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Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. If you are lucky enough to be a part of a

company that goes from zero to a monster with an IPO or some big liquidity event along the way,

it's not usually the case that the distribution of the wealth created is equitable.

A few people make out like bandits, deserving

or not, while others, many of whom put in the work to make the company a success end up with

very little. That was the case with Andrew Mason and his first company Groupon. And frankly,

it bugged him. So while building his next company, Mason also designed a system for equity distribution

that he thinks is fair, something Mason calls progressive equity.

Ben Horowitz, who has seen plenty of bad ideas to make equity distribution more equitable,

he actually loves this one, joins Andrew Mason on this segment of the A16Z podcast to

dissect Mason's idea and the admittedly very high quality problem that underlies it.

I am Ben Horowitz, and I'm here talking to Andrew Mason, and today we're going to talk about a

concept that he invented called Progressive Equity and Megadogs.

And we are very excited to have him.

Andrew, thank you for coming.

Thanks for having me.

It's good to be here.

So, you know, this is one of these things where I get kind of emails all the time about new kinds of employee incentive plans and so forth and like how

...