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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Horowitz
Read between
April 8, 2018 - June 10, 2019
Building a company inevitably leads to tough times.
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.
leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.
The simple existence of an alternate, plausible scenario is often all that’s needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce.
I always thought about myself first. When you are part of a family or part of a group, that kind of thinking can get you into trouble, and I was in deep trouble. In my mind, I was confident that I was a good person and not selfish, but my actions said otherwise.
Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don’t like each other or they become complacent about each other’s feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship.
Media companies focused on things like creating great stories whereas technology companies focused on creating a better way of doing things.
Deploying software to scale to millions of users was totally different from making it work for thousands.
abstract thinker who could encapsulate complex strategies into pithy sentences with ease.
During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”
if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc
the best thing about startups?”
“You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”
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?
Some things are much easier to see in others than in yourself.
“What’s the worst thing that could happen?”
“What would I do if we went bankrupt?”
This was wartime. The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility.
Needs always trump wants in mergers and acquisitions.
“Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.”
An early lesson I learned in my career was that whenever a large organization attempts to do anything, it always comes down to a single person who can delay the entire project.
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.
innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage.
Sloppiness would not be tolerated.
Early in my career as an engineer, I’d learned that all decisions were objective until the first line of code was written. After that, all decisions were emotional.
It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”
“Well, boys, if you are going to have a dog race, then you are going to need a rabbit. And Oracle will be one hell of a rabbit.”
“But the indeterminate future is somehow one in which probability and statistics are the dominant modality for making sense of the world.
statistical ways of thinking are going to drive the future.”
It was a very hard thing for him to say and only the best of friends will muster the courage to break news that horrible.
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.
“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.
if a CEO keeps the following lessons in mind, she will maintain the proper focus when hiring, training, and building her culture.
The Struggle is when you wonder why you started the company in the first place. The Struggle is when people ask you why you don’t quit and you don’t know the answer. The Struggle is when your employees think you are lying and you think they may be right.
The Struggle is when you don’t believe you should be CEO of your company. The Struggle is when you know that you are in over your head and you know that you cannot be replaced.
The Struggle is where self-doubt becomes self-hatred.
The Struggle is when you are having a conversation with someone and you can’t hear a word that they are saying because...
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The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse. The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone. The Struggle has no mercy.
The Struggle is the land of broken promises and crushed dreams.
The Struggle is where your guts boil so much that you feel like you ar...
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The Struggle is not failure, but it causes failure. Especially if you are weak....
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Every great entrepreneur from Steve Jobs to Mark Zuckerberg went through the Struggle and struggle they did, so you are not alone. But that does not mean that you will make it. You may not make it. That is why it is the Struggle. The Struggle is where greatness comes from.
Don’t put it all on your shoulders. It is easy to think that the things that bother you will upset your people more. That’s not true. The opposite is true. Nobody takes the losses harder than the person most responsible.
Technology businesses tend to be extremely complex. The underlying technology moves, the competition moves, the market moves, the people move.
There is always a move.
Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today.
Don’t take it personally.
If you want to be great, this is the challenge. If you don’t want to be great, then you never should have started a company.
1. Trust. Without trust, communication breaks. More specifically: In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.
As a company grows, communication becomes its biggest challenge. If the employees fundamentally trust the CEO, then communication will be vastly more efficient than if they don’t. Telling things as they are is a critical part of building this trust. A CEO’s ability to build this trust over time is often the difference between companies that execute well and companies that are chaotic.
