#33 - Ben Horowitz

Balaji (0:00)

Ben, thank you for speaking at the Network State Conference.

Ben Horowitz (0:02)

Good to see you, Balaji. Ready to go.

Balaji (0:05)

Awesome. So, you know, Ben, you've been, you know, a mentor and I think, I'd say a friend, hopefully, for many years now. And, you know, one thing is, in The Hard Thing About Hard Things, in that book, you wrote about your time at Netscape. And Netscape in many ways was like the first Internet company. And because it had downloads and so on and so forth, and it went viral and you guys went public, and you had an acquisition and all the monodrama, right? And then we worked together on the rise of Bitcoin, which was first Internet currency. And obviously, we've been very heavily involved in that with the A6Z Crypto and everything, and Coinbase and all that stuff. And now we're building Internet communities. So I'd love to hear your thoughts on that as, you know, I think of them as the third kind of thing, start societies, Internet communities, Network states. I'd love to hear your thoughts. Do you think they're the next big thing or could be?

Ben Horowitz (0:53)

Yeah, so I think they're very kind of parallel in the development and that, you know, kind of before Netscape, which was the first thing that kind of brought all of the Internet pieces together. You know, there were many pieces. You know, there's FTP and TCPIP and Gopher and this and that. But you needed something to unify all the technology. So it was a little deceptive in that a lot of people deep in the tech kind of saw it as, well, what's new here? You know, like, it's just like you're just putting an interface on it. And I think that what The Network State is is in Network School is very much like that and that we have all the primitive building blocks of community. We've got, you know, Discord and WhatsApp groups. And, you know, we've got, we have Bitcoin now and we have many kind of different currencies, stable coins and so forth. But, you know, nobody's brought them all. We have VR.

But nobody's put the whole package together. And that's really when it gets unleashed. I mean, in my experience, that's kind of where you hit the knee in the curve when is that the integration. And it doesn't seem, in a way, it doesn't seem like a lot because all the pieces were already there. But the pieces as pieces just aren't, you know, it's not actually the thing. It's not the product.

Balaji (2:18)

It's funny because you're right, the system integration. And the thing is that actually has to happen after all the other pieces are mature because if any one piece of those is wiggly, then the whole thing doesn't work. You have to wait for that to be there. So only when all those pieces are mature, can you snap them together.

Ben Horowitz (2:33)

Right, exactly, exactly. And that's kind of the deceptive thing because until that point, you know, people might have tried it and failed or, you know, it's kind of like this. Oh, no, that doesn't work.

Balaji (2:45)

Right.

Ben Horowitz (2:45)

You know, that kind of thing. Yeah, same with Bitcoin, right? Like, it put together like a lot of techniques, you know, peer-to-peer, cryptography, et cetera, that had been around, but they weren't put together in a way where you could actually have money.

Balaji (3:02)

Right, because ECVSA existed.

Ben Horowitz (3:04)

Yeah.

Balaji (3:04)

Hash functions existed. Hashcast existed. And in a sense, I think somebody, exactly as you said, remarked, it was a clever integration of existing things, but they all existed before, and they didn't innovate on cryptography. They innovated on the system, right? Right. And, you know, it's funny you say that because I myself actually had not thought of that before in quite that way as the analogy to the web browser, but once you do snap all this piece together, then that itself becomes a platform for other things.

Ben Horowitz (3:36)

Yes, exactly.

Balaji (3:38)

And then you have web apps and you had everything else, because then you could, right? And so what we're starting to see is these startup societies, I call them like the parallel physical, are each usually inspired by the parallel digital. For example, there's a startup society that is like Kuldisac, which is based on all the micro-mobility stuff, and it wants to be a walkable community, right? And then there's Prospera, which has MiniCircle and it's inspired by the biotech innovations. And then there's another one that's booting up, which is inspired by all the educational innovations.