a16z's First Employee on the History of a16z, Venture Capital & Fixing the Government | Scott Kupor

Tell me what it 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 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. We've been... They've been doing angel investing for a long time with their own money and they said, look, it's... It'd be a lot more fun if we institutionalize this thing out and raise money. We were literally having this conversation summer of 'eight and then September of 'eight, of course, Lehman goes bankrupt like 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. And we were actually living in North Carolina at the time because we had a quieter business out there and Ben and Mark had asked me to go move out to run it. I was already, I was, you know, not in California even anymore. So it took me a long time. I hemmed it hard on it. And these guys joke to this day, which I don't know if it's true or they just like to razz me is had I agreed to actually join them sooner that I would have been, you know, it would have been Andreessen Cooper, or what, instead of Andreessen Horace. Now, I don't know if that's true or not, but, so I, my official title was first employee, not actually co founder of the firm, but they started. So I finally kind of Christmas... I I still have these emails. I look back at them. Mark and Ben were like, look, you gotta get off the dime. Gotta figure out what you're doing. And I finally said, okay, like, I'm gonna go do this, but it took me a long time to figure it out. What was the job description? Where did they say There was no job description. This was part of the problem was that's... Yeah. I was like, I was like, what are you doing? I was like, I had no idea. So this was basically... So remember, it was just the two of them, and the job description was actually... Mark and Ben said, look, we're gonna invest, and you need to figure out everything else we need to do to build a firm. And I didn't know what that was. So in the early days, it was literally like going to Costco …