Ben Horowitz argues that working at a large tech company before starting a startup teaches you management, builds your network, and exposes you to real-world problems. You learn what slow decision-making and bureaucracy feel like, which teaches you how to build a company that doesn't have those problems. Without that experience, you lack the skills and connections to hire and operate effectively.
Chapters
So when you come out of school, you know some things and there's a whole lot that you don't know. And there's kind of advantage and disadvantage in building a company at that point in your life. But the big disadvantages in that, the things that you get from a big company are one, you really have no idea how to run a company or manage a company. And going to a big company, that's where I learned how to manage. And it wasn't so much that there were great managers who managed me or something like that, but the way you learn how to run a big organization is to work in a big organization. Because it's the frustrations you have trying to get something done that basically become the basis for the design of the organization. When you're on the other side because you're like, okay, if I was an engineer and it was taking me an hour to check something into the source code tree and then like 12 hours to build it, that would be a nightmare. So now I'm back running the company. I know that that's going to be an issue. Or if it took me a week to get a decision made, how frustrated would I be? Whereas you talk to a CEO right out of Stanford who's never been through that, and they've got guys sitting there like, not being able to get a decision made, and they're like, what's the problem? And it's like, well, that's why you've got all the attrition. Nobody wants to work for you. But it's harder to figure out if you've never worked in a company, why that would be such a big problem to not be able to work for a week on anything, because you're waiting for somebody to make a decision who doesn't think it's important enough to give it the time of day. These are the kinds of things that you learn. And there's a million details around that which you just can't learn. Like, you just. It is not intuitive, I guarantee you. Nobody figures out how to do that on their own. And that is the best way to learn it. So that's the first thing. And then the second thing is you meet people who like people at Apple, like people at Facebook, people at Google, like smart people. And you kind of build a reputation so that if you go to build a company, like those are people whose skills and who you can draw upon and who you can hire and work with and build something really excellent. And then the third thing is you kind of learn about the world and the basis of a good company is to basically figure out something about the world that nobody else knows, and then that secret becomes the company. And if you've not been in the world, then your basis for the secret is you just have a more limited scope of what you might have learned. Now, there are people who learn stuff in school that is a big enough secret. Like Mark Zuckerberg figured out Facebook while he was at Harvard. Like, absolutely. If you have an idea that big, then by all means, go for it. But if you don't and you try and go build a company with zero management skill and no network, that's hard, bro. That's going to be hard. And you have to think, who would want to work for you? And it's like, unless it's like, well, everybody smart will want to work for me because I've got the breakthrough idea of all times, and it's running away like a freight train, and it's growing like nothing else ever, then, yeah, definitely start a company. But if you don't have that and you try and do it and you're competing with, like, Tony Fadell, who invented the ipod and is also starting a company for engineers, where would you work? Would you work for you? Would you work for Tony? And that's the kind of thing you have to figure out.
