Ben Horowitz: evaluation

Transcript context

…You said that one of maybe the main reason founders fail the CEOs is they lose confidence, and you had some ideas that you guys have to help founders work through that. Are there a couple you can share how you help? Yeah. So we do a lot of things on that. So the kind of design of the firm is about confidence. So the first thing is, well, what would give you? Well if you can get stuff done. So what if I could give you a network that's as good as Bob Iger's network, day one, the day you stepped into the job. And so we have 600 people at the firm and why is that? Well, most of them are building that network for you, so you can call any CEO or anybody in Washington or any executive or that kind of thing and get them on the phone and they'll talk to you and you can kind of deal with that thing. And then that just makes you feel like a CEO. And then we have a lot of people in the firm like myself, who you can talk to on a CEO to CEO basis, as opposed to an investor to CEO, and just kind of feel that. Early in the firm days, we used to do this thing. I think I'm going to bring back in some form this thing called the CEO barbecue. And it was like a lot of people have these events where they bring in speakers and this and that and the other. And I always felt like those were one, they were too many days. And then sometimes what they said wasn't really applicable and that kind of thing. So I said, "Why don't we just have a barbecue?" I would barbecue. We get everybody in my backyard because was 500 people at the peak, which is why at the stuff I couldn't cook that much, that kind of stuff. And then we'd have Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg and Kanye West, and so you're a CEO in there with portfolio. You're like, "Wow, I must be important. I'm here with all these guys" and we're just hanging out having a drink, eating barbecue. And so then when I go back to my company, I feel like I am somebody. And okay, I might not be perfect at all this, but I am really a CEO. I was at the CEO barbecue, for crying out loud and that kind of thing. But the whole idea was always like, "Okay, do you feel like you can do it?" Because that's half the battle? And look, having been in and every CEO has been in a position where they feel like, "Well, maybe I shouldn't be the one running this thing. Maybe it's just too big for me." And that's a bad, you don't want to go there. And because as we've said, founders can get to the next product and that's something that almost no professional CEO is able to do. There've been rare cases, but very rare. So clearly you've worked with a lot of companies, a lot of founders. Let me kind of zoom out a little bit and ask you this question. What's the most counterintuitive lesson you've learned about building companies that goes against common startup wisdom?…

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