If you follow tech, venture capital, business, leadership or just plain great thinking you need to subscribe to Ben Horowitz’s blog. Ben is the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, the co-founder of Loudcloud and one of he great, great thinkers in terms of leadership, start-ups and business. This post shows why. The world is a better place because of thinking like this.
http://bhorowitz.com/
“After raising our first round of funding for Loudcloud in 1999, we went to visit our new venture capital firm and meet their full team. As founding CEO, I remember being quite excited to meet our financial backers and talk about how we could partner to build a great company. That excitement took a sharp downhill turn when one of the top partners said to me, in front of my co-founders, “When are you going to get a real CEO?”
I was completely stunned—the comment knocked the wind out of me. Our largest investor had basically called me a fake CEO in front of my team. I said, “What do you mean?”—hoping he would revise his statement and enable me to save face. Instead he pressed on: “Someone who has designed a large organization, someone who knows great senior executives and brings prebuilt customer relationships, someone who knows what they are doing.”
I could hardly breathe. It was bad enough that he undermined my standing as CEO, but to make matters worse, I knew that at some level he was right. I didn’t have those skills. I had never done those things. And I did not know those people. I was the founding CEO, not a professional CEO. I could almost hear the clock ticking in the background as my time running the company quickly ran out.
Could I learn the job and build my network fast enough or would I lose the company? That question tortured me for months.
In the years that followed, I remained CEO, for better or worse. I worked incredibly hard to close the gap between what the partner had described and where I was at the start. Thanks to a lot of effort and help from friends and mentors, especially Bill Campbell, the company survived and ultimately became quite successful and valuable.
However, not a day went by when I didn’t think about that interaction. I always wondered how long I had to grow up and how I could find help to build my skills and make the necessary connections along the way.
Marc and I discussed this often. We wondered aloud why as founders we had to prove to our investors beyond a shadow of a doubt that we could run the company, rather than our investors assuming that we would run the company we’d created. This conversation ultimately became the inspiration for Andreessen Horowitz.
