Ben Horowitz

Don't forget the Horowitz in Andreessen Horowitz. Ben Horowitz is an authority on management and I bet a17z investments get as much focus on sustainability and fundamentals as anyone. I recommend his blog http://www.bhorowitz.com/, and there's a book based on it too. It's a level headed management blog with far less future gazing than you'd expect.

I enjoy reading Ben Horowitz (http://bhorowitz.com/), Steve Blank (steveblank.com), and Fred Wilson (http://www.avc.com/a_vc/) Also, not a blog but Kevin Rose's Foundation videos are great: http://revision3.com/foundation

Wow. Just wow. So ... the fact that he listens to hip-hop means he can't say anything of value? I guess you think Ben Horowitz (of Andreesen Horowitz) is an idiot too: http://bhorowitz.com/ You could have posted your comment as "NourielRoubini" or "LinusTorvalds" and it'd be just as xenophobic and worthless.

Exactly. Be upfront. Ben Horowitz spoke critically on this topic, responding to Sam Altman's post on equity which is the genesis of all this. Really mandatory viewing. [1] Sam was in the room and added that he is "revising" his recommendation because "there needs to be more incentive to stay." (@26:00) I personally haven't seen Sam post about his revised position. Would be great if he did. [1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/one_management_concept_from_how_to_manage_sta…

Many great companies takes decade or more to build. A lot of the most valuable companies have their founders/early employees as their CEO vs. someone who join later (usually a professional one): http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos Though you may argue it is a survivor bias, I believe sticking longer with something that works give an edge vs. leadership changes every few years.

Academia is particularly political. I've worked in industry and seen a lot of politics there too, but in academia the problem is much worse. I think that this article is just examining one consequence of the politics in academia, which is that people sometimes come across as assholes. The article doesn't get to the root cause of the problem. For a while now, I've been trying to understand why there is so much political behaviour in academia, as I really don't like it and I'm not interested in participating. Recently, I found the answer perfectly summarised in this essay by Ben Horowitz: http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_company Ben also explains how to solve this problem, and I couldn't agree more. This essay is included in his book, "The Hard Thing about Hard Things," which gets a lot of mentions on here and is definitely worth a read.

A great example for lead bullets: http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets

Really loved this post when I read it the first time: http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets Same vein.

Ben Horowitz begins all of his blog posts with rap lyrics: http://www.bhorowitz.com/

From the VC space: Fred Wilson's AVC: http://avc.com Ben Horowitz Ben's Blog: http://www.bhorowitz.com Paul Graham's Essays: http://www.paulgraham.com/articles.html

Ben Horowitz had a good post about this a couple of years ago (http://www.bhorowitz.com/is_now_the_time_to_hire_mbas). tl;dr: People with MBAs ran some of the great companies of the 80s, pushing up demand and graduation rates in the 90s (every company suddenly wanted some), but in the last few years the curriculum has become more focused on startups.

One last comment - this post from Rand reminds me of the following from Ben Horowitz: "By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown." http://www.bhorowitz.com/what_s_the_most_difficult_ceo_skill_managing_…

A great blog post on this topic: http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off Though it's advice aimed at much much smaller companies than Microsoft it still resonates. Also I bet HN readers are much more likely to have to one day lay off 18 people than 18,000.

I think the article you mention is Ben Horowitz's blog on 'How to Minimize Politics in Your Company'[1]. It's a great read and also has advice for CEOs dealing with disputes between executives. [1] http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_company

Ben Horowitz "How to Minimize Politics in Your Company" http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_company Great article and very relevant here.

I think Tom and Chris are doing a fantastic job running and growing github. I'm just curious how this idea of trading CEO roles without making it public for a while works in practice. I think it could potentially matter to their employees, along the lines Ben Horowitz discussed in his post, "Shared Command" [1] - different situation, but analogous potential muddling of the chain of command. Obviously some companies with both a CEO and a President can be amazingly successful [2], but tend to still be clear about who is ultimately in charge. It's not that I doubt Tom and Chris share a vision for github and clearly communicate and execute on that vision together; I just wonder when and how that model might hit its limits. 1. http://bhorowitz.com/2013/07/03/shared-command/ 2. http://www.spacex.com/about/leadership

Pleasantly surprised to find the son of David Horowitz is a rap fan. Not only does this article start with a Rick Ross (ugh) quote, but most of his blog posts all start with music lyrics too. [http://bhorowitz.com] Seems he's on the Board of Rap Genius.

"Make sure you build a company where you want to work" is also one of the top-5 pieces of advice, yes. But I think the general argument is that at least at some points in a startup's life, it's an all-out fight for survival. Ben Horowitz probably wrote the best essay about this, peacetime vs. wartime ceo[1]. And he notes there are certain really good things that only happen in the "peacetime" type company (where it isn't about just survival). In this case, maybe it's a cost/benefit thing. If the cost of going from an informal consensus common salary to a more transparent formal salary (in implementation cost, and risk if it screws up) is low, go for it. If it's something like "we're going to try a new thing: only working one day a week", the cost is probably really high, so you'd want to be sure it was core. [1] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/

As you suggest, I think the point was that there's often no brilliant idea that will provide a magical solution to a hard business problem - be that a product pivot or a new sales/marketing gimic. Instead, you often know what you need to do - it's a long, hard slog, and it's about sticking at it longer than your competitors. It's a recurring theme in Ben's blog: >> Mediocre CEOs point to their brilliant strategic moves or their intuitive business sense or a variety of other self-congratulatory explanations. The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say: “I didn’t quit.” http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/01/what%E2%80%99s-the-most-difficult-ceo-…

Agenda, structure and status report is not the way I usually see 1:1 being talked about. Contrast with Horowitz's [1]: "The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting. This is the free-form meeting for all the pressing issues, brilliant ideas and chronic frustrations that do not fit neatly into status reports, email and other less personal and intimate mechanisms." Not saying there's not a time and place for Ryan's style. 1 - http://bhorowitz.com/2012/08/30/one-on-one/ 1' - http://www.randsinrepose.com/archives/2010/09/22/the_update_the_vent_a…

I've always felt that Ben Horowitz's characterization was the best: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/ TLDR Eric was a peacetime CEO and could allow the company to do the things he allowed. Larry is a wartime CEO. Hard decisions need to be made, and the company needs to be driven with focus.

Reminds me of this: http://bhorowitz.com/2011/01/04/when-smart-people-are-bad-employees/ The solution - if it's worth it, personally mitigate their bad behavior. If you can't make them a net positive, drop them.

Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy. All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.[1] [1] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/10/08/nobody-cares/

[0] Ben Horowitz's blog: http://bhorowitz.com/ [1] patio11: http://www.kalzumeus.com/

The main problem is when you're going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it's a an antler, that you can't kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again. Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audience that the problem you're solving is the biggest issue their business faces. They're completely indispensable. Bad sales guys, the type I've usually come across, bring too little domain and product knowledge to the table, and end up selling the completely wrong thing if they sell at all. Like Ben Horowitz said, great sales people protect your business [1], they don't wreak unnecessary havoc on it. [1] http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2/

Great post. Much more eloquent than Mark Suster's[1]: Yes, I know it’s my job as the CEO to be the coach for people and that’s fine. But if everybody is looking for me to make their decisions we’ll never get anything done. And makes a nice complement to Swombat's Making all the decisions yourself[2], and to Ben Horowitz CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is[3]. Also the same point of Delegate or Die[4] [1] http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2009/11/19/what-makes-an-entreprene… [2] http://swombat.com/2011/7/13/taylor-drucker [3] http://bhorowitz.com/2010/07/02/why-ceos-should-tell-it-like-it-is/ [4] http://sivers.org/delegate

My favourite resource on the topic is "Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager". http://benhorowitz.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/good-product-manager.pd… It's a training document that Ben Horowitz wrote when he was at Netscape. More here: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/14/why-startups-should-train-their-people…

Exactly. The way I would put it is that this CEO is flunking out in his job. If any executive (CTO or whoever) is not getting things done, CEO's job is to replace them as fast as possible. If the CEO is failing to do that, this means he needs to be replaced. Ben Horowitz has an excellent post explaining the CEO job: http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-evaluates-ceos… At the end of the day any company needs real leadership. The one described in the article lacks it.

Reminds me of peace-time ceo vs war-time ceo [0] I'm no CEO, but that's some decent advice on the blog, I'd want the CEO of my employer to read it. A question beckons...where would the likes of Amazon/Uber be if they followed rules and regulation? Microsoft, famously trampled its way to success. My hypothesis is that out of some hundereds of CEOs that do break the rules, only a handful get caught, so the incentive simply isn't there, compared to accelerate growth that could be had by bending the rules, as it were, and acquiring enough wealth or importance that then you can lobby your way through and change the rules to suit your business or motivies. Ben Horowitz (ironically a partner at A16Z, that's a major investor in Zenefits) wrote: "Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive." And I tend to agree with that, too. But I never managed a fruit-stand in my life, so what do I know? It's tough being a CEO. You need a team to make your way through, I guess. [0] http://www.bhorowitz.com/peacetime_ceo_wartime_ceo

When executing layoffs like this, the hardest thing _for the company_ is to make sure that the negativity from laying people off doesn't destroy the company completely. Ben Horowitz has some interesting insights on this in this blog article: http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off I think this is essentially just a better way to make sure that the people 42 floors really wanted to keep knew personally that they were important to the future of the company. And reading the article again, all they told people is that they were staying, and what was going to happen the following day. They didn't say that the people staying were told who was going to actually get let go. I think in the context of a pivot away from a failing business model, this move seems smart, not wrong. People affected by the layoffs are being let go - their happiness, in some sense, is definitely going to be impacted by the layoffs. But for those people staying, it seems like they really needed to go through some stuff, and I'm sure they all appreciated the heads up.