Good things happen to good people. 60x revenue growth in 12 months. Happy fal day @gorkemyurt @burkaygur @isidentical

Time for a Margit update! Here is the news: I’m “graduating” from operating partner to partner emeritus @a16z. First, let me back up. It seems that I do things in decade and a half increments. I got to the US in 1991 (October 19 is like a sort of birthday. Ask any immigrant and they will know their US birthday!). There was a tech recession at the time. Also, no American resume. Nor academic credentials. But this is America! And it came through for me. I spent a few years trying to get a job. I got a temp job at a tech PR firm. Then I got my first real break. A huge thank you to @simonecoxe and @maureenblanc for giving me my first real job and a shot at an actual career. That was a job as Account Executive at Blanc & Otus. I worked there for 4+ years. Then the talented @carynm650 and I started The Outcast Agency, which turned out to be the very best tech comms firm in the world. We built Outcast into the most sought after firm for tech franchises for over a decade and a half. We sold it to Nextfifteen (thank you, @timdyson . So that house was built; it’s still around and has amazing clients. @bhorowitz and @pmarca came calling. Before they ever raised money. These guys were ballsy. It was the height of the financial crisis, there was zero liquidity. Ben and Marc wanted to raise $300m. Just the two of them. When probed on this, Marc just said, “Let’s assume success, shall we?” Despite the risk…. It was a chance to build the top brand in venture capital. Period. Mind you, back then no VC firm was doing any marketing at all. It was seen as almost unseemly! I love building so I took a chance. The founders made me - I think - the first VC firm CMO. Now every firm has one of those, and that’s a good thing. Over the last 15 fabulous years, we’ve done so many things: - We marketed ahead of any result. We had to. So we marketed people and their ideas. - We invented going direct, creating a powerful content operation that allows us to communicate on our terms. - We produced events where people tried to crash multiple times and had to be escorted out by security. - Literally so many firsts and big things, there are too many to list them all. Now we actually have results! And we’re still the most exciting brand. a16z is full of talented people giving their best, full of amazing portfolio companies, and a very large and powerful network that everyone in our orbit can plug into. I can’t possibly thank every single person in the firm here, so I will keep it to the founders for being committed to building the top brand, and to @garcegarce of course. She was my first hire - she also took a chance on me and our entire project. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to the indefatigable @Mili10 , who has made my life easier and more productive for a decade. My sincerest thanks. Many more of you deserve a thank you, I’ll ping you directly. What’s ahead? I will be an active advisor for the next 6 months. We all want to make sure the change is smooth, in particular for the folks in our network who have a long-standing relationship. After that, I will not be gone and dead, haha. While I’ll take a nice break, I’ll also be looking for what to build next. My number won’t change. So feel free to reach out if you need anything. The house is built. I will forever bleed a16z. Here’s to more building!

Today we’ve formalized an important hiring policy at Scale. We hire for MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. This is the email I’ve shared with our @scale_AI team. ——————————————————— MERITOCRACY AT SCALE In the wake of our fundraise, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about talent. All of our external success—powering breakthroughs in L4 autonomy, partnering with OpenAI on RLHF going back to GPT-2, supporting the DoD and every major AI lab, and the recent $1bn financing transaction—all of it is downstream from us hiring the best people for the job. Talent is our #1 input metric. Because of this, I spend a lot of my time on recruiting. I either personally interview every hire or sign off on every candidate packet. It’s the thing I spend the plurality of my time on, easily. But everyone can and should contribute to this effort. There are almost a thousand of us now, and it takes a lot to hire quickly while maintaining, and continuing to raise, our bar for quality. That’s why this is the time to codify a hiring principle that I consider crucial to our success: Scale is a meritocracy, and we must always remain one. Hiring on merit will be a permanent policy at Scale. It’s a big deal whenever we invite someone to join our mission, and those decisions have never been swayed by orthodoxy or virtue signaling or whatever the current thing is. I think of our guiding principle as MEI: merit, excellence, and intelligence. That means we hire only the best person for the job, we seek out and demand excellence, and we unapologetically prefer people who are very smart. We treat everyone as an individual. We do not unfairly stereotype, tokenize, or otherwise treat anyone as a member of a demographic group rather than as an individual. We believe that people should be judged by the content of their character — and, as colleagues, be additionally judged by their talent, skills, and work ethic. There is a mistaken belief that meritocracy somehow conflicts with diversity. I strongly disagree. No group has a monopoly on excellence. A hiring process based on merit will naturally yield a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and ideas. Achieving this requires casting a wide net for talent and then objectively selecting the best, without bias in any direction. We will not pick winners and losers based on someone being the “right” or “wrong” race, gender, and so on. It should be needless to say, and yet it needs saying: doing so would be racist and sexist, not to mention illegal. Upholding meritocracy is good for business and is the right thing to do. This approach not only results in the strongest possible team, but also ensures we’re treating our colleagues with fairness and respect. As a result, everyone who joins Scale can be confident that they were chosen for their outstanding talent, not any other reasons. MEI has gotten us to where we are today. And it’s the same thing that’ll get us where we’re going, as we embark on our next chapter focusing on data abundance, frontier data, and reliable measurement to accelerate the development and adoption of AI models. Alex