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📶 16 Lessons from Ben Horowitz (GP @ a16z)
Decision-making velocity, creating motion through stories, skills vs. experience, and the two types of friends every person needs
Clay Norris
November 09, 2023 • Estimated Reading Time: 7 minutes
Good morning 👋
This week’s deep dive is on Ben Horowitz (@bhorowitz), legendary GP at Andreessen Horowitz.
Ben is an author, a leader, a hip hop fan, and one of the best investors to ever live. He has built businesses through ups and downs, written multiple books, and he is not afraid to tell people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear.
Here are 16 of our favorite takeaways from studying Ben and his investment philosophy.
Explore all investor deep dives here.
LESSONS
CEOs aren’t born. The most successful CEOs you recognize have been built through more years of decisions, mistakes, and pressure than most people cannot comprehend.
The only thing that can train you to run a company is running a company. MBAs thinking they can come in and turn a business around are delusional (according to Ben).
Managers have one skill: make things extremely clear. Creating unnecessary complexion is a great way to create internal frustration from your team.
Experience and skills are two totally different things. Most VCs sitting on boards have experience.
Involve multiple people in brainstorming but make the final decision solo. Consensus-based decisions tend to sway the process away from strength and towards weakness.
Your lens determines your perspective. Good leaders look for alternative narratives to create a more informed opinion.
Feedback is a dialogue, not a monologue. If people get comfortable talking about what each other are doing wrong, then it will be very easy to talk about what the company is doing wrong.
Flowers are cheap; divorce is expensive. Ben got this advice from his father, and the lesson is about tradeoffs we all make in life. For him, it was a wakeup call to delegate more in order to have more time to spend on the things that matter.
QUOTES
“Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous, and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.”
"Take care of people, products and profits (in that order)"
“Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.”
“Most companies that go through layoffs are never the same. They don't recover because trust is broken. And if you're not honest at the point where you're breaking trust anyway, you will never recover.”
“One person is never as stupid as a group of people. That's why they have lynch mobs, not lynch individuals.”
“You can have a great product, but a compelling story puts the company into motion. If you don’t have a great story it’s hard to get people motivated to join you, to work on the product, and to get people to invest in the product.”
“Breakthrough ideas usually come from guys who look like they’re hallucinating.”
“No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be?”
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READING
Similar investor lessons: Bob Kagle (GP @ Benchmark), Brian Singerman (Partner @ Founders Fund), Charlie Songhurst (Angel Investor)
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