David Senra
00:05:34 · Scott Kupor
[00:05:34] S1: Okay. A matter of fact. Tell Michael I said hello. I haven't seen him in a while, but but look, he'll tell the story much better, but my recollection of the story is look, they they started CAA in, I think 1975, and the whole industry was was... Which was very similar to how the venture capital industry was, you had an agent, right? So you're Robert Redford, right? And you have an agent and that agent comes to you and says, great, I'm gonna help you do this, right? I'm gonna help you get movie deals, I'm gonna help you get book deals, radio, whatever the whatever the stuff is, which was great, but the model was basically a one to one model, which was your agent to actor. What Michael did in CAA was they said, look, we're gonna basically maintain the relationship context between agent and actor, But when you would go, like, show up for a pitch at CAA in, like, 1990 where I think they had, like, 90% market share, they would sit around a table and Michael would introduce you as Robert Redford and say, look, meet my colleague who does nothing other than radio deals. Here's my expert in radio deals. Here's my expert in international. Here's my expert in books. So you had this whole idea that you were surrounded. Yeah, phalanx maybe is the right way to think about it. You have this whole firm as opposed to an individual who's responsible for your career. And we basically took the same model to the VC world. Right? The VC world was a lot like that was you had a one to one relationship with John Doerr, who was fantastic at what he did. The problem with that inherently was number one, it just wasn't scalable. You know, at some point, John has so many board seats that you time out from a GP perspective because you can only take so many board seats on. And then two was, you had to get everybody to invest in all that same amount of relationship development work across all these domains. And that might have worked in the days John Doerr did it when basically we invested in enterprise software companies that was essentially the domain of VC, but if you believe, you know, which I do, you know, Marc's software, you know, ate the world or seen the world, as the domains grew, like the expertise needed just continued to grow.
00:07:18 · Scott Kupor
So the fundamental theory that Marc and Ben had was, let's hire GPs who are functional domain experts in the particular areas of investing they want, and then let's surround them with this failings of somebody who all they do all day long is manage CFO relationships or CEO relationships or VPs of engineering, somebody who all they do does government relations or business development or other stuff like that. So again, like our pitch to an entrepreneur when they came in, we used to do this thing, we call it the reverse pitch actually, where an entrepreneur would pitch us and then we would bring the team in and we would do the reverse pitch to them to say, hey, look, if you work with Andreessen Horowitz, not only do you get me Ben Horowitz as your board member, but you get this entire table of people whose job it is day in and day out to figure out how do we institutionalize a set of relationships and networks that'll make you successful. So that was like the key application of like what Ovitz did to, you know, how Marc and Ben adopted it to the VC world.
00:08:08 · David Senra
[00:08:08] S0: I wanna tell you about the presenting sponsor of this podcast, Ramp. I have been reading a lot about SpaceX lately. SpaceX is one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and one of the main themes in the history of SpaceX is constantly attacking and questioning your cost. Ramp helps many of the most innovative businesses in the world do exactly that. The median company running on Ramp cuts their expenses by 5%. And one thing SpaceX has demonstrated is that a religious dedication to controlling costs can help actually increase revenue because you can pursue opportunities you couldn't otherwise. And we see that in the ramp data too. The median company running on ramp also grows their revenue by 16%. So when you're running your business on Ramp and your competitors are not, you have a massive competitive advantage that compounds over time. Ramp is the only platform designed to make your finance team faster and happier. Many of the top founders and CEOs I know run their business on Ramp. I run my business on Ramp, you should too. Go to ramp.com to learn how they can help your business save time, save money, and grow revenue. That is ramp.com. I found one of my all time favorite quotes when I was reading the book Zero to One. The quote says, the single most powerful pattern I have noticed is that successful people find value in unexpected places, and they do this by thinking about business from first principles instead of formulas. That is exactly what AppLovin has done with their advertising platform. Applovin connects you with over a billion potential new customers in mobile games. Applovin allows you to capture undivided attention. Applovin ads are full screen videos that are watched for an average of thirty five seconds. That is retention that blows other ad platforms out of the water. You can launch on Applovin in minutes. You set the goal and Applovin achieves it. No complex setup, no expertise needed. Applovin scales quickly. They can put your ads in front of over a billion potential customers. Other businesses have seen immediate results scaled to hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend per day and increase their revenue by millions. So you wanna get started quickly before all of your competitors are on Applovin. And you can do that by going to applovin.com. That's applovin.com.
00:10:17 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
Before you left A16z to go to government, you were there for how many years? [00:10:21] S1: Sixteen and a half years. So 'nine until. What are some [00:10:24] S0: of your like most memorable stories from the very early days? First year, two, three years? [00:10:29] S1: Well, there were some fun ones like we had a little bit of our Mad Men episode during the firm where at, you know, in the evenings, we would go sit around and drink bourbon at the time. This was when Marc actually used to drink. I think he doesn't drink anymore. [00:10:42] S0: No. He said that I think he was on the show earlier. [00:10:44] S1: And I [00:10:45] S0: think he said, like, he thought the best day was, like, twelve hours of caffeine followed by six hours of alcohol or
00:10:45 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:10:45] S0: think he said, like, he thought the best day was, like, twelve hours of caffeine followed by six hours of alcohol or [00:10:50] S1: something. He was great. Right? Yeah. Like Marc would drink a lot of coffee. He always had sushi for lunch. Don't know. Don't know how well you know Marc, obviously, sounds like you don't know, but like Marc is very, Marc gets very deep in things. So like, if he gets excited about sushi, quite frankly, he'll eat sushi for like every meal for like a six month period of time. Right? So he would do that. And then, yeah, like we would sit around his office at the end of the day and drink. And I remember very simply because we had to buy a special ice cube maker that actually made like, you know, the square ice cubes. Yeah. And Arsho, who's his assistant, was incredibly generous with us, but like she would basically come in at the end of the day and, like, make sure the ice machine was right. So that was fun. And it was just Hold on. You gotta know what we're doing. [00:11:30] S0: Let's get over this. Bring me to this. Okay. So Mad Men style. We're working all day. Now we're [00:11:35] S1: hanging We out didn't drink her there. [00:11:37] S0: So, of [00:11:37] S1: course, the Mad Men style maybe is overrated because Woah. So then nobody was smoking cigarettes. [00:11:40] S0: But now it's nighttime. [00:11:41] S1: Now it's nighttime. Nighttime. [00:11:43] S0: Work day is kind of [00:11:44] S1: over. Right. [00:11:45] S0: But we're gonna keep it going, and we're gonna drink. What's happening?
00:11:47 · Scott Kupor
[00:11:47] S1: Yeah. In our original office... And actually, in our new office too. But our... Marc and Ben had these very spacious offices, which was very nice. And, Marc literally had, like, a bar. Like, Marc had one of the most amazing, like, bourbon and whiskey collections that I've ever seen. He probably still has it. Although he's been generous with my birthdays over time. He sends things to me now since he's less of a drinker. I pick up most of his stuff. But, yeah, we would sit around and, like, talk, and it wasn't like there was no... It was like the one part of the day where there was no formal agenda. And sometimes we just bullshitted about whatever was going on. Sometimes we're actually talking about an investment or something in the company, but it was fun. It was like... It was a time period where you felt like, I mean, number one, for someone like me, even though I'd been around Ben and Marc already for almost ten years, they're just like the kinds of people where if you have time to sit down with them and just shoot the shit, like outside of work hours, like you always learn something. And so that was always fun. And it just felt like we just had this sense of camaraderie that we were trying to build something. So there was no agenda. We would sit around and sometimes it would go for fifteen minutes and we'd all disappear and sometimes we'd sit there for an hour. It never, like, turned, like, raucous. Like, you know, we all had, like, you know, families and kids to go home to. So it wasn't like we were, like, going from there to, like, a bar somewhere else, but it was just kind of a relaxing way to quite frankly end the day and have like some like fun and or intellectual conversation about stuff we were doing.