What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

by Ben Horowitz

Horowitz roots his own definition of innovation in the deliberate choices he makes to center the leadership stories of present, past, and long past people of color far outside the C-suite or open floor plans of today’s tech giants. They include Toussaint Louverture, the genius behind the only successful slave rebellion in the history of the western hemisphere, the Haitian Revolution of the late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth century; the samurai of Japan, whose bushido code elevated virtues above values; Genghis Khan, the ultimate outsider who led one of history’s most dominant armies by absorbing the best and brightest among those he defeated; and, perhaps most moving of all, James White, aka Shaka Senghor, who, on a devastating murder conviction, stepped out of quarantine into the belly of the Michigan prison system to become the leader of a violent squad called the Melanics that, over time, he shepherded toward a culture revolution focused on community uplift after prison.

To really understand how this stuff works, I knew I had to dig deeper. So I asked myself, How many of the following questions can be resolved by turning to your corporate goals or mission statement? Is that phone call so important I need to return it today, or can it wait till tomorrow? Can I ask for a raise before my annual review? Is the quality of this document good enough or should I keep working on it? Do I have to be on time for that meeting? Should I stay at the Four Seasons or the Red Roof Inn? When I negotiate this contract, what’s more important: the price or the partnership? Should I point out what my peers do wrong, or what they do right? Should I go home at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m.? How hard do I need to study the competition? Should we discuss the color of this new product for five minutes or thirty hours? If I know something is badly broken in the company, should I say something? Whom should I tell? Is winning more important than ethics? The answer is zero. There aren’t any “right answers” to those questions. The right answers for your company depend on what your company is, what it does, and what it wants to be.

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.

Culture is not like a mission statement; you can’t just set it up and have it last forever. There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard. This is also true of culture—if you see something off-culture and ignore it, you’ve created a new culture.

Fairchild Camera, based in New York City, did business the east coast way, which had become the way big businesses across the country conducted themselves. Fairchild’s owner, Sherman Fairchild, lived in a glass-and-marble town house in Manhattan. His top executives got cars and drivers and reserved parking places. As Tom Wolfe observed in his 1983 Esquire story “The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce,” “Corporations in the East adopted a feudal approach to organization, without even being aware of it. There were kings and lords, and there were vassals, soldiers, yeomen, and serfs.” Bob Noyce didn’t believe any of that made sense when it was his individual engineers—the yeomen—who were inventing products and driving the business. So Fairchild Semiconductor did things differently. Everyone was expected at work by 8 a.m., and whoever got in first got the best parking space. The company’s building in San Jose was a warehouse filled with cubicles, and nobody wore a suit. Noyce didn’t hire professional managers. He said, “Coaching, and not direction, is the first quality of leadership now. Get the barriers out of the way to let people do the things they do well.” This created a new culture, a culture of empowerment: everyone was in charge and Noyce was there to help. If a researcher had an idea, he could pursue it for a year before anyone would start inquiring about results. Employees who got a taste of Noyce’s culture of independence split off to start their own companies, including Ra...

if Silicon Valley is about anything, it’s about the primacy of the idea. Breakthrough ideas have traditionally been difficult to manage for two reasons: 1) innovative ideas fail far more than they succeed, and 2) innovative ideas are always controversial before they succeed. If everyone could instantly understand them, they wouldn’t be innovative.

Wikipedia was considered a joke when it started. How could something written by a crowd replace the work of the world’s top scholars? Today it is so much more comprehensive than anything that came before it that it’s widely considered the only encyclopedia.

Critics love to attack companies for having a “broken culture” or being “morally corrupt,” but it’s actually a minor miracle if a culture isn’t dysfunctional. No large organization ever gets anywhere near 100 percent compliance on every value, but some do much better than others. Our aim here is to be better, not perfect.

Vincent de Vaublanc, a white deputy from Saint-Domingue, warned the French Parliament that the colony had fallen under the control of “ignorant and brutish negroes.” Vaublanc’s speech had a tremendous impact, and there were rumors of a counterrevolution being plotted in Paris. Louverture’s response was to publish a justification of the Haitian Revolution that laid out his theory of race and culture. As Philippe Girard wrote, “One by one he listed Vaublanc’s accusations; one by one he took them apart. Blacks were not lazy and ignorant savages: slavery had made them so. Some violence had indeed taken place in the Haitian Revolution, but violence had also taken place in the French Revolution, he reminded his readers; the slaves had in fact proved remarkably merciful toward the planters who had so cruelly oppressed them.” Louverture demonstrated that these former slaves had elevated their culture to a point where he could in justice close the letter by reaffirming black freedmen’s “right to be called French Citizens.”

He used two preexisting cultural strengths to great effect. The first was the songs the slaves sang at their midnight celebrations of voodoo. Louverture was a devout Catholic who would later outlaw voodoo—but he was also a pragmatist who used the tools at hand. So he converted this simple, memorable vocal template into an advanced communications technology. The Europeans had no means of long-distance, encrypted communication, but his army did. His soldiers would place themselves in the woods surrounding the enemy, scattered in clumps. They would begin their voodoo songs—which were incomprehensible to the European troops—and when they reached a certain verse, it was the signal to attack in concert.

In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust.

The explanation will be repeated to every new recruit and will embed itself into the cultural fabric. New officers would ask, “Tell me again why I can’t have a concubine?” And be told: “Because in this army, nothing is more important than your word. If we can’t trust you to keep your word to your wife, we definitely can’t trust you to keep your word to us.”

Once the rebels won control of the island, many of Louverture’s soldiers wanted revenge on the plantation owners. It would have been the course of least resistance for Louverture to order the owners shot out of hand. They would certainly have done the same to him. But he abhorred the spirit of revenge, believing it would destroy rather than elevate the culture. He also had to fund his war against France. If his country went bankrupt, his revolution would fail. Crops were the entire economy of Saint-Domingue: without them, it could never be an important nation. As Louverture declared, “The guarantee of the liberty of the blacks is the prosperity of agriculture.” He knew that plantations had to remain large to be economically viable, and that the owners had the knowledge, education, and experience the colony needed to keep the plantations going. So Louverture not only let the plantation owners live, he let them keep their land. But he insisted that they pay their laborers one-fourth of the profits. And he ordered them to live on their plantations, so they would be directly accountable for paying their workers and treating them well. If they disobeyed, their land was confiscated. With these decisions, Louverture established what a thousand speeches could not have: that the revolution wasn’t about revenge and that the economic well-being of the colony was its highest priority. It was all very well for him to say “no reprisals,” but it was what he did that set the culture.

Because Louverture believed in the French Revolution and the freedoms it claimed to embody, he saw Napoleon as an enlightened product of the revolution rather than as the racist he was. In one outburst, Napoleon said: “I will not rest until I have torn the epaulettes off every nigger in the colonies.”

It must be memorable. If people forget the rule, they forget the culture. It must raise the question “Why?” Your rule should be so bizarre and shocking that everybody who hears it is compelled to ask, “Are you serious?” Its cultural impact must be straightforward. The answer to the “Why?” must clearly explain the cultural concept. People must encounter the rule almost daily. If your incredibly memorable rule applies only to situations people face once a year, it’s irrelevant.

So Greene came up with a shocking rule: Partnerships should be 49/51, with VMware getting the 49. Did she just tell her team to lose? That definitely begs the question “Why?” Greene said, “I had to give our business development people permission to be good to the partners, because one-sided partnerships would not work.” Her rule was actually met not with resistance but with relief. Her people wanted to create mutually beneficial partnerships, and Greene’s rule gave them permission.

If you have to talk about something complicated, you want to load the data into people’s brains as quickly as possible so you can have an intelligent, facts-based conversation about the business decision you’re trying to make. So, say you’re meeting to figure out pricing for a new product, you’ve got to talk about the cost structure, how much is fixed, how much is variable, and then there might be three different pricing models, each with pros and cons. That’s a lot of information. Now, you can sit and listen to someone pitch all of this information, but most people don’t have the patience to pay attention long enough to be effective in absorbing all of this data and it typically takes too much time. There’s been a lot of research done on this that shows that most people’s brains can absorb new information several times faster and more effectively by reading information versus listening to it. Also, asking people to present their plans in written format forces them to express their ideas with a deeper level of detail.

Hastings figured out a way to detect memory leaks in the lab before a program shipped, and in 1991 he started a company called Pure Software to capitalize on his discovery. Its product, Purify, radically improved the way people developed software and was a hit. Yet he had never paid any attention to management or culture and as the head count grew, morale plunged—so much so that he asked his board to replace him as CEO (it refused). Every time Pure had a cultural problem, it aggressively put a process in place to fix it, just as though the company were maximizing semiconductor yield. The side effect of creating a massive set of rules that governed behavior—of optimizing for removing all errors rather than for encouraging exploration and free thinking—was to stifle creativity. Hastings vowed not to make that mistake again. Pure went public in 1995 and was sold to Rational Software in 1997 for about $500 million, which gave Hastings the capital to start a company called Netflix.

The age of streaming was clearly at hand—but how could Hastings make the jump to becoming a global business built around streaming? Obviously he’d have to bundle streaming with DVD to begin with, but what next? Every time he raised this vital topic with his team, trying to hyperleap the company into the future, the conversation reverted to optimizing the DVD service. Hastings made a hard decision to demonstrate his priorities. He kicked all the executives who ran the DVD business out of his weekly management meeting. “That was one of the most painful moments in building the company,” he said later. “Because we loved them, we’d grown up with them, and they’re running everything that’s important. But they weren’t adding value in terms of the streaming discussion.” Hastings had long kept looking over his shoulder for a pure-streaming company that would run right by Netflix. He knew that that competitor wouldn’t have any DVD execs in its meetings. So why should Netflix, if it was going to be that company? You’d be hard-pressed to find a management book that recommends rewarding the loyal team generating all your revenue by booting them out of the company’s key meeting. But Hastings understood that moving the culture in the right direction trumped all other priorities. He had to shift the culture from one that prioritized content and logistics to one that prioritized content and technology. That change would affect everything from work hours to compensation strategy. But if he ...

But there was a flaw in the plan. Two-factor authentication was required on everyone’s work email. The phishing attack was sent to Podesta’s personal email. Now, what past behavior could possibly have given Podesta the idea that he could send and receive tons of highly confidential campaign emails from his personal email account? Oh, snap. Not once did Hillary Clinton tell John Podesta, “Don’t take email security seriously.” Not once would she ever have told him that. But Clinton’s actions overrode her intentions. It did not matter that the campaign had taken all the steps necessary to prevent the attack, because John Podesta imitated what Hillary Clinton did, not what she said. The talk said, “Secure your email”; the walk said, “Personal convenience is more important.” The walk almost always wins. That’s how culture works.

When you inevitably take an action that’s inconsistent with your culture, the best fix is to admit it, then move to overcorrect the error. The admission and the self-correction have to be public enough and vehement enough to erase the earlier decision and become the new lesson.

The next day, I opened the meeting by saying, “Okay, I am the one who drove the last business into a ditch, so why should you trust me this time?” Then I had my management team present every aspect of the business, including the financials—especially the financials, down to every penny we had in the bank and all the debt—and the complete product and business strategy. Full transparency again, after a period of necessary obfuscation. It mostly worked. Of the eighty people who attended the off-site, all but four stayed with the company through our ultimate sale to Hewlett-Packard five years later. I definitely did not walk the talk on our pivot, but thankfully I didn’t trip and land face-first on the pavement, either.

Proud Uber employees circulated them widely: Uber Mission Celebrate Cities Meritocracy and Toe-Stepping Principled Confrontation Winning: Champion’s Mindset Let Builders Build Always Be Hustlin’ Customer Obsession Make Big, Bold Bets Make Magic Be an Owner, not a Renter Be Yourself Optimistic Leadership The Best Idea Wins

Finally, “Do the right thing. Period,” makes the issue seem simple, and therefore trivial. But ethics is not easy; it’s complex. That’s why Louverture spoke to his slave army as though they were philosophers. He needed them to understand that they would have to think deeply about their choices. If you remember one thing, remember that ethics are about hard choices. Do you tell a little white lie to investors or do you lay off a third of the company? Do you get publicly embarrassed by a competitor or do you deceive a customer? Do you deny someone a raise that they need or do you make your company a little less fair?

The samurai, the warrior class of ancient Japan, had a powerful code we call “bushido,” or “the way of the warrior.” This code enabled the samurai to rule Japan from 1186 until 1868—nearly seven hundred years—and their beliefs endured long after their reign. The samurai are the taproot of Japanese culture to this day.

Bushido looks like a set of principles, but it’s a set of practices. The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues. A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody. The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are. Even the samurai oath is oriented toward action: I will never fall behind others in pursuing the way of the warrior. I will always be ready to serve my lord. I will honor my parents. I will serve compassionately for the benefit of others.

Whether your aim is to keep death in mind, to do it for each other, or some analogous formulation, the glue that binds a company culture is that the work must be meaningful for its own sake.

Other VCs as well as the people covering the industry misinterpreted the virtue and referred to it as “founder friendly,” a massive corruption of the concept that has delivered us a competitive advantage for years. Being “founder friendly” implies that you take the founder’s side even when he is mistaken. This kind of “virtue” helps nobody. In fact, it creates a culture of lies. Any time you decide one group is inherently good or bad regardless of their behavior, you program dishonesty into your organization.

So what did Barksdale do? He created a piece of lore so memorable it outlived the company itself. At a company all-hands he said: We have three rules here at Netscape. The first rule is if you see a snake, don’t call committees, don’t call your buddies, don’t form a team, don’t get a meeting together, just kill the snake. The second rule is don’t go back and play with dead snakes. Too many people waste too much time on decisions that have already been made. And the third rule of snakes is: all opportunities start out looking like snakes.

As the company bringing the Internet to life, we faced many snakes. The Internet had no security, so we invented Secure Sockets Layer (SSL). The Internet had no way of maintaining browser state between sessions, so we invented cookies. The Internet couldn’t be programmed easily, so we invented JavaScript. Were these the optimal solutions? Probably not. But those snakes died fast, we never played with them again, and the technologies we created still dominate the Internet.

One specific incident changed my internal compass. A football player got into a car accident in Detroit. A young lady crashed into him on a bridge. He jumped out of the car like he was going to attack her and she got scared and jumped off the bridge to get away and drowned. It became a big national story. When he was on his way to the joint, all these guys were saying, “We’re going to stab this dude for what he did to the sister.” And I was like, There are probably people’s family members who think that about us. So I end up calling these guys out. And we have a tense-ass yard meeting. I’m like, “First of all, I don’t even know this guy but ain’t nobody gonna do shit to him.” To explain why, I go around the group and say to the first guy, “What you in for?” And he goes, “Attempted murder.” And I say: “Whoever you tried to kill, their family probably wants to fuck you up.” I turn to the next guy and he goes, “Assault with intent to murder.” I ask him how that guy’s family would feel about that. As I continued around the group the guys gradually stepped outside of their bullshit and realized we had all made poor decisions and that we’d been fortunate that nobody had seen those decisions as stabbing-worthy. It was my way of getting at the implications of perpetuating violence and how two wrongs don’t make a right.

If you’re a leader, how do you know what your culture is? The question is harder than it sounds. All leaders get surprised by feedback like “Our culture is really harsh” or “We’re arrogant,” but when they try to examine it directly to figure out what’s going on, they fall prey to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle of Management. The act of trying to measure your culture changes the result. When you ask your managers, “What is our culture like?” they’re likely to give you a managed answer that tells you what they think you want to hear and doesn’t hint at what they think you absolutely do not want to hear. That’s why they’re called managers. The best way to understand your culture is not through what managers tell you, but through how new employees behave. What behaviors do they perceive will help them fit in, survive, and succeed? That’s your company’s culture. Go around your managers to ask new employees these questions directly after their first week. And make sure you ask them for the bad stuff, the practices or assumptions that made them wary and uncomfortable. Ask them what’s different than other places they’ve worked—not just what’s better, but what’s worse. And ask them for advice: “If you were me, how would you improve the culture based on your first week here? What would you try to enhance?”

Cultural orientation is your chance to make clear the culture you want and how you intend to get it. What behaviors will be rewarded? Which ones will be discouraged or severely punished? People’s receptivity when they join, and the lasting impact of first impressions, is why the new-employee process is the most important one to get right. If your company’s process for recruiting, interviewing, orienting, training, and integrating new employees is intentional and systematic, great. If any part of it is accidental, then so is your culture.

In Genghis Kahn and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford observes that the experience gave Temujin “the conviction that some people, even those outside his clan, could indeed be trusted as if they were family. In later life, he would judge others primarily by their actions toward him and not according to their kinship bonds, a revolutionary concept in steppe society.” As we shall see, judging others primarily by their actions is also a revolutionary concept in many of today’s corporate cultures.

Genghis codified many aspects of inclusiveness into law. He outlawed kidnapping women and made it illegal to sell them into marriage (even as his warriors continued to rape and take concubines from among the defeated). He declared all children to be legitimate, thereby eliminating the concept of illegitimate or lesser people. And he introduced, perhaps for the first time anywhere, total religious freedom. While conquered peoples had to swear allegiance to Genghis and had to obey the Mongols’ common law—and while he executed clerics and imams who preached against him—they could otherwise believe what they liked and follow their own laws. He was a pragmatist, not a zealot.

As a society, we often ask, “Why do we have so few African-American CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?” And we get answers like “Racism, Jim Crow, slavery, and structural inequality.” Perhaps we should be asking, “How in the world did a black kid from the notorious Chicago housing project Cabrini-Green Gardens become the only African-American CEO of McDonald’s?” If we want to figure out why inclusion hasn’t worked, we ask the former. As we want to figure out how to make inclusion work, we should ask the latter.

When Wilderotter arrived at Frontier, she told me, “Everybody wanted to show me the org chart, to make sure I understood the pecking order. I didn’t even look at it, because I believe that work gets done through the go-to people. They may not have titles and positions, but they’re the ones who get the work done.”

you aren’t yourself, even you won’t follow you. A CEO will often hear something like this from a board member: “I don’t think your CFO is as good as the CFOs of other companies whose boards I’m on.” This is an extremely tricky statement to deal with. The CEO doesn’t know those other CFOs, and she can’t interview them and compare. How does she respond? The CEO’s common—and wrong—move is to go tell her CFO to be better in front of the board. She is trying to be what the board member wants, but failing, because she has refused to have a point of view. Her CFO will be confused, because he has no idea what he’s done wrong. He will try to transform into something he’s not and also lose his leadership mojo. The CEO should tell the board member, “Great. Let me know what you think makes those CFOs better than our guy, and please introduce me to them.” The CEO should spend time with those CFOs, decide for herself whether she comes to the same assessment of a skills gap, then—and this step is critical—decide how important those skills are for her company.

As a salesperson, you must know the truth. Does the customer have the necessary budget? Are you ahead of or behind the competition? Who in the target organization is a supporter and who is a detractor? Experienced salespeople like to say, “Buyers are liars.” That’s because, for a variety of reasons, buyers do not volunteer the truth. They may enjoy being wined and dined; they may be using you as a stalking horse to get a better price out of the competition; or they may just have a hard time saying “No.” Like Jack Bauer in 24 interrogating a terrorist, you must extract the truth. In sales, if you take what you’re told at face value, you won’t last.

When you ask an engineer a question, her instinct is to answer it with great precision. When you ask a salesperson a question, she’ll try to figure out the question behind the question. If a customer asks, “Do you have feature X?” a good engineer will answer yes or no. A good salesperson will almost never answer that way. She will ask herself, “Why are they asking about that feature? Which competitor has that feature? Hmm, then they must be in the account trying to take my deal. I need more information.” So she’ll reply with something like, “Why do you think feature X is important?” Having their questions answered with questions drives engineers insane. They want answers fast, so they can get back to work. But if they hope to see their product succeed—if they want great salespeople to go sell it, so they can keep working for a company that’s still in business—they need to be able to tolerate that cultural difference.

Smart. It doesn’t mean high IQ (although that’s great), it means disposed toward learning. If there’s a best practice anywhere, adopt it. We want to turn as much as possible into a routine so we can focus on the few things that require human intelligence and creativity. A good interview question for this is: “Tell me about the last significant thing you learned about how to do your job better.” Or you might ask a candidate: “What’s something that you’ve automated? What’s a process you’ve had to tear down at a company?”

A well-designed cultural interview need not be long. Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) is a computer-aided-design software company with a legendary sales culture. My head of sales at Opsware, culture-changer Mark Cranney, came from PTC and was always bragging about how good they were at selling. I got annoyed and asked why they were so great. He said, “Well, it started with the interview. I walked into the interview with the senior vice president of sales, John McMahon. He said nothing for what seemed like five minutes, then asked me, ‘What would you do if I punched you in the face right now?’” At this point in Mark’s story, I cried, “What!? He wanted to know what you would do if he punched you in the face? That’s crazy. What did you say?” Mark said, “I asked him, ‘Are you testing my intelligence or my courage?’ And McMahon said, ‘Both.’ So I said, ‘Well, you’d better knock me out.’ He said, ‘You’re hired.’ Right then I knew that I’d found a home.” How did McMahon make a hiring decision so quickly? That brief exchange enabled him to suss out whether Mark was a fit with his key cultural elements: the ability to keep your poise under fire, the ability to listen carefully, the courage to discover why a question is being asked—and, most of all, competitiveness.

A potential large deal with Sony would make or break the quarter. The good news was that the deal was on track. The bad news was that Okta’s sales rep had promised Sony that a feature called on-premise user provisioning—which would allow Sony to put users into the system from within its own buildings—would be delivered in a few months. In fact, Okta didn’t plan to build it for a few years. Sony didn’t require contractual assurance that the feature was just around the corner, but it did want McKinnon’s word. Was the smart thing to do to tell Sony the truth, or was it to save the company? Was that feature so important to Sony that it had to be warned that it would be delivered a little late—even at the risk of layoffs at Okta, or worse? “I knew that I could get the deal if I stretched the truth,” McKinnon recalled. “But I knew that everyone from the sales rep to the engineers would know that I had done that. They would assume that little lies were okay. I’d like to say it was an easy decision, but it was a hard decision. I ended up not taking the deal, because I knew it would be fatal in the long run. And maybe more than that because I did not want to lie.” He chose to risk the company rather than risking the culture. In this case, it worked out. Khosla Ventures made a gutsy bet and funded Okta’s next round despite all those missed quarters. As of this writing, Okta is worth nearly $15 billion and has become the most important cloud-identity product in the world. Okta has st...

When we founded Andreessen Horowitz, we made a brand promise that became the basis of our culture. We guaranteed that if you raised money from us, the general partner from our firm who’d sit on your board would be a former founder or CEO of a significant tech company.

Why would a smart person try to destroy the company he works for? He is disempowered. He feels he can’t access the people in charge, so complaining is his only way to get the truth out. He is fundamentally a rebel. Sometimes these people actually make better CEOs than employees. He is immature and naive. He cannot comprehend that the people running the company do not know every minute detail of its operations. He therefore believes they are complicit in everything that’s broken. It’s very difficult to turn heretics around. Once a heretic takes a public stance, the social pressure to be consistent is enormous. If he tells fifty friends that the CEO is the stupidest person on the planet, reversing that position will cost him enormous credibility. Most people aren’t willing to take the credibility hit.

Many managers want to attend executive staff meetings, as it makes them feel needed and it puts them in the know. I made use of this desire by setting a price of admission to the meeting: you had to fess up to at least one thing that was “on fire.” I’d say, “I know, with great certainty, that there are things that are completely broken in our company and I want to know what they are. If you don’t know what they are, then you are of no use to me in this meeting.” This technique got me deluged in bad news, but it also created a culture where surfacing and discussing problems was not just tolerated, but encouraged. We didn’t solve all the problems that came up, but at least we knew about most of them. Sometimes just knowing about a problem we did not solve solved other problems. When I launched Opsware from the ashes of LoudCloud, I wanted to ship Opsware, the software we used to manage our cloud environment, as soon as possible. We would have to scramble to fix the inevitable bugs and issues, but the knowledge and the skills we would gain from competing in the market would be invaluable. That’s what I thought. But most of my engineers thought, Ben has lost his mind. He has no idea how far away this product is from being ready for prime time. I did not know they thought that until, during a routine conversation with one of my engineers, I asked, “What do you think we should do differently?” He said, “Nobody thinks we should ship Opsware but you.” I still thought shipping was ...