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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Ben Horowitz
Read between
September 30 - November 4, 2022
Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved.
Do you really want him to bury that information? Management truisms like these may be good for employees to aspire to in the abstract, but they can also be the enemy of free-flowing information—which may be critical for the health of the company.
If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.
he’d never seen a company recover from consecutive layoffs and achieve a billion-dollar-plus outcome.
If the managers don’t know, they will look stupid. If the managers do know, they will either have to lie to their employees, contribute to the leak, or remain silent, which will create additional agitation.
You are laying people off because the company failed to hit its plan.
A layoff breaks that trust. In order to rebuild trust, you have to come clean.
Every manager must lay off his own people.
people won’t remember every day they worked for your company, but they will surely remember the day you laid them off.
They should explain briefly what happened and that it is a company rather than a personal failure. 2. They should be clear that the employee is impacted and that the decision is nonnegotiable. 3. They should be fully prepared with all of the details about the benefits and support the company plans to provide.
The message is for the people who are staying.
The people who stay will care deeply about how you treat their colleagues. Many of the people whom you lay off will have closer relationships with the people who stay than you do, so treat them with the appropriate level of respect.
The people whom you laid off will want to know if they still have a relationship with you and the company. Talk to people. Help them carry their things to their cars. Let them know that you
soon. Like so many things, the key to correctly firing an executive is preparation.
At this level, almost every company screens for the proper skill set, motivation, and track record. Yes, the reason that you have to fire your head of marketing is not because he sucks; it’s because you suck.
If you don’t know what you want, you will be unlikely to get it.
If you don’t have world-class strengths where you need them, you won’t be a world-class company.
If you hire someone who will be great in eighteen months but will be poor for the next eighteen months, the company will reject her before she ever gets a chance to show her stuff.
If you build a great product and the market wants it, you will find yourself needing to grow your company extremely quickly. Nothing will ensure your success like hiring the right executive who has grown an organization like yours very quickly and successfully before.
The successful fast-growth executive is so important to building successful startups that recruiters and venture capitalists often advise CEOs to bring them in before the company is ready.
Leaving a failing leader in place will cause an entire department in your company to slowly rot. Let that happen and the board will be more than alarmed.
takes about ten times longer for an executive to find a new job than it does for an individual contributor.
the executive will be keenly interested in how the news will be communicated to the company and to the outside world. It is best to let her decide. Bill Campbell once gave me a critical bit of advice when I was preparing to fire an executive. He said, “Ben, you cannot let him keep his job, but you absolutely can let him keep his respect.”
keep the message positive and refrain from throwing the executive under the bus. The best employees in the organization will likely be the ones closest to the executive. If you trash her, you will put all her best employees on notice that they are next. Is that a message you want to send?
As hard as it may be, you need to take a Confucian approach. You must consider first all of the other employees and second your friend. The good of the individual must be sacrificed for the good of the whole.
More than anything
you were a more experienced CEO, you might be able to develop him into the role, but two people who don’t know what they are doing is a recipe for failure.
The best way to do this, if appropriate, is to couple the demotion with an increase in compensation.
employee attrition in three categories: 1. People who quit 2. People who got fired 3. People who quit, but it’s okay because the company didn’t want them anyway
humans, particularly those who build things, only listen to leading indicators of good news.
Both leading indicators may have been wrong, or both may have been right, but our hypothetical CEO—like almost every other CEO—only took action on the positive indicator and only looked for alternative explanations on the negative leading indicator.
you find yourself wondering why your honest employees are lying to you, the answer is they are not. They are lying to themselves. And if you believe them, you are lying to yourself.
we focused our engineering team on fixing the performance issues while working on the other things in the background.
To make matters worse, we needed to win those deals in order to beat Wall Street’s projections, so the company felt tremendous pressure.
No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door. We had to go through the front door and deal with the big, ugly guy blocking it. Lead bullets.
“If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”
Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.”
When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care.
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.
We had cloud services executives, but now we were a software company and needed software executives.
two most important positions tend to be VP of sales and VP of engineering.
Colin Powell’s instructions and hire for strength rather than lack of weakness.
Ordinarily, that vibe would rule out a candidate for me, but the strengths that I needed were so critical to the business that I was willing to overlook every weakness.
ask a series of questions about hiring, training, and managing sales reps.
a successful sales leader still must inspire courage in the team. He sounded like General Patton. I knew I had my guy.
The reasons for voting “no” never referred to Mark’s lack of strength, but rather to his abundance of weakness: Mark went to Southern Utah. Mark made people feel uncomfortable. Mark did not look like a head of sales.
He gave me a list of seventy-five references. He said he had more if I needed them.
Woooahh
Mark Cranney walks up to the podium, looks at the crowd of fresh new recruits, and says, ‘I don’t give a fuck how well trained you are. If you don’t bring me five hundred thousand dollars a quarter, I’m putting a bullet in your head.’ ” Ben:
Lodi haaaa
The world looks one way in peacetime but very different when you must fight for your life every day. In times of peace, one has time to care about things like appropriateness, long-term cultural consequences, and people’s feelings. In times of war, killing the enemy and getting the troops safely home is all that counts. I was at war and I needed a wartime general. I needed Mark Cranney.
Woordd
Marc is so humble that he never believes that other people think he is smart, which makes him sensitive to being ignored.
“I agree with every single one of those issues. However, Mark Cranney is a sales savant. He has mastered sales to a level that far exceeds anybody that I have ever known. If he didn’t have the things wrong with him that you enumerated, he wouldn’t be willing to join a company that just traded at thirty-five cents per share; he’d be CEO of IBM.” Marc’s reply came quickly: “Got it. Let’s hire him!”
:,)
