Ben Horowitz - Backing America's Future

“A culture is not a set of ideas, it's a set of actions. If you define your culture as a kind of set of ideas, integrity, do the right thing, we have each other's backs, or any corporate values, it's actually just a bunch of fucking platitudes that doesn't mean anything. The culture has to be defined in terms of the exact behavior that you want that support that idea. What do you have to do to actually be that thing that you want to be? It's the little things.”— Ben Horowitz

Leadership & Management · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Culture is actions not aspirations

“What happens to founders is you invent something. Now I've gotta build a company. You don't know what you're doing and you make mistakes, and then those mistakes really cost the company and you lose confidence, and that leads you to hesitate. That hesitation is what causes the failure mode. The company's indecisive or they get very open. All these guys got so open to input from their team and their executives. The team doesn't have the full context. Only the leader's got the context.”— Ben Horowitz

Leadership & Management · Psychology & Behavior

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Hesitation creates vacuum, vacuum breeds politics

“Technology solutions work much better than policy solutions. That's the other thing, like policy solutions, it's very hard to make anything work. So if you think about COVID we could tell everybody to stay in their house. Well, that's got some like extremely bad side effects. Turned out not to work that well. Or we could invent a drug that cures it, or like a vaccine that works. It's just hard to have a policy solution.”— Ben Horowitz

Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering · History & Geopolitics

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Tech bypasses coordination problems policy can't

“The laws of physics of company building changed. The one thing you knew if you'd ever built a software company is you cannot throw money at the problem. What's a man year? 700 IBMers before lunch. That phenomenon, everything was built on because you knew if somebody built a great product and it took them 3 years and they did it with a small team, Google's not going to hire 2,000 engineers and catch them. It's just not going to happen. That was a law of physics.”— Ben Horowitz

Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering · Business & Entrepreneurship

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AI broke the software moat physics

“We have an idea about you have to respect the entrepreneur. Well, what is that behavior? Well, like, one, you can't ever be fucking late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. I used to fine people $10 a minute in the beginning of the firm to reinforce it. And then you have to get back to an entrepreneur. If you say no, you have to say no. You have to explain why you're not investing.”— Ben Horowitz

Leadership & Management · Business & Entrepreneurship

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Enforce values through behavior measurement and consequences

“The hardest version of this, by the way, is the reorg, because reorg is basically you're redistributing power to make the company work better, to like have communication be better, to not have as much conflict. But what's going to happen is somebody who's really good, who you've had for a long time, is going to lose power. And they're gonna be fucking pissed.”— Ben Horowitz

Leadership & Management · Strategy & Decision Making

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Compromising reorg for feelings kills organization

“A bad government, no matter how many smart people you have, no matter how great a culture you have, no matter how great the country is, can ruin the whole thing. Venezuela was the fourth richest country in the world, and then communism, and that's that. If you look at how little comes out of so many of these countries in Europe that have so many smart people, and then the ones that went into communism, there's so many genius Romanian entrepreneurs.”— Ben Horowitz (quoting his father)

History & Geopolitics · Economics & Markets · Strategy & Decision Making

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Policy destroys talent regardless of human capital

“When I think about the firm, I think of it a lot in those terms. The reason America's America, and there's many narratives on this, but the factual one is we won the Industrial Revolution. We had Henry Ford and we had Thomas Edison. We had like great entrepreneurs. They built great technology. The technology lead led to military lead, led to an economic lead, led to cultural dominance. None of that was by accident.”— Ben Horowitz

History & Geopolitics · Strategy & Decision Making · Technology & Engineering

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Tech lead cascades to military, economic, cultural dominance

“I went to visit him. He had this award on the wall, which was Manager of the Year for the Santa Clara facility of Intel. And it was from 1992. And I'm like, Andy, you were like the biggest CEO in the world. Why did they give you the Manager of the Year award for the Santa Clara facility? And he goes, oh man, he's like, you know, Santa Clara, it was the lowest quality scores, the lowest fucking score on everything at Intel. And so I was just like, I'm going over there and talk to them.”— Andy Grove (via Ben Horowitz)

Leadership & Management · Operations & Execution

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Symbolic confrontation cuts through organizational BS

“Go to the library, pick any book on socialism. There's hundreds of books. And in that book, I guarantee you, you will find page upon page, chapter upon chapter of how to divide the wealth. You will not find a single sentence on how to create wealth. And I was like, oh wow, that's not like a very good system, is it? I learned a lot about systems thinking from that.”— Ben Horowitz (quoting his father)

Economics & Markets · Philosophy & Reasoning

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Systems must address creation not just distribution

“The descriptions cause half the violent confrontations. So somebody jacks a car, there's a baby in the backseat. We get a description of the car. It's a 2004 Hyundai that's blue. Well, it's really a 2008 Hyundai that's green, but we pull a guy over in a 2004 Hyundai that's blue. That person has had bad experiences with the police. Now he's got a gun in the car, and all of a sudden we've got an incident and like an innocent citizen gets harmed or a police gets shot.”— Ben Horowitz

Operations & Execution · Technology & Engineering

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Precision reduces false positives, false positives cause escalation

“When somebody is murdered, there's always somebody who knows who did it. They just don't talk to the police. But they talk to us because we're part of the community. They know us. So I was like, wow, that's a great environment to see if this new technology worked. And I knew about all the public safety technology because we invested in through American Dynamism. So I was like, look, we're going to become the highest tech police force in America, hopefully the world. I'm just going to fund it.”— Ben Horowitz

Technology & Engineering · Operations & Execution

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Intelligence makes dangerous work safer for all parties

“Andy Grove said to me, a great CEO by the name of Andy Grove, and he famously did the major pivot of them out of the memory business into the microprocessor business. Maybe the greatest tech CEO we've had. And one of the things that he said that in a way is very obvious, but I think is also profound is, if you're the leader in the industry, then the growth of the industry is dependent on you. It's up to you to expand the market. Nobody else is gonna do it.”— Ben Horowitz (quoting Andy Grove)

Strategy & Decision Making · Leadership & Management

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Leaders must expand markets, not just defend position