YouSaid · the spoken record

Frank Chen

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22
first
2019-02-25
most recent
2019-02-25
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1
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podcast

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  1. “Just as seriously, if not more seriously. I couldn't agree more on the emphasis on kind of distribution channel there. But I do want to finish, Frank, on which company have you spent the most time with recently whereby you're most excited about the coming years and the opportunity ahead? Harry, you're killing me. All my children are special and brilliant. I would say you can always choose your favorite child. Yeah, exactly. I love what Branch is doing. Branches making loans to people who have never gotten loans before in countries like Kenya and Tanzania, Nigeria, and Mexico. And so serving the unbanked, I think, is a great social good. And they're doing it on the back of machine learning, which is deciding which people to give loans to when there are no credit bureaus comes down to behavioral analysis. And so do you have gambling applications on your phone? It turns out if you have gambling applications, you're a better credit.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “In the pitch decks are hiding key facts. And I think, look, we're in this journey together. We want to help you create a successful business. And so beginning of that conversation by hiding key facts about your business is not helpful. And then on our side as investors, I think we can be a lot more transparent. We're certainly trying it at A16Z in how we make decisions and what we're looking for in companies. Let's not hide things from each other. Let's get started on transparency and mutual trust. What advice do you often hear given? Maybe you most disagree with. I think Silicon Valley has this great bias that if you build a great product, then they will come. And so all you have to do as an entrepreneur is to build a great product. And what that leaves on the table is you have to think about how do I get my product to market? How do I get distribution? The advice that I would love to give people is building a great product is hard. I'm not taking any away from that. Building a great distribution channel is equally hard and we need to take that.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “But we can't say yes to all of them by giving them money. We have to be measured in sort of who we give money to or who we invest in. And so saying no breaks my heart every time. How do you scale the learning curve on new verticals so fast? What's that process for you? So this probably won't surprise you, but Google enough so you can have smart conversations with people who really understand the space. So you got to do step one, which is you've got to read and study yourself so that you get to the point where you can ask smart questions. We'll do 20% of the learning on Google and 80% of the learning with people that we can ask smart questions of. What would you most like to change about the world of technology and venture itself? The thing I'd like to most change is to bring a lot more transparency, especially to the interaction between investors and entrepreneurs. I feel like we've gotten into a phase where we need the ecosystem encourages hiding stuff from each other. And so the metric.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Are you ready? I am ready. So I'm sure you've read libraries and libraries of books, but what's the favorite book for you and why? Okay, I have a sheet. There are two series of books that are my favorites, the Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings, and they were written by friends, C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkey, who used to gather at this pub at Oxford called the Eagleman Child. I've actually taken my kids there. It was a pilgrimage for me. And I love these books because they are what the authors would call sort of true myth, like the fiction that they created, the detail around the world sort of taught you something about the world in a way that even the real world can't teach you. So love those books. What's the most challenging element of your role with Andreessen today? Well, the hardest thing for me still, and I've been doing it now almost 10 years, is say no to an entrepreneur because every entrepreneur I meet is convinced that they're going to change the world and a lot of them are right.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “At a time, one car dealership at a time. And we're going to make these local decisions like, gee, if we don't own cars, then we don't need to sell them. Therefore, car dealerships are going to start vanishing from inner cities. What do we do with that space? What do we do with the DMVs? I think the UK calls them DVLAs, right? So these places where we go and get our licenses, well, what do we do with that space? Because we don't need licenses anymore. We're being chauffeur. And so as these buildings disappear from the infrastructure, we get to think about how do we recycle and reuse for a better and higher purpose in each city. And of course, each city will have a different answer to that question depending on what their economy and what their social goals are for the city. I mean, it's just phenomenally exciting to see the surplus space that we'll see over the coming years. But I do want to move into my favorite element of any interview being the quick fire round. So I say a short statement and you give me your immediate cause about 60 seconds per one.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And say hello. Today, 14% of all land in Los Angeles is parking lots. And I've waved a magic wand and you can have all of that land back to put to a higher and better use. Like how excited would you be? Like it was just such a transformation to the way that we can think about our cities. I'm just really intrigued when you think about kind of fundamentally reshaping our existing cities. How do we think about that when they are so established and so concrete in their structure? How do we think about the ease of transitioning towards an autonomous kind of structured city itself? Much easier if it was a new city from afresh. Yeah, there's an awful lot of hardware, right? Concrete, hash pulps, bridges, and so on. And then there is also a decidedly non-software governance process, right? Which is civil planning mediated by governments. So this is not going to happen fast. The redesign of our cities. So it's going to happen when parking lot at a time, one auto repair shop.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Here. And then you could argue there was sort of a chapter 3B, which is the freeways came through the cities. So depending on how you count them three or four chapters, when we have self-driving cars, we'll get to design the next chapter. And if we think about designing the next chapter, we can completely rethink how we use the space in our cities. So first, all the parking lots can go away because the cars will constantly be in motion. The fleet operators will need that to drive the efficiency and utilization out of their cars. And so if the car is not carrying you, it's carrying goods. And if it's not carrying the goods, then it's on its way to being cleaned or serviced or charged, right? So there will be no need for parking lots. And if we do need parking lots because we do need to plan for peak utilization in a city, we're not going to put them in a city. Like if you were the sin city designer of city, you'd put that in a suburb somewhere where the cars can go and rest overnight.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “That's a boon obviously for people who are making those components. And it comes at the expense of people who are making older style components, so beginning with the internal combustion engine, think about your steering wheel, think about the exhaust pipe, think about your rear view mirrors, right? All of those will go away because the self-driving cars don't need rearview mirrors. They don't need steering wheels. They don't need brake pedals. They'll be doing all that through software. I do want to finish, and before we move into the quickfire, on the cities that these cars really drive in, starting on again, the foundations being kind of the public infrastructure layer, how will both the rise of automation and autonomous cars change? Maybe how we approach, build, and use public infrastructure in the future? Well, the super exciting thing is we've really only had three chapters of city design in the history of cities. So chapter one was we walked around in our cities. And then chapter two was the horses came. And then chapter three was, okay, the internal combustion engine powered cars.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So there are really new questions that we can ask and answer of our software that we've never been able to do before. My partner, Benedict Evans, uses a great analogy of imagine that you had a internet.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I'm not sure I would say all AI is a scam. I will say, I think I understand the impulse behind that statement, which is about three years ago as we looked at startups, everybody became an AI startup. They got the.ai domain name. It was the second phrase in their pitch decks, which is I'm an AI-powered such and such. And look, some of those were real applications of AI and some of them was sort of marketing of a deer over things that they had always been doing, like, you know, data analysis. On the balance, though, I think there are genuinely new techniques that big companies and small companies are putting into their software that make them better and more useful. The types of predictions we can make, like do you have cancer or not, the types of things that we can do, like, is your grandmother in this picture, the types of questions that we can answer, like where should the soccer players be on the soccer field? Those were things that we could never do with the previous generation of technologies, no matter how hard you asked an Oracle database, where should the soccer players be, you were never going to get a good answer.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Of techniques that does not depend on big data sets. And so reinforcement learning is an example of a type of machine learning that doesn't require a massive data set. You let the system play in a simulated environment and it sort of figures out what to do. So programming robots to put stuff in the boxes that Amazon is sending you, sort of ticket patch, those types of things are now using these techniques like reinforcement learning where you don't need massive data sets.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Well, if you think about one of the most popular machine learning techniques today, it's called deep learning, and it absolutely depends on large data sets. So if you think about deep learning in the context of self-driving cars, they're using deep learning to figure out, is that a stop sign? Is that a pedestrian? Is that a biker? And that absolutely depends on large data sets where you're taking the video and other feeds from these cars and you're giving them to human labelers and asking them to identify what is actually in this frame of video. So there are certain tacks for which large data sets matter a lot. Now, some interesting approaches to achieving very good AI without large data sets. So approach one, let's have the machine generate the data sets themselves. And so if you look at alpha go, which is a system that learned to be world champions at Go, they basically generated their own data sets by playing each other. So no human games involved. That's one way to get around this big data set problem. Another is to use a”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “But I had a guest on the show the other day that won't counter to this. The value of massive data sets is Is that a fair assessment?”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “The most awesome parts of being human, and then hopefully we get some help on the routine and the boring and the frankly dangerous. I do have to ask, can I speak?”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Little known facts is one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet is long haul trucking, which is in the United States. This causes the most fatalities being a long-haul trucker. So look, we've got to get the truckers out of the cabs as soon as we can if we can invent a technology that can drive long-haul trucks safely and there are many startups working on that. And that can be more exciting. So I think there's a bunch of jobs we don't want to do because they're dangerous. There's a bunch of tasks we should be doing because computers are just better at them than us. And then what's left for us, I think, is sort of the most creative and awesome parts of being human, which is it's the non-repetitive task. It's thinking outside of the box. It's connecting dots that didn't seem like they possibly be connected. It's being truly creative, like figuring out the double helix structure of DNA. All of those things that created the unanticipated are not soon to be automated. We have no idea how to do that. And so we can lean in on”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “I'm not sure it changes class distinctions, but the way I think about it is that there's a set of things that machines are fantastic at. And so think about sort of the spreadsheet error or the database error. It was just true that spreadsheets and databases remembered more could do math faster, could do math more accurately, and it turbocharged humans. And where we were actually afraid when the spreadsheet came out that, oh my God, well, there go all the white collar jobs, we've actually created more white collar jobs post the spreadsheet than we have in the decades before the spreadsheet. And so it didn't turn out to wipe out all the jobs. It turbocharged us and it created new jobs. So AI, I think, is going to be like that, which is there's a bunch of things that AI can now do that spreadsheets and databases could never do. It will turbocharge our capabilities. It will do some of the most dangerous and dirty jobs. So think about power plant inspections. Think about cell tower inspections. Think about improving mind safety. One of the very”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “Seats, it's hard to achieve the continuity, it's hard to keep the tribal knowledge in the system. And so that's sort of the bug point of view. And I think we need to strike the right balance in building great companies. You're not going to hang on to everybody, but it would be good to be skilled enough and persuasive enough and had high enough EQ to convince the people that you need to convince to stay with you for years and years rather than 1.4 years.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Know it is both a feature and a bug, as I pointed out. If you're looking at it as a feature, you think, look, we have a free-flowing setting set of ideas and people moving between companies. And actually academics who have studied why Silicon Valley beat Route 128 in Boston, they will point to this as a feature, which is in Boston, you basically settled in a deck or Lotus, and you basically spent your entire career there. You might think of different ecosystems where sort of Japan and Korea where this is still prized. Like my parents grew up in a generation where lifetime employment at the same company was the ideal and anything else that sort of fell short of that was considered suspicious. And so that's sort of the feature point of view. The bug point of view on it is as a manager and as an entrepreneur trying to build a durable company that can weather the many, many stories you're going to go through as a startup. And so if you've got people leaving every 1.4 years, it's hard to keep people in the”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “What it is, which is there's a free flow of people and information and ideas. But if you think about it from the flip side, which is from the point of view of the company or a manager, like having people leave every 18 months, that's not good for your company. And so I learned a lot about how to inspire loyalty and certainly taught me a lot about staying in place when things didn't look like they were going well because it's hard enough building a company if you have attrition of your key talent continuously, it's even harder. So loyalty is sort of, I think, an underappreciated value here in the valley.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Yeah, so two big things from my experience, and this is sort of Netscape and LoudCloudLine Opsware, which is, one, it is a lot harder to build a business than it looks from the outside. And when you read the hard thing about hard things, you sort of realize, yeah, boy, that thing, we nearly died a hundred times. And then we had lunch every day. It is a lot harder to build a big durable business than it looks from the outside. And then two, the thing that I really learned was the value of loyalty because when the company is not doing well, what happens as a manager and a leader in the company is you spend all of your time basically talking people from leaving the company. And if you think about the ecosystem that you're in, there's always a shinier of new thing in Silicon Valley. There's always a Google or a Facebook or some other cool place to go. And there's a natural flow of talent. You know, some would argue, look, this is one of the things that keeps the valley.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “Well, I kind of did it by accident, which is unlike many of my peers, I had not plotted a lifelong path to get to venture. It kind of fell into it backwards because Mark and then, sort of the Antrison and the Horwitz of Andreessen Horwitz, were doing it. And I have been working with these guys now for 25 odd years, and they're always doing interesting things. And I'm like, okay, so I'm going to start a venture firm. Maybe I'll go see what that's like. And the thing that has been awesome for me is I have a super curious personality. I'm always like the four-year-old asking, why is that? Why is the sky blue? Why does gravity pull us down? And for somebody with that kind of innate curiosity, this is the best job ever, right? Because you're going to learn something new every hour if you do your job right. And that's exactly the situation.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “So thank you for having me, and that's very kind of you to note on the content. I have a ton of fun putting together the presentations.”

    2019-02-25 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: a16z Partner Frank Chen on The Future of Car Ownership, Whether The High Employee Attrition Rate in The Valley Is A Feature or A Bug & His Biggest Lessons From Netscape, Loudcloud & Opsware · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source