On Mentorship and Leadership

Behind many great leaders, you’ll usually find a great mentor. a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz discusses mentorship and leadership with his mentor, Silicon Valley legend Ken Coleman, and his mentee, Michel Feaster, founder of Usermind and Chief Product Officer of Qualtrics.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Behind many great leaders, you'll usually find a great mentor. The mentor mentee relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have in both their careers and in their lives. The mentor mentee relationship is often one of the most important and most fulfilling relationships people have in both their careers and in their lives. So how do you find a mentor? What are different kinds of mentorship? And how can it help you break into an industry? Or help others break in themselves? In this episode from July 2018, A16Z co-founder Ben Horowitz discusses mentorship with his

• 0:40Speaker 00

  mentor, Silicon Valley pioneer Ken Coleman, and Ben's mentee, Michelle Feaster, founder of Usermind and now Chief Product Officer at Qualtrics. They begin with their personal journeys and share advice and frameworks for mentorship, leadership, and growing as a founder and CEO.

• 1:00Sonal?

  Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6andZ Podcast. Today's episode is all about mentors and mentees. The discussion takes place between A6andZ co-founder Ben Horowitz and his mentor, Ken Coleman, who started his career at HP and then Activision, was later chairman of Acceleris and is on multiple other boards, and held several executive positions at Silicon Graphics in between. It's based on a Q and A that took place at an event we hosted in May 2018, and the discussion is moderated by Michelle Feaster, herself a mentee of Ben's. She was formerly at HP and then Apptio, and is now the CEO and co-founder of Usermind. You can also hear her insights on creating a category, from pricing to positioning, in a previous episode, which you can find at a6andz.com/podcast.

• 1:43Sonal?

  But today's episode covers everything about mentors and mentees, from how to break into a particular industry or company, to how to help up and comers of all backgrounds, to the most annoying and best things between mentors and mentees. But the conversation begins with how they found each other.

• 2:00Speaker 00

  Ben, how did you and Ken meet? I'd love to hear that one.

• 2:03Ben Horowitz?

  That's an interesting story. So my father, who had... I grew up in Berkeley. My father was like a, I don't know how to describe him, like a political rabble-rouser, intellectual kind of thing, but no, like, connection to corporate America. My mom was a nurse, and, you know, I'm trying to get a job. Coming out of school and so you know I asked Mark, did he know anybody who like worked in technology and he said, "Well, you know, I was at this yoga class and one of the women at yoga class, she's married to this guy who runs a tech company and the woman was Sanja McCracken and the man was Ed McCracken and the company was Silicon Graphics."

• 2:47Ben Horowitz?

  He got Sanja to ask Ed if he would look at me as a summer intern and Ed, of course, wasn't going to deal with that, so he gave it to Ken.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  As you do.

• 2:58Ben Horowitz?

  And you know, Ken followed up, which you know, I say in a lot of companies, that follow-up doesn't even happen. He followed up and gave me that summer internship and that was in 1987.

• 3:10Speaker 03

  Why did you follow up?

• 3:12Speaker 04

  Well, I think there's an overreliance on resumes and experience and people miss what's really important in success, which is skills, abilities and personal attributes. And I thought he was a smart kid at those days. I thought he had just enough of an edge on him to be interesting. He had a drive and I thought he had the personality to do interesting things. And in those days, we were looking for people at SCI who were going to do interesting things because we were creating new technology.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. By the way, that's been part of my life experience is that I think the people who become the best mentors see past your resume and see something inside you that they connect with. Certainly, I feel like that's what happened with us.

• 3:58Ben Horowitz?

  That's a good point.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  And so I think when you're looking for mentors, knowing whether that person has that approach to the people that they're encountering, I think it's a core part of finding your mentor.

• 4:07Ben Horowitz?

  And vice versa.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 4:09Ben Horowitz?

  You know, the mentee has to take that approach.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  I find it fascinating that a manager who's five years out of school recruiting somebody and puts a spec together for 15 years of experience.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  I just find it weird.

• 4:24Ben Horowitz?

  And they had to go to Stanford.

• 4:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 4:28Ben Horowitz?

  Even though the manager didn't.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So I'm interested, Ben, so how did your relationship change over time? How did it go from the initial kind of meeting and getting the opportunity to really becoming a more important figure in your life?

• 4:41Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, so, you know, one thing that I think is actually important in retrospect is, you know, as soon as I got in the company, like, people knew why I got the interview. That's not something that stays secret. Okay, you come in through like Ed McCracken and Ken Coleman, and like, Ken was literally, I think, six levels up the org chart from me, like, it was a big, big distance. So people know that. And what that said to me wasn't, oh, I'm a made guy. What that said to me is like, I cannot embarrass Ken. I have to be better than everybody expects me to. I gotta work twice as hard. I gotta keep grinding. And that's really how the relationship started. Like, I just went in there and worked as hard as I possibly could. And so, because I knew somebody was gonna say something to him. It was either gonna be good or bad.

• 5:26Ben Horowitz?

  And I wanted it to be good. And that's really how it got started.

• 5:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, I totally relate to that. It's funny, I was telling some people, I speak a lot in public, but I was nervous before coming up on stage tonight, and I was telling everybody, I didn't want to embarrass you.

• 5:40Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah. There you go. And it was that same feeling, and I think, you know, it was really, I was super grateful for the job. I mean, at that time, I had no idea how to get into Silicon Valley. I was coming from, you know, outer space as far as I could tell.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So figuring out a way to get in, not necessarily coming in through the front door, you know, I'd love kind of your, I think it's a really important point.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Companies put together systems and processes, and unfortunately, about 10, sometimes up to 20% of the time, that process makes no sense. It's just not helpful. And so what you want to do in a company is people who can do what I call intelligent override. The problem is, most companies don't have many people like that. Who will do intelligent override. And so if you let the system dictate to you whether you get an opportunity or not, you probably won't get that opportunity. You can't take it personally and you need to figure out how to deal with that with intelligent override. And if you're interacting with the company, you got to figure out how to go through the

• 6:43Speaker 04

  side door rather than have the system keep you for getting an opportunity. I'm always impressed with people who are persistent who will try different things. You know, I admire those kind of people and you figure out if they'll do that to get an interview, they might do that to get a customer or solve a problem.

• 7:01Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, so that's a really interesting point. It's a little bit of a qualifying test to see if you can actually find the side door. And actually venture capital works very much like that in that you hear people complaining a lot, "Well, I don't know any VCs, so I can't get my company funded." Well, if you're going to be an entrepreneur and build a company, you know, scrape and get customers and figure out how to build a product and hire people, you better be able to find the side door. Because you can't do that, like that's actually an essential skill for that job.

• 7:33Speaker 03

  Part of it is, you know, is the person inclined to mentor? But the other piece is, does that mentor see something in you, that persistence or that drive and that hustle that makes them want to take their time and spend it? You know, it's interesting, I was reflecting on mentorship and mentors in my life, you know, most of them have been unexpected. You know, if you asked me to plan my life forward, I would never have imagined I'd be sitting here, that you'd be my mentor, that I would necessarily be a founder. So I'd love to hear from both of you, like, who have been the unexpected mentors in your life?

• 8:02Speaker 04

  My first mentor in technology was a guy that most of you probably haven't heard of, his name was Howard Smith. Before Silicon Graphics, we recruited Howard to HP. And I learned more about how to manage engineering from him than anybody. And we used to go to a place called The Red Coach and I used to drink scotch. I'd talk about management and leadership and that kind of stuff and he would talk about engineering, how you manage engineering, how do you identify engineering people? And I just went to school on him. And that was a very important relationship. And my point there, you can have a peer as a mentor, because we were peers. I didn't work for him, he didn't work for me.

• 8:43Ben Horowitz?

  I think every mentor I've had has been unexpected, including Ken, who I like, I would never have expected Ken to be my mentor. Even like when I got the job, that was just, he was so senior to me at the time. But like, one of the more unusual ones is very early in my career, I read a book called High Output Management by Andy Grove. And I, you know, I thought it was the best book I'd read in.

• 9:07Speaker 03

  First book he gave me.

• 9:09Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, first book I gave you. If I've given any of you a book, it's probably that one. And, you know, I read all his books and I studied him. And, you know, I thought he was, wow, this guy's such a great CEO. And he knows how to break down management the right way. And, you know, over the years, I met him a couple of times. But in my mind, he was always my mentor. And the really crazy thing about that story is very, very many years later, towards the end of Andy's life, he called me up, he said, they're doing a new addition to High Output Management. I want you to write the foreword. And I was like, wow, why me? And he said, you know, I watched this talk you gave at Stanford on your book. And they asked you, you know, why you wrote it? And you said, when I was a kid, Andy Grove wrote this book.

• 9:54Ben Horowitz?

  And I couldn't even understand why the CEO of Intel would write a how to book on management. Like, there is no reason for him to do that, other than, you know, to help people like me. And so I thought, if I ever get to any level near what he got to, I will try and do something like that. And he said, I read the book and like, it's, it's pretty good, which for Andy Grove, that's a big compliment. And so it was just like a very unusual mentor mentee relationship for me. And I think the foreword to that book is my favorite thing that I've ever written.

• 10:23Speaker 03

  So mentoring founders, right? That's a unique thing. Can you talk about transitioning? Like, how do you mentor a founder? How do you see them transitioning from founders to successful CEOs?

• 10:35Speaker 04

  I've been thinking about that a lot recently as I've worked with founders trying to build companies. And I'll be interested what Ben has to say about this also. But there's a difference when there are five of you, or eight of you, or 10 of you, when there's 500 of you, or 1,000 of you. And the person's job who changes the most in a growing environment is the CEO job. The guy at the top, a woman at the top.

• 11:00Ben Horowitz?

  Hundred percent.

• 11:01Speaker 04

  And that's a tough journey. That's a really difficult, complex journey. You know, because when you're up to about 125 people, you the CEO, you're the leader of the company, can know everybody. When you got 500 people, everybody knows you, and you just know a very small part of the company. One of the first thing that happens when you go to that transition, you realize I didn't know so much about X, because I now have an expert. I always remember when I hired a general counsel work for me, I said, wait a minute, what's my value proposition? The guy's gonna know more about legal than I'll ever know. Confronting that reality, that it is really a different job, it's really important.

• 11:44Ben Horowitz?

  You know, like when I was CEO, I would sometimes just give somebody instruction, you got to do it this way. But you can't do that as a CEO mentor. And it is complicated at times, because you will know the answer, and you have to have the discipline to not go all the way through.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  So Ben was my mentor before I became a CEO. So, you know, when I was an executive, and kind of a middle-level product person, and has stayed in my life, you know, since I made the transition to founder and CEO. I find two things very fascinating about how you mentor me. One, you know, it's a lot of questions. But two, you've known me so long, that I feel like you have a sense for how I'm gonna react. And sometimes your questions are to like snap me out of an emotional state that I'm in, and get me to engage more intellectually, you know, with the problem I'm solving. I mean, do you think that relationship mentoring is as core to it as like the fact that you've both been CEOs, and so you know how to ask the right questions?

• 12:38Ben Horowitz?

  It's hard to advise people on how to do this. It is, it really does get at what you're talking about. It's There's no real generic advice that works. You can't say it, you know, it's for that person in that situation based on what they're feeling. And so much of that job is so emotional and so much of when they screw it up, they're so afraid of the dark place that they put themselves in a dark place.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  That was my phone call to Ben last week.

• 13:00Speaker 04

  You have to be a good listener. You have to be able to ask good questions. And I can tell a lot about ability to be helpful. Two things. One is how self-aware is the person? Does the person have a sense of who they are, what their blind spots are? That's one. Two is there's somebody and you make a point, he always has the answer. He's figured it out before you can ask the question. Well, nobody's always figured it out. And so when just somebody like that, it's gonna be really hard to come to grips with an issue. So the people that can grow the most are people when you have a conversation today and you talk to them a week from today and they've done something with the conversation.

• 13:42Speaker 04

  Not necessarily they did what I might have done, but they've done something. Because I always, it's fascinating, if I meet any of you or executives or managers and I ask you a question to walk me through your team, always like everybody will have somebody on the team. I say, why is that person, given what you just said to me, why is that person working for you? Given what, not what I said, it's what you said. And so it's just being a mirror to what somebody said can be quite helpful to that person. Now, they can still choose not to deal with it, but they can't deny that they said it. I didn't say it, you know?

• 14:21Speaker 03

  All three of us are kind of walking representations for the power of mentorship in our lives. And so I think, you know, everyone here is gonna walk out of there thinking, I want a mentor. Maybe they came in here wanting a mentor. But I think it's hard to find. What advice would you give? How do people network or cultivate these kinds of life-changing relationships?

• 14:40Speaker 04

  I feel strongly that networking is an undervalued skill in the world. So I believe you should be about getting to know more and more people. And the mentorship happens organically as you get to know people. Because you can't make somebody be a mentor. And for it to work... That relationship, there has to be trust. And you've got to be willing to hear, if you're a mentee, something that you don't want to hear. And then for the mentor, I got to feel like it's worth the journey. You know, that there's a chemistry, it's worth the time and effort to spend with somebody. And so it's, you got to date and see if it happens.

• 15:23Speaker 04

  If you're trying to develop a relationship with somebody, of how do you stay engaged without being a pest? There's a skill there or a sense there. If you just pull away and don't stay in contact, that doesn't work. But if you're a pest, that doesn't work. So you got to have the sensibility to how much is enough? So that I maintain a relationship or build a relationship, but not be a pest.

• 15:50Ben Horowitz?

  Then you guys seem verified on Rap Genius. Like the rapper explains his own lyrics. So Jeezy did one. And it's a great explanation of kind of mentorship. Because it's really like people like, you know, he's an established rapper. So people want to have Jeezy as a mentor. And he says, "Look, I don't hang a lot of rappers because I feel like rappers are fake. They dress up in their Halloween costumes and they're always trying to pretend to be somebody." He says, "I like to hang around with genuine motherfuckers. Like somebody who will call you on your birthday or, you know, call to check in on you." And to me, that really got at it in that, look, it's a relationship. And it's got to be a relationship where there's value going in both directions.

• 16:34Ben Horowitz?

  Where, you know, you're actually interested in that person, not in what you can get out of them.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  I totally agree. I've mentored people who've worked for me and mentored people who just got intro to me, you know, friends, kids. And I think some of it's chemistry. And some of it is like, do I just admire their grit and determination? You know, they come to me prepared and they, you know, ask me questions and don't waste my time. And then do we, you know, meet enough times to actually develop a relationship? So I think, you know, you can't make it happen. You can't force that, right? There is some core element of chemistry to it. So you both talked about mentorship as a two-way street, right? Where you're giving to the mentee and you're also learning from them. I'd love to hear, you know, what lesson or piece of advice that you learned from one of your mentees that kind of changed your point of view on the world?

• 17:25Speaker 04

  Well, I'll tell you one right here. Ben had started Opsware before I started the company. And I used to go meet with Ben and Mark regularly. Tell me about what you guys learned. What were the tripwires you tripped over?

• 17:40Ben Horowitz?

  I tripped over a lot of them.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  And so I got from him on their journey that helped me deal with my journey. So I think you can learn something from anybody. And if it's not a two-way street, it doesn't work very well.

• 17:57Ben Horowitz?

  I learn a lot from everybody that I work with. And you learn different kinds of things. So one of the best CEOs I work with is a really, really remarkable CEO. And one thing is just his relentless sense of what the standard has to be at his company in terms of how good you have to be to work there, how good the processes have to be. He's always going like, are we the best company that you have at like agile development? Who's better? He always wants to know that constantly. And he's always kind of meeting people and seeing like how his team stacks up and really, really trying to be the best possible.

• 18:35Speaker 04

  There is somebody I mentored a long time. I learned something very powerful from him. Every time you meet with this guy, he always ends with, what can I do for you? It's fast, it's disarming. And you feel, wow, he cares. He cares about how he can help me. I just find that a very powerful way to end the conversation.

• 19:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I've certainly been changed by both my mentors in my life and the people I've mentored. Ken, I'd love to know, what was your experience like, you know, when you first got to the Valley? And how has diversity changed over the course of your time here?

• 19:15Speaker 04

  That's an interesting question. I get that a lot. You know, when I got here, there were very few African Americans in technology. I never thought about it quite that way. I thought about achieving, making a difference, being successful, having a challenge. And in my generation, life was gonna be hard. And I had to be better than my white counterparts. That was just an is, an accepted reality. And there's a book I read in college that most of you probably never heard of. I'm sure it's not in print anymore called Five Smooth Stones.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  And this is a really effective way I view my life as a black male. And this black kid in New Orleans, and he had a mentor. And he was going to college in Ohio. And his mentor said this, "You're gonna go to school in Ohio, and you'll find prejudice and discrimination, but don't look under the bed for it." What that means is, if you're black in this country, or you're female, or if you're different, you're not majority. There are some people that won't appreciate you and will discriminate you because of that fact.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  But if you spend your life looking for it, you can't be successful. You can't win. You can't even afford to make an excuse for yourself. You can't be stupid about it. You can't be naive. The world is what it is, and some people will do bad things because of that. But you gotta move on. You can't get bogged down with it. Now, I tell my close white friends, "You have to be careful, no matter how liberal you are. You never have to ask yourself this question, 'Did this happen to me because I was black?'" You never have to ask that question, and that's a different experience. And that you have to appreciate that. You know, in hindsight, I powered through. I wasn't looking for excuses.

• 21:18Speaker 04

  And I was just trying to achieve. And then I tried to bring people along with me and force organizations to deal with themselves and understand what they're doing. If you take a simple thing, as I said earlier, an over-reliance of experience. If you overly rely on experience and not on skills, abilities, and personal attributes.

• 21:44Speaker 04

  You can cut out women and minorities who might not have lots of experience. I didn't find it lonely to be an early black person in this business. I just was trying to win, make a difference, be challenged. I worry about, I'm finding that a number of DNI people have the job but no power, no influence. And trying to do diversity is hard, like anything else. You have to have goals and objectives like anything else that's important. And you have to have people who have the ability to move the needle. You can't just hang a sign out and says, "I believe in diversity," and think diversity happens. You know, companies are social systems.

• 22:29Speaker 04

  Social systems like to recreate themselves. And so if you want to create a diverse workforce because you think is important, then you have to be willing to work at it. And, you know, there's this statement, have you heard this one about the elephant and the giraffe? So the giraffe were in a tall, slender building. It was raining outside like terribly. And they started feeling sorry for the elephants. And so, you know, they're gonna recruit and bring in the elephants into the building because they felt sorry for the elephants. And then after elephants have been in the building for a while, they says, "We can't see out of the window, but the windows are too high."

• 23:14Speaker 04

  And the giraffe says to elephants, "Well, grow your neck longer." All right? And then the elephant says, "Well, the walls are too tight. Can we widen the building a little bit so we can fit, is this lose weight?" So I think that what companies often do, they hire black folks or women, et cetera, but they talk and act and do exactly what they've always done. They don't accommodate. That's why the inclusion part of DNI is really important. And you have to look at who you are and how you do things. And it's really, are those the best things to be doing?

• 23:54Speaker 03

  You know, a lot of the press about the valley is, what are we doing about hiring? But to your point, how do we include, how do we make people feel welcome and stay in cultures?

• 24:04Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, well, I think when you set up a job, you set up a profile that you want for the candidate. And people's natural tendency is to profile to themselves. Because I know what I'm good at, I value it highly, and I can test for it in an interview. So like, why wouldn't I profile to me? It's perfect.

• 24:24Ben Horowitz?

  But if you do that, you're taking a very narrow view of the talent pool. Because you're seeing it through a very, very specific prism. And so the challenge, the work, I think, starts with broadening your view of what the profile should be beyond yourself. The real benefit of that is gets to the giraffe and the elephant, which is once somebody comes on board with a broader profile than just like the person hiring, then nobody has to question why they're there. Because everybody knows why they're there. They're the very best candidate for that job description. Because like, that's the criteria.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  I have a belief. I think, no matter what we'd say around here in technology, that the average hiring manager is not trying to maximize the opportunity, they're trying to minimize risk.

• 25:12Ben Horowitz?

  That's a great point.

• 25:13Speaker 04

  Okay. So if you buy that, then the more different you are, the higher risk I perceive.

• 25:22Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 25:23Speaker 04

  Especially if you are of a person who's really different than me. So if I'm white male, I went to Stanford, then it just feels, well, no better yet, I'm black male and went to Ohio State. So I know they're better than Stanford people, so less risky. Okay. But you create that, at least subconsciously, if not consciously, in your mind. And so that manager, subconsciously, or that system, that company, creates a higher bar.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  Of qualification to minimize to perceive risk. And I believe if you don't tease that out, we will all make that mistake. And so I think it's very important as a manager, as an executive, as a company, to make sure that you're first not trying to minimize risk, you're trying to maximize opportunity. And that you deal with your own belief system about what a qualified person looks like.

• 26:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:25Speaker 04

  And be willing to broaden that if you believe that diversity of thought and talents and experience creates better outcomes.

• 26:35Ben Horowitz?

  Colin Powell had a great line on that, which is you hire for the strength, not the lack of weakness. And very few people do that, but it's a huge advantage if you can, because that's how you get greatness. You never get greatness if you look for like, does the person not have any holes? And I'll tell you something about lack of weakness. Everybody's got a weakness. You just didn't see it in the interview.

• 26:57Speaker 04

  You want to know what you are getting so you can manage, say, I can manage against that weakness. I can surround that person with the support against that weakness. But if you don't know the weakness of somebody you're trying to hire, that doesn't mean they're perfect. If you don't know what you need to work on, you're not working on it.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 27:14Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah.

• 27:14Speaker 04

  You know?

• 27:15Speaker 03

  So when you think about your point of view on diversity and inclusion, how does that affect the way you coach and mentor the next generation of entrepreneurs?

• 27:24Speaker 04

  One of the fascinating things about diversity is if there's a problem, it just shows up more powerfully or quicker to a person who's different, or a minority person, or a female person. So if you push on the diversity issues, it'll make you a better company or a better leader. And so I believe that that is to your best interest to challenge yourself as a company, as a leader, as a person.

• 27:54Speaker 03

  I agree.

• 27:55Ben Horowitz?

  So I had a manager, and he had a woman working for him, and I, he said, like, I can't manage her, like, she hates me. And I said, well, why do you think that? And he said, well, you know, we were having a meeting, and I cut her off during the meeting, and she came to me afterwards, and she said, I really appreciate how you cut me off during the meeting. And I said, well, why do you think she hates you?

• 28:18Ben Horowitz?

  And he's like, "Well, it's such a small thing to have a confrontation over." So I just said, "It's like, well, maybe she just didn't like the way you cut her off in the meeting."

• 28:28Ben Horowitz?

  And I said, "So why don't you go talk to her about that and find out." There are these little things that can turn into big things from a diversity standpoint. And, you know, like, people come from different backgrounds, they're used to different things. I mean, I was a diversity problem when I started working at SGI. Because, you know, in my family, like, the way we used to argue because of my father and the way he is is like, you know, you attack each other, you call them idiots. And you do that in a company setting, you say, "Well, you're an idiot." People don't like that.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  By the way, no wonder we get along.

• 28:59Ben Horowitz?

  So sometimes you have to help somebody adjust into the culture that you have. And then, just because they come from a different culture doesn't mean they can't make that adjustment. And so I think how you think of it on the individual level, particularly when you're coming up for yourself, should be different than how you think about it. And that's so important, because I do think people, you know, lose ground. Because if you feel defeated before you start, then you are defeated.

• 29:23Speaker 04

  So, some of the companies I work with or have worked with, people will say, "Doing diversity is hard, diversity recruiting is hard." And I say, "Yeah, but we do hard in this business, so we're all in." If you think diversity is hard, try to build a company.

• 29:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do hard.

• 29:42Speaker 04

  Try to raise money. I mean, so...

• 29:45Ben Horowitz?

  Try to deal with the people you raise money for.

• 29:51Speaker 04

  So, hard is a terrible reason not to do anything. Because we live in this world where we choose to do hard every day.

• 30:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, we do. My last startup, I was constantly having culture issues with my peers. And I call him one day, and I'm kind of complaining about this culture and how I don't fit in. And Bed said, "Why don't you just go found your own company and create your own culture?" And so, you know, I think that's a third way. But I think, you know, entrepreneurship is a powerful vehicle for social change. And my company, you know, we're certainly not perfect, but I do think that's a third option. And I'm glad he challenged me, and I'm glad I did it. And it changed my life, so I want to encourage those of you who get stuck, drop out.

• 30:34Speaker 03

  Found, yeah.

• 30:36Ben Horowitz?

  That's a great answer.

• 30:39Speaker 05

  My question is, when you think about mentors and you want to approach someone with a request to be a mentor and then you're sort of in a junior role, you guys mentioned that it's important to have a two-way relationship, you know, like both parties have to get something out of it, and you want to talk to an exec and you're like in a junior role, like, how do you present that? How would you give back to them?

• 30:58Ben Horowitz?

  One of the things that you, you know, you can start with is if there's somebody who you want to get to know, then you can say, look, especially if they're in the same companies, you can say, like, I really admire you, would you mind if I bought you lunch and asked you some questions? And then, you know, you really just want to get started, you don't just go, will you marry me? It's like, who are you? You know, like, what are you talking about? So, you know, start there and, you know, and it really is, people like people who know them. And, you know, like, how much do you really understand about that person? And do you really like them? Or are you just doing this, you know, so that you

• 31:41Ben Horowitz?

  can kind of have a relationship with somebody up in the hierarchy? And those are the kinds of things you need to ask yourself. And try and find a mentor who you really like and would love to just meet. That's a great place to start.

• 31:52Speaker 03

  So I have one thought there, by the way, targeting. So I think anyone who is inclined to mentor has a track record of promoting from within. They have a track record of, of kind of having mentees. And it's pretty evident, if you think about it, who's inclined to take that lunch meeting and who's not. And so I think I would put that lens on it. And you can't control the chemistry, but you can control the selection of who joins you for lunch. So I would be deliberate. Many, many people don't value that. And their actions and their own teams they manage clearly reflect that.

• 32:22Speaker 06

  So we've talked a lot of tonight about positive experiences with mentorship, but have any of you ever had any experiences with mentor-mentee relationships that haven't worked out? And at what point do you make the decision to step away?

• 32:35Speaker 04

  Well, it can be really self-challenging and frustrating to see somebody headed for a train wreck that you've seen 10 times before.

• 32:45Ben Horowitz?

  Is he talking about me? I work at HeadLabs?

• 32:48Speaker 04

  And the person just won't listen. And at some point, I've had to say, it's just not worth my time. Because a person knows it all, you know, and they don't care to hear, you know, they have all the answers to everything. And I just, I don't want to waste my time or your time. And so if, if I have no value proposition, I don't know why we should be discussing it. So I've had that happen several times in my career.

• 33:17Ben Horowitz?

  Yeah, for me, the biggest thing is when they don't tell me the truth.

• 33:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:20Ben Horowitz?

  On purpose. You know, it's not that they don't know, they know. And they don't want me to know. And so I'm just like, why am I here? Under no circumstances do I want to work with somebody who doesn't tell me the truth, like consistently.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  What a marvelous evening. Thank you guys very much for coming.