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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Horowitz
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? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.
“When we drove off the cliff, we left no skid marks.”
It turns out that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job.
“What Are We Not Doing?”
No, markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.
Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
best move when there are no good moves.
Ironically, the key to an emotional discussion is to take the emotion out of it.
Andy explained that humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news.
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.
I’d learned the hard way that when hiring executives, one should follow Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
“We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.”
In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective, and make a difference for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling.
Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence.
Good product managers think about the story they want written by the press.
Good product managers assume members of the press and the analyst community are really smart.
It’s important to supplement a great product vision with a strong discipline around the metrics, but if you substitute metrics for product vision, you will not get what you want.
metrics are sanity checks
To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors.
The best way to approach management quality assurance is through the lens of the employee life cycle. From hire to retire, how good is your company?
Hire people with the right kind of ambition.
Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate.
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
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.
If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.
There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.
High-quality company cultures get their cue from data networking routing protocols: Bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly.
The story of the company goes beyond quarterly or annual goals and gets to the hard-core question of why. Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I buy its product? Why should I invest in the company? Why is the world better off as a result of this company’s existence?
The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, salespeople, and finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority.
