Ben Horowitz argues that people skills matter more than most founders think, even though they focus on technical ability. Understanding what motivates people leads to better feedback and stronger teams. Whether you develop these skills yourself or hire people who have them, both approaches work.
Chapters
Good morning, Believe Nation.
Today's message is: Learn people skills. Over to you, Ben Horowitz.
You know, in the world of entrepreneurship, the big skills are kind of programming skills and people skills. Like, those are the big two. And I think people skills tend to be highly underestimated in terms of kind of just ability to run a company and so forth. And what I mean by people skills is the ability to understand other people's motivation and other people's motivations who you're talking to and then who you're also not talking to and how they're going to think about something and where they're coming from and relate to that in a way that gets you to the right conclusion about how you build an organization or build a company or, or make a deal or any of these kinds of things is incredibly valuable and that's what I would say most of the kind of good entrepreneurs end up lacking more than the technical skills that we see now. Like being like a boss-level engineer, like that's extremely valuable. I'm not discounting that, but that's really the other big, big skill that you can learn.
So what do you think?
I'm a strong believer in having people skills. When I was in university, I read an awesome book and I think this is like a staple of anyone who wants to learn to deal with people better, understand them. It's by Dale Carnegie, it was written in the '30s, "How to Win Friends and Influence People." What I loved about it was it doesn't really, the book doesn't teach you how to manipulate people or how to be rude or conniving with people. It's more of like you set good expectations, high expectations for people, even if they don't have those skill sets yet, and they start to live up to them. I've learned a lot of great people skills from Evan too. When someone's doing something that is, you don't agree with, that's not quite executed well, it's always very easy to say, You know what, you're doing it wrong, that's it, stop it. Versus, you know, taking a little bit of time and being like, well, I understand, you know, where you're coming from. Here's maybe a better way to do it. What can I do? How can I empower you to make this better? And what happens at the end of the day is that more people respect you, more people value you, more people support you if you pick up those skill sets. So read that book, it's super awesome.
I'm gonna throw a bit of a curveball on this one, and I feel like another way to do it is to hire the people skills, or to partner up with somebody who has the people skills. Where if you are the strong technician, you are the coder, you are the programmer, you're the greatest engineer of all time, go all in on that and partner up with somebody who can do all the people skills stuff so you can be really good at it. I look at this business, Entrena Dance Salsa, and Alex is better at dealing with people than I am. He's much more extroverted, he's, you know, he's cracking the jokes and he's the life of the party. I'm good with people but more in an introverted way, and I wanted him to be part of Toronto Dance Salsa and kind of lead us forward because of that, a bunch of other stuff. And, and so it was actually interesting where a couple weeks ago I had somebody come over here, and for the first time I saw somebody who wasn't getting along with Alex, and it was really weird. There's this weird dynamic between them, like, it was like, what's happening here? Why are they not getting along? Because Alex just gets along with everybody. It doesn't matter what background you come from, who you are, he just gets along with them. You'll leave a conversation with him feeling better. That's one of his great skills. You know, if you want to focus on the engineering side or the product side, then another way to do it is instead of you trying to work on your own people skills to be that person, find that person and partner with them or hire them to join your team. It might be the better way to go. Just a little bit of a curveball answer on that.
100% agree with you, but you have very good skill sets that you've had to learn and hone. I hope that people don't think that, okay, so now I can just hire people to solve sort of my shortcomings. It doesn't mean that there's, there's not room for improvement, right? Like, maybe Evan will never be as extroverted as me, but there's a huge amount of communication skills on how to improve people, how to work with people that I picked up from you that I never had, even though I'm sort of life of the party, or I'm extroverted. So there's always room for improvement. Yes, you should hire people that are like sort of, you know, if you need someone who's loud and spontaneous, extroverted, and that's sort of the front end of your business, that's important. But you should still continue to work on yourself, even if you're like the, the most, you know, you're a programmer and you're shut in completely, you never go outside, never see daylight, you're pale, right, like almost translucent skin kind of thing. But you should be educating yourself, you should be improving, because at the end of the day, You know, people won't want to even work for you if you're not able to understand them a little bit or know how to communicate with them. And so you have that strength. You have a strength that, you know, you're analytical, but you still communicate with me. You still sort of give me confidence in you and you, you know, mentor me. And so that's important, even though that's not necessarily what maybe was your initial skill when you started becoming an entrepreneur, right?
I'm really good at communications. And I'm really good at dealing with people. I'm just not extroverted. And so that's part of what you're learning and picking up. But if you are just a rockstar programmer, I'm okay with you going all in on programming, just being the mad science genius and not having to worry with building a team and improving your communication delegation skills, if that's what you're really good at. But to build a company, you need to have of somebody who can deal with you, right? Like, I can deal with crazy people. You look at my team, I have people on my team who are a team of misfits. Some people on my team have a really hard time fitting in with other people, but I can deal with them. Maybe because I have patience or whatever it is. So those people are really important, and if you're that person, then you just need to find the person who can deal with you and communicate your message out to everybody else. I think there's a lot of artists who suck at communication, who suck at dealing with people, and they've built good businesses off of it because they have managers and people around them who help them through their shortcomings. And telling them to be more like everybody else, or telling them to improve their— this area of their life while stopping doing other things, because it's an opportunity cost, right? Like, I can work on this, which means I'm not working on something else. But if I suck at this and I don't want to get better at it, then how much better am I actually going to get and how big a difference is that going to make versus I want to get better at this thing and I'm all in on it. I'm okay with it. I don't know, I'm okay with it. Question of the day today is: Who is right, Evan or Ry?
No, no, no, okay, no.
No, but I'm curious to hear your perspective.
Yeah.
Leave that in the comments below. Maybe we'll get a good debate happening. So thank you guys so much for watching. Have an amazing day. Continue to believe, and we'll see you again tomorrow morning for another shot of espresso.
