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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Horowitz
Read between
April 8, 2018 - June 10, 2019
If they have the experience in what you need, they will be articulate on this point.
It’s much better if they want to be more creative.
A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company.
Force them to create. Give them monthly, weekly, and even daily objectives to make sure that they produce immediately. The rest of the company will be watching and this will be critical to their assimilation.
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.
Consider scheduling a daily meeting with your new executive. Require them to bring a comprehensive set of questions about everything they heard that day but did not completely understand. Answer those questions in depth; start with first principles. Bring them up to speed fast. If they don’t have any questions, consider firing them. 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.
How many CEOs have been head of HR, engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and legal? Probably none. 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.”
be clear in your own mind about your expectations for this person upon joining your company.
Effective is the key word. It’s possible for an executive to be well liked and totally ineffective with respect to the other members of the team. It’s also possible for an executive to be highly effective and profoundly influential while being totally despised. The latter is far better.
No matter how great an executive is, they will have trouble succeeding if the people around them sabotage everything they do.
assign questions to interviewers based on their talents. Specifically, make sure that the interviewer who asks the questions deeply understands what a good answer will sound like.
Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo.
giving the team a task that it cannot possibly perform is called crippling the army.
I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time—in that order.
many young companies overemphasize retention metrics and do not spend enough time going deep enough on the actual user experience.
To get things right, you must recognize that anything you measure automatically creates a set of employee behaviors. Once you determine the result you want, you need to test the description of the result against the employee behaviors that the description will likely create.
While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest.
1. Putting two in the box 2. Overcompensating a key employee, because she gets another job offer 3. No performance management or employee feedback process
Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving.
People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of.
one of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product.
Do you sharply understand the skills and talents required to succeed in every open position? Are your interviewers well prepared?
managers with the right kind of ambition tend to be radically more valuable than those with the wrong kind.
“must have excellent management skills.” In fact, the best leveling tools get extremely specific and even name names: “should be a superstar recruiter—as good as Jenny Rogers.”
In business, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.
No large organization achieves perfection. As a result, a company needs lots of smart, super-engaged employees who can identify its particular weaknesses and help it improve them.
it takes a really smart person to be maximally destructive, because otherwise nobody else will listen to him.
Some brilliant people can be totally unreliable.
A company is a team effort and, no matter how high an employee’s potential, you cannot get value from him unless he does his work in a manner in which he can be relied upon.
As a company grows, its biggest challenge always becomes communication.
If one of your big dogs destroys communication on your staff, you need to send her to the pound.
No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age.
no matter how beautiful your dream most employees will lose faith after the first five or six years of not achieving it.
The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area.
for engineering managers the comprehensive knowledge of the code base and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than knowledge of how to run scalable engineering organizations. As a result, you might very well value the knowledge of your own organization more than that of the outside world.
the CEO’s most important operational responsibility is designing and implementing the communication architecture for her company.
The key to a good one-on-one meeting is the understanding that it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting.
How do you get help when you love your job but your personal life is melting down?
A good practice is to have the employee send you the agenda in advance.
the manager should do 10 percent of the talking and 90 percent of the listening. Note that this is the opposite of most one-on-ones.
If you manage engineers, drawing out issues will be an important skill to master.
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.
The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market.
The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.
long-lasting companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture.”
Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.
build frugality into his culture.
Every smart company values its employees. Perks are good, but they are not culture.
