Ben Horowitz on how to design a culture that’s right for your company

A lot of it comes back to, okay, who you are. So on the one hand, like, so if you look at, well, who's Amazon? Amazon wanted to be, like they came out wanting to be. We're going to be the low price leader. You're never going to have to comparison shop because it's always going to be cheapest at Amazon. So part of the culture necessarily was we're not going to waste money. And they did all kinds of things to set that. And so if you see somebody wasting money at Amazon, that's a big deal. Apple doesn't have that culture, doesn't have that product positioning. They're building the premium product, they're building the most beautifully designed product. And so look, they spend a lot of money. And if you waste money at Apple, well, you know, that's probably not as big a cultural violation because it's not fundamental to what they want to be and the strategy of the business. So you, you really have to start with, okay, who are we? Who do we want to be? And then if there's something that takes you off of that, even if it's little, it's important. You know, here one of the things we want to be, we want to be very respectful and empathetic to the entrepreneurial journey. So here in a normal place, if you're late for a meeting, it's probably not that big a deal. Here, if you're late, it's a big, very bad problem if it's with an entrepreneur, because we do not want to be, under any circumstances disrespectful in that regard, because that's off culture for us, not for everybody.