If you share control, it becomes very, very difficult to change the organization,

because everybody's got to agree.

I quoted Little Wayne, I said,

when I see another VC coming at me with the P-Sign,

all I see is the trigger and the middle finger,

and everybody hate me for that.

There would only be 15 technology companies that would ever get to $100 million in revenue.

And we really thought that was going to change because, look, at that time, we thought software was going to eat the world.

And every new company was going to be a technology company, and therefore, there were going to be more like 200 companies a year that would hit that bar

not 15. If you have a network with a billion people on it, it's going to be very valuable,

but like how did Alexander Graham Bell sell the first telephone when there was nobody to talk

to? Like that part is actually really hard.

The rules of venture capital were built for a different era.

Recorded live at Stanford for CS-153 Frontiers,

this conversation explores how Ben Horowitz helped rethink the structure of venture capital

as software expanded what startups could become.

From network effects and firm design to leadership and culture,

it traces how the system evolved and why it may be changing again.

Now AI is shifting the equation once more.

Code is less of a moat. Capital matters more.

And the bottlenecks are moving toward compute, energy, and organizational design.

Anjini Midha, founder of AMPPPC,

...