Ben Horowitz on Raising a New Fund and How Venture Firms Scale

What It Covers

Ben Horowitz explains how a16z scaled to 600 people and $15 billion in new funds by structuring as multiple small teams, prioritizing winning deals over picking, and building platform services that help founders succeed.

Key Questions Answered

• •Venture firm scaling structure: Keep investing teams under five GPs each to maintain conversation quality and truth-seeking. Larger teams lose ability to have productive debates about technology and markets, making it impossible to reach consensus on investment decisions.
• •Winning versus picking deals: Ability to win deals matters more than picking ability for venture returns. Being able to consistently win automatically places a firm in top tier performance, while great picking without winning capability yields poor results across all stages.
• •Board member value creation: Board members provide highest value during discrete crisis moments like difficult fundraising rounds or acquisition decisions, not daily engagement. Monthly CEO calls focused on helping founders think through decisions prove more effective than constant involvement.
• •Conflict management in venture: Venture firms require much lower tolerance for interpersonal conflict than operating companies because high-powered disagreeable investors can wreck each other's work. Organizational design must minimize conflicts rather than relying on rules or process to resolve them.