Ben Horowitz on Slack's Pivot and Why His Firm Doesn't Have a Woman Partner (Video)

Earlier this week at the Milken Institute’s annual global conference, I interviewed Ben Horowitz, who is the co-founder of high-profile Silicon Valley venture firm Andreessen Horowitz.

Unlike a lot of powerful people in Silicon Valley — and much to my surprise — Horowitz gave an unusually honest answer to why his firm is not actively trying to hire a woman general partner, noting that it had “no quotas, goals [or] mandates.” The issue of the small percentage of women at VC firms has been in the spotlight of late, due to the recent trial between Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and former partner Ellen Pao.

Pao lost her gender discrimination case, but the hot-button topic now is why most major firms have few or no women general partners.

Said Horowitz: “I know the firm would get 1,000 times more credit if we had one woman general partner rather than if I had 53 percent of the firm being women. But that’s the least impactful thing I could do, because no one in the firm reports to a general partner.”

He added: “It would be great if we could attract a great person to that position, but why should that be a goal? It’s not going to actually change Silicon Valley.”

He also talked about Slack, the enterprise collaboration software that has been a huge hit investment for Andreessen Horowitz with a current $2.8 billion valuation. But it didn’t start out that way, which Horowitz noted was a pivot (from a game company) that actually worked.

Here’s the full video of the interview, which also includes discussion of the tech bubble, IPOs and the rise of what Horowitz calls the “full-stack” startup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kO9r0USMJoU

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

Will you support Vox’s explanatory journalism?

We'll be honest: advertising alone isn't enough for Vox, or most newsrooms, to do the amount of high-quality journalism that the world needs and keep it free. We count on contributor support in order to produce nuanced, clear, and optimistic journalism. We don't have a paywall or ask our readers to subscribe in order to see our content, so instead, we’re coming to you this #GivingTuesday to ask you to make an investment in our future. If you’ve read an explainer this year that helped you to see an issue more clearly, got the answer to a long-time question, or just plain learned something, then we hope you’ll consider making a contribution of $20 or whatever you can today.

One-Time Monthly Annual

$5/month

$10/month

$25/month

$50/month

Other

$

Yes, I'll give $5/month

Yes, I'll give $5/month

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via