Ben Horowitz on the importance of company culture

When I became CEO the first time, I asked all the kind of veteran CEOs, what should I focus on to be a great CEO? What should I do? And they pretty consistently said, ben, pay attention to the culture. And I was great. How do I do that? And that's kind of where the advice stopped. And most of the things written on it have been relatively trivial based on one organizational behavior kind of experiment or something like that. But when you look at it, it turns out to be a really important thing. So if you go, well, how does your company behave? Particularly how does it behave when you're not looking? Do they show up to meeting on time? If somebody calls them, do they return the call? If it's a person who's a lower rank than them, do they return it? Do they return it that day? Do they return it the next day? Do they return it the next week? Week? All these things. If they do a deal, is it for the price or for the partnership? What are they optimizing? And so all those things which are not in your goals and objectives, they're not in your mission statement, they're not in your okrs, they're how you behave on a daily basis, how people experience your company, what you're like to do business with, what you're like to work at. All that stuff is your culture. But the amount of attention it's paid to in the management literature is like close to zero or close to zero usefully. So I thought it was an important thing to try and get out. Well, how do you move that? How do you shape it? How do you change it? Because you can't just do the simple thing. You can't say, oh, well, we'll put in your performance review. Did you follow the cultural values? Well, you don't know if they received that phone call, so you definitely don't know if they returned it. So that's not going to be the thing that drives the culture. What's going to drive the culture are all these little behaviors, all these little cues that people take about this is what I have to do to succeed in this company.