What It Takes to Win as a Founder | Ben Horowitz

One of the amazing things that I think everyone in the industry is so shocked by is how good LLMs are at writing code.

And, you know, who would have thought? And so there's this idea that maybe building software, writing software becomes as easy as creating content on the internet.

There's the idea that maybe you end up with a bunch of billion dollar companies being built with, you know, much smaller teams.

Maybe it becomes even further geographically democratized or maybe there's going to be solopreneurs with, you know, billion dollar, you know, All those variations.

Do you agree with that? What risks do you think come with that? Do you think that's a lasting trend or do you think you need to still scale businesses ultimately?

Well, I think we're going to see.

You know, it's funny because I think Ray Kurzweil predicted like everybody was going to be a solo entrepreneur.

Like it could get to there.

I would say, you know, like Instagram was 13 people and sold for a billion dollars.

But like Meta's got like a ridiculous number of employees.

You know, would Instagram have just been that many employees if they hadn't got bought by Meta? Probably.

And so I think you can get to a giant audience and a ton of money with a very few number of people.

Like I think that that's for sure true.

And then the question is, can you sustain it or will you get taken out by somebody who's kind of doing more things? I would tend to think like just historically that, you know, people always want more.

Like the standard just goes up in terms of what people want.

John Maynard Keynes had like this very famous or it was his worst paper, but he had this paper that he wrote in, I think it was like 1970. which basically said as soon as people's needs are met, so once they had like shelter, food and clothes, people would start to work maybe no more than 15 hours a week.

I'm not sure now to be spectacularly wrong because of course then all of a sudden everybody needed a car and then everybody needed a car for everybody in the family and everybody needed a television and then everybody needed television in every room in the house.

And now everybody needs a smartphone and everybody needs air conditioning.

And none of that stuff even existed when he wrote that.

And so now people are working like, I'm sure nobody here is working 15 hours a week.

I think like what people need does tend to expand almost infinitely.

So to fulfill that need, sometimes you have to build a bigger company, but we'll see.

Software gets so easy to build that you kind of have like fast fashion SaaS, you know, like you kind of get copycats all the time that kind of get cloned.

The other version that has kind of been predicted is sort of, you know, sort of bespoke software.

Maybe everybody uses... a different, slightly different, you know, version of software that gets generated, that's instantiated at basically at runtime, that's personalized to you.