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slash disclosures. Welcome to the A16Z podcast.

Today we have one of our hallway style conversations between Benedict Evans and Steven Snofsky, and they'll be discussing big companies in their platforms, Google, Apple,

Facebook, and Amazon.

What makes them work, how their tactics and strategies differ, and how they've adapted

to change over time.

Good afternoon.

This is Steven Snosky and Benedict here. We were having this hallway conversation

about what is it that makes a big company unique and interesting to think about from an

org perspective. The thing about big companies that we wanted to start with is, of course,

is that they work. Like, they're not dysfunctional as of very nature. From the outside, everything might

look mixed up or people might be complaining, but for the most part, like, they got to be

big. Yeah. So the thing I thought was specifically interesting, just kind of looking at the tech

world today, at Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, as being together about 10 times

the size in terms of the number of people that they were 10, 12 years ago. And how is it that

they've ballooned in this size and have 10 times of people that they used to have not that long ago?

And yet continue, for all intents and purposes, to work well, continue to create great products,

more or less. How do those companies run? And when you talk to people there, what you realize

very quickly is that they're actually run in radically different ways. From each other. From each other.

And inside. Like even across them inside, they're quite different. Yeah. And that's partly

...