Communityplanet

Ben’s last post on minimizing corporate politics generated a bunch of interesting comments. One set of commenters essentially asked, “gee, why should an employee be motivated first by a company’s success rather than by their own success”? Frankly, this surprised both of us. So I suggested that Ben answer this line of questioning directly, which he…

As the ranking officer, the CEO has a huge impact on their company’s culture. This is especially true in startups where the whole company is watching the CEO’s every move, every interaction, every decision. As a result of this micro-scrutiny, CEOs can feel like they need to be the company’s Chief Morale Officer, continuously and relentlessly accentuating…

Every job in a startup is (usually) hard: building a new product is hard, marketing a new product is hard, selling a new product is hard. But no job is harder than the job of a CEO. Also, no job...

Conventional wisdom: startups don't have the time or dollars to invest in training. Training is only for big companies who can afford it, both cash- and time-wise. Not surprisingly, Ben picks a fight with conventional wisdom in his latest post,...

My good friend Steve Blank does a great job of describing the metamorphosis a scalable startup needs to undergo to become a big company. During that metamorphosis, many startups hire executives from big companies to help scale the business. Some...

For those of you who have been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that my partner Ben Horowitz has been very actively blogging—and folks are paying attention. His post on All Things Digital called The Case for the Fat...

For those of you who have been keeping up with this blog, you’ll know that my partner Ben Horowitz has been very actively blogging—and folks are paying attention. His post on All Things Digital called The Case for the Fat Startup struck a nerve in the startup community, prompting my good friend Fred Wilson to write a counter-post…