Ben Horowitz: belief

Transcript context

…I know it's the lightning round, but can you just share one example of something he did that was like, wow, that's a really good lesson, someone trying to create a good culture that worked for him? Yeah. So one of the things that he did that I thought was really smart is ... Well, he did a couple of things. One is just a simple thing. He just made everybody eat lunch together in the gang, just to build rapport, relationship, trust, like it's all one thing. We're all together on that. And I think particularly in the remote work world and so forth, people really underestimate how powerful just that idea can be. And then another thing he did is, he made morality ... he had very specific things about, you had to be good to your word internally and externally. So normally a gang, like I said, it's kind of a kin-based culture thing. But it made it much more powerful when he said, "Look, you can't do devious shit outside the gang either." And he had a bunch of examples of that, that I went through in the book. Like I said, because you're building it from zero, you really have to take a hard line on things that I think people in companies don't even take a hard line on. Is it okay to lie internally? Probably not. Is it okay to lie to a customer? Well, in some organizations it is, but in Shaka's organization, that's as big a penalty as lying internally. These things, I think, end up being really important. We're going to link to this book. This is, What You Do is Who You Are. This is your second book that fewer people know about. And this is one of the stories you tell and just what the lessons are for building-…

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