How the Best CEOs Delegate

24:44When I'm in more chairman mode, then I prioritize as few meetings as possible and voice notes. And what I request is voice notes out and text message back because listening to voice notes is slow. It's assault as Mark and Tree's tweeting. Yeah, it is interesting. One of my favorite self-help books is the seven effective habits. how it affects people. And one of their, you know, principles, maxims is this idea of like efficiency with when it comes to achieving, uh, you know, tasks or accomplishing tasks, but effectiveness when it comes to people. And, and so, um, you know, the efficient path might not be the effective path because you might, you sort of save some time on the front end, but you might, you know, accrue sort of a debt on the, on the backend.

25:32And, um, yeah, it might be efficient to just send a text or something, but, you know, keeping the dynamic, Yeah, phone calls are obviously underrated. Yeah, that's true remote cultures too. Remote cultures build up debt of just the lack of bandwidth. And so if you are in a remote culture, you should get together every couple of months for a few days in person. How do you think about how, when founders are asking for advice, like how should I spend time? What's most important? What frameworks are helpful for founders about thinking about, obviously there's a million things they could be doing. There's not enough time in the day for even a fraction of them.

26:07What are the most important ways to get right? Whether it's your time at Thumbtack, Christine. Yeah, I mean, it's build your product, you see his customers, raise capital, build your team. And when founders asked me, like, how to leverage an assistant, what should I be doing? The way I turned around is, like, what's your top two goals for the month? If it's recruiting, you have to be closing candidates, but you don't need to be sourcing all of the emails. You could pull up a voice note and say, here's a template I want you to reach out to. Let me go through my contacts. Here's 20 people send an outreach email asking them for suggestions for this role.

26:43You know, if your goal is to raise capital, your assistant could help project manage the process of all of that. And so, you know, step one is you set your goals and then you break them down into subtasks. And your assistant won't be able to run the fundraise but can run components of it. And your job is just to decompose things into the smallest part that you can hand off. Maybe you should have some sort of forward deployed sort of thing. It's not just the assistant, but it's also someone that helps you really get the most leverage out of it and watches your activity. One of our learnings from this business, when we first started it, we were like, we're just going to hire the best assistants, match them with clients, and boom, amazing.

27:22But we matched the first five assistants, and every single client said the same thing. How do I delegate calendar? How do I delegate inbox? And so it became clear we needed to invest more in actually teaching the clients how to delegate. because that is as much of a constraint as the assistants. And we've got a few thousand assistants and clients. And if you look at the best performing assistants at Athena, they work for the best delegators. It's not a coincidence. The reason they're the best is because someone has figured out how to export their ideas, decompose projects, create SOPs in a way that helps the assistant fly.

28:00And the more mediocre delegators struggle with that and need more training. Yeah. One thing that you've been phenomenal at is whether it's StumTech or Athena is hiring executives. What do you think that you do differently or what are the principles or frameworks that really guide your sort of exec hiring process? I mean, one thing that is obvious as you hire execs is the more senior they go, the better they hire interviewing almost by definition. And so when you get to C-suite, they all are really good at interviewing. And so you actually have to discard the interview more the more senior they go.

28:33And so I use references much more the higher you go. And then the other thing that I think is interesting that people should do more of is I just ask people for their 360 reviews. Like at their last company, 10 people wrote reviews of them that are honest about their strengths and weaknesses, and I just ask to see it. And I say, hey, I'll share mine. You show me yours. I actually think this would be a cool kind of reference startup where you could ping the LM about someone versus pinging their references. So I try to get to more ground truth on the person versus the UX of an interview is just going to be pretty good when you get to the senior level.

29:16What's most important when you're doing reference checks? What are you really, what's the way to get the most signal out of them? I mean, what I often tell people is, hey, I'm probably going to hire this person and now tell me all the things you don't like about them or things that they could be better at. Because, you know, people are so biased to just tell you all the good things. You have to get them to see it as a safe place to share strengths and weaknesses and just do enough references until they start to sound the same. And once they start to sound the same, then you've got a signal. Yeah.

29:48One question I like to ask is, what skill sets would be really important to complement this person with? Which is another way of just saying, what are they bad? Like, you know, what's really important? Or one of my questions is, if this didn't work out in six months or a year, why would that be? Yeah. And I mean, the best way to source talent is hired an executive recently is just ask the people that you respect the most. They have the highest standards. Who's the best person? So like, here's the three people who have the highest standards in this role. I ask them for the two or three best people and I go to try to hire one of them.

30:19And that is the like speed, rapid way to hire an exec. You know, using an exec recruiter, you spend three months, you get all this cold leads, but going through a network of high bar people is super efficient. There's some maxim that almost like half of executives, you know, don't work out within like, you know, 12 to 24 months. Checks out. Yeah. Why is that? I think it's difficult to judge. The interview process is not representative of the work they're doing. And that's ultimately what's broken about interviewing is interviewing should be someone doing the work they're going to do. So I think it was like Weebly back in the day would actually have execs come work for two weeks to trial before they ever hired.

31:01That's difficult to pull off because people have other jobs. But I do think something like that makes a lot of sense. Your interview process is just kind of irrelevant compared to what the work they're doing in lots of cases. Yeah, and Keith has this maxim that's like, you're not going to get 100 % hiring in the same way you're not going to get 100 % investing. and if you know like you also want to avoid the you know of not the trap of not taking enough risk or moving too slow yeah and as long as you cut your losses quickly it's okay it's what if you like don't cut losses then you compound a hole that's where it's painful the the other thing i'd say is more useful for basically all interview process is project-based work yeah so just like you know hiring a c-suite for one prod uh one part of the team i just tell them what the pain points in the org are and what I want to fix.

31:52And I'm like, come up with a plan. How would you fix this? Like if you, we hire you, you're then going to do it. And that sort of practical work is more useful. Yeah. That's really interesting. What, um, going back to other sort of founder principles, what is your stance on, um, transparency with the company? Like what's information that's helpful, maybe going back to thumbtack days, what's helpful for the company to employees to know, What are principles that guide how much you share? Yeah, I mean, default transparency is obviously the best, but there's obviously some lines.

32:28At Thumbtack, there was a moment, you may remember this a decade ago, where I woke up and I had a message from someone on our team in the Philippines and it said, Thumbtack does not exist on the internet. I was like, what? And I went to Google, you type in Thumbtack and nothing shows up. and we basically received the death penalty from Google. There was a misunderstanding. They thought we'd done something wrong, but they eliminated us from the internet. And so our traffic went to zero, and our revenue went to zero. And I remember waking up, and I go to the office, and there's a class of 25 new thumbtackers who it's their first day.

33:05I'm supposed to do the onboarding with them. There's a journalist walking around outside trying to get a quote. And that's one of those times where you can't share everything. and so you want to ultimately be transparent. But if I just walked into a new class and say, hey, the business might be dead, it's not going to work. And so you have to kind of get a handle of the situation, you know, the people who need to know it, know it. And then once there's a plan and a solution in place, then the whole company is told. Yeah, that makes sense. At Thumbtack, you were a non-CEO co-founder and you lasted, you know, a decade or almost a decade and you're still on the board, of course.

33:44I feel like it's pretty rare when I think about co-founding teams that it feels like the non-CEO, especially if not a CTO, usually doesn't last over five years or something. I'm curious what's really important to get right in co-founder relationships or how you think about advising companies you invest in. I heard Sir Michael at Sequoia say something that was like, there's only one founder. and he said it at a founder event and I was like, that's rude. There's lots of co-founders here. And now a decade later, I'm like, of course, there is only one co-founder that goes the distance because ultimately as you scale the org, it only makes sense to have one person on top.

34:28So I think that's just the reality and it's good to know that going into starting a business. In terms of who to pick, my advice is you pick someone you want to get married to and you're going to have all the same relationship issues you have with a partner. No makeup sex, but it's still like, yeah, there's highs, lows, and you want someone that ultimately you really deeply trust because there's going to be stress and challenges. But as long as you trust the foundation, then you've got a good thing to build on. I'd say one of the biggest, I don't know if I called a mistake at Thumbtack because I love my founders, but it's something I wouldn't recommend others do, is we had four co-founders, and one was technical.

35:15He left after like two years, and then the other three were non-technical. This is like the most idiotic way to start a technology business, but we had no idea what we were doing, and it worked out. And how did you divide and conquer between those three non-technical? We just kind of jumped on things as like whoever was good at something would do it. Yeah, but it was no clear executive. Yeah, and I think that's not recommended because it's obvious how that could create tension. We worked through it, but that's why it's non-standard, not best practice. Right. But I'm going back to the original story because I remember there's this, you got into GSB and you were going to go to grad school, but you had your buddies from college and you were thinking of starting this business, which wasn't even like a personal pain point.

36:00You just thought it'd be a good business. And you emailed the, you know, you let the GSB people know you weren't going to accept it. And they sent you back this very moralizing email and how you're making the biggest mistake in your life, etc., you know, it turned out pretty good. But how do you, pretty good decision, how did you at the time think about getting enough conviction to take the leap and do it? It was scary. I got into, you know, this good school. Seemed like that was a safe bet. I knew I wanted to start a business. And, you know, if I went to business school, I knew that I'd have all this debt.

36:38I probably might need to get a nice paying job afterwards, and if I was gonna go for it, I should probably just go for it." But yeah, when the dean sent me that email, it's like, this is the biggest mistake of your life. He said something like, you can, startups will come and go, but you can only come to Stanford once or something. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity. I never responded, and I have it as an email in my save that I'm just gonna respond to whenever Thumbtack goes public and be like, I made the right decision. And I have nothing against this guy. He's just doing his job, but it's good to have a little chip on your shoulder.

37:17Yeah, totally. Okay, so there's EAs and then there's chief of staffs. How should we think about sort of the difference there and what's really important to get right in chief staff? Is there a role that everyone, in addition to EA, wishes they had, but seems hard to find the right person? Yeah, there's no formal definition. I think it's something that an EA is typically more administrative and taking things off your plate, and a chief of staff is more offensive, and that's the type of person who can follow you into meetings. You could deploy to, hey, actually take this meeting for me, or hey, this problem came up today, go figure out how to solve it.

37:55And so a chief of staff typically has the capabilities to become a founder themselves, and the only reason they take the job as chief of staff is so they can see what it's like to be a founder, so they can go off to do it. So you kind of get people who do more tours of duty and you get super high capability, but you don't get the same longevity as an assistant. What have you looked for in Chief of Staff? Or what's sort of the right, you know, there's sort of this tension between, you know, getting someone younger who's, you know, definitely going to do it for a couple of years and is more ambitious versus someone who's been more seasoned, but maybe not as high slope or something.

38:32How do you think about it? The way I break it down is assistant, you find someone you want to go a decade with. The intimacy and the compounding of that relationship is super important. And so you go deep. And that means you probably don't find a founder because they're not going to be excited to do this. It's someone who's much more of a caretaker and is excited to be number two. And then a chief of staff, I do pure slope where you know the person is going to move on in a couple years. But they could start a business, but instead you get them by your side to help solve problems. And there are people, you know, like Lonsdale, maybe like a lot or something, who have, you know, chief of staff for like a year or two, and then they start a company, then they invest in them, and they build kind of this reputation for doing, and then they have sort of these like, you know, alumni, almost a chief of staff, just kind of, you know, Peter Thiel, just kind of further.

39:20Yeah, Bezos has this, someone follows him around, that goes to every meeting, and yeah, it's cool. Yeah. Let's talk about some people who get an enormous amount done, and I'm curious what are lessons that we can draw from them. Whether it's someone like Lonsdale, whether it's someone like Elon, whether it's someone like Sam Altman, who are folks that you've particularly learned something from, even just watching from afar, of like, how do they build their world? How do they operate? I'll just say one for someone like Lonsdale. Teal has done this really well. They sort of compound these certain talent networks, so, you know, whether it's like Stanford Review or just Stanford in general, they're often hiring people from there and then involved in sort of these talent pipelines.

40:01They've sort of, you know, created, you know, they're deep in the hackathon scene. But they just kind of build this proprietary compounding sort of talent base that they're constantly, you know, sort of... I mean, the talent access is part of it. I think the other thing is there are some people who have just limitless ambition. You're very much this way of like, well, what if I could do 10 times more things? And I think lots of people just think that's impossible. but it's not. It is possible and with delegation and empowerment you can just keep compounding bigger and bigger scale. The other thing that's interesting that we've seen from working with these power delegators is people assume that people of great power or wealth or resources can afford this team and then that is why they have this ambition but we've actually seen the opposite is the case is as people get more leverage with assistant, their ambition increases.

41:01And it's difficult to have big ambition if you're just weighed down by DMV forms and passports. But once that's off your plate, then you raise your sights and you can be more ambitious. And then you go from assistant to a chief of staff and you just keep leveling up until you're Lonsdale or the president. I think another thing I've admired about some of these people is they hold remarkably few grudges. like you know apparently you know Peter Thiel like kicked Elon out of PayPal or something or you know like a lot of these people have had beefs you know decades ago and yet he ended up funding his next company and so people have very short memories if someone you know mistreats them or they make a mistake or something they're quick to reconcile and just do business again over yeah yeah I mean look what President Vance said about President Trump before they were partners it's a I think there's Trump's actually quite forgiving A lot of people say a lot of bad things about him, and he'll continue to work with them as long as they change your mind.

41:59Yeah, I think there's just a desire to win at all costs, and grudges are not helpful. Yeah, Trump and Elon, right? Getting into it and reconciling. It's TBD where it stands by the time this comes out. And then there are some people who seem to have pretty... Bill Gates has a pretty big team, pretty big operation. But then it seemed like Bezos and Elon maybe have pretty lean teams. I'm curious how you think about sort of... Elon's the one that makes no sense. He claims to not have an assistant and to be scheduling stuff. There's a story of Bill Gates trying to schedule a meeting with Elon. He's like, connect me with your assistant.

42:43And Elon's like, no, I am my assistant. I hardly believe it, but Elon's just insane. So maybe he is that way. I think most normal humans, if you want to get leverage, you have to delegate. I mean, one of the cool personal teams I saw is this guy who's a billionaire. He runs this hedge fund, and he has a team of 40. He has eight personal executive assistants. All of the executive assistants graduate from Princeton, insanely high bar, and I was asking this woman who managed the EA team, how do you decide what to prioritize your team on? And she's like, if my team can spend one day saving my principal one minute, it's well worth our time.

43:27And I'm like, that is so next level. And definitely like, that's something I would love to aspire to, but it's just, you know, the billionaire budget. Yeah, it's pretty funny. Also just in terms of prioritization, like, you know, we're hiring, you know, assistants here and someone's saying, oh, you know, do you want them to be in all meetings with you? And I was like, well, if they're in meetings with me, then they're not working. Like, I want them to be like, you know, finding ways to give me leverage and take things off my plate. I mean, this is one of our visions at Athena is that you can have digital assistants that listen to you and work with you and are connected to your Zoom and your inbox and your calendar and can be mining all of that digital exhaust for things your assistant should work on.

44:06And so, I mean, your assistant can't possibly sit in every meeting if they're going to do anything. But if the digital, the machine assistants are surveying it and pulling things out, that's a pretty cool combination. Yeah. I think it's interesting to look at how people build out their universe. Like, for example, you know, Mark and Ben funnel everything through A, C, and Z, and are all in on A, C, and Z, and of course have, you know, other intellectual or philanthropic interests, but mostly it's like consolidated. Whereas someone like Peter Thiel has this, he sort of fragments it a bit more, you know, like, you know, Founders Fund, but then other, several other, you know, Mithril, several other funds, other company, all sorts of like initiatives that are, you know, somewhat collaborative, but independent.

44:51And he sits on top, but also it seems like he lets them, you know, he's not like CEO of them. and he's got this sort of talent, you know, network that he's worked with for a long time that kind of like, you know, goes in almost boomerangs across the universe. Lonsdale feels like he's more, he's got the ABC universe, but then his other initiative, he's like quick to institutionalize something, whether it's like a think tank or like, you know, it's no coincidence that, you know, Peter Thiel would do the sort of Thiel Fellowship and Lonsdale will create a university or something. Teal is almost like early to stuff.

45:32He creates a format for something, a template. He does the hard work of sort of field building or doing something that's in a controversial space where it's longevity or charter cities or higher education. And then people like Lonsdale institutionalize it to some degree. And then Elon, it's been described, also has this SWAT team. of people that help him from company to company and he's just able to recruit world-class people to lead these efforts. I think it's like, what's the right org structure? There's actually no right org structure. It's what's the right org structure for you as a founder?

46:14And Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz are company builders and so they're building their leverage like a company. The A6 and Z is a company. Not that Peter Thiel is not an entrepreneur, but he's more of a philosopher today. And so his system is more like a philosopher. It's all these kind of wild and crazy ideas. And so I think, you know, Jensen Huang has like 46 direct reports or something, which is absolutely insane, but it works for him. And so I think you just have to know what your style is and then you build it for you. Totally. And someone like, you know, Sam Allman is like a deal maker and a fundraiser and a talent identifier.

46:52And so he's able to, like, I remember he was at YC and he was talking to one of my friends about sort of this universal basic income company. My friend didn't end up doing it, but I was like, oh, that's interesting. Why is he even doing that? He's like, focus on YC. He's like, he has a knack for good ideas. He has a knack, and this person was like 22. He has a knack for, you know, high slope talent and he has a superpower around raising money. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that I think new founders, or at least me as a new founder was like, okay, what are my weaknesses and how do I get better at them?

47:22But then a second time founder is like, Forgive all my weaknesses. I'm just not even going to try. I'm just going to be really good at my strengths. And I'm going to hire other people to do all the things I'm not good at. And that is way more effective. Yeah, totally. There used to be this sort of skepticism of like, hey, you can't really, and this still is actually, you can't really incubate company. Like the CEO has to be the founder and they have to drive it too. Where do you stand on kind of that debate? I think the biggest companies aren't incubated because the biggest companies have a founder who is monomaniacal from the beginning and compounds it for 50 years.

47:57And that's not incubation. Incubation is kind of, let me try a bunch of things. It's not this monomaniacal power law commitment. So if you're just trying to build a trillion dollar business, I think that's not the way to do it. But look, if you like, you know, we have a mutual friend who likes to remain anonymous, who incubates lots of companies, and he launches four companies a year, and he loves doing it, and he's going to make a ton of money doing it. And that's just his style. He's not going to probably have trillion dollar businesses, but he's going to have 50, you know, a hundred million dollar businesses, which is still incredible.

48:30Right. Yeah. I think one bull case is more of it's like a breeding, like, you know, Sam Altman in some sense incubated open AI and that it wasn't the main thing he was working on. But then once he identified that it could be, you know, this massive opportunity, then, then went all in with it. Yeah. I mean, it's more like a venture portfolio. And, you know, there's probably a bunch of stuff Peter Thiel has done that we don't even remember, like seasteading and things like that because they just disappear into the ether and then things that work compound. And so, I mean, if you have the resources to launch 10 new things and then just double down on the one thing that's big every year, that's a cool, cool approach.

49:07Right. A decade ago, Mark Andreessen wrote this blog post on productivity. Yeah. And they were asking him, how do you think about meetings, scheduling, whatever? And he said, you know what? I try not to schedule things in advance because I don't know how I'll feel next week. And I kind of want to do things in flow. And so when people are trying to get my time, what I typically say is, call me right now or feel free to check in next week and we'll see how I feel. And it kind of is better aligned with the flow state. I mean, that's the ultimate flex. It's like, if you can pull that off, that is definitely the ultimate way to live.

49:46Because you just work on whatever you want, And the world opens up to you, you call. Obviously, it's hard for most new mortals to pull off. But yeah, if you can get to that level, that is the dream. Right. So then I was, for certain meetings that people are cold reaching out or whatever, I was kind of trying, it's like, I always anticipate that in a few more days, I'll be like busier than I am or something, or I'll have, whereas like right now, yeah, I got time, give me a call. But so I tried that a little bit. And then Mark did a follow-up interview where someone asked him, Sure am." And he's like, oh, you know, that didn't work.

50:22Like, I tried, but that didn't work. Now I'm just scheduled everything. Just back to back all day long. And I was like, oh, goddammit. You've been doing that. And it's, um, but he's, you know, he's also mastered multitasking. I mean, I think people just, the thing I think you can learn from Mark and other people is just challenge the defaults occasionally. And if you're in back to back memes all the time, try this other system and see if it works. I think most people just go with the flow I think the other thing is most people aren't vicious enough at saying no and just being super hardcore is like is that conference you're going to matter is that random get to know you chat mean anything I think you just say no to most things you know back in the Uber versus Lyft really scaling war days I remember emailing Logan a question probably to come to one of our dinners and he just responded war mode.

51:18And I love that. And I'm like, well, most people should actually be in war mode like 90 % of the time. And that same, yeah, hardcore-ness is just like the right way to operate. Yeah. What have you learned in your extensive founder career about managing your own psychology, dealing with stress, dealing with the cognitive dissonance of, you know, having to present externally, like things are amazing even when, you know, You're concerned about Google taking out your business. What advice might you have for others in terms of cultivating this? Yeah, man, I think it's like a cold plunge or something.

51:58It's just shock therapy, and eventually it's just like you're bathing in existential fear all the time, and you're like, whatever, let's bring it on. Totally. I don't think there's much other than knowing that it's going to happen. There's going to be tons of ups and downs. I think one of the clear lessons from Thumbtack, which is now scaled and done so well, was that like there was lots of near misses where we almost died, times where we thought it wasn't going to work and it was like you just got to stay in the game. And if you can stay in the game, you can eventually win. And I think Thumbtack was very good at staying in the game so that we can eventually win.

52:36Yeah. It's funny, there's like degrees of panic in the beginning, you know, you're getting your feet wet. It's like, oh my God, someone said something mean about me on the internet. And then it's like, oh my God, someone wants to leave my company. And then it's like, oh my God, we might die. We only have six months of payroll. Then it's like, oh my shit, we're gonna get sued. Well, it's like the first time you get sued or you're worried about getting sued. And then eventually you have a board meeting and there's just a list of lawsuits. And it's just, you review them quarterly. It's just like, that's actually what success is.

53:08It's like you're going to have that stuff constantly and it becomes, yeah, just part of business. Yeah, and you just keep building up more capacity to handle these things and they, you know, just come. Yeah, and it's where I think co-founders are the best is the people you can be totally open with and be like, well, that situation's effed up. And someone you can trust and be on the ups and downs with. Let's go to Athena and let's go where we started, which is sort of the intersection between humans and AI. How have you thought about building Athena given sort of developments in AI? What does that mean for your future?

53:45Athena started fully bootstrapped, human only, scaled to a thousand people, no outside capital. And then we had this AI moment a few years ago and it was clear we could make a big AI play and this could become a generational business or we could get railroaded by AI. And so only one option there is go big. And our vision here is you take the best of a human, the best of a machine, wrap it into one unified product, and what the machine does will increase over time, just like a self-driving car. And so the human's the UX, it's on top, it will become more, the human assistant will focus more on project management and high-level work, and really be that caretaker, that empathy, that partner, and the machine will increasingly do the more mechanical administrative stuff and you know just as when you get into a Tesla you know Elon made them with wheels or with steering wheels so you could drive them because they don't drive themselves when he started but every time you get in the car you're actually teaching the machine how to drive and these models don't generalize well you have to bring edge cases under distribution and so every time you drive the model gets more powerful And the same is true in executive assistant.

55:03Our humans are driving, they're doing the tasks, but we're building machine models that are being improved by the way they act. And so the more your assistant does tasks for you, the more our models will improve, and that will allow the human to upgrade what they work on to more high-leverage stuff. Yeah. That's exciting. So what else can you share about plugs for the company or things to watch out for or for people who, you know, want to get assistance? Yeah, look, I just say, if you don't have an assistant, you are the assistant. Step one, if you're starting a business, you should hire an assistant.

55:37And if you've got 20 bucks a month, use ChatGPT. If you've got, you know, 10 bucks an hour, go on to Upwork and hire someone yourself. If you hire someone yourself, I would say my main recommendation is you need to interview a lot of people. You know, Athena, we have 50 ,000 assistants apply per month and we put them through a huge battery of tests and we hire like one in 300. So if you're going to hire on yourself, make sure you interview not 10, but probably like 50 people. If you have the resources for$3 ,000 a month, then you should work with a company like Athena who can recruit, train, manage, and teach you how to delegate.

56:14And then when you have the resources for an in-person assistant, 100, 150K a year, you should do that as well. And then ultimately, when you get later stage, you have Achieve a staff, in-person assistant, and a fleet of Athena assistants in the cloud. Yeah, that's a great overview. Well, let's wrap on that. Awesome.

56:34Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or a review, and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at a16z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode. As a reminder, the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund.

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