Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy · Colossus | Investing & Business Podcasts

Ben Horowitz - Backing America’s Future

·56 min·5 clips

Ben Horowitz discloses a Biden executive order almost banned GPU sales, risking America's global chip dominance.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy interviews Ben Horowitz at length about Andreessen Horowitz, the state of American technology, and his broad theory of the country's future. Horowitz opens by describing the American tech ecosystem as uniquely healthy in 2026 -- lower regulation, lower energy prices, strong entrepreneurship culture -- and contrasts it with Europe, which has the talent and universities but lacks the cultural valorization of building something larger than oneself. He identifies policy as the primary risk to this trajectory, citing the Biden administration's executive order that would have required federal approval before selling a GPU as an example of how quickly good conditions can be reversed, and draws on his father's observation that a bad government can ruin even the greatest country, giving Hungary as an example of a nation that produced John von Neumann and went to nothing under communism. On AI and company building, Horowitz argues the laws of physics of software company building have changed: the previous certainty that you could not throw money and engineers at a great product to catch it -- the law that protected incumbents -- no longer holds. He cites Elon Musk's rapid entry into frontier AI as an example. He argues the market sizes implied by AI are so large that old valuation frameworks may need to be discarded. He notes that AI researchers who have trained large models at Google, Facebook, OpenAI, or Anthropic constitute a talent pool of roughly 40 people globally, which explains what looks from the outside like irrational compensation. On inequality, Horowitz argues it is a feature of the American system rather than a bug, that every attempt to correct it historically transfers power to the correction-runner rather than redistributing opportunity, and that AI is actually a significant opportunity equalizer -- giving everyone access to a world-class tutor, lawyer, and advisor on a smartphone. He describes the founding logic of a16z: that venture capital was a good product for LPs but a poor one for entrepreneurs, and that he and Andreessen, having both been founders, could build a firm designed specifically to give founders the confidence, knowledge, network, and operational support needed to actually run a company. He discusses the early investor profile mistake -- requiring all investors to have been founders or CEOs, which produced people less interested in investing than expected -- and the fund-by-fund story from a brilliant Fund One with Skype, Slack, Okta, and Stripe to a difficult Fund Three that recovered on the strength of Coinbase, Databricks, Lyft, and GitHub. He describes the evolution of a16z from a generalist firm to a multi-team structure modeled on the crypto fund, with separate investing teams each backed by a portfolio services platform. Horowitz describes personally funding AI and data technology for the Las Vegas Police Department, framing the decision as a direct expression of his belief that technology solutions outperform policy solutions: defund the police did not make anyone safer, but giving police better tools does. The conversation closes on a16z's long-term ambition: to be the venture firm that helps ensure America maintains the technology leadership equivalent of winning the Industrial Revolution, which Horowitz identifies as the source of every form of American global power including military, economic, and cultural.

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