Ben Horowitz on Strategy and Culture

DR. PAVAN SONI
5 min readApr 16, 2021

Ben Horowitz is a serial entrepreneur and a very successful VC — the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), with investments in firms like Airbnb, Facebook, Box, Groupon, Lyft, Pinterest, and Zynga, among others. In his 2014 book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Ben offers insights on how to start, run, scale, sell and rebuild organizations, and take hard decisions, such as firing your hand-picked employees, taking a stance against the board, selling the company at the right prices and keeping your mental hygiene while doing all of this.

Ben offers critical insights on culture, CEO succession planning, strategy, decision making, execution excellence, employee engagement, coaching, mentoring, managing, and leading, all in a first-person voice and offering hard-hitting examples.

Some of the critical insights in the book are as follows:

  1. Having the right kind of ambition is more important than a person’s IQ. One must learn to minimize organizational politics.
  2. Content-free executives have no value in a startup. Whereas big company executives tend to be interruption-driven (they expect things to come to them).
  3. A CEO must spend time in training his employees, it offers some of the highest returns on investment of CEO’s time and attention.
  4. Hire for a person’s strength and not the lack of weakness.
  5. Organizational design is essentially how communication flow happens. Communication becomes the key issue as a company scales
  6. The only way to become an effective CEO is ‘on the job’. Ingredients include: the ability to articulate a vision, demonstrating the right kind of ambition, and the ability to achieve the vision
  7. A good CEO is defined by knowing what to do, ability to get the company to do it, and measuring success against stated objectives
  8. Sell your company based on the size of potential market, and your chances of being number one in it.

Here’re select quotes from the book.

Innovation and creativity

Figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. (pp.49–50)

In the technology business, you rarely know everything up front. The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important. (pp.251)

The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least ten times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. (pp.179)

Crisis management

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all. (pp.4)

Get the maximum number of brains on the problems even if the problems represent existential threats. (pp.62)

People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out. it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. (pp.59)

All the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess Spend zero time on what you could have done and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end. nobody cares; just run your company. (pp.92)

Entrepreneurial success

Perhaps the most important thing that I learned as an entrepreneur was to focus on what I needed to get right and stop worrying about all the things that I did wrong or might do wrong. (pp.200)

When my partners and I meet with entrepreneurs, the two key characteristics that we look for are brilliance and courage. (pp.208)

Over the past ten years, technological advances have dramatically lowered the financial bar for starting a new company, but the courage bar for building a great company remains as high as it has ever been. (pp.213)

CEO and leadership

The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager — and particularly a great CEO — is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. In fact, often you will have to hire and manage people to do jobs that you have never done. (pp.124)

Generally, someone doesn’t become a CEO unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. (pp.201)

Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions. Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite mixture of intelligence, logic, and courage. (pp.237)

Company culture

Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition. (pp.155–156)

When I was a CEO, this was one of the most difficult lessons for me to learn. I felt that it was my job to create an environment where brilliant people of all backgrounds, personality types, and work styles would thrive. And I was right. That was my job. Companies where people with diverse backgrounds and work styles can succeed have significant advantages in recruiting and retaining top talent over those that don’t Still, you can take it too far. And I did. (pp.165)

In well-run organizations, people can focus on their work (as opposed to politics and bureaucratic procedures) and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen both for the company and for them personally. By contrast in a poorly run organization, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries and broken processes. (pp.240)

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DR. PAVAN SONI

Innovation Evangelist and author of the book, Design Your Thinking.