Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…Totally. It's so funny how we’ve painted hopefully the picture on this episode of all the life experiences leading into Netscape, leading into Loudcloud, leading into that moment with Benchmark, and then Ovitz joining. It all gets expressed by Andreessen Horowitz. There's one more principle that you touched on earlier that I want to tie a little bit of a bow on that's a founding principle of the company. When Ben Horowitz is getting dressed down in the partner meeting at Benchmark and they ask him when are you going to hire a professional CEO? This becomes a major tenet of Andreessen Horowitz about technical founders being CEOs, being armed with the resources that they need, and the ability to—even before they would otherwise acquire those skills—have a leap on being a professional CEO. There's this 2003 interview—I love reading things from 2003 about Marc and Ben because it's this really interesting perspective where it's post-Netscape, post-Loudcloud, post-crash but they're just angel investors. It's six years before they start Andreessen Horowitz. One of the questions in this great Q&A that we’ll link to in the show notes is, should a founding technologist run a mature company? Marc’s answer—he's a brilliant person. He gives these long philosophical answers to every other question. This one he just answers absolutely. It's so great. This is so brilliant. We'll talk about this much more in the next episode. But what's so smart about this and so dumb about the rest of the venture capital industry until Andreessen changed the game. Let's put aside what's right or wrong or what you believe or don't believe. It was so dumb to preach and practice anything else except that founders should run the companies they start because if you say anything else, who are you alienating? You're alienating founders. If you want to win deals, why on earth would you say anything other than I support my founders and I'm loyal to them to the end?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.