Ben Horowitz on the Lessons He Learned From Intel's Andy Grove (video)

Ben Horowitz on the Lessons He Learned From Intel's Andy Grove:

Ben Horowitz, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z.com) co-founder, discusses the death of former Intel  (intel.com) CEO Andy Grove with Bloomberg's Emily Chang on "Bloomberg Markets." (Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg Television, is an investor in Andreessen Horowitz. Published March 22, 2016).

When Steve Jobs and Larry Ellison told Andy Grove he was the only person in Silicon Valley who they would willingly work for, he told them he wouldn’t have hired either because they were “a couple of flakes.” He was at least half serious and didn’t crack a smile. “It didn’t matter,” said Ellison, the founder of Oracle Corp. “Both Steve and I admired and respected Andy. We enjoyed all of our precious time with him, including the memorable and characteristic abuse.”--source: Bloomberg

Books written by Andrew (Andy) Grove:
A. S. Grove (1967). Physics and Technology of Semiconductor Devices. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-32998-3.
A. S. Grove (1988). One on One With Andy Grove. Penguin Putnam. ISBN 0-14-010935-8.
A. S. Grove (1995). High Output Management. Random House. ISBN 0-679-76288-4. (originally published in 1983)
A. S. Grove (1996). Only the Paranoid Survive. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-48258-2.
A. S. Grove (2001). Swimming Across: A Memoir. ISBN 0-446-67970-4.
Robert Burgelman and A. S. Grove (2001). Strategy Is Destiny: How Strategy-Making Shapes a Company's Future. ISBN 0-684-85554-2.
Robert A. Burgelman, Andrew S. Grove and Philip E. Meza (2005). Strategic Dynamics: Concepts and Cases. McGraw-Hill/Irwin. ISBN 0-07-312265-3.

Andy Grove quotes:

Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive.

A fundamental rule in technology says that whatever can be done will be done.

Technology will always win. You can delay technology by legal interference, but technology will flow around legal barriers.

Bad companies are destroyed by crisis, Good companies survive them, Great companies are improved by them.

Your career is your business, and you are its CEO.

You need to try to do the impossible, to anticipate the unexpected. And when the unexpected happens, you should double the efforts to make order from the disorder it creates in your life. The motto I'm advocating is — Let chaos reign, then rein chaos. Does that mean that you shouldn't plan? Not at all. You need to plan the way a fire department plans. It cannot anticipate fires, so it has to shape a flexible organization that is capable of responding to unpredictable events.

You have no choice but to operate in a world shaped by globalization and the information revolution. There are two options: adapt or die.

I think it is very important for you to do two things: act on your temporary conviction as if it was a real conviction; and when you realize that you are wrong, correct course very quickly

And try not to get too depressed in the part of the journey, because there’s a professional responsibility. If you are depressed, you can’t motivate your staff to extraordinary measures. So you have to keep your own spirits up even though you well understand that you don’t know what you’re doing.


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Startups, Best Practices (slides); Ben Horowitz at Columbia video

"Don't Follow Your Passion": Ben Horowitz's Commencement Speech at Columbia University from a16z 

Don’t Follow Your Passion: Career Advice for Recent Graduates | Andreessen Horowitz: "... I learned the most valuable lesson that I learned at Columbia, which is: Don’t listen to your friends. Think for yourself. Thinking for yourself sounds both simple and trivial, but in reality it’s extremely difficult and it’s profound and here is why. As human beings, we want to be liked. It’s anthropological. If people didn’t like you in caveman days, they would just eat you. So you really have a natural built in instinct to want to be liked and the easiest way to be liked is to tell people what they want to hear. And you know what everybody wants to hear? What they already believe to be true. And so the last thing they want to hear is an original idea that contradicts their belief system. So it’s very hard to even bring that kind of stuff up. But those are the things; those are the only things — things that YOU believe, that everybody around you doesn’t believe — that when you’re right that create real value in the world. Everything else people already know. There is no value created. It’s just business as usual. So it’s so important to think for yourself ... my recommendation would be follow your contribution. Find the thing that you’re great at, put that into the world, contribute to others, help the world be better and that is the thing to follow ..."

Andreessen Horowitz, Venture Capital firm, domain name: a16z.com

Go-to-Market Best Practices for Startups from a16z

See also on Domain Mondo: Startups, Venture Capital, Tech Markets, Unicorns, a16z Podcasts


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