The story of startups is often a story of survival.

What do you do when the markets go down,

when your biggest customer churns,

when your next major product launch falls flat,

and as a CEO and leader, how do you make the right call that helps you live to fight another day?

In this episode from February 2017, Ben Horowitz and Jason Rosenthal

shares stories and lessons learned from doing whatever they could to help their

companies survive in the hard times, including making and living through major pivots,

selling new products before they were ready,

figuring out financing with market and industry headwinds against them,

and more.

From their days together at Loud Cloud

to Jason's experience at LITRO and beyond,

a common theme emerges.

A CEO's job is lonely in these moments.

And the hardest thing about a big pivot or change

might be in finding the courage

to make the decision in the first place.

Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sono. I'm here with Ben Horowitz and

Jason Rosenthal, CEO of LITRO, and we're sharing some founder war stories today focusing on the theme of

pivots especially since pivot is one of those overused and now seemingly

innocuous words that has lost a lot of meaning for a lot of people.

...