Ben Horowitz Quotes

nothing happens unless you make it happen.

Yes, yoga may make your company a better place to work for people who like yoga. It may also be a great team-building exercise for people who like yoga. Nonetheless, it’s not culture.

NO PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT OR EMPLOYEE FEEDBACK PROCESS Your company now employs twenty-five people and you know that you should formalize the performance management process, but you don’t want to pay the price. You worry that doing so will make it feel like a “big company.” Moreover, you do not want your employees to be offended by the feedback, because you can’t afford to lose anyone right now. And people are happy, so why rock the boat? Why not take on a little management debt? The first noticeable payments will be due when somebody performs below expectations: CEO: “He was good when we hired him; what happened?” Manager: “He’s not doing the things that we need him to do.” CEO: “Did we clearly tell him that?” Manager: “Maybe not clearly . . .” However, the larger payment will be a silent tax. Companies execute well when everybody is on the same page and everybody is constantly improving. In a vacuum of feedback, there is almost no chance that your company will perform optimally across either dimension. Directions with no corrections will seem fuzzy and obtuse. People rarely improve weakness they are unaware of. The ultimate price you will pay for not giving feedback: systematically crappy company performance.

It amazed me how a diverse perspective utterly changed the meaning of every significant event in the world.

Si gestionas una empresa, experimentarás una presión psicológica abrumadora para ser positivo. Haz frente a la presión, enfréntate a tus miedos, y di las cosas como son.

Get it out of your head and onto paper. When I had to explain to my board that, since we were a public company, I thought that it would be best if we sold all of our customers and all of our revenue and changed business, it was messing with my mind. In order to finalize that decision, I wrote down a detailed explanation of my logic. The process of writing that document separated me from my own psychology and enabled me to make the decision swiftly. Focus on the road, not the wall. When someone learns to drive a race car, one of the first lessons taught is that when you are going around a curve at 200 mph, do not focus on the wall; focus on the road. If you focus on the wall, you will drive right into it. If you focus on the road, you will follow the road. Running a company is like that. There are always a thousand things that can go wrong and sink the ship. If you focus too much on them, you will drive yourself nuts and likely crash your company. Focus on where you are going rather than on what you hope to avoid.

Watered-down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient.

We decided that while we would not be able to give a founder CEO all the skills she needed, we would be able to provide the kind of mentorship that would accelerate the learning process. As a result, we decided that all of our general partners would need to be effective mentors for a founder striving to be a CEO.

It also makes clear that it is her meeting and will take as much or as little time as she needs. During the meeting, since it’s the employee’s meeting, 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.

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.

I managed the team to a set of numbers that did not fully capture what I wanted. I wanted a great product that customers would love with high quality and on time — in that order. Unfortunately, the metrics that I set did not capture those priorities. At a basic level, metrics are incentives. By measuring quality, features, and schedule and discussing them at every staff meeting, my people focused intensely on those metrics to the exclusion of other goals. The metrics did not describe the real goals and I distracted the team as a result.

I said that Oxide was simply another product line. This statement deeply worried two of my employees who had graduated from Stanford Business School. They scheduled an appointment and presented me with a slide deck detailing why my decision to start Oxide was quixotic, misguided, and downright stupid. They argued that it would steal precious resources from our core business while pursuing a product that would surely fail. I let them present all forty-five slides without my asking them a single question. When they finished I said, “Did I ask for this presentation?” Those were the first words I spoke as I made the transition from a peacetime CEO to a wartime CEO.

Play long enough and you might get lucky. In the technology game, tomorrow looks nothing like today. If you survive long enough to see tomorrow, it may bring you the answer that seems so impossible today.

The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text The One Minute Manager.

There are two distinct types of complaints that you will receive: 1. Complaints about an executive’s behavior 2. Complaints about an executive’s competency or performance Generally, the best way to handle the first type of complaint is to get the complaining executive and the targeted executive in the room together and have them explain themselves. Usually, simply having this meeting will resolve the conflict and correct the behavior and improve the relationship (if it was actually broken). Do not attempt to address behavioral issues without both executives in the room. Doing so will invite manipulation and politics. Complaints of the second type are both more rare and more complex. If one of your executives summons the courage to complain about the competency of one of their peers, then there is a good chance that either the complainer or the targeted executive has a major problem. If you receive this type of complaint, you will generally have one of two reactions: they will be telling you something that you already know, or they’ll be telling you shocking news.