Ben Horowitz breaks down the ideal founding team: two people with complementary skills, one who builds a dramatically better product and one who takes the market. He and Marc Andreessen exemplify this, with Marc as the inventor and Ben as the entrepreneur.
Chapters
An ideal founding team is usually two people, and the two people are of two different types. So one, you need an inventor, and it's the inventor's job to build the product that's 10 times better than anything that's available to solve that problem. And then you need an entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur's job is to take the market. So my partner, Marc Andreessen, he was the inventor and I was the entrepreneur. Now, what helped a lot for us is that as the entrepreneur, I've got a master's degree in computer science. So I understood invention and I understood how to drive the company around continuous innovation, and that's really, really important. And Mark, although he was the inventor when he invented the browser and a lot of important things, he knows a lot about business, and he knows a lot about taking markets, and he knows a lot about competition. And so the best thing to do is have two people who know how to do both, but at least one person who's world class in each. And that's how you think about the founding team.