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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Horowitz
Look for candidates who come in with more new initiatives than you think are possible. This is a good sign.
How will your new job differ from your current job? Look for self-awareness of the differences here. If they have the experience
in what you need, they will be articulate...
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Why do you want to join a small company?
It’s much better if they want to be more creative. The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company.
You should plan to spend a huge amount of time integrating any new executive.
Force them to create. Give them monthly, weekly, and even daily objectives to make sure that they produce immediately.
Make sure that they “get it.” Content-free executives have no value in startups. Every executive must understand the product, the technology, the customers, and the market. Force your newbie to learn these things.
If in thirty days you don’t feel that they are coming up to speed, definitely fire them.
Give them a list of people they need to know and learn from. Once they’ve done that, require a report from them on what they learned from each person.
So, with no experience, how do you hire someone good?
“If you don’t know what you want, the chances that you’ll get it are extremely low.”
you are not hiring an abstract executive to work at an arbitrary company. You must hire the right person for your company at this particular point in time.
The very best way to know what you want is to act in the role. Not just in title, but in real action.
In addition to acting in the role, it helps greatly to bring in domain experts. If you know a great head of sales, interview them first and learn what they think made them great.
If possible, include the domain expert in the interview process. However, be aware that the domain expert only has part of the knowledge necessary to make the hire.
Therefore, you cannot defer the decision to the domain expert.
What will this person do in the first thirty days?
What do you expect their motivation to be for joining?
Develop questions that test for the criteria
Next, assign questions to interviewers based on their talents.
Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness.
Note that there were many numbers as well as more qualitative goals that would have helped:
Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.
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?
Sometimes an organization doesn’t need a solution; it just needs clarity.
If they are telling you something that you already know, then the big news is that you have let the situation go too far.
Almost always, this means firing the executive.
On the other hand, if the complaint is new news, then you must immediately stop the conversation and make clear to the complaining executive that you in no way agree with their assessment.
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.
“Do I value internal or external knowledge more for this position?”
Perhaps the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
Some questions that I’ve found to be very effective in one-on-ones: If we could improve in any way, how would we do it? What’s the number-one problem with our organization? Why? What’s not fun about working here? Who is really kicking ass in the company? Whom do you admire? If you were me, what changes would you make? What don’t you like about the product? What’s the biggest opportunity that we’re missing out on?
What are we not doing that we should be doing? Are you happy working here?
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. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something ten times better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out.
If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit.
The world is full of bankrupt companies
with world-class ...
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Culture does not make a company. So, why bother with culture at...
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However, you do need to think about how you can be provocative enough to change what people do every day.
Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value.
If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior.
Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.
Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers.
If you want to build an important company, then at some point you have to scale. People in startup land often talk about the magic of how few people built the original Google or the original Facebook, but today’s Google employs twenty thousand people and today’s Facebook employs more than fifteen hundred people. So, if you want to do something that matters, then you are going to have to learn the black art of scaling a human organization.
Imagine trying to find a killer engineer if you’d never written a single program. Second, many investor-board members don’t know anything about scaling a company, either, and can be suckers for people who have the experience but not the skills.
When an organization grows in size, things that were previously easy become difficult. Specifically, the following things that cause no trouble when you are small become big challenges as you grow:
Communication Common knowledge Decision making