Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. This episode is a conversation between Mark Leslie, former CEO and chairman and founding team member of Veritas Software and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, an A16Z general partner, Peter Levine. In the conversation, which is based on an event held at Andreessen Horowitz for veterans, Peter and Mark talk all about sales and entrepreneurship

from what makes a good salesperson and how to best incentivize them to how to build a culture

that engenders loyalty and trust. To learn more about this subject, check out Peter Levine's

video sales primer on how technical founders should think about sales on A16Z's YouTube channel.

We teach at Stanford together.

We've sit on boards together.

We've worked together.

And so this is one of those occasions, which is super awesome for me to be here and super

awesome to have Mark here.

You often talk about the importance of authenticity as an entrepreneur.

What do you mean by that?

To me, authenticity in that context means

that the person whose idea it is and the thing they want to craft and do comes from real

experience, that they're solving a problem that they personally experienced, that they see

their customers experience, and it has a real, you know, kind of substance to it for those people.

There's a lot of people who are really smart and look at the world and say, I think there's a problem over there that I can solve.

I don't think that's so authentic, and I think that the probability of success is much lower

when you're trying to solve a problem that you've never personally experienced.

So you have people come from a company that's in a similar technology.

They have a network of people.

They have seen the problems that they themselves experience, that are experienced in their

company, the companies are their customers.

...