What You Do Is Who You Are Quotes

“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.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

“There’s a saying in the military that if you see something below standard and do nothing, then you’ve set a new standard.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“I began looking for these four: 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?” Humble. I don’t mean meek or unambitious, I mean being humble in the way that Steph Curry is humble. If you’re humble, people want you to succeed. If you’re selfish, they want you to fail. It also gives you the capacity for self-awareness, so you can actually learn and be smart. Humility is foundational like that. It is also essential for the kind of collaboration we want at Slack. Hardworking. It does not mean long hours. You can go home and take care of your family, but when you’re here, you’re disciplined, professional, and focused. You should also be competitive, determined, resourceful, resilient, and gritty. Take this job as an opportunity to do the best work of your life. Collaborative. It’s not submissive, not deferential—in fact it’s kind of the opposite. In our culture, being collaborative means providing leadership from everywhere. I’m taking responsibility for the health of this meeting. If there’s a lack of trust, I’m going to address that. If the goals are unclear, I’m going to deal with that. We’re all interested in getting better and everyone should take responsibility for that. If everyone’s collaborative in that sense, the responsibility for team performance is shared. Collaborative people know that success is limited by the worst performers, so they are either going to elevate them or have a serious conversation. This one is easy to corroborate with references, and in an interview you can ask, “Tell me about a situation in your last company where something was substandard and you helped to fix it.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“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.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

“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.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“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.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“The extent of one’s courage or cowardice cannot be measured in ordinary times. All is revealed when something happens.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“Since tech became a consumer phenomenon, thousands of nontech people have come up with great ideas that use technology. But if their startups outsource their engineering, they almost always fail. Why? It turns out that it’s easy to build an app or a website that meets the specification of some initial idea, but far more difficult to build something that will scale, evolve, handle edge cases gracefully, etc. A great engineer will only invest the time and effort to do all those things, to build a product that will grow with the company, if she has ownership in the company—literally as well as figuratively. Bob Noyce understood that, created the culture to support it, and changed the world.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“Without trust, communication breaks. Here’s why: In any human interaction the required amount of community is inversely proportional to the level of trust.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“He instilled in our eight-person sales team the crucial four C’s. To sell, you had have 1) the competence—expert knowledge of the product you were selling and the process to demonstrate it (qualifying the buyer by validating their need and budget; helping define what their buying criteria are while setting traps for the competition; getting sign-off from the technical and the economic buyer at the customer, and so forth) so that you could have 2) the confidence to state your point of view, which would give you 3) the courage to have 4) the conviction not to be sold by the customer on why she wasn’t going to buy your product. Cranney was obsessed with training every salesperson, testing them, and holding them accountable on the four C’s.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“the most robust, sustainable cultures are those based on action, not words; an alignment of personality and strategy; an honest awareness and assessment of the norms imbibed on the first day of work by new—not veteran—employees grasping at what it will take to make it; an openness to including outside talent and perspectives; a commitment to explicit ethics and principled virtues that stand out and have meaning; and, not least, a willingness to come up with “shocking rules” within an organization that indelibly and inescapably prompt others to ask, “Why?”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“We tell the truth even if it hurts. When talking to an entrepreneur, an LP [limited partner], a partner, or each other, we strive to tell the truth. We are open and honest. We do not withhold material information or tell half truths. Even if the truth will be difficult to hear or to say, we err on the side of truth in the face of difficult consequences. We do not, however, dwell on trivial truths with the intention of hurting people’s feelings or making them look bad. We tell the truth to make people better not worse.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“Culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. Culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“That’s the nature of culture. It’s not a single decision—it’s a code that manifests itself as a vast set of actions taken over time. No one person makes or takes all these actions. Cultural design is a way to program the actions of an organization, but, like computer programs, every culture has bugs. And cultures are significantly more difficult to debug than programs.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“Integrity, honesty, and decency are long-term cultural investments. Their purpose is not to make the quarter, beat a competitor, or attract a new employee. Their purpose is to create a better place to work and to make the company a better one to do business with in the long run. This value does not come for free. In the short run it may cost you deals, people, and investors, which is why most companies cannot bring themselves to actually, really, enforce it. But as we’ll see, the failure to enforce good conduct often brings modern companies to their knees.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“I recently recommended to Lea Endres, CEO of NationBuilder, which builds software for community leaders, that she follow Senghor’s lead. NationBuilder was operating close to the red and Endres was frustrated because, despite her reminding everyone that cash collection was a priority, she couldn’t get her team to care enough about it. Our conversation went like this: Lea: I’m really worried about cash collections. We use this outsourced finance firm and they don’t care. We have a low cash balance and we got surprised last month. A couple more surprises and we’re in deep trouble. Ben: Is there a team on it? How much do you need to collect this month? Lea: Yes. And $1.1 million at least. Ben: If you have a crisis situation and you need the team to execute, meet with them every day and even twice a day if necessary. That will show them this is a top priority. At the beginning of each meeting you say, “Where’s my money?” They will start making excuses like “Boo Boo was supposed to call me and didn’t,” or “The system didn’t tell me the right thing.” Those excuses are the key, because that’s the knowledge you’re missing. Once you know that the excuse is that “Fred didn’t answer my email,” you can tell Fred to answer the damned email and also tell the person making the excuse that you expect way more persistence. The meetings will start out running long, but two weeks later they’ll be short, because when you say, “Where’s my money?” they are going to want to say, “Right here, Lea!” Two weeks later: Lea: You wouldn’t believe some of the excuses. One was that we have an auto email that is one sentence long that tells customers they are late—but it doesn’t tell them what to do! I’m like, “Well, then, let’s fix the damned email!” We’re making progress and they know I want my money. End of quarter: Lea: We collected $1.6 million in September! And the team loves hearing me say “Where’s my money?!?!” To change a culture, you can’t just give lip service to what you want. Your people must feel the urgency of it.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“products are dramatically cheaper than Apple’s. 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. Meanwhile, as business conditions shift and your strategy evolves, you have to keep changing your culture accordingly. The target is always moving.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“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.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“If you want people to treat every corporate nickel like it’s their own, then having them stay at the Red Roof Inn sends a better cultural signal than having them stay at the Four Seasons—but if you want them to have the confidence to ask for a $5 million order, the opposite might be true. If you don’t know what you want, there is no chance that you will get it.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

“Grove would ask, “How would you sum up the Intel approach?” Someone might answer, “At Intel you don’t wait for someone else to do it. You take the ball yourself and run with it.” Grove would reply, “Wrong. At Intel you take the ball yourself and you let the air out and you fold the ball up and put it in your pocket. Then you take another ball and run with it and when you’ve crossed the goal you take the second ball out of your pocket and reinflate it and score twelve points instead of six.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“If the key to inclusion means seeing someone for who they are even if they come in a color or gender that you’re not used to, then it follows that hiring people on the basis of color or gender will actually defeat your inclusion program. You won’t see the person, you will just see the package. This seems obvious enough, but it’s actually trickier to understand than it would seem, because if you are hiring your own race or gender then you can see them just fine. If a woman hires a woman, there will probably be no problem later. If a man does it, then he runs a strong chance that he’ll only see that she’s a woman and not who she really is. Because most advisors on inclusion come from the groups being included, they often miss this point. And this is why hiring women and minorities into senior positions usually accelerates your inclusion efforts.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense). This does not mean that we leave CEOs in place forever. Our obligation is to the company not the founder. If the founder is no longer capable of running the company, the founder will not remain as CEO.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“The trainers at Uberversity, where new employees underwent a three-day initiation, began schooling everyone on this scenario: a rival company is launching a carpooling service in four weeks. It’s impossible for Uber to beat them to market with a reliable carpool service of its own. What should the company do? The correct answer at Uberversity—and what Uber actually did when it learned about Lyft Line—was “Rig up a makeshift solution that we pretend is totally ready to go so we can beat the competitor to market.” (Andreessen Horowitz, the venture capital firm where I work, invested in Lyft and I am on its board, so I was keenly aware of the dynamic between the companies—and I am decidedly biased.) Those, including the company’s legal team, who proposed taking the time to come up with a workable product, one far better than Uber Pool 1.0, were told “That’s not the Uber way.” The underlying message was clear: if the choice is integrity or winning, at Uber we do whatever we have to do to win. This competitiveness issue also came up when Uber began to challenge Didi Chuxing, the Chinese market leader in ride-sharing. To counter Uber, Didi employed very aggressive techniques including hacking Uber’s app to send it fake riders. The Chinese law on the tactic wasn’t entirely clear. The Chinese branch of Uber countered by hacking Didi right back. Uber then brought those techniques home to the United States by hacking Lyft with a program known as Hell, which inserted fake riders into Lyft’s system while simultaneously funneling Uber the information it needed to recruit Lyft drivers. Did Kalanick instruct his subordinates to employ these measures, which were at best anticompetitive and at worst arguably illegal? It’s difficult to say, but the point is that he didn’t have to—he had already programmed the culture that engendered those measures.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process and we know that without the entrepreneurs we have no business. When dealing with entrepreneurs, we always show up on time and we always get back to them timely and with substantive feedback, even if it’s bad news (like a rejection). We have an optimistic view of the future and believe that entrepreneurs, whether they succeed or fail, are working to help us achieve a better future. As a result, we never publicly criticize any entrepreneur or startup (doing so is a fireable offense).”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“To sell, you had have 1) the competence—expert knowledge of the product you were selling and the process to demonstrate it (qualifying the buyer by validating their need and budget; helping define what their buying criteria are while setting traps for the competition; getting sign-off from the technical and the economic buyer at the customer, and so forth) so that you could have 2) the confidence to state your point of view, which would give you 3) the courage to have 4) the conviction not to be sold by the customer on why she wasn’t going to buy your product. Cranney was obsessed with training every salesperson, testing them, and holding them accountable on the four C’s.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“Here are the rules for writing a rule so powerful it sets the culture for many years: 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.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“I was definitely zero-tolerance on managers who undermined decisions, because that led to cultural chaos.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“I hear you and, quite frankly, I agree with you, but I was overruled by the powers that be.” This is absolutely toxic to the culture. Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless. This makes them one level less than powerless.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“You ask an electrical engineer to design the thermal system on the french fryer. Then you ask me to carry flip charts to facilitate strategic planning. I had many reasons to refuse all the opportunities that led to me becoming CEO.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture

“If you ask, “Why am I so fat?” your brain will say, “Because I am stupid and have no willpower.” Robbins’s point is that if you ask a bad question you will get a bad answer and you will live a bad life.”
― Ben Horowitz, What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture