...idra had previously worked at The Washington Post’s interactive division. He had been talking to Hughes about the magazine for the better part of a year and had recently read and become enamored with the book The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers, written by Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz and the former C.E.O. of Loudcloud, a software company. The book focuses on the “struggle” of running a start-up and is largely a collection of blog posts that Horowitz composed over the years. It’s not hard to see why the book might have struck a chord with an owner seeking a dramatic change. Horowitz delivers this message about what the hard things really are: “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those ‘great people’ develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things.”
The Complex Power Coupledom of Chris Hughes and Sean Eldridge | Vanity Fair
9 years
..., the six-feet-eight Bill Gurley, another outspoken giant with a large Twitter following, advised Horowitz to cut Andreessen and his six-million-dollar investment out of the company. Andreessen said, “I can’t stand him. If you’ve seen ‘Seinfeld,’ Bill Gurley is my Newman”—Jerry’s bête noire.
The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker
9 years
...om at his relatives’ farm was an outhouse. Everyone believed in dowsing and the weather reports in the Farmers’ Almanac. One winter, with money tight, his father decided to stop paying for gas heat, “and we spent a great deal of time chopping fucking wood.” The local movie theatre, one town over, was an unheated room that doubled as a fertilizer-storage depot; Andreessen wore a puffy Pioneer Hi-Bred coat to watch “Star Wars” while sitting on the making...
The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker
9 years
Venture capitalists with a knack for the 1,000x know that true innovations don’t follow a pattern. The future is always stranger than we expect: mobile phones and the Internet, not flying cars. Doug Leone, one of the leaders of Sequoia Capital, by consensus Silicon Valley’s top firm, said, “The biggest outcomes come when you break your previous mental model. The black-swan events of the past forty years—the PC, the router, the Internet, th...
The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker
9 years
...last time. As Andreessen drank an iced tea in two gulps and began to roam the room, Doshi called up a slide that showed his competitors—Localytics, Amplitude, Google Analytics—grouped into quadrants. Then he explained how he’d crush each quadrant. “I want to buy a machine-learning team, I want to buy cutting-edge server hardware,” he said. Indicating his all-but-obliterated competitors, he added, “I want to buy stuff no one here can afford.” ...
The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker
9 years
...nched, six years ago, it has vaulted into the top echelon of venture concerns. Competing V.C.s, disturbed by its speed and its power and the lavish prices it paid for deals, gave it another nickname: AHo. Each year, three thousand startups approach a16z with a “warm intro” from someone the firm knows. A16z invests in fifteen. Of those, at least ten will fold, three or four will prosper, and one might...
The Mind of Marc Andreessen - The New Yorker
9 years
...aluation. This wasn't unique to Gillette: other richly-valued blue chips like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Disney saw their share prices peak a year or two before the general market.
Narrative uber alles
Good to Great is essentially narrational, and Collins omits or downplays things that contradicts his narrative. His descriptions of individual people are idealized, which calls their accuracy into question. Every good-to-great CEO is a mild-mannered company man with unexpected reserves of strength-- it's Clark Kent as CEO. Collins' description of Gillette's leader is typical:
[Gillette CEO Colman Mockler's] placid persona hid an inner intensity, a dedication to making anything he touched the best it could possibly be...
It wouldn't have been an option within Colman Mockler's value system to take the easy path and turn the company over to those who would milk it like a cow, destroying its potential to become great, any more than it would have been an option for Lincoln to sue for peace and lose forever the chance of an enduring great nation.
Ron Perelman attempted a hostile takeover of Gillette in the 1980s. Good to Great describes the company heroically fighting Perelman off ("In the proxy fight, senior Gillette executives reached out...
Young Money: Good to Great is a flawed book
9 years
... of the market-beating performances cataloged were due primarily to financial leverage used by the organization in question, above and beyond the positive effects of their organizational structure."
Some of the good companies were smaller than their comparisons when they began the transition from good to great. Simply being smaller and having more room to grow might have contributed to their outperformance. Collins ignores this, e.g. when he compares the performance of Circuit City-- a tiny near-bankrupt retailer when it began its transition from good to great-- with General Electric, one of America's largest companies:
If you had to choose between $1 invested in Circuit City or $1 invested in General Electric on the day that the legendary Jack Welch took over GE in 1981 and held to January 1,2000, you would have been better off with Circuit City-by six times.
• The winning companies' successful decisions weren't necessarily independent of the losing companies' unsuccessful decisions. In some cases, a winning company's decision turned out well because it...
Young Money: Good to Great is a flawed book
9 years
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