Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitz
Ben Horowitzis an American businessman, investor, blogger, and author. He is a high technology entrepreneur and co-founder and general partner along with Marc Andreessen of the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded and served as president and chief executive officer of the enterprise software company Opsware, which Hewlett-Packard acquired for $1.6 billion in cash in July 2007. Horowitz is the author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. In the...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth13 June 1966
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John D. Rockefeller said that he found friendships based on business to be far more long lasting and profitable than the reverse. I think there's something to that. A company can end up being very Confucian, where the good of the individual is subjugated to the good of the whole.
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A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate's knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth.
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Do you have a real interest in people who work for you? Most good leaders have that - it's hard to get someone to follow you if they feel like you hate 'em.
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Good shareholder activists have incredible interest in the company because they own a lot of it.
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The bad thing about young people starting a company is that sometimes they do it for the wrong reasons or because they have the wrong skill set, but the good thing is that they don't have any of the old paradigms baked into them, so they have a lot of the bright new ideas that are harder to come by as you get older.
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I think there's a lot to be said about just enjoying your work. It can be very contrived when people say their work is for the good of mankind.
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From a systematic standpoint, I think that capitalism is the best system. I can spend a lot of time explaining why I like communism, but it is actually not a good solution. Nor is socialism. So, capitalism is the right model.
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I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.
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As a company gets big, the information that informs decision-making gets massive. Depending upon the prism through which you view the business, your perspective will vary. If two people are in charge, this variance will cause conflict and delay.
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I had a terrible time hiring rich people. It sounds funny, but the problem is when things go wrong they can ask, 'Why am I doing this?' You don't ever want anybody asking that question. You want them to say, 'I know why I'm doing it, I need the money, let's go' or whatever it is that draws them.
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You can't worry about the mistakes, because you're going to make a lot of them. You've got to be thinking about your next move.
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When you look at a company that's already succeeded or is at the very top of its game, it isn't necessarily when it's executing well. It tends to be peacetime - you've defeated the competition, you have the highest margins, the highest multiple.
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The laws of business physics have been broken in terms of how many customers you can acquire and how fast. No one in history has ever acquired 450 million customers in the same amount of time that WhatsApp did.
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When screening engineers from other companies, its smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies.