Ben Horowitz on the rap group he started at 18, and why hip-hop became the source material for how h...

a16z on X: "Ben Horowitz 谈及他18岁时创立的说唱团体，以及为什么嘻哈文化成为他思考商业问题的灵感来源：'我大概12岁的时候，Rapper's Delight这首歌问世了...真正让我意识到这将大不相同的是Run-DMC的Hard Times...这与我以前听到的任何东西都截然不同。' '让我彻底沉迷于嘻哈文化的原因是：我在纽约上学。我有一个从小一起长大的朋友，他因某种枪支事故面部中弹，失明了...我打电话回家问妈妈：'他会不会有事？' 妈妈说：'自从他中弹后，他还没跟任何人说过话。' '作为一个懵懂的18岁少年，我想：'嘻哈文化太棒了。即使一无所有，你也可以通过说唱表达对鞋子的热爱。他需要这种感觉。' 所以我会录制DJ Red Alert和Chuck Chill Out的节目。当其他人都在周六晚上外出时，我却在录音，然后把磁带寄给他。' 后来我打电话回家询问他的近况，他们说：'他现在能说话了，但谈论的只有嘻哈文化。' '那年夏天，我们组建了一个名为The Blind and Def Crew的嘻哈团体。Blind and D-E-F。我们说唱关于失明的主题。我写了大部分歌词：'The Blind Def Crew，你们知道我们很酷。我们三个人，却有四只眼睛。' '嘻哈文化在早期就非常注重商业性。当我开始撰写商业相关内容时，很多想法都源自那些老的嘻哈歌曲。所以我开始在文章开头引用歌词，以向原创者致意。' / X

a16z

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Ben Horowitz on the rap group he started at 18, and why hip-hop became the source material for how he thinks about business: "I was probably 12 when Rapper's Delight came out... The first one where I was really like, 'Oh, this is gonna be very different,' was when Run-DMC's Hard Times came out. This has a whole other feel to it than anything I've heard." "The thing that made me locked into hip-hop: I went to school in New York. I have this friend who I grew up with who had gotten shot in the face in some kind of gun accident, and he was blind... I'd call home to my mom: 'Is he gonna be okay?' She's like, 'He hasn't spoken to anybody since he's been shot.'" "Being a dumb 18-year-old kid, I was like, 'Hip-hop is so great. You can have nothing and you'll rap about your shoes. He needs that feeling.' So I would record the DJ Red Alert and Chuck Chill Out show. Everybody else would be out Saturday night, and I'd be recording. And I would send him the tapes." "Then I called home to see how he's doing, and they're like, 'Well, he's talking now, but all he'll talk about is hip-hop.'" "When I went out that summer, we started a hip-hop group called The Blind and Def Crew. Blind and D-E-F. We rapped about being blind. I wrote most of the lyrics: 'The Blind Def Crew, you know we're fly. Three of us, but we got four eyes.'" "Hip-hop is very business oriented, particularly in the early days. When I started writing on business, so many of the ideas came from those old hip-hop songs. So I started putting the lyrics at the top of the post to give credit where credit was due."

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8:11 PM · Oct 4, 2026

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