The Hard Things About Scaling: Executive Hiring with Ben Horowitz and Ali Ghodsi

a16z Podcast

a16z

Science, Innovation, Business, Entrepreneurship, Culture, Disruption, Software Eating The World, Technology

4.4 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 14 June 2023

⏱️ 40 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The holy grail of company building is finding product-market fit. But what most people don’t tell you is that once you’ve found it, product-market fit brings its own set of challenges, particularly when it comes to scaling rapidly and hiring the right executives at the right time. Drawing from their extensive experiences, a16z cofounder Ben Horowitz and Databricks cofounder and CEO Ali Ghodsi sit down to talk about the hardest things about executive hiring and firing, and what is at stake. They dive into the common reasons an exec fails, why sometimes micromanagement is a good idea, and the difference between someone who has written a playbook and someone who has only run one.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you're giving them a lot of ideas like more ideas than you're getting out, then that's probably not going to work.
0:06.5	If I have a new executive, I call them every day.
0:08.8	When they're new, I call them every day.
0:10.3	When do I call them, do we have a scheduled time?
0:11.9	No, I just call them
0:12.6	Can you run a playbook or can he write a playbook? To spend the energy spend the time this is one of the most important decisions you could ever make as a leader in your company spend energy
0:21.1	I gotta make a decision about am I keeping your peer or am I keeping you?
0:25.0	Mistakes are cost. Mistakes take between a year and a half to two years.
0:29.0	I always find if you give somebody a task and they get super emotional, then they're done.
0:35.0	I think companies quickly form a culture and fortunately or unfortunately, the more successful they are,
0:41.0	they become a little bit arrogant.
0:42.0	So companies typically are not super open to massive change.
0:45.0	You think you're being like objective and factual what you're really being is emotional, defensive and afraid of the actual truth.
0:53.2	And the actual truth when you fire somebody is mistakes were made.
0:57.9	The holy grail of company building is finding product market fit.
1:02.3	But what most people don't tell you
1:04.4	is that finding product market fit brings its own challenges.
1:08.0	All of a sudden you need to scale really quickly
1:11.0	and scaling really quickly is actually really hard.
1:14.4	One of the hardest yet most critical aspects of scaling
1:18.0	is finding the right leaders at the right time.
1:21.0	And while the growth stage of a company is hard, it doesn't need to feel like
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from a16z, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of a16z and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.