You know, if you want to change the world, you have to believe you can change the world.

What you're really trying to find is, are they literally the best in the world at a thing?

And that's always the thing that's worth investing in, as opposed to they're pretty good at a lot of things,

and I can't figure out what they're not good at.

We just have a higher concentration of talent here than that's probably possible in a

company in terms of just sheer IQ.

There's a lot of VCs, very few who can actually help you succeed as a company.

And so being one of those, I think, is still quite a special position.

AI is changing how companies are built and how venture firms operate.

And those changes are forcing new decisions about structure, judgment, and speed.

Traditional venture models were designed for long timelines and slow feedback.

In the current AI cycle, outcomes move faster, competition is denser, and firms have to

evaluate people and ideas before results are visible. That shift raises practical questions about

how to run a partnership, how to hold investors accountable, and how to stay close to the work

without creating friction. In this episode, Ben Horowitz joins for an AMA to explain how A16Z

approaches those problems.

He discusses why managing a group of GPs is different from running a company,

why the firm evaluates investors at the point of decision rather than waiting for portfolio outcomes,

and how verticalization allows small investing teams to scale without internal politics.

Ben also shares his current view of the AI cycle,

including why AI should be treated as a new computing platform,

why application design and model orchestration matter more than raw model size,

...