I think really good companies, the very, very, very best companies tend to have founders and CEOs who ask pretty aggressive questions.

Zuckerberg, Larry Page, those guys who have kind of gotten all the way to the mountaintop, they're pretty blunt.

If you're running away from the truth to preserve feelings, that's a very dangerous thing

in the tech company. And the kind of corollary to that is it's really important that bad news

travels fast. Yeah. That, you know, if something's wrong, that as CEO, you find out about it. And so

you need that bluntness. Ben Horowitz didn't feel like he knew what he was doing as CEO until about four years in.

His company went public when it was 18 months old.

He says that feeling is more normal than most founders admit.

Horowitz has spent more than 15 years at Andresen Horowitz, backing and coaching founder

CEOs.

The pattern he sees in the ones who fail isn't a lack of intelligence.

It's hesitation.

They see a problem.

The head of sales who isn't working, a decision that needs to be made, and they wait.

Brian Halligan calls that decision debt.

Horowitz says it's the worst kind because it paralyzes

everything downstream. This conversation covers where a founder mode works and where it's being

taken too far, why the VP of sales is the higher that goes wrong more than any other, and what

Zuckerberg, Jensen, and Elon actually have in common.

This episode previously aired on the show Long Strange Trip, Brian Halligan, partner at Sequoia

Capitol, speaks with Ben Horowitz, co-founder and general partner at A16Z.

Everybody, today's guest is Ben Horowitz of A16Z fame. Few reasons I wanted to have him on. First, I wanted to get the behind-the-scenes look on why Andresen passed on HubSpot back of the day. And it's a funny story behind that. He's seen so much. He's back some amazing CEOs and some CEOs that went down in dust. Like, what do they have in common? What are the great ones? What do they do? What are they like? What's the patterns there? And the same with the ones who failed. I read his book, like 100 years ago when I was running HubSpot. I thought it was really good. I think he published it in 2014. I wanted the updated, you know, what's changed since he wrote the hard thing about hard things back in the day. The convo is I think it's really good. One of the things I've always liked about Ben is he is completely unfiltered and gets after it. I think there's

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