Ben Horowitz On What Makes a Great Founder

On the show Long Strange Trip, Sequoia Capital partner Brian Halligan speaks with a16z’s Ben Horowitz about what separates great founder CEOs from everyone else. Ben explains why first-time founders lose confidence, defer too much to senior hires, and let decision debt paralyze their companies. They discuss where founder mode works and where people are taking it too far, why the VP of Sales is the hire founders mess up more than any other, and why Andy Grove's "constructive confrontation" matters more than most CEOs realize. Ben also shares what he's learned working with Zuckerberg, what Jensen Huang and Elon Musk actually have in common, and why culture is defined by behavior, not values.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Ben Horowitz?

  I think really good companies, the very, very, very best companies tend to have founders and CEOs who ask pretty aggressive questions. Zuckerberg, Larry Page, those guys who have kind of gotten all the way to the mountaintop, they're pretty blunt. If you're running away from the truth to preserve feelings, that's a very dangerous thing in a tech company. And the kind of corollary to that is it's really important that like bad news travels fast.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:29Ben Horowitz?

  That if something's wrong, that as CEO you find out about it. And so you need that bluntness.

• 0:34Erik Torenberg?

  Ben Horowitz didn't feel like he knew what he was doing as CEO until about four years in. His company went public when it was 18 months old. He says that feeling is more normal than most founders admit. Horowitz has spent more than 15 years at Andreessen Horowitz backing and coaching founder CEOs. The pattern he sees in the ones who fail isn't a lack of intelligence. It's hesitation. They see a problem, the head of sales who isn't working, a decision that needs to be made, and they wait. Brian Halligan calls that decision debt. Horowitz says it's the worst kind because it paralyzes everything downstream.

• 1:15Erik Torenberg?

  This conversation covers where founder mode works and where it's being taken too far, why the VP of Sales is the hire that goes wrong more than any other, and what Zuckerberg, Jensen, and Elon actually have in common. This episode, previously aired on the show Long Strange Trip, Brian Halligan, partner at Sequoia Capital, speaks with Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at E16Z.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  Hey, everybody. Today's guest is Ben Horowitz of E16Z fame. Few reasons I wanted to have him on. First, I wanted to get the behind the scenes look on why Andreessen passed on HubSpot back in the day, and there's a funny story behind that. He's seen so much. He's backed some amazing CEOs and some CEOs that went down in dust. Like, what do they have in common? What are the great ones? What do they do? What do they like? What's the patterns there? And the same with the ones who failed. I read his book like 100 years ago when I was running HubSpot. I thought it was really good. I think he published it in 2014. I wanted the updated, you know, what's changed since he wrote The Hard Thing About Hard Things back in the day?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  The convo is, I think, is really good. One of the things I've always liked about Ben is he is completely unfiltered and gets after it. I think there's a lot of nuggets in here. I'll come back to the end and give you my summary. You probably don't remember when we first met. Can I, can I?

• 2:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, remind me.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Can I tell you about it? It's, it's stuck in my mind. Kind of a long story. How'd I pitch you on the series D?

• 2:48Ben Horowitz?

  Okay, I remember that. Yeah.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  Three of us came in for the pitch. Our very newly hired COO, JD Sherman, myself, my co-founder Dharmesh. And we walked in the room. We had a nice welcome because there's a guy that worked for you that was your sales guy named Mark Cranny that was a former colleague of mine. And then we had just written a book called Inbound Marketing and two of your marketers had the book. So we're like, this is a hometown. We got this.

• 3:10Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:11Speaker 01

  Okay, we sat down and JD sat here and I sat here and Dharmesh sat here. I remember it like it was yesterday. And we started with intros. JD barely got a sentence out of his mouth. It's like, wait, you're the COO? Tell me about your background. You spent like 15 minutes on JD. You spent like 15 minutes on JD and then went to me. And then it's about 15 minutes on me, like, you're such a knucklehead. Why did you hire a COO? And then Dharmesh. Anyway, you guys passed, as did everyone. Two weeks later, I read your book. And I saw in the book that you're not a fan of the idea of hiring a COO. So I guess my question, and by the way, I think chips on the shoulder are really valuable. You put a chip, a ginormous chip on JD Sherman's shoulder.

• 3:50Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, good.

• 3:51Speaker 01

  It was incredibly beneficial. How do you feel about CEOs, COOs these days? You same, same thing or change your mind?

• 3:57Ben Horowitz?

  Well, no, I mean, I, I think that generally when a company is small, flatter is better. In the early 2000s, it was a very popular construct and it was kind of Mr. Outside, Mr. Inside, that kind of thing. You know, if you're really scaling and you're not kind of wrestling with product market fit, like it can work for a time. On a product cycle, but when you hit the end of the product cycle, it's so much about a company, a tech company is kind of the communication architecture and it just makes that worse generally. It's a little like two people in charge. Not to say it can't work and you know, it depends on the definition of COO. And if COO is really just a big title for the sales guy, like that's fine.

• 4:40Ben Horowitz?

  You know, COO in the sense that I'm running the company and you're like Mr. Thought Man outside, I think that's not a great thing for a startup.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. You've invested in tons of CEOs at this point, coached tons. What like, what are you looking for? What's like a major green flag, red flag? How's it changed over time? Like, what's your filter?

• 5:00Ben Horowitz?

  On a CEO?

• 5:01Speaker 01

  Founder CEO. So you're looking at the company and the market, but the person, not the co-founder, the CEO.

• 5:07Ben Horowitz?

  The thing about founder CEOs is that there's definitely not what I would consider like a canonical one. So if you look at Mark Zuckerberg and Ali Gotze and Elon Musk, they're all like extremely different types of people. So, you know, you try not to get into like anything about the look and feel or sound or like, you know, are they very extroverted or are they very introverted or this kind? And none of that, I think, matters. There's a few things in common. One is, you know, anybody great really thinks for themselves. So they don't feel like they're reading the room or influenced by what I'm going to say or anything like that.

• 5:48Speaker 01

  And you could probably figure that out during the pitch, you think?

• 5:50Ben Horowitz?

  Well, you can figure out if they're not that during the pitch for sure. And then, you know, do they have like truly original thinking on things? So, and then, you know, from a leadership standpoint, I really like the Colin Powell definition, which is, you know, leadership is the ability to get people to follow you if only out of curiosity. So I think, well, would I want to work for this person? Like, how interesting are they? And if you don't have that, right, you're not going to bring in the super high-end talent, which is. You know, it's kind of a momentum thing. If you can't hire the very, very top talent, then you're not very unlikely to be a great company. It's kind of, you know, how good is your talent density and all that kind of thing? So.

• 6:33Speaker 01

  We just had our Sequoia offsite and I got into, not an argument, but discussion with Sean McGuire, one of our partners.

• 6:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, he's very outspoken.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  Very outspoken. And he got up and he said, what we should be looking for are these founders that won the chess Olympiad or the math Olympiad in high school and surrounded by other of those folks. And he was very articulate on it, made a good point. A lot of people shook their head and I thought about it and I was like, well, HubSpot's no Tesla, but it did pretty well. And my co-founder and I, we're Sloan people, you know?

• 7:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  And then we hired crap tons of people from Northeastern and I was like, it worked out pretty well. And then I just think like, early in the cycle, maybe you need those PhDs and those, you know, chess champions, math champions, but as it moves up the stack, a Salesforce and ServiceNow kind of look like us. Do you have a take on my disagreement with Sean?

• 7:24Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think it depends a little on the era and the market. So if you look at HubSpot, right, like it was a marketing sales idea as much as it was a technological idea. So you have to have great people on that side who tend not to be math Olympians.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 7:43Ben Horowitz?

  And so for that company, I don't think that's right. For other companies, that's right. The other thing is, you know, math Olympiad is very specific. The very best companies are founded by exceptionally smart people. There's no question about that. I agree with him on, on that angle of it. You know, like how smart is Elon? Extremely fucking smart. Was he math Olympian? Probably not, like, I don't think so. But just like raw horsepower is pretty important. Like Larry Page is probably, you know, one of the smartest people in the world. That ends up mattering if you're going to build something Google size. It's very hard to imagine that without somebody like Larry Page who could even think of something that big.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. You've worked with a lot of CEOs. Who's the best?

• 8:22Ben Horowitz?

  Probably the best one that I personally work with right now is Ali Gotze at Databricks. You know, he's a PhD in computer science. He's extremely smart. So he kind of meets the Sean McGuire test, but he's like an exceptionally good, you know, for an enterprise software CEO, he's exceptionally good at go to market, able to compete with Snowflake, which was a very, very good go to market organization. And then he's just absolutely.

• 8:48Ben Horowitz?

  Paranoid. The only person I ever known as paranoid as Ali, I mean, I guess Elon is this level of paranoid, but Andy Grove is this level of paranoid.

• 8:56Speaker 01

  He wrote a book about it.

• 8:57Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, I think some of that comes from him being, and he's a refugee. He grew up in Iran, and then when the Taliban came in, he had to flee to Sweden. Hopefully that's correcting now finally after all these years. But, you know, that having everything taken away from him really informed his psychology in a way that's, I'd say, very beneficial for a founder.

• 9:23Speaker 01

  Okay, I work with a lot of founders, their companies are growing fast, and I'm kind of new to this. What's the pattern of mistakes these folks make on the way up?

• 9:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yes.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  What are the common traps?

• 9:35Ben Horowitz?

  So, look, I think the universal one is kind of starts with, it's kind of confidence is a way, kind of in a word. But it starts with the fact that nobody knows what they're doing, as you probably have experienced yourself. You have an idea, you invent something, you know how to run a company.

• 9:54Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 9:54Ben Horowitz?

  And so you start, you know, building the company and you make a lot of mistakes. Those mistakes are extremely damaging. You feel terrible about it because you hired all the people, you sold them on this great idea. Then you make a mistake and everybody gets hurt. And if you've not kind of been in a position like that, which almost no founder has, it can be like highly psychologically challenging. And you see people react to it in two very dangerous ways. One is they overly defer. So, okay, I hired a lot of smart people. I'm going to be very open to their input on all the decisions, to the point where I'm not really making the decision myself. I'm kind of doing a poll. But nobody other than

• 10:39Ben Horowitz?

  the CEO has the contacts to make that decision. Nobody kind of sees the whole picture. And so that can lead you into not only bad decisions, but a very dangerous political environment where people go, oh, there's a vacuum here, I can step into it. And then the second thing that you see often is just hesitation. I don't know what the right answer is. I have a suspicion, I'm like 52, 48 on it, but I'm afraid of making mistakes. So I'm, I'm gonna not decide. And then the other kind of hesitation is, well, I'm gonna avoid it. Like, I see something bad. I really need to fire the head of sales. What is the press gonna say? What is my board gonna say? What is this gonna be? Da, da, da, da.

• 11:22Ben Horowitz?

  And just thinking about everything that you should not be thinking about, rather than, can this person do the job? And those things are really what cause founders to fail at the CEO job. That, that lack of confidence, that hesitation. You know, I talk to CEOs, I'm like, like, if you were like a linebacker in the NFL and you were really fast, but you didn't trust your eyes, you would get cut. Because you wouldn't get to the, no matter how fast you are, you're not gonna get to the ball carrying time. If you don't trust your eyes as CEO and go run at the problem and make the decision, you're gonna fail. You're gonna, like, that's what's gonna get you replaced.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  It resonates with me. At HubSpot, we had all kinds of debt, culture debt, product debt. We had decision debt at times, I would call it.

• 12:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:08Speaker 01

  And when the company was-

• 12:09Ben Horowitz?

  Decision debt is the worst debt, by the way, because it, it paralyzes a company.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  We had, I had it.

• 12:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  So I fell in your trap. And the way it kind of worked was, I would see the company slowing down, and just like a lot of debate, and a lot of just stuff on my desk. And then once every like four, five, six months, be like, I need to make some friggin' decisions. And then once I made some decisions, it just, everything just started moving and flowing.

• 12:36Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Speaker 01

  So I felt that very much.

• 12:39Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  What other mistakes did they make? Talk about the team building, like, you've hired a lot of VPs of sales, like, people fuck up their VP of Sales hires all the time.

• 12:47Ben Horowitz?

  More than anything else, yeah. More than anything else. So kind of more generically, hiring executives-

• 12:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:52Ben Horowitz?

  -is also something you don't know how to do.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 12:55Ben Horowitz?

  Right? Like, it's, a lot of times, you even know what the job is. Like, what is a CFO? What's a control structure? You know, what are these systems they speak up?

• 13:06Ben Horowitz?

  And people go in to hire them like with that level of knowledge and think they can like smell it out from talking to a person. And it's a little like trying to hire a Japanese interpreter and you don't know Japanese. They're all gonna sound pretty good. And it's gonna be very hard for you to distinguish. So preparation, I would say is very important in terms of, okay, have you spoken to enough CEOs? Have you asked them, like, what's the difference between a good CFO and a great CFO? Like, you know, how would you hire this person? What would you ask them? What would you want to see? You know, these kinds of things. And just understand the job. I always say, if you have a chance, just try to do the

• 13:48Ben Horowitz?

  job yourself, act in that role so that you can get a feel for what the challenge is in your company. And it's also right, like, you don't want a generic CFO, you want one for your business. Then when you get into sales, so the problem that we have all the time is we have engineers running the company. And then they're hiring a head of sales. You could not be culturally different between like an engineer and a head of sales. The main thing is, like, right down to how they talk to you. So engineers, if you ask them a question, 100% of them will try and think of what is the correct answer to that question. That's how they think about it. If you're a salesperson, your first thought isn't, what's

• 14:33Ben Horowitz?

  the answer? It's, why the fuck are you asking me that question? Right? Because that's a clue. And so, you know, if you ask an engineer, like, does your product have this feature? The answer is yes or no. If you ask a sales guy, it's like, okay, what competitor was in here that planted that trap for me? What's their weakness? And how do I get to that? And so if you have an engineer talking to a head, a good sales guy, it's gonna upset them. Because they're often not going to answer the question.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:01Ben Horowitz?

  They're going to try and figure out why they're being asked that question. And so then.

• 15:06Speaker 01

  I like this, by the way, I hadn't thought of it this way.

• 15:08Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, but the guys who are good at the job get rejected.

• 15:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:12Ben Horowitz?

  Because you don't like them. And then the people who are terrible at it, those are the ones that end up getting hard. Mark Cranny used to say, you know, these CEOs, they just want to take a guy who failed the engineering test, put a clean shirt on him and like make him the head of sales. And there's a real truth to that. It's funny, I had this conversation with Suje when he was at Dropbox. He goes, how do I like deal with the fact that our engineers are upset that we're going to pay the sales guys commissions?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  By the way, guaranteed, guaranteed they're going to be upset.

• 15:43Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and I said, well, it's very simple. Tell them if they want to make commission, then they can fucking grab a bag and sell some fucking software. And if they don't hit their number, you're going to fire them. And if they want that job, they can get a commission. But otherwise, you know, shut the fuck up. You know, he said, oh, okay. I never thought of it that way. I was like, look, the other question you can ask them is, do you have engineers that like on the weekend, might write some software for fun, like as a hobby? And he goes, yeah. And I said, I guarantee you don't have a single fucking sales guy on the weekend who's selling software as a fucking hobby. Like, that is not a fun job. There has to be, it's a prize fight. There is no fight without a prize.

• 16:25Ben Horowitz?

  And I think that the whole mentality, the whole cultural difference between like what founders are and what salespeople are is so vast that, you know, somebody's got to have a conversation with them about like, okay, what are you really looking for? Because otherwise, you're just going to get somebody who's not good at sales.

• 16:45Speaker 01

  Okay, I'm the head of, I'm the engineer, I'm CEO of your brand new company. I'm likely to screw the hire up. What's your advice to me?

• 16:54Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, it's funny. So, you know, one of the companies that both Sequoia and we were invested in is a company called Okta, which ended up doing very well. It's actually Pat Grady. I was on the board with Pat Grady on that one.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I love those guys.

• 17:07Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, and you know, the very first like big mistake that Todd almost made was hiring the head of sales. There were two candidates. One, I forgot his name, and the other was Adam Arons, who was a PTC guy. You know, we knew everything about Adam because, you know, he had worked for Cranny. You know, he had worked for McMahon. Like, I knew everybody in the tree and I called them all. And then they were like, this is a guy. And then this other guy, you know, I got front door references on him.

• 17:34Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 17:34Ben Horowitz?

  And they came out okay, like not great.

• 17:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:38Ben Horowitz?

  But Todd wanted to hire this other guy. And the reason that he wanted to hire him was he was much more enthusiastic about Okta. Whereas Adam was like, well, I don't know about this company. Let me talk to some of your customers and so forth and that kind of thing.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:53Ben Horowitz?

  And so, you know, the conversation I had with Todd was, I was like, Todd, you don't want the sales guy all enthusiastic. They, you want them to be qualifying you.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:02Ben Horowitz?

  Because when you're selling, good sales guys don't just answer the damn questions they're being asked. They qualify the customer. Do you really have the money? Do you really have the need? Do I really have a shot here? Or am I politically already boxed out? You need that. And I said, but beyond that, I got guys who owe me favors more than they owe Adam favors, telling me he's great.

• 18:26Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:26Ben Horowitz?

  And this other guy, who all the guys owe him favors and don't owe me anything. Say he's a B. And so, do not fuck this up. I'd never forget it. And I don't talk to founders like this anymore because I'm more mature. But I said, Todd.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Sure. I'm still working on that.

• 18:45Ben Horowitz?

  I said, Todd, look, if this hire doesn't work, because we were in a lot of trouble at the time, you realize what's going to happen is this is the end of your company. Like, this is it. So, you gotta be 100% confident because I'm telling you, you're wrong. And I have more experience at this than you and so forth. So, I really put pressure on him and he hired Adam and, you know, it ended up really making the company. So, it's worked out.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  I have a bunch of questions.

• 19:09Ben Horowitz?

  But that's how important it is. Like, I think if we had hired the other guy, Okta would have gone bankrupt.

• 19:14Speaker 01

  I have a couple of questions on that. It sounds, well, just the takeaway of I'm that engineer who's CEO, I'm getting some traction, hiring that as sales, it's one, blind references really matter. And two, get

• 19:26Ben Horowitz?

  I want sales, by the way, it's the whole thing.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Ben Horowitz?

  Also, who are you bringing with you?

• 19:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:33Ben Horowitz?

  That's what I always, who are you bringing with you? Okay, you're bringing this, that, and the other? Okay, can I call them?

• 19:39Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 19:39Ben Horowitz?

  And find out if they're coming?

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:41Ben Horowitz?

  Cause any great sales leader has a big set of followers. And anyone who's not great?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Nobody.

• 19:49Ben Horowitz?

  Nobody. Cause the one thing sales guys are, they're savvy about the leader.

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 19:55Ben Horowitz?

  Like you've, I've never met, even a mediocre salesperson knows who's a good leader.

• 19:59Speaker 01

  Okay, you brought up PTC, you've hired people from PTC, I came from PTC. First of all, who's the equivalent of PTC now, building on the sales leaders that are filling Silicon Valley? I can't figure that out. And two, what do you think it was about the PTC model that worked so well? And by the way, for listeners, PTC was a great, still a great company, but in the nineties, it ripped and was fastest growing company in the world for a while. And we sold CAD CAM, we sold PLM software to manufacturers, hard sell, but we were very good at it. And the diaspora of PTC sales execs throughout Silicon Valley was very interesting and compelling.

• 20:35Ben Horowitz?

  There was a number of things about PTC, but one of the underrated things was the product wasn't that great. Particularly the windshield, the hoop.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  Didn't work.

• 20:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Anybody can say

• 20:46Speaker 01

  So you like when you, you like to hire a sales guy that had a hard sale. You don't like to hire somebody who was like, yeah, he crushed his numbers, but anyone could have sold that.

• 20:53Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, like hire somebody selling Google AdWords.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Fine.

• 20:56Ben Horowitz?

  Like, you know what that job is? How much do you want? Okay. You're not going to build the

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Okay, you see someone from Databricks though, and they were VP of Databricks, you're looking for a CRO in your new company. I'm not saying that's easy to sell, but they have a brand, they have like a lot of mojo. Is that someone you're looking for an early stage startup or no?

• 21:15Ben Horowitz?

  Well, you know, I can't comment on that because, you know, Databricks is

• 21:19Speaker 01

  Well, do you know the analogy?

• 21:21Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, it's like the early days of Oracle, those guys were different than an Oracle salesperson today, right? And I think that like as it gets more established, it's harder to tell.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:32Ben Horowitz?

  Because you can survive on that, but I will say this, if you have a product that's complicated to sell, Then that's when you get to the PTC level. The thing about PTC that was so amazing, other than like the culture and the attitude. So there's a culture and the attitude, and we talked about that, which was unique and probably illegal today. I would say almost certainly illegal today. But the thing that I think is very replicable, but only if you have a difficult product to sell is a discipline. And the discipline really came down to, okay, you're going into an account. You know there are competitors.

• 22:12Ben Horowitz?

  And how systematic are you about laying the traps for the competitors? You know, making sure you make a comprehensive technical case, a comprehensive business case, making sure that you've charted everybody in that organization who's in that decision process. And it's a very complicated decision process for PTC. Getting assurances that they're all lined up. And that's so complicated and requires so much courage and effort and competitiveness that that translates into anything. Whereas, look, if you're walking into an account and they're already predisposed to buy, you can skip steps. You can get away with shit.

• 22:55Ben Horowitz?

  You know, you just have to call in, show up, hey, I'm the, you know, salesperson from, you know, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, away you go. You know, like right now, I think with OpenAI and Anthropic and so forth, it's like, that's like everybody wants to buy AI. They're already predisposed to buy. Very, very different than, who the hell are you? Oh, we're PTC. I never heard of PTC. Okay. Like now I'm in the door. Why should I buy this? I can't get it to work. Well, like, let me walk you through how it's going to work. Like these kinds of things. Yeah, that's invaluable if you have that actually. So the, Ron Gabrisco, who's kind of the original head of sales at Databricks, we got him. I had never heard, like, I had never heard of the company he was at, which was a public company.

• 23:39Ben Horowitz?

  Imagine that, a tech sales guy that I had never heard of his company. And the company was literally selling FTP. Okay. But secure FTP. Okay. Like, think about how good at selling you have to be to make your number as a public company selling that. Yep. And so this guy, like, obviously had the discipline forced upon him. And he was extremely smart. And that combination, you know, I'll take that all day. Yeah. You know, if you've got that. And so you'd rather have You know, a successful company is fine, but some kind of playbook that was harder to write,

• 24:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:14Ben Horowitz?

  some product that was harder to build. And that's another big one is can you run a playbook? Are you somebody who like joined VMware when it was on fire and got a big position, but you ran the playbook that was set up for you? Or are you the person who wrote the playbook, who figured out how to sell this very complicated piece of software, who figured out how to lock out the competition, to train the sales force, to discipline them, to do all that kind of thing? That's a much harder find. And, you know, depending on the complexity. Look, if you've got an easy product, then that's one kind of thing. If you've got a hard product, that's another.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Some of my takeaways were, I was the first, basically, BDR and worked and spent 10 years. It was, in a lot of ways, contrary to the way people thought about selling.

• 25:02Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  We sold an application, we sold it one way, and then we moved into the platform business, totally changed the way we sold, very disciplined on both sides, and very process oriented, like really managed the process tightly.

• 25:16Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  So we're very good at that, and just very tight on the profile of sales rep.

• 25:20Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  And it's scaled down very, very well.

• 25:23Ben Horowitz?

  The profile.

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:24Ben Horowitz?

  By the way, that's, when I interview sales guys, I always ask them,

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Good question.

• 25:29Ben Horowitz?

  what's the profile of your rep?

• 25:30Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:30Ben Horowitz?

  And it's amazing to me that guys who are very senior and very big jobs have sometimes very loose profiles.

• 25:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 25:40Ben Horowitz?

  Whereas the ones who really have to compete, it's extremely tight. What they're looking for is so specific, and, you know, often surprising.

• 25:50Speaker 01

  One of the things we, just sticking on sales for a sec, one of the things we got right, got a lot wrong at HubSpot, one of the things we got right was the process to interview a rep. And what we found out was reps who were good learners did well inside of HubSpot. And so we got lots of resumes. We like people on their second sales shop, not their fifth, not their first, their second. So they had done something. And if they had gone to a half decent school, not Harvard, not MIT, state school.

• 26:19Ben Horowitz?

  State school, B. A. R.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And they, yeah, an competitive athlete. If they could fog them here, and they did those things, they came in, and we didn't overthink it. We came in for a half hour and the half hour was Ben, welcome. And I would give you a scenario and I would be the customer and I would say, sell me HubSpot. And I'd give you 12 minutes to sell me, like literally watch 12. I said, that's very good, Ben. Here's my feedback. A couple minutes of feedback. Why don't you think about it and let's do it again. And if the person internalized that feedback and sold it better the second time, 99% of the time we hired them.

• 26:54Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 26:55Speaker 01

  I thought that was, and it scaled really well.

• 26:58Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right. Can they, how good are they at listening? This is, by the way, that's the other, I think, mistake people make. They look for somebody who's good at talking. You really want somebody who's good at listening. Yeah.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  While.

• 27:12Ben Horowitz?

  It's an important subtle difference.

• 27:15Speaker 01

  Okay, while we're on this type of thing, you were the recipient of maybe my favorite email in the history of emails. May I read it to you?

• 27:22Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, sure, sure.

• 27:23Speaker 01

  In the background of this was you had a big product launch coming. You were excited about it and you had a press tour coming up in a couple of weeks. And Marc Andreessen front ran it and you sent him an email. I guess we're not going to wait until the fifth to launch a product, Ben. And the response to Ben Horowitz from Marc Andreessen. Apparently you don't understand how serious the situation is. We're getting killed, killed, killed out there. Our current product is radically worse than the competition. We had nothing to say for months. As a result, we've lost over $3 billion in market cap. We're now in danger of losing the whole company and it's the server management's fault. And then I love the ending. Next time, do the fucking interview yourself. Fuck off, Mark.

• 28:06Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Are we out of the fuck off era?

• 28:11Ben Horowitz?

  From Mark?

• 28:12Speaker 01

  Everyone. Like, this is the emails that we get at PTC.

• 28:16Ben Horowitz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:17Speaker 01

  And are we too soft now?

• 28:18Ben Horowitz?

  You know, Elon's not soft.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  Nope.

• 28:21Ben Horowitz?

  And I think there's some of that. Like, I don't think it's quite at PTC level. So in Cranny's interview with McMahon, I think McMahon said to him, what would you do if I hit you in the face right now? And I think Cranny's response was, well, first of all, you better knock me out. And then McMahon says, well, like, but what would you do? He says, is this a question? Are you testing my intelligence or my courage?

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Good answer.

• 28:48Ben Horowitz?

  And that kind of thing. You wouldn't ask somebody that in an interview.

• 28:53Speaker 01

  My first interview, I walked in with my suit on and Harrison, who was originally at a sales, says, I wouldn't wear that suit to a shit fight.

• 29:02Ben Horowitz?

  I think really good companies, the very, very, very, very best companies tend to have founders and CEOs who ask pretty aggressive questions. Zuckerberg, Larry Page, those guys are pretty, who have kind of gotten all the way to the mountaintop, they're pretty blunt. And I think, look, I think that's important in that one of the most critical things in a company culturally is, you know, one, you give direct feedback and like, you can have it out. Like, you know, like Mark was wrong on that feedback to me. I was right. But like, it's important that he be able to say that. And then it's important that I'd be able to stand up to it. Otherwise, the truth doesn't come out.

• 29:46Ben Horowitz?

  Like, you've got to, like, if you're running away from the truth to preserve feelings, that's a very dangerous thing in a tech company. And the kind of corollary to that is, it's really important that like, bad news travels fast. That, you know, if something's wrong, that as CEO, you find out about it. And so you need that bluntness. Andy Grove used to call it constructive confrontation. And he was, by the way, that's another one, where one of my favorite Andy Grove anecdotes was, somebody was late to a meeting, you know, and then this is when Intel was a monster and Andy was God and all that kind of thing. And they come in late to the meeting.

• 30:25Ben Horowitz?

  And he, he just looks at them and he goes, all I have in this life is time and you're fucking wasting it. You know, which is like the meanest thing you could ever say to somebody. But particularly as a company grows, you need to reset the culture, like if it's starting to fray at the edges, you can't just let that go. And by him saying that, you know, it might crush that person's feelings. But everybody's telling that story to the point where I heard it, I didn't work for Intel. Right. And that, that's a culture center. Like, we're not fucking late to meetings here. Like, that's not what we do. And, and that's, look, not every company has that culture. But in, if you have that culture, you need to, to maintain it.

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Kind of speaking of that, I coach all these CEOs. Well, one thing I've noticed is Paul Graham wrote that founder mode memo. It's, it strikes me as relatively standard operating procedure now. It's really, is that your reaction too?

• 31:20Ben Horowitz?

  Well, yes, although there's a part that's wrong to it.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 31:23Ben Horowitz?

  Or there's a part that I would say is a little misleading to it. You know, and I think it came originally from Brian Chesky.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:29Ben Horowitz?

  And so Brian, like, so there's part that's very right about it, which is, um, what happened to Brian is he hired like extremely senior people.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:38Ben Horowitz?

  Uh, and then he did the thing that, you know, we talked about earlier, which he overly deferred.

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:43Ben Horowitz?

  And then that created fiefdoms, politics, um, all kinds of like weird stuff. And then he kind of, after COVID, took the company back by going into, quote, founder mode. And this is like, I'm being much more dictatorial. And I think that that part is all correct. I think the danger with the idea is people are taking it to the point where they're going, well, I don't want to hire any senior people.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I see that.

• 32:08Ben Horowitz?

  It's like, well, okay, so you're gonna go compete with, and you need a worldwide sales organization. And you're gonna try and grow a motherfucker from scratch to do that. Well, let me tell you all the things that that person doesn't know that they're gonna have to learn on your nickel that you could just buy.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 32:25Ben Horowitz?

  Today, what's your profile? How do you split territories? Like, how do you open it up international? How do you, like, there's just like years and years of experience and relationships that are required to do that, right? And so because you're in founder mode, you're so fucking afraid to do that. It's like, no, you need to be able to hire that person too, when you need them. But you need to be able to manage them. And that's very different than avoid, avoid, avoid. And I think people have taken what Paul wrote and it's like, oh no, like, no, no, no experience people, like, screw that and so forth. And I, you know, particularly, you know, if you're an enterprise company, I think that definitely doesn't work. Like, even on a consumer company, it's gonna be shaky, you know, like, positions like CFO and so forth.

• 33:08Ben Horowitz?

  Like, outside knowledge is as valuable. You have to understand enough about that. You know, in founder mode, you've got to learn enough about that job that you feel confident managing that person and telling them what to do and not having them tell you what to do, because that's when you lose the company. So I think it's good. It's like an overcorrection from where things were.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  I think you're, by the way, I think you're spot on on that. One of my favorite CEOs is Jensen Huang, and he's got a unique playbook. He's got 60 direct reports. He gives feedback in public, and everybody knows the story. The interesting thing about the CEOs I coach, none of them really do that. They don't have 60 direct reports. They haven't followed his playbook. I kind of scratched my head on it.

• 33:53Ben Horowitz?

  People also haven't followed Elon's playbook, right?

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Exactly. No one uses the algorithm outside of Elon's companies. I don't get it. You notice the same thing.

• 34:01Ben Horowitz?

  So most of the companies you recruit out of don't run like that, and so they don't think of it that way. And then also, I think that to run it like Jensen does, by the way, that's a little bit like, I would say, closer to how I run Andreessen Horowitz is more like how Jensen operates. But you gotta, like, I think what founders are lacking is the level of competence that you have to have to do that, because you have to be able to say, if you're reporting to me, you gotta be like, basically, CEO caliber.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Autonomous.

• 34:41Ben Horowitz?

  I'm not, I'm not developing you, which is something that I highly believe in. CEOs can't really develop executives. They either can do it, or they can't.

• 34:49Speaker 01

  I agree with you on that.

• 34:50Ben Horowitz?

  And then you have to have, feel like you've got enough knowledge to just be able to like, walk in and understand what's going on and so forth, and kind of be able to evaluate how the company's going from, you know, at that level. You know, Elon is the most competent and has the most confidence of anyone, and Jensen is kind of at that caliber. I think that a lot of people, you know, need to develop that as they go. I would say, like, when I observed Zuckerberg, he didn't have that the whole way. He's kind of...

• 35:23Ben Horowitz?

  Over time, getting more like that, but you know, like he'd preferred like half the company to Cheryl for a while until he could kind of build his confidence over there. And, and I think that's a little more the normal path. It's hard to go from zero to Jensen.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:38Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like, I mean, you know, it's interesting. Jensen's been doing it now for

• 35:45Speaker 01

  30 years.

• 35:46Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, 30 plus years. So, you know, what was he like four years on? I suspect he wasn't quite at this level of master of the universe.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  What can the CEOs listening learn?

• 35:56Ben Horowitz?

  And Elon, of course, got fired early. Like you do, like, there is a learning curve to the job, even for the best.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  What can CEOs learn from Zuckerberg? You've worked with him pretty closely here.

• 36:05Ben Horowitz?

  Well, I think Zuck, he's very, very, very good at operating from kind of first principles thinking, not being overly influenced by one, anybody else's ideas, or just like the way things are. Like he's very, very good at just looking at it. And then also, you know, they were amazingly disciplined at looking at things through a data lens. Like, okay, what does the data say and do that? And, you know, that's how they were able to grow it so fast, overcome the competition and these kinds of things. And he, he definitely stays like extremely curious, which I think all the, all the great CEOs are like very just interested in everything all the time.

• 36:47Ben Horowitz?

  You know, I think people underestimate him and Elon and Jensen and so forth on, they're like, oh, those guys are nerds. Their people skills are astounding good.

• 36:57Speaker 01

  And do you think they always were? Zuckerberg struck me as that not being the case early.

• 37:01Ben Horowitz?

  He was so introverted that you couldn't see it, but I, I felt like it was going on inside his head. You know, if you look at like the M and A deals he's done, he's, he's like a really outstanding psychologist. And I think that he always had some of that in it. You know, his mom's in that profession and she's, she's very smart about it, Karen. I think it was always in there. But he needed the confidence to get it out. I mean, he started that company when he was like a little kid.

• 37:29Speaker 01

  Funny. Yeah. You wrote a whole book about culture. What are people getting wrong?

• 37:35Ben Horowitz?

  I think people don't know what it is. Like, I mean, that's the main thing. The, the main thing that particularly founders don't know, which is why I wrote the book. Although it's funny, the people who really liked that book were like Ted Sarandos, you know, like, and I realized after I wrote it. You really don't have the cultural issue till you get big. And so at the startup phase, you may be sowing the seeds of your own cultural like problems, but there are no cultural issues in the beginning because the thing is small, you're seeing it, you're kind of managing the culture by hand unconsciously. So the big thing that people, people think of culture is values.

• 38:18Ben Horowitz?

  They think, oh, it's, you know, like, we have a culture of integrity, or we have a culture of, you know, whatever.

• 38:23Speaker 01

  All the same, everyone's got the same ones.

• 38:25Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, we have each other's backs or like whatever, whatever it is. And those things aren't really anything. They're just platitudes. The actual thing is behaviors. And so when you think about your culture, you kind of want to think about like, what are the behaviors that put you in a place where you're the kind of company that you want to be and give you the advantage that you want to have? Okay, we're in venture capital. What is everybody, well, we really love entrepreneurs. Like, everybody in venture capital fucking loves entrepreneurs. But then you get down to the way entrepreneurs talk about a lot of VCs. And they're like, these guys are fucking arrogant, they're assholes, they talk down to me, this and that. Well, like, well, if you want to be this, why are you that?

• 39:10Ben Horowitz?

  And it gets down to the behaviors. Are you on time for a pitch me? Are you on your phone during pitch me? Do you get back to the entrepreneur if you're not going to invest in them? Like, these behaviors end up setting the culture, whether you're like, care about entrepreneurs, have respect for them, or you think you're above them. And it doesn't have anything to do with what you said. It has to do with what you do. Which is why I called the book, What You Do Is Who You Are. But it's, that's the, really the core thing. But it takes a lot of thought to say, okay, if I want to be this, how must I behave to get there? And, you know, you can say like, oh, treat the company's money like it's your own. Okay, great, but what does that mean?

• 39:54Ben Horowitz?

  Well, where are you staying? What hotel? You know, how are you traveling? What's your thing? And like, so if you want that, then that has to be systematic.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  Let me ask you about.

• 40:05Ben Horowitz?

  No, you may not want that, you know?

• 40:07Speaker 01

  There's one cultural gotcha that I see a lot, where there's a brilliant, brilliant.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  Hundred X engineer in the company, that's an asshole.

• 40:18Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:21Ben Horowitz?

  Not sometimes, but by the way, venture capital is more like that than engineering organizations. There's more of those.

• 40:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 40:29Ben Horowitz?

  Well, like, I mean, and I think that on an engineering team, you kind of have to have the parameters of, okay, like, what does asshole mean? If asshole means that in the code review, I don't say anything, and then I go in the middle of the night and I rewrite your code, that's gonna be tricky as you grow, like, that's hard to manage. If asshole is, I expect like a super high standard, that's another thing. And so you kind of want to define like, okay, what is it that we're not gonna do here? And the thing about engineers is they're like amazing at following rules. So if you make clear like what the parameters are on it, and I find that in venture capital too, like, we have that. That's a venture capital problem if I ever heard one.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:11Ben Horowitz?

  You know, you get a lot of very smart, spiky personalities. And, you know, Mark and I talk about this sometimes. It's like, well, was Steve Jobs so mean to people because that just goes with being so brilliant? Or because he could get away with it because he was so brilliant, right?

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Where'd he come out? Oh, I've had the same debate.

• 41:32Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so I think it's a little bit more the latter. And so I think that if you're running an organization.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  Wait, which one is the latter? I forgot.

• 41:41Ben Horowitz?

  That he could get away with it, right? Like, he didn't have to do that. Like, but he could do that. And, you know, like, it's his company, he can do what he wants. I think that the problem with founders modeling themselves after Jobs, I mean, to some extent, after Elon is, well, if you're not Jobs or Elon, maybe you can't get away with that. And like, maybe people just walk out the damn door in a way that they went with those guys. And it's very hard to have like the highest performing talent without like them coming with some of those behaviors. You know, and it doesn't matter like in engineering and VC and whatever. And so you kind of have to be very specific about, okay, we're not going to have this, but we'll have that. You know, one of the things that I've outlawed at the firm,

• 42:26Ben Horowitz?

  which a lot of, you know, kind of people of this ilk would do is like, look, you can't make yourself look smart by making somebody else look dumb. Like, that doesn't, that fucking doesn't count here. And if you do it, by the way, with an entrepreneur, like if you get on Twitter and say, oh, that business sells dollars for 85 cents. Ha, ha, ha, I'm so smart. Fuck you, you're fired. Like, I'm not dealing with that at all because that's just like not who we're going to be. We love that you're smart. You can be as smart as you want to be. Like, that's fine. You don't have to get there through that method. And then once people know that, they're fine, like, not doing that. But I couldn't say, I think it would be hard to say, just don't be an asshole. Because like, sometimes, you know, the smarter, like, they're just like,

• 43:11Ben Horowitz?

  I'm not going to suffer through this dumbass conversation. Like, you know, if people who are extremely smart are going to do that. And it can't be like, no, you have to suffer through every dumb conversation. Like, that's not going to work.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Okay, but there's, Ben Horowitz isn't like, don't tolerate it. Zero tolerance to this thing, it's...

• 43:29Ben Horowitz?

  No, I think that no asshole rule is never going to work.

• 43:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:32Ben Horowitz?

  So what is it that you don't want them to do?

• 43:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:36Ben Horowitz?

  Like, what's over the line and what's not over the line? And like, I think even like very spiky people can live in that kind of context.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  He's very spiky.

• 43:44Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. What percentage, I like, you brought this up in another pod that I wanted to follow up on. Like, when I was CEO of HubSpot, I didn't know what I was doing a lot of time. I was confused a lot. And when you were CEO, you felt the same way. Like, what percentage of the time do you feel like, I really don't know what I'm doing? Versus, I kind of got a handle on this thing. And today, running Andreessen Horowitz or through your journey, like, I founders pretend like they know what they're doing.

• 44:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, everybody pretends. And this is kind of part of the challenge. So I think it takes a while. I mean, like, I, now, like, I had to grow up very fast. We went public when we were 18 months old, right?

• 44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:20Ben Horowitz?

  So that'll grow you up in a hurry.

• 44:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 44:24Ben Horowitz?

  But I didn't really feel like I knew what I was doing there, probably till...

• 44:32Ben Horowitz?

  Four years into it. You know, when I rebuilt the sales forest, I brought in cranny, all that kind of thing. Maybe three and a half, four years into it. And I was never as confident at that as I was, as I am now. And it's different for different people, but like you need like enough reps at it to have, like the more confident you are in your judgment, the faster the decisions you can make, the less you care about what people think, the less you care about making a mistake. And those are all the things. That's why Jensen is so magical. Right? Like he sits in the room, he talks to everybody. He knows exactly what he wants. Same with Elon, right? Like he can just sit there and go. I guarantee you neither of them started that way.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 45:18Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like you build it into that.

• 45:20Speaker 01

  I see silly things on Twitter where people say, venture capital is easier than entrepreneurship or entrepreneurship is easier than venture capital. People ask me that.

• 45:30Ben Horowitz?

  Venture capital is easier. What are you talking about?

• 45:33Speaker 01

  Way easier.

• 45:36Ben Horowitz?

  Like that's not even close.

• 45:37Speaker 01

  I agree.

• 45:38Ben Horowitz?

  Who the fuck would think venture capital is harder than entrepreneurship?

• 45:40Speaker 01

  A lot of people. I think the venture capital, there's a lot more luck involved. Like if you join Andreessen Horowitz today, you have amazing platform or Sequoia amazing platform. And you may do three deals, you know, maybe one turns into a trillion dollar company. There's a fair amount of luck around that.

• 45:56Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think that.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  Entrepreneurship doesn't have a lot of luck. It's some luck.

• 46:02Ben Horowitz?

  There's a lot of bad luck. You know, entrepreneurship, you have one shot and you have to make it work.

• 46:09Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 46:09Ben Horowitz?

  And then you really, really pay for your mistakes much more directly. And then the clock is ticking in a way. It's like, there are no quarters in venture capital. So like venture capital is just kind of like an easier kind of business now. Look, there's a lot of people, I'm saying that as, you know, someone who succeeded in it. And I suppose if you failed in it, it might have looked harder in a, in a different way. But I like, I think the, the pressure level and the stress level is not close. Because if you have a small venture capital thing and it fails, it's never a lot of people. Like you, you can get a tech company up to thousands of people and then have them lay them all the off.

• 46:54Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 46:55Ben Horowitz?

  Like that is common.

• 46:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:57Ben Horowitz?

  And it's brutal. And then.

• 47:00Ben Horowitz?

  The people that you're raising money for have a much tighter eye on you because you could have one funding source, whereas in venture capital, you always have many funders. Very generally have many funders.

• 47:15Speaker 01

  I appreciate you coming on the pod.

• 47:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, no, it was fun.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  All right. Yeah, thank you very much. I think all the CEOs who watch are gonna really like it. Thank you.

• 47:23Ben Horowitz?

  All right. Good, good, good.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Okay. I hope you liked that episode with Ben. I really liked it, learned a lot. Something I thought about while he was talking is one of Mike Bugs, the CEO of HubSpot, was I'm pretty conflict diverse. I think a lot of CEOs are, particularly first time founder CEOs. Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia back a lot of first time CEOs who haven't really managed before, and it's just uncomfortable. Confrontation is uncomfortable unless you kind of grew up with it. It's just not natural. Ben's got a good term that I'm gonna borrow. He calls it constructive confrontation. I like that. You need to have a constructive level of confrontation with most people inside of your organization.

• 48:06Speaker 01

  I think kind of related to that, Ben talks about decision debt. And we had this at HubSpot. You had a VP of Sales, you know you need to fire them, but you kick the can down the road, hoping they nail the next quarter. You know your pricing model not really working and scaling, but you kick the can down the road a couple of quarters to fix it. There's all kinds of stuff kicking around your head like that. And, you know, I think it's a lack of confidence. I want to be a popular CEO. I think that was another bug of mine, kind of related with that conflict diverse thing. All of this also rhymes, I think, with hiring. And there's a lot of talk around founder mode and, you know, people hiring and deferring to people, and now they're micromanaging.

• 48:48Speaker 01

  I think when you're a first time founder CEO and you're hiring a been there, done that person that's more senior than you, has done more stuff in their career. You're a little nervous about truly managing them and you end up deferring to them. And that's where the problems start. And so I think a lot of this idea around constructive confrontation that Ben talked about is really productive. And if you're a little risk averse like me, if you're a little, you want to be popular like me, maybe you need to be a little bit more constructive in your confrontation. The last thing I would say that he talked about and I agreed on is being a CEO is pretty uncomfortable, particularly from one of these hyper growth CEO companies today. They're growing so fast, everything's breaking, everything's changing.

• 49:32Speaker 01

  I think it's just fine if in your head, you think you don't know what you're doing because Ben didn't think he knew what he was doing when he was running LoudCloud and I didn't think I knew what I was doing when I was running HubSpot. So if you're feeling that as a CEO, I'm here for you. Hope you liked it. Let's keep the convo going. I'm at B Halligan on X. See you over there.

• 49:53Erik Torenberg?

  Thanks for listening to this episode of the A16Z Podcast. If you liked this episode, be sure to like, comment, subscribe, leave us a rating or review and share it with your friends and family. For more episodes, go to YouTube, Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Follow us on X at A16Z and subscribe to our Substack at A16Z.substack.com. Thanks again for listening and I'll see you in the next episode.

• 50:19Erik Torenberg?

  This information is for educational purposes only and is not a recommendation to buy, hold or sell any investment or financial product. This podcast has been produced by a third party and may include paid promotional advertisements, other company references and individuals unaffiliated with A16Z. Such advertisements, companies and individuals are not endorsed by AH Capital Management, LLC, A16Z or any of its affiliates. Information is from sources deemed reliable on the date of publication, but A16Z does not guarantee its accuracy.