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a16z Podcast · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Horowitz was asked how a venture investor gets good at picking winners. He calls this a trap his own firm falls into from time to time: every great entrepreneur has something badly wrong with them, so a list of flaws tells you little. What he looks at is the size of the one strength.
should have hired Aaron. That's the one that Chris Lyons got.
Being a VC is about picking winners. Tell me something about picking winners. How do you manage emotion? How do you become great at picking winners?
…Like that's a mistake. Or, you know, vice versa, you're like, this is a great entrepreneur, but you don't realize his idea is no good. So probably not as good as you think. So it is tricky in that sense. And then, yeah, you don't know how they're going to perform under pressure. And then the other thing that like the other trap that, you know, we'll get into from time to time is, you know, we have all these great analytical people and they'll be able to figure out everything that's wrong with any idea or any company or any entrepreneur. But that's not what matters. What matters is, are their strengths world class? So are they the best in the world at something? And then you overlook everything else. Like kind of going back to Elon, like he's got some personality issues. You know, like he upsets people from time to time, but like his strength is so ridiculous that you put money on that every time. And I think you want to look at the magnitude of the strength. And I think that like every entrepreneur we see who gets to us is pretty good. But are they like outstanding? Are they better than…
When you think about, you know, picking the person and be like, well, those things are not so good, but this person's going to make some moves. Definitely sent waves through Silicon Valley, but blowback from the culture on like, you know, the firm kind of getting behind the Trump campaign to some…
So with the Trump thing, you know, like we try to be as apolitical as possible, but we had run into massive problems with the Biden administration on kind of two fronts. One was crypto and then the other was AI. So on crypto, they basically didn't outlaw to the end. They did these extra legal…
who are you to ask for a meeting? You deserve a meeting with Biden.