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Audio Source: https://a16z-live.simplecast.com/episodes/a16z-infra-1-2iEyBTf5

a16z on Infra

Introductions and Backgrounds [00:00:00]

Martin Casado: [00:00:00] So this is the a16z infrastructure show. This is actually the very first one. Where are we going to be talking about infrastructure companies investing in them, building them products? It just turns out that we're three GPS at a16z, and we all have a lot of experience in info.

Like all of our companies were infrastructure companies. We do a lot of infra investing. So the way that we're going to structure this session is first, we're going to introduce, our backgrounds in context of that. Many of you know, us, many of you have worked with us. But we do want to give you a sense our relationship with infrastructure and how we went through it.

So we'll and we each go through our own kind of bios that way and I'll orchestrate that. Okay. Th then we're going to talk about why infrastructure is different. This isn't B2B, this is an enterprise, this isn't vertical SAS. It's specifically infrastructure. And it's my it's my favorite topic and my favorite area.

So we'll go through that. We've got a lot of great questions on Twitter, and so we're going to try and get through those. And then if we still have time, then we'll open up to questions. Uh, for everybody else. So that's rough, we plan to have this every two weeks and we want to cover everything as things go, we want to cover category creation and we want to cover open-source and we want to cover the shifts and go to market and the cloud and investing and everything else.

So we're going to go ahead and start with our intros and just, yeah, very quickly. So for the, if you don't know, so I'm Martine I'm a GPN Andreessen Horowitz, and. I actually want to start by introducing Ben actually having him introduce himself, but I want to let you know how I met Ben. So I was doing my PhD at Stanford in the networking space, and we spun out and we started a company called this Sera.

This is the software defined networking space. And we started it right before. Like the great recession, the nuclear winter had set in and we were struggling. And one of our investors who was also on our board was Andy Rachleff, who was actually a professor at Stanford at the time, but he's this super famous investor from benchmark.

And we were at the, we were at the bottom of the recession and we're like, we had a professor as a CEO and he needed a new CEO and we were talking with Andy Rachleff and we're like, who would be the best person on earth? It's well, there's this guy that just sold the company to HP.

And his name is Ben. And I had never heard of him at the time. And and we should talk to him. So this I, this was in 2008, so I got introduced in the band and he came in, of course, Ben's you have so insightful and he'd just done it. Like he just built a company at the same thing. And uh, so I asked Ben if he would be our CEO, actually.

Ben, do you remember what you said in response to that? I don't. I don't. I said, no, you said I'm too rich.

You're like to be CEO of a company like this. You gotta be piped in. And so instead, however, Ben and Mark invested Ben ended up joining the board. And so much of what I've learned has been with Ben. And so I thought it'd be great if Ben, most of you know him, but it'd be great if he just gave you a quick rundown of kind of his background with respect to infrastructure that we'll move on to David.

So Ben, if you wouldn't mind.

Ben Horowitz: [00:02:36] Yeah. Sure. And that, that did bring that a, man's got to know his limitations. If you know how hard a job is if you're going to give somebody a really, really hard, nearly impossible job, it's it really helps if they're not rich, I have to say, yeah, that's a good hiring tip as well.

At some point, rich people are just like, this is too hard. I'm going to the

Martin Casado: [00:02:54] beach. Things we learned multiple times, I think, in, in our

Ben Horowitz: [00:02:57] careers. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah kinda my career, actually, my, probably my career in infrastructure, I started way back when I was an engineer at Silicon graphics and kind of the first.

I was working on, we were, we had to put, we had an operating system called IRX or truss Unix-based and we were the first we had built the, the original multiprocessor machines. And so there was this task of having to. Put semaphores on all the Colonel processes and so forth so that they went collide and you wouldn't have all these weird race conditions, which was I would say probably the most complicated engineering job I ever had, but.

Eventually then eventually went to a company called Netscape where I was in charge of kind of the web servers and then we needed a directory kind of project. And so we that's where we. I got the idea to popularize LDAP and kind of make up the directory standard.

And that was like my big infrastructure thing there. And then Mark and I founded a company called LoudCloud, which was one of the first or the original kind of cloud computing company started much too early. Ironically, because there wasn't enough infrastructure like principally, there was no virtualization, for example.

And so you couldn't really do cloud computing in that way, but the tools that we had so we transformed that company into a company called Opsware and that's the one that I sell to HP, which made me to to rich, to take Martine stock.

Martin Casado: [00:04:21] And since joining Andreesen, you've done a lot of infra investing actually so comfortable.

It'd be great to just go through that a bit.

Ben Horowitz: [00:04:28] Yeah, sure. Made a bunch of introduced structure investments. The first investment I've made is on a company called Okta, which was very familiar to me from my directory days. And more recently I've invested in a company called Databricks.

And then, most recently one called any scale and Databricks is infrastructure for AI and big data. And any scale is a new way to, how do you get the kind of processing power that you need, at the growth rate that you need. Now that Moore's law is definitely not going fast enough to support the hunger of AI and it can turn it can basically Make the cloud look like your laptop and make it very easy to program in parallel.

Martin Casado: [00:05:10] Awesome. All right. Cool. So I was one of Ben's investments. He joined, we were definitely for a journalist Sarah networks. I was gonna say there was another one, sorry about that. Yeah we so very honestly I learned so much of what I know by having been on my board.

We ended up selling the company to VMware where I ran that business. And when I left, there was about a $600 million business and end to end, that was about an 11 year journey. And then I joined Andreessen Horowitz where I also focus on core infrastructure. And as part of that, I'd always heard of Dave

But I met him and I don't know if you ever have these moments where you're like, I dunno, you meet someone new and it's like talking to a long lost brother, but I feel like he's lived this parallel life to me as far as the company he's built and what he's done. And so super happy he was able to join as well.

And do you, if you're cool with it, it'd be great to get your personal journey thro...

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