I am Ben Horowitz of Andresen Horowitz and I'd like to thank you all for coming.

We have a really exciting and thrilling guest tonight, Melody Hobson.

And I'm going to give a brief introduction.

Since we live in the world of Google, I won't go through her childhood and everything.

But she's the president of Ariel Investments, which is one of the larger investment firms

and with just an absolutely stellar reputation.

She's also, and that's just running a big investment fund is one thing, but she's also

chairwoman of the board at DreamWorks

on the board of some companies you may have heard of Starbucks and Estee Lauder

and she runs something that I know she runs a conference called the Black

Directors Conference which is one of the very best business conferences in the world I. And I bring that up because it's important to know that as an investor, she's also,

like, she's the type of investor who could actually run a company quite easily,

in addition to an investment firm.

And then she is married to a decent filmmaker.

He made a movie that some of you may have seen called Star Wars.

But the big thing about Melody is that anyone who you ever run into who knows her will say,

she's the real deal,'s unbelievable and I had this

experience two nights ago I was with the legendary musician Quincy Jones and

his son is here tonight and there he is QD3 and he asked me you know what are

you doing next week I was like oh I'm interviewing

melody hops and he's like Melody Hapsen and you have to understand Quincy jones literally

knows like everybody like he knows guys he knows like the president of Israel he knows people like

...