Ben Horowitz

Reminds me of peace-time ceo vs war-time ceo [0]

I'm no CEO, but that's some decent advice on the blog, I'd want the CEO of my employer to read it. A question beckons...where would the likes of Amazon/Uber be if they followed rules and regulation? Microsoft, famously trampled its way to success.

My hypothesis is that out of some hundereds of CEOs that do break the rules, only a handful get caught, so the incentive simply isn't there, compared to accelerate growth that could be had by bending the rules, as it were, and acquiring enough wealth or importance that then you can lobby your way through and change the rules to suit your business or motivies.

Ben Horowitz (ironically a partner at A16Z, that's a major investor in Zenefits) wrote: "Wartime CEO cares about a speck of dust on a gnat’s ass if it interferes with the prime directive." And I tend to agree with that, too. But I never managed a fruit-stand in my life, so what do I know?

It's tough being a CEO. You need a team to make your way through, I guess.

[0] http://www.bhorowitz.com/peacetime_ceo_wartime_ceo

When executing layoffs like this, the hardest thing _for the company_ is to make sure that the negativity from laying people off doesn't destroy the company completely.

Ben Horowitz has some interesting insights on this in this blog article: http://www.bhorowitz.com/the_right_way_to_lay_people_off

I think this is essentially just a better way to make sure that the people 42 floors really wanted to keep knew personally that they were important to the future of the company.

And reading the article again, all they told people is that they were staying, and what was going to happen the following day. They didn't say that the people staying were told who was going to actually get let go.

I think in the context of a pivot away from a failing business model, this move seems smart, not wrong. People affected by the layoffs are being let go - their happiness, in some sense, is definitely going to be impacted by the layoffs. But for those people staying, it seems like they really needed to go through some stuff, and I'm sure they all appreciated the heads up.

The main problem is when you're going bear hunting and they bring back a stampede of wolves. Wholly impossible to kill with the gun you brought, but if you tweak it just a little, you can kill them as well. Then the next time it's a an antler, that you can't kill like that due to regulation, but with just a few tweaks again.

Great sales people are a game changer. People that can sell your vision and convince the audience that the problem you're solving is the biggest issue their business faces. They're completely indispensable. Bad sales guys, the type I've usually come across, bring too little domain and product knowledge to the table, and end up selling the completely wrong thing if they sell at all. Like Ben Horowitz said, great sales people protect your business [1], they don't wreak unnecessary havoc on it.

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2010/08/29/the-right-kind-of-ambition-2/

"Make sure you build a company where you want to work" is also one of the top-5 pieces of advice, yes. But I think the general argument is that at least at some points in a startup's life, it's an all-out fight for survival. Ben Horowitz probably wrote the best essay about this, peacetime vs. wartime ceo[1]. And he notes there are certain really good things that only happen in the "peacetime" type company (where it isn't about just survival).

In this case, maybe it's a cost/benefit thing. If the cost of going from an informal consensus common salary to a more transparent formal salary (in implementation cost, and risk if it screws up) is low, go for it. If it's something like "we're going to try a new thing: only working one day a week", the cost is probably really high, so you'd want to be sure it was core.

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/04/15/peacetime-ceowartime-ceo/

Academia is particularly political. I've worked in industry and seen a lot of politics there too, but in academia the problem is much worse. I think that this article is just examining one consequence of the politics in academia, which is that people sometimes come across as assholes. The article doesn't get to the root cause of the problem.

For a while now, I've been trying to understand why there is so much political behaviour in academia, as I really don't like it and I'm not interested in participating. Recently, I found the answer perfectly summarised in this essay by Ben Horowitz:

http://www.bhorowitz.com/how_to_minimize_politics_in_your_company

Ben also explains how to solve this problem, and I couldn't agree more.

This essay is included in his book, "The Hard Thing about Hard Things," which gets a lot of mentions on here and is definitely worth a read.

Because, you see, nobody cares. When things go wrong in your company, nobody cares. The press doesn’t care, your investors don’t care, your board doesn’t care, your employees don’t care, even your mama doesn’t care. Nobody cares.

And they are right not to care. A great reason for failing won’t preserve one dollar for your investors, won’t save one employee’s job, or get you one new customer. It especially won’t make you feel one bit better when you shut down your company and declare bankruptcy.

All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.[1]

[1] http://bhorowitz.com/2011/10/08/nobody-cares/