David Solomon & Ben Horowitz on Building Organizational Resilience & Navigating Macro Uncertainty

We were the largest wholesale funder in the world ten years ago. There are a lot of things you wanna be the largest in the world. The wholesale funder, not one of them. We got a lot of criticism, like, why are you raising money now? What are you? Stupid. And it turns out that the best time to raise money is when nobody has money. Last year, the four largest companies contributed 1% to GDP growth with their $400,000,000,000 of spending. M and a and capital raising, IPOs are driven by confidence. For the last four years, whatever the question was, the answer was no. Okay. Now, whatever the question is, the answer is maybe. David, you've been at Goldman now over twenty five years. You know, what are you focused on to position Goldman for the future? If you're in our kind of businesses, if you're attached to financial assets, this is as sweet a spot that I've seen. With AI, if you have proprietary data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve, like, almost any problem. It is magic. What if the thing that made software companies defensible for fifty years just stopped being true? In 1975, Fred Brooks published the Mythical Man Month, which included a simple observation. Nine women cannot have a baby in one month. You couldn't accelerate software development by throwing more engineers at it. That insight shaped how startups competed for decades. A small team with a head start could outrun a giant because you can't buy your way to a breakthrough. Fifty years later, something has changed. Companies are going from zero to more than $1,000,000,000 in revenue in less than a year. OpenAI built a $10,000,000,000 business with a seemingly insurmountable lead, and competitors are catching up anyway. The old playbook assumed that leads compound. The new reality suggests they might not. This raises uncomfortable questions for founders and investors alike. If you can throw money at the problem, what happens to the advantage of being first? And if incumbents can close gaps faster, does that change when companies should go public or how much capital they need to stay ahead? A sixteen z general partner David Haber spoke with a sixteen z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Goldman Sachs chairman and CEO David Solomon about how AI is reshaping competitive dynamics, why enterprise adoption is harder than it looks, and what today's policy fights over crypto and AI actually mean for builders. I've had the distinct pleasure of working at least indirectly for both David Solomon and Ben Horowitz and have a lot of affection for both Goldman Sachs and a sixteen z. If you haven't read, I highly recommend reading the book The Partnership, which is written by a guy named Charles Ellis, which chronicles Goldman's nearly a hundred and sixty year history. And I think the most remarkable thing about Goldman's history is the fact that it's not a business built through a series of bank mergers, …