Ben & Marc: Why Everything Is About to Get 10x Bigger

What virtually everybody finds, including Elon Musk, is the real world is just really, really big and really, really messy.

The AI thing is so interesting, right? Because from a technology perspective, it feels like you can build products pretty immediately that are going to win.

Our entire way of doing everything as humans, we think it's going to change. We reinvented the computer and the new computer is far better than the one that we have been building on for the last 50 or so years. The purpose of building the dominant venture brand was precisely to be able to have the companies be able to borrow that at the most critical points in their development so that the companies can kind of use our force in the world as a slingshot to basically build their own force.

You cannot join the firm unless you sign the culture document. If you had to pick a thing, what are you compounding?

Reputation.

We have a very special guest, Packy McCormick, who just wrote an excellent profile of A16Z. Packy, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me. Packy, I want to start by saying thank you for the amazing piece. Like it's just like incredible. Like absolutely incredible. So we just like really appreciate all the work that you put into it because that was a big one.

Everybody, welcome to the Ben and Marc show, first of 2026, and we're now getting into how the media ecosystem has changed. We talked about this great, great Tad Friend profile in The New Yorker in 2015 that I referenced in the piece that I wrote on A16Z this past week, saying that that kind of kicked off or was the last kind of point in an era where journalism cared about free speech. I think Marc will do a better job kind of summarizing what happened over the past decade. Now we're at the end of that point. And I was asking, you know, to what extent Marc thinks that he and kind of a few people who stood up against this actually kind of shifted back to this anarchic or liberated view of the press or relationship with the media that we have now.

Yeah. And I was just saying I think you could describe what's happening kind of going forward, the information environment being, you know, you could use kind of three words. You could say uncontrolled is maybe the neutral word. You could say anarchic is the negative word. You could say liberated is the positive word. You know, in terms of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, you know, and I say at least in the US, I think generally on the internet and then, you know, we can talk about what other countries are doing, but at least in the US, you know, we're clearly entering a much more free speech world. So I just start by saying like I don't think I should claim any moral heroism at all here at all because you know I mean I have my own version of my own story going all the way back to I turned down the opportunity at the time in 1993 to implement censorship in the web browser, you know, which would have been a completely different and, you know, very dystopian world. So I don't know, maybe I get a little bit of credit for that, but you know I think for the last decade like I was kind of on the same ride as everybody else and you know we, you know, I've been on the Facebook board since 2007 so I kind of went through the entire kind of crazy roller coaster that that company went through over the last decade and then you know we've been involved in, you know, lots of these companies. You know, I was an angel investor in Twitter, angel investor in LinkedIn, you know, they both, you know, became kind of key parts of the censorship machine at certain points and so I don't want to claim like huge moral heroism. I do think a couple things. One is obviously Elon's purchase of Twitter, you know, obviously was like a gigantic turning point. I also want to give just like enormous credit to the Substack guys. You know, and they were very proud because we were the original investor and we're the largest outside investor in Substack and, you know, I think they did a really, really great job holding the line of freedom of speech under, and I would tell you under enormous pressure, you know, especially a very consistent and totally principled stance on it.

Yeah, that's right. And they got, I don't know if people remember this or not, but I mean they got really lit up, you know, by a lot of the sort of, you know, anti-speech forces for, you know, I mean the whole litany of, you know, kind of standard accusations of just being absolutely horrible. And yeah, they stuck to their principles the whole time. And then they, you know, at least with Elon acts like he's Elon. And so when he wants to go to war with like, you know, somebody who's like trying to get him to censor more, like he does it in a very kind of force, you know, public, visible and forceful way. You know, Substack's still, you know, a younger company. And so they don't have that level of kind of just throw weight in the world yet. And so they have the harder version of the challenge and they had to fight, you know, a whole bunch of fights, including, you know, fights that aren't even public, you know, to basically keep the service with high integrity.

Yeah. So we say we, you know, we never make investments for just purely kind of social or political reasons. Like so the goal obviously always is as sort of fiduciaries is to generate returns and so you know in the main business and so we always invest with the intention that the company that we invest in, you know, has the opportunity to become what we call kind of a cornerstone franchise, you know, in the industry and an important force in the world. And you know I and I we certainly believed that of Substack at the time and you know we believe that more than ever today. So I think that's true but I also think I think this is kind of the magic in a lot of what we do, you know, at Silicon Valley which is I think the companies in many, not in every case, but in many cases the companies that become the best version of themselves also become the most successful businesses. And I think Substack is a great example of that and Substack is actually a very, very, very good example of that because if Substack is making its writers successful then it's making itself successful, right? And so it's got this just like extremely direct alignment of interest between its success and its writers' success and then as a consequence of that if its writers are successful kind of by definition, you know, those writers' readers are successful, they're getting what they want. And so you know I would say, you know, there were sort of a bunch of reasons we invested in Substack. You know, one was just, you know, we fell in love with, you know, with the guys. And, you know, you probably know the guys, they're easy to fall in love with. So that was the easy part. And then, you know, look, I had been around, you know, we had been around, you know, the web going all the way back. And then, you know, particularly the kind of golden age of blogging, you know, was kind of this very, you know, special time. And you know, and blogging really, you know, I think maybe gets underestimated because maybe there was no single company that kind of got full credit for it or something, but you know, it really created, the phenomenon of blogging created an enormous amount of intellectual content, you know, that basically was not going to exist otherwise. And then it just, you know, blogging kind of just always had a series of problems because there was no single company behind it. But, you know, one of the problems was bloggers just could, it was just very hard for bloggers to make money, right? And so, you know, the Substack guys basically said, well, we're going to do that, but we solve the economic model. People are ready to pay now for content. And this makes sense. And then, you know, there was this chicken and egg thing right up front, which was like, well, you know, can you really see, you know, the internet's awash with content. People aren't paying for almost any of it. Like are they really going to, you know, you have to kind of squint and kind of say, okay, are people actually going to pay for any of the stuff that they're getting today? And I think the thing that in that case that we had faith in was basically this could be what we call a supply-driven market, which is right, if you provide the monetization capability, then you're going to bring into existence writers and content that don't exist today and that is going to create new demand that's not visible today and then that demand is going to come back around and it's going to incent... So it was basically a bet that there's like an entire generation of high-quality content that doesn't exist because the monetization mechanism doesn't exist. And that's, you know, that's certainly what Chris and his partners believed. And I think that's absolutely what's proven out. And so, yeah, I think it's like a great example of founders that like really see a future that doesn't exist yet. And it's obvious to them. And unfortunately, in that case, they were able to, you know, convince us. Like whenever we really screw up, it's because there's a founder who can see the future and they come and they sit in our office, they tell us what the future is, and we say, 'Yeah, I don't really buy it.' Right? And then for the next 30 years, you know, we have to read about the, you know, glorious success of this thing as that future actually develops. And like that really sucks. And I don't like to talk about those, but I will say, you know, Substack is, yeah, maybe they're just really good at sales, but they fully convinced us. And I'm really thrilled that that's what's happening.

They were kind of ahead of the kind of change from old media to new media in that, you know, as the brand moved from The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal to the actual writers themselves, Substack was like a massive enabler for that. And, you know, they created this thing which they call the non-fungible writer, which is, you know, like how many things in the newspaper could anybody write, and including AI by the way, and, you know, how much is like truly like interesting and valuable. And they really wanted all the truly interesting and valuable things to be able to build their people to build their own brands and their own businesses on Substack and that also turned out to be very true.

Yeah. And that was where, you know, Hamish in particular, right, turned out to be really critical on their team, you know, and, you know, he and I had a conversation early on this where, you know, I was like, well, you know, I don't know, are these people ever going to leave their publications? Are they ever going to actually write content that's, you know, like, you know, what Substack was gearing up? It's when in my view the press kind of became this kind of extreme and negative monoculture. And so I was like, all right, you got, you know, because he's like, you got all these writers kind of trapped at these places. And I'm like, well, are they really trapped? Like, are they, you know, are they in jail or have they built the jail? Like, what, you know, like, and if they leave, are they going to be any different? And he's like, look, if their only option to basically put food on the table is to work for a publication that basically, you know, requires them to write a certain way, then they're going to write that way, you know, because they need to pay the bills. But he basically said, 'I guarantee you that there's a lot of these folks, you know, where if they had an independent path, they would take, you know, they would be thrilled to be able to, you know, maybe break themselves out of jail and they would be thrilled to, you know, write about things, you know, from different angles. And have different takes on things and, you know, you'd see this basically this, you know, this liberation phenomenon take place, where you'd have actually many different kinds of voices even coming from people where you wouldn't expect it based on the work that they did for, you know, The New York Times or whoever.' And of course, he was 100% right. You can see a world where because it attracts kind of all of the best writers from all of these different places who can build their own businesses, Substack becomes 10 times larger than any of the media organizations that it replaces.

I want to understand like the mechanism of that. Like do you think that happens every generation that the new companies are 10 times bigger? Why does that happen? Is it just software?

Yeah. So on that one it was actually pretty simple because if you compared the on-premise software companies to the cloud software companies. So compare PeopleSoft to Workday or compare Siebel software to Salesforce. The cloud version was just 10 times bigger.

And Oracle was kind of the on-premise version of Databricks, you know, kind of rough analog, you know, things are different, you know, data is bigger and so forth. But if you look at like who was going to be the data kind of provider in the cloud, the provider of technology to manage your data in the cloud, it was going to, I mean, I was very confident Databricks would win that. And so then if you say, well, what's the market size of that? And by the way, you know, when I said that AI wasn't as big as it is, so I think that's helping my prediction. But, you know, like it was just clearly going to be 10 times bigger. And I was like, Ali, why are you trying to convince this candidate that you're going to be worth 10 billion? Like that's, what are you even talking about? But, you know, Ali is super paranoid. So, you know, God bless him. So, you know, those are kinds of things. And look, you have to know your entrepreneur. I mean, I think this is, you know, one of the things that I think Marc does very well is like, you know, that advice isn't advice you give to every entrepreneur. It's, you know, it worked well specifically for him. And I think that, you know, that's always the case. Like it's a very psychological game running a company and so you have to kind of tap into that person's particular psychology to kind of change the trajectory of what the company is doing into the right direction.

Yeah. I'd also add, you know, Packy, on the Substack point, like I think Substack could be like a thousand times the size of the existing like content industry, whatever you want to call it, media news industry. The collective, you know, kind of value and the reason is because, and you know, you're an example of this yourself. So, you know, my whole life, so I'm like, you know, mid-50s and so like I grew up, you know, when I was a teen, you know, kid and teenager, you know, the moral panic of the era was television. And it was just this like endless litany of sort of social criticism, you know, from kind of, you know, fancy people basically saying, you know, consumers are, you know, basically normal people are idiots. They just want to sit in front of the boob tube. They just want to like be couch potatoes. You know, the line everybody used at the time was Americans watch six hours of TV a day and then you turned on TV and you just saw this, they have this term, the vast wasteland of, you know, game shows and [__]. Yeah. And it's just like this like very dystopian kind of thing of just like people are just morons. And then, you know, the internet version of that is of course, you know, these, you know, that kind of moral panic has transferred straight over onto the internet in the form of, you know, of course, you know, short-form videos. TikTok, you know, people just want to watch, you know, these stupid short-form videos and it's just...

Cat playing the piano is the original one. Right.

Yeah. Exactly. Cat videos. By the way, I'm an aficionado of cat videos. I do not look down on cat videos whatsoever. AI cat videos are my current favorite genre of any form of entertainment. So I will...

The AI cat videos are very good.

I will, I will, yes, Marc can confirm. I send around a lot of AI cat videos. However, there is an enormous market for just like mass media, just for like whatever, you know, for whatever game shows or sitcoms or, you know, soap operas or their modern versions of those and there's a giant, you know, mass media market for cat videos. But this goes back to this idea of supply-driven market. There's also, I think, just like enormous latent demand for actual smart, high-quality stuff. And particularly in media and in every kind of media. And I think the issue is not lack of demand. And I think the issue is lack of supply. Because like this kind of goes back to, you know, kind of consumer marketing 101, which is people don't know what they want until it's given to them, right? You know, nobody ever asked for a Macintosh. Nobody ever asked for an iPhone. Like, you know, these things had to be designed and built and provided on the supply side before the demand materialized. And then the demand of course turned out to be, you know, far higher than anybody expected. And I think that same thing is exactly true of media. I think a great early existence proof of this was the success of long-form podcasting. You know, which is, I remember my early conversations with some of the early long-form podcasters and they're like, it's the strangest thing we've ever seen because everybody tells us that the consumers have short attention spans but, you know, people are literally watching three-hour podcasts and we get the analytics and people are watching all the way to the end of the three-hour podcast. And so I view this very much as like, you know, this is one of these classic markets that's a barbell, which is, yeah, you have a certain amount of whatever, just, you know, whatever, you know, sort of mainstream whatever, you know, filler, whatever on the one side, but you have this massive sort of untapped market for high-quality content in basically every domain. And they just had, you know, and again, you know, technological transformation, the existing structure of the media company was a structure that was designed for a world of centralized media. You need a new structure today and, you know, of course that's why we're so high on Substack. But yeah, when we look at Substack, it's the exact same thing that you were just talking about with Databricks, which is like, wow, this thing could be orders of magnitude, orders of magnitude multiples larger than anything we've seen so far. And frankly, I think we're starting to see that.

Well, I think that we reinvented the computer. So and the new computer is far better than the one that we have been kind of building on for the last 50 or so years. Well, really longer than that, but 50 in earnest. And, you know, so there is not, I mean, we talk about this all the time in the firm, there's not a problem that we can think of that you won't be able to solve with AI. So like almost every problem in the world and, you know, from cancer to transportation to massive fraud in the US. You just name a problem in the headlines and we're like, 'Oh yeah, we can solve that.' And so it's kind of the reinvention of everything. So like our entire way of doing everything as humans, we think it's going to change. And so, you know, I would view it as 15 billion to start for us because there's so much to do and there's so many things that are going to get built and, you know, like some of it is just timing with the entrepreneurs, but we think the number of entrepreneurs is going to multiply as well. Because the ease of going from an idea to a really fantastic solution and a fantastic product is just going to be so much simpler because, you know, one of the things that AI is best at, of course, is kind of building stuff. And so yeah, it's just a very unique time in kind of the history of the world.

Yeah. Yeah. The out-of-body experience I have with AI on a regular basis now is, you know, it's just like, okay, I think about the way Marc does and then I'm like, all right, how might you apply AI to solve, yeah, for example, the fraud scandal, you know, the kind of fraud that we're seeing play out, you know, anything like that. And it's like, oh, okay, I need to think and think about how to have AI solve this. And I'm like, well, wait a minute, why don't I ask the AI, right? And then I go in there and I'm like, you know, da da da, how should I do this? And it's like, oh, well, here it's obvious how you would do it and here's, you know, the 18 steps that you would take. And then I tell it, well, you know, okay, like, you know, interview me, you know, interview me on all the open questions in the topic, you know, to get my thoughts on them. And then it starts, you know, it starts interrogating me, right? And then I'm like, okay, now give me your point, you know, and so it's just like, you know, as you know, like if you had tried to do that with a normal computer in the old days, it would just like stare at you, right? Like, so like this is really, really, really different. And then, you know, Packy, I think the venture lens I would put on this is, you know, in terms of the mechanics of venture capital, you know, the sort of classic venture capital triangle is team, product, and market. And you're always trying to kind of evaluate all three of those and people have always had, you know, different theories over the years of which is more important than the others and how they interact. But the thing that basically every investor, public market investors, private investors, the thing that we're all trained to do is basically market sizing. Like we're, you know, we're trained to do technology analysis. We're trained to do like, you know, background checks on people. And then we're trained to do market sizing. Like, you know, okay, how big is this market? Because, you know, the classic adage, right, is if you put a huge amount of effort into going after a small market, you still get a small outcome. But there's a presumption in there which is that you can actually predict market sizes on these things. And the problem with that again is this presumption that you can predict market sizes based on the dynamics that exist in the market today. But if there's a fundamental change on the supply side, if there's a fundamental breakthrough, a fundamental capability that doesn't exist yet, you're not going to be able to accurately model the market size because you can't see it yet. Like you've changed one of the major variables and you can't do that. And, you know, and then you could call that the leap of faith or whatever, but it's like, okay, if you make the change in the supply side, then all of a sudden the market gets 10 or 100 or 1,000 times larger. Like you can almost never validate that with math at the time of the investment, but that's the thing that makes the outperformers, you know, really go. And I just think like as Marc and I kind of go through our careers, we just see more and more examples where the mistake that we or others make is, oh, this must be, you know, the market for Uber and Lyft must be the market for taxi cabs, right? Or, you know, the market... Yeah. Or the market for cloud software must be the same as the market for on-prem software, right? Or the market...

The market for GPUs must be the market for people who like to play games.

Yes, exactly. And we just keep seeing example after example after example where the significant enough technology change, product change on the supply side unlocks much larger markets. And I think that's going to be, I mean, frankly, that's going to be like the single dominant trend in investing for like the next 30 years. I think that's just going to like telescope way out.

The AI thing is so interesting, right? Because from a technology perspective, it feels like you can build products pretty immediately that are going to win. And then A16Z starts to make a lot more sense in that context where it's like all of these other things. It's how do you do go-to-market? How do you do policy? Like how do you set the conditions for the actual best technology to win as quickly as possible? Like how do you think about all the different things that you do there? And is that the right way to think about it that like the best technology should win and the platform is there to make sure that that happens?

You know, the way we always thought about the firm was what can a partner do for an entrepreneur that will not only help them ensure their success but help them kind of build the company they want to build and the way they want to build it with the people they want to build it with and the culture that they're proud of. And to do that there's many, many pieces and a lot of it, you know, some of it is just like very fundamental, like can you do your business in the United States of America? Can you do it in the world? And so that's where the policy comes in. It's just like a very basic question and Washington has a huge interest in technology these days. So like it's a necessary one. A lot of the other things come down to, you know, how do you go from being an inventor to being a competent CEO and that really is a confidence game for lack of a better word. And that, you know, it's very difficult to run an organization when you don't know what you're doing. Which nobody does when they're an inventor. And you get tremendous amount of advice and advice that's often extremely bad. And almost the opposite of what you should be doing. And there are very few, like the people who have actually built things don't have time to talk to you. They're often away building things. So you get these like advisors and, you know, Silicon Valley people who tell you how to run your company, who to hire, this and that and the other. And then those things turn out to be wrong and you get into this confidence spiral. And so we, you know, the whole firm is built to put you in a kind of a virtuous confidence cycle as opposed to a vicious confidence cycle. And that means like, oh, I need to call somebody who's hard to get to, like an important CEO or like, you know, I've got to recruit a top-end engineer or I have to figure out how to market my product or I have to get to somebody important in the government. If I can do that, my confidence builds. If I can't do that, my confidence sinks. And so then, you know, once you're confident, you can make decisions faster. You can, you know, build the company more effectively. You can go for what you actually want. You can have confidence that, okay, what I want is the right thing as opposed to what somebody's whispering in my ear, you know, who is whatever, a CEO coach or a VC or this or that or the other. And so the whole firm is designed to kind of enable that inventor to become a CEO and run their own company and put their mark not just, you know, locally but in the world by being able to kind of network to anyone. And so that's a lot of what we're about.

Yeah. And I just add the sort of macro, you know, kind of outside-in on that is it's just like, you know, we get to work with these, you know, super geniuses, but they're specifically they are super geniuses at building products, building technologies. You know, to be a super genius at building technologies generally, it requires you to have been sitting in a lab, you know, in front of a screen for, you know, 10 or 20 years. You know, they just, they have, they, you know, these folks are fully capable of understanding everything about the world at large. They just haven't, they just haven't done it yet. They just haven't been out there and they haven't met all the people and they haven't dealt with all the issues in the real world. And so that leads to this kind of recurring, you know, kind of I would say misimpression sometimes that the people have just like, well, if you just, if you build the right product, you know, if you build the breakthrough whatever XYZ widget, like it's just the world is obviously going to adopt it, everybody's going to use it, it's just obviously going to, you know, kind of sweep things. And, you know, if, and basically if it doesn't, the answer is the product's not good enough. And, you know, there's a little bit of truth to that, like obviously the better, the more breakthrough the product, you know, the more there will just be organic traction. What virtually everybody finds, you know, up to including Elon Musk, right? What everybody finds is the real world is just like really, really big and really, really messy, right? And there are, you know, 8 billion people out there with like opinions that are not necessarily, you know, your opinions. And, you know, many of them have a real vote as to what is going to happen with your product and with your company, you know, including whether anybody buys, you know, your thing or, you know, all of the X factors that kick in, you know, all the different ways that, you know, people are going to come and try to, you know, [__] what you're doing. Or, you know, or maybe even worse than that, you know, just ignore you, right? And so there is this, there is this really big world out there. It's really complicated. It's really messy. It's not necessarily in favor of new ideas. In many cases it really, really doesn't like them and wants to reject them. And there...

There's real art and science, you know, to — yeah, to Ben's point — to building the company around the product and the founder, to be able to take the breakthrough and be able to take it successfully into the world. And as far as we can tell, like as far as I can tell, that process is getting, you know, hairier and more complicated over time, right? It's not getting easier. It seems like it's actually getting significantly harder. And so, yeah, that's a big part of what the firm is built to do — is really help founders, you know, work through that.

And one of the things that Mark said in the past, which is really true, is like, look, as an inventor, you're looking for power, like a power boost. So how do I go from little old me with my invention to like I'm the important company in the space in the world? I can build momentum. I can get the best engineers. I can get the, you know, customers faster. And that turns into a snowball and I'm rolling downhill. And so the whole firm is designed as like a very powerful entity that you can just tap into and, you know, take our brand, take our connections, take our expertise and become extremely powerful very fast.

Yeah. And by the way, this is the solution of the puzzle that people have had about us for a long time, which is, wow, it seems like those guys are like, you know, awfully promotional. You know, they do all this marketing stuff. They're doing all this politics stuff. They must be doing this for ego reasons. They must be really full of themselves. You know, this must be about, you know, they talk so much — like the whole thing. And at least, you know, and maybe it's possible we talk too much. I'll judge that from time to time, maybe. However, from the beginning, the goal was to build — the purpose of building the dominant venture brand was precisely to be able to have the companies be able to borrow that at the most critical points in their development, so that the companies could kind of use our force in the world as a slingshot to basically build their own force. And I think that's worked really well, and that's why we don't, you know, shrink back in a lot of these things.

Well, we train for that. Yeah, we train for that. So we have a culture, a written culture, that you cannot join the firm unless you sign a document, the culture document, that says you will adhere to this culture, and then you must sit through one hour with me understanding the culture. And fundamentally, on that, you know, our whole point is if you want to do something larger than yourselves and make the world a better place, we are 100% for it and we do not care. You know, like if in the moment we think you're making a mistake or like the idea isn't good enough, it doesn't matter if we invest in you or don't invest in you. We're for that. We are dream builders. We're not dream killers. We're not here to be like the analytical smarty-pants who makes ourselves look smart by making somebody else look stupid. And that's just fundamental to how we think about the world. So like anybody who's trying to push the world forward and make it better, like whether we agree with their method or not, like we're for it. And so we just ask you to sign up to that idea before you ever join.

Katherine said that, you know, we believe in the future and bet the firm that way should actually be the number one kind of value in the culture. By the way, that was Mark's — you know, I did the wording, so I give myself a little credit, but that was Mark's idea.

Well, look, I mean, the culture document is seven things, and the culture is more than that. Every culture is more than seven ideas and kind of seven sets of behaviors, but those are the ones — all seven of them — that we really expect everybody to live to. So I don't know if I rank them in that sense because they all go together. They're part of a single thing. So, you know, we believe in the future means that we believe in the people who build the future, which means we're not going to criticize them, which means, you know, we're not going to be on the attack side of that. We're never going to attack the future. We're going to try and make — you know, there are going to be problems with how we build the future, but we're going to try and make it the best future we can. We're not going to try and live in the past. And so you can't do that if you're attacking entrepreneurs all the time. You can't do that if you show up, you know, an hour late to meet with somebody who's trying to build a company. You can't do those kinds of things. And so every part of the culture, I think, is in support of we want to build a better future. Like that is why we're here.