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Chapter 1: What is the founder's primary responsibility according to Ben Horowitz?
You people are doing everything but your job. You're writing these requirements. You're pitching customers, this and that. You're doing all this stuff. It's a lot of work. But your job is right product, right time. And if you don't give me the right product at the right time, I don't give a fuck what you do. The story of the company is, why do we exist? Why should this be a company?
Why should you join this company? Why should you invest in this company? The why is the depth. If you know the why, I don't even have to tell you the what, because you know what to do.
Founders spend time on everything. Hiring, fundraising, product specs, customer conversations. But at the end of the day, there's only one thing that determines whether a company works.
Chapter 2: How does storytelling relate to a company's strategy?
Whether you deliver the right product at the right time. Everything else supports that goal. Strategy evolves as you learn. The story becomes how you communicate it. And the team exists to execute it. But none of it matters if the product isn't right. In a world where tools are changing faster than ever, the core challenge remains the same.
Here's Ben Horowitz speaking at A16Z's Speedrun on what it takes to get it right. Another challenge that we talk about here at Speedrun often is sort of building teams. Many of the folks who are bringing on their first employees, their first sort of set of hires.
What do you find has worked best in teams trying to attract top talent early on when they don't have as much of a brand or a track record just yet?
Well, if you have a brand, all you have is a story, right? So this is something that I think founders... often neglect over time is the so the story of the company is also the strategy of the company nobody's got some strategy in their back pocket that's entirely secret and then they've got a story that's different so like that's the one thing and the truth about strategy is
It's not like a meeting that you have and you go out with your team and go like, what's our strategy? Okay, everybody give me your input. And then we assemble this strategy by committee. What really is happening is you have the initial idea, you're learning about the market, you're learning about the customers, you're learning about the technology, you're learning about each other.
And in your mind, you're kind of adjusting that strategy a little bit at a time every day. But then a quarter later, it's actually pretty different than what you started with. And so it's really important that you keep upgrading your story, the articulation of your story.
Like I would definitely recommend it be in written form and it kind of be something that you can share with everybody in the company, but everybody you're recruiting, everybody you're trying to raise money from, like all your constituents, every customer, what the hell is the story of this thing? And the problem that I think founders have is it doesn't feel like work.
Like, what are you doing today? Oh, I'm working on my story. That doesn't sound like work. Why don't you have like OpenClaw write that for you, motherfucker. But sorry for the language. I used to be a CEO. So because it doesn't feel like work, people don't do it, but it's probably one of the most important parts of the job is to have that thing really.
And even like today at the firm, John will tell you, like I write the story every once in a while, not all the time, but... It's very helpful for people to just go, and it's helpful for me to go, this is what we're trying to do here.
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Chapter 3: What should founders focus on when building a team?
But you just have to have a running articulation of the why.
Do you feel like in an AI world where now the nature of talent and teams is changing very rapidly, do you feel like founders should be trying to look for particular traits or skills in the employees that they're hiring? What would you look for that's different than talent from pre-AI?
So I think it's a little hard to know. I mean, it depends on the position. It depends on the company and all those things. But I do think two things that, at least in Silicon Valley, have probably been underrated over time are going to increase in importance anyway, which are creativity and ability to create and maintain relationships. I think those are things that
are hard to get out of at least today's AI in a very good way. So if you don't have instincts around those things, I don't know that all the AI in the world can help you. Whereas kind of like the grind-em-out tasks, AI is already really good at. So those are things like, do you have original ideas?
Can you establish and maintain very high quality, high fidelity relationships with people off the rip? I think people don't think about that enough in my business. I would say people don't value that highly enough. One big advantage I think that we have at the firm is we really look for that on the relationship side. But many firms just ignore that whole thing. Like, it's not a thing.
It's a thing.
And on the creativity side, there's an element of taste there as well, right? Do you have good taste in decision-making and the people that you hire and so on and so forth? Yeah.
But just like idea, you know, I find what's very valuable is just people have new ideas on what to go pursue. So... Well, I'll give you an example. So we had kind of a legendary marketing organization that we had built, but we built in 2009. So it was very oriented towards traditional media. And then it was very hard to get breakthrough ideas about how to use new media.
And then as we brought in people who were very, very creative on that front, all of a sudden we were able to do that super effectively. But it's difficult. Not everybody has a ton of ideas around a new thing. That's actually not that common.
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