Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland.

Costolo and Ben Horowitz talk about leadership in front of an audience of military veterans and active duty soldiers on this segment of the A16Z podcast.

What Silicon Valley can learn from the military's approach to leadership and how that applies and doesn't to building today's technology companies.

Does leadership, does it transfer from one venue to another? So in this case, from the military to

Silicon Valley. Well, I hope so, because like all my favorite management books are military

books. So it's like the art of war. There's the Colin Powell book,

My American Journey. There's the Black Jacobin's a Touss, the Toussaint-Lovature book.

The problem with leadership in general is the easy thing to do is generally the wrong thing to do.

So you sort of slide into that. And the great thing about the military leadership

books is like everybody's going to die if you do that. Whereas in like companies, it's not

actually life and death. One of my favorite Sun Su stories, which is, I shouldn't even tell

this story because it's so violent. But there is a, you know, they're doing

calisthenics. And during the calisthenics, two of the guys are talking. And you're not allowed to

talk in calisthenics. So he just walks over to guys talking, tells him to stand up, takes out a sword

and cuts off his head. No more talking in calisthenics.ans after that, like that work. Not that you should do that in a company.

Speeches don't do anything, but like an object lesson like that, cut his head off. They're like,

okay, like everybody learned that. And nobody's ever going to forget it. You give an all-hand speech,

nobody's going to remember tomorrow. And so, you know, these kinds of things are super powerful, and it is like it's a pretty straight translation in that way.

For me, I had several folks in my company who were leaders in the military, and they were the

most mentally tough people in the company. I remember the night of the IPO, you know, the stock

was at like 47, and we had priced it at 16 on the S1 like two weeks earlier. And I got up in front of everybody and said, listen, we took us seven years to get from zero to 16.

And now here we are two weeks later and it's 47.

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