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BH Ben Horowitz Ben Horowitz Co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, the venture firm he launched in 2009 with Marc Andreessen.

“When I think about the decisions I made as CEO, the ones that I'm most proud of and would have cost us most weren't actually difficult decisions. They were just difficult to make. And that was like a psychological thing.”

a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026

“When I think about the decisions I made as CEO, the ones that I'm most proud of and would have cost us most weren't actually difficult decisions. They were just difficult to make. And that was like a psychological thing.” — Ben Horowitz, a16z Podcast

Horowitz, speaking to founders, explains why hesitation is what sinks companies. His example: taking LoudCloud public on $2 million in trailing revenue, because the only other option was bankruptcy.

Transcript

a16z Podcast Around 35:53 into the episode
Ben Horowitz

…You know, how do you add channels? Because you have to be kind of multi-country, multi-channel, multi-product as you go. How do you do all that? And what can we as a firm do to enable that kind of thing? So we're playing with a lot of those ideas and other things that'll hopefully make us better.

Andrew Chen

Well, I think we have maybe 25 minutes to do some audience questions.

Ben Horowitz

Yeah, so I think the biggest thing that I have concluded that I'm feeling pretty sure about is AI kind of video and entertainment and so forth is a new medium. So there was kind of like plays and then there was film and then there's going to be AI film. And I think it'll be as different from film as film was from plays. So in the beginning of the movie industry, they would just film plays. And, you know, they'd like fix camera, do the play, and we'll record it. And that was the idea. Andrew Chen it obviously changed dramatically over the intervening decades. And I think that's going to happen. I think that's like in the beginning, it'll just be using AI to kind of generate certain scenes and movies and this kind of thing and so forth. But I think what's going to happen is there's going to be a whole new set of creators using the new medium to do things. You know, like it's interesting, like if you think about it in the context of social media, social media is like storytelling where the main character is…

Andrew Chen

Any parting words of wisdom in many of the kind of year one projects here?

Ben Horowitz

I would just say this. Congratulations on betting on yourself because that's what this is all about. You know, your job is to like make your bet pay off. So like you believed in yourself enough to do it. You got to, there are going to be many times when you question that bet and you question that…

Andrew Chen

All right. What about?

Speaker names from our own diarization · position estimated from where the line sits in the episode

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