Ben & Marc: Why Everything Is About to Get 10x Bigger

What virtually everybody finds, including Elon Musk, is the real world is just really, really big and really, really messy.

The AI thing is so interesting, right? Because from a technology perspective, it feels like you can build products pretty immediately that are going to win. Our entire way of doing everything as humans, we think it's going to change. We reinvented the computer and the new computer is far better than the one that we have been building on for the last 50 or so years.

The purpose of building the dominant venture brand was precisely to be able to have the companies be able to borrow that at the most critical points in their development so that the companies can kind of use our force in the world as a slingshot to basically build their own force. You cannot join the firm unless you sign the culture document. If you had to pick a thing, what are you compounding? Reputation.

We have a very special guest, Pachy McCormack, who just wrote an excellent profile of A16Z and Zama. Pachy, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.

Pachy, I want to start by saying thank you for the amazing piece. It's just incredible. So we just really appreciate all the work that you put into it because that was a big one.

Thank you. I appreciate being able to tell this story. It's such a cool one and appreciate getting to work with you guys on it.

Everybody welcome to the Ben and Mark show first of 2026 and we're now getting into how the media ecosystem has changed. We talked about this great TAD friend profile in the New Yorker in 2015 that I referenced in the piece that I wrote on A16Z this past week saying that that kind of kicked off or was the last kind of point in an era where journalism cared about free speech. I think Mark will do a better job kind of summarizing what happened over the past decade.

Now we're at the end of that point. And I was asking, you know, to what extent Mark thinks that he and kind of a few people who stood up against this actually kind of shifted back to this anarchctic or liberated view of the press or relationship with the media that we have now.

Yeah. And I was just saying I think you could describe what's happening kind of going forward, the information environment being, you know, you could use kind of three words. You could say uncontrolled is maybe the neutral word. You could say anarchctic is the negative word. You could say liberated is the positive word.

In terms of freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and I say at least in the US, I think generally on the internet and then, you know, we can talk about what other countries are doing, but at least in the US, you know, we're clearly entering a much more free speech world.

So I just start by saying I don't think I should claim any moral heroism at all here at all because I have my own version of my own story going all the way back to I turned down the opportunity at the time in 1993 to implement censorship in the web browser which would have been a completely different and very dystopian world. So I don't know maybe I get a little bit of credit for that but I think for the last decade I was kind of on the same ride as everybody else.

I've been on this Facebook board since 2007 so I kind of went through the entire kind of crazy roller coaster that that company went through over the last decade and then we've been involved in lots of these companies. I was an angel investor in Twitter, angel investor in LinkedIn, they both became kind of key parts of the censorship machine at certain points and so I don't want to claim huge moral heroism.

I do think a couple things. One is obviously Elon's purchase of Twitter obviously was like a gigantic turning point. I also want to give just enormous credit to the Substack guys. You know, and they were very proud because we were the original investor and we're the largest outside investor in Substack and I think they did a really really great job holding the line of freedom of speech under and I would tell you under enormous pressure, especially a very consistent and totally principled stant on it.

Yeah, that's right. And they got really lit up by a lot of the sort of anti-speech forces for the whole litany of kind of standard accusations of just being absolutely horrible. And yeah, they stuck to their principles the whole time.

And then at least with Elon acts like he's Elon. And so when he wants to go to war with somebody who's like trying to get him to censor more, like he does it in a very kind of force, public, visible and forceful way. You know, the Substack, you know, Substack's still a younger company. And so they don't have that level of just throw weight in the world yet. And so they have the harder version of the challenge and they had to fight a whole bunch of fights, including fights that aren't even public to basically keep keep the service with high integrity.

It's a I think a good place to kind of talk about a bunch of the themes that we covered in the piece. One of which is I mean the Substack investment. I remember at the time I was on Substack my career was starting because of Substack and I still at the time thought it was kind of a crazy investment. Were you thinking about it from the perspective of this is going to be a great returner. This is something that is good for the future. Is it a mix of the two of those things? And then to what extent have you allowed Substack to fight that fight by being on their side that they wouldn't have been able to do if you weren't there?

Yeah. So we say we never make investments for just purely kind of social or political reasons like so the goal obviously always is as sort of fiduciaries is to generate returns and so in the in the in the main business and so we always invest with the intention that the company that we invest in has the opportunity to become what we call kind of a cornerstone franchise in the industry and an important force in the world. And I and I we certainly believe that a Substack of the time and we believe that more than ever today.

So I think that's true but I also think I think this is kind of the magic in a lot of what we do at Silicon Valley which is I think the companies in many not in every case but in many cases the companies that become the best version of themselves also become the most successful businesses. And I think Substack is a great example of that and Substack is actually a very very very good example of that because if Substack is making its writer successful then it's making itself successful right and so it's got this just like extremely direct alignment of interest between it success and it and its writer success and then as a consequence of that if its writers are successful kind of by definition those writers readers are successful they're getting what they want.

So I would say there were sort of a bunch of reasons we invested in Substack. One was just we fell in love with the guys. And, you know, you probably know the guys, they're easy to fall in love with. So, that was the easy part.

And then look, I had been around, we had been around, you know, the web going all the way back. And then, particularly the, you know, the kind of golden age of blogging, was kind of this kind of very special time. And blogging really I think maybe gets underestimated because maybe there was no single company that kind of got full credit for it or something but it really create the phenomenon of blogging created an enormous amount of intellectual content that that basically was not going to exist otherwise.

And then it just, you know, blogging kind of just always h it had a series of problems because there was no single company behind it. But, one of the problems was bloggers just could it was just very hard for bloggers to make money, right? And so, the Substack guys basically said, well, we're going to do that, but we're solve the economic model. People are ready to pay now for content. And this makes sense.

And then there was this chicken and egg thing right up front, which was like, well, can you really see, the internet's a wash with content. People aren't paying for almost any of it. Like are they really gonna you have to kind of squint and kind of say okay are people actually going to pay for any of the stuff that they're getting today and I think the thing that in that case that we were that we had faith in was basically this could be what we call a supply driven market which is right if you provide the modernization capability then you're going to bring into existence writers and content that don't exist today and that is going to create new demand that's not visible today and then that demand is going to come back around and it's going to incent so so it was basically a bet that there's like an entire generation of of high quality content that doesn't exist because the monetization mechanism doesn't exist.

And that's certainly what Chris and his partners believe. And I think that's absolutely what's proven out. And so, yeah, I think it's like a great example of founders that really see a future that doesn't exist yet. And it's obvious to them. And unfortunately, in that case, they were able to convince us like whenever we really screw up, it's because there's a founder who can see the future and they come and they sit in our office, they tell us what the future is, and we say, "Yeah, I don't really buy it." Right? And then for the next 30 years, you know, we have to read about the, you know, glorious success of this thing as that future actually develops. And like that really sucks.

And I and I don't like to talk about those, but I will say, you know, Substack is Yeah, maybe maybe they're just really good at sales, but they they fully convinced us. And I'm I'm really thrilled that that that's what's happening. they were kind of ahead of the the kind of change from old media to new media in that you know as the brand moved from the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal to the actual writers themselves Substack was like a massive enabler for that and you know they created this thing which they call the nonfgeable writer which is you know like how many things in the newspaper could anybody write and including AI by the way and you know how much is like truly like interesting and valuable and they really wanted all the truly interesting and valuable things to be able to build their people to build their own brands and their own businesses on Substack and that that would that that also turned out to be very true.

Yeah. And that was where you know Hish in particular right turned out to be really critical on their team you know and and you know he and I had a conversation early on this where you know I was like well you know I don't know are these people ever going to leave their publications? are they ever going to actually write content that's you know like you know what's Upstack was gearing up it's when in my view the press kind of became this kind of extreme and negative monoculture and so I was like all right you got you know because he's like you got all these writers kind of trapped at these places and I'm like well are they really trapped like are they you know are they in jail or have they built the jail like what you know like are and if and if they if they leave are they going to be any different and he's like look if if their only option to basically put food on the table is to work for a publication that basically you know requires them to write a certain way then they're going to write that way you know because they need to pay the bills but he that he basically said, "I guarantee you that there's a lot of these folks, you know, where if if they had an independent path, they would take, you know, they would be thrilled to be able to, you know, maybe break themselves out of jail and they would be thrilled to, you know, write about things, you know, from different angles.

And and have different takes on things and, you know, you'd see this basically this, you know, this liberation phenomenon take place, uh, where you you'd have actually many different kinds of voices even coming from people where you wouldn't expect it based on the work that they did for, you know, the New York Times or whoever. And and of course, he was 100% right.

You can see a world where because it attracts kind of all of the best writers from all of these different places who can build their own businesses, Substack becomes 10 times larger than any of the media organizations that it replaces.

I I love the the email that you send to to Ali at at Data Bricks Ben where you talk about the fact that you know the business was underelling itself. He was under selling the business and it was going to be 10 times bigger than Oracle. So $2 trillion.

Yeah. I want to understand like the mechanism of that. Like do you think that happens every generation that the new companies are 10 times bigger? Why does that happen? Is it just software?

So on that one it was actually pretty simple because if you compared the on-premise software companies to the cloud software companies. So compare people soft to workday or compare seal software to Salesforce. the cloud version was just 10 times bigger and Oracle was kind of the on-premise version of Data Bricks you know kind of you know rough rough analog you know things are different data is bigger and so forth but if you look at like who was going to be the data kind of provider in the cloud the provider of technology to manage your data in the cloud it was going to I mean I I was very confident Data Bricks would win that and so then if you say well what's the market size of that.

And by the way, you know, when I said that AI wasn't as big as it is, so I think that's helping my prediction. But you know, like it was just clearly going to be 10 times bigger and I was like, Ali, why are you trying to convince this candidate that you're going to be worth 10 billion? Like that's what are you even talking about? Uh, but you know, Ali is super paranoid. So you know, God bless him.

So you know those are kinds of things and look you have to know your entrepreneur. I mean I think this is one of the things that I I think Mark does very well is like you know that advice isn't advice you give to every entrepreneur. It's you know it was very worked well specifically for him. And I think that um you know that's always the case like it's a very psychological game running a company and so you have to kind of tap in to that person's particular psychology to kind of change the trajectory of of what the company is doing into the right direction.

Yeah. I'd also add, you know, Pachy on the Substack point, like I think Substack could be like a thousand times the size of the of the existing like content industry, whatever you want to call it, media news industry. The collective, you know, kind of value and and the reason is because and you know, you're an example of this yourself. So you know, my whole life, so I'm like, you know, mid mid-50s and so like I I grew up, you know, when I was a teen, you know, kid and teenager, you know, the the the moral panic of the era was television.

And it was just this like endless litany of sort of social criticism, you know, from kind of, you know, fancy people basically saying, you know, consumers are, you know, basically normal people are idiots. They just want to sit in front of the boob tube. They just want to like be couch potatoes. You know, the the line everybody used at the time was Americans watch six hours of TV a day and then you turned on TV and you just saw this they they have this term, the vast wasteland of game shows and [ __ ].

And it's just like this like very dystopian kind of thing of just like people are just morons. And then you know the internet version of that is of course you know these you know that kind of moral panic has transferred straight over onto the internet in the form of you know of course you know short form videos. Tik Tok um you know people just want to watch you know these these these stupid short form videos and it's just cat playing the piano is the original one.

Right. Yeah. Exactly. Cat cat videos. By by the way I'm an afficionado of cat videos. I do not look down on cat videos whatsoever. AI cat videos are my current favorite genre of any form of of entertainment. So I will the AIAT videos are very good. I will I will Yes, Ben can confirm. I send I send around a lot of AI cat videos.

However, there is an enormous market for just like mass media just for like whatever, you know, for whatever game shows or sitcoms or, you know, soap operas or there modern versions of those and there's a giant, you know, mass mass mass mass media uh market for uh for cat videos. But um this goes back to these this idea of supply driven market. There there's also, I think, just like enormous latent demand for actual smart high quality stuff. and and particularly in media and in and in every kind of media and and I think the issue the issue is not lack of demand.

And I think the issue is lack of supply. Because like this kind of goes back to, you know, kind of consumer marketing 101, which is consu people don't know what they want until it's given to them, right? You know, nobody ever asked for a Macintosh. Nobody ever asked for an iPhone. Like you know, these things had to be designed and built and provided on the supply side before the demand materialized. And then the demand of course turned out to be, you know, far higher than anybody anybody expected.

And and I think that that same thing is is exactly true of media. I think a great early existence proof of this was the success of long form podcasting. you know which is I remember my early conversations with some of the early long form podcasters and they're like it's the strangest thing we've ever seen cuz everybody tells us that the consumers have short attention spans but you know people are literally watching three-hour podcast and we get the analytics and people are watching all the way to the end of the three-hour podcast and so I view this very much as like you know this is one of these classic markets that's a barbell which is yeah you have a certain amount of whatever just you know whatever uh you know main you know sort of mainstream whatever uh you know filler whatever on the one side but you have this massive sort of untapped market uh for high quality content in basically every domain.

And they're just had you know and again you know technological transformation the the the existing structure of the media company was a structure that was designed for a world of centralized media. You need you need a new structure today and you know of course that that you know that's why we're so high on Substack. But yeah when when we look at Substack it's the exact same thing that you were just talking about with Data Bricks which is like wow this thing could be orders of magnitude orders of magnitude multiples larger you know than than anything we've seen so far. And I and you know, frankly, I think we're starting to see that.

So implicit in in kind of the fund sizes that you raise is some kind of view on how big the future is going to be or how much of the world technology is going to eat over the next decade or so. What does 15 billion say about kind of what the world looks like in a decade and how many substacks there are that are much bigger than whoever they're replacing?

Well, I think that we reinvented the computer. So and the new computer is far better than the one that we have been kind of building on for the last 50 or so years. Well really longer than that but 50 in earnest and you know so there is not I mean we talk about this all the time in the firm there's not a problem that we can think of that you can't that you won't be able to solve with AI.

So like almost every problem in the world and you you know, from cancer to transport transportation to massive fraud in the US. You just name a problem in the headlines and we're like, "Oh yeah, we can solve that." And so, it's kind of the reinvention of everything. So, like all our our entire way of doing everything as humans, we think it's going to change. And so, you know, I would view it as 15 billion to start for us because there's so much to do and there's so many things that are going to get built and you know, like some of it is just timing with the entrepreneurs, but we think the number of entrepreneurs is going to multiply as well.

Because the the e kind of the the ease of going from an idea to a really fantastic solution and a fantastic product is just going to be so much simpler because you know one of the things that AI is best at of course is kind of building stuff and and so yeah it's just a a very unique time in kind of the history of the world.

Yeah. Yeah. the the out body experience I have with AI on a regular basis now is you know it's just like okay I think about the way Ben does and then I'm like all right how might you apply AI to solve yeah for example the fraud scandal you know the kind of fraud that we're seeing play out you know any anything like that and and it's like oh okay I need to think and think about how to how to have AI solve this and I'm like well wait a minute why don't I ask the AI right and then I go in there and I'm like you know da da da how should I do this and it's like oh well here it's obvious how you would do it and here's you know the 18 steps that you would take and then I tell it well you know okay like you know interview me, you know, interview me on all the open questions in the topic, you know, to get my thoughts on them.

And then and then it starts, you know, it starts interrogating me, right? And then I'm like, okay, now give me your point, you know, and so any it's just like, you know, as you know, like if you had tried to do that with a normal computer in the old days, it' just like stare you, right? Like, so like this is really, really, really different.

And then, you know, Pachy, I think the venture lens I would put on this is, in terms of the mechanics of venture capital, you know, the sort of classic, you know, venture capital triangle is is team, product, and market. And and you're always trying to kind of evaluate all three of those and people have always had, you know, different theories over the years of which is more important than the others and how they how they interact. But the the the the thing that basically every investor, public market investors, private investors, the thing that we're all trained to do is basically market sizing like we're, you know, for, you know, we're trained to do technology analysis. We're trained to do like, you know, background checks on people. And then we're trained to do market sizing. Like, you know, okay, how big is this market? because you know the the classic adage right is if you if you put a huge amount of effort into going after a small market you still get a small outcome.

But there's a presumption in there which is that you you you can actually predict market sizes on these things and and the problem with that again is this sort of this presumption that you can predict market sizes based on the dynamics that exist in the market today. But if there's a fundamental change on the supply side, if there's if there's a fundamental breakthrough, a fundamental capability that doesn't exist yet, you you're not going to be able to accurately model the market size because you can't you can't see it yet. Like you you you've changed one of the major variables and you you you can't do that. And you know, and then you could call that the leap of faith or whatever, but it's like, okay, if you if you make the change in the supply side, then all of a sudden the market gets 10 or 100 or thousand times larger. like you you can almost never validate that with math at the time of the investment, but that's the thing that makes the outperformers, you know, really go.

And and I just I just think like as as Ben and I kind of go through our careers, we just see more and more examples where the mistake that we or others make is, oh, this must be, you know, the market for Uber and Lift must be the market for taxi cabs, right? Or, you know, the market Yeah. or or the market for cloud software must be the same as the market for for for on-prem software, right? or or the market the market for GPUs must be the market for people who like to play games.

Yes, exactly. And we just keep seeing example after example after example where the significant enough technology change, product change on the supply side unlocks much larger markets and I and I think that's going to be I I mean think frankly that's going to be like the single like dominant trend in investing for like the next 30 years. I think that's just going to like telescope way out.

The AI thing is is so interesting, right? cuz from a technology perspective, it feels like you can build products pretty immediately that are going to win. And then A16Z starts to make a lot more sense in that context where it's like all of these other things. It's how do you do go to market? How do you do policy? Like how do you set the conditions for the actual best technology to win as quickly as possible? Like how do you think about all the different things that you do there? And is that the right way to think about it that like the best technology should win and the platform is there to make sure that that happens?

You know, the way we always thought about the firm was what can a partner do for an entrepreneur that will not only help them ensure their success but help them kind of build the company they want to build and the way they want to build it with the people they want to build it with and the culture that they're proud of. And to do that there there there's many many pieces and a lot of it you know some of it is just like very fundamental like can you do your business in the United States of America? Can you do it in the world? And so that that's where the the policy comes in. It's just like a very basic question and looks have a huge interest in technology these days. So like it's a necessary one.

A lot of the other things come down to, you know, how do you go from being an inventor to being a competent CEO and that really is a confidence game for for lack of a better word. And that you know, it's very difficult to run an organization when you don't know what you're doing. Which nobody does when they're an inventor. and you get tremendous amount of advice and advice that's often extremely bad. And almost the opposite of what you should be doing. And there are very few like the people who have actually built things don't have time to talk to you. They're often away building things. So you get these like advisors and you know Silicon Valley people who tell you how to run your company, who to hire, this and that and the other.

And then those things turn out to be wrong and you get into this confidence spiral. And so we, you know, the whole firm is built to put you in a kind of a virtuous confidence cycle as opposed to a vicious confidence cycle. And that means like, oh, I need to call somebody who's hard to get to, like an important CEO or like, you know, I've got to recruit a top-end engineer or I have to figure out how to market my product or I have to get to somebody important in the government. the if I can do that, my confidence builds. If I can't do that, my confidence sinks. And so then, you know, once you're confident, you can make decisions faster. You can uh, you know, build the company more effectively. You can go for what you actually want. You can have confidence that, okay, what I want is the right thing as opposed to what somebody's whispering in my ear, you know, who is uh whatever a CEO coach or a VC or this or that or the other. And so the whole firm is designed to uh kind of enable that inventor to become a CEO and and and run their own company and put their mark not just you know locally but in the world uh by being able to kind of network to anyone. And so that's that's a lot of what we're about.

Yeah. And I just add the the sort of macro, you know, kind of outside inland on that is it's just like, you know, we we we get to work with these, you know, super geniuses, but they're specifically they are super geniuses at building products, building technologies. You know, to be a super genius at building technologies. Generally, it requires you to have been sitting in a lab, you know, in front of a screen for, you know, 10 or 20 years. You know, they they just they have they, you know, these folks are fully capable of understanding everything about the world at large. They just haven't they just haven't done it yet. they just they they just haven't been out then they haven't met all the people and they haven't dealt with all the issues in the real world and and and so that that leads to this kind of recurring you know kind of I would say misimpression sometimes that that the people have just like well if you just if you build the right product you know if you build the breakthrough whatever XYZ widget like it's just the world is obviously going to adopt it everybody's going to use it it's it's just obviously going to you know kind of sweep things and you know if and basically if if it doesn't the answer is the product's not good enough and you know there's there's a little bit of truth to that like obviously the better the more breakthrough the product you know the more there will just be organic traction what virtually everybody finds, you know, up up to including Elon Musk, right? What what what everybody finds is the real world is just like really really big and really really messy, right?

And there are, you know, 8 billion people out there with like opinions that are not necessarily, you know, your opinions. And you know, many of them have a real vote as to what is going to happen with your product and with your company, you know, including whether anybody buys, you know, your thing or, you know, all of the X factors that kick in, you know, all the different ways that, you know, people are going to come and try to, you know, [ __ ] what you're doing. Or or, you know, or maybe even worse than that, you know, just ignore you, right?

And so there is this there is this just there is this really big world out there. It's really complicated. It's really messy. It's not necessarily in favor of new ideas. uh in many cases it really really doesn't like them and wants to reject them. And there there are there's real art and science you know to yeah to to Ben's point to building the company around the product and the founder uh to be able to take the breakthrough and be able to take it successfully into the world. And and as far as we can tell, like as far as I can tell, like that that process is getting, you know, hairier and more complicated over time, right? Uh, it's not getting easier. It seems like it's actually getting significantly harder.

And so, yeah, that's that's a big part of what the what the firm is built to do is really help founders, you know, work through that. And one of the things that that that Mark said in the past, which is really true, is like, look, as a as an inventor, you're looking for power, like a power boost. So how do I go from little old me with my invention to like I'm the important company in the space in the world. I can build momentum. I can get the best engineers. I can get the, you know, customers faster. And that that turns into a snowball and I'm rolling downhill. And so the whole firm is designed as like a very powerful entity that you can just tap into and you know take our brand, take our connections, take our expertise and become extremely powerful very fast.

Yeah. And by the way, this this this you know this this is the solution of the puzzle that people have had about us for a long time which is wow. It seems like those guys are like you know awfully promotional. You know they're they're you know you know they do all this marketing stuff. They you know they're doing all this politics stuff. You know they they must be doing this for ego reasons. They must be really full themselves. You know, this must be about, you know, talk so much [ __ ] They talk so much [ __ ] like the whole thing. And at least, you know, and maybe maybe maybe it's possible possible we talk too much. I'll judge that from time to time maybe. However, however, from the beginning, the goal was to build the do the the purpose of building the dominant venture brand was precisely to be able to have the companies be able to borrow that at at the most critical points in their development so that the companies could could can kind of use use our force in the world as a slingshot to basically build their own force.

And and I think that's worked really well and that's why we don't, you know, shrink back in a lot of these things.

Yeah, I I want to like just squeeze something in and then get right back on this conversation. Talking too much [ __ ] is so interesting, but I really love I think the thing that impressed me the most when I started working with the crypto team was seeing never take the negative in person and like never talk [ __ ] on a technology, never talk [ __ ] on a founder, never talk [ __ ] on a company. Like how do you even train for that? Cuz that really really impressed me.

Well, we train for that. Yeah, we train for that. So we have a culture that is written culture that you cannot join the firm unless you sign a document the culture document and says you will adhere to this culture and then you must sit through one hour with me understanding the culture and fundamentally on that you know our whole point is if you want to do something larger than yourselves and make the world a better place, we are 100% for it and we do not care.

You know, like if in the moment we think you're making a mistake or like the idea isn't good enough. It doesn't matter if we invest in you or don't invest in you. We're for that. We are dream builders. We're not dream killers. We're not here to be like the analytical smarty pants who makes ourselves look smart by making somebody else look stupid. And that's just that's fundamental to how we think about the world. So like anybody who's trying to push the world forward