What You Do Is Who You Are
"Keynote Straight talk and advice on building and running a startup from Ben Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley's most respected voices"
Stats for nerds
7recommend
10mentions
10people
2019–2025years
70% recommend30% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Advice to Founders and CEOs
- Dear Founder (Maynard Webb) - The Hard Things About Hard Things (Ben Horowitz) - Straight Talk for Startups (Randy Komisar and Jantoon Reigersman) - The Founders’ Dilemmas (Noam Wasserman) - The Entrepreneur’s Daily Nietzsche (Brad Feld and Dave Jilk) - Build (Tony Fadell) - Zero to IPO (Frederic Kerrest) - The Great CEO Within (Matt Mochary)
Finance
- Wharton's Introduction to Financial Accounting course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/wharton-accounting](https://w... - How Finance Works: The HBR Guide to Thinking Smart About the Numbers (Mihir Desai) - Financial Intelligence for Entrepreneurs: What You Really Need to Know About the Numbers (Karen Berman and Joe Knight)
Open-Book Company (Employee Ownership, Financial Literacy, Goal-setting)
- The Great Game of Business (Jack Stack and Bo Burlingham)
Legal
- Acceleration (Ryan Roberts) - The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Law and Strategy (Constance Bagley and Craig Dauchy)
Company Strategy and Direction (post-product/market fit)
- Crossing the Chasm (Geoff Moore) - Zone to Win (Geoff Moore) - Only the Paranoid Survive (Andy Grove) - Blitzscaling (Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh) - The Innovator's Dilemma (Clayton Christensen) - Good to Great (Jim Collins) - Playing to Win (A.G. Lafley and Roger Martin) - Tape Sucks (Frank Slootman) - Strategy vol. 1&2 (Harvard Business Review)
Pricing
- Monetizing Innovation (Georg Tacke and Madhavan Ramanujan) - Confessions of the Pricing Man (Hermann Simon)
Startup Phase
- The Lean Startup (Eric Ries) - The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Steve Blank) - Zero to One (Peter Thiel)
Management/Leadership
- The Effective Executive (Peter Drucker) - Managing Humans (Michael Lopp) - The Art of Leadership (Michael Lopp) - High Output Management (Andy Grove) - Managing Oneself (Peter Drucker) - Essentials: Management (First Round Capital) - The Making of a Manager (Julie Zhuo) - The Powell Principles (Oren Harari) - Radical Candor (Kim Scott) - Leading Matters (John L. Hennessy) (fantastic book list in the coda) - Turn the Ship Around (L. David Marquet) (this is THE book on delegation) - Principles (Ray Dalio)
COO/Succession Planning
- Riding Shotgun (Nathan Bennett and Stephen A. Miles)
People Performance/HR/Culture
- Powerful (Patty McCord) - No Rules Rules (Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer) - Netflix culture deck - The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni) - Work Rules! (Laszlo Bock) - It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work (DHH and Jason Fried) - The Culture Map (Erin Meyer) - The Talent War (Mike Sarraille and George Randle) - Great People Decisions (Claudio Fernández-Aráoz) - The Holloway Guide to Technical Recruiting and Hiring (Ozzie Osman) - Punished by Rewards (Alfie Kohn)
Purpose, Passion, and Self
- Start with Why (Simon Sinek) - What You Do is Who You Are (Ben Horowitz) - Drive (Daniel Pink) - Mindset (Carol Dweck) - Grit (Angela Duckworth) - The Almanack of Naval Ravikant (Eric Jorgenson)
Fundraising/VC
- Secrets of Sand Hill Road (Scott Kupor) - Venture Deals (Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson) - Raising Venture Capital (Andy Sparks) - The Business of Venture Capital (Mahendra Ramsinghani) - Done Deals (Udayan Gupta) - The Power Law (Sebastian Mallaby) - VC (Tom Nicholas)
Board
- Boardroom Excellence (Paul Brountas) - Startups Boards (Brad Feld and Mahendra Ramsinghani)
M&A
- Winning (Jack Welch) - M&A chapter - Connecting the Dots (John Chambers) - M&A chapter
Marketing
- Data-Driven Marketing (Mark Jeffery) - Positioning (Al Ries and Jack Trout) - Scientific Advertising (Claude Hopkins) - Traction (Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares) - Behind the Cloud (Marc Benioff and Carlye Adler) - Ogilvy on Advertising (David Ogilvy) - Marketing High Technology (William Davidow)
Psychology
- Influence (Robert Cialdini)
Negotiation
First, read Influence (under Psychology), then, in order
- Thinking in Bets (Annie Duke) - Getting to Yes (Roger Fisher and William Ury) - Never Split the Difference (Chris Voss) - The Bald Truth (David Falk)
Self
- The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey)
Design and UX
- Creative Confidence (Tom Kelley and David Kelley)
AI (Machine Learning, Deep Learning/Neural Networks)
- Andrew Ng's AI for Everyone course: [https://www.coursera.org/learn/ai-for-everyone](https://www....
Growth (Data Science, etc.)
- Hacking Growth (Sean Ellis and Morgan Brown)
Graph Theory
Product
- Inspired (Marty Cagan) - Joel on Software (Joel Spolsky)
Customer Loyalty/Customer Success
- Delivering Happiness (Tony Hsieh) - Setting the Table (Danny Meyer)
Finding a Startup Job
- Entering StartupLand (Jeffrey Bussgang)
CIO as ICP
- The CIO Paradox (Martha Heller) - Be the Business (Martha Heller)
Stories
- Made in America (Sam Walton) - Shoe Dog (Phil Knight) - The Everything Store (Brad Stone) - Built from Scratch (Bernie Marcus and Arthur Blank) - Hard Drive (James Wallace) - Steve Jobs (Walter Isaacson) - Elon Musk (Ashlee Vance) - Creativity, Inc. (Ed Catmull) - The Ride of a Lifetime (Bob Iger) - Valley of Genius (Adam Fisher) - The Idea Factory (Jon Gertner) - Dealers of Lightning (Michael Hertzik) - Idea Man (Paul Allen) - Pour Your Heart Into It (Howard Schultz)
- Books that I read (and re-read) in 2022 that I'd recommend to folks on HN. Ordered from most enjoyable / insightful to least.
- Edward O. Wilson - Biophilia
- Will Durant - The Lessons Of History
- Freeman J. Dyson - A Many-Colored Glass
- Venkatesh Rao - The Gervais Principle
- Ray Bradbury - The Martian Chronicles
- Colin Wilson - The Outsider
- Stanislaw Lem - Cyberiad
- Antonio Martinez - Chaos Monkeys
- Ben Horowitz - What You Do Is Who You Are
- Alice Flaherty - The Midnight Disease
- Oliver Sacks - Musicophilia
- Ken Binmore - Rational Decisions
- Josh Kaufman - The Personal MBA
Edit: All these books made the cut, there were others that I never completed / disliked / wouldn't recommend, or were just plain mediocre / bad.
- Author here! I didn’t even think about it from an organizational learning perspective - this was written with individual learning in mind. I run a product team and this is a challenge we have as well - I think that requires a balance between building processes, ownership, and visibility efforts that keep organizational learning growing. All together that creates a culture - it’s not the processes themselves, but shared enforcement and encouragement that keeps organizational learning going. Ben Horowitz’a book “What you do is who you are” is good on that as well. Worth a deeper dive :)
- Look up the “shocking rule” principle from Horowitz’s “What you do is who you are”.
Sometimes you need to take a dramatic action to make it clear what your culture is (or what you want it to be).
It’s perhaps unfair to one of those 6 who was hypothetically just being polite and pretending to laugh along. But you can bet the rest of the org got the message loud and clear.
Sadly with entrenched -isms like sexism, it seems to require a drastic action like this to really make a change in org culture. It’s really hard to “make the company less sexist” if there is an entrenched bias among employees. And you may just need to fire a bunch of otherwise good people to get rid of it.
- I really liked Ben Horowitz's new book "What You Do Is Who You Are". However, the only passage that I disliked and stood out to me is when he defended David Drummond for his ability to thrive at Google for a long time despite the corporate culture changing.
This was after Drummond was called out publicly for abandoning his kid he had with a subordinate: https://www.law.com/corpcounsel/2018/10/25/report-alphabet-c...
I am sure he's made a lot of people money, but it's not like Google couldn't find a great legal chief who also wasn't a terrible person.
Edit: First article I linked to was paywalled, so here is the underlying story: https://medium.com/@jennifer.blakely/my-time-at-google-and-a...
- You know I don't normally recommend books I read or have read, but both of these books below really resonate with me:
"The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=the+hard+thing+about+hard+things&...
"What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture": https://www.amazon.com/What-You-Do-Who-Are/dp/B07X36GGQ7/ref...
