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
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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.
00:13:01 · David Senra, Scott Kupor
[00:13:01] S0: What do you think those versions of you three back then would think about the outcome that played out over the next sixteen, seventeen years? [00:13:08] S1: When I did the math for myself and I was trying to convince my wife why in the middle of the global financial crisis we should pick our family up from North Carolina, go back to the Bay Area and do this thing, my math was like, okay, I'm pretty confident they'll raise the first fund, No idea quite frankly what happens after that, but my general calculus was like worst case, these funds take a long time, you know, we'll kind of weather through the financial crisis and, you know, these guys had always been very good to me in terms of taking care of me and I was like, look, you know, I'll find a job. I'll find another job basically if like this thing just doesn't pan out. That was kind of my general general back of the envelope calculus. I never imagined we'd get to where we were, and nor did I actually... Nor did I imagine we would get there as fast as we did, and I think that was the big thing. So Marc talked about this, but in literally like the first couple months after we closed the first fund, we invested in Skype. And yeah, if you remember Skype was part of eBay, right? Skype, it was bought by eBay. And it was like completely neglected inside of eBay. And yet amazingly, it had this incredible network effect. If you look at the numbers, like the numbers of subscribers just kept growing and growing. So we joined with Silver Lake at the time. I don't know if you know Egon Durban who runs Silver Lake.