Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers. It’s about office design, it’s about screening out the wrong kinds of employees, it’s about values, it’s about fun, it’s about alignment, it’s about finding like-minded employees, it’s about being cult-like. So what is culture? Does culture matter? If…
More »The other day, a friend of mine asked me whether CEOs were born or made. I said, “That’s kind of like asking if Jolly Ranchers are grown or made. CEO is a very unnatural job.” After saying it and seeing the surprised look on his face, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t as obvious as…
More »Every entrepreneur starts her company with a clear vision for success. You will create an amazing environment and hire the smartest people to join you. Together you will build a beautiful product that delights customers and makes the world just a little bit better. It’s going to be absolutely awesome. Then, after working night and…
More »When I started Loudcloud, I hired the best people that I knew—people whom I respected, trusted and liked. Like me, many of them did not have deep experience in the jobs that I gave them, but they worked night and day to make it work and they made great contributions to the company. Yet for…
More »This post is dedicated to the late Al Davis. Rest in peace. “Just win baby.” —Al Davis Back in the bad old days when I was running Loudcloud, I thought to myself: how could I have possibly prepared for this? How could I know that half our customers would go out of business? How could…
More »When you recruit an executive, you paint a beautiful picture of her future in your company. You describe in great depth and color how awesome it will be for her to accept your offer and how much better it will be for her than joining that other company. Then one day you realize you must…
More »I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got…
More »Great chefs find things in the style, presentation and technique used in a meal that the ordinary diner never sees. Great musicians hear things that casual listeners completely miss. CEOs evaluate other CEOs much differently than the popular press or the general population. In mainstream thinking, the absolute success of the company determines the CEO’s…
More »TOM HAGEN Mike, why am I out? MICHAEL CORLEONE You’re not a wartime consigliere. Things may get tough with the move we’re trying. —Scene from The Godfather Recently, Eric Schmidt stepped down as CEO of Google and founder Larry Page took over. Much of the news coverage focused on Page’s ability to be the “face…
More »In Jim Collins’ best selling management book Good to Great, he demonstrates through massive research and comprehensive analysis that when it comes to CEO succession, internal candidates dramatically outperform external candidates. The core reason is knowledge. As I discussed in Why We Prefer Founding CEOs, knowledge of technology, prior decisions, culture, personnel, et al tend…
More »Shortly after we sold Opsware to Hewlett-Packard, I had a conversation with the legendary venture capitalist Doug Leone of Sequoia Capital. He wanted to hear the story of how we went from doomed in the eyes of the world to a $1.6B outcome with no recapitalization. After I took him through the details including several…
More »Stay in your place While I sit here and rule I’m king of a cow And I’m king of a mule —Yertle the Turtle In my last post, I mentioned that you should strive to hire people with the right kind of ambition. Surprisingly to me, I received a large number of responses from readers…
More »In all my years in business, I have yet to hear someone say: “I love corporate politics.” On the other hand, I meet plenty of people who complain bitterly about corporate politics—sometimes even in the companies they run. So, if nobody loves politics, why all the politics? Political behavior almost always starts with the CEO.…
More »Recently, I was reminded of one of the more annoying things that happens to the CEO when things go horribly wrong in your business. After a terrible event such as a lay off or a whiffed quarter or getting stomped by the competition in a critical deal, you run the scenarios of doom through your…
More »No position in a company is more important than the CEO and, as a result, no job gets more scrutiny. Sadly, little of this analysis benefits CEOs as most of the discussions happen behind their backs. This post is a step in the opposite direction. By describing how Andreessen Horowitz evaluates CEOs, I am at the same time describing what I…
More »Most managers seem to feel that training employees is a job that should be left to others. I, on the other hand, strongly believe that the manager should do it himself. —Andy Grove, High Output Management When I first became a manager, I had mixed feelings about training. Logically, training for hi-tech companies made sense,…
More »The other day I was talking to a couple of friends of mine, one a VC and the other a CEO. During the meeting, we were discussing one of the executives at the CEO’s company. The executive in question performs exceptionally, but lacks experience managing at larger scale. My friend the VC innocently advised the…
More »When my partner Marc wrote his post describing our firm, the most controversial component of our investment strategy was our preference for founding CEOs. The conventional wisdom says a startup CEO should make way for a professional CEO once the company has achieved product-market fit. In this post, I describe why we prefer to fund…
More »You’re a small fry and I’m a Big Mac. —The Bingo Boys So you’ve achieved product market fit and you are ready to start building the company. The board encourages you to bring in some “been there done that” executives who will provide the right financial, sales and marketing expertise to help you transition from…
More »[This blog post was originally published on All Things Digital on March 17, 2010.] Much has been written and said about the current economic downturn and the resulting lessons on how to run high-technology companies. Quite famously, Sequoia Capital, the premier venture capital firm in Silicon Valley, held a mandatory all-CEO meeting in fall 2008…
More »[This blog post was originally published on TechCrunch on March 14, 2010.] At Andreessen Horowitz, we favor founders running the company. The reasons are many (and will be the topic of a future blog post). As a result, we spend a great deal of time thinking about the characteristics required to be a founding CEO.…
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