This episode of Vintage and Vintage is brought to you by Northwestern Mutual.
I think it was midnight and my phone rings. Unknown caller. So I'm like, "Oh, it's Kanye." I go, "Yeah, yay. What's up?" And he goes, "Hey, Ben, I heard you're having a barbecue tomorrow." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I am. I want to record in your studio." And I'm like, "Yay, I don't have a studio."
Are their strengths world class, or are they the best in the world at something? And then you overlook everything else. That's what makes a company great, and that's what makes an entrepreneur great. Not, oh, they don't know how to do this, or wow, they know nothing about finance. There's so many things that are wrong with every entrepreneur. Every great entrepreneur has got something like horribly wrong with them. But that's okay.
You know, it's what are they truly great at? What they're great at.
I'm James Norman. I live in the Bay. I came here by way of Detroit. I straddle the worlds of tech and hustle. I'm the CEO of Pilotly, the managing partner of Black Ops. I'm a builder, a father, entrepreneur, and investor. I'm also very blessed to have spent time with some of the coolest and smartest people in the space in which we operate. And these people are of a certain vintage, and they're in limited supply. I'm here to share these special conversations with you. This is Vintage and Vintage.
Welcome to the first episode of Vintage and Vintage.
This is the first one. It's the first one.
All right. Well, that's good. We're getting off with a bang, right? You know, step into the game. But to start the conversation, it's Vintage and Vintage. You are of a certain vintage of entrepreneur.
We also have a certain vintage of wine as well. So like, and all the wines are connected to like the relationships. This is continuum, right?
But it's actually like Mondavi. So Robert Mondavi, you know, they kind of set the tone for American wine. But by '93 though, there was like this like virus vineyard situation in Napa.
And so they had to go public under duress, like, oh, we got to get this money. We got to keep going.
Didn't turn out that well because Wall Street directors came in and like abused the name, and now you have the Robert Mondavi wine that people would know today. But yeah, it kind of fell apart by '04, and the family had to pick up the pieces. But the youngest son came along and decided to make Continuum, and he wanted to shoot for the stars, take all the learnings he had, the inner workings of how they make great wine, and make this. And so this was born out of struggle, and similar to my guest today did the same in Silicon Valley. Set the tone for cloud computing, had to sell the heart of the company to keep the thing going. Even after going public, stock dropped as a result, and had to crawl out of that. But like, took the knowledge one had in the team and the inner workings of how the thing was managed, Opsware, and you know, clawed your way back from people was like, they counted him out. Nah, they're not going to make it. It's a dot-com boom bust. Was like, you know, got the 1.65 billion exit, and so Continuum is special and legendary. My guest is special and legendary, but it's great because of the struggle.
And so this is the hard thing about hard things in the bottle.
And this is my guest, Ben Horowitz.
All right. That's a very nice introduction. Thank you. So I call you James. Most people know you James.
I'm talking from the knew me days, right? So actually, hold up. Actually, take a look at the year in the wine before that.
We did something pretty funny and crazy. We did something pretty...
Was that the co-barbecue with Kanye?
Oh boy. It was a day in the studio with Yay.
Yeah, that was wild. So, for you listeners, what happened was we're having the CEO barbecue, which is a big event at my house and so forth, and it's like I think it was midnight, and my phone rings, and you know, I heard, I guess I didn't turn off the ringer, and I look at it, unknown caller, so I'm like, oh, it's Kanye. And so I answer the phone and I go, "Yeah, yay. What's up?" And he goes, "Hey, Ben, I heard you're having a barbecue tomorrow." And I was like, "Yeah, yeah, I am." He's like, "Can I come?" I was like, "Sure, you can come." He goes, "Oh, can King Kim come?" And I'm like, "Yeah, Kim can come. Of course he can come." "Well, can Chris come?" Yeah. I was like, "Yeah, Chris can come." And he goes, "Okay, great. And I want to record in your studio." And I'm like, "Yeah, I don't have a studio." And he goes, "Okay." And so like, "Okay." Then like I wake up 6:30 in the morning, I get a call. "Hey, Ben, this is Noah. I'm Kanye's engineer." He's like, "I'm just calling about the specs on your studio." And I'm like, "I don't have a studio, Noah." He's like, "What do you mean you don't have a studio? What are we going to do? Kanye's expecting a studio. We got to have a studio." I'm like, "Oh, shit." So I call Chris and Nate. I'm like, "Who do we know who has a studio?" And they're like, "Howie." And I'm like, "Okay, well, let's call him because like Kanye's coming over. We need a studio." And so we call you like, "What are you doing? How are you?" He's like watching Netflix. And I'm like, "Okay." I was like, "Is that studio you have portable?" And he's like, "Yeah, yeah, it's portable." And so long story short, you drove the studio down to my house, and we set it up in the room, and then a lot more crazy stuff happened. Yay was playing us the Pablo album.
Yeah, we went through a lot of them. We went through Push's album. We went through basically all the Wyoming stuff. Yeah, basically all of it.
Yeah. So that was a legendary day.
Crazy thing. That was a legendary day. No doubt. There were a lot of beefs at that barbecue, too. There was conflict, which we could get into later, but we should take up the whole podcast with that.
Yeah, that would be the hip-hop champ situation. Hip-hop's important, like we're both hip-hop heads. When did hip-hop become a thing? When did it be like, I can see myself in that and it's motivating me to do things? Like, how did that come to be?
Yeah. So it's kind of a slow thing. So I was probably like 12 years old when Rapper's Delight came out. That was kind of the first one that a lot of us heard, you know, if you weren't in New York. I think the first one where I was really like, ooh, this is going to be very different, was when Run DMC's Hard Times came out, and I was like, this has a whole another feel to it than anything I've heard. So I was really into it, but the thing that made me locked into hip-hop. So I went to school in New York. I had this friend who I grew up with who had gotten shot in the face in some kind of weird gun accident, and he was blind. And so, you know, I was very worried about him. We were super close. And you know, I would call home to my mom. I was like, "How's Seth doing? Is he all right? Is he going to be okay?" She's like, "You know, he hasn't spoken to anybody since he's been shot. He's just, you know, sitting in the hospital. Everybody's worried. He's suicidal. This and that and the other." And so I got the idea, being like a dumb 18-year-old kid. I was like, you know, hip-hop is so great. Like it's like the most, like you can have nothing and you'll rap about your shoes and like my shoes are the best. And I'm like, you know, he needs that feeling. And so I would record DJ Red Alert and Chuck Chill Out.
That's where all the good stuff was.
Yeah. You know, I'd sit there on Saturday night. Everybody else would be out, and I'd be just like recording, and I would send him the tapes of the show. And then I called home to see how he's doing, and they're like, "Well, he's talking now, but all he'll talk about is hip-hop, you know, and DJ Red Alert and, you know, Rock the Bells and all that." And I was like, "Oh, cool." So then when I went out that summer, we started a hip-hop group called the Blind and Deaf Crew. Blind and deaf. And we rapped about being blind. I wrote most of the lyrics. So I wrote things like, the Blind Deaf Crew, you know, we're fly, three of us, but we got four eyes. Oh man, you know, just rapping about being blind. And so then I was very attached to it after that, you know, and hip-hop is very business-oriented, as you know, particularly in the early days it was all about business, right?
And so, you know, when I started writing on business, so many of the ideas came from those old hip-hop songs. And so I started just putting the lyrics at the top of the post, mostly to give credit where credit was due, because if like, you know, I hear an idea, this is my inspiration. So I'm, you know, here.
Yeah. Just put it out there. So like, you know, it came from, I didn't come up with this idea. It came from Rakim. It came from Rick Ross or whatever. And so then I got really associated with it and all that kind of thing.
Okay. It's funny though because knowing where I'm coming from, I'm of a different vintage though, right? Yeah. So it would be impossible for you to be growing up on the West Coast and be of your vintage and actually like grow up in hip-hop because it just didn't travel. There's no DSPs and stuff. So it's like versus like, you know, I'll be six years old listening to, you know, whatever it's Hammer or whatever. Like I'm nine listening to 36 Chambers. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. So it's like a different...
No, actually, so my friend Roland Fryer, the economist at Harvard, just wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal kind of on, you know, did hip-hop have a bad influence in society? And the way he did this study, which turns out no, it had a positive influence, was because no radio stations played it. So you could track the cohorts from the cities that had hip-hop and see how they did versus the cities that didn't have hip-hop. And turns out the cities with hip-hop, the inspiration level is just like, you know, their level, like that's the driver.
You're getting into college, you're doing your thing, and now like you're getting into entrepreneurship. How did we get into like, I'm going to work with Mark and do all these things?
I wasn't in position to be an entrepreneur very easily, and that, you know, by the time I was 25, I was married, I had three kids, like so I was just trying to keep the lights on. Yeah. Yeah. You know, keep the lights on, that was my main thing. And you know, it's a little, you know, starting a company was a much more unusual thing in those days, you know, it's kind of more systematized now. So I started as an engineer at a company called Silicon Graphics. And...
Yeah. Ken Coleman. Yeah. Ken hired me in there, you know, I kind of learned the ropes, learned how to be an engineer, learn product management and that kind of thing. And I ended up going to Netscape. A lot of SGI guys were there. And that's where I met Mark, and you know, I was still just trying to like, I was happy to be like making money and, you know, Netscape went public. I think I got a million dollars out of that, which was crazy. I couldn't even believe it. I was so rich. And...
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I thought. And then, you know, once Netscape kind of got sold, Mark's like, hey, we should start another company. You know, it didn't cross my mind to do something like that. And I was like, well, who's going to be the CEO? He's like, you. And I'm like, all right, I'll try. You know, I don't know anything about being CEO, but that's kind of how I got started.
I mean, that also actually speaks to a lot of, you know, the sinusoidal trajectory of a company that finally gets to an opportunity. Like the first time you really step into something, there's going to be downs, right?
