In the later section “How to Evaluate CEOs”, I describe the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a pr… - Ben Horowitz

I describe the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want.

If CEOs were graded on a curve, the mean on the test would be 22 out of 100. This kind of mean can be psychologically challenging for a straight-A student. It is particularly challenging because nobody tells you that the mean is 22.

When you expect your employees to act like adults, they generally do. If you treat them like children, then get ready for your company to turn into one big Barney episode.

As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired — Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook — had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. Marc and I thought that if we created a firm specifically designed to help technical founders run their own companies, we could develop a reputation and a brand that might vault us into the top tier of venture capital firms despite having no track record. We identified two key deficits that a founder CEO had when compared with a professional CEO: 1. The CEO skill set Managing executives, organizational design, running sales organizations and the like were all important skills that technical founders lacked. 2. The CEO network Professional CEOs knew lots of executives, potential customers and partners, people in the press, investors, and other important business connections. Technical founders, on the other hand, knew some good engineers and how to program.