by Ben Horowitz

• Ask: What am I not doing?
• Tell it like it is, don’t try to be overly positive and bend the truth
  • The more brains working in a hard problem the better.
  • Given enough eyeball, all bugs are shallow

Setting goals & metrics:

• Setting a quantitative goal is going to dictate behavior of your people.
• If you set a quantitative goal without qualitative constraints you may get unwanted results
  • Ie. Ben’s example at Loudcloud of trying to reduce a majority of their deals closing in the last day of the quarter. incentivizing deals to close early in the quarter also resulted in lower average deal size
• Managing strictly by the numbers is like painting by numbers – it’s amateur.

Executive One’s & Two’s:

• Ones love making decisions and love gathering information  from a variety of sources. Ones are great strategic thinkers and can get bored with the execution details of running a company.
• Two’s like the process of running a company and enjoy super clear goals. They like to participate in the strategic conversations but have difficulty with the strategic process itself
• Ideally your CEO has competencies of both

Follow the leader – key characteristics of the best leaders:

1. articulate the Vision: the Steve Jobs attribute. Can a leader articulate the vision even in the darkest days when it should no longer make sense to continue
2. The right kind of ambition:  the Bill Campbell attribute -get people  to work for you because they have your best interest in mind.
3. The ability to achieve the vision: the Andy grove attribute – do I think she can actually achieve the vision? See Andy navigating intel from a memory business to a microprocessor business.

Becoming CEO:

Creating a culture of delivering feedback is key

Nobody likes the shit sandwich

Keys to delivering good feedback:

• Be authentic
• Come from the right place
• Don’t get personal
• Don’t clown people in front of their peers
• Feedback is not one size fits all
• Be direct, not mean

Feedback is dialogue, not monologue