Weird ways Ben Horowitz makes Founders more confident

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
All right, today we're hanging out with Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of A16Z. These guys manage 46 billion in assets. They've invested in Stripe, Coinbase, OpenAI, a bunch of the big hit tech companies. But today we're talking about stuff that you don't usually get to hear from Ben. So things like, how do you actually have a high confrontation conversation? The advice he actually gives us founders. Things like when he met Mark Zuckerberg and he was really young, what he noticed about Mark that was different and what makes him such a great CEO that you can kind of steal or copy from Mark Zuckerberg's playbook. Sam, what else do we got?

**SPEAKER_2** (0:30)
Dude, we also just hung out with him, which is like the best part. So he tells a story about how he helped catch Tupac's killer. We also asked him, what interests him right now? What books is he reading? What content is he consuming? What rabbit holes is he going down? It was incredibly interesting.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:44)
Awesome conversation with Ben Horowitz. Enjoy.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:55)
Let's travel never look back. I have a good Tupac story for you.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:58)
Oh my gosh. All right. I'm incredibly excited to hear it.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:02)
My wife is like the biggest Las Vegas evangelist in the world. She was talking to Quincy Jones' son, QD3 and said, you need to move to Vegas and he's like, fuck that, I'll never move to Vegas. They didn't solve the Tupac murder.
You know, his sister, Quidada, was dating Tupac. I was like, let's have dinner with the Vegas PD and see what happened. And so me and QD3 and Nas sit down to dinner with the Las Vegas Police Department and they bring the whole case file. And it turns out the LAPD really filed the case, like almost on purpose it looks like. So at the end of the dinner, I say to the Chief of Police, Mike Gennaro, I'm like, Mike, you ought to reopen the Tupac case. And he goes, I'll talk to the sheriff. And the next day I called him, I said, what did the sheriff say? He said, Ben wants us to open the case, we're opening the case. And they reopen the Tupac case and they caught the guy.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:02)
That's insane. So, Shaan, like, I don't know, Shaan, if you know the story, but like basically, like, you know, Pac and Shug got in a fight at a Tyson, Mike Tyson fight. And then like 30 or 40 minutes later, he was shot right in the strip on Las Vegas. And it was a cold case for years. But everyone knew who did it. They knew it was this guy named Orlando Anderson. Like, that was like the rumor.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:24)
Orlando pulled the trigger. Keefie Dee told him to shoot him.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:27)
And like, everyone knew this, but for some reason, like, it didn't happen. And Orlando ended up dying a handful of years later. And the craziest thing ever is there's this guy named DJ Vlad, who does these interviews with all these gangsters. And he got him to, like, tell the story about the murder. And this idiot, like, went on a podcast. It just said, yeah, here's what happened.

**SPEAKER_3** (2:49)
So here's why he did that. He thought he had immunity because the LAPD proffered him, which means basically, in exchange for testimony, we grant you immunity. But they granted him immunity in LA, not in Vegas. It's the latest PD where life, oh, that doesn't count here.

**SPEAKER_2** (3:07)
And little do we know that Beds Behind the Scenes getting it all done. That's pretty awesome. I, like, I followed that case religiously.
I thought it was riveting. I did not know that you were involved. That's pretty cool. All right.

**SPEAKER_1** (3:18)
Well, I don't know where we want to start, but I just thought, you know, usually, Ben, you don't know this, but we have a little tradition here. We'd like to typically start with our intro music, but for some reason, it's not playing. I'm trying to get this cassette to play, but it's just not playing. What are we looking at here?

**SPEAKER_3** (3:35)
Oh boy, that is, that's the blind and deaf crew. So my friend, Seth Clark, this was back in 87 or 88 or maybe 86 got shot and was blind. So we formed a rap group called the blind and deaf crew, DEF, and we had all kinds of rhymes about being blind and being deaf.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:00)
I have one here. It's like-

**SPEAKER_3** (4:01)
The blind, deaf crew, you know where fly. Three of us, but we got four eyes. Like that, that, that, this, this, you know.