look back on that period when everyone, yourselves and your competitors included,

were going big and not going home, you know, if you could do things over again, what would you have done differently?

And I guess more importantly, could you have done things differently given what everyone around you was doing?

Well, there's kind of two things that were very deceptive, at least to me as a founder CEO at that time.

One is when money is easy to come by, it's hard

to visualize what it's going to be like if it's ever hard to come by. And the dangerous thing

about that is you don't actually own your strategy until you're generating money. And that's

what I meant by cash flow and destiny was your strategy for how much money you want to spend,

what you want to do, like what direction you want to go in, you know, how fast you want to

expand your market opportunity. You may not think it affects your thinking. It absolutely

affects your thinking. And it didn't really strike me as how corrupting that was to my thinking

...