The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

Ben Horowitz


Introduction

Every time I read a management or self-help book, I find myself saying, “That’s fine, but that wasn’t really the hard thing about the situation.” The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

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Chapter 1: From Communist to Venture Capitalist

It taught me that being scared didn’t mean I was gutless. What I did mattered and would determine whether I would be a hero or a coward. I have often thought back on that day, realizing that if I’d done what Roger had told me to do, I would have never met my best friend. That experience also taught me not to judge things by their surfaces. Until you make the effort to get to know someone or something, you don’t know anything. There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience.

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Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

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Chapter 2: “I Will Survive”

pre-money valuation (the value of the company before the cash goes into the company treasury)

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During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.”

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Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.”

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No matter who you are, you need two kinds of friends in your life. The first kind is one you can call when something good happens, and you need someone who will be excited for you. Not a fake excitement veiling envy, but a real excitement. You need someone who will actually be more excited for you than he would be if it had happened to him. The second kind of friend is somebody you can call when things go horribly wrong—when your life is on the line and you only have one phone call. Who is it going to be? Bill Campbell is both of those friends.

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I turned to Scott Kupor, my director of finance, and said, “We did it!” He replied, “Yeah, but we’re still fucked.”

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For most CEOs, the night before their public offering is a highlight. For me, it was a highlight of depression.

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“What would I do if we went bankrupt?”

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“Is there a way to do that without going bankrupt?”

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By virtue of my position and the fact that we were a public company, nobody besides me had the complete picture. I knew we were in deep, deep trouble. Nobody besides me could get us out of the trouble, and I was through listening to advice about what we should do from people who did not understand all the pieces. I wanted all the data and information I could get, but I didn’t need any recommendations about the future direction of the company. This was wartime. The company would live or die by the quality of my decisions, and there was no way to hedge or soften the responsibility. If everybody I had hired—and who gave their lives to the company—could be sent home with little to show for it, then there were no excuses that would help. There would be no: “It was a horrible economic environment”; “I got bad advice”; “Things changed so quickly.” The only choices were survival or total destruction. Yes, most things could still be delegated and most managers would be empowered to make decisions in their areas of expertise, but the fundamental question of whether—and how—Loudcloud could survive was mine and mine alone to answer.

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Michael paused, thought for a moment, and then delivered his advice: “Gentlemen, I’ve done many deals in my lifetime and through that process, I’ve developed a methodology, a way of doing things, a philosophy if you will. Within that philosophy, I have certain beliefs. I believe in artificial deadlines. I believe in playing one against the other. I believe in doing everything and anything short of illegal or immoral to get the damned deal done.” Michael had a way of making things extremely clear. We thanked him and headed to the airport. We called both EDS and IBM to let them know that we would complete the process over the next eight weeks and sell the Loudcloud business to someone.

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I called Bill Campbell to tell him the good news: The deal was signed and we would be announcing it in New York on Monday. He replied, “Too bad you can’t go to New York and be part of the announcement; you’ll have to send Marc.” I said, “What do you mean?” He said, “You need to stay home and make sure everybody knows where they stand. You can’t wait a day. In fact, you can’t wait a minute. They need to know whether they are working for you, EDS, or looking for a fucking job.” Damn. He was right. I sent Marc to New York and prepared to let people know where they stood. That small piece of advice from Bill proved to be the foundation we needed to rebuild the company. If we hadn’t treated the people who were leaving fairly, the people who stayed would never have trusted me again. Only a CEO who had been through some awful, horrible, devastating circumstances would know to give that advice at that time.

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Chapter 3: This Time with Feeling

“I move onward, the only direction Can’t be scared to fail in search of perfection.”—JAY Z, “ON TO THE NEXT ONE”

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I guess I did it because I knew what desperation felt like.

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that is exactly what product strategy is all about—figuring out the right product is the innovator’s job, not the customer’s job. The customer only knows what she thinks she wants based on her experience with the current product. The innovator can take into account everything that’s possible, but often must go against what she knows to be true. As a result, innovation requires a combination of knowledge, skill, and courage. Sometimes only the founder has the courage to ignore the data; we were running out of time, so I had to step in:

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markets weren’t “efficient” at finding the truth; they were just very efficient at converging on a conclusion—often the wrong conclusion.

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Note to self: It’s a good idea to ask, “What am I not doing?”

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And thus began a series of very long talks with myself. It was an argument to the death, and it was me against me. On the one hand, I argued that virtualization created an explosion of virtual server instances, making what we did more essential than ever. In the next breath, I retorted that while that may have been true, the architectural changes would make our market position vulnerable. I battled myself for weeks before concluding that things were changing fast enough that we’d need to make major changes to our product architecture in order to stay on top. The key to answering the ultimate question was knowing the state of the team. Were they up for yet another giant challenge or were they at the end of a very long road? I decided to bring my direct reports into the loop and ask them what they thought. The answers came back clear: Everyone, with the exception of one person who felt that the opportunity in front of us was still quite large, opted for the sale. Now it was just a matter of price. But what price?

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When it finally ended—the long road from Loudcloud to Opsware—I couldn’t believe that I’d sold what it took eight years and all of my life force to build. How could I have done that? I was sick. I couldn’t sleep, I had cold sweats, I threw up, and I cried. And then I realized that it was the smartest thing that I’d ever done in my career. We’d built something from nothing, saw it go back to nothing again, and then rebuilt it into a $1.65 billion franchise.

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Chapter 4: When Things Fall Apart

I learned one important lesson: Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same. In the end, I did find the answer, we completed the deal with EDS, and the company did not go bankrupt.

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People always ask me, “What’s the secret to being a successful CEO?” Sadly, there is no secret, but if there is one skill that stands out, it’s the ability to focus and make the best move when there are no good moves. It’s the moments where you feel most like hiding or dying that you can make the biggest difference as a CEO.

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While most management books focus on how to do things correctly, so you don’t screw up, these lessons provide insight into what you must do after you have screwed up. The good news is, I have plenty of experience at that and so does every other CEO. I put this section first even though it deals with some serious endgame issues such as how to fire an executive and how to lay people off. In doing so, I follow the first principle of the Bushido—the way of the warrior: keep death in mind at all times. If a warrior keeps death in mind at all times and lives as though each day might be his last, he will conduct himself properly in all his actions. Similarly, if a CEO keeps the following lessons in mind, she will maintain the proper focus when hiring, training, and building her culture.

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CEOs Should Tell It Like It Is

Trust. Without trust, communication breaks. More specifically: In any human interaction, the required amount of communication is inversely proportional to the level of trust. Consider the following: If I trust you completely, then I require no explanation or communication of your actions whatsoever, because I know that whatever you are doing is in my best interests. On the other hand, if I don’t trust you at all, then no amount of talking, explaining, or reasoning will have any effect on me, because I do not trust that you are telling me the truth.

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The more brains working on the hard problems, the better. In order to build a great technology company, you have to hire lots of incredibly smart people. It’s a total waste to have lots of big brains but not let them work on your biggest problems.

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The resulting action item for CEOs: Build a culture that rewards—not punishes—people for getting problems into the open where they can be solved. As a corollary, beware of management maxims that stop information from flowing freely in your company.

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If you run a company, you will experience overwhelming psychological pressure to be overly positive. Stand up to the pressure, face your fear, and tell it like it is.

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The Right Way to Lay People Off

During a time like this, it is difficult to focus on the future, because the past overwhelms you—but that’s exactly what you must do.

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Once you decide that you will have to lay people off, the time elapsed between making that decision and executing that decision should be as short as possible. If word leaks (which it will inevitably if you delay), then you will be faced with an additional set of issues.

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If individual performance were the only issue, then you’d be taking a different measure. Company performance failed. This distinction is critical, because the message to the company and the laid-off individuals should not be “This is great, we are cleaning up performance.” The message must be “The company failed and in order to move forward, we will have to lose some excellent people.” Admitting to the failure may not seem like a big deal, but trust me, it is.

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Managers must lay off their own people. They cannot pass the task to HR or to a more sadistic peer.

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Why so strict? Why can’t the more confrontational managers just handle this task for everyone? Because people won’t remember every day they worked for your company, but they will surely remember the day you laid them off.

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Once you make it clear that managers must lay off their own people, be sure to prepare them for the task: 1. They should explain briefly what happened and that it is a company rather than a personal failure. 2. They should be clear that the employee is impacted and that the decision is nonnegotiable. 3. They should be fully prepared with all of the details about the benefits and support the company plans to provide.

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Demoting a Loyal Friend

Another problem with this approach is that from a career path perspective there is no way to paint a picture of him reporting to his new boss as anything but a demotion. An alternative, if appropriate, would be to move him to another area of the company where his skills, talent, and knowledge will help. This kind of move will give him a chance to develop a new set of skills and help the company while he’s doing it. For young employees, getting experience in different areas can be highly valuable.

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Use appropriate language. Make clear with your language that you’ve decided. As previously discussed, use phrases like “I have decided” rather than “I think” or “I’d like.”

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Admit reality. If you are a founder-CEO like I was, it probably won’t be lost on the employee that you are just as underskilled for your job as he is for his. Don’t dodge this fact. In fact, admit that if you were a more experienced CEO, you might be able to develop him into the role, but two people who don’t know what they are doing is a recipe for failure.

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The best way to do this, if appropriate, is to couple the demotion with an increase in compensation. Doing so will let him know that he’s both appreciated and valued going forward.

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Lead Bullets

All these approaches reinforced to me was that we weren’t facing a market problem. The customers were buying; they just weren’t buying our product. This was not a time to pivot. So I said the same thing to every one of them: “There are no silver bullets for this, only lead bullets.” They did not want to hear that, but it made things clear: We had to build a better product. There was no other way out. No window, no hole, no escape hatch, no back door. We had to go through the front door and deal with the big, ugly guy blocking it. Lead bullets.

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Entrepreneur: “We have the best product in the market by far. All the customers love it and prefer it to competitor X.” Me: “Why does competitor X have five times your revenue?” Entrepreneur: “We are using partners and OEMs, because we can’t build a direct channel like competitor X.” Me: “Why not? If you have the better product, why not knuckle up and go to war?” Entrepreneur: “Ummm.” Me: “Stop looking for the silver bullet.”

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There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself, “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?”

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Nobody Cares

Parcells: “Al, I am just not sure how we can win without so many of our best players. What should I do?” Davis: “Bill, nobody cares, just coach your team.” That might be the best CEO advice ever. Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The media don’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, and even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares. And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.

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the mental energy you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. Spend zero time on what you could have done, and devote all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares; just run your company.

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Chapter 5: Take Care of the People, the Products, and the Profits—in That Order

TAKE CARE OF THE PEOPLE, THE PRODUCTS, AND THE PROFITS—IN THAT ORDER

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My old boss Jim Barksdale was fond of saying, “We take care of the people, the products, and the profits—in that order.” It’s a simple saying, but it’s deep. “Taking care of the people” is the most difficult of the three by far and if you don’t do it, the other two won’t matter. Taking care of the people means that your company is a good place to work. Most workplaces are far from good. As organizations grow large, important work can go unnoticed, the hardest workers can get passed over by the best politicians, and bureaucratic processes can choke out the creativity and remove all the joy. When everything went wrong from the dot-com crash to NASDAQ threatening to delist the company, the thing that saved us were the techniques developed in this chapter. If your company is a good place to work, you too may live long enough to find your glory.

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A Good Place to Work

He said, “The players stopped paying attention to his temper tantrums. Heinsohn used to yell at the team and they’d respond. Now they just ignore him.” Was the team now ignoring me? Had I yelled at them one time too many? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that while I had told the team “what” to do, I had not been clear about “why” I wanted them to do it. Clearly, my authority alone was not enough to get them to do what I wanted. Given the large number of things that we were trying to accomplish, managers couldn’t get to everything and came up with their own priorities.

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“Steve, do you know why I came to work today?” Steve: “What do you mean, Ben?” Me: “Why did I bother waking up? Why did I bother coming in? If it was about the money, couldn’t I sell the company tomorrow and have more money than I ever wanted? I don’t want to be famous, in fact just the opposite.” Steve: “I guess.” Me: “Well, then why did I come to work?” Steve: “I don’t know.” Me: “Well, let me explain. I came to work because it’s personally very important to me that Opsware be a good company. It’s important to me that the people who spend twelve to sixteen hours a day here, which is most of their waking life, have a good life. It’s why I come to work.” Steve: “Okay.” Me: “Do you know the difference between a good place to work and a bad place to work?” Steve: “Umm, I think so.” Me: “What is the difference?” Steve: “Umm, well . . .” Me: “Let me break it down for you. In good organizations, people can focus on their work and have confidence that if they get their work done, good things will happen for both the company and them personally. It is a true pleasure to work in an organization such as this. Every person can wake up knowing that the work they do will be efficient, effective, and make a difference for the organization and themselves. These things make their jobs both motivating and fulfilling. “In a poor organization, on the other hand, people spend much of their time fighting organizational boundaries, infighting, and broken processes. They are not even clear on what their jobs are, so there is no way to know if they are getting the job done or not. In the miracle case that they work ridiculous hours and get the job done, they have no idea what it means for the company or their careers. To make it all much worse and rub salt in the wound, when they finally work up the courage to tell management how fucked-up their situation is, management denies there is a problem, then defends the status quo, then ignores the problem.” Steve: “Okay.” Me: “Are you aware that your manager Tim has not met with any of his employees in the past six months?” Steve: “No.” Me: “Now that you are aware, do you realize that there is no possible way for him to even be informed as to whether or not his organization is good or bad?” Steve: “Yes.” Me: “In summary, you and Tim are preventing me from achieving my one and only goal. You have become a barrier blocking me from achieving my most important goal. As a result, if Tim doesn’t meet with each one of his employees in the next twenty-four hours, I will have no choice but to fire him and to fire you. Are we clear?” Steve: “Crystal.”

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So was it really necessary for me to make such a dramatic speech and threaten one of my executives? I think it was, for the following three reasons:

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Being a good company doesn’t matter when things go well, but it can be the difference between life and death when things go wrong. Things always go wrong. Being a good company is an end in itself.

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Why Startups Should Train Their People

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO FIRST? The best place to start is with the topic that is most relevant to your employees: the knowledge and skill that they need to do their job. I call this functional training.

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The other essential component of a company’s training program is management training. Management training is the best place to start setting expectations for your management team. Do you expect them to hold regular one-on-one meetings with their employees? Do you expect them to give performance feedback?

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Once you’ve set expectations, the next set of management courses has already been defined; they are the courses that teach your managers how to do the things you expect (how to write a performance review or how to conduct a one-on-one).

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The first thing to recognize is that no startup has time to do optional things. Therefore, training must be mandatory.

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Ironically, the biggest obstacle to putting a training program in place is the perception that it will take too much time. Keep in mind that there is no investment that you can make that will do more to improve productivity in your company. Therefore, being too busy to train is the moral equivalent of being too hungry to eat. Furthermore, it’s not that hard to create basic training courses.

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GOOD PRODUCT MANAGER/BAD PRODUCT MANAGER

Notes:

Gold.

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Good product managers know the market, the product, the product line, and the competition extremely well and operate from a strong basis of knowledge and confidence. A good product manager is the CEO of the product.

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They are responsible for right product/right time and all that entails. A good product manager knows the context going in (the company, our revenue funding, competition, etc.), and they take responsibility for devising and executing a winning plan (no excuses).

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Engineering teams don’t consider good product managers a “marketing resource.” Good product managers are the marketing counterparts to the engineering manager.

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Good product managers communicate crisply to engineering in writing as well as verbally. Good product managers don’t give direction informally. Good product managers gather information informally. Good product managers create collateral, FAQs, presentations, and white papers that can be leveraged by salespeople, marketing people, and executives.

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Good product managers take written positions on important issues (competitive silver bullets, tough architectural choices, tough product decisions, and markets to attack or yield). Bad product managers voice their opinions verbally and lament that the “powers that be” won’t let it happen. Once bad product managers fail, they point out that they predicted they would fail.

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Good product managers think in terms of delivering superior value to the marketplace during product planning and achieving market share and revenue goals during the go-to-market phase.

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Good product managers think about the story they want written by the press. Bad product managers think about covering every feature and being absolutely technically accurate with the press. Good product managers ask the press questions. Bad product managers answer any press question. Good product managers assume members of the press and the analyst community are really smart. Bad product managers assume that journalists and analysts are dumb because they don’t understand the subtle nuances of their particular technology.

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Is It Okay to Hire People from Your Friend’s Company?

A good rule of thumb is my Reflexive Principle of Employee Raiding, which states, “If you would be shocked and horrified if Company X hired several of your employees, then you should not hire any of theirs.” The number of such companies should be small and may very well be zero.

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So, when you tell your CEO friend that you don’t think she’ll ever be worth more than this employee, don’t expect to stay friends.

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Why It’s Hard to Bring Big Company Execs into Little Companies

As a result, I spent most of my time optimizing and tuning the existing business. Most of the work that I did was “incoming.” In fact, most skilled big company executives will tell you that if you have more than three new initiatives in a quarter, you are trying to do too much. As a result, big company executives tend to be interrupt-driven. In contrast, when you are a startup executive, nothing happens unless you make it happen. In the early days of a company, you have to take eight to ten new initiatives a day or the company will stand still. There is no inertia that’s putting the company in motion. Without massive input from you, the company will stay at rest.

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Beware of any indication that the candidate needs to be interrupt-driven rather than setting the pace personally. The interrupts will never come. Look for candidates who come in with more new initiatives than you think are possible. This is a good sign.

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Look for self-awareness of the differences here. If they have the experience in what you need, they will be articulate on this point. Beware of candidates who think that too much of their experience is immediately transferable. It may pay off down the line, but likely not tomorrow.

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Beware of equity being the primary motivation. One percent of nothing is nothing. That’s something that big company executives sometimes have a hard time understanding. It’s much better if they want to be more creative. The most important difference between big and small companies is the amount of time running versus creating. A desire to do more creating is the right reason to want to join your company.

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Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?

The biggest difference between being a great functional manager and being a great general manager—and particularly a great CEO—is that as a general manager, you must hire and manage people who are far more competent at their jobs than you would be at their jobs. In fact, often you will have to hire and manage people to do jobs that you have never done. How many CEOs have been head of HR, engineering, sales, marketing, finance, and legal? Probably none. So, with no experience, how do you hire someone good?

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The very best way to know what you want is to act in the role. Not just in title, but in real action. In my career, I’ve been acting VP of HR, CFO, and VP of sales. Often CEOs resist acting in functional roles, because they worry that they lack the appropriate knowledge. This worry is precisely why you should act—to get the appropriate knowledge. Indeed, acting is really the only way to get all the knowledge that you need to make the hire, because you are looking for the right executive for your company today, not a generic executive.

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Finally, be clear in your own mind about your expectations for this person upon joining your company. What will this person do in the first thirty days? What do you expect their motivation to be for joining? Do you want them to build a large organization right away or hire only one or two people over the next year?

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For the final candidates, it’s critically important that the CEO conduct the reference checks herself.

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Despite many people being involved in the process, the ultimate decision should be made solo. Only the CEO has comprehensive knowledge of the criteria, the rationale for the criteria, all of the feedback from interviewers and references, and the relative importance of the various stakeholders. Consensus decisions about executives almost always sway the process away from strength and toward lack of weakness. It’s a lonely job, but somebody has to do it.

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Management Debt

Thanks to Ward Cunningham, the computer programmer who designed the first wiki, the metaphor “technical debt” is now a well-understood concept. While you may be able to borrow time by writing quick and dirty code, you will eventually have to pay it back—with interest. Often this trade-off makes sense, but you will run into serious trouble if you fail to keep the trade-off in the front of your mind. There also exists a less understood parallel concept, which I will call management debt.

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Like technical debt, management debt is incurred when you make an expedient, short-term management decision with an expensive, long-term consequence. Like technical debt, the trade-off sometimes makes sense, but often does not. More important, if you incur the management debt without accounting for it, then you will eventually go management bankrupt.

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Every really good, really experienced CEO I know shares one important characteristic: They tend to opt for the hard answer to organizational issues.

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Management Quality Assurance

Ironically one of the first things you learn when you run an engineering organization is that a good quality assurance organization cannot build a high-quality product, but it can tell you when the development team builds a low quality product. Similarly, a high quality human resources organization cannot make you a well-managed company with a great culture, but it can tell you when you and your managers are not getting the job done.

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Chapter 6: Concerning the Going Concern

After much consideration, I realized that the best technology companies of the day, Intel and Microsoft, were known to be highly profane places, so we’d be off culture with them and the rest of the modern industry if we stopped profanity.

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but prohibiting it seemed both unrealistic and counterproductive. Attracting the very best engineers meant recruiting from highly profane environments. The choice was between optimizing for top talent or clean culture. Easy decision.

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The next day, I gave the following speech at the all-company meeting: “It has come to my attention that many people are uncomfortable with the amount of profanity that we use. Being the number-one abuser, these complaints have caused me to reflect on my own behavior as well as the company as a whole. As I see it, we have two choices: (a) we can ban profanity or (b) we can accept profanity. Anything in between is very unlikely to work. ‘Minimal profanity’ cannot be enforced. I’ve said before that we cannot win unless we attract the very best people in the world. In the technology industry, almost everybody comes from a culture that allows profanity. Therefore, banning profanity will likely limit our talent pool more than accepting profanity. As a result, we will allow profanity. However, this does not mean that you can use profanity to intimidate, sexually harass people, or do other bad things. In this way, profanity is no different from other language. For example, consider the word ‘cupcakes.’ It’s fine for me to say to Shannon, ‘Those cupcakes you baked look delicious.’ But it is not okay for me to say to Anthony, ‘Hey, Cupcakes, you look mighty fine in them jeans.’ ” And that was all I said about that. After that day, I never heard another complaint about profanity and I don’t think we lost anybody

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How to Minimize Politics in Your Company

What do I mean by politics? I mean people advancing their careers or agendas by means other than merit and contribution.

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Hire people with the right kind of ambition.

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As defined by Andy Grove, the right kind of ambition is ambition for the company’s success with the executive’s own success only coming as a by-product of the company’s victory. The wrong kind of ambition is ambition for the executive’s personal success regardless of the company’s outcome.

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Build strict processes for potentially political issues and do not deviate. Certain activities attract political behavior. These activities include: Performance evaluation and compensation Organizational design and territory Promotions

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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

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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.

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As CEO, you must consider the systemic incentives that result from your words and actions. While it may feel good in the moment to be open, responsive, and action oriented, be careful not to encourage all the wrong things.

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The Right Kind of Ambition

At a macro level, a company will be most successful if the senior managers optimize for the company’s success (think of this as a global optimization) as opposed to their own personal success (local optimization).

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As an employee, why would I want to work long hours to advance the career of my manager? If the manager cares more about his career than the company, then that’s what I’d be doing. Nothing motivates a great employee more than a mission that’s so important that it supersedes everyone’s personal ambition. As a result, managers with the right kind of ambition tend to be radically more valuable than those with the wrong kind.

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that ambition for the company above one’s own goals is particularly important for the head of sales. The reasons are many:

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While it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea.

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Titles and Promotions

the Peter Principle holds that in a hierarchy, members are promoted so long as they work competently. Sooner or later they are promoted to a position at which they are no longer competent (their “level of incompetence”), and there they remain being unable to earn further promotions.

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Another challenge is a phenomenon that I call the Law of Crappy People. The Law of Crappy People states: For any title level in a large organization, the talent on that level will eventually converge to the crappiest person with the title.

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The best way to mitigate both the Peter Principle and the Law of Crappy People is with a properly constructed and highly disciplined promotion process. Ideally, the promotion process should yield a result similar to the very best karate dojos. In top dojos, in order to achieve the next level (for example, being promoted from a brown belt to a black belt), you must defeat an opponent in combat at that level. This guarantees that a new black belt is never a worse fighter than the worst current black belt.

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To begin, start with an extremely crisp definition not only of the responsibilities at each level but also of the skill required to perform the duties.

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Next, define a formal process for all promotions. One key requirement of the process should be that promotions will be leveled across groups. If you let a manager or a single chain of command determine promotions unilaterally, then it’s possible that, for example, HR will have five vice presidents and Engineering only one. One way to level across groups is to hold a regular promotions council that reviews every significant promotion in the company. When a manager wishes to promote an employee, she will submit that employee for review with an explanation of why she believes her employee satisfies the skill criteria required for the level.

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Andreessen argues that people ask for many things from a company: salary, bonus, stock options, span of control, and titles. Of those, title is by far the cheapest, so it makes sense to give the highest titles possible.

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when competing for new employees with other companies, using Andreessen’s method you can always outbid the competition in at least one dimension.

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by contrast, Mark Zuckerberg purposely deploys titles that are significantly lower than the industry standard. Senior Vice Presidents at other companies must take title haircuts down to Directors or Managers at Facebook.

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First, he guarantees that every new employee gets releveled as they enter his company. In this way, he avoids accidentally giving new employees higher titles and positions than better-performing existing employees. This boosts morale and increases fairness. Second, it forces all the managers of Facebook to understand and internalize Facebook’s leveling system, which serves the company extremely well in their own promotion and compensation processes.

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When Smart People Are Bad Employees

In business, intelligence is always a critical element in any employee, because what we do is difficult and complex and the competitors are filled with extremely smart people. However, intelligence is not the only important quality. Being effective in a company also means working hard, being reliable, and being an excellent member of the team.

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You may find yourself with an employee who fits one of the above descriptions but nonetheless makes a massive positive contribution to the company. You may decide that you will personally mitigate the employee’s negative attributes and keep her from polluting the overall company culture. That’s fine, but remember: You can only hold the bus for her.

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Old People

But CEO, beware: Hiring senior people into a startup is kind of like an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs. If all goes well, you will achieve incredible new heights. If all goes wrong, you will start degenerating from the inside out.

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The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area.

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In order

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Finally, you’ll need your new executive to be more than just a goal achiever. She will need to be well rounded and part of the team. Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas:

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One-on-One

it is the employee’s meeting rather than the manager’s meeting.

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Some questions that I’ve found to be very effective in one-on-ones:

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Programming Your Culture

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. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something ten times better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are ten times better than the competition’s, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one. If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit.

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world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

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culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work, and help it perform better in the future.

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Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement but have far-reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior.

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Here are three examples: Desks made out of doors Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price leader and customer service leader for the long run. You can’t do that if you waste a lot of money. Jeff could have spent years auditing every expense and raining hell on anybody who overspent, but he decided to build frugality into his culture. He did it with an incredibly simple mechanism: All desks at Amazon.com for all time would be built by buying cheap doors from Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks are not great ergonomically, nor do they fit with Amazon.com’s $150 billion–plus market capitalization, but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon.

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In order to shock the company into the right behavior, we instituted a ruthlessly enforced ten-dollar-per-minute fine for being late to a meeting with an entrepreneur.

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When new employees come on board, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. If you don’t think entrepreneurs are more important than venture capitalists, we can’t use you at Andreessen Horowitz.

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Move fast and break things Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: Move fast and break things.

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Prior to figuring out the exact form of your company’s shock therapy, be sure that your mechanism agrees with your values.

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Taking the Mystery Out of Scaling a Company

The first scale technique to implement is specialization. In startups, everybody starts out as a jack-of-all-trades. For example, engineers write code, manage the build system, test the product, and, increasingly, deploy it and operate it. This works well in the beginning because everybody knows everything and the need to communicate is minimized; there are no complicated handoffs, because there is nobody to hand anything to. As the company grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to add new engineers, because the learning curve starts to get super-steep. Getting a new engineer up to speed starts to become more difficult than doing the work yourself. At this point, you need to specialize.

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The purpose of process is communication.

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If there are five people in your company, you don’t need process, because you can just talk to each other.

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With four thousand people, communication becomes more difficult.

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A process is a formal, well-structured communication vehicle.

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The process of scaling a company is not unlike the process of scaling a product. Different sizes of company impose different requirements on the company’s architecture. If you address those requirements too early, your company will seem heavy and sluggish. If you address those requirements too late, your company may melt down under the pressure. Be mindful of your company’s true growth rate as you add architectural components. It’s good to anticipate growth, but it’s bad to overanticipate growth.

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Chapter 7: How to Lead Even When You Don’t Know Where You Are Going

Years later I asked Herb why he believed in our company at a time when nobody else did. I pointed out that, at the time, Allen & Company wasn’t very involved in technology, let alone data center automation. Herb replied, “I didn’t understand anything about your business and I understood very little about your industry. What I saw was two guys come visit me when every other public company CEO and chairman was hiding under their desk. Not only did you come see me, but you were more determined and convinced you would succeed than guys running giant businesses. Investing in courage and determination was an easy decision for me.”

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The Most Difficult CEO Skill

By far the most difficult skill I learned 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 with keeping my mind in check. I thought I was tough going into it, but I wasn’t tough. I was soft. 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 the risk of violating the sacred rule, I will attempt to describe the condition and prescribe some techniques that helped me. In the end, this is the most personal and important battle that any CEO will face.

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Generally, someone doesn’t become a CEO unless she has a high sense of purpose and cares deeply about the work she does. In addition, a CEO must be accomplished enough or smart enough that people will want to work for her.

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Yet no CEO ever has a smooth path to a great company. Along the way, many things go wrong and all of them could have and should have been avoided.

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The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO. No training as a manager, general manager, or in any other job actually prepares you to run a company. The only thing that prepares you to run a company is running a company. This means that you will face a broad set of things that you don’t know how to do that require skills you don’t have. Nevertheless, everybody will expect you to know how to do them, because, well, you are the CEO.

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Even if you know what you are doing, things go wrong. Things go wrong because building a multifaceted human organization to compete and win in a dynamic, highly competitive market turns out to be really hard.

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When people in my company would complain about one thing or another being broken, such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened under my direction. Unlike a hired gun who comes in and blames all of the problems on the prior regime, there was literally nobody for me to blame. If someone was promoted for all the wrong reasons, that was my fault. If we missed the quarterly earnings target, that was my fault. If a great engineer quit, that was my fault. If the sales team made unreasonable demands on the product organization, that was my fault. If the product had too many bugs, that was my fault. It kind of sucked to be me. Being responsible for everything and getting a 22 on the test starts to weigh on your consciousness.

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Ideally, the CEO will be urgent yet not insane. She will move aggressively and decisively without feeling emotionally culpable. If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.

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IT’S A LONELY JOB In your darkest moments as CEO, discussing fundamental questions about the viability of your company with your employees can have obvious negative consequences. On the other hand, talking to your board and outside advisers can be fruitless. The knowledge gap between you and them is so vast that you cannot actually bring them fully up to speed in a manner that’s useful in making the decision. You are all alone.

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At times like this, it’s important to understand that nearly every company goes through life-threatening moments.

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My partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Scott Weiss, relayed that it’s so common that there is an acronym for it, WFIO, which stands for “We’re Fucked, It’s Over” (it’s pronounced “whiff-ee-yo”). As he describes it, every company goes through at least two and up to five of these episodes (although I’m pretty sure that I went through at least a dozen at Opsware). In all cases, WFIOs feel much worse than they are—especially for the CEO.

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Make some friends.

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it is extremely useful from a psychological perspective to talk to people who have been through similarly challenging decisions.

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Get it out of your head and onto paper.

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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.

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Focus on the road, not the wall.

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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.

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As CEO, there will be many times when you feel like quitting.

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Great CEOs face the pain. They deal with the sleepless nights, the cold sweats, and what my friend the great Alfred Chuang (legendary cofounder and CEO of BEA Systems) calls “the torture.”

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The great CEOs tend to be remarkably consistent in their answers. They all say, “I didn’t quit.”

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The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage

“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. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.”—CUS D’AMATO, LEGENDARY BOXING TRAINER

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In my experience as CEO, I found that the most important decisions tested my courage far more than my intelligence.

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In all the difficult decisions that I made through the course of running Loudcloud and Opsware, I never once felt brave. In fact, I often felt scared to death. I never lost those feelings, but after much practice I learned to ignore them. That learning process might also be called the courage development process. In life, everybody faces choices between doing what’s popular, easy, and wrong versus doing what’s lonely, difficult, and right. These decisions intensify when you run a company, because the consequences get magnified a thousandfold. As in life, the excuses for CEOs making the wrong choice are always plentiful.

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Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.

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Ones and Twos

Most founding CEOs tend to be Ones. When founding CEOs fail, a significant reason is that they never invested the time to be competent enough in the Two tasks to direct those activities effectively. The resulting companies become too chaotic to reach their full potential and the CEO ends up being replaced.

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If you’re a One, it can be counterproductive to have another One on your staff,

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As a result, many great One CEOs employ primarily Twos and Functional Ones on their staff.

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Follow the Leader

So what makes people want to follow a leader? We look for three key traits: The ability to articulate the vision The right kind of ambition The ability to achieve the vision Let’s take these in order.

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THE ABILITY TO ARTICULATE THE VISION: THE STEVE JOBS ATTRIBUTE

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I believe Jobs’s greatest achievement as a visionary leader was in getting so many super-talented people to continue following him at NeXT, long after the company lost its patina, and in getting the employees of Apple to buy into his vision when the company was weeks away from bankruptcy.

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THE RIGHT KIND OF AMBITION: THE BILL CAMPBELL ATTRIBUTE

Notes:

Don't Be a jerk. Most CEOs are inherently good people.

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The first thing that any successful CEO must do is get really great people to work for her. Smart people do not want to work for people who do not have their interests in mind and in heart.

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Truly great leaders create an environment where the employees feel that the CEO cares more about the employees than she cares about herself. In this kind of environment, an amazing thing happens: A huge number of employees believe it’s their company and behave accordingly. As the company grows large, these employees become quality control for the entire organization. They set the work standard that all future employees must live up to. As in, “Hey, you need to do a better job on that data sheet—you are screwing up my company.”

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In the end, some attributes of leadership can be improved more than others, but every CEO should work on all three. Furthermore, each attribute enhances all three. If people trust you, they will listen to your vision even if it is less articulate. If you are super-competent, they will trust you and listen to you. If you can paint a brilliant vision, people will be patient with you as you learn the CEO skills and give you more leeway with respect to their interests.

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Peacetime CEO/Wartime CEO

Peacetime in business means those times when a company has a large advantage over the competition in its core market, and its market is growing. In times of peace, the company can focus on expanding the market and reinforcing the company’s strengths. In wartime, a company is fending off an imminent existential threat. Such a threat can come from a wide range of sources, including competition, dramatic macroeconomic change, market change, supply chain change, and so forth. The great wartime CEO Andy Grove marvelously describes the forces that can take a company from peacetime to wartime in his book Only the Paranoid Survive.

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In peacetime, leaders must maximize and broaden the current opportunity. As a result, peacetime leaders employ techniques to encourage broad-based creativity and contribution across a diverse set of possible objectives. In wartime, by contrast, the company typically has a single bullet in the chamber and must, at all costs, hit the target. The company’s survival in wartime depends upon strict adherence and alignment to the mission.

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Be aware that management books tend to be written by management consultants who study successful companies during their times of peace. As a result, the resulting books describe the methods of peacetime CEOs. In fact, other than the books written by Andy Grove, I don’t know of any management books that teach you how to manage in wartime like Steve Jobs or Andy Grove.

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Making Yourself a CEO

Being CEO requires lots of unnatural motion. From an evolutionary standpoint, it is natural to do things that make people like you. It enhances your chances for survival. Yet to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.

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If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say, “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the buildup and then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it, and present it to me again tomorrow.” Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do. If she doesn’t, the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation, and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.

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The basic idea is that people open up to feedback far more if you start by complimenting them (slice of bread number one), then you give them the difficult message (the shit), then wrap up by reminding them how much you value their strengths (slice of bread number two). The shit sandwich also has the positive side effect of focusing the feedback on the behavior rather than the person, because you establish up front that you really value the person. This is a key concept in giving feedback.

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To become elite at giving feedback, you must elevate yourself beyond a basic technique like the shit sandwich. You must develop a style that matches your own personality and values. Here are the keys to being effective:

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Be authentic. It’s extremely important that you believe in the feedback that you give

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You can’t fake the funk.

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Come from the right place. It’s important that you give people feedback because you want them to succeed and not because you want them to fail.

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Don’t get personal. If you decide to fire somebody, fire her. Don’t prepare her to get fired. Prepare her to succeed. If she doesn’t take the feedback, that’s a different conversation.

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Don’t clown people in front of their peers. While it’s okay to give certain kinds of feedback in a group setting, you should strive never to embarrass someone in front of their peers.

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Feedback is not one-size-fits-all. Everybody is different.

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Be direct, but not mean.

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If you think somebody’s presentation sucks, don’t say, “It’s really good, but could use one more pass to tighten up the conclusion.” While it may seem harsh, it’s much better to say, “I couldn’t follow it and I didn’t understand your point and here are the reasons why.”

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

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when done properly, feedback is a dialogue, not a monologue.

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Once you’ve mastered the keys, you should practice what you’ve mastered all the time. As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation, and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself.

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Feedback won’t be personal in your company. If the CEO constantly gives feedback, then everyone she interacts with will just get used to it.

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People will become comfortable discussing bad news. If people get comfortable talking about what each other are doing wrong, then it will be very easy to talk about what the company is doing wrong.

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If you are a founder CEO and you feel awkward or incompetent when doing some of these things and believe there is no way that you’ll be able to do it when your company is one hundred or one thousand people, welcome to the club. That’s exactly how I felt. So did every CEO I’ve ever met. This is the process. This is how you get made.

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How to Evaluate CEOs

The CEO must set the context within which every employee operates. The context gives meaning to the specific work that people do, aligns interests, enables decision making, and provides motivation.

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The story of the company goes beyond quarterly or annual goals and gets to the hard-core question of why. Why should I join this company? Why should I be excited to work here? Why should I buy its product? Why should I invest in the company? Why is the world better off as a result of this company’s existence? When a company clearly articulates its story, the context for everyone—employees, partners, customers, investors, and the press—becomes clear.

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The CEO doesn’t have to be the creator of the vision. Nor does she have to be the creator of the story. But she must be the keeper of the vision and the story. As such, the CEO ensures that the company story is clear and compelling. The story is not the mission statement; the story does not have to be succinct. It is the story. Companies can take as long as they need to tell it, but they must tell it and it must be compelling. A company without a story is usually a company without a strategy. Want to see a great company story? Read Jeff Bezos’s three-page letter he wrote to shareholders in 1997. In telling Amazon’s story in this extended form—not as a mission statement, not as a tagline—Jeff got all the people who mattered on the same page as to what Amazon was about.

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Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions.

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The most difficult decisions (and often the most important) are difficult precisely because they will be deeply unpopular with the CEO’s most important constituencies (employees, investors, and customers).

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Chapter 8: First Rule of Entrepreneurship: There Are No Rules

CHAPTER 8— FIRST RULE OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: THERE ARE NO RULES

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Then disaster struck. Or more specifically, our auditor, Ernst & Young, nearly destroyed the deal.

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am telling this story today because just when you think there are things you can count on in business, you quickly find that the sky is purple. When this happens, it usually does no good to keep arguing that the sky is blue. You just have to get on and deal with the fact that it’s going to look like Barney for a while.

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Solving the Accountability vs. Creativity Paradox

You should expect experienced people to be able to forecast their results more accurately

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While you don’t want to punish people for taking good risks, not all risks are good. While there is no reward without risk, there is certainly risk with little or no chance of corresponding reward. Drinking a bottle of Jack Daniel’s then getting behind the wheel of a car is plenty risky, but there’s not much reward if you succeed.

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In the technology business, you rarely know everything up front. The difference between being mediocre and magical is often the difference between letting people take creative risk and holding them too tightly accountable. Accountability is important, but it’s not the only thing that’s important.

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The Freaky Friday Management Technique

In the film, mother and daughter grow completely frustrated with each other’s lack of understanding and wish that they could switch places and, through the magic of film, they do. Through the course of the movie, by being inside each other’s bodies, both characters develop an understanding of the challenges that the other faces. As a result, the two become great friends when they switch back.

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The very next day I informed the head of Sales Engineering and the head of Customer Support that they would be switching jobs. I explained that, like Jodie Foster and Barbara Harris, they would keep their minds, but get new bodies. Permanently.

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However, after just one week walking in the other’s moccasins, both executives quickly diagnosed the core issues causing the conflict. They then swiftly acted to implement a simple set of processes that cleared up the combat and got the teams working harmoniously.

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Staying Great

While it feels awkward, it is perfectly reasonable to change and raise your standards as you learn more about what’s needed and what’s competitive in your industry.

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One of the most depressing lessons of my career when I became CEO was that I could not develop the people who reported to me. The demands of the job made it such that the people who reported to me had to be 99 percent ready to perform.

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It is possible to take the standard setting too far. As I discussed in the section “The Scale Anticipation Fallacy,” it’s neither necessary nor a good idea to evaluate an executive based on what her job will be two years from now. You can cross that bridge when you come to it. Evaluate her on how she performs right here and right now.

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When I used to review executives, I would tell them, “You are doing a great job at your current job, but the plan says that we will have twice as many employees next year as we have right now. Therefore, you will have a new and very different job and I will have to reevaluate you on the basis of that job. If it makes you feel better, that rule goes for everyone on the team, including me.” In providing this kind of direction, it’s important to point out to the executive that when the company doubles in size, she has a new job. This means that doing things that made her successful in her old job will not necessarily translate to success in the new job. In fact, the number-one way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job.

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Should You Sell Your Company?

When analyzing whether you should sell your company, a good basic rule of thumb is if (a) you are very early on in a very large market and (b) you have a good chance of being number one in that market, then you should remain stand-alone. The reason is that nobody will be able to afford to pay what you are worth, because nobody can give you that much forward credit.

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So, the judgment that you have to make is (a) is this market really much bigger (more than an order of magnitude) than has been exploited to date? and (b) are we going to be number one? If the answer to either (a) or (b) is no, then you should consider selling. If the answers to both are yes, then selling would mean selling yourself and your employees short.

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Chapter 9: The End of the Beginning

In retrospect, people’s perceptions changed because of the sale to HP and the things that I’ve since written. Once I stopped being CEO, I was granted a freedom that I did not have before. As a venture capitalist, I have had the freedom to say what I want and what I really think without worrying what everybody else thinks.

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Hard things are hard because there are no easy answers or recipes. They are hard because your emotions are at odds with your logic. They are hard because you don’t know the answer and you cannot ask for help without showing weakness.

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When I first became a CEO, I genuinely thought that I was the only one struggling. Whenever I spoke to other CEOs, they all seemed like they had everything under control. Their businesses were always going “fantastic” and their experience was inevitably “amazing.” I thought that maybe growing up in Berkeley with Communist grandparents might not have been the best background for running a company. But as I watched my peers’ fantastic, amazing businesses go bankrupt and sell for cheap, I realized that I was probably not the only one struggling.

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I realized that embracing the unusual parts of my background would be the key to making it through. It would be those things that would give me unique perspectives and approaches to the business. The things that I would bring to the table that nobody else had. It was my borrowing Chico Mendoza’s shocking yet poetic style to motivate and focus the team. It was my understanding of the people underneath the persona and skin color that enabled me to put Jason Rosenthal together with Anthony Wright to save the company. It was even my bringing in to the most capitalistic pursuit imaginable what Karl Marx got right. On my grandfather’s tombstone, you will find his favorite Marx quote: “Life is struggle.” I believe that within that quote lies the most important lesson in entrepreneurship: Embrace the struggle.

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When I work with entrepreneurs today, this is the main thing that I try to convey. Embrace your weirdness, your background, your instinct. If the keys are not in there, they do not exist. I can relate to what they’re going through, but I cannot tell them what to do. I can only help them find it in themselves. And sometimes they can find peace where I could not.

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Of course, even with all the advice and hindsight in the world, hard things will continue to be hard things. So, in closing, I just say peace to all those engaged in the struggle to fulfill their dreams.

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Appendix: Questions for Head of Enterprise Sales Force

QUESTIONS FOR HEAD OF ENTERPRISE SALES FORCE

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