Ben Horowitz is the cofounder of the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). He has also founded a previous start in Opsware which was acquired by HP in 2007, and has published multiple books. He’s given a few talks over the years in investing, business, and culture, some of the nuggets of wisdom are gathered here.
Andy grove corporate culture founder of intel – best early technology founder per Ben Horowitz
-deliver bad news early
-be careful of publicly embarrassing others
-you have to know a little to be able to know who knows a lot
-put yourself in others shoes
-being unpopular in the short term leads to the best result long term. If you do what others approve of as a leader; you aren’t adding value as they already knew it, so by definition being a leader is tough
-day to day you just have to do things and not worry about probabilities or pitfalls otherwise you wont do anything from our defensive nature
-confront problems and issues head on to lead to more short term duress; do not avoid problems or put them under the rug
-contradictions and disagreement is where real information and truth is discovered, not in agreement. Don’t avoid disagreement, openly seek it
-what you do is who you are, not what you believe or say
-think for yourself; don’t listen to your friends
-as human beings we want to be liked
-passion is largely a me-focused phenomenon
-what you get out of the world is much more important than what you put in the world
-follow your contribution; what your good at and what you can produce for others
-Fake it till you make it does not work, especially long term. Same with sacrificing integrity
-designing a culture is key
-the system are the goods