Building Startups: Major Shifts in Tech & Culture

This episode delves into the landscape of startup creation post-COVID, focusing on technology's evolution and shifting cultural dynamics within the business sector.

1. Hybrid and Remote Work Trends: The pandemic has permanently altered the landscape of how startups operate, emphasizing flexibility and remote work capabilities.
2. Government's Role in Innovation: Operation Warp Speed is discussed as a successful model of government intervention in accelerating technology and innovation, specifically in vaccine development.
3. AI's Impact on Startups: AI is poised to be a significant factor in future startup ecosystems, influencing everything from operational efficiency to strategic decision-making.
4. Cultural Shifts in Business Practices: The episode underscores a significant shift towards questioning traditional business practices and institutional trust, particularly in the wake of the pandemic.
5. Future of Workforce and Management: Discussions include predictions about the changing nature of workforce management and the integration of AI, impacting HR roles and corporate structures.

1. Introduction to Post-COVID Startups

Overview of the startup environment post-pandemic with a focus on technological disruptions. Key topics include changes in work modalities and the accelerated adoption of AI.

• Marc Andreessen: "The biggest tech disruption from COVID could arguably be the acceleration of vaccine development timelines through initiatives like Operation Warp Speed."
• Ben Horowitz: "The traditional model of vaccine development was transformed, paving the way for rapid innovation in biotechnology."

2. Government Interaction and Technological Advancements

Discussion on how government interaction during the pandemic can serve as a model for future technology advancements.

• Ben Horowitz: "The government acting as a customer rather than a venture capitalist could be a model moving forward, especially seen in the success of the space race and now Warp Speed."

3. The Shift in Workplace Culture

Analysis of how remote work has changed the foundational aspects of workplace culture and employee interaction.

• Marc Andreessen: "Remote work has fundamentally changed how we perceive office and work life, accelerating the adoption of video conferencing and digital collaboration tools."

4. Societal Trust and Institutional Credibility

Exploration of how societal trust has evolved during the pandemic, impacting startups' operational and strategic approaches.

• Marc Andreessen: "We're witnessing a seismic shift in how people view institutions, which is recalibrating how startups need to position themselves in terms of corporate governance and societal impact."

1. Embrace Flexible Work Arrangements: Adapt to the increasing demand for remote and hybrid work models to attract and retain talent.
2. Leverage Government Partnerships: Explore opportunities for collaboration with government initiatives to secure early traction and funding.
3. Integrate AI into Business Processes: Utilize AI to streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and innovate product offerings.
4. Rebuild Institutional Trust: Develop transparent practices that rebuild trust both internally with employees and externally with customers and stakeholders.
5. Prepare for Continuous Learning: Cultivate a culture that embraces continuous learning and adaptability to stay ahead in rapidly changing technological landscapes.

Welcome to "The Ben & Marc Show" featuring a16z co-founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. In this first episode of a two-part series, Marc and Ben visit the Twittersphere (or X-sphere) to answer YOUR questions about startup building in this post-COVID world.
In this one-on-one conversation, Ben and Marc discuss the biggest tech disruptions of the past four years, dive into the major problems facing American cities – including crime and a commercial real estate crisis – and question the future of our 40-hour work week. That and much more. Enjoy!

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Marc Andreessen
If I'm an HR person and I want to really assert control of our company, it's like, look, I've got the law on my side, I've got your career in my hands, and I can nuke you on social and moral grounds whenever I want. Like, that's an incredibly powerful set of capabilities in these larger institutions. Are those apparatuses now so powerful that they actually run the show and they can't be taken out? Or at some point is there some sort of revolt, either from the top or from the bottom, where people are just like, no longer willing to live like this? The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investor or potential investors in any a 16 z fund.

Please note that a 16 Z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast. For more details, including a link to our investments, please see a 16 z.com disclosures welcome back. We're thrilled to have you all here again. We have a big show today. Once again, we have gone to the Twitter, the Twitter sphere, now known as the X Sphere, the zeek sphere, to get your questions and many good questions poured in.

The topic for today is building startups in the post COVID world. And Ben, we're going to cover four sets of questions. One is just on the post COVID environment generally. Second is on kind of the modern state of building stone startups. What's changed?

What's not? Third is on hybrid and remote work, which continues to be a hot topic. And then fourth is building startups in the era of AI, which is, of course, the other big change. So we will dive right in. Very first question, big, sort of big, big picture question.

Si asks, what do you think was the biggest tech disruption that came out. Of COVID Yeah, you know, that's a great question. I think the one that I'm hoping is, is the biggest disruption is actually warp speed, because, you know, we've been kind of through many iterations of trying to figure out how the government should be involved in tech. And we've seen this all over the world with many different governments. And, you know, there was the famous kind of government being a venture capitalist for clean tech, which led to the giant cylinder investment that didn't turn out so well.

Ben Horowitz
And then kind of like various other activities that haven't been so good. But the model that seems to work the best in the US anyway is the model we use in the space program. Which kind of created the chip industry, which was, okay, if you can build this chip, then we will become a giant customer. And that's sort of what they did with warp speed. They said, look, if you can make this vaccine, we will buy a lot of it.

And that kind of is a huge thing because it really changed the nature of vaccine development in the sense that prior to that, it's just very, very challenging economically to fund vaccine development because, you know, basically the trials are very difficult because you're trying doing trials on people who are not sick. And so that really, really complicates the issue. And it's why we don't, you know, we went along with the Ebola vaccine, and, you know, it's very hard to come up with vaccines for various things because it's just too hard to finance. But if the government says, hey, if you make one that works and that we like, then we'll give you a bag of money. Then all of a sudden, you know, everything changes.

And I think that for things that are strategic to the United States, that's the right model. So, you know, hopefully that is kind of a government interaction, which will create many technological breakthroughs, which hopefully came out. Of COVID No, I can't resist noting that the enormous amount of enthusiasm for the vaccine and for warp speed, both during the last year of the Trump administration when it was a republican project, and that's an equal amount of enthusiasm in 2021 when it was a democratic project. Both parties that we sitting here today seem to have just let it, the whole idea die. And that's in two parts.

Marc Andreessen
Number one, just all of a sudden, nobody cares about, like, vaccines. Like, there are no calls for, like, expanded vaccine development programs. And then, of course, there are no calls for expanding Operation Warp drive to other domains. Are you. Yeah.

Does that depress you? Or do you think that idea is still there and we just need to, like, we can, like, kind of light it back up? Well, I think we can light it back up. Cause it was so recent and it actually worked very well. I mean, you look, there are issues with the vaccine and so forth, but at least the initial vaccine against the initial variant was a home run, you know, and then, like, we got more variants and the vaccine didn't work and there were side effects there.

Ben Horowitz
There are other things, but, you know, as vaccine development goes, it was a miracle. So, sadly, Ben just got us banned on YouTube, so we will see you all on rumble. Hey, that's it.

Marc Andreessen
That's a joke. Hopefully. That's a joke. Yeah. So let me.

Let me just add. Add my voice, which is. Yeah, I mean, you know, very clearly, like, what we could. What we could really use as an operation. Warp speed for a whole broad cross section of technological developments.

There's a version of this for chips, but it sort of seems a little bit stalled in the launch pad. Although maybe it's in the process of gathering momentum. Yeah, perhaps. Maybe. Anyway, I think that was a great.

Okay, that's a great one. I'm going to add just the obvious one, but it's worth calling out because we've all gotten used to it so fast. But video conferencing, it's worth noting that the concept, it's just a great case study of technological adoption. The first video conferencing system, I believe, was the at and t picture phone in 1965, which was a complete failure. And then there was, you know, 40, 50 years.

65, 50 years. And the rationale for the failure, I think, wasn't actually true. Right. Like, so for years, the rationale was people don't want to see each other when they talk on the phone. Right.

Ben Horowitz
Like it was the user behavior supposed to ban what thing or something else. Yeah, there was that, you know, which. Which is, of course, reminiscent of at one point, the movie studios thought that people didn't want to. Want to hear actors talk. So, you know.

Marc Andreessen
Yeah, that could be. That could be. But also, I think there was also just bad. I think there was just a straight up chicken and egg problem, or what our colleague Andrew Chen calls the cold star problem, which is video conferencing. Unit number one is totally useless because there's nobody to call.

And so if everybody has video conferencing set up, it becomes very useful. But there was no. It is striking that between 1965 to 2020, there was no real slingshot effect. I mean, you'll remember, Ben, we were obviously involved in Skype, know, almost 15 years ago now, and they had video calling and, you know, some people used it, but, you know, it was hardly even the main feature of Skype at that point. But anyway, so obviously.

So obvious observation is COVID has, you know, lit that on fire starting in 2020. It was sort of remarkable to see everybody discover webcams and zoom and video conferencing and all these things also, of course, cause podcasts and YouTube and so forth like this format to take off. But it is striking, like how. How long it took for that to happen and then how immediate the cutover and then that stuck. And what we'll talk later about, you know, how much hybrid and remote work continue.

But I think everybody just now takes it for granted that they're available by video when they're not available in person. And that seems to now be a human universal, but definitely was not the case in 2019. Yeah, no, for sure. For sure. It actually kind of showed how, like, horrible most conference call systems were.

Ben Horowitz
Like, when you're in a big room with, like, lots of little microphones and nobody can hear anything. Yeah, it was such a, it was such a big step to just to not have that, to have the, have everybody on a say, we're much better, of course, to have everybody just on a video call versus a hybrid meeting. And then the other tech disruption I would just highlight is sort of a broader societal disruption that leads to a lot of tech opportunity, which is something I've talked about in the past, which is just, I think COVID was another just massive blow to, I don't say for better or for worse, deserved or not. COVID was a massive blow to societal trust in institutions and trust in authority. And so a very large number of people in the US and certainly in the western world kind of saw what happened during COVID and they saw the operation of various kinds of authorities.

Marc Andreessen
And they, you know, they, I think they view what happened as a fundamental breach of trust. And by the way, I would say that's actually true of both people who think that, for example, lockdowns should have been lifted much sooner. And also for people who think they should have gone on much longer, nobody was happy. Nobody was happy, or even the vaccine people who thought there should be universal vaccination, the government didn't push hard enough, or people who thought that vaccines should not have been mandated. And the common theme here, of course, is just this world we live in now where just generalized trust in institutional authorities collapsing.

I've mentioned in the past, you can see this in all the surveys. Gallup does a regular survey of trust in all the major institutions. And it's basically been falling in a secular line across most major institutions since the 1970s. By the way, we way predating the Internet, but accelerating in recent years and then specifically since 2020. For a bunch of big institutions, the credibility has just fallen off a cliff.

And so, again, for better or for worse, the average person in western societies now has just an incredibly dim view of the ruling authorities. And that is something that is going to ripple through our society in many ways and already is. But also, I think, generally speaking, is bullish on new institutions because as people get kind of madder and madder at the existing status quo institutions, they're going to want more alternatives. Yeah. You know, I've been observing, like, a really wild phenomenon along those lines where if you listen to any economist or read any newspaper, you'll think the economy is doing fantastic.

Ben Horowitz
And then if you read any survey of the american people, you'll see the economy is a disaster. And that I don't think could have happened in any other era where people were so confident that what they were reading and hearing was false that they would actually stick to their own view, like almost universally on it. Then, of course, the delta is like how you interpret inflation. And it turns out if you need to buy stuff in our rate, for you and I, inflation is not that big a deal for, like, I think most of the populace, it's a huge deal, but kind of ignored in the reporting of economic statistics to a very, very large degree. Yeah.

Marc Andreessen
Well, as you know, just because inflation goes down doesn't mean prices go down. Right. So if you're paying 30% more for groceries and inflation falls, you're still paying 30% more for groceries. Well, and then Larry Summers had a really interesting piece where he pointed out, like, we're not counting like, the interest rate impact on inflation, which is massive. If you consider, like rent or like mortgage payments or these kinds of things.

Ben Horowitz
You know, it's, it dwarfs everything and, you know, we're not counting it. So that's a problem I have a. Much longer speech I could give about how the public health, basically, public health officials really, you know, basically blew the, blew the giant hole in the side of the credibility of their entire. Things up. It turns out, yes, they weren't totally honest at every step.

Marc Andreessen
And I bring that up because I could argue that basically the mentality from authorities of we're going to lie to you for your own good, which has been a very common kind of thing for authorities for forever. Only the whole history of the United States. Right. Yeah. Well, even before.

Even, say, even before that, even the long lived history of all institutions, all authority, which is basic, basically that the theory would be basically that reality is messy. But as a leader, you can't get up there and say reality is messy. You have to get up there and have a simple, clean message that people can understand and follow. And so there's always this process of kind of distilling, distilling the messiness of reality down to a political message. And that always involves some level of misrepresentation, deception.

And for a very long time, populations that were illiterate were easy to steer that way. Populations that only had top down media were able to steer that way. A population that has bottoms up media is basically impossible to steer that way. Yeah. And so there's this, like, mismatch between the sort of, you know, what you might call sort of top down, sort of simplified messaging or, you know, more cynically lies, you know, and then the ability to kind of sustain authority when, when people can really question it in detail.

And so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a little bit, Ben, to your point on inflation, it's a little bit like the public health mentality has sort of infected many other fields of sort of governmental and authority communication and economics is now one of those also. And like, they will just, yeah, they will just, like, flat out say things that just are, like, visibly not true. And then they get very upset when they're called on it because they're like, wait a minute, we're the authorities. We are supposed to distill this down so the masses will follow. Like, how dare you question us?

And then you get this sort of, sort of, you know, rise in, let's say, tension slash anger on both sides. Yeah. And actually, it's going to be very interesting to see how that phenomenon plays out. So, you know, on the optimistic side for this country. Okay, now we're going to get closer.

Ben Horowitz
The truth is going to be out there. It's certainly not going to be completely hidden. And so they, the old Abe Lincoln thing, if you can fool some of the people all the time, like, maybe you can't even do that anymore. But then, like, other countries, Russia, China, are taking the op. They are trying to lock it down so that there is not bottoms up media that's not at least heavily, heavily censored.

And, you know, how does that model end up evolving versus the model of more central control, at least of thinking and information and the interpretation of the world? You know, how does that play out? It's an open question. Yeah. My guess, you know, we'll see what happens in more authoritarian societies.

Marc Andreessen
But my guess is in at least western societies with relatively open access to information, it will just be impossible for, it will just be impossible for most centralized authorities to retain respect in the eyes of the people over the next decade. And the numbers, for some institutions, specifically Congress and the press, the numbers are entering now single digits, a percentage, and they show every indication that they're going to go to zero. And so you're going to have generations of people now who just don't buy what's being sold and again, just to bring it back to our day job, this should be, therefore, a prime time for the construction of new institutions that actually gain and justify and deserve trust. And so new kinds of entrepreneurial ventures in the most important fields of all, in fields like education, healthcare, the press. And the press, right?

Yes, yes, yes. Media, information, journalism. Exactly. Which is obviously happening in real time. Right.

There's entirely new journalistic voices that have completely different levels of trust from maybe the incumbents. So. Okay, well, we'll keep going. Let's see. Okay.

And actually, this is actually kind of related to that. So Daniel asks, how have our cities evolved in the post COVID world? And, Ben, you know, I'm a radical on this concept or this question, so why don't you start? Well, some cities have evolved and others have devolved. So, you know, one of the things that happened during COVID so you.

Ben Horowitz
You had the lockdowns, but you also had this kind of two movements. One was a defund the police movement, and then the other was a hesitate to call it criminal justice reform because, you know, there are multiple schools of criminal justice reform, but this specific one was something called restorative justice, which basically really raised the kind of threshold of what you would prosecute. So, like, very few things, you know, if you're a restorative justice da get prosecuted. And so many of the major cities had the combination of lockdowns, restorative justice, and defund the police. And that combination just made it very, very hard for your normal city entrepreneur who owned a restaurant or a retail store or bodega or anything like that to stay in business, because first we're gonna not let you open your store, and then once you open it, it's going to be totally cool for anybody to rob you.

And they're definitely not only we're not gonna arrest them, but even if we did arrest them, we're not gonna prosecute them. And so as a result, I think in a lot of major cities, just the way the cities have worked has changed. I know that's the case in San Francisco, which is kind of close to city tasks, where, like, the restaurant scene has really changed since COVID and then retail, like shopping just kind of has gone. That the major mall in San Francisco is just gone. They were like, I'm out.

And so that's really different. And, you know, it means, you know, kind of. It's a huge boon for Amazon, of course, and other kind of online retail sorts of things. But it's changed. I think the fabric, the community aspects of the city, the, you know, who can earn a living in a city has really kind of moved a lot in many cities, not all cities.

Some cities recovered very nicely from COVID and are thriving and vibrant and all that kind of thing. But it's been weird. What's your sense of the commercial real estate situation in cities, specifically with respect to employers and with respect to all of these big employers that are still grappling with the aftermath of the shift? Remote work and whether they get people back to the office and whether they need as much square footage and. Right, because that also bears, like in places like San Francisco as an example, but many others, I mean, there's also this great, actually, Washington, DC has a very potent case of this because a lot of federal agencies that never went back to work.

Marc Andreessen
It's just like this kind of hollowing out of the actual populations, especially the daytime populations of the city centers and the business sectors. It's just like the buildings are empty, and then there's the employer question on that, which is what do we do and what do we want and so forth. And then there's the commercial real estate side of it, which is what are those buildings going to be filled with, if anything, in five years? And then there's the city thing, which is if you're a restaurant owner or a retailer, are there even customers? Yeah.

Ben Horowitz
So, and again, I do think it's very different in different cities. You know, I like, you know, just apartments in New York City are totally crowded and going for very high rents and so forth. And I imagine, like, if there are all those people living in apartments, there's got to be people going into the office. You know, it's kind of. But what about, is that true of Midtown?

Marc Andreessen
Is that true of midtown Manhattan? So, you know, Midtown Manhattan's not the hottest of the areas. I think the hottest areas are downtown and Soho and that kind of thing. But it's still like, you know, given, you know, New York City and New York state lost a tremendous number of residents. I think they're kind of the second most kind of people moving out other than California and San Francisco.

Ben Horowitz
So I just say that's interesting. I mean, what we've seen in San Francisco is it's very hard to get people back in the office. And a lot of people during COVID actually moved not only out of the city, but out of the state. And we haven't seen a lot of companies other than Elon at Twitter go, like, you have to come back or you're gone. That's the one big case, but most of them have been okay with it and rents have gone down, but not that much.

And then there's kind of this commercial real estate loan cycle which I think has everybody nervous who, you know, who has money in anything or is a resident of anything. I mean, it's huge amount of kind of commercial debt, you know, kind of against commercial real estate coming due and there aren't people in those buildings. That's a real problem. And I don't know, you know, I'm not up to speed enough on that. But like, I do think it's a, you know, there could be, there hasn't been a massively abrupt change in terms of like, rents falling.

You know, that could, it could happen. Residential rents or commercial rents or both. Commercial, either. I mean, it's not, I mean, like residential rents in San Francisco had been going straight up and then they kind of flattened and dropped, but not, you know, they fall off a cliff. You know, you can't, like, why?

It's not like what happened in Detroit, you know, where khouses for five grand and that kind of thing. But if you go to, like, if you go to Midtown Manhattan or downtown Washington, DC and the federal, you know, or you go to, you know, la, I don't know, downtown or, you know, financial district, whatever, in five years, like, do you have a thing where it's like, oh, like everybody, you know, the offices have been refilled and everybody's out to lunch every day and you kind of have the city functioning the way that it used to from a business standpoint and occupancy standpoint. Or do you have a, wow, like we have these like increasingly like blasted out cores and, you know, maybe some buildings are being converted to condos, but a lot of buildings are just sitting empty. Like, what, what would you guess of how it tips? Well, I'd say I'm most worried about the, the mall and the kind of shopping districts.

Like, I think it's so hard to have, you know, kind of any kind of shopping and particularly if the goods are high value, you don't like whatever rodeo drive. Like, it's hard to imagine rodeo drive ever being the same because, you know, and La has one of these restorative justice Da's. So like, you know, you get into a situation as a retailer where you've got, yeah, I mean, they're selling purses that cost whatever, 20,000, $50,000 and then the security guards are not allowed to stop people from like, breaking in and stealing stuff and the police will not arrest the thieves and the prosecutors will not prosecute. Like, how do you stay open in that scenario? Like, it's not even, like, viable.

And so, you know, and then there's, you know, grocery stores have very similar issues where, like, you know, there's kind of a running joke. Like the criminals are allowed free, but the toothpaste is behind bars. And, and that is kind of being increasingly true. So I don't know. I mean, like, I think shopping, you know, in person shopping is probably the most, the scariest of all of them.

You know, restaurants, they get broken into. There's not that much to steal. I think the biggest problem restaurants have right now is just getting people to take those jobs. Like, for whatever reason, people don't want to do that kind of work anymore or many people don't want to do that kind of work anymore. Let me ask you this.

Marc Andreessen
I'm in LA right now. What do you think is the true, back to our observation, we're making on trust in institutions and relating directly to the future of a city like LA. What do you think is the difference between the reported crime rate in LA and the true crime rate where crimes, meaning violent crimes, robberies, assaults, muggings? Yeah, I think there's a very big delta in most major cities right now just cause. Yeah, they're like, if you're a police officer, well, I know in San Francisco, like, so many people will call the police and the police will tell them, like, you know, we can't, you know, you voted such that we cannot.

Ben Horowitz
Somebody broke into your house. Great. We're not going to come over there and look at it because, you know, somebody broke into your car. Sorry. You know, keep your windows rolled down and don't leave anything in there.

That's what you need to do. Not, and so they, you know, first, so there's a kind of cascade of that. Like, you know, does the crime get written up? Do the people report the next crime, et cetera, et cetera. And so I think there's a pretty big difference.

I wouldn't presume to be able to estimate it. I think in other cities, you know, like in Las Vegas, the police respond and, you know, generally, you know, they, they don't do that. They don't do the thing the San Francisco police do. So the reporting is probably much closer in Las Vegas, which still, you know, has a fair amount of crime. What I've heard from people in the field, you know, like people in local governments who work on this, is like, the murder rate is usually pretty correctly measured.

Yeah. Because for two reasons. Number one, it's a big deal when somebody gets killed. And number two, there's a body, and the authorities tend to find out about it. But non, non murder violent crimes are much harder to count because you have no idea how many times they happen and they're just never reported.

Yeah, I think that's probably right. I think that's right. Well, you know, one of the big things that's changed in talking to many police officers is, like, grand theft auto is no longer a thing. Like, if you steal a car, you don't get prosecuted in almost any state. Certainly in any blue state, you're not getting prosecuted for stealing a car.

And then you combine that with, you know, there's kind of this funny thing where the left is like, well, let's sue Hyundai for making the cars that are too easy to steal. And then the right going like, that's the craziest thing I ever heard. But, like, I think the truth is actually somewhere in the middle in that, you know, there are these TikTok videos that teach you how to steal a car. And then if you have a prosecutor, if people have voted in a DA that won't prosecute car theft, then that it becomes a huge problem, you know? And so then what do you do?

You either have to vote in a new DA or you have to get Hyundai to, like, not make their car so easy to steal. So it's. It is a really weird situation. I have to do my Jim Downey little comedy routine, which is, you know, tick tock, you know, not. Surely not that chinese app where people share makeup tips.

Marc Andreessen
They would. They wouldn't. They wouldn't allow videos on, like, how to steal a car. That would never happen. Never.

Ben Horowitz
Particularly not a korean car.

Marc Andreessen
Outstanding. So then let me close this topic on one big question. I think about a lot, which has to do with the post COVID world. So there was this critique during COVID from some quarters, which kind of goes as follows, which is, you know, whatever, whatever. However you got to the policies, you got to whatever.

The effect of the policies was basically a massive wealth transfer, income transfer, opportunity transfer from sort of normal, normal people to what gets preservatively called the laptop class, of which, of course, we are in the laptop class. Here we sit on our laptops. Yeah. And so it's like this massive transfer of, like, you know, if. I mean, it started out with just basic COVID lockdown policies, which is the laptop class all got sent home.

It was the, quote, unquote, essential workers who are blue collar workers, service workers, low income service workers who had to keep working, who got hit, you know, who got hit with COVID you know, hardest in the first place, when. When the pain was the most deadly. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So it started with that.

And then, to your point, it was this massive shift from sort of normal offline businesses like corner stores, to online retailing, which is dominated by a small number of very big companies like Amazon. And then, by the way, a shift again from the rise of video conferencing. And so the shift from hotels. Half the hotels in the country are owner operated. There's a lot of small business hotel owners, and all of a sudden, everything just went online.

And so in category after category of economic activity, the result of the policies was to basically shift a huge amount of wealth from sort of the offline class, sort of regular people to the online class, the upper middle class online class. And then the nature of the laptop class is, you know, the upper middle class is sort of the most, the most. The most divorced from day to day life generally, you know, just due to high incomes. And then specifically, if they're at home and their laptops all day, they're really divorced by what's happening in the real world. Like, do you buy that as a.

Like, how does that critique resonate with you, like, you know, four or five years later? So I think that's generally general. Generally. Right. I do think that.

Ben Horowitz
So I'd add two things, one in each direction. One is travel has kind of come back quite a bit. It's not quite where it was, but it's very close. So I think certainly not ghost towns in the hotels currently, they're starting to be lively again. The other kind of giant factor was the other thing that happened during COVID of course, was inflation, and which may or may not have been caused by the fact that we printed more money since 2009 than we did in the whole rest of the country's history combined.

That may have been a factor, but who knows? You're not allowed to talk about that in polite society. So inflation is probably the single biggest transfer of wealth from the regular person who has their assets in cash, and the wealthy person who has their assets and stocks, real estate, things that inflate the asset. Inflation has actually been much more severe than price inflation. And meanwhile, you have your money in dollars, you're just getting poorer and poorer and poorer.

So I think that's been a real thing and very dangerous thing for society when that kind of thing happens, when your policies start to transfer money from the poor to the rich at increasing rates of speed. I think that's very bad in general. Yeah. It feels like this might be one of the big underlying trends in our politics and in the rise of more extreme forms of populism on both sides of the political spectrum, which is you just have a large number of people who are sort of, maybe they can't explain all of this, but like they're generally aware and they feel it. Yeah, I mean, they feel that it.

You know, I mean, the fact that the proposition of going to college and buying a house 20 years ago is so radically different today. If you didn't somehow grow up with money, those two things seem impossible now. And it's a result of asset inflation on the one hand, and then this huge incentives that we've given to universities to increase tuition with. No, you know, kind of normally if you increase prices, you know, that affects demand. It doesn't affect demand if the government is willing to lend you, them, lend you the money, and then, you know, perhaps forgive that loan, and then, so the right for a normal person who, or for a person who's like, okay, if I go to college, either have to have the money or pay the loan back, if that's your mindset, you know, and you didn't grow up with money, you're not going to college.

So that, that's a huge, huge, huge problem. Yeah. And then you get out. Also healthcare, I think this is the case. But one of the dramatic cases in health care, dramatic changes in healthcare economics even before COVID was the rise of the rise of the size of the deductible.

Marc Andreessen
Like that was the big surprise, I think coming out of the Affordable Care act for a lot of people, which is like, oh my God, like in addition to like all this, you know, all of a sudden now the deductibles, you know, my deductible used to be $50, now it's 1500. And that's the kind of thing, again, where like rich upper middle class people are not going to feel it or not feel it nearly as much, but normal people are going to. The minute they get exposed to the healthcare system, they get that bill. It's just like a slap across the face. Yeah, no, for sure.

Ben Horowitz
I mean, it's funny, every government program is named the opposite thing that it is, right? The Affordable Care act was the unaffordable Care act. The Inflation Reduction act was the inflation cause react. It's just, it is so weird. We do live in a proved world.

Marc Andreessen
We do. Or at least Alice in Wonderland. Okay, we have a fantastic question. This is actually a very broad question, but it certainly has its post COVID elements. But I love every part of it.

So we can go step by step, but Mt asks, when do you think the following vestiges of the previous industrial age will disappear? And I'm going to just list. He lists five questions, and I'm going to. I'll list them and then we'll go one by one. So the 40 hours workweek.

Number one. Number two, talent recruiting universities. Number three, HR departments. Number four, corporate headquarters, meaning, I think, physical, physical facilities. And then number five.

Number five, single CEO leadership. Yeah. So let's go. Let's go. Let's go.

And let's, you know, again, put these in the. Put these, you know, we talk about these topics both generally, but also specifically, you know, what was changing now. So in this, in this new, in this new upside down world. So, okay, let's start with 40 hours work weeks. Ben, what is your prognosis for the 40 hours work week?

Ben Horowitz
So it's interesting. I think it's gone in most places that aren't connected to the government. Right. Like, so in our world, there's. There's no 40 hours.

I mean, what's your like? I feel like the work we at our firm, and it's not imposed at all, but, like, is closer to 60 or 70 hours than 40 hours, you know, for most of our people, not all of them, you know, depending on what the job is. And then, you know, certainly for restaurant workers, it's not, it tends not to be 40 hours. You either work a shorter shift or, you know, you're a manager or something and work a longer kind of time. And then, you know, I think most jobs are not quite like that, although there are, well, many jobs aren't like that.

I mean, the things that keep it that way are. So if you're a whatever, an exempt or a non exempt worker, then, you know, you have these labor laws that say you need overtime or, you know, pay if you work over 40 hours a week. So there's all these kind of maneuvers that people do to not have you work 40 hours a week, which, you know, maybe you want to work 60 hours a week cause you'd like the money, but that becomes implausible and they'll just add workers and that kind of thing. So. Or robots.

Yeah, so I. And then, you know, government jobs are 40 hours a week, and then anything the government touches seems to be 40 hours a week. So it's really a government imposed thing. At this point, as opposed to a capitalism imposed thing. And I think that as long as you have a Department of labor, because the Department of Labor itself is a very industrial age idea.

So I think to get rid of the 40 hours work week entirely, you have to get rid of the Department of Labor because that's the kind of entity that's enforcing it. And we saw this weirdly with ab five. So one of the things that, like, modern people liked a lot about the gig economy was, okay, I'm my own boss. I work when I need money. I don't work when I don't need money.

It's like, great. And I just press a button on the app and I get work, and away I go the department. Or, like, in California at least, they sort of outlawed that. And I think in Minnesota, maybe they just outlawed that as well because they want people to work 40 hours weeks. So it's not a market function, it's a government function.

And I don't, you know, it's the. These. The politics of it are hard to predict. Yeah. There's been this massive cultural shift and sort of the sort of social, on the socially progressive side of things, which is, you know, there was this kind of iconic movie of the late sixties called the Graduate.

Yeah. With Dustin Hoffman. And the whole kind of theme of the graduate, which is very consistent with the era, was basically the worst thing in the world that you could possibly end up as is as a corporate drone, 40 hours a week, you know. Plastic. Yeah, plastics.

Marc Andreessen
Yeah. The famous line in the movie is the uncle of the Dustin Hoffman character who's graduating, I guess, college or whatever, and walks over and says, you know, I have one word, you know, to give you, and it's plastics. You know, you should go into the plastic industry. But of course, you know, the underlying meaning also was you become plastic. You're going to go to work for a big plastics company, and you're going to work 40 hours a week for 30 years, and you're going to get a gold watch, and you're going to hate every minute of it.

But, like, that's, you know, and the movie, the whole point of the movie, and I won't spoil the ending for people who haven't seen a movie older than I am, but the whole point of the movie is, you know, he's rebelling against this life of basically being a corporate drone 40 hours a week. You know, basically, you know, they sort of present it as if it's like one step away from slavery. And so it went from, you know, and of course, what you're supposed to do, the message of the movie, you're supposed to rebel and you're supposed to be creative and live in a different, independent life and follow your muse and kind of let your personality flower and figure out some other way to live. But the sort of philosophy, the sort of value system went all the way from that all the way to, no, you must live that life. You must live that life.

The employers must provide that life. You must work 40 hours a week and not 41 or 39. You must be a drone, you must be a cog in the machine. And if you're not that basically, like, something has gone wrong and you're being let down and betrayed. So it's a weird inversion.

And then, yeah, for people who don't follow it, at least in states like California with extremely aggressive states, departments of labor, yeah, you just, you have this thing where they're just like. There's like extremely punishing consequences. If you have an employee, you can have managers who are on salary, but basically, it's become very difficult for a lot of employers in California to have just like, regular working people who are on salary. And so they, they shove you hard into this hourly thing. Even in many cases, employees don't want it and they actually resent it and they, you know, resent having to clock in and clock out and track their time, and they resent the fact that they're not a full member of the team and they're not being treated like a professional, but they required to do.

Ben Horowitz
That as an employee, you cannot opt out. So, like, I want to go take this job. I want to work. I want to build this thing. I want to contribute as much as I can.

I want to get in line for bonuses, stock options, promotions, all that. And the government literally says, no, you can't because we don't think that's a good job, even though they know nothing about the job. And you must work 40 hours a week and, you know, fill out a time card and get paid for overtime if you're, you know, a minute over that and all that kind of thing, which is kind of a very weird situation. Yeah. And then the sort of that comes from.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. It's all government imposed. Yeah. And then the onerousness of that and the lack of flexibility coupled with rises in minimum wage laws and other sort of labor things, of course, there's a giant incentive for employers to implement automation and just take out the jobs entirely. And so, of course, you see that in the restaurant industry right now.

Marc Andreessen
Where there's a big push to get kiosks into all the fast food restaurants precisely to be able to eliminate the workers. And it's not like anybody at those companies thought woke up one morning and decided, wow, it'd be great if we could get rid of all these people. It was a lot of people who, in those businesses, actually really value being able to work with young people and kind of help them develop. And they'd rather be in a restaurant with other workers than be by themselves with a bunch of machines. But the economics are pushing a lot of these companies towards to get as automated, machine driven as possible and then wiping out entire tiers of jobs.

Ben Horowitz
Yeah. Which is really unfortunate because the fast food industry, for whatever you think about it, has always been a great place. Like, if you grow up in kind of, if you grow up poor in America, like, there's a few, there's many things working against you, but one of them is, you know, you're. You may be in a culture where, like, showing up on time, like, and kind of knowing the, whatever norms of working society are just unknown to you. You may, like, live in a place where most people work in the shadow economy, which is a different set of culture and norms.

And so fast food has historically been a bridge to that. So you'll come in and get trained on, like, basically how to enter the workforce. But, yeah, that, that kind of tier of the system is going away, I think, very, very fast. I'm in California now. I think they raised the minimum wage for fast food over the regular minimum wage, which is kind of a weird idea, like the $20 an hour, because, again, it's mostly teenagers working in fast food.

Yeah, something like. And when you talk to the people, like, you know, I used to be, or I am friends with a former CEO of McDonald's. And he was like, we're not trying to hire 45 year old people with five kids to work at McDonald's. Like, this is a job for teenagers to learn, enter the workforce. And I think at McDonald's, something like 60 or 80% of the franchise ease.

The owners of McDonald's restaurants started as hourly employees. So there's actually a nice progression and all that kind of thing, but not anymore. You know, the other question to ask on this, which also goes back to the, when we have still topics coming up on the work from home stuff. But so here's the other question. This is sort of my.

Marc Andreessen
Put my cynical hat on. So, Ben, in a typical corporate environment with a 40 hours workweek, so let's not, you know, fast food restaurant. You're covering shifts and you have customers and so forth. And so when you clock in and so people know when you're there. But let's say a typical corporate job where you're in an office and you're whatever, doing corporate things and, you know, again, you're sort of on, on a, on a computer most of the day.

We're in meetings most of the day. Like how many hours were, how many hours a week was the average corporate worker actually working pre COVID, like in terms of actual productive work as contrasted to, you know, all of the circumflex web? Are you asking about me personally? Exactly. Exactly.

Exactly. Yeah. Like what, what was the actual productive, like, if you're a CEO of a big company and you're doing honest assessment of your white collar workforce in 2019, like, how many hours of productive work a week were you actually getting? Yeah, I mean, I think it's tricky, right? Because on the, you know, on the high end, you're probably getting certainly over 40 hours and on the low end, you know, you might have been getting like 4 hours.

Ben Horowitz
And, you know, I think it depends a lot on the company, the company culture, the level of accountability and so forth. So if you have a place like very low accountability culture, like say at Google, which has a monopoly that kind of supports the other businesses, so it's hard to have accountability when there's like a single profit center that dominates to that degree, then the number is probably quite low. And then you add work from home from that and all these kinds of things, and it gets like super low. I think. On the other hand, if you're in a company that's fighting for its life where there's super high accountability and they're seeing if, you know, every job is necessary and so forth, then you're probably much higher.

Marc Andreessen
There are government agencies, I won't name, but there are government, large government agencies where I believe they now have employee bargaining agreements that have been struck and they often have civil service and sometimes unions and so forth. But I think they're government, domestic government agencies where they are only now required to be in the office four days a week. This is a big topic in Washington because this has led to significant hollowing out of the whole Capitol Hill area because literally employees just don't come to the office anymore. And so if you have a government bureaucracy where people are working, are in the office four days a week, like how many hours? How many hours a week are they actually working?

Ben Horowitz
Yeah, that's well, and it's not just a government bureaucracy, but you can't be fired. And then there are really strict rules around advancement. Right. You know, advancement has much more to do with tenure and your, like, literally your racial and gender demographic than it does, you know, any of the work that you do just because that's where the government works right now. So it's, yeah, like we, I don't want to get political, but like, the bang for the buck that we get out of government services has been inspiring lately.

Marc Andreessen
So the reason I bring it up is because I think. Tell me what you think of this. I think that there's a critique. There's a critique you often hear and you hear it from CEO's in particular and kind of business thinkers. And it's sort of like, oh, people are less productive working from home.

They just, they're working fewer hours, they're goofing off more that we need to get them back in the office to get them back to like, working the full, full, you know, full, the full time. My view is that's actually a fake problem, that the real problem was they weren't working hard to begin with and they were goofing off 20 hours a week in the office already. And, and so, yeah, they're goofing off at home, but they were goofing off in the office too. And you just didn't see it because you thought that they were, you know, you would look out at the cubicle farm and it looked like everybody was working, but they weren't. And of course, my support for my cynical view on this is all of the usage data from all the construction Internet companies, which shows, you know, huge usage between 08:00 and 05:00 Friday, you know, in each local time zone.

Our friend Jonah Peretti used to refer to this, as. He called it the, what was it? It was the. Oh, the at work network. Yeah.

You know, it's consumer Internet services that are basically like, you know, they're the prime, the prime usage is literally through five Monday through Friday while people are at work. Because that's when they just like, sit on the computer all day. Yeah. Like, and so is my view. Like, does that sound right?

And therefore CEO's that think if they get people back in the office, they're gonna get a productivity boost, are actually fooling themselves. Or is that too cynical? Well, I agree that, like, people were wasting lots of time while in the office as well. I do think that if you, it just depends, like, what is your accountability for, like, work output? Like, how do you like, look at that, think about that, and, you know, measure that, understand that and so forth.

Ben Horowitz
And if your only way of doing that is like, literally walking by people's desks and popping in and go, what are you working on? Then? You know, obviously working from home is going to potentially create a job drop off because, like, a zero accountability on that. On the other hand, if the work output, you know, for an engineer or whatever is like, okay, like, how many pull requests you have, like, what's the quality of your code and so forth, that's a different kind of measure. And it's a lot more independent of where you are physically.

And then there's a lot of stuff at work that is work or feels like work but isn't productive. Like, there's many meetings that are like that and so forth. So I think if you're running an organization, you just probably have to think a little bit harder about some of these questions than you did when you had everybody together. But, yeah, there's obviously, I mean, what the net is, is hard to say. Well, the reason I bring it up is because I'm glad you brought this up.

Marc Andreessen
You brought up, I think, the key underlying point, which is how do you actually measure output? Like, how do you actually measure productivity? And if you're in a factory, you measure it by which it's produced. And if you're in a McDonald's, you register, you know, you measure it by number of big Macs sold and so forth. If you're in a lot of office environments, actually, it's not a lot of knowledge workers are actually very hard to measure output.

And the reason I bring it up is because as the generative AI revolution hits white collar work over the next five years, I suspect, I'll put it this way. A reason for bullishness on AI in the workplace is I suspect it may be easier than it looks to replace a lot of white collar work because it may just be that a lot of white collar work actually wasn't actually all that complicated or all that deep or all that didn't actually require that much time. There actually wasn't as much there as people thought. And it's relatively easy to replace the email jobs. Yeah, I think that's probably correct.

Ben Horowitz
The other one, which won't change the number of jobs because that would be illegal, but that his potential is just bureaucratic work. Right. Like pushing paper. You know, I mean, we had, we had the episode on higher ed, but, you know, the fact that higher ed has more administrators than students is so crazy. Like, you know, when you say it, you can't believe it.

And like, do they need any right to the or, like, is this a job for AI? And it seems like a job for AI. Yeah. So maybe come back to that in future episodes because I think that's a very interesting topic. Okay.

Marc Andreessen
Speaking universities. Second part of our question, when do you think the following vestiges of the previous industrial age will disappear? Ben, talent recruiting at universities.

Ben Horowitz
Yeah, we are. It's a special day for us to record this podcast because I've been teasing Ben all day because he was on the board of Columbia for a long time and the president and board of trustees at Columbia just got lit up in front of Congress today. And I keep reminding him that on earth two, he's the chair of the board of Columbia and he was spent all day getting yelled at.

417 and it's far away prospect. So talent recruiting at universities.

Yeah, that's an interesting one. I mean, I think that, you know, we did that. There's no question that our education system is getting very, very out of date, you know, and we went through that in detail. But like, one of the biggest things for me is what you need to be effective in the workforce is not just very dynamic, but you kind of need to be educated your whole life. And so to take out four years and maybe high school falls in this category too, by the way, like, once you get to be like 13, I think you probably be much better off with a portion of your life being education, a portion of your life being productive work.

The reason being is productive work. And the nature of productive work is changing so rapidly now that being in the mode of and just having the expectation for everyone that you're going to continue to learn new things and do new stuff, as opposed to I'm going to go away for four years to a university and have no productivity, and I'm going to learn a bunch of stuff that very likely to be, you know, potentially outdated very quickly. I mean, you know, and, you know, it used to be like, things have always gotten outdated. Like you and I learned the Dewey decimal system. I don't think anybody learns that work, which is like, actually a kind of a complicated system, but, you know, everything is like that now.

And the main thing is like, you know, it's going to be like, can you interact with AI in a productive way? Can you interact with the Internet in a productive way? And can you learn new things? And the people who can learn new things have unlimited job prospects, and the people who can't learn new things are, you know, like, even if you went to college, I don't think it matters. So, you know, I think society is starting to rethink that.

I think college admissions or college applications are way down this year. So I think people are starting to realize, okay, college is clearly not worth the money. That's why the student loan debt that we have to forgive, because, like, I can't get a job that can ever pay back what I spent on this university. And so then how are people going to get ready for the workforce? And I got to think that, like, there's going to be a lot of innovation along those lines.

I mean, just a company that, like, looked at the jobs that are available and gave you, like, a self directed study way to be ready for them, and then educated employers on how to, you know, look in non traditional places for those employees would be a miracle company.

Yeah. You know, I think we can get ourselves another YouTube strike here by coming out for child labor. Yeah, that's true, too. I just say.

Having raised three teenagers, I'll just say that I think child labor is a good idea and not like eight year olds. But look, once you become an adult, an adult physiologically, like, so once you cross puberty, you know, like, it's pretty. You. You are like, at that point, in many ways smarter than your parents, but you're living under this very restrictive regime that they control. And the reason that you're living under that restrictive regime is that you are very smart, but you don't have to live with the consequences of any of your decisions because you don't have to work or be productive or do anything.

So, like, you can go get in your car drunk and run people over and all that. All the things that teenagers do that we try and contain adolescents over, we might not have those issues if they were also kind of getting into society at that point and starting to work and do some things and not just whatever, studying history and algebra and all these kind of techniques that we think are so important but probably aren't as important as starting to integrate into society. Yeah, well, the whole construction, historically, the whole construction of adolescence is new. Like, it's not. It's a very modern sort of post 1900 concept, you know, basically.

Marc Andreessen
Right. Every society, basically pre 1900, would have thought that this whole thing is. You're definitely working on the farms probably well before. Yeah, you're going straight to work or you're. Yeah, you're.

I mean, it's just like this idea that you're physically an adult and mentally a child and live, you know, and don't have the rights and privileges of, like, previous societies, which just all just considered this completely ludicrous. And then, by the way, they would have looked at the dysfunction of teenage life, you know, with all of the problems that everybody likes to talk about, about how, you know, dysfunctional and screwed up teenagers are. You know, they would have looked at that and any previous society would look at. Look at that and said, well, obviously it's because you're treating them like children. You need to treat them like.

Like adults. Like, this is crazy. I would just say also in support of the idea of child labor, you know, look, I worked, you know, I worked for. I worked 40 hours a week basically from the age of 13. And by the way, I would say completely voluntarily.

Yeah. Like, my parents had forced me to. Where I wanted to get a job. Yeah. You know, and the same jobs you had probably, you know, paper boy, dishwasher, you know, bell hop, like kinds of things, you know, that were around, you know, that they.

Ben Horowitz
Minimum wage. Yeah. So, like, yeah, by the time I graduated college, I had been basically working 40 hours a week for ten years. And right in both. Right in both blue collar jobs and then later in knowledge work jobs, you know, programming jobs and so forth in college.

Marc Andreessen
And so, yeah, I mean, there's a. Yeah, this is maybe a no brainer, but maybe, you know, like the Waterloo co op, you know, the Waterloo University of Waterloo co op model or something is the, you know, you know, makes much more sense, which is you just. You just integrate work into education at a much. At a much. At a much earlier point.

But, okay, we can keep going. All right. Because I'm a dying. We got to leave time for this one. So HR departments.

Ben Horowitz
So HR. Yeah, this is another, I think. So there's two parts of HR. There's a government imposed part of HR, which is a very, very large kind of thing, which, you know, it is an industrial revolution idea. And, you know, what was that book, Upton Sinclair's book called?

The. I can't remember. Cockroach jungle or. No, the. It was the meatpackers.

Yeah, the meatpacker. But the horrible jobs. Yeah. Kind of create horrible abuses. Horrible abuses by employers.

Yes. That created kind of labor regulation, and then that created HR, because if you have regulation, then you need somebody who understands the regulation and can help the company comply. So it's almost, you know, you need HR today, you know, or that whole part of HR. You can't run with HR without HR because you have to be compliant with a very large and complex set of regulations around labor laws. And.

Yeah, these cover everything from safe working conditions to sexual harassment to this and that and the other. And it's all like civil rights. Specific rights. Yeah, yeah. The entire civil rights regime.

Marc Andreessen
Right. All the. Yeah. So discrimination, non discriminations. So I don't see how that or that can't go away without like some real big change in view on kind of how that ought to work.

Ben Horowitz
The other part of HR is, I think, a little more kind of optional, potentially strategic, depending on how you think about it, which is more what I call kind of like management quality assurance. So are we, you know, in our recruiting practice, are we finding the best people? Are we running a good process? Are we closing candidates at a high rate? Once we close them, do we have employee satisfaction?

If not, what groups suck? That kind of thing. Just like how do you know your managers are doing their job in terms of the environment that you create at work? And I think that that will get to, in an AI world, are all companies consist of one person. And in that case, I don't think that HR does go away short of that.

I think if you have large organizations or government regulation around labor, then I'm not sure how HR actually goes away, even though it is. It is a contract of the industrial revolution. Farmers didn't have HR. They said kids. Yes, yes, exactly.

Marc Andreessen
Okay, so you identified two categories, so kind of legally necessary. Category number one. So compliance with all laws or regulations around labor, which continuously expand so that it seems like it gets bigger over time. Two is the high value aspect of HR that we would say enlightened CEO's want to have an advanced HR department for the purpose of working with them on management quality assurance and on sort of developing the organization. There is the third function, which is the other direction, which is ideological, political, sort of compliance.

And so a lot of the, when companies take on social, that's the connection. Well, it's a lot of companies, it's designed. Right. It's desired. Right.

At a lot of companies, including a lot of big tech companies, it's. HR has a charter to basically drive political and social change and enforce that change very broadly inside the organization. Right, right. Yeah. Yep.

And becomes very, very strong. Right. Like, they've tremendous power to, like, obliterate, you know, employees on contact if they get sideways with, you know, whatever is the prevailing kind of social vision or mission, you know, that management has decided to endorse. So this is kind of, it's interesting because this is sort of the replacement of the religious right with the religious left. So you kind of go from, you know, and I do think that if I recall correctly, like in the kind of first half of the century and then kind of into a little bit of our childhoods, like religion specifically, Christianity was very kind of integrated into a lot of workplaces and, you know, like there's still some vestiges that would like, you know, football teams sent to do a Jesus prayer kind of before the game and that kind of thing.

Ben Horowitz
And then that was kind of rooted out through kind of a lot of kind of legal proceedings and separation of church and Satan this and that and third. And then, but look, people like that, I mean, not all people, but, you know, their spirituality is a real thing. And so that as you kind of get rid of Christianity as a kind of fabric in society, like, what's the new kind of spiritual bond amongst the people? And I think that's become kind of the religious left, which is kind of more political in nature and it's like equity and, you know, I guess, you know, recently stopped the war in Gaza and, you know, whatever the kind of moral high ground as determined by the, you know, some branch of, of left wing politics is. And then that gets adopted by HR in the same way that the church might have got adopted in the past.

So that part has gone away before. And will it go away again? I dont know. Its really a tricky thing. I mean, my father used to always say, I remember my friend Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called God is not great.

And my fathers criticism of that hes like, look, you have two choices. You can believe in God or some buddy who claims to be God. And I think we're in the, where somebody who claims to be God category where, you know, people decide morality and morality not just for themselves but for a whole company or, you know, a whole organization. And that's, that, that's how I interpret that one. So I would just say that that one, I think could go away because it has gone away, but I better.

Marc Andreessen
Bring it up because I think you'd agree that HR becomes the enforcement arm for whatever those principles are in a lot of companies. Like that's how a lot of employees are experiencing HR. Yeah, you know, I think so. And I, and I think like HR in those cases also runs, they usually have some philanthropic arm that is, connects back through the practices in the company and so forth. I think that's all right.

Ben Horowitz
And I think it's, it does the same thing that, you know, like it would make you feel a little uncomfortable if you weren't Christian in one of those companies. And I think it makes you feel a little uncomfortable if you're not of that view of morality, you know? Well, I just bring it up because, you know, HR, the combination of those three functions is. It conveys incredible power. Right.

Marc Andreessen
And so I don't think because it. Only because it's there, it ends up being intertwined. Right. 100% right. Right.

Ben Horowitz
Like your performance review plus your, you know, career path. Yeah. Do you. Plus your. Yeah.

Marc Andreessen
Your legal status and your moral status and your career status. You know, like, as an HR. As an HR. If I'm an HR person and I want to really assert control of our company, it's like, look, I've got the law on my side. I've got your career in my hands, and I can nuke you on social and moral grounds whenever I want.

Like, that's an incredibly powerful set of capabilities. And, of course, I'm a staff function, so I don't have responsibility for business output. Yeah, I think in the extreme case, that's true. I think at most of the companies that I'm involved with, the HR function hasn't been elevated to that level of power where they're more powerful than the managers. I imagine as companies get bigger and bigger in size, then HR becomes more and more powerful as a result of that.

There was another society in the 20th century that had this model, and it was soviet communism, and they had a political commissar, and the Chinese have a CCP as a similar thing. So every manager in the soviet system was paired with a political commissar who sat next door and in theory, was a staff person, and in practice was actually in charge of everything. And if you remember the great movie the Hunt for Red October, when Sean Connery decides to defect and take the submarine to America, the very first thing he does is take out the political commissar, because that would be the primary thing that would stop him. Yeah. So I do think we say big companies, large institutions, have backed into a system that actually is very reminiscent of how the Soviets used to run things with respect to this kind of parallel control structure.

And you kind of wonder. Yeah, you kind of wonder, since the reason I go through all this is just. It's like, okay, is that in these larger institutions, are those apparatuses now so powerful that they actually run the show and they can't be taken out? Or at some point, is there some sort of revolt, either from the top or from the bottom, where people are just like, this is just, I'm no longer living no longer willing to live like this. Yeah, well, look, I think it creeps in.

Ben Horowitz
And so if it crossed the threshold, I imagine, you know, depending on who the CEO is, they may go, okay, that's too far. But yeah, it slides in because it's like, well, you know, we want to be for good. Like we want to do well and do good is probably a pretty dangerous phrase in retrospect. And that, you know, you kind of want those things aligned. So whatever the company produces is going to make the world a better place like that.

And you kind of want to stop it there. If it's like, okay, we're going to go get the money over here and then we're going to turn around over there and impose our morality on the world. And that's doing good, then you probably are doing evil. And evil, you know, you're probably being like massively evil because you have no constraints on your business practices, which is a huge impact in the world. And then you're imposing your unaccountable morality, which is also a huge impact, and you're wrecking everything.

So I think that that's, you know, one of the worst phrases that's ever been invented in terms of it sounds so great and it's so bad. Yeah. Somebody once said virtue is more dangerous than vice because vice has a natural stopping point. It's when you or somebody around you realizes you're actually doing something horrible. Yeah.

Marc Andreessen
Whereas virtue, virtue has no stopping point and it can just run, it can run into just like completely crazy levels of and without. With everybody feeling like they can't challenge it. Yeah. Yeah. Completely berserk.

Yeah. And I think, I think it's very important to be, like, aligned, have a consistent code that touches everything that you do not, isn't kind of separated like that in that way. So let's close on your favorite topic then, which is culture, and culture in this new post COVID world. So we had three questions that kind of all circle around this question. And so Chris asks, how do you anticipate remote workers influencing the evolution of company culture?

What specific strategies do you recommend for effectively adapting to this transformation? Andrew asks, has remote work been the death of company culture? And if so, what can we do to get it back? And then HD retrovision asks, remote work is great, but how do we make sure new graduates slash young talent won't lose out on in person mentoring? What is your take on the best way to bring new talent into the fold in a remote environment?

Ben Horowitz
All right, which one do you want me to answer? Well, yeah, so, like, I'm a CEO. You're coaching and advising me, and I'm a CEO, and I'm one of these, you know, CEO's, mid size or large company, and I'm struggling with this. Like, I'm. I have a sort of a default hybrid thing going on, but I'd really like to get everybody back in the office, but I can't.

Marc Andreessen
I'd really like to only hire new, you know, in person people, but I'm also still hiring remote people because they have skills that I want. And, like, I, you know, my. And I can maybe get my people back in the office a couple days a week or a few days a month, but, like, I can't, like, all of the. All of the ways that I used to be with people, and we used to, like, you know, all be together, and I used to, you know, give. Give talks and perpetuate culture.

It, you know, now I just find myself staring into a camera and hoping people are on the other side listening to me, like, yeah. So, like, you know, and I worry. I worry that my culture is unraveling, and I don't know how to pull it back together. Yeah. So I think that.

Ben Horowitz
So my big conclusion, you know, having done this kind of, you know, at the firm for the last few years, is the hybrid thing makes certain things you get for free in terms of cultural cohesion, like, not free. Like, you have to design things in and kind of. I think it's very important that when you do that or like to be effective if you have the constraints you talked about, if you aren't willing to do the elon and just say, everybody's got to be in the office, and I don't even know if they're in the office or not? He certainly said that. Then you have to decompose the problem.

So, in that, okay, different functions are different and different. So what do I mean that by that? Like, okay, so if you have. If you want a high quality engineering culture, high quality engineering culture has the. There's a few things that, like, I think are very common.

You know, one is great communication, so that you have very high fidelity understanding of how the entire code base works, the architecture, so forth. So how do you do that in a remote environment? And then there's like, okay, I feel like my work matters, and usually your work mattering in an engineering organization has a lot to do with what the other engineers think of it. And so is there a way for you to demonstrate that, for you to share that on a kind of regular basis and so forth. And then to get to the best new product ideas or new architecture ideas, it's really hard to do that remotely.

So do you have a way to get them together for that and so forth? I think that's really different than, say, a sales organization where, like, they've always been hybrid if they're, particularly if it's a direct sales force and not a kind of whatever phone sales force. And, you know, and you kind of in their kind of tried and true ways of when you put them together on forecast calls work. But, like, sales kickoff has to be a person, you know, where you're getting trained and that kind of thing and so forth. So, so I think decomposition is important.

And then, you know, you've got to, you know, just engineer in some things, you know, cultural things on and how you behave, how the managers behave, like, you know, what's over the line. You know, if somebody does something, do you, like, how likely are you to pick up the phone and call them and talk to them about it, all these kinds of things? So it's a lot of, you know, it takes some real thought to deal with the fact that you're not, like, all together. But I would say, you know, I feel like we're functioning kind of culturally as well as we ever have in the case. You know, like, we have, the investment teams have to be together in person certain days.

We have a lot of off sites. You know, we get everybody in the firm together once a year, like, you know, with the families and all that kind of thing. So, like, there's a lot of the rhythm to it is important. I mean, if you go back to everybody in the office, how much of that time was spent on email or on phone calls or doing isolated work? And, you know, the office is actually less productive for that, I think, for many people.

Although depending on your age. Right. Like, the older you are, the less productive that is, the younger you are. The kind of being in the office actually helps a lot. Yeah.

Marc Andreessen
What do you think is the most, like, what's the single, if I'm a CEO and I'm in the state that I describe, like, what's the single biggest, you know, what's the single biggest, most useful thing that I could do to sort of advance on this and make sure that I still have cultural coherence, you know, in two years out? Well, I mean, I think you got to start with, like, okay, what do you, like, what are your cultural goals? What are the behaviors? Like, what do you want? You know, if you want, like, lots of new ideas and innovation and this kind of thing.

Ben Horowitz
Do you want. Let me, let me, let me, let me point it. Yeah. So I want people to care about the company. I want people to feel bonded to the company so that it's just not another, you know, they're just not, it's just not another interchangeable thing where they can log off Zoom on Friday and log in another Zoom on Monday and they just don't care that they left.

Marc Andreessen
And I'm just totally fungible as an employer. Yeah. So I think then, like, the things that kind of connect you to the people tend to be things like, okay, one on one meetings and those, like, even a one on one meeting on the phone is much more intimate than a group zoom. Like a group zoom is the most impersonal thing. I would say high frequency of off sites where you get people together in person.

Ben Horowitz
You know, hopefully, like at least one day a week in the office for kind of, that kind of thing is very, very helpful and just like real, like, acknowledgement of, I mean, think of a very underrated thing, whether you're in person or remote, is acknowledgement of the work. Like, so much of it is from an employee perspective, is, do I matter? Does the work I do matter? Do you care about it? And we just went through a performance review cycle here at the firm.

And, like, one of the biggest things, you know, that I've come to realize over the years in performance reviews is just like, you know, it's an expression. I know what's going on. I appreciate it. Or I, you know, here's things I'd love to work on together. Here's how we can develop you.

Like, this kind of thing. Just to, if you never have that conversation, then, like, why would anybody feel good about the work they're doing? And, and, yeah. So that kind of thing ends up being, I think Jeff Bezos used to have a thing where he'd have a day a week where he would, like, focus on just saying thank you to people, which is a strong Amazon, by the way. Like, I think under him had probably one of the highest levels of cohesive culture at scale.

It's funny, there was a big takedown of the Amazon culture in the New York Times at one point. But I think, and right or wrong, the things that they said in there, like overall, like, in tech world, you know, of course, people at Amazon were very cohesive culturally, and they had great retention with not the best pay, I would say, other companies. So for sure, if I recall correctly, that takedown was because apparently it was a demanding workplace with high performance expectations. And so, therefore, well, yeah, there was a real bit of truth to it in the sense that. So what they did is because they were a tech company and a retail company, they hired a lot of people from Nordstrom, from Macy's, from these kinds of places, and they drop them into a tech culture.

And people are like, you guys are fucking crazy. Like, I got. I work from nine to five. What are you doing to me? You know?

And they were crying and they were upset. And Amazon, by the way, reacted to that and created a kind of subculture for their retail, for their true retail people who are really retail, not like Amazon retail. And, you know, I'm a believer in subcultures. I think that made sense. But, yeah, yeah, it was very weird for us in Silicon Valley to read, Amazon's got a bad culture.

It's like Amazon. I'm like, what are you talking about? Best culture? Exactly. Yeah.

Marc Andreessen
Look, I think we're at an hour 20. I think that's a great. And it's a great place to end. We got through five of our 25 questions. We did another outstanding job on time management.

So we will leave it there for now. Benjamin, thank you. All right. And we will see you all soon. Awesome.

Ben Horowitz
Thank you for listening.