Ben Horowitz (1) (1966–)

Packed with war stories about his experience being involved and building startups (largely as the CEO) there are many good insights.

Having to make so many decisions that could result in the life or death of a company would not have been easy. Some of my takeaways:
- Everyone makes mistakes so don’t be too hard on yourself
- Ask "What would you do if we went bankrupt?" for a source of good ideas and potential pivots
- Be open with the team about challenges (they may have great ideas)
- Make tough decisions and then act decisively
- Be visible and engaging
- "Take care of the people, the products and the profits in that order"
- Hire for strength, not for lack of weaknesses.
- Good product managers act as the CEO of their products.
- Managing by numbers is like painting by numbers. Can drive a short term focus.
- Anything you measure creates a side effect of behaviours.
- Hire people with the right type of ambition. Ambition for the company vs the team vs themselves.
- 1:1s should be considered the employee's meeting, not the manager's meeting.
- "Think of the organisational design as the communications architecture for your company. If you want people to communicate the best way to accomplish that is to make them report to the same manager"
- "The organisational design is also the architecture for how the company communicates with the outside world"
- Everything is hard when you don't know what you are doing.
- "People judge you for what you do not how you feel"… (mere)