Many venture industry observers have wondered whether Andreessen Horowitz, a firm that manages $45 billion, has its sights on eventually becoming a publicly traded company.

Co-founder Marc Andreessen said he isn’t “chomping at the bit to take the firm public,” on this week’s Invest Like the Best podcast. But he discussed his goal of building a16z into an enduring company, drawing inspiration from JP Morgan and publicly traded private equity firms.

Historically, venture capital firms have been partnerships consisting of a “small tribe of people sitting in a room together, trying to bounce ideas off of each other when they make investments,” Andreessen said on the podcast.

The problem with the partnership model, he said, is that it’s highly dependent on the ideas and expertise of those people at the table with “no underlying asset value,” as he described it. Once the original partners retire, the firm loses a lot of its value, even if a new generation of investors takes over.

“But even if they can keep it going, there’s no underlying asset value. That next generation is just going to have to hand it off to the third generation,” he said. “That’s probably going to fail on the third generation. It’s going to be on Wikipedia someday: that firm existed, and then it went away.”

The partnership model can be lucrative. A16z’s billions under management generates sizable money management fees for the firm, in addition to profits made when its investments succeed.