- Dan Schawbel is a bestselling author, speaker, entrepreneur, and host of the "5 Questions with Dan Schawbel" podcast, where he interviews world-class humans by asking them just five questions in under 10 minutes.
- He recently interviewed Ben Horowitz, the cofounder and general partner of Andreessen Horowitz and author of "What You Do Is Who You Are."
- Horowitz said that all successful entrepreneurs have two things in common: They are original thinkers and have leadership skills.
- When asked for his best career advice, Horowitz said, "Don't listen to your friend."
- Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.
Born in London, England, Ben Horowitz was raised in California. He graduated from Columbia University with a BA in computer science, then got his master's in computer science from UCLA.
From there, Horowitz got his first job at Silicon Graphics before joining Netscape founder Marc Andreessen as a product manager. When Netscape was acquired by AOL, Horowitz became AOL's vice president of ecommerce. He and Andreessen left Netscape to cofound Loudcloud, eventually taking it public and transforming it into enterprise software company Opsware.
Horowitz grew the company to over $100 million in annual revenue before selling it to HP for $1.6 billion. Once he left, he joined forces again with Andreessen to create venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which has invested in Box, Facebook, Slack, Instagram, and Airbnb. Ben's latest book is called "What You Do Is Who You Are: How to Create Your Business Culture."
In our conversation, Horowitz shares how entrepreneurs should prepare for pitch meetings, what all successful entrepreneurs have in common, what he's learned about leadership from historical figures, how to find the right career, and his best career advice.
Dan Schawbel: What should entrepreneurs do to prepare for a pitch meeting with you, and what is your criteria for which companies you invest in?
Ben Horowitz: I think they should have their business articulated as clearly as they can. I wouldn't overprepare. Their job is to come in and describe what they're doing. If you over present it, you end up presenting not what you're actually doing but what you think we want to hear, which is always a mistake. Our criteria vary a lot. Our main criteria is: Is it an original breakthrough idea, and can the entrepreneur build the company? Those are our primary criteria.
DS: What qualities do you find consistent across all successful entrepreneurs?
BH: It's not very consistent in general. Entrepreneurs come in lots of different shapes and sizes. The one thing that they all have in common is they have to be original thinkers. They have to be able to come up with their own brand-new take on the world and how they're going to improve it and that's a pretty rare thing.
One of my favorite questions is Peter Thiel's question, "What do you believe that nobody else does?" because it's a very difficult question to prepare for because, whatever you say, by definition the person asking it isn't going to like the answer. Nobody believes what you're about to say unless you say something unoriginal. I would say by far that's the one thing that you have to have.
The other thing is leadership skills, which all come in many different styles. But at the end of the day, people have to want to work for you and be motivated to do so. And without that you're not really going to build anything interesting.
DS: What have you learned from studying successful leaders of the past and present on how to create a highly engaging and productive organization that lasts?
BH: I've learned a lot from the leaders of the past and it's one of the big topics of my new book. The most interesting leader that I've learned from is Toussaint Louverture, the leader of the Haitian revolution, who was able to reprogram slave culture into a military culture and win the only successful slave revolt in human history. Many of the ways that he did it are one very innovative but are very relevant to today. One of the techniques that he used was to create a rule that was so kind of shocking and absurd that it changed behaviors.
For example, one of the things that he needed to do was build trust in the army because trust is probably the most important cultural element in a military operation. If you don't trust the order, you kind of degenerate into the Byzantine Generals Problem and you can't function.
Coming out of slave culture where there isn't a lot of long-term planning because you don't even own your future; you don't own tomorrow. That ends up being a very fragmented trust kind of culture. So he had to convert that and one of the things he did is made it required that officers don't cheat on their wives. It was very absurd in the very extremely rough raping and pillaging kind of era of French colonialism and the European Paris, the French army, the British army, and the Spanish army vying for control of the colony. But that rule change or that rule let everybody know in his organization that your commitments, your word are the most important thing.
Toussaint famously said, "I'd rather relinquish my command than break my word," and that kind of role can really change a culture and it did for him. He ended up not only the winning army delivering more casualties to Napoleon then he had at Waterloo, but also kind of what was done as the most discipline and cohesive outfit on the colony.
DS: How do you align what you do and who you are with the right company?
BH: I think that part is pretty easy to figure out. If you're the company, I think it's pretty important to communicate clearly your work style, your culture, and your values upfront to candidates so that they know what that is and what they're getting into.
And then as a candidate, there are some questions that are pretty easy to ask that will enable you to figure out whether it's a fit for you. You know, like, "Hey, you know, if I get an email on a Friday night, do you want that thing turned around Friday night or Monday morning?" is a pretty easy question to get at what we were just talking about. You want to go someplace where you're going to fit. There's a lot more opportunities for entrepreneurship and to own yourself and your own business as well.
DS: What's your best piece of career advice?
BH: Don't listen to your friends. That's my best career advice. Particularly for young people who want to know what their friends are doing who are graduating from the same school as they are or their friends that they're hanging out with. Your friends might be able to figure out what they want to do with their life, but they're not going to be able to figure out what you want to do with your life. And so when you ask people for career advice, they give you the advice for them, but you need the advice for you and the advice for you has to come from you ultimately, so don't listen to your friends.
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