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ClaimVideo · 23:40 — 25:10

Fighting back against public attacks is a real opportunity to boost your brand, and a brand should never be neutral or lukewarm because that makes it uninteresting.

Ben Horowitz explains that responding to attacks (like his viral New York Times post) built their brand, and that provoking both love and hate is necessary since neutrality reads as boring. ✦ AI generated

Ben Horowitz · a16z Podcast · 2026-06-19 · original ↗

starts at this moment · 23:40

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I'm curious what those discussions are like for you both. How do you decide when to fight back versus stay quiet? And maybe if there are times that you wish you did things differently.

you really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don't want to be neutral. You don't want to be lukewarm. Um, because then you're uninteresting. So, you're only you can't be interesting and not have people both hate you and love you.

verbatim transcript · starts at 23:40

Transcript · around this moment

23:40is also kind of a an important change in new media, which is you really want people to hate you and you want people to love you, but you don't want to be neutral. You don't want to be lukewarm. Um, because then you're uninteresting. So, you're only you can't be interesting and not have people both hate you and love you. Just cuz there's too much no matter what you do, there's too much

24:00jealousy and just hatred in the world to not have it be that, cuz as soon as you get big that's what happens. There there's nobody I used to when people used to get upset about like things that were written about us, I said like nobody's nobody writes a puff piece on like Rupert Murdoch or Elon Musk or like it's never going to happen again. Like it's over. When you get to a certain size,

24:20people hate you. Um, and that's good, cuz that means you did it. You did something important. You made a mark on the world. People care about what you're doing. And you have to take it that way. If you take it like oh, I got to stop doing that so people like me, you'll you'll ruin your marketing. Yeah. >> The Mark Mark you since I've said the term you know, they have all the right

24:42enemies. So, it's picking, you know, the right people to hate you that galvanizes the people who love you. The what about building the right marketing and media team in the age of new media? What what have you guys learned or what advice do you have for for CEOs in terms of making sure you get the right the right personality. What what's the principle you think about the building

25:01that team? >> Well, the first principle is if you're trained in old media, it's very very very hard to do new media. Um so, you have to be a very exceptional person to make that transition because it's like if you spent 10 years doing old media, there are laws of physics, there are rules of the game, there's things that you do every single time in terms of,

25:26you know, like you know, from vetting reporters to uh rude Q&As to this and that like everything about it is opposite world. And so, there are very few people who can go, "Okay, I'm getting out of opposite world and I'm going into a new media world." So, you just have to be careful about for the new media side of what you're doing to hire too much experience in not

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