Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox. Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner of Andreessen Horowitz.
He was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Okta, Rap Genius, SnapLogic, and Tidemark. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter @bhorowitz. If I knew what I knew in the past I would have been blacked out on your a** —Kanye West, Black Skinhead Because I am a prominent advocate for founders running their own companies, whenever a founder fails to scale or gets replaced by a professional CEO, people send me lots of emails. In response to all of these emails: No, I am not going to rewrite that post, but I will write this post. The founder doesn’t really want to be CEO. The board panics. The Product CEO Paradox. The Product CEO Paradox. Thinking: How do I become a better thinker.
The Most Successful Leaders Do 15 Things Automatically, Every Day. Leadership is learned behavior that becomes unconscious and automatic over time.
For example, leaders can make several important decisions about an issue in the time it takes others to understand the question. Many people wonder how leaders know how to make the best decisions, often under immense pressure. The process of making these decisions comes from an accumulation of experiences and encounters with a multitude of difference circumstances, personality types and unforeseen failures. More so, the decision making process is an acute understanding of being familiar with the cause and effect of behavioral and circumstantial patterns; knowing the intelligence and interconnection points of the variables involved in these patterns allows a leader to confidently make decisions and project the probability of their desired outcomes. The most successful leaders are instinctual decision makers. Peter Thiel Talks About the Day Mark Zuckerberg Turned Down Yahoo's $1 Billion.
At SXSW Tuesday afternoon, Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and contrarian thinker, told the story of the day Mark Zuckerberg decided to turn down Yahoo's $1 billion offer to buy Facebook.
"The most important moment in my mind in the history of Facebook occurred in July 2006," he began. At the time, Facebook was just two years old. It was a college site with roughly eight or nine million people on it. And, though it was making $30 million in revenue, it was not profitable. "And we received an acquisition offer from Yahoo for $1 billion," Thiel said. The three-person Facebook board at the time--Zuckerberg, Thiel, and venture capitalist Jim Breyer--met on a Monday morning.
The ancient art of rethoric. What We Look for in Founders. A six-step framework to make strategic decisions. Any number of challenges can arise during a startup’s initial years.
Some of these changes could be major and may require rethinking strategy. Competitors enter your target market. New products are released into your market which undercut yours. Customer acquisition costs rise dramatically. If faced with these questions, it’s hard to know where to begin or how to structure an analysis to reach an answer. McKinsey uses a 6 step process to frame the process of answering these strategic questions which is profiled in this month’s Harvard Business Review. Case: A new competitor emerges to compete with a startup Frame the strategic choices as mutually exclusive options. By definition strategy is critical to companies. The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage.
If you a scared motherf%^*&r, go to church—Ice Cube, Go to Church I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward?
What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. {PG} Subject: Airbnb. Yesterday Fred Wilson published a remarkable post about missing Airbnb.
VCs miss good startups all the time, but it's extraordinarily rare for one to talk about it publicly till long afterward. So that post is further evidence what a rare bird Fred is. He's probably the nicest VC I know. Reading Fred's post made me go back and look at the emails I exchanged with him at the time, trying to convince him to invest in Airbnb. The Yin and Yang of Product and Engineering. For a tech company, product and engineering are the heart and soul of the business.
When I do a quick mental query of headcount across our entire portfolio of ~30 companies, I think at least 50% and maybe as much as 60% of the entire headcount of our portfolio is in either product or engineering. Many of the founding teams we back include a strong coder and a strong product person. Nobody Cares. This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis.
Rest in peace. Software Engineering: Does a good engineering culture matter. Quora: What separates the top 10% of startup CEOs from the rest. Quora: what separates the top 10% of startup CEOs from the rest? (Robert Scoble answer)