Overview
- Running Toward Fear: The worst thing a leader can do is hesitate—both options are usually bad, but indecision is worse. Leaders must build the psychological muscle to choose the slightly better path.
- Success Is Incremental: Success comes from a series of small, difficult decisions that compound over time, not one brilliant move. Breaking sunk cost thinking prevents cascading bad choices.
- Founder Confidence Crisis: Most founders fail not from incompetence but from losing confidence after mistakes, which leads to hesitation, power vacuums, and political dysfunction.
- Managerial Leverage: As CEO, you can't develop executives in areas you don't understand. The goal is finding people who push the company forward without you having to direct their every move.
- Good PM, Bad PM Legacy: Product management is fundamentally a leadership job where nobody reports to you—the PM must own the outcome like a CEO, not just complete tasks.
Takeaways
Ben Horowitz, co-founder of a]6z, shares decades of insights from building companies and advising founders. The core lesson: leadership means making unpopular decisions quickly because if everyone agrees, you added no value.
The only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like.