The biggest mistake people make on cultures, they think of it as this very abstract thing.

And my favorite quote on this is from the samurai, from Bushido, where they say, look,

culture is not a set of beliefs, this set of actions.

So the way for the U.S. to compete is the way the U.S. always competes.

We're an open society, which means everybody can contribute.

Everybody can work on things. We're not top down. And the way that get everybody to work on

things is to have the technology be open and give everybody a shot at it. And then that's how

we're competitive. I think when you have new technology, it's easy for policy makers to make

really obvious, ridiculous mistakes that end up being super harmful.

Today on the podcast, we're sharing a conversation from Columbia Business School with A16D co-founder, Ben Horowitz.

Ben is a Columbia College alum from the class of 88 and joined Dean Costas McGlaris

for a discussion on AI, culture, and leadership in times of disruption.

They cover how open source AI and blockchain could shape the global race for technological leadership

and why culture, not just strategy, determines which companies thrive through disruption.

Let's get into it.

What a wonderful, wonderful way to start the semester by inviting an incredible leader and an

alum of the college, Ben Horowitz, to join us to talk about sort of a variety of things.

So I'm not going to spend time introducing Ben,

but I'm going to make a small anecdote because Ben run a company in the Bay Area

in the late 90s until the mid-2000s that I, without knowing Ben back then,

visited with a bunch of MBA students, I think in 99 or 2000 as part of

our Silicon Valley trip back in January.

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