Which Way Do You Run?
a16z.com
a16z.com
[Me gets to the end of the article] Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense.
I'd argue a great engineer is someone who can anticipate exactly how a software product is going to evolve, where it will not scale properly in those cases and see if the code they are writing today is potentially going to be a problem then or not (and play a fine line game of not over-engineering vs. preparing for future circumstances).
Then I ran into something truly awful, and got drugged (and possibly raped, though I will never know). I've been afraid since then, and it's gonna take me a good long while to shake it off. It has immensely negatively affected my life, and it's made me question my judgement in a lot of situations - because I'm pretty sure the experience is only unique in that the stars aligned, not that the intent, will, and opportunity wasn't there in plenty of previous places, only didn't all line up before.
I don't have anything that I can take from it, except a certainty that Chestertons fence is real, and a lot of things that are looked down upon are looked down upon for good reason.
In the context that Ben is writing this post (founding a startup), basically the worst thing that can happen to you is that your company goes bankrupt and you have to look for a job. It feels a lot scarier than that because your ego gets wrapped up in the startup and all sorts of negative events can be existential threats to the startup, but there are basically no physical threats to your person other than yourself. If a tiger comes running at you or someone points a gun at you, by all means, be afraid and run away, but if you're signing a $30M lease, be afraid and then face that fear and rationally analyze the risks.
This post reeks of the privilege of a VC who sells self-help books.
To put it kindly, I disagree.
It's not that you need to spot a ball is about to drop and catch it. Founders are up at 2am and every e-staff & advice meeting thinking about them & then acting on them. However, running at all of them will give you a heart attack, burn out your team, and derail your mission.
Instead, you have to accept that a ton of balls are dropping, and somehow get good at guiding which & how. Now that's a chapter I'd like to read :)
That’s what we need in a modern non-jungle world - understand your impulses, but be enough in control or yourself to rationally examine your environmental triggers, counteract your adrenaline and logically decide your future actions.
Save the evolutionary adaptions for your camping trip.
Should have have addressed something with his head of sales, or should he have handled his expanding workforce differently?
Or something else entirely? Maybe the point is that ignoring evidence that the market is turning can be a disaster?
But he didn't. He delegated the space problem so he didn't have to think about it anymore. And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story).
It's not about ignoring evidence that the market is turning. It's not that specific. It's that your spidey-sense, for lack of a better word - your gut, your sense of fear - is telling you that something is a problem. You can then either engage that problem, or avoid that problem. And if you avoid it, you will screw up.
But it's incredibly difficult to face our gut fear. So we don't do it.
That's the problem with companies that raise gobs of money -- zero discipline in spending.
Loudcloud was a terrific concept in its day. It could have become what AWS has become. But it was growing because money was just getting poured into dotcom startups. When the money dried up, they were stuck with all this hardware and staff they had needed. It's a credit to Horowitz that he saved even the sliver he did.
I'm always baffled that people who flop in the most spectacular way manage to convince others to buy books with advice from them.
I distinctly remember an article about a year or so ago touting a new managing partner(?) at a VC who ran his one and only startup into the ground. The logic was "He can help you not to do what he did"
Isn't that confusing what someone who fails should do ( do it again/do something else/try another path) with what those who see it should do ( not listen to whoever failed about how to succeed at doing what the failed person did )?
More than ever, we need to tone down the clickbait, put it to perspective, and understand if it's something we should give attention to. HN does this in a quick manner
It's a good point albeit expressed obscurely. It took me two reads to get it, which seems about average judging from some of the other comments here.
One helpful thing though is the same framework I use to manage my anxiety is a great decision making tool for business. Forcing yourself to actually ground yourself where you are right now and look at what's actually going on. Basically cutting through the meta narrative and seeing things as they are. Early on in dealing with my anxiety the name of the game was pain avoidance. Use whatever I could to go numb basically. After a while, some of us at least, realize what's happening and are able to take the steps to change that perspective. Going numb constantly is no way to live. A focus on the process and what's happening right now as opposed to the maybe outcomes is really key. You learn to basically coexist with the anxiety, and as weird as it sounds, find a place of peace inside of it. To me that's what this post is saying. See things as they are, and lean into the pain rather than go numb. Ironically when you do that you realize the imagined horror is usually worse than the reality and in terms of business you make the hard decisions to get things done.
This post resonated pretty deeply with me and I appreciate him sharing.
Wouldn’t it be less stressful to get a job?
Trial and error over a period of about 8 years. Lots of suggestions from folks. Some worked out, some didn't. Lots of incremental change, but mediation, exercise, stoic journaling, and therapy were the big 4 leaps I made. The therapy mostly focused on process orientation and self esteem/self worth for me personally.
>How long did it take before you were able to see positive changes?
Usually a few weeks with any of the 4 above. If I keep in my routine I usually can feel positive change within 1-2 weeks.
>Any diet and/or daily routine changes?
Limiting alcohol helps a lot. Generally avoiding processed foods and high sugar or starch foods helps. Supplements are a very mixed bag, but vitamin d, vitamin b, fish oil, magnesium, a mens daily vitamin help. Everything else either had no effect or negative effects for me. Also it seems silly but drinking enough water is a big deal.
>Wouldn’t it be less stressful to get a job?
Almost certainly it would be easier. Though a different more existential anxiety sets in after a while whenever I stop working on my own thing so it's a bit of give and take.
- "fear": "dot com boom will crash" ... but I can't articulate why I believe that in perfectly logical statements
- option (1) is to run away or ignore the fear: delegate to somebody to go ahead and buy more office space for $30 million and make the fire marshall happy
- option (2) to "run towards the fear" is to cut spending immediately which may also include laying people off. E.g. create a new MS Excel spreadsheet, put all the staff's salaries on it and start making the hard decisions of who needs to be let go. In other words, your business actions still need to match your fears -- even if your "fears" are poorly articulated gut feelings
As a bonus, the painful exercise of doing Option 2 may reveal the logic of why you believe the dot com boom is ending.
(Of course, an alternative to Option 2 is to find new revenue but that's often 100x more difficult than cutting costs.)
In other words, it's way easier to have your office admin shop for a new office building than to fire people -- some of whom are your friends that took a risk and depend on you.
In his Personal Memoirs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S....), Ulysses S. Grant wrote of how he learned this lesson one of the first times he led troops into battle in the Civil War:
I received orders to move against Colonel Thomas Harris, who was said to be encamped at the little town of Florida[, Missouri], some twenty-five miles south of where we then were...
Harris had been encamped in a creek bottom for the sake of being near water. The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet. As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp,and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.
Perhaps he's writing for a particular audience. Anyone who's run a company for any meaningful length of time will be nodding along as they read this essay.
That's sort of the middle road, between buying office space and firing people, right?
The 1999 to 2001 time period of home-internet was mostly slow dial-up modems instead of high-speed broadband. I'm unaware of any high-velocity SV company that had an army of remote workers collaborating and checking in code over dial-up. (Yes, Linus Torvalds Linux project was collaborating over email but that's a different cadence.)
In the story, he says they lost half their customers in the dot-com crash. That magnitude of revenue loss is going to overwhelm the savings of having people work from home and layoffs will happen anyway.[0] The company still has to pay employees' expensive full-time salaries whether they're in the office or remote.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudclo...
Owners have infinite ways to allocate their time. Many owners feel problems in their gut but they are uncomfortable to deal with, and so instead they do other things (which are easy to rationalize as more important). E.g. firing someone, perhaps someone that was just hired two months ago who moved across the country to take the job but is not working out. Many people would come up with a hundred reasons to keep the person even if their gut is saying to fire them, because of how uncomfortable it would be to actually do it. This article is saying you need to run towards those moments of fear and discomfort and do the right thing, not run away from them and dig the hole deeper.
There’s nothing revelatory about telling someone to “face your fears” but a pseudo-philosopher VC is trying to pass this off like it’s this sage piece of advice no one has heard before.
Ben has done it. His experience, and the way he describes them, speaks to me. His first book, the Hard Thing About Hard Things, is therapy for founders. I don't think he's trying to prescribe anything new.
To paraphrase something that stuck with me: "the mechanics of starting a business are easy and can be taught to anyone. the emotions involved are very difficult and it's [Ben's] job at A16Z to help founders deal with them." I really appreciate what Ben is doing.
Totally.
1) Vague advice is much easier to sell and elevate ones position (look at Tony Robbins). There's no negatively correlative impact to the advice so its hard to argue if someone is wrong.
2) Providing concrete advice is impossible to "scale" (e.g. books, podcasts, video, etc) as it requires context.
Wouldn't that make it easier to scale, since there's more context you can provide?
Everything you said sounds great for the person selling advice, but not great for the consumer, which was the point of the original comment.
If that's the case (I personally think it often is), then it that much more important to run towards the fear in the relatively rare cases that you do see the possible indicators.
I have also found it useful to document key assumptions, and the reasons behind those assumptions, and then compare to actual as actual materializes. That comparison sometimes unearths problems (or opportunities) that may have otherwise been obscured by other items.
Any other methods that folks use to have more open eyes and ears to potential problems, or to assure you act upon them in the right manner without rationalizing them away?
It's probably finding the office space themselves, and presumably for cheaper. But this is kind of left for the reader to conclude, so I'm not sure what the message is here.
I think the CEO's overall point is still valid, but in a different way. If you are a leader with substantive responsibilities, you'll get tons of "bad feelings", and some subset of them will turn out to be real problems. One sign of a good leader is how accurate they are at predicting which ones are real problems. This is one place where experience matters a lot, because experience (applied well) helps a lot to translate the bad gut feeling into targeted investigation.
* Fire people?
* Do a cost-benefit analysis - could they sustain a new space? Or would they have to move everyone to somewhere cheaper?
* Would shifting some people to work remotely work?
Delegating getting more office space was running away from fear because it was the option that required the least thinking about his fear.
Stopping and thinking critically about the situation, questioning assumptions, analyzing KPIs, analyzing risk levels... (or delegating the above to a capable team member with the understanding that you want the truth), asking thoughtful, open-ended questions of subordinates --- essentially, opening your mind up and allowing yourself to carefully consider all potential outcomes, even the nasty ones that you would rather remain blissfully ignorant of.
As a leader, you want to believe everything is going along just fine. Sometimes when it's not, you sense that as a fear-in-the-gut, and the temptation is to ignore it. The message here is - don't.
What I’m not quite clear on is how he would’ve handled the situation differently by “running towards” the fear. Handle the building search personally? Letting the Fire Marshall shut him down? Act on his gut feeling that something was wrong and start slow slowing down? Those don’t seem like that’s what he meant. Maybe I would understand more if I knew more of his story.
To me the biggest takeaway might not be what the author intended... never ever sign leases which put unreasonably large amounts of cash at risk. To answer his question, I'd certainly run away from those!
https://a16z.com/2011/03/16/titles-and-promotions/
https://a16z.com/2015/03/16/the-sad-truth-about-developing-e...
I don't have this skill automatically so I'm trying to cultivate it. Ironically, I'm here on HN because I'm dodging a fear.
0: As an antonym of the famous schlep-blindness http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html
Every time I read the philosophizing of a venture capitalist, it sounds more and more like an indoctrination into how to run your company in the venture capitalist's favor.
If you're a venture capitalist with a portfolio of dozens of CEOs running toward their fear, odds are a few of them are going to crash through and win, and the rest you can just disregard as the cost of doing business.
If you're the CEO actually running toward the fear, it's more of an all-or-nothing thing.
The reason it's a good idea is because it forces you to really confront your feelings, examine the present moment, and identify which are rational and which are assumptions that you were just raised with. If you run away from your fear you'll always be boxed into the path that you were on in high school; if you run towards it you have the option to really decide what you want your life to look like.
They're not giving you their money for their health, ya know? You should already have decided that your business ambitions align with the way a VC wants you to run your business before you take their money. Want to start a passive income project? Take a loan from the bank :) or bootstrap.
If you're at the point where you've taken VC money and you're not sure you want to run a VC-type business, mistakes were made.
If a challenge induces a major risk with a subpar reward, just don't take it, or drop it.
Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" is sound when the stakes are at their max, when there is no other way around.
Moreover there are challenges imposed to you, and challenges you chose (among those last there are rewarding ones and also (whatever the reward) too dangerous ones).
Expertise is the best tool when it comes to select a challenge rewarding and adequate for you, to avoid/drop other challenges and to avoid having anything imposed to you.
As Frank Borman said "A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid situations which require the use of his superior skill."
However in order to gain expertise you have to tackle challenges. Generally life and our family and friends let us start with non-dangerous ones, therefore the best way to gain pertinent expertise is, especially as a youngster, a "realistic" and guided will to explore.
For me, I think the actual takeaway here is: Find what scares you, and figure out why you fear it
Then, rather than making a blind decision to "run towards or away" from it, you can actually try to make a more calculated decision.
There should be an executive other than the CEO who can solve the problem with the given constraint ("don't spend too much")
The smartest people I know tend to often see things correctly, or do things correctly. Their intuition is just a form of intelligence, where something has been recognised but it can't necessarily be rationalised. Intuition has deeply negative connotations to many people, so we often use other words instead like: pattern matching, foresight, common sense, seeing connections, feeling in my /\w/, etc.
The problem with the word intuition, is that plenty of people have "incorrect" intuitions that fail, and often they overestimate their intuitive abilities (Dunning-Kruger intuition?). It is very hard to identify people with good intuitions, and sometimes we just say they have good luck.
Good intuitions are especially valuable with soft skills - anything where you have to deal with people and you start to spot someone with a knack - this should be highly prevalent in successful CEOs (and politicians, marketers etcetera).
"Obvious" is another way to say this: seeing something is obvious, then stating the rationalisations why it is obvious, only later to find out they were right but their rationalising was wrong (I find this frustrating).
From another comment: "it’s just that he’s doing it in such a vague and generalized way and passing it off as actionable advice that it becomes almost comical" -- it really is extremely hard to write about intuitions, and we often dismiss good commentary (even when written by a smart person trying to communicate something difficult to us).
Disclaimer: I am an engineer type that loves rational thought. I see my smart friends come up with intuitive answers that turn out to be correct, and then I struggle to try and learn the same skills.
This hits pretty hard.