Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
by Ben Horowitz
This the real world, homie, school finished
They done stole your dreams, you dunno who did it.— Kanye West, Gorgeous
- Most management / self-help books try to provide recipes that don't exist instead of tackling the hard things -- our situations are complicated and dynamic
- This book is the backstory to his blog, his difficulties, and patterns
- "Because hip-hop artists aspire to be both great and successful and see themselves as entrepreneurs, many of the themes -- competing, making money, being misunderstood -- provide insight into the hard things."
- Chapter intro quotes Who We Be... I'm feeling it
- Communist grandparents, moved to Berkeley as a baby, the wagon story where he met his best friend
- "[That story] shaped my life. It taught me that being scared didn't mean I was gutless."
- "There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all."
- "Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity."
- Gathering different perspectives (e.g., calculus class vs. football team) to inform his outlook on world events helped him learn how to separate facts from perception
- On not relying on first impressions: met his now wife because when she canceled on their first date, after he made a nice dinner, he called and appealed to empathy that showing up "would be rude and leave a permanently poor impression", she came
- Quit his job at NetLabs to prioritize family after his father hinted that his job was taking over his life
- "In my mind, I was confident that I was a good person and not selfish, but my actions said otherwise. I had to stop being a boy and become a man. I had to put first things first. I had to consider the people who I cared about most before considering myself."
- Working at Lotus, a coworker showed him Mosaic: "It amazed me. It was so obviously the future, and I was so obviously wasting my time working on anything but the Internet."
- A few months later Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark (Founder of Silicon Graphics) founded Netscape, he interviewed with 22-year-old CTO Andreessen and hoped "despite my lack of proper business schooling"
- "A week later, I got the job. I was thrilled. I didn't really care what the offer was. I knew that Marc and Netscape would change the world, and I wanted to be part of it."
- In 16 months: inception to $3B IPO boom
- Then Microsoft bundled IE free with Windows 95 when Netscape's revenue was all browser sales, so they switched to making money off web servers... except IIS was better and faster than what they'd built
- "Most business relationships either become too tense to tolerate or not tense enough to be productive after a while. Either people challenge each other to the point where they don't like each other or they become complacent about each other's feedback and no longer benefit from the relationship. With Marc and me, even after eighteen years, he upsets me almost every day by finding something wrong in my thinking, and I do the same for him. It works."
- Sold to AOL, a few months in realized AOL saw itself as a media company, not a tech company: "Media companies focused on things like creating great stories whereas technology companies focused on creating a better way of doing things." (wow)
- Born out of the experience connecting AOL partners with their e-commerce platform, then watching partner sites crash from the traffic, they started with Loudcloud in '99 to invent the idea of cloud computing