The Stories and Code of Culture Change

0:00:05 Hi everyone, welcome to the A6NZ podcast. I’m Sonal and today I’m so excited since we finally
0:00:11 have our interview, the A6NZ podcast way of co-founder Ben Horwitz on his new and best-selling
0:00:16 book, What You Do is Who You Are, How to Create Your Business Culture. The conversation, which
0:00:21 took place recently at the Computer History Museum between me and Ben, probes on the themes of business,
0:00:26 culture and tech from the book and beyond, with lots of nuanced discussion on everything from
0:00:32 common tropes such as reality distortion fields, fake it till you make it, Silicon Valley folklore,
0:00:37 whether companies and people can change diversity and inclusion and so on. All told through some
0:00:42 tough stories. On that note, just a note for listeners with kids in the car that this podcast
0:00:47 talks about historical themes with various mentions of violence. Finally, we try to share some
0:00:53 practical advice throughout for both leaders and even for employees going through cultural change
0:00:57 and crowdsource questions from our audience as well that are answered at the end. You can read
0:01:05 more about and order the book at a6nz.com/whatyoudo. 100% of the proceeds will go to anti-recidivism,
0:01:09 helping people get out of jail, stay out of jail and towards making Haiti great again.
0:01:15 We’re here to talk about Ben’s best-selling new book, What You Do is Who You Are, which is really
0:01:20 about culture and we all know it’s important but no one really tells you how to shape it, how to
0:01:25 set it, even how to fix it when things go wrong and what I love about Ben is he’s not only a
0:01:29 builder but a bridger of cultures and that’s why it’s so significant that we’re sitting here at
0:01:34 the Computer History Museum because this represents the heart of Silicon Valley which itself has been
0:01:39 going through lots of cultural change and so the first question I want to ask you Ben is a very
0:01:44 obvious straightforward question to actually define culture because you say it’s not corporate
0:01:52 values, it’s not perks, but then what is it? Yeah, you know one of my kind of favorite semi-definitions
0:01:57 of culture or pieces of it is from The Way of the Warrior, the Bushido, which is the ancient code of
0:02:02 the Samurai. They say a culture is not a set of beliefs, it’s a set of actions which is where the
0:02:07 title of the book came from so it’s not what you believe, it’s not what’s in your heart, it’s not
0:02:12 what you tweet, it’s what you do, that’s who you are culturally. But when you get into a company
0:02:20 context it ends up being really small subtle things that determine your culture, determine the way
0:02:25 you treat each other, determine the way you treat your business partners and your customers and
0:02:31 they’re very amorphous, nearly invisible things. Do you return that phone call in an hour, in a day,
0:02:38 in a week? Never. Do you go home at five or at eight? When you do a business deal it’s about the
0:02:45 partnership or the price. All these things, that’s your culture and they’re not in your KPIs or your
0:02:53 LKRs or your mission statement or any of that. And then how do you move and shape them because in the
0:02:59 conventional kind of method, I can tell you it doesn’t work, which is oh we’ll bring in the HR
0:03:05 consultants and we’ll have an offsite and we’ll put a bunch of values on the board and then once a year
0:03:10 in people’s performance reviews we’ll say does he have integrity? What are those values again?
0:03:14 Well the real thing is like how do you know if you return the phone call, you don’t even know if you
0:03:20 got the phone call and so like how do you get that behavior going in the direction that you want it
0:03:25 and that’s you know what the book is about and that was really the hardest, most difficult thing for
0:03:31 me to learn as CEO so I thought it was a good thing to write a book about. Sitting in Computer
0:03:36 History Museum, I think of the book as culture as code and you actually use a lot of words, I’ll
0:03:41 read some of them out loud but you describe culture as code, you talk about programming culture, you
0:03:46 talk about reprogramming culture, you talk about how it’s hard to debug, every culture has bugs,
0:03:52 I mean you basically use a lot of digital words but your examples are all analog. I mean the most
0:03:57 recent one was maybe 20 years ago and it was from prison where there was a lot of technology and
0:04:01 frankly they go back over a thousand years, specifically the example that comes to mind is
0:04:07 the samurai. What drew you to that example of culture as code and why? Well it’s interesting,
0:04:12 the first example is the Haitian Revolution which is an amazing story because it’s the only
0:04:18 successful slave revolt in human history and it’s a story of how Toussaint Louverture reprogrammed
0:04:25 slave culture to be kind of military culture which is an incredibly difficult job for many reasons
0:04:32 but the tragedy of the Haitian Revolution is they lost the culture almost the instant they
0:04:38 won the revolution and it was a kind of crazy story about what happened to Toussaint who’s
0:04:43 double crossed by Napoleon and thrown in jail in a diplomatic meeting and Jean-Jacques Desolines
0:04:47 took over and went completely different direction. That was his second in command. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
0:04:53 But the samurai code lasted at least a thousand years depending on how you count it and so I
0:05:00 really wanted to kind of go through all the things they did to make it last so long
0:05:06 and amazingly so. So with the samurai code lasting so long, it’s another programming word,
0:05:10 it was a system and I have to ask about this because on one hand in the book you say,
0:05:15 hey you can’t have platitudes but it was a system of words, like they had a code with
0:05:19 eight principles and so how do you reconcile that? You can describe your actions in words,
0:05:25 I’m not anti-word. So one of the things with culture that you run into is things that you think
0:05:29 that you want to put in your culture can get weaponized against you and they tell a story
0:05:36 in the book about slacks. So Stuart Butterfield early on had this cultural value empathy and his
0:05:42 intention was look, I don’t want people to just state their point of view, I want them to understand
0:05:48 the other person’s point of view thoroughly and then decide if they still want to argue the point
0:05:55 as opposed to just going at each other. Well, it wasn’t defined where the boundaries were and so
0:06:00 forth and so what ended up happening is employees would be getting their performance reviews and
0:06:04 the manager would say, well I need you to improve here and there and they’d be like,
0:06:09 you’re in violation of the culture, you’re not being empathetic. And so he was like, okay,
0:06:14 got to get rid of that value if that’s not going to work. And the samurai developed over a very
0:06:20 long time, but it’s amazing how they had sort of points and counterpoints and where the
0:06:26 virtues worked in a system that would govern itself. So for example, you know, they were an honor
0:06:32 culture. If somebody dissed you or insulted you, they had to go. That was it because that insult
0:06:38 was really could have been a diagnostic to say, is this guy weak? Can I besmirch his honor
0:06:43 and get away with it? Because if I can do that, I can probably stab him in the head or rob him or
0:06:51 whatever. And there’s a really great story in the Hagukari about a samurai who has a flee
0:07:00 on his shoulder. And another person says, excuse me, you have a flee on your shoulder
0:07:06 and the samurai cuts his head off. And you go, wow, that was like a pretty harsh response.
0:07:09 And they ask the samurai, why’d you cut his head off? He’s like, look, I’m not an animal. I don’t
0:07:17 have fleas. Call me that. And so when you have a kind of a virtue like that, you need something
0:07:23 to balance it. And you know, one of the things that they did is really establish a very elaborate
0:07:30 system of how they treated each other in this virtue known as politeness. And politeness means
0:07:35 the best way to show someone love and respect and respect is very, very important because,
0:07:40 you know, you don’t want to say they’re an animal with a flee. And it’s everything to how you bow
0:07:48 to how you set up the tea ceremony to every aspect of how you make somebody maximally comfortable
0:07:55 so that they feel how you feel about them. But right, if that was fake, just so you didn’t get
0:08:01 your head chopped off, then that really wouldn’t be good either. So one of the things in the code is
0:08:08 politeness without veracity is empty. It has to be honest. It has to come from the right place.
0:08:14 It has to be true. And so these are the kinds of ways that they created a system that built a much
0:08:20 kind of stronger and long lasting culture. That is honestly my favorite example from the book,
0:08:24 because you describe this interlocking system of eight values in the Bushido code.
0:08:28 They did them. Let’s talk about the difference between that. They didn’t just put them on the
0:08:33 wall. Virtue is what you do. Actually, you are trying to rebrand the word values into virtues.
0:08:37 Well, it’s not so much a rebranding. It’s a different thing. A value is what you believe,
0:08:43 what you want to be, what you aspire to. A virtue is what you do. And so I think from a chief executive
0:08:49 perspective and a company, you want to think through not just what you want, but how you’re
0:08:54 going to get it. And when you talk about culture, people just go, well, here’s what I want. And
0:08:58 then I’ll just tell people it in all hands, and then I’ll get it. And that never happens.
0:09:02 Like, then you know what your culture is? Hypocrisy, because I have all these values
0:09:07 on the wall, and I don’t do any of them. So it’s trying to kind of move the mindset into how do
0:09:11 you do it? Like, what are the mechanisms? What are the mechanics? What do you think the power
0:09:16 of storytelling is then in disseminating and sharing that culture? In fact, one of the lines
0:09:21 in your book is that stories and sayings define cultures. I have to ask what the difference is
0:09:27 between the story and those sort of hypocritical value statements on a wall. Like, what power does
0:09:32 story have? Yeah, so, well, I’ll give you an example. Let’s stay with the samurai for now.
0:09:39 My favorite. So there’s a great story. So one kind of really powerful cultural virtue is loyalty.
0:09:42 And then there’s kind of a question, okay, well, like, how do you show its importance? How do you
0:09:49 kind of make that stick? And one way is either in a company or in an ancient Japanese warrior society,
0:09:54 you can do that through a story that’s so compelling that people literally can’t get it
0:09:58 out of their head. And so here’s a story I’m going to tell you that you won’t be able to get out of
0:10:04 your head. Oh, no. So there was this lord in ancient Japan. His name is Lord Soma. And,
0:10:09 you know, in those days, the status symbols weren’t what we have today. But one of the things that
0:10:14 they had that like everybody was kind of proud of if they had a good one was their genealogy.
0:10:20 And it was on scrolls and it’d be written out and generations of who your ancestors were and kind
0:10:26 of the more you knew who you were, like that was a big thing. And Lord Soma had the best genealogy
0:10:33 in all of Japan and had a name was the Chai Ken Marikoshi. And then working for him was a samurai
0:10:40 who was like just a mediocre guy, clumsy, always getting things wrong, messing things up. But he
0:10:48 was always sincere and loyal. One day, Soma’s house catches fire and it’s engulfed in flames.
0:10:54 I mean, it is like burning down and there’s no way to deal with it or put it out. And inside the
0:11:01 house was the Chai Ken Marikoshi, his genealogy. And the samurai runs into the house engulfed in
0:11:06 flames. Lord Soma was shocked. He’s horrified. They watched the house just burn to the ground
0:11:12 and they know he’s dead. And they go in and sure enough, they’re looking for him and he’s face down
0:11:20 and it’s horrible. But then they notice that he’s in a pool of blood and they’re going,
0:11:24 why is he in a pool of blood? You know, he just ran into a fire and they turn him over
0:11:30 and there’s a slit in his stomach and they open the slit and inside it is the genealogy.
0:11:37 He cut himself open, put the genealogy in and saved it. And it was known from that day as the
0:11:43 blood genealogy. And everybody knew that even if you were mediocre, if you had that kind of loyalty,
0:11:47 you could be great. So that was the story. No one’s going to forget it. And I am sure
0:11:53 everyone in this room is wondering quite honestly, why are all your stories so far so violent?
0:11:59 I’m wondering that right now too. I think I can only answer that with another violent story.
0:12:06 Some of them I got before I was actually like writing the book. Yeah. Like it’s just me and
0:12:11 Shaq in the backyard and I’m barbecuing and like he tells me these stories and I’m like, wow,
0:12:17 when you hear it, just think that’s how I heard it. So Shaq, who’s in the book, went to jail
0:12:22 for a murder he did commit. He was in jail 19 years, seven years in solitary confinement. But
0:12:28 this story is about his first day in jail. So in prison, him and a group of guys are in quarantine,
0:12:32 which is where they keep you until they put you in general population. They come out into
0:12:39 general population very first day. They’re in the recreational area and a prisoner walks up to
0:12:46 another prisoner and stabs him in the neck with a shank, pulls the shank out. The prisoner bleeds
0:12:53 to death, dies. The other prisoner throws the shank in the trash and walks into the cafeteria and
0:12:59 has a sandwich. And Shaq said, you know, all the prisoners are looking like, where in the hell are
0:13:08 we at? And I had to ask myself, could I do that? And I said, wait a minute, you murdered a guy to
0:13:16 get in here. You did do that. And he said, oh, no, Ben, I didn’t do that. I said, I was dealing drugs.
0:13:22 One of my customers came. He was supposed to come by himself. He brought another guy. The other guy
0:13:28 is in the back seat of the car. I’m already traumatized because I had been shot like 18 months
0:13:32 earlier. This guy in the back of the car is supposed to stay in the back of the car. He opens the
0:13:37 door. He comes out. He comes at me real aggressive. I react. I had a gun in my pocket. I shot him.
0:13:45 That’s what I did. This guy spent two weeks taking a two liter bottle and filing it into his shank.
0:13:51 Then he decided, am I going to stab this guy in the stomach and wound him? Or am I going to stab him
0:13:57 in the neck and kill him? I couldn’t do that. But I had to ask myself, could I do that? Because
0:14:04 that’s what it took to survive here. And that is new employee orientation. That’s getting indoctrinated.
0:14:10 You guys laugh. I’m about to explain to you why the book is so violent. That’s how you get
0:14:15 oriented into such a violent culture with an experience like that. People join a company.
0:14:19 First thing they do. First thing all of you did when you joined a company.
0:14:26 Who’s successful here? Who’s the person everybody looks up to? What’s their behavior like?
0:14:31 Oh, that guy’s making all the money. He’s got the big job. He’s the one, the golden boy.
0:14:36 Oh, and he just took credit for her work? That’s what I have to do to succeed here.
0:14:43 That’s cultural orientation. That’s way higher impact than the value statement. And I have
0:14:47 conversations with CEOs all the time. I’m like, look, you have to take onboarding seriously. You
0:14:54 have to take new employee orientation seriously. You have to train your managers and your people
0:14:59 on like what’s expected of them behavior wise in the culture from day one. And they don’t listen
0:15:06 to me. So I needed a real story that they would remember and understand that would get them
0:15:11 to do the right thing. Because culture, it feels very invisible. You’re like, why do I have to do
0:15:15 that? Like I see that person doing something wrong, but it’s not that wrong. And I don’t want to hurt
0:15:20 their feelings by calling them on it. But you’re not looking at the knock on consequences, the knock
0:15:25 on cultural consequences that you’re setting up by not addressing it. And so a lot of what the
0:15:29 book is about is, you know, can you recognize culture? So a lot of the examples in the book
0:15:35 are things that people are not familiar with. And the reason for that is nobody can see their
0:15:40 own culture. Like it’s just, that’s just my way of doing things. That’s my culture. That’s my
0:15:45 behavior. Well, like maybe it’s not, but you can’t see it because it’s you, but you can see prison
0:15:51 culture. You can see slave revolt culture, these kinds of things. Yes. And something to borrow from
0:15:56 and think about and kind of riff on in your own way. I want to let people know that Chaka is
0:16:00 actually a wonderfully kind, empathetic person. No, he’s amazing. One of the great stories in the
0:16:06 book is how he transformed not only his own culture from that super violent culture, but also the
0:16:10 culture of the Milanics, which was a gang he ran. And you know, a lot of the guys, his guys that
0:16:14 got out and you know, it’s an amazing transformation that somebody could do that. I want to ask you
0:16:19 about that. I know Chaka because he’s a friend of yours and both actually just a plug for this. Ben
0:16:25 and Chaka co-host a podcast series called Hustlin Tech, which is guides to technology for everyone.
0:16:30 You can find that on our website. But what’s really amazing is that in the book, the story was
0:16:37 about how he took a group of outcasts and built a more cohesive team. And that’s how you described
0:16:41 it in the book. For me, I wondered coming at it from again, this theme of the vantage point of
0:16:45 Silicon Valley, I understand what you’re saying about the, you know, using examples that are
0:16:50 shocking and strong that you can learn from. But part of me was like, why is there a jail example
0:16:56 in a book about business culture? And so then I wondered, well, maybe can we draw an analogy
0:17:01 between a group of outcasts, like technologists, like in this room, and they can do the same thing,
0:17:06 and we can draw lessons from that? Or is that too far a stretch? Look, so let me tell you where
0:17:10 the analogy doesn’t work. You know, people in Silicon Valley, some people may be outcast, they
0:17:16 may have like not fit in as a kid and, you know, spent more time with the computer or what have you.
0:17:23 People get to prison very often because they’re really severely abused as kids. And so the thing
0:17:30 that prison culture or prison that I thought was very instructive was, we can tell you culture
0:17:35 for granted here, because when you hire someone, you can expect certain things. You know, you can
0:17:41 expect them to be reasonably on time for their interview. You can expect them to be literate.
0:17:46 You can expect them to, you know, there’s just a lot of cultural things that you can take for
0:17:51 granted, like more functional things. Yeah. Whereas in prison, you know, there’s really nothing you
0:17:57 can take for granted, including things like literacy and so forth. So when you go through the way
0:18:04 Chaka built the culture of the Milanics, he really had to start from first principles. And
0:18:09 sometimes in a culture, in a company, you’ve got to do that same thing. So one of the things that
0:18:17 Chaka did to kind of create loyalty is, you know, he just had the guy spent a lot of time together,
0:18:23 eating together, working out together, and it was required to be a member. And these things,
0:18:28 just that proximity and the nature of how they did it and so forth, kind of built the culture.
0:18:34 So one of my portfolio companies, a nation builder and the CEO, Leah Andres calls me up one day,
0:18:41 and she’s like, Ben, we just, our cash collections are always late and not a hundred percent.
0:18:46 And I said, well, you have like big customer satisfaction issues. She’s like, no, no, no,
0:18:50 like we’re just not collecting the money. And she’s like, but I don’t, I tell them, you know,
0:18:54 like we need to collect the money and it never happens. And I get it. And I was like, well,
0:18:58 you know, you have to start from first principles. I took her through what Chaka did. And I said,
0:19:03 like, this is how we’re going to apply it here. I want you to hold a meeting every day with the
0:19:08 cash collections team, every day, eight in the morning, everybody comes to work, like we’re
0:19:13 having a meeting. And in that meeting, the very first thing that I want you to say is, where’s my
0:19:21 money? And then what you’re going to find out is they’re going to have all kinds of weird reasons
0:19:26 why they can’t get you your money. And they’re all going to be very easy to fix because it’s a
0:19:31 cultural problem, not an actual problem. And so sure enough, she goes, she calls me up after
0:19:34 the first day. She’s like, you’re not going to believe it. You know what one of the biggest
0:19:39 things is? We have an email that we send to collect the cash and auto email that’s really
0:19:45 poorly written. And I’m like, you know, it’s not a big company. And so she every day has this
0:19:49 meeting and works through it. And like pretty soon they were, you know, collecting literally
0:19:54 twice as much cash as they had been previously. And it was just a culture change. But it was a
0:20:00 culture change taken from a prison example. And because you can’t make cultural assumptions when
0:20:05 you’re in prison, so often CEOs make cultural assumptions they shouldn’t. I love that you
0:20:11 brought up first principles because I’m fascinated by first principles type thinkers. I think some
0:20:16 of the greatest CEOs, scientists, innovators are first principles thinkers. And one thing I often
0:20:22 wonder, I always ask myself this when I observe the evolution of technology and innovation is,
0:20:26 are there maybe two camps of people, people who can be first principles thinkers,
0:20:31 and some who can’t and a Silicon Valley folklore story of Reed Hastings CEO of Netflix. You tell
0:20:36 this briefly in the book of how he wanted to pivot the Netflix business from DVD streaming.
0:20:41 He would say he didn’t want to pivot it. He said the plan was always to be a network.
0:20:47 He wanted to evolve the network in his view from the outset to a streaming service.
0:20:50 Yeah. So I shouldn’t use the word pivot because that’s even more powerful, frankly, from a first
0:20:55 principles perspective that he had the vision upfront and the confidence to know that I’m
0:21:00 going to pace myself by doing the DVD business before I do the streaming business. But then he
0:21:06 built a successful DVD business and then he kicked out the leaders of his DVD business from the room
0:21:10 when they were talking about the streaming business, which felt like a very bold first
0:21:14 principles move as Silicon Valley folklore. You tell the story in your book. I read that and I
0:21:20 was like, would you really advise your CEOs to do that? Was there something about him uniquely
0:21:24 that he could make such a bold move or is this really advice that people in this room should
0:21:29 actually go translate into their work? No. It was actually analogous to the move that
0:21:34 Toussaint Louverture made in the Haitian slave revolt. The leader of the, you know,
0:21:39 as I said, the only successful slave revolt in human history. He was obsessed with culture and
0:21:47 one of the things that he wanted to move from a kind of a broken slave culture to a world-class
0:21:53 military and not only military, but like societal culture because he thought, hey,
0:21:57 he could be a first-class country. And one of the decisions he made just to make that priority
0:22:03 clear because like the default culture in a slave revolt is revenge, a revenge culture.
0:22:09 When it came to the decision of what to do with the plantation owners, the slave owners,
0:22:13 you know, he could have executed them. He could have seized the land. He could have done a lot of
0:22:19 things. He actually left them in place, let them keep the plantations, but said he had to pay the
0:22:23 workers as opposed to have them as slaves. And in order to facilitate that, he lowered their taxes.
0:22:31 So that was a decision to set the culture away from revenge and towards reconciliation and caring
0:22:37 about the economy and caring about the go-forward. Reed wanted to get to streaming. His big fear
0:22:43 was that a pure streaming company would come along and he would be stuck in the DVD business.
0:22:47 And he couldn’t figure out how to change the culture to do that. And then one day he said,
0:22:52 even though the DVD business is 100% of the revenue, like imagine that 100% of the revenue,
0:22:56 I’m going to let everybody know that streaming is more important. And the way he did it is he
0:23:02 kicked all the DVD people out of the executive staff meeting. And anybody who knows about companies
0:23:07 knows that’s a meeting everybody wants to be in, that executive staff meeting. They’re like,
0:23:13 that’s going to really hurt feelings. But it wasn’t like Reed was so great that he got to do it and
0:23:18 people would be okay with it. He was just willing to take that because the principle was so important.
0:23:22 And the same way people were mad in the Haitian Revolution when Toussaint did that,
0:23:28 but they were working towards something, you know, a higher cultural principle.
0:23:34 – You described it as creating a shocking rule that does that kind of a reset. One recurring
0:23:38 theme I noticed in the book, and for those who haven’t read it, this is just something people
0:23:42 in marketing and brand talk about too, which is the power of the why. And I noticed almost every
0:23:47 other chapter, every other sentence, every other paragraph, you kept emphasizing this message,
0:23:51 the why matters more than the what. The why matters, the why matters. And it seems obvious on the
0:23:58 surface, but I really want you to share with us why the why is so important. – So I’ll give you two
0:24:03 very different examples. One is, well, Andrews and Hearts. One of the things that we wanted in
0:24:10 the culture from the outset was we wanted to respect the entrepreneur and the entrepreneurial
0:24:16 process. Now, there is not a venture capitalist in the world who won’t say that, but there’s a big
0:24:23 cultural force that screws that up in venture capital, which is this dynamic. I have the money.
0:24:29 You want the money. In order to get the money, you got to come see me and ask for the money.
0:24:35 And then I get to decide whether you get the money. So that could make a person disrespectful.
0:24:40 And I’ll tell you what it does, because anybody here raised venture capital money.
0:24:47 How often did the VC show up on time for that meeting? Okay. – No one’s raising their hand.
0:24:52 – You know, why is that? Well, they say it, but they don’t believe it. They aspire to it,
0:24:59 but it’s a value, not a virtue. And so I set a rule early on, which was if you’re late
0:25:07 to a meeting with an entrepreneur, you owe me $10 a minute. And oh, you have to go to the bathroom?
0:25:12 No problem. $50. Oh, you had a really important phone call on the deal. We all want to close.
0:25:21 No problem. $100. And people would come to me and they’d go, why? – Why? – Why am I paying you to
0:25:28 work here? I’m like, look, because I need you to know how important and valuable an entrepreneur’s
0:25:32 time is when they’re trying to build a company, and you’re not going to waste any of their time
0:25:35 if you’re here. You’ve got a plan when you go to the bathroom. You’ve got a plan when you have
0:25:39 that phone call. And I know you can do it, because if you were getting married, you wouldn’t be five
0:25:49 minutes late to the altar. You would have gone to the bathroom already. But every time somebody’s
0:25:53 got a plan, when they use the restroom, when they make their phone calls and so forth, which is
0:26:00 every day at the office, they have to say, why am I doing this? Oh, I remember why, because we
0:26:07 respect entrepreneurs and what it means to build a company. And so that’s a kind of technique to
0:26:11 move the culture, right? – Yeah. I said to tell everyone in the room, since you gave that A6NZ
0:26:16 example, they actually formally call those breaks biobrakes. They actually schedule in
0:26:22 bathroom breaks into the schedule. But anyway, onto your other example. – So a different one,
0:26:28 ethics turns out to be really tricky in a company. And people make fun of Dara at Uber for saying,
0:26:33 like, we’re going to be ethical. Our new corporate values just do the right thing, period. It’s
0:26:40 like, what the hell’s the right thing? It actually turns out to be fairly subtle, much of the time.
0:26:46 So in a company, you could imagine, okay, we made promises to all the employees about what
0:26:50 their stock was going to be worth and to Wall Street about the numbers we were going to hit.
0:26:56 And like, we live up to our commitments. In order to make the number, we got to get this deal.
0:27:01 In order to get this deal, they need this feature, but they need a quarter and we’re
0:27:07 not going to deliver for a year. So is it ethical to whiff the quarter and have lied to all the
0:27:12 investors and the employees? Or is it ethical to stretch the truth to the customer and like,
0:27:18 get the money? Well, you better be clear on that and you better get to some kind of higher
0:27:22 principle than do the right thing. And so a great example of this is in the Haitian Revolution,
0:27:28 this is a war over sugar. It’s the British Army, the Spanish Army, the French Army,
0:27:35 and the slave army all fighting for control of this colony. And so it is the most mercenary
0:27:41 kind of endeavor that you could ever imagine. All of the European armies are letting their guys
0:27:49 pillage all they want. And Toussaint makes the decision that he’s going to not allow any pillaging
0:27:57 in the slave army because you can’t fight for liberty if you’re taking people’s liberty.
0:28:03 And it was an amazingly powerful thing because the stories of some of the stories in the book,
0:28:09 but the story would be of like the Spanish Army going in, setting the plantation on fire,
0:28:16 killing all the animals, robbing everybody, raping the women on the plantation. And then
0:28:23 the slave army would show up starving and they would not touch the thing. No violence, no pillaging,
0:28:33 no nothing. And the knock on effect of that ethic was that Toussaint had the support of the locals,
0:28:40 including the white women in the colony, who referred him as father, like amazingly, to that
0:28:44 level of loyalty. He didn’t say do the right thing because to the right thing is pillage.
0:28:51 You pillage, the guys get paid, they fight harder, they win the war, you end slavery.
0:28:56 Like that seems like pretty legit. So you can’t just say do the right thing. You have to say
0:29:01 here’s what we’re doing and here’s why we’re doing it. And that’s why I emphasize the why.
0:29:06 The power of the why. I have two follow-ups on this and I want to actually shift gears to more
0:29:11 practical techniques based on these wonderful principles and violent stories as well. In
0:29:16 the Dara example and the values and why the why matters, I also read it and heard it a little bit
0:29:23 as maybe mistakes of omission are more important than mistakes of commission, that what you don’t
0:29:27 say is more important than what you do say. And so then it wondered like practically,
0:29:32 does that mean as someone in this room, for instance, wants to write their, figure out their
0:29:38 code, their Bushido for their company, do they start with what they’re not? Or is there room for
0:29:42 them to figure out what they are? Like how does that sort of play out practically? Well, now I do
0:29:49 think one like the universe of what you’re not is too big. Yeah, sure. But here’s the thing
0:29:54 that is true in every culture. And this is the thing that Toussaint did. So effectively you have
0:30:01 to make ethics explicit. If it’s, oh yeah, we’re going to do the right thing. Oh yeah, like it’s
0:30:10 going to be like, yeah, don’t don’t be evil. That’s just not good enough. And you know, a great example
0:30:16 of this is Uber under Travis. Travis would get criticized for building a bad culture, but he
0:30:23 actually had the bestifying culture in Silicon Valley. And if you read the original values that
0:30:29 he had, always be hustling, you know, super pump, toe stomping, whatever, like they, they were all
0:30:36 really creative, well crafted, energizing kind of set of principles that they worked on. But he
0:30:41 went way beyond that. They really trained people on them. They had Uber University and they trained
0:30:47 people on the culture. And it really stuck. And probably the most powerful virtue that defined
0:30:53 the company was competitiveness. They were like massively competitive. And really great at that.
0:31:00 But what he did not do is he didn’t say where the line was. So ethics were just like unstated
0:31:08 completely. And so a lot of people would interpret that competitive virtue to be like
0:31:14 whatever at all cost, you know, even say hashtag winning, right? And so when Susan Fowler joined
0:31:20 the company, she gets sexually harassed her first day on the job by her manager in writing,
0:31:27 like she snapshots it sends a HR. Now anybody who knows anything about HR law knows if you get
0:31:31 any kind of complaint, let alone one in writing with proof, you have to investigate it. Like
0:31:35 that’s not like a practice. That’s the law. That’s the law. Yeah, you like you just have to do that.
0:31:42 But this HR person said, Oh, that manager is a high performer. So like we can move you. But like
0:31:46 we’re not doing anything. There’s no way like Travis wanted that manager to do that. It’s just
0:31:51 like a dumbass thing to do. Like even if you didn’t care about sexual harassment, like that’s
0:31:58 idiotic. That’s ridiculous. But when you don’t counterbalance the culture, if you don’t say
0:32:02 what the ethical line is, which we won’t cross, particularly in business, because every conversation
0:32:06 you have is how do we make the number? How do we get better? You know, how do we get more customers?
0:32:12 How do we grow the user base? All that. And so if you don’t have any countermeasure on that that
0:32:19 you talk about out loud, then it can run away from you like very hard and very fast. And so that’s
0:32:24 why when you talk about what not to do, it’s really like, where is the ethical line in this
0:32:30 company? And then particularly in Uber’s case, it was tricky because they were flirting the law
0:32:35 on a lot of things. So the law wasn’t even the line, right? Because they’re challenging the
0:32:41 regulation, the laws of the land in place. And so what is the line? Definitely not something that,
0:32:45 you know, every employee would just figure out on their own. I loved that because one of the
0:32:51 things that I think is a through line through the book is this idea that the very strength you
0:32:56 have is also your weakness. And that it’s all a difference of degree, not a difference of kind,
0:33:00 which I think is such a powerful idea because there’s a fuzzy area between the yellow and the red,
0:33:05 you know, strength weakness. So it’s kind of on a continuum. I do have one question for you about
0:33:11 the Uber example. I’m just curious about it because I love a comeback story. And the idea that you
0:33:19 can change, do you think that Travis himself could have led that change at Uber or that they needed
0:33:24 to bring an outside person or that he could have come back like 10 years later, like Steve Jobs
0:33:31 at Apple on his second time? I guess my question is, can the same person actually make that change
0:33:36 of a culture? Does it have to come from the outside? Yeah. So look, I think that Travis could have
0:33:40 done it, but Travis would have had to change if that makes sense. When Chaka changed the prison
0:33:47 culture when I go through it in the book, it couldn’t change until he changed. And I think that,
0:33:53 you know, with Travis, he may be changed now, but he didn’t change then. And I don’t think he ever
0:34:01 saw the lack of explicit ethics as the problem, getting the medical records from the women in
0:34:09 India or the sexual harassment or the hell application where they hacked the lifter. Like
0:34:14 all of those things were individual incidents. They weren’t systematic, I think in his mind. So
0:34:20 like, unless you believe it’s systematic, and you know, I go through the story in the book where
0:34:25 they have the confrontation with the nation of Islam where Chaka realized that it was systematic,
0:34:30 the violence was systematic, and that’s when he changed and that’s when they changed.
0:34:34 And he turned his whole group, the gang of the Milanics around.
0:34:40 Yes, yes. And I think that that’s very unusual and difficult to do. There are other things where
0:34:47 there’s a competency issue. So, you know, there’s a lot of Boeing in the news lately on the 737.
0:34:51 And I think anybody who’s been in a company knows that there were people in Boeing that
0:34:55 knew that thing wasn’t safe. Like, there’s no question. There were engineers that knew it wasn’t
0:35:00 safe and they think it’s come out even that they told the CEO it wasn’t safe. But somewhere in the
0:35:06 culture, whatever it was, being on time with the product release or earnings or whatever became
0:35:12 more important than safety. And in a place where lives are on the line, you probably can’t have a
0:35:20 leader that lets that stand culturally. So, in that case, I would probably say you have to remove
0:35:24 them because you have to shock the system hard enough to reset the culture to the point where
0:35:31 they value safety over whatever it was that they were valuing. If he or someone else in this position
0:35:36 who’s trying to turn around or reset their culture did actually become to your point self-aware,
0:35:41 what would they have to do then to then communicate that to their company? Or how do they sort of
0:35:49 convey that this is a shift? I think that it’s very, very hard and detailed work. I don’t make
0:35:55 light of it and probably the best example is kind of, you know, shock in the book. I hate to say
0:35:59 read the book, but like that one’s complicated. I actually do want to tell people to read the book
0:36:04 because I actually think no matter how much we talk about it here, it doesn’t do justice to the
0:36:09 nuance and the layers of meaning within meaning within meaning without reading that. You can
0:36:15 actually almost only convey that in the written form in some ways, but one thing about this idea
0:36:21 that you have to be self-aware have truths that you know. I also wonder if it’s at odds with the
0:36:27 sort of Silicon Valley technologist culture of reality distortion fields to use the phrase that
0:36:32 Walter Isaacson used to describe Steve Jobs, but the other thing is we work in venture capital.
0:36:36 We see founders every day. There’s a certain will to power that you need to get through and punch
0:36:42 through an industry that is hard to penetrate. And you kind of have to have some lies that you
0:36:47 tell yourself. So for me, it felt like a bit of a contradiction between lies and truth and being
0:36:53 self-aware. Like how can you be a founder and also self-aware at the same time? It feels like
0:36:58 they’re at odds. So look, when you talk about a reality distortion field or like a founder who
0:37:05 like, you know, has a crazy idea or whatever, that’s innovation. And so on those ideas,
0:37:13 what you’re really saying there is 99.999% of the world believes X and the founder believes Y.
0:37:21 But when it’s really a breakthrough, the founder is actually right. So these people were all deceived
0:37:25 or thought they knew the truth, but didn’t. And the founder did. And that’s always what
0:37:30 innovation looks like. But that’s believing something but not knowing it. And that’s different
0:37:38 than lying where you know something and then you say something else to try and move things.
0:37:43 That’s why I hate the term fake it till you make it because that’s like lie to get what you want.
0:37:49 That’s got all kinds of bad cultural implications that’s going to come back and eat you alive in
0:37:54 your own company if you’re not careful. So I think that those are two different concepts. I don’t
0:37:58 think you have to reconcile. Yeah. So some quick lightning round style questions with you on a couple
0:38:03 of things. So one is superstars, 10 X engineers, brilliant jerks, you know, other outliers in a
0:38:11 company. When is cultural cohesion more important than those types of special unique individuals
0:38:16 and their performance? Like, is there a tension between the two? Yeah. So almost all the time,
0:38:20 John Madden had a great line on this. He said, look, on a football team, there’s one guy
0:38:26 that you can hold the bus for. Like everybody’s got to be on time, but that person is so great.
0:38:30 It’s okay. We’re going to hold the bus. Yeah. And the reason it can only be one is
0:38:34 you have to make it clear to everybody else that you’re going to let that person be
0:38:38 outside the culture. They’re clear exception. But you have to have great skill. Like John Madden
0:38:45 was an amazing football coach and so forth. So generally you wouldn’t do it, but if you want
0:38:51 to do it, they better be the one. Okay. So pirates versus Navy. And you’ve actually talked a lot in
0:38:56 your other writings about wartime versus peacetime CEOs. I love that because it comes from the
0:39:00 Godfather, the wartime peacetime conciliary, one of my favorite movies of all time. By the way,
0:39:03 I’m a big fan of Godfather one, not Godfather two. And there’s two camps on that. Godfather two
0:39:07 is good. It’s good, but it’s not great. It’s not as good as Godfather one. And Godfather three,
0:39:13 let’s not even talk about it. Well, because you’re an editor, Godfather one, the editing was way
0:39:18 tighter. I agree with that. I’m glad we agree. Or someone on that. But pirates versus Navy.
0:39:24 Is there a phase when every startup and inevitably starts off as pirates and becomes a Navy?
0:39:29 How does someone navigate that cultural transition? So, you know, there’s a great story
0:39:34 in Andy Groh’s book, only the paranoid survive about this. So when they had the, whatever the
0:39:41 floating point error, which was like, you know, and Andy Groh’s was like, it’s not going to affect
0:39:47 anybody. These guys are all stupid. F off. Because Andy was, he didn’t suffer fools. But it was a
0:39:53 huge catastrophe for Intel. And what he said he learned, and it was kind of this transition from
0:39:59 pirates to the Navy is when you’re dealing with consumers, how they feel matters, these things,
0:40:04 these other things matter more than the actual technical answer. And so, you know, he had to
0:40:08 make that transition. I’m going to skip some of the other ones until we have time for everyone’s
0:40:13 questions. I’m going to ask some of the questions that came from the audience. So the first question
0:40:18 is, Ben, given the importance of culture in any organization, how would you evaluate candidates
0:40:24 for culture fit? Yes, I think that’s very tricky, because people can change their culture. So one
0:40:30 thing that you can get with exact culture fit is a lot of homogeneity, right? We went to the same
0:40:37 school, we read the same books, we believe the same things, you know, and there’s a power in that,
0:40:46 but it’s a slippery thing. So you have to be careful. So what I find to be powerful is to
0:40:50 really define your culture. And, you know, like, we have a very comprehensive culture
0:40:55 document at the firm. And one of the things that we do, which actually learned while writing the
0:41:02 book, is we don’t let anybody sign their offer letter without agreeing to the culture, saying,
0:41:08 I’m going to live in this culture. I’m going to adhere to these standards. So, like, if somebody
0:41:13 says, oh, they’re not a culture fit, it’s like, why? Like, what exactly about them doesn’t fit
0:41:18 into our culture? And it’s that element we want in our culture or not want. And, like, you have to
0:41:24 be able to have at the conversation at that level. And so I would just say, like, doing it in a fuzzy
0:41:29 way is very dangerous. Doing it in a specific intentional way and knowing that people can change,
0:41:35 I would say, would be the correct approach. This is a follow-up related question from another
0:41:40 person. I’m just kind of theming these. You talked about building culture. What do you do if you
0:41:43 walk into — this is now from the employee perspective — what do you do if you walk into a new
0:41:47 company and you find yourself a misfit in terms of culture? I don’t know if you have any thoughts
0:41:50 on that, but I’m very curious for what you think about that. Well, like, if you don’t believe
0:41:57 in the behaviors of that company and you’re coming in at the individual contributor level,
0:42:03 you probably want to move on. I think it’s very difficult because what’ll end up happening is
0:42:06 that culture will change you. And I know a lot of you have probably worked in organizations where,
0:42:11 you know, people be rate each other. And then what happens, right? Like, if you’re in that,
0:42:16 like, you’ll go home and do that. And, like, you’ll pick that up. And so you don’t do that to
0:42:20 yourself. Don’t become a person you don’t want to be. I would also add to that, because I’ve heard
0:42:25 this from you so many times, and it’s in our values, too, that we celebrate difference. It shouldn’t
0:42:29 be — the assumption should not be that someone following a code means that everyone’s in the
0:42:33 same cult mindset. Like, there’s room for a variety of people in different ways of being.
0:42:38 So, you know, and we talk about at the firm, which is what I always say is, like, if you have an
0:42:45 NFL team, you’re going to have players that weigh 350 pounds, and you’re going to have players that
0:42:52 weigh, like, 180 pounds and run fast. And if you have all 350-pound players, you’re going to lose.
0:42:56 And if you have all skinny guys who run fast, you’re going to lose. And so we have to value
0:43:01 each other’s strengths. And it can’t always be, like, I only value the strengths that I have.
0:43:06 And that’s basically where people screw up the whole diversity and inclusion equation is
0:43:14 they can’t see the talents that they don’t have. And so then they try and use a proxy,
0:43:20 like race or gender or whatever. When, like, if you could see the talent, like, you’ll get diversity,
0:43:24 you just have to be able to see what people can do. And I talk about this a lot in the book,
0:43:30 but, you know, that really is important. But you have to see and value the things that you can’t
0:43:36 do. Right. So this is also related. I don’t know if you have a different thought on this angle.
0:43:41 What can I do to change a culture at my company as a rank and file employee? Like, do they
0:43:47 go to HR? Do they talk to someone? What advice would you have for this? Well, to change the culture.
0:43:53 Yeah. How can they change it from that perspective? I think the thing that that’s different companies
0:44:02 versus a society, like, in society, like Jay-Z can change the culture. Yeah. Companies, the hierarchy
0:44:10 has a heavier weighting to it. So if the, like, let’s say you wanted to change the culture so that
0:44:15 everybody was, you know, on time and respectful about each other’s time. And the CEO always showed
0:44:20 up to everything a half hour late. Like, it’d be really hard to do. And so I think that if you’re
0:44:25 an individual coming in, you kind of have to compel the top of the organization to do it for
0:44:29 starters. Otherwise, like, you’re just going to be fighting the tide. Yeah. And I have to say,
0:44:33 I actually appreciate that you’re someone that I can come walk into your office and tell you the
0:44:36 truth of what I’m thinking and you don’t actually get mad at me for that. Yeah. And then, you know,
0:44:41 as a leader on the other hand, like, everybody’s culture is broken in some way. Like, I never
0:44:46 met a company that has anything close to 100% cultural coherence. Like, and people who tell
0:44:50 you they have or just literally don’t even know they’re lying to themselves. They publish it.
0:44:56 Like, it’s a mathematical terms. It’s a complex adaptive path dependent system. Like,
0:44:59 everybody’s behavior is moving the culture all the time. And you’re going to have breakage and
0:45:04 you’re going to have slippage and you’re going to have regressions and all that kind of stuff.
0:45:08 So as a leader, if somebody says, like, I think we have a cultural problem,
0:45:13 you know, you can’t tell them to pound sand or like you can, but that thing is going to
0:45:17 fester and grow. We call that a kimchi problem. That’s great. My Korean friends.
0:45:22 It’s funny, too, because you say in the book, the goal is to be better, not perfect,
0:45:26 which I think is a much more attainable thing for someone to do, which I loved.
0:45:31 So here’s another employer-oriented question. How can I evaluate company culture before I
0:45:34 join? How can you tell from the outside if you don’t have a culture doc and the kinds of things
0:45:41 that we and others do? Well, you know, like, I think you have to ask specific questions
0:45:48 about the kinds of, you know, behaviors that you’re concerned about. If you ask about a behavior,
0:45:54 people won’t know even to try and like head fake you on it. If I send somebody an email here,
0:45:59 like, how long will it take to get back to me? Like, that’s a, that’s a very telling thing in a
0:46:03 culture, right? Like, because people are either responsible or they’re not. If I go to a meeting
0:46:07 or people are going to be listening to me, are they going to be like on their laptops and computers?
0:46:11 Like, because in different companies run differently that way. And so you just have to
0:46:15 think about, okay, where are you going to be effective? And what are the behaviors that, like,
0:46:20 you want to be part of? And what is going to drive you bananas?
0:46:25 Right. Here’s, oh my God, I love this question. In the blood genealogy story, you mentioned the
0:46:29 samurai was a mediocre performer. Yeah. How do you decide whether or not to keep that mediocre
0:46:37 performer without he or she having to demonstrate value in such an extreme way in an extreme situation?
0:46:42 Yeah. You know, I love that question. That’s a great question. Well, it’s interesting because
0:46:52 in the story, if you’ll recall, the Lord Selma really had an affinity for the samurai,
0:46:57 despite all his issues. And I always say, one of the things I really believe in is
0:47:03 you value people on the magnitude of their strength, not their lack of weakness. And that’s in kind
0:47:08 of hiring. And as you go forward, and the late Raiders owner used to say something I really
0:47:13 like, it says coach them on what they can do. Like, not everybody can do everything, but like,
0:47:20 if what they can do is world class, and you need that, then that’s a real thing. And, you know,
0:47:28 he would do his level best at whatever you needed him to do 100%. And, you know, that shows up more
0:47:32 than just when he went and got the genealogy. It’s how you look at people. I would always
0:47:37 rather have somebody world class it’s something that I really needed than like, above average at
0:47:42 everything. And, you know, and horrible at something else. We have people in the firm like that, as
0:47:48 you know, like, and I value that. And I’m okay. And you do have to have that conversation. No,
0:47:53 you can’t go do that job, because you’re no good at that. I love that. Yeah, I love that. And I
0:47:57 love that we’re all really honest about that. And we allow that I have it because we just because
0:48:01 we talked about Godfather earlier, I have to say that I call this my capo theory of management,
0:48:07 which is that there’s a capo layer in every company. And I sometimes wonder to myself that
0:48:11 kind of loyalty, does it actually really pay off? Like sometimes with the that what I love about
0:48:16 that question that person asked was, it almost made me wonder, like, I don’t want to be that blood
0:48:21 genealogy person, like I’d rather be excellent at something than mediocre and have to prove myself
0:48:26 that way. But not everyone. Anyway, that was a real test. Okay, so this is a great one as an
0:48:30 investor and board member. This is kind of a governance related thing. How do you keep your
0:48:36 company management responsible on the question of culture? Is it something that you actually even
0:48:41 ask? Like, is it around processes, KPIs, priority versus profit? Does it come up at a board level?
0:48:46 Yes, I know, like it does at least it does for me, because I spend a lot of time,
0:48:52 at least with the CEOs in my portfolio, talking to them, and it starts with hiring, like,
0:48:59 let’s not I don’t care about like your close rate on your candidates and all that right now.
0:49:06 What I want to know is, how are you onboarding them? How long does it take them to get productive?
0:49:11 What is your in place satisfaction? What are your attrition rates? And this is actually,
0:49:18 this is the biggest mistake people make on diversity is they measure how many
0:49:24 women underrepresented minorities are coming through the door. Yeah, that’s not the metric.
0:49:31 The metric is, what do promotion, attrition, in place satisfaction means around across race and
0:49:36 gender? Yeah, can you see the talent? Do you value it? Do people enjoy their career there?
0:49:42 Because if they do, then you can get the talent. But if you don’t recognize the talent and you just
0:49:47 force people in so you can get the gold sticker that says you’re not racist and sexist, then you’re
0:49:53 going to make everybody miserable. All your employees. So anyway, sorry. That’s great. No.
0:49:58 Okay, a couple more and then we can wrap up. If you could be world-class at only one thing,
0:50:02 culture or product, which do you choose and why? And by the way, for those in the audience who
0:50:06 haven’t read this book, one of the recurring themes Ben does talk about is this tension that
0:50:12 culture is this abstract thing. So how do you make those choices? Let’s not get confused about one
0:50:16 thing. You have a great culture and you build a product that like people don’t want. Your company
0:50:22 is going out of business. Nobody’s going to worry like that’s that. So like the product has to work
0:50:31 for you to have a business. But having said that, and I talk to entrepreneurs about this all the
0:50:38 time, the most important thing about your company isn’t necessarily going to be the success or the
0:50:45 deals you won or like the customers you had. It’s going to be what that time was like, you know,
0:50:50 that time of your life and the life of all the employees who spent most of their waking hours
0:50:57 with you at your company. What did that feel like? How did you treat each other? How did you treat the
0:51:02 people you work with? Did everybody’s lives get better? Did they become better people or worse
0:51:07 people? And that’s your culture. And so that’s like a real thing with incredible value. So I don’t
0:51:13 want to say, you know, just because you can’t succeed through culture alone doesn’t mean it’s
0:51:22 not incredibly important. Okay, so last one. If starting a VC fund like A6 and Z today, what would
0:51:28 be the most important to build the right culture? Well, you know, like it depends what your business
0:51:34 strategy is and not every culture is for everybody. And one of my favorite examples that I have in
0:51:40 the book is, so you take Amazon. Amazon, one of their cultural things is frugality. And you know,
0:51:45 they used to have, your desk used to be a door like in the old days at Amazon, so just to let
0:51:50 you know, we’re not going to buy you a desk. That’s how cheap we are. But their business strategy was
0:51:56 to be the low cost leader. So that from a customer perspective, if I went to Amazon, I didn’t have
0:52:01 to price compare because I knew they had the lowest cost. And to get to that, you need to not waste
0:52:06 money. You contrast that with Apple. Apple doesn’t have that strategy. They’re not trying to be the
0:52:13 low cost, low price leader. They’re trying to build the best product possible, the most beautiful,
0:52:19 best designed, spare no expense. Steve Jobs even got fired by sparing no expense his first time around.
0:52:24 And to be like, you go to their campus, it like costs $5 billion. And it’s like gorgeous. And the
0:52:30 doorknobs cost like thousands of dollars, all that kind of thing. And that works for them.
0:52:35 You know, that culture kind of produced the products that they produced. And Apple’s products
0:52:39 probably will always be more beautiful than Amazon’s products, which are not very beautiful.
0:52:45 But they’ll also always be more expensive. And so that culture was right for Apple and
0:52:49 the other culture was right for Amazon. So, you know, and for Apple to take Amazon’s culture
0:52:52 wouldn’t have been productive for them because it didn’t go with their business strategy.
0:52:58 That’s great. So I have one question that the Computer History Museum asked us to do as well.
0:53:03 So you made the best seller list. And it’s in the category for advice and how to, which I personally
0:53:07 love, the business category is not out yet, but I love that because I found the book very therapeutic
0:53:11 and reading it. And there’s something about personal development as well as career development
0:53:17 and leadership in it. On that note, for you sitting where you are today, knowing everything you know
0:53:23 now and what you could tell your younger self, the Computer History Museum has a one word initiative
0:53:28 where they ask you to reveal one word of advice to a young person. And it could be for yourself or
0:53:34 to any young person today. Could you share what your word is and the story behind it? Sure. Do I
0:53:38 have it here? I don’t even know what it is. I don’t know if you’re going to read it. It’s persistence.
0:53:44 This is for entrepreneurs. Because like entrepreneurship makes you want to quit all
0:53:50 the time from fundraising to like everything going wrong to problems with customers to your
0:53:59 employees telling you your culture sucks. And like if you’re not absolutely committed to getting
0:54:07 better and learning and changing and making it go, then you’re not going to get there. And if you
0:54:13 think about the top, top entrepreneurs, they are amazingly persistent people. This is something
0:54:17 that I think if you want anything in life, this is what you need. One last question. I want to
0:54:22 ask you about the process of writing the book because of course as an editor, I have to know.
0:54:27 And also frankly, before I met you and came to Andres and Horowitz almost six years ago,
0:54:30 I thought it was kind of sticky and gimmicky that you would put rap lyrics at the top of your
0:54:34 blog post. I was like, no offense. I’m just going to say this out loud. But I’d be like, who is this
0:54:40 like white guy putting rap lyrics on his post? Judged by my culture, not my color. I agree. I
0:54:46 agree. But I had that thought in my mind. And I was like, what’s up with this? And you also say
0:54:51 in the book that the majority of your entrepreneurial and business and culture ideas occur to you
0:54:55 when you’re listening to hip hop. And so what I want to ask you because now that I know you and I
0:55:00 know that there’s layers and layers and meanings behind what you do, what specifically about hip
0:55:05 hop culture draws you and what’s the bigger cultural context for the rap lyrics that you put
0:55:11 at the top of your blog post? Yeah. So rap music is very entrepreneurial in nature. The original
0:55:17 rap music, because they created a new musical art form out of nothing. And nobody would put it on
0:55:21 the radio. MTV won’t play the videos. Nobody would sign the guys for the first 10 years of rap
0:55:25 music. Nobody would sign them. And so they did all these things. They sold records out of the
0:55:29 trucks of their cars, that kind of thing. And they kind of built this whole thing that it ended
0:55:36 up being the biggest musical art form in the world currently. And they tell those stories in
0:55:40 the songs. And they’re very related to the entrepreneurial journey. So I have a lot of
0:55:45 those things in it. And then, you know, and of course now I listen to so much rap music. A lot
0:55:50 of other things come to mind. So if you think about the opening quote for the culture and revolution
0:55:54 chapter, it’s from Nas, who I spent hours and hours talking about the Haitian Revolution with.
0:56:01 And he had a song on his album, Stillmatic, the introduction to the album. And this album,
0:56:07 you have to understand, his career, like they had buried him, like he was dead. And Jay-Z came out
0:56:13 with this like very aggressive diss rap against him, which he countered with a song called
0:56:21 Ether. But the opening line is Blood of a Slave, Heart of a King. And I was like, that’s too sound
0:56:28 overture. Blood of a Slave, Heart of a King. And so those kinds of things. So it’s kind of telling
0:56:33 the hidden story in the book, you know, the rap lyric in the Chaka chapter from a young woman,
0:56:39 Dejloff, really describes the culture he came from, well, but she’s also from Detroit. So it’s
0:56:45 just kind of the backstory on the book. It’s how I tell that for the really avid readers.
0:56:49 One of the things I’ve learned from you, and I agree it’s about judging a person based on their
0:56:56 culture, not on their color, is that the influence of hip hop is outsized in our culture. And we
0:57:01 did, you did an episode, you did an event with Dapper Dan. And that was a great example of how
0:57:08 a man from Harlem, his design, his influence, many, many, many other great designers. And
0:57:12 there’s a riffing culture, but sometimes it’s also a borrowing culture, a remix culture, that’s
0:57:17 TikTok. So I think what I love about it is that hip hop has had an outsized cultural influence in
0:57:22 our world today. And it’s very powerful because you constantly bridge these cultures for us too.
0:57:27 Yeah, so I want to go back to culture in that color, because that actually comes from something
0:57:35 that Toussaint did. So in 1797, he was actually running the colony as part of France. There was
0:57:42 a guy, Vincent Vaublanc, who hated the idea of a slave running a French colony. And he lobbied a
0:57:48 French parliament. He said, look, the colony’s been overrun by ignorant and brutish Negroes.
0:57:54 And Toussaint had to counter this argument. And the counter argument was really interesting
0:58:00 because he said, look, black people are not savages. It’s slavery that makes them so.
0:58:06 And then he went on to basically break down point by point why the Haitian revolution was far less
0:58:12 bloody and brutal and savage than the French revolution. And some of the things I talked
0:58:17 about, like they didn’t pillage, made his case. And he won that argument with the French parliament.
0:58:21 But it was so interesting to me the way he phrased it, because it was the culture of slavery
0:58:29 that created the perception of these guys that had nothing to do with it. It just got a color
0:58:34 assigned to it. And I think that with hip hop, it’s the culture of entrepreneurship. And it has
0:58:40 nothing to do with being black. It has to do with that culture. And that’s why I think that a lot
0:58:47 of entrepreneurs resonate with it. And we get divided up into these dumb demographics, age,
0:58:53 gender, color, zip code. But what you do is who you are. That’s your culture.
0:58:57 That’s fantastic. I want to say to everyone, thank you for joining this episode of the A6NC
0:59:02 podcast. We’re here at the Computer History Museum. Thank you, everyone, for coming today and joining
0:59:03 us. Thank you.
0:59:06 (audience applauding)
0:59:10 (audience applauding)