CEOInterviews.AI
Start App
Try: AI strategy tariffs earnings guidance layoffs interest rates growth

Ben Horowitz

Co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz

Search every verified Ben Horowitz interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, recently appeared in several podcast conversations discussing topics including entrepreneurship, artificial intelligence, education, and hip-hop culture. In an interview with James Norman, Horowitz discussed his approach to evaluating founders, saying that what ultimately matters is the entrepreneur rather than the idea, and that every great entrepreneur has "something horribly wrong with them" but what matters is their world-class strengths. He also described AI as "clearly bigger than the internet" and compared its rapid development to the computer industry being reinvented over two years instead of 80 years. Horowitz also participated in discussions about AI software reliability and education. In a conversation with TypeSafe AI founder Diogo Almeida, he questioned why AI's capabilities have not translated into more automation of real-world tasks, and expressed skepticism about claims that software is becoming easier to replicate. In an episode announcing the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, he argued that the current moment is one of the best times in history to be young, comparing it to the eras of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, and said the existing education system was built for a world that "is soon to no longer exist." He also discussed the Paid in Full Foundation with Nas, Grandmaster Caz, and Steve Stoute, describing the effort to financially support and publicly honor hip-hop pioneers, saying that it is important to start with "what's right" rather than "what's possible" when pursuing great endeavors.

Recent appearances

Verified interview transcripts

Notable quotes

“I think it's clearly bigger than the internet. People talk about it like it's a sector like we're talking about oh it's a bubble like crypto. I'm like crypto is a thing. It's a conduit but like it ain't AI you know AI is a new computer right? Like it's a it's it's like the reinvention of the computer. Imagine the entire computer industry got invented but instead of it developing over 80 years it developed over two ye”

“It's a tricky thing because really what ends up mattering is the entrepreneur. Like if you just if you had a perfect rating system and you could exact go like do you want this entrepreneur or this idea? You would take the entrepreneur every time. The problem is you know as as you were saying like it's hard to evaluate entrepreneurs. You don't know that much about them when they come in. Um and you don't know how they”

“In the SAS apocalypse story, the story that I feel like has panned out really poorly is that software is very cheap and perhaps easy to replicate, which I think I could believe the former. I could not believe the latter because a lot of the stuff happens beneath the hood. I'm maybe overly a software fanboy here. So I don't think that really panned out. So SAS seems like maybe the markets don't agree, but I think SAS ”

“I don't entirely buy the data argument in my opinion. I do believe that there's a long tail for sure, that would be kind of crazy to deny, and I don't think that in my canary in the coal mine situation we need to automate that long tail. I think we need to be incredibly pragmatic on everything and building reliable software is always an investment. It should be an ROI decision for people who automate stuff. I would j”

“The other reason that now is actually the correct time to do it is if you look at the university system you know it started out as this religious institution with the Jesuits and so forth. Um and then the industrial revolution came and then all of a sudden everybody needed kind of a higher level of the ability to learn things, the ability to you know being literate etc etc and so the university system just exploded i”

“The idea was like, how do you contribute so much culturally, but yet the financial take is so meaningless? How does how do you put pour so much in and get so little out? ... everybody became comfortable with that idea. They just accepted it as, oh, that's just the way it is. That's just the way it is. Like meanwhile, you're changing the way people are dressing. You're changing dialect. You're changing so much in the ”

Other executives at Andreessen Horowitz

The summary and quote tags on this profile are produced with AI assistance from verified, first-person interview transcripts, then checked by our team to confirm the speaker's identity and the accuracy of every quote. See how we verify →