What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

by Ben Horowitz

After he transferred to state prison, White faced an even more intense version of orientation. The new men were kept in quarantine for two weeks to make sure we didn’t have any diseases or other issues that would keep us out of the general population. The day we got out, we saw a guy get stabbed in the neck. People get stabbed in areas of the prison where there are no officers—on the back staircase; in the recreation center where one officer watches three hundred men; in the corridor to the chow hall or to the law library. So we’re in the recreation center and this guy gets stabbed and the guy stabbing him does it so calmly and casually, discards the knife, and goes to the chow hall. Guys were visibly shaken, like, “Where the fuck are we at?” I remember thinking, So this is the extreme end of what happens in prison. And then asking myself, If you get into a conflict with somebody, could you stab them and just keep it moving? I had never stabbed anybody. I had shot someone, but that was a reaction to a conflict on the streets. It was very different from premeditating, “Okay, I am going to stab this person. Where am I going to stab this person at? Do I want to scare him, wound him, get him to leave the yard I’m on, or kill him?” In prison you stab with many different intentions. It takes callousness to do that, and I didn’t have that yet. So I had to ask myself, If this is about survival, can you make that call? You don’t know who the fuck you are in prison until you face so...