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The a16z Show

How To Lead | Ben Horowitz on My First Million

The a16z Show

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.41.1K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2025

⏱️ 71 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz joins Shaan Puri and Sam Parr on My First Million to talk about how to be a great leader.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

You kind of strive to get to a point of honesty, true honesty, where you're not lying to yourself.

0:06.1

That's hard. To show you what a great CEO he ended up being, he created this two-month

0:11.9

boot camp for everybody in product management, every engineer who entered Facebook had to go through

0:16.4

this thing, learn everything, and so forth. He's like a phenomenal student of management. I see young people

0:23.9

wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is going to be

0:28.7

fair. Like nothing about life is fair. And so the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation.

0:36.4

Today's episode is a bit different.

0:38.6

A16C co-founder Ben Horowitz recently went on the My First Million podcast,

0:42.9

and we found the conversation so valuable we wanted to share it here with you.

0:47.1

You'll hear Ben get into how he thinks about wartime versus peacetime leadership,

0:51.1

building culture, and making hard calls as a founder.

0:54.0

We hope you enjoyed the

0:54.8

episode as much as we did. All right, today we're hanging out with Ben Horowitz, the co-founder

1:01.2

of A16Z. These guys manage 46 billion in assets they've invested in Stripe, CoinVase, OpenAI,

1:07.1

a bunch of the big hit tech companies. But today we're talking about stuff that you don't usually get to hear from Ben. So things like, how do you actually have a high confrontation conversation? The advice he actually gives his founders, things like when he met Mark Zuckerberg and he was really young, what he noticed about Mark that was different? And what makes him such a great CEO that you can kind of steal or copy from Mark Zuckerberg's playbook? Sam, what else do we got? Dude, we also just hug out with him, which was like the best part. And so he tells the story about how he helped catch Tupac's killer. And we also asked him, what interests him right now? What books is he reading? What content is he consuming? What rabbit holes is he going down? and it was incredibly interesting. Awesome conversation with Ben Horwitz. Enjoy.

1:51.8

Okay, so I have a good Tupac story for you.

1:54.7

Oh my gosh. All right. I'm incredibly excited to hear it.

1:57.6

So my wife is like the biggest Las Vegas evangelist in the world.

2:02.6

And she was talking to Quincy Jones' son, QD3, and said, you know, you need to move

2:10.6

to Vegas.

2:11.6

And he's like, fuck that, I'll never move to Vegas.

2:14.6

They didn't solve the Tupac murder.

...

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