Ben Gilbert: preference

Transcript context

…I think it's an important difference between art and other professions, like being investors or being entrepreneurs. I think an artist's job is more, like Brian said, make people feel something and ask questions. Whereas it's not really our job to provide the answers to those questions. That's not art. I'm actually curious. I said a minute ago, what happens when companies are only incentivized by profit? Where does that leave us with a world? It seems like it's maybe leading us towards disaster. What are your thoughts on that? Do you see a need to try to change that and how could that change? What would that do to your jobs as investors? I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. I really like your framework of artists' jobs are to make you feel and to ask the important questions but not provide the answers. If you're working in an operating company, or you're an entrepreneur, or you are an investor, your job is the answer. To be more concrete about that, your job is to create value for your shareholders. The vast majority of the time, the way you do that is to put something out in the world that creates value for customers and then capture some percentage of that value that you create. That thing that you're creating, that product you're creating, that value creating out in the world for people is necessarily an answer to something, presumably some problem that they had. Some business can be conducted in a more artful way, but it is kind of antithetical. Your job is to give something to someone that solves a problem for them and then collect value from that. For art, this is why you can't put a price on making someone feel a certain way. It's lightning in a bottle. When you have it and you're able to make someone who rarely cries cry, that's that magical, priceless thing. There is a continuum though, isn't there? I think about your episodes about a16z and Mosaic to Netscape. At Mosaic, Marc Andreessen is an artist. He's changing the world as an artist, I would assert, and he's looking at something that doesn't exist, and seeing a way that he wants to see the world. No one even knew who owned the underlying code. No one knew who owned the thing. Did the school own it? Did the institute own it? But then, partners come into it. Things changed and it becomes a business and priorities shift. That's fascinating to me always, like what happens to an artist like that? Maybe Marc's the smartest person in the world—you could make that argument—but he's also like this great visionary artistic thinker, who then becomes a business person.…

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