a16z Podcast

a16z Podcast: Your Worst Deeds Don’t Define You — Life and Redemption in Prison

Shaka Senghor and Ben Horowitz

Posted March 18, 2016

Men and women who have spent decades in prison are being released into an iPhone-enabled world that they hardly recognize. Shaka Senghor is one of those people, imprisoned at age 19 for second-degree murder and released almost two decades later in 2010. “It was like Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of the Jetsons,” he tells Ben Horowitz in a conversation about his book, Writing My Wrongs: Life, Death, and Redemption in an American Prison.

Today, Senghor is an activist, advocate, and mentor for young men and women who find themselves on the same troubled path he took. This episode of the a16z Podcast covers Ben and Shaka’s conversation about healing, humanity, and redemption — especially if you believe that it’s how you finish, not just how you start, that matters.