Scott Kupor on Building a16z and Rebuilding the Federal Workforce

Scott Cooper was a sixteen z's first employee. Sixteen years later, he left venture capital to help rethink how the federal government hires, rewards, and retains talent. In this episode, Founders host David Senra sits down with Scott to trace both sides of that that story. Scott takes us back to 2008 when Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz were starting a venture firm in the middle of the global financial crisis. His initial mandate was simple. They would invest, and Scott would figure out everything else required to build the firm. That meant everything from buying office furniture and making capital calls from his personal Gmail account to building the services organization that would become a defining part of a sixteen z. Scott explains how Michael Obitz and CAA influenced that model, why a sixteen z deliberately broke with venture capital's aversion to marketing, and how early investments like Skype help accelerate the firm's growth. Today, Scott is applying a similar organizational lens to a very different institution, the federal government. As director of the office of personnel management, he's focused on bringing in younger technical talent, rewarding high performers, removing tenure based barriers to advancement, and giving people more room to take what he calls permission risk. Because for Scott, whether you're building a venture firm or reforming government, the underlying question is surprisingly similar. Do you have the right people, the right objectives, and the right incentives to get them there? Tell me what was like starting a '16 z with Ben and Mark. It was interesting. So let me give you the backstory if I can. So we don't... We sold our last company to, Hewlett Packard. Right? So we sold it in 2007, and a bunch of us had basically indentured servitude to HP for, you know, twelve to eighteen months. And then the summer of 'eight... And remind you, right, you know your history, right? So in March of 'eight, basically, Bear Stearns disappears, right? So it's summer of 'eight, and Mark and Ben are like, Yeah, we're going to do this. They've been doing angel investing for a long time. We threw our money, and they said, Look, it'd be a lot more fun if we institutionalized this and went out and raised money. We were literally having this conversation in summer of 'eight, and then September of 'eight, of course, Lehman goes bankrupt overnight, and so the world seems to be coming to an end. So I go home one day to my wife. I'm like, Good news. I'm going to quit my job at HP, which is probably the most stable job you have, and join these two guys. We were actually living in North Carolina at the time because we had a quieter business out there, and the Benin market asked me to go move out to run it, so I was already... I was not in California even anymore. It took me a long time. I hemmed it hot on …