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." @bhorowitz w/ @MotownIni