Ben Horowitz faced brutal press during his IPO, including a cover story calling it "the IPO from Hell." He explains why negative coverage tanks employee morale and shares his approach: stop dwelling on problems and focus on finding concrete solutions, a distinction Peter Thiel made between statists and calculus-minded founders.
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When I was going public, BusinessWeek wrote a cover story called the IPO from Hell. And that was like one of many that Red Herring wrote that I was setting. Taking my cash and setting it on fire in my parking lot. That was another article that was written about me. So, you know, these things hurt my feelings. Look, most of the stress to me doesn't come from so much what people in the press think and people on Twitter. It's more how the people in the company start to feel about it. You've brought all these people in, they believed in you. Things aren't going as sold, and you feel that and it's going badly. And then it's amplified. If they read that you suck in the press, as they did about me many times, it's like, ben's an idiot. I didn't care that they said I was an idiot. What bothered me was people who worked for me would go home and. And their spouse would go, you know, your CEO's an idiot. Like, I just read it here in BusinessWeek. And so, like, that is. That's hard. I never, as an entrepreneur, had a great outlet for that. Probably one of my best ones is I'm friends with Bill Campbell, who had, like, as bad experiences when he was running a company called Go. We'd talk about it and he would understand, but it didn't help that much. It's still a struggle, it's still difficult. And, you know, you just have to focus your mind on, like, what you can do, not what you can't do. And you can't focus on, like, what's going on wrong and what that might imply. And, you know, Peter Thiel has a great thing in his startup class that he taught, which is he says, look, there's people who believe in statistics, and they believe that, like, there's, you know, probabilities of things happen, and all you can do is run a process and, like, it is what it is, and the statistics come out. And then there's people who believe in calculus, and they believe there's a right answer. And if you're a startup CEO, you have to believe in calculus. You have to believe you can find the answer, and that's all you can focus on. And there's an answer out there somewhere. And trust me, like, there's always an answer. And hopefully, you know, God willing, you have enough time to get to the answer. But that's really all there is. I don't think there's not that much comfort out there. Like, I talk to entrepreneurs all the time. I try and tell them. Let me tell you how bad it was for me. It sucked. And they're like, that was then, motherfucker. This is now. This is my company. I don't care about you.
