Rowan describes Apollo's employment philosophy as 'merit plus distance traveled' — judging individuals on what they've overcome and achieved rather than group identity, explicitly rejecting DEI-style immutable-characteristic criteria. ✦ AI generated
Marc Rowan · a16z Podcast · 2026-05-27 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 43:04
We hire for merit adjusted for distance traveled. And distance traveled is not about your immutable characteristics. It is about you as an individual, not your class, not your group. Show me the kid. Show me the individual who's had to overcome something and still achieved... We don't treat you as a group. We treat you as an individual. Apparently, that's controversial, by the way.
verbatim transcript · starts at 43:04
43:04sounds as anti-American as I could possibly imagine. >> I agree. >> And it never made any sense. And yet the business community adopted it, not us. >> Yep. >> We've stuck with the same formula. We hire for merit adjusted for distance traveled. And distance traveled is not about your immutable characteristics. It is about you as an individual, not your class, not your group. Show me the kid.
43:30Show me the individual who's had to overcome something and still achieved. >> Totally. >> That's who I want. >> Totally. >> That's who we should want in our universities. That's who we should want in our companies. That's who we should want as our entrepreneurs. That's who we should back. This is not about concentrating power in an elite. This is about democratizing that, but also not destroying the notion of what I think
43:54makes this country great, which is everyone has a shot at it. Not based on your skin color, not based on your religion, your sexual orientation, your country of origin, or any other immutable characteristic. We don't treat you as a group. We treat you as an individual. Apparently, that's controversial, by the way. >> Shouldn't be. >> Apparently, it is. But I think that whether the team here agreed with what I
44:17did at UPEN or not, whether the team agreed with the climate or not, whether they agreed with what we did on employment or not, a resounding amount of positive feedback on moral leadership and it's one of the principles that we have at Apollo, which is we do right over easy. It was easy to have said no carbon >> or said nothing >> or said nothing. It was hard to have
44:46said, "We're going to make it better, not worse, but if that includes financing hydrocarbons, we're going to finance hydrocarbons." >> Yep. >> And it was easy to have said, "Yes, we're going to sign up for this metric or that metric." And it was harder to have said merit plus distance traveled. >> Totally. But I hope that this is now ingrained in our company and it hasn't been costf free but I don't think it