I caused a lot of antagonists in between us and the other firms in that stays. Your filter is like, you're going to get the deal or I'm going to get the deal. You die or I die. And they're not exactly shrinking ballots themselves. They hated that cover story. Look at him on the cover of the magazine. That's not supposed to be him. That's supposed to be the entrepreneur. What the hell? I mean, they just like lost it on that.

We didn't have any entrepreneurs at the time.

V.C. was like a big secret.

And then actually building companies was a big secret.

And so just kind of talking about it was a big differentiator.

We don't have products.

Yeah, and we have products.

We have people and ideas, that's it.

In 2009, at the bottom of the financial crisis, two entrepreneurs decided to raise $300 million for a venture capital firm.

They had never been VCs before, and they planned to do everything differently.

Marketing aggressively, building a platform, putting themselves on magazine covers. Every

established VC told them it was a terrible idea. Sixteen years later, Andresen Horowitz

has fundamentally changed how venture capital works. Today, Ben and Mark talked to the person

who architected that transformation from behind the scenes. Margate Wenmockers, who joined as head

of marketing when

the firm was literally operating out of a restaurant booth. This is a conversation about breaking

cartels, about why secrecy stopped working as a business strategy, and the moment when

Mark Andreessen wrote, Software is Eating the World, and a single draft after an off-ham comment to a

reporter, and about a profound shift happening right now,

where companies without authentic, interesting founders at the helm are starting to lose.

There's a reason other VCs called their LPs in a panic

when Ben Horowitz appeared on the cover of Fortune.

...