Why We Prefer Founding CEOs You’re just a rent-a-rapper, your rhymes are minute-maidI’ll be here when it fade to watch you flip like a renegade”—Rakim, Follow The Leader When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund companies whose founder will run the company as its CEO. The macro reason: that’s the way most of the great technology companies have been built At Andreessen Horowitz, our primary goal is to invest in the great technology franchises. (*) While not technically cofounders, Andy Grove and Thomas Watson, Sr. were the driving force behind Intel and IBM, respectively. Two more quick data points before I move on to explain why this happens. The underlying reasons The innovation business These innovations are product cycles.
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology. “It’s fucked up when your mind’s playin’ tricks on ya” —The Geto Boys By far the most difficult skill for me to learn as CEO was the ability to manage my own psychology. Organizational design, process design, metrics, hiring and firing were all relatively straightforward skills to master compared to keeping my mind in check. Over the years, I’ve spoken to hundreds of CEOs all with the same experience. Nonetheless, very few people talk about it, and I have never read anything on the topic. It’s like the fight club of management: The first rule of the CEO psychological meltdown is don’t talk about the psychological meltdown. At risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. If I’m Doing a Good Job, Why Do I Feel So Bad? Generally, someone doesn’t become CEOs unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. And to rub salt into the wound and make matters worse, it’s your fault. 1. 2. 1.
My Life as a CEO (and VC): Chief Psychologist I’ve had a post in my head for months – maybe longer – about the role of a CEO. It originally appeared on TechCrunch as a guest post but just in case you missed it there. My primary role was “chief psychologist” and as I’ve learned over the past few years the same has been true as a VC. Both are basically people businesses. I finally got around to writing it having read Fred Wilson’s post about what a CEO does. He says it basically comes down to three key functions: Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholdersRecruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Matt Blumberg, who runs one of Fred’s portfolio companies, Return Path, follows up with an additional three: Don’t be a bottleneck (make sure you aren’t holding up people’s work)Run great meetings (don’t be a productivity drain on the company)Stay fresh (be mentally and physically fit & attuned to what is going on in the world) Howard Lindzon weighed in with his comments:
Nobody Cares This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace. “Just win baby.”—Al Davis Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? As I was feely sorry for myself, I randomly watched an interview with famous football coach Bill Parcells. That might be the best CEO advice ever. And they are right not to care. All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess.
Steve Jobs’s Real Genius Not long after Steve Jobs got married, in 1991, he moved with his wife to a nineteen-thirties, Cotswolds-style house in old Palo Alto. Jobs always found it difficult to furnish the places where he lived. His previous house had only a mattress, a table, and chairs. He needed things to be perfect, and it took time to figure out what perfect was. This time, he had a wife and family in tow, but it made little difference. “We spoke about furniture in theory for eight years,” his wife, Laurene Powell, tells Walter Isaacson, in “Steve Jobs,” Isaacson’s enthralling new biography of the Apple founder. It was the choice of a washing machine, however, that proved most vexing. Steve Jobs, Isaacson’s biography makes clear, was a complicated and exhausting man. Isaacson begins with Jobs’s humble origins in Silicon Valley, the early triumph at Apple, and the humiliating ouster from the firm he created. Jobs ripped it off and mumbled that he hated the design and refused to wear it.
Staying Credulous: On Not Letting Being 40 Get In The Way I turned 40 in March. I didn’t think of it much, and I don’t plan on buying a convertible sports car or otherwise engaging in a mid life crisis. These age milestones just aren’t as meaningful for most men as they are for some women. Besides, I still have the maturity level of an average teenager. But one thing I am very aware of is my growing skepticism of some of the crazy startup ideas I see. I have always been that guy, looking for the positive in any startup situation. There is some evidence that the most successful entrepreneurs are 40 or older. The companies that shape our culture – Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, etc. – are almost always started in a dorm room. It’s so easy to look at a startup and think of the ten startups before that tried to solve the same problem and failed. The wisdom that comes with experience seems like such a valuable asset to have. There’s no room in my world for that kind of nonsense.
Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining I slept at work again last night; two and a half hours curled up in a quilt underneath my desk, from 11am to 1:30pm or so. That was when I woke up with a start, realizing that I was late for a meeting…But it was no big deal, we just had the meeting later. It’s hard for someone to hold it against you when you miss a meeting because you’ve been at work so long that you’ve passed out from exhaustion. Suddenly everyone’s complaining about how unfair things are in Silicon Valley. Silicon Valley is an unfair place, say all the headlines. As if all of this was new. I saw Ian today, for the first time in months. and Well the kids went out to get drunk, or rather, more drunk. I’m so fucking burnt. Yes, there was crying. But then, the payoff. You can imagine the same words, the exact same words, being written by the guys that created the early Zynga games. They’re wrong. You might be sad that you work long hours and that sometimes your boss yells at you when tensions run high. Work hard.
Notes on Leadership: Be Like Steve Jobs, . . . And Bill Campbell Editor’s note: When venture capitalists invest in early stage startups, more than anything else they are investing in the founders of the company and their ability to lead their employees through the most improbable set of circumstances to take an idea from a germ to a real and profitable business. In this guest post, Ben Horowitz of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz explains the leadership traits he and his co-founder Marc Andreessen look for before they invest in a startup. SOme of their investments include Skype, Zynga, Factual, and RockMelt. At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. Most people define leadership in the same way that Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously defined pornography when he said: “I know it when I see it.” A better definition comes from former Secretary of State Colin Powell who said: “You have achieved excellence as a leader when people will follow you anywhere if only out of curiosity.” So what makes people want to follow a leader?
Six failed businesses on, Dropmyemail’s John Fearon says, “I’m amazing” “I’m a good boss, I really am,” John Fearon, founder and CEO of DropMySite, tells me, in full earshot of his employee at their office in Block 71, Ayer Rajar Crescent, considered the nexus of Singapore’s technology startup scene. He was making a point about how he’d be a bad subordinate but a good leader who is comfortable with starting things. “I’m one of those that can go into the room and self-combust.” With all his self-confidence (whenever he speaks at conferences, he start with,”Hi, I’m amazing”), it’s easy to assume that John, who comes from South Africa, has a string of successful businesses to stand on. Not at all. I prod him about the number of failed businesses he had. (Photo: John being featured in an Amazon Web Services video) John struggles to find his words, which is a rarity. His first business collapsed after six months, burning through the $3,000 that his parents gave him as initial capital. John worked on an online nursing startup next. “It could go broke or go crazy.
The Struggle Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz. He was a 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, Nicira, Okta, SnapLogic and Tidemark, and blogs at “Don’t admit that your faith is weak Don’t say that you feel like dying Life’s hard then it feels like diamonds Your home’s just far too gone Much too late to even feel like trying Can’t understand what I’m saying Can’t figure out what I’m implying If you feel you don’t wanna be alive You feel just how I am” —Lupe Fiasco, Beautiful Lasers Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. About The Struggle “Life is struggle.” The Struggle is when food loses its taste. The end