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Ben Horowitz explains the biggest mistake founders make pitching VCs “The big mistake people make is they try to appeal too much to the venture capitalists. That’ll drive us crazy because it’s a little bit of a sign of anti-courage.” Ben shares an example of being pitched by founders...

28,216 次观看 • 4 个月前 •via X (Twitter)

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a16z co-founder Ben Horowitz: “Don’t follow your passion” Ben gives this advice to the Columbia University class of 2015: “Don’t follow your passion. Now I know you’re probably thinking: ‘That’s a really dumb idea because if you poll 1,000 people who are successful, they’ll all say they love what they do. And so the broad conclusion of the world is that if you do what you love, then you’ll be successful.’ But we’re engineers, so we know that might be true. It also might be the case that if you’re successful, you love what you do — you just love being successful, everybody loves you, it’s awesome. So which one is it?” He continues: “The first tricky thing about passions is they’re hard to prioritize. Are you more passionate about math or engineering? Are you more passionate about history or literature? Are you more passionate about video games or K-pop? These are tough decisions. How do you even know? On the other hand, what are you good at? Are you better at math or writing? That’s a much easier thing to figure out. The second thing that’s tricky if you’re going forward in time with this ‘follow your passion’ idea is that what you’re passionate about at 21 is not necessarily what you’re going to be passionate about at 40. Now this is true for boyfriends, as well as career choices. The third issue with following your passion is that you’re not necessarily good at your passion. Has anybody ever watched American Idol? So you know what I’m talking about. Just because you love singing doesn’t mean you should be a professional singer. And then finally, and most importantly, following your passion is a very ‘me-centered’ view of the world. And when you go through life, what you’ll find is that what you take out of the world — money, cars, stuff, accolades — is much less important than what you put into the world. And so my recommendation would be to follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better. That is the thing to follow.” Video source: a16z (2015)

Startup Archive

357,918 次观看 • 6 个月前

Ben Horowitz: “Culture is not a set of beliefs. It’s a set of actions.” In his book What You Do Is Who You Are, Ben explains that culture can feel abstract and secondary when you pit it against a concrete result that’s right in front of you. But culture is a strategic investment in the company doing things the right way when you are not looking. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. • Is that phone call so important I need to return it today or can it wait until tomorrow? • Can I ask for a raise before my annual review? • Is the quality if this document good enough or should I keep working on it? • Do I have to be on time for that meeting? • Should I stay at the Four Seasons or the Red Roof Inn? Should I go home at 5 p.m. or 8 p.m.? • Should we discuss the color of this new product for five minutes or thirty hours? • If I know something is badly broken in the company, should I say something? Whom should I tell? • Is winning more important than ethics? If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake. In the clip below, Ben cites the quote from The Way of the Samurai: “A culture is not a set of beliefs. It’s a set of actions” and explains: “[Culture is] not what you believe, it’s not what you think, it’s not what you tweet… who you are is what you do… the behaviors are the culture, not the values. When people say they have 20 values, I ask how many of those behaviors they have. If it’s none, your culture is hypocrisy.” Video source: Commonwealth Club World Affairs of California (2019)

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NVDIA CEO Jensen Huang: Your startup doesn't need a business plan “I didn’t know how to write a business plan… Making a financial forecast that nobody knows is going to be right or wrong turns out to not be that important.” Jensen continues: “I think that the art of writing a business plan ought to be much, much shorter. It should force you to concisely answer: What is the problem you’re trying to solve? What is the unmet need you believe will emerge? And what is it that you’re going to do that is sufficiently hard that when everybody else finds out it’s a good idea, they’re not going to swarm it and make you obsolete? It has to be sufficiently hard to do.” Marc Andreessen echoes similar points in a separate interview: “The process of planning is very valuable for forcing you to think hard about what you’re doing, but the actual plan that results from it is probably useless. In particular, now that we’re VCs, we’re evaluating pitches and when people come in, we want to hear their plan and we want to hear it in some detail because we want to see that they can think about the entire thing end-to-end. And if their initial plan doesn’t make sense, then obviously there’s an issue because they’re not quite capable of fully thinking this through. But when you get somebody who comes in and they present you the perfect plan and everything is fully integrated and makes sense, all you know from that is that they can come up with a good plan—which is good! But the odds that will be the plan they succeed on is still very small.” Video source: Acquired Podcast (2023)

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33,961 次观看 • 4 个月前