Carter: The World's Largest Venture Fund Administrator

Carter is the world's largest venture fund administrator. They have a different structure where they're shared economics, but we've kind of centralized control. This enables them to change the structure of the firm very easily. And if you want to grow in an integrated way with a kind of single culture, single offering, then you have to be able to change the organizational structure as you get bigger. So like the structure that you had at 50 people is just not going to work at 500 and that's for any organization.

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Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and one of the most influential venture capitalists of the last decade, joins Erik for the inaugural episode of Turpentine VC. If you’re looking to make fund administration easy and intuitive, check out: http://carta.com/turpentine

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

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TIMESTAMPS:

(00:00) Episode Preview

(02:25) Ben on what allows the legendary VC firms to be great for multi-decades

(03:37) a16z’s unique product-first, investor-second approach

(04:34) YC as a16z’s closest spiritual analog

(06:20) The strategy behind how Ben and Marc set up their firm structure

(08:12) Ben on why venture firms should stay private

(09:32) How a16z scaled their fund sizes to market opportunities

(10:54) Why a16z chose to go bigger than Benchmark or USV on fund size