Weird ways Ben Horowitz makes Founders more confident

alright today we're hanging out with ben h the cofounder of a sixteen z these guys managed forty six billion and assets they've invested in stripe coinbase open ai a bunch of the big hit tech companies but today we're talking about stuff that you don't usually get to hear from ben so things like how do you actually have a high confrontation conversation the advice he actually gives us founders things like when he met mark zuckerberg and he was really young what he noticed about mark that was different and what makes him such a great ceo that you can kinda steal our copy from mark zuckerberg playbook sam what else we got dude we also just hung out with him which is like the best part and so he tells the story about how he helped catch box killer and we also asked him what interest him right now what books is he reading what content is he consuming what rabbit holes is he going down and it was incredibly interesting awesome conversation with ben h enjoy i feel like i could rude word i know i could be what i want to put my all in it like a days off on a travel never i have a good two story for you oh my gosh alright i'm incredibly excited to hear it so my wife is like a biggest las vegas evangelist in the world and she was talking to quincy jones on q three and said you know you need to move to vegas and he's like fuck that i'll never move to vegas they didn't solve the murder yeah and you know his sister kid was dating tu i was like let's have dinner with the vegas pd and see what happened and so me and q three and nas don to dinner with the las vegas police department and they bring the whole case file and it turns out the lap lapd really filed the case like almost on purpose it looks like so the end of the dinner i say to the chief of police mike jane arrow i'm like mike you ought to reopen the part case and he goes i'll talk to the sheriff and it'll next say call me said whether the sheriff save he said ben wants us to open the case for opening the case and they reopen the case and they caught the guy that's insane so shit sean like i don't know sean if you know the story but basically like you know poc and shu gotten a fight at a at a tyson mike tyson fight and then like thirty or forty minutes later he was shot right in the strip on las vegas and it was a cold case for years but everyone knew who did it they knew is this guy named more orlando anderson like that was like the random orlando pulled the trigger q told him to shoot no sucks and like everyone knew this but for some reason like it didn't happen in orlando and ended and ended up dying a handful of years later and the with the craziest thing ever is there's this guy named dj vlad who does these interviews with all these gangster and he got him to like tell the story of about the murder in this idiot like went on a podcast it just said yeah here's what happened so here's why he did that he thought he had immunity because the lapd profit him which means basically in exchange for testimony we grant you immunity but they granted a immunity in la mid not vegas what is the were life oh that doesn't count here and then the little do we know that beds behind the scenes getting it all done that's pretty awesome i like i filed that case religiously i thought i thought it was riveting i did not know that you you were involved that's pretty cool alright well i don't know where we wanna start but i just thought you know usually ben you don't know this but we have a little tradition here we we'd like typically start with our interim music but for some reason stop playing i'm trying to get this cassette to play but it's just not playing what are we look at at here oh boy that is that's the blind and death crew so my friend seth clark this was back in eighty seven or eighty eight i or maybe eighty six got got shot and was blind so we formed a wrap group called the blind and death crew d e f and you know we had all kinds of crimes about being blind and being deaf you know i have one here it's like blind deaf crew you know fly three of us but we got four eyes you know like that vet you know where did you grow i mean like i your dad was like a i know who your dad is and he was like he was like a well known academic but where were you growing up where you were around guys who got a shot and rap well so i grew up in berkeley california which you know kind of is either like an academic town or part of oakland depending on you know where you are and i was in the kind of more part of oakland berkeley and then you i went to school in new york and so i got him to rap in new york and then seth got shot back in the bay area and he was very very depressed because he's blind he was only he's a kid you know so i sent him these dj red alert check chill out mixtape tapes you know were tapes that i taped off the radio show which had the brand new hip hop which was you know really new at the time and that kinda of cheered them up and so that's how we got to wrap when we camera around it will we didn't succeed but we tried real hard well we wanted to just hang out with you because this you'll do you've done fifty thousand podcast podcasts i think asics z now has fifty thousand podcast podcasts and so yeah yeah yeah you know i could sit like hey ai bubble right like we can kinda do that i will probably ask you something about ai but i think yeah more than anything what we try to do on the podcast is give people a sense of what it's like to hang out with ben h right like what is it if they could just be a fly on the wall hanging out and obviously we come from a business tech background so we got a bunch of questions around that but i think for me and sam the most interesting part that i feel like you've you've contributed to the collective wisdom of founders right is your stuff on leadership so you've written two books i feel like that really i don't know like top shelf on how to be a leader and i think it started with a general philosophy so so tell me why most management books are terrible let's start with that you know the problem with management generally i would say is it's very kind situational any emotional and so it's like oh here's the book to teach you how to play nfl quarterback and you can read that twenty times you go out on the field like things are extremely different if there's a two hundred and ninety pound guy running at you extremely very fast i'm gonna kill you like what you feel like what you think how you process that is just different and i think management tends to be like that and that it really has to do a lot with your situation and the feeling you have at the time it happens and so these management books are written like at some step by step you know like you know you're anybody with a basic like eighth grade education can understand the of management there nothing they it's a cookbook and you could just follow the rest yeah it's like oh here are the five steps for building a strategy or the three steps for like you know setting objective it's not actually very useful at all because yeah know that stuff is so simple so i always thought like well the the difficult thing you know you're either gonna like run the risk of renting completely out of money if you don't fire half the company but like you don't wanna have that conversation because you promised all these guys the company was gonna be successful when you hired them so like the level of inconsistency that you're gonna have to go through the level of like you know i i was completely wrong about everything and i'm gonna fire half of you because i of the mistakes i made they'll just cause you to hesitate in a way that could cost you the company itself and like how you get over that and then like what do you actually say and how do these conversations work and all this kind of thing is is the actual thing that people need to really kind of getting understanding of like what are the words you know they get me out of this thing at least temporarily and you know nobody had been writing like that the last guy who kind of i thought wrote a book like that was andy grove back when he wrote management and yeah know that book was really old at the time so i was like well somebody had write the sequel you know we're now it's spent thirty years do you think that it's like when it comes to leading do you think that it's mostly just getting your mindset right i mean is that what you're saying where it's like no no no it's far it's more complicated than that you kind of strive to get your point of honesty like true honesty where you're actually being true like you're not lying to yourself that's hard you know that it it's almost like you know like if you're you guys are kind of creative on the pipe but like to be a like a great creative at some point you have to get all the way to that very vulnerable point where you've exposed to yourself and all your issues and weaknesses and and everything and like leadership is a little bit like that and that you're kind of pushing and pushing and pushing to get all the way to what's true so that's you know that's part of the process but the other thing is just you know you you don't really necessarily completely know what you're doing particularly when you start and you're building a company and so you have to kind of have like it's a confidence game where you have to talk yourself into okay you know like i i think i know enough you know to do this and you know it can be very little things like i had conversation with an he's like ben like i need your help and i was like why do you need my help he says by cto is an asshole and i said well okay but you know like he's a good cto i know that from i'm talking to before so you're you're not even asking me said you fire i'm are you and he's like no i'm not asking me that and i said well tell me why he's an asshole and maybe maybe i can help him he goes well you know he made a like a young woman in our on our finance team cry yesterday and i was like okay yeah that's kind of mean spirited for a cto to do that and i said well you know so you're really kinda asking me like not how to fire but just how to have a conversation with him about his behavior without him quick that's what you're saying and he's like yeah and i said well here's what i would say to him i would say hey you know you're a fantastic director of engineering but you're not an effective ct and you know if you wanna be a director of engineering forever like we can just run just like this and it's no problem you do a great job in managing your team you get stuff done on time you're great but you're not effective with the rest of the organization and that's what a cto is the cto has gotta marshal the resources of the whole company to get what he needs to get the job done and if you go to like a junior person you're like five levels below you and make or cry you know you're probably right but like you're never gonna go what would you want out of her so like you can't be effective with her like how you gonna be effective with like execs so if you wanna learn how to do that like let's learn how to do that but you know and if not no problem but just know at some point i gotta bring in the cto that's where i would have the conversation with them and that kind of got them went okay now i can talk him and so so much of like the mistakes that ceos maker are like they just don't even know how to have the conversation and so it's it's a little bit like the mindset part is correct and that there is a like a confidence part about it where you have to be able to kinda do things when you're not sure that you're right but there's techniques and there's ideas and there's things in there that yeah you know it's just harder than it looks and the problem is the mistakes like not talking to him is gonna multiply right like because now you're gonna isolate engineering and nobody's gonna like them and you're gonna politics in the company and like ann and and n and then pretty soon people are suddenly even wanna work there and you have high attrition and then you know well why the fuck do we have high attrition and this and that and the other and then the board's all upset in this so it kind of snowball on you if if you can't deal with these segments man this is so cool because i just read this book called the motive and the whole book is how to have a conversation like that so basically like someone showed it and it's like small stuff so it's like someone shows up to late for a meeting they're not prepared they made someone cry and i remember reading this and i was like i wanna talk about this on the pod maybe because i think i feel stupid that i'm happy to learn like a scripts on how they that someone that i hear you talking about this on yeah alright i feel a little bit better because why why is this conversation hard for me i feel like this just should be easy i i don't know what to say i literally don't know what words to use to for this to be the effective confrontation and so i had to read a book and so it's actually really cool to hear you describe that other people i think you even said i saw other of you about z and i think you referenced sam alt and you're like i've seen inside these companies they all face these like challenging situations but they just don't know how to like communicate yeah and know people get sick and and you know like not nope but there there's no way to learn like how to be ceo of like a big company without kind being ceo and so you found a company it starts growing and you don't know what you're doing and you make mistakes and it's very scary and you know it's easy to lose your confidence and if you lose your confidence you hesitate and if you hesitate as ceo then somebody's gotta step into that vacuum and then that's when it becomes very like political and dysfunctional alright a few episodes ago i talked about something and i got thousands of messages asking me to go deeper to explain and that's what i'm about to do so i told you guys how i used chat gb as a life coach or a thought partner and what i did was i uploaded all types of amazing information so i uploaded my personal finances my net worth my goals different books that i like issues going on in my personal life and businesses i uploaded so much information and so the output is that i have this gp that i can ask questions that i'm having issues within in my life like how should i respond to this email what's the right decision knowing that you know my goals for the future things like that and so i worked with hubspot to put together a step by step process showing the audience showing you the software that i use to make this the information that i had chat ask me all this stuff so it's super easy for you to use and like i said i use this like ten or twenty times a day it's literally changed my life and so if you want that it's free there's a link below just click it enter your email and we will send you everything you need to know to set this up in just about twenty minutes and i'll show you how i use it again ten to twenty ten today alright so check it out the link is below in the description back to the episode you've said before like having confrontation the right way is super important and i nod in my head and then i was like cool i really don't know how to do that though so okay so what is the right way to have confrontation hannah complicated but like the first thing is you gotta stop thinking about yourself right so you you know and it could be anything it could be like firing somebody or getting them to change your behavior or whatever you're you're gonna be saying something that they don't wanna hear and so i think people to get caught up in well either i need to be a tough guy or i need them to like me or you know some other thing that's about you but really you have to go okay what am i gonna say to them that isolate it to this thing that i'm really talking about you know so if i need them to change this behavior like how do i get them to hear that in a way they can actually act on it without getting in their feelings and you in order to do that you just have to be like very straightforward and you have to be open with how you feel about like if you think there is shit bird then you're probably gonna have to fire them anyway but if you think there otherwise good then you kind of have to let them know that but in a way where you're not clearly setting them up you know you're not giving them a shit sandwich you're a greatest person in the world but this is all fucked out and i love you like that that like people are onto that like that it's just too simple so you kind of have to you know you have to get to a very honest place with them and say like you know we're working together on this you're doing this it's not working it's not effective and you know like i can help you get to it to be effective but i need you to get it to be effective like you have to get that message across and a lot of it you know like people will accept things from you if they feel like you're basically telling them the truth like you're i'm like completely open and honest about this shit like i'm not i'm not telling you it's worse than it is and i'm not telling you it's better than there it is i'm telling you what it is and and this is you know when i said earlier about like a lot of leadership is getting all the way to his truth you have to sit with cell phone to say like what do i really think about this like not what like my motherfuckers were complaining about him or this happened or you know like it hurt my feelings the way like this went down like he's doing that in my company you you kinda have to get beyond that and go like what's really true why do they do it you know can it be corrected if it can be corrected what would motivate them to correct it like you you have to get all the way to to that otherwise what happens is you know they're just gonna get upset and defensive or like you know they're not gonna hear it because it's too soft and it's like well yeah like ben kinda doesn't like that but he doesn't really care so you know how do you get into that like meaningful place where people can hear what you're talking about and you've invested in and known for a long time a lot of the tech the biggest tech ceos and i would say the stereotype of the most successful tech founders is this sort of like slightly autistic very high iq lower e q sort of persona but that's not really what would be good at the thing you're talking about and so what is it that that stereotype is just wrong and that's not what you've seen when you've kind of been are you guys i think invested in facebook early on stuff like that like is it that the stereotype is wrong is it that they learn these things is they're like some are they taking touchy feely at stand for like what what's helping them be able to do this yes i think some of these guys have like much higher people understanding than you might think like the ones do who truly like can't read people and understand people don't get like they don't become mark zuckerberg mark zuckerberg like his mom by the way is like a psychiatrist or psychologist and like he's actually pretty insightful and and you can see it like in the deals he's negotiated the moves he's made you know guys who are processing information at that rate of speed you know it's a little weird like like you always feel like okay what the fuck is around the my clock like this guy's thinking faster than me but so the my very first conversation i had was z i think in two thousand and seven and you know at that time if you guys recall you know the facebook traffic had flattened and the current the executive staff he had at the time was trying to run a coup to force them to sell to so they they were leaking all this stuff to valley where at the time and valley where was you know calling for zach to be fired and you know that whole stupid that was like that famous story where you like didn't sell right yeah yeah many he didn't sell but you know right at that time you know his first question to me was you know should i if i fired by executive team for the second time would the board be nervous i was like well you you know it's not that's not even the question mark because you know if you're asking that question and you know you kind of have to do it because the you you can't succeed with them so you know whether or not you can see succeed without them is like at least a question mark he'll let you know you're gonna die with them and i said but like you know like let's talk about like why they're they're doing this you know like why has traffic went flat and he said well he said look we doubled the size of the engineering team this year we went from four hundred to eight hundred engineers and we have you know the way the product is architect that we have like hey my sequel layer and then an api and then the applications are built on the api but a lot of the new engineers just wrote straight to my sequel and they like worked up the whole thing and now it takes like ten seconds to log in and so traffic flatten because of that and i was like well how do you train these guys and he said train these guys and i never forget that and i was like oh shit i said zach like when when you're ten people there's no knowledge in the like everybody just comes on and they jump in and they start working and so forth but you get to like eight hundred people a thousand people like you have a lot of knowledge that's in your company about like how the product works how you check and code everything you actually have to teach people that because they don't know who to ask or how to learn that on their own and so you have to do that and like just you know to show you what like great ceo he ended up being he created this two month boot camp for like everybody in product management every engineer who facebook had to go through this thing learn everything and so forth so he was like he you know like he's like a phenomenal student of management and you know before he became like nah you know now he's one calling him a student he's a great ceo but like a lot of these guys you know can figure out the people part pretty fast i would say and like i said the ones who truly don't understand people art don't actually turn out to be good ceos like they they don't get to that level like you can you know you can make fun a larry page or elon or z so forth that they are actually very smart about people all three of them you you have these great stories that's a great story one i think that's in your new book is a story that i feel like it's relevant to kinda any business size so some of these are it's like oh well my company's is never gonna be twenty thousand people so like i don't really i can't really relate to this but one i thought this was it was about collections it was about collecting money which i think is you know whether you're like an accountant and you have to do this for your clients or you're you're your ten clients or you're a big business and i think it's the ceo of nation yeah could you tell this story i thought this is a phenomenal story yeah so i you know then they're they're they're kind of we're living on the edge you know they need every kind of thing collected possible and you know she was just like you know cash collections would just be you and there were all this dumb stuff that would happen like they sent out the wrong kind of email or this and that and you know they didn't kept the thing and so forth and i said you know i learned this technique actually from andy andy grove we're like if a project was off track he would just go okay eight am every day we're gonna meet on it and i'm gonna be in the meeting and i'm gonna want answers and what that meeting actually turns into is you know every dumb thing going on you can just resolve very very fast because people don't know who to ask how to resolve it you know whether it's a problem and so forth so he said leah just like every day eight am get everybody in the cash collection team together and start meeting by saying like where's is my money like why haven't we collected it and like make him explain to you why they haven't collected it and you'll be shocked at why they haven't collected it and sure enough you know it's like well we didn't know we could edit the email it's just like oh you didn't know you could edit the email like but but it's you know those kinds of things start popping up i i didn't know that i could do this because this is what we ought to be doing but we're not doing it because i don't think i'm allowed to do it and it's like we'll know i'm the ceo you're allowed to do it and then that can un stick a like dumb pro you know project that's way off track or or a process that's off track or so forth so it's kind of like a different idea about management where you know the the enemy as as you grow like communication becomes your biggest challenge and so it's just a way to go like okay i'm gonna manually un fix communication in this organization right now and the the amazing thing about is does tend to be very long last thing where like once they get that then you know it sustain i had a experience with a a founder you invested in do do you know sue ali he's one of good buddies and you guys invested in tiny yeah yeah yeah the day of course yeah yeah he does the this exact thing the founder emailed to us and was like hey what you know we're gonna start raising money you know we really need to raise money so it's important and i would just love to pick your brain on what it was like very like yeah can i pick your brain would you like to go get coffee for this my house is on fire and we were like wait just to clarify is the house on fire he's like the house is on fire so we said okay well let's meet like now why are you email me mean let's just talk right now and so he jumps on the call and like okay what do you have so far you know let's phrase the money and he's like oh here's the pitch deck and basically in the first thirty minutes we just gave them like hey here's three things let's go like these are the three most important things you gotta change this is this still part of the story is broken and you're missing this information and you know you're not you're framing it the wrong way you gotta frame it this way and he's like okay this is so helpful wow thank you guys would love to touch base again next week and su was like next week how long do you think it'll take you to make those three changes he's like well he's like how about we meet today at three pm and you show me and we did two days with it and i i it kinda broke my brain a little bit because there was like this invisible wall as a business person like you don't meet twice in a day like that would be a faux pas you know like it's like bad manners it's like fuck your manners when it's like was this a big problem or not like just clarify that for me because if it is a big problem then i'll just keep showing up and saying okay now what okay now what and okay and if you just do that for three days that like all of the excuses get squeezed away is when i found like all the excuses suddenly disappear and you get to the brass tacks about what's going on it was amazing and that's definitely right no no that's a you know z silly and i actually had a lot of conversations but he he went through a lot of crises in that so he he he knows today's episode has brought you by health hubspot because using only twenty percent of your business data is like dating somebody who only text you in emojis first of all that's annoying and second you're missing a lot of the context but that's how most businesses are operators today they're only using twenty percent of their data unless you use hubspot that's when all your emails your call logs your chat messages just to turn into insights to help you grow your business because all that data makes all the difference learn more at hub hubspot dot com can i ask me about confidence you give a talk with the a bunch of portfolio companies about i think i thought you say that like they don't fail due to lack of confidence but a lack of confidence i would say the number one reason why a founder fails at the ceo job is some kind of lack of confidence crisis of confidence whatever it is that causes them to hesitate basically okay i should do this and i can see that i should do this but i'm not sure i should do this so i'm gonna wait if you had to teach a class on how to improve someone's confidence is do you have like a framework or simple bullet points that you would that you would stand by it ends up being like at the end of the day confidence is personal and you have to feel it yourself to have it like i can't you know it's like the wizard of oz it's like i you know i can give you like a clock and tell you it's a heart or whatever but like at some point you've gotta believe that and the thing that causes the crisis in confidence is you know okay you invent something you hire a bunch of people you make a decision it's wrong people really suffer from it you feel horrible because you're like wow i don't know what i'm doing and i made a mistake and it had real consequences like most people in life don't have a situation like that until they become ceo and so then you know it's like well how do i how do i recover that and so like a lot of the idea of the firm is like well you know what if you could call anybody like how would that make you feel like what if you could call anybody you know in the white house in congress in you know like any executive you know any kind of big company ceo and be able to have a conversation you know like what if we could build that network for you so that was kind of the idea behind the platform and then you know we would do i used to have this event which i should probably bring back but i i ran out a room in my backyard eric called the ceo barbecue where we would bring all the ceos for the portfolio and then we would just like put like very famous people around them so we had like zac and larry page and kanye a lot of barbecue and they're at the barbecue and there's no like talks there's no business agenda there's no nothing there's no even toast right like it's just a barbecue and so it's just to make them feel like oh shit like i know kanye hit like i'm i i have to be somewhat important like so it's you're trying to like view this feeling though like i may not totally know what i'm doing but i should be ceo you know what about a barbecue with kanye yes yeah so i can't be too yeah what about what about the inverse when you look at a ceo and you're like oh they have just like hit this fork in the road now confidence is gonna go horribly is gonna go down and it's gonna be the their demise what decisions do those people make like what are the commonalities between the people who lose it that way it's sort like the charlie mu like tell me where i'm gonna die so i know not to go there right what what would be the decisions i would make to to take me off the path i would say the big thing is it's almost like a lack of decision right like it's a hesitation in football though i say like trust you have to trust your eyes because you could be really fast but if you don't start running when you see the thing if you wait then you're not fast and that's kind of what it's like for ceos like you could be really really smart but if you wait too long before you pull the trigger you're not smart anymore it's too like and there there's all kinds of like excuses people tell themselves to not make a decision so for example like the one of the biggest ones on an executive like is well if you know we made such a big deal when we hired him like what is the press gonna say or what are the people in the company gonna say or you know i don't have time to hire a new person to do the job that this guy's fucking up with you like these kinds of there's all these reasons not to make the decision and they're all just if you think about him for more than like five minutes you go well that's doesn't make any fucking sense because this guy's like fuck up the whole org like who goes a fuck what the press is like can you just get rid of him like start rebuilding now you you know like it's not if he's doing a bad job like no job is better than a bad job like i think we all know that and everything kind of ends up like that i don't know enough to make the decision like i didn't give him enough of a chance this than that the other so it's it's kind of that lack of confidence that generally causes a no decision where there really needs to be a decision is is the main i i would say that's the common pattern yeah so and the two examples you gave the first one was like the cto blah blah that's kind of like avoiding the conversation yeah would be the the the mistake there and then in this one like avoiding the decision would be the mistake yeah you have to you know i wrote a post the long time ago so you know run at the pain in darkness you have to run at the pain in darkness you can't run away from it if you run away from it it's all bad you're pretty good at a tit blog posts in books i think you know the hard thing about the hard things like bad ass but i think you said that i think in the in the publishing industry typically the author's title is not the winning title and i think you were like brag and that you're like that's my title i came up with yeah hey ram i i i didn't take full yeah because i didn't need a book like i i didn't actually wanna write the book they asked me to write the book the the publisher so i felt like i did do what i wanted so i i called it what i wanted yeah what what do you what excites you so this you know a lot of the stuff we talked about is like the hard stuff the pain and but nobody gets into this for just the pain right nobody gets into this though the pain is just a sort of necessary that we we go through to get to do the good stuff i'm just curious what are you really excited about right now like what are either you know rabbit holes are going down cool stuff you've seen that you can't haven't have been able to forget like what's really cool and interesting to ben h well so one of the most exciting things that's going on now is you know like kind of it's well known that the united states has kind of fallen behind in defense manufacturing rare minerals all these kinds of things but what's been very exciting is like there are startups that are like or all solve that for america and so like we have a company that we just funded recently periodic labs which is using ai to do like novel material science to kind of enable better kinda of design of everything from like rockets to missiles to you know all sorts of things and then we have a company cobalt metals that is basically using ai so they take a dirt sample and they use ai to analyze the dirt sample and they it tell you oh yeah there's gonna be like you know copper below that you know whatever a mile down into the earth and so you know these kinds of techniques where you're kind using tech to go no we're gonna catch up fast has been like very very exciting i would say my my view is a founder on the ground is just that sometimes you see something and like i said it it breaks like imaginary wall you had and and sometimes things become cool and cool although we tried to not like follow trends sometimes you could use your psychology for you you rather and against you and instead i you know seeing what elon is done where it's like oh he goes into these really hard spaces and does these like like hardware or hard tech literal literal rocket science right and it's sort of una afraid of that or you know and going in and doing you know weapons and defense tech and making that cool to be kinda patriotic in that way is that what it was is that what it took or was there something else to it you know there's is a lot they're very challenging companies to build in some ways but on the other hand you know it's a good time to do them because people because elon has i mean know god bless elon for showing that it was possible so now whereas like only elon could have financed tesla normal people that can start to finance these things now because elon has shown that it's possible so it's a little bit like a four minute mile mile on that way i would say but yeah i mean like you know the things that yeah and even in like public safety you look at something like you know flock safe see in a way technologically it's not nearly as complicated as some of the other is like a as an or something like that but is very very powerful i mean you know they really make both kind of policing being a citizen and even being a criminal more safe because all of a sudden you're using ai to provide real intelligence so you know for example in las vegas where we deployed it a huge problem a huge problem in like police violence police getting killed our traffic steps and a big reason for that is somebody reports there's a you know a nineteen ninety eight honda acura that's driving that's brown that kidnapped have a baby okay so that's a real situation but like that description is usually wrong like the description of the actual car is usually wrong so you you have flex safety you have the exact match so the difference between a cop going into a situation where they may have the wrong guy and if they have the wrong guy that guys could get very agitated and then you have a bad situation or they know a hundred percent this guy he is in a car that we know is the car and there's a baby in the back that's not his okay you're going in with a hole you're not sending a single person in there with a gun coming out their motorcycle like you've got a whole team that's gonna make sure that that person is apprehended safely and incorrectly and the baby is synced i've heard i've heard fox this amazing thing is it drones is it cameras what are the so it's it's primarily like a camera system where ai well basically so somebody does something you know they grab the car on the camera that car shows up on another camera anywhere in the city and there they're like oh there it is and actually that's how they caught interestingly the the the tesla terrorist to set the tesla ship on fire in las vegas was he came in earlier to case the place flock safety pick up the car they saw the car come back at night and they were like oh we know whose car that is and they just went arrested them did you guys see that ad i think it was like two weeks ago i i was trying to find it it was went viral on twitter but it was basically i believe it was a solar company was it a solar company where they're recruiting employees and they had a whole website just dedicated to the recruitment aspect of just they needed more staff and they bought an ad in the new york times i believe were some newspaper and it was like an old man sitting with like what it looked like his grandson overlooking a mountain saw and and they're like overlooking i think it was solar panels i'm not exactly sure but it was like do you really wanna to tell your grandkids that you spent your entire thirties and forties building just b2b b software it was great and it like and there's this whole trend amongst young people in twitter of like being more traditional and things like that and i think that taking answer your question sean on about andrew and and elon i think that it's kinda been like a perfect spiral or a perfect mix of like people seeing elon and and palmer do these interesting things and also just like getting sick of just building b software or something you know that's just a stereotype for what's boring this may or may not be true but like you know like seeing this is like there could be more out there i think that the the software had to get good enough to of course make make these other things possible which is you know and it's amazing that we're at that time where you can really imagine changing the world in all kinds of ways you you get to see a lot of pitches of the smartest people in the world telling you what the future is gonna look like in five years and so you have this like element of your job that's a little bit like a time traveler so you you probably have a better sense of what the world looks nobody has perfect sense but you a better sense of what the world looks like you know five seven ten years from now you don't know exactly why you don't know who's gonna do it what's broken your brain either from a demo or a a story pitch that you've heard you know sometime in the last year so that that the rest of us we'll experience you know sometime in the future yeah so i think you know one of the things that i mean you in everybody's talking good about embodied ai and robots and so forth rightly so but i i would say like in the creative space i i'm starting to realize like this ai video and so forth it's not like making the old thing more efficient it's a new medium it's an actual new thing in the same ways that like movies weren't plays you know ai video is not video the stories that you can tell are completely different because you can do things that you just you know without a two hundred million dollar budget you had had no chance of doing and then now it's like no problem and i think that's gonna be like very very very interesting and then the how well it's working on like existing stuff so people you know the people who are on the cutting edge of the movie industry are now you know they're able to do like whole movie scenes or edit or change their movie have the ai actor do the do the do the third cut at at a level of quality that even the the actor doesn't know it wasn't a m doing the acting and and that kind of thing so it's i think it's gonna change dramatically again and and there's gonna be kind of white space for not new creative but new entertainment entrepreneurs and so forth that nobody is really imagining now is there any ai content that you consume as a fan yeah no no well like you know i i we've been watching that the one with the cap was pretty good over the over the weekend to cap playing all the instruments and the lady coming out unfortunately it's going like you gotta get that ra out you guys see that one yeah was without a sore those freddie good i think it's sore video ben do you mess around on sun at all with ai music yes sun and you know eleven labs has a model and u has got a very good models so there there's there's a few different really good models like i feel like i can have a music career again that's gonna be very very interesting to me because it it's sort of like one thing that hip hop showed was so people don't really realize this but this is something quincy jones pointed out to me before he pass he said you know ben like hip up started like exactly when they canceled all the music programs and schools like it was the saying that the exact same time when people didn't learn to play instruments and schools that's when that is exactly when hip hop began and hip hop kind of free you as a somebody who was like a musical talent from actually having to learn to play an instrument which you know and and even for the producers right like you had a drum machine you had samples so you could hear what you liked and play it but you didn't need to be a and that kind of opened up a world that we've happy for and i think ai music is kind of that on steroids i don't know if you guys know the number one song in the country right now is an ai country artist this i'll walk my walk oh yeah and and the first i think the first ai artist to got a record deal recently like you know so this is definitely what the future yeah looks like is people who pit non musicians it's just like you know rep and others make it so that you don't have to be a code to make ads yes yeah and now you don't have to be a musician to make music and i don't think people really understand how big of a deal that is like my my personal trainer who's been in the fitness world his whole life yeah has been in a rabbit hole making he's probably in the top point one percent of ai creators in the world right now that's pretty and he's like got like a full band he's like his own record label and every day he's up till two in the morning and he knows these programs inside it out and because he wasn't really accessible to somebody who didn't have you know musical talent before to be able to make music right there's a big difference between taste and creativity and being a virtuous of violin right like those those don't necessarily have to be the same thing and it's great that yeah know people you know whatever practice violin in for three hours a day and like get got amazing at it and all that kind of thing but it it's pretty neat to have a world where like okay if you can just do this part you can still play this is for the folks out there who have a business that does at least three million dollars a year in revenue because around this point that's when you're able to look up after being heads down for years building your company and you realize two things one you've done something great but you're still a long way from your final destination and two you look around and you realize i am all alone i've out run my peers which means you're now making ten million dollar decisions alone by yourself and that is when mediocrity can creep in my company hampton we solve this problem by getting a room of vetted peers of other entrepreneurs who are gonna hold you accountable call you out on your nonsense and help show you away because the fact is is that there's only a tiny number of people in your town who know what you're going through and who have been there and they're hard to find the biggest risk is not failing you have a company and it's working you're gonna be fine but the biggest risk is waking up ten years from now and saying shit i barely grew in business and in life and for people like you who are ambitious wasted potential and regret is what we want to help you to avoid we have made so many of these groups and we have a thousand plus members and i know this stuff actually works it can change your life it change mind and i know it will change yours so check it out join hampton dot com sean can you ask you have this really cool light about the rules of culture and making them memorable well yeah so when i'm doing the research one thing that stands out is like you talk about culture you talk about like and it which is normally culture is like i just fall asleep because it is so overt talked about in the business world just like you gotta really tell me something wrong overt talked about without anybody saying anything the exactly culture culture right it's like so cool tell me your values is like integrity like alright great glad to hear i'm i was worried it was gonna be the opposite right like it doesn't really tell you anything and you know when you go walk into the company the stuff on the wall doesn't match the stuff you see happening within the four walls so it's so you you get sort of disillusioned in the way but when you see somebody do is something interesting or you or somebody actually pulling it off which of course there are examples i get interested so one thing that i thought was cool of nuance that i hadn't really heard before is you were talking about how at asics z you kind of take time to drive the culture like i think in the new onboarding you like i do in a culture session one hour they signed something at the end and one of the nuances is i thought that was interesting was you said my rule for writing the kind of like the culture rules is it has to have some shock value like it has to give per per the the other person like oh what the hell are you talking about type of reaction if it's gonna be memorable i think the idea was if it's not memorable it's never gonna be remembered or used so you have to do something to make it memorable can you talk about your theory around this yeah so i mean it it kind of comes down to what you do every day right like it's a daily habit so you know this idea that you put cultural values on the wall and then you know the once a year at a performance trip you you said do your fall the culture it's like that that means absolutely nothing right it's nothing and so it's like well what do you do every day and so like one of the things we do every day is like we meet with entrepreneurs so like what's a rule that sets the culture around that so it's like well if you're late at at anything it's ten dollars a minute it's like well ten dollars a minute like well what if i have to go to the bathroom yeah you owe me fifty dollars i don't care you know what what if had an important phone call like can you only me a hundred dollars like i don't care you have an important phone call well like why am i paying the work here you know well because building a company is extremely hard and culturally we wanna have the ultimate respect for that and we don't wanna waste any entrepreneurs time and so that's your most important thing so you have to plan to do that you guys have a fine now you're talking about this is a real a z yeah so every time i have to like go to the meeting you know like i have to think about that because i've gotta be on time i gotta fucking plan my day so like there's not i'm not back to back on that one i gotta be on time otherwise you know i'm gonna be embarrassed in all that kind of thing and so well why and why am i doing that and then that okay if you do that that's a habit that makes you go okay like no i'm gonna respect what this is i know how hard this to build a company i may not even know how hard it is but i know that like somebody here thinks it's hard enough that i have to show up on time so can you keep can you tell some more of those interesting like you know the the tar ness paying thing that's pretty cool what does the amount so as well second one is like if you if you talk smack about an entrepreneur on x you're fired it doesn't matter if they're in the portfolio or not you're just that's it and why is that you know well culturally first of all we're dream builders when not i dream killers if you want do something bigger than yourself and make the world a better place i don't care what it is i don't care if i think it's stupid i'm for that i'm not against that i am for that and i don't care if like sequoia funded you or benchmark funded you i'm for that like go get it like we're a pro entrepreneur and then you know kind of related to that i don't wanna give anybody credit from making themselves like smart by making some else look stupid like i don't wanna give anybody like a gold star for saying that guy's you know make selling dollars for eighty five cents i'm so clever you know like fuck you like no we're not doing that here and so it's it's that kind of thing where it's like oh that seems like a harsh punishment but i get it i get it because i've heard it and and i understand it and so then that's like a way to kind of show up behavioral daily as opposed to you know like look here's the problem with integrity what does that mean break like integrity only matters when it's tested everybody has integrity everybody's honest until it's tested and then when it's tested very few people are right like when it cost you money when it cost you a deal would it cost you your marriage are you honest then because that's the actual thing and so you can't just have it in the abstract you have to say like what behaviors do want do you have to have to work here you know how responsive do you have to be these things end up making the culture much more so than like a value or like one thing i really like is the the the samurai called them vi virtue saying ain't call them values it's like these are the virtue like this this is your way of being this isn't like some fucking it's not a set of ideas it's a set of actions a culture is a set of actions listen to this sean so if you go to a sixteen z dot com slash about you'll see their values and i just wanna read like i've never seen this before so i'm gonna read a couple of them but the six one the six out of seven it's we played a win our culture only matters if we're important and in order to be important we must win we are the best firm in the world we expect to win there it's just like that's fantastic i love that and that's i don't know if controversial is the right word but it's polarizing right and not a lot of people are are into that but that's that's bad ass and then you say you have another one that are really like we only do we only do first class business and only in a first class way i think that's a really i actually stalled out phrasing from jpmorgan so called he said it in court they were accusing him with some kind of like crazy like mark manipulation and here talking about me v jp yeah yeah yeah james part jpmorgan yeah yeah yeah i think that was i think i read about that line in the andrew so got that like nineteen twenty eight or twenty nine book and and i think it says that but that's great so but okay but like when i go to this site and i see these i'm like okay this kind of like these are like the high level principles but you what you were saying just now is a little bit different you were like hey look well there's it's got be behaviors that support the principles yeah yes so you you you basically were like what are the daily situations and actions where we have a choice we either show up this way or we show up this way and we're gonna show up this way and sometimes with a a penalty punishment or praise based on like the extreme version of that behavior with the no tolerance policy right like and i think there's this great military quote that you have in your book oh yeah well hey if you if you see something below standard and you don't correct it you said a new standard and right and that's a but that's very true and that's why they have to be specific because if they're not specific you can't enforce it how do you enforce like you don't have integrity that just gets weaponized it's like that guy doesn't even tell you he's not following the cultural value you know he doesn't why doesn't he have integrity well he lied me well let's go talk to him no i didn't lie you did it like so it's not that whereas oh you just put out that tweet like that's clearly against the cultural value like there's no backing off that so like you know facebook famously had moved fast and break things which i think that was really good by the way hall of fame yeah know that's that's a hall fame but like that's kind of the you know one of the famous that i thought about i thought about that for months like i'm like move fast and break kid because it's so counterintuitive intuitive it's like well you know you you want me to break things i'm an engineer i make things i'm gonna break things but it it was just his way of saying like there is no excuse for not fucking ship it like we're going right yes but it'll don't have that anymore do today is that well you know they got bigger and then you know i think speed wasn't their main thing that they were trying to achieve i think they literally changed it to like move fast it's moved and stable it like with stable infrastructure and reliable yeah i'm lost its edge yeah to have you seen anything like that move faster break things or just a behavior when you walked into their airbnb office you noticed something yeah i'm mean too and you know amazon had this thing where they used to make the desks out of like doors and to by forest and so i tried doing that by the way it's it's way cheaper to get a desk it's way cheaper were to get a desk but like i think the idea back in whatever the late nineties when they did that was like like we're not wasting anyway yeah you know and that kind of thing which is you know those markers are are very very powerful like one of my favorite one of those was actually from the haitian revolution when to saint lo basically made a role he's like you you can't cheat on your wife which which was like so absurd because here they are they're in a colony you know a french colony they're you know the british the spanish the french they're all raping and pill and doing all this stuff all these armies and these guys i can't cheat on their walks but that little cultural idea that said look this is about trust i gotta be able to trust you and like the people has to be able to trust you ended up basically really influencing the war so one of the things that was like very surprising i think to people who read about the hi revolution was the you know here's the slave army taking on these european colonies and the white women in the colony supported to cent against like the french and you go like well why they do that because they didn't rape they didn't pill like to sound like these guys were like half naked soldiers or slaves and they weren't doing any of that they were super polite they were they they behaved in a certain way and the legend is so he was too sat mature but slaves didn't have last name so where did mature come from and so the story is napoleon who really was pissed at them brought his generals together and it's like how the fuck can you not get this slate like how can you not defeat this slave and they're like well we get them backed up we get them surrounded it and then all of the sun there's an opening and he became to san church to sand the opening and the opening a lot of people say was created by these towns people these you know these women who were just like now fuck where for him who where for that army i don't give fuck about your jeremy army we're for that army so like the culture it can be like super influential that's a great story that's really cool ask you mentioned amazon see jeff bezos got a new startup oh it's yeah did jeff got new photo oh yeah you you didn't see this announcement they project prometheus it they raised an initial seed round of six billion two two that true they called it a sea round oh yeah the first round of funding so six billion dollars raised and they got a hundred people and they're building ai for like the the physical world so it's not just robots but basically like the manufacturing of airplanes and ships and think things like that so they're basically saying how do we use ai yeah and like sort of advanced manufacturing i think it's the i think is the idea but obviously the little title details but that's pretty cool he's like back in a operational role for the first time which is cool yeah no i i think that by the way like how great is it that the logistics genius of our time is back at it and gonna help us like get back in the manufacturing game like that yeah yeah yeah those things are just incredible to me and i think all of us were a little sad when jeff was just living his best life just because he's is so talented so this is very great news i loved it i was like hi these guy's having fun he's getting jacked he's showing a a different you know a a new north star also which like has has kind of also taken over the ticket by the way like what whatever like you know people always make you into cartoon when you get to that level he is you know for sure like a top two or three best ceo in the last forty years so you're you're you're a bit surprising to me because i've read all your books i know about your background basically like you have like a guided the people who have shaped destiny you have also shaped destiny yourself but like you're you've done all these amazing things and you're a shockingly fun hang normally think like you know about hip hop and all this stuff normally the people who have outs size results typically have very strange personalities and and they're like a little quirky and i'm sure you have your quirks but you just seem shockingly well balanced for how not normal your successes is there anything in your day to day life you that you think that is would would surprise probably like the average person or are there any tendencies that you have that you recognize probably aren't at all normal well yeah you know i i would say probably the thing the thing that my daughter always says that is unusual about me and i think it came from like the beginning of my you like i had i i am different than the modern people like i was married when i was twenty two i had three kids by the time was twenty five like i i kind of had to grow up fast and you know and then right i had the company again i was trying to raise the kids and the company and you know i i have money for na or anything so like it it was a lot of that but what she says to me is she's like dad like you're like at the up of mas hierarchy key like you're very zen with all this mh and like i take things for what they are i i don't look like i'm pretty good not being une emotional but not letting like my emotional reaction control my behavior were you always that way or did you become no no it's definitely not like i think it was just all the trauma that like forced me to learn that what age do it did what what made you calm down was it age was it kids was it success was it like look i've made it everything else is just icing on the cake i don't care well hey i think it was the combination of the kids and the company you the the the first company i found it love caught which pretend became ops where was so difficult that i never like in life since then like we like we've had difficulties building the firm whatever but like they never got like a rise out of me that could compare to you know what i'd already been through so it's almost like i i feel like it's almost like i know guys my friend oliver stone was in vietnam and like you could tell everything about him was i'm not in vietnam anymore so much of his life is defined by not being a na and like i i do feel like i i don't wanna compare it to work as people always criticized me for my war metaphors but it it's kinda like that feeling where it's like okay i've been through that i'm just looking at the world differently now and about it and and and like i'm sure you had some sense of like alright i've accomplished something like i feel good maybe i'm playing with house money a little bit with with everything else yeah it's a little house money and then it's a little like all you can do is deal with the thing that it is you can't stop it from having happen it happens and that now you have to deal with it were there any other sort of wisdom accelerators so you have these formative experiences right you you got three kids in three years or whatever in you're about time twenty five and then you're trying to build a start up and everything you face kind of like the back against the wall moments were there any other formative things like you know for example my life i went to like a tony robbins seminars like you know i sort of got five years of wisdom in the weekend type of type of yeah he's very good at like dealing with your own psychology he's yeah are you first summer doing something or you read a book at the right time or you get the right message at the right time and you have a moment where you just aside like from now on x i guess i'm just curious was there any if i just think about like formative moments besides the kids and besides loud cloud what what else would there have been okay so when i was a kid i was in this relay race and it was like it was a very big deal for me you know like it was whatever the track made and we came in second in the relay race my father wasn't at the race but we came in second because and the team that came in first dropped the baton and like didn't pick it up the guy just ran up the baton and they gave in first place and they didn't penalize it and so i was you know my father said how'd you doing the race and i was like well we came in second but it wasn't fair and i was gonna explain to him why and he said stop right there he said life isn't fair and that shocked me so much at the time but it really stuck with me and it's the single best lesson that i ever got in my life was life isn't fair and i see young people wreck themselves so much because they have an expectation that something about life is gonna be fair like nothing about life is fair it's not fair where you're born it's not fair what race you are it's not fair like what your parents did it's not fair like the job interviews aren't fair like nothing the tests aren't fair nothing is fair and laugh and so the way you succeed is you don't have that expectation you just deal with it as it is and i think that everybody who tries to or who like thinks well like i wasn't treated fairly or this is fact like that is devastating you know like for sure i mean the whole time you you know when lot of cloud in the dot crashed and half our customers went out of business i never crossed my mind to go this is unfair it was just like okay i have to deal with it and that is i would say the single best peace of advice and way of looking at life that you can have is just it is what it is and now do what you can do with it being as it is it is very important you've referenced a lot of really cool stuff the the haiti story i've heard you talk about history a lot outside of work work related stuff what interests you right now you know sean and we like to talk about just like just fun stuff that you were into i'm i'm constantly reading about world war two i like that what about you is there anything that you're kind of like being obsessed about yeah so i do have this i'll give a plug for it so i i have this charity that i created with my wife called the paid and full foundation which basically you know it's kind of this idea a win but we give pensions to the old hip hop guys so you know i got a hundred thousand dollars a year and and then we have this award so for them you know where we named them grand masters and so forth and you know that's so the first winners were rock camden scarf face and and you know we had grand master cows and s and q d and so forth and then grand p and and ko rap and this year you know we added this thing the quincy jones award to the guys who got sample the most and we gave it to george clinton and the event was so i'm still thinking about it was so amazing because so george clinton knows all the words to follow the leader and so he's on stage and quincy john says can he rap all and he's rap follow the leader and ra kim came out and wrapped with him so it got george clinton and ra kim and then doctor dr bought a table to the event and he like couldn't help himself he goes up on stage just to say look i have no career without george clinton and it was just so amazing to have like all these guys that were so important and that influenced so many people just being that appreciative of of each other was i was like you know and it's kind of and you know hip hop of course is so competitive and and you know they're always going out each other and so forth but to for them to be at that point where they could just go man you guys meant so much to me and and that kind of thing was it was just very special that's so cool yeah that that idea of tensions for for for the og is is so great where what did that just come on a whim or you're just at lunch one day and you're like why don't they you know how does that because that one liner gives you the clarity right gives you the clarity of where to go so so i was listening to the the each of the is jay z son where he says i'm over charging for what they did to the cold crush and it goes with and it's like who was the cold crush and it turns out right it's grand master cas and grand master cas wrote bra was delight basically and they stole it from it and they stole it from him so nasty that they didn't change the words so big bang graft so if i'm the g r andy ray ray n nd m the as that's grand master cas that's his he's rap about his name not big back hank big bang hank is them not named grand master why is he calling himself grandma s because he stole is fucking wrong and he never got paid and he never got credit for it and everybody in hip hop knows this and grand master cas by the way like if you meet him he's a stop like he's the coolest guy in the room he dresses amazing he's like super articulate he can still wrap like crazy today sixty six years old or sixty five something like that and i was like wow like we ought to go back and fix that and then you know where kim was like on tour at these little clubs and so forth i was like i guess where kim like how are people treating them like that so that was the idea most like we ought to just do it you know i'm like getting it set up with the irs and all that stuff is like extremely complicated but yeah it's been it's been really really i i would say amazing and like just the like an unbelievable epi so cas at the last one tells me he's like ben i bought a house i was like oh that's amazing cast you've got a house he's like no ben it's first time my wife i haven't lived in the projects like grand master cas the guy who were the first great hip hop sign who was never not lived in into projects like how crazy is that and you know now here he is for the house in pennsylvania here and see he's got berries in his backyard and the whole thing yeah he's got berries his backyard it is pretty nuts the people who are like invent the shit don't get it like for example sean i love seen and like we see like the early u events in bad yeah and they're getting two thousand dollars to show up yeah and they still come to like the legends awards and they still are talking and you're like damn him dude this guy probably is someone insurance or something like that like he like you know he probably got made fifteen thousand dollars that year no doubt no doubt yeah this happens is the nba too this is why like the culture gets kinda messed up the because the old heads keep criticizing all the new players yeah and it's like wow why are you doing that it's like they made too much more money makes seventy million dollars a year and that guy didn't make seven in his whole career and he's like i'm better than that guy and that guy you know so the this resentment and then they get on and then they're the the guys doing the halftime shows and it's bad bad for the product right like bad for their lineage because everything is a creative lineage like on top of what was yeah before right so you it's really cool to kind of almost like economically fix the you know or like try to improve that ecosystem because we all think like you know it's funny it's it's also kind thought i have about capitalism this capitalism is is definitely the system that lifted the world out of poverty and like kind of created the modern more we live in yet you know it's incredibly powerful but right over time it does get corrupted and so forth and even if it wasn't corrupted it's not perfect and like certain things happen like oh you create a musical art form and or the guys who actually made it happen and it becomes the biggest musical art form in the world and you never got paid like capitalism shit work like that but it's just kind of the way it works right like and it's nobody's fault and so like you can go back and say fool just correct those things i think that i think you are so cool like you're on one hand you're like a pretty like hard hitting capitalists where you're getting after it and you're you're talking about making really tough decisions of having to fire people whatever but then you're also like but also we can we could do good by doing all this other stuff and i think that like particularly in tech i don't think that people's interests are are particularly that wide yeah well i think people are get very into tech yeah like tech is so deep and invest that like people can get stuck in it for sure yeah yeah well ben we thank you for coming on man i know you're you got a lot of things going on but this was this is a lot of fun i appreciate it yeah no it's a good time thanks guys definitely alright appreciate you that's it that's a pod i feel like got rude to work to know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like a days off on a road travel never looking back hey let's take a quick i tell you about a podcast that you could check out it is called the science of scaling by mark robe he was the founding ceo of hubspot and he's a guest lecturer at harvard business school the guy smart and he sits down every week with different sales leaders from cool companies like cla y and van and open ai and he's asking about their strategies their tactics and how they're growing their companies as you know head of sales or chief revenue officer if you're looking at to scale the company up if you're a cro or head of sales just look at to level up in your career i think a podcast like this could be great for you listen to the science of scaling wherever you get your podcast