Andreessen Horowitz On Startups

1. The most important attribute required to be a successful founding CEO is leadership
2. All CEOs should work on the vision component of leadership
3. To create the original innovation to start a company, founders must exhaustively understand the technology required, the likely competitors (past, present, and future), and the market in all its variations and segmentations
4. As CEO, you must consider the systemic incentives that result from your words and actions. While it may feel good in the moment to be open, responsive and action oriented, be careful not to encourage all the wrong things
5. A technology startup is all about the entrepreneurial team and their vision
6. Building a great company is a team sport
7. Trust is essential to building a great company
8. Product is the heart of any technology company
9. The technology business is fundamentally the innovation business
10. The best way to understand the entrepreneurial process is to go through it. If you haven’t been through it, it’s kind of hard to learn from a book
11. The process of scaling a company is not unlike the process of scaling a product. Different sizes of company impose different requirements on the company’s architecture
12. Be mindful of your company’s true growth rate as you add architectural components. It’s good to anticipate growth, but it’s bad to over-anticipate growth
13. Without a well-thought out, disciplined process for titles and promotions, your employees will become obsessed with the resulting inequities
14. Nothing will accelerate your company’s development like hiring someone who has experience building a very similar company at larger scale
15. CEO evaluation need not be a byzantine, unstated art. All people, including CEOs, will perform better on a test if they know the questions ahead of time
16. While it may work to have individual employees who optimize for their own careers, counting on senior managers to do all the right things for all the wrong reasons is a dangerous idea
17. Every time your company gives someone a promotion, everyone else at that person’s level evaluates the promotion and judges whether merit or political favors yielded the promotion

If the latter, then the other employees generally react in one of three ways:

1. They sulk and feel undervalued
2. They outwardly disagree, campaign against the person, and undermine them in their new position
3. They attempt to copy the political behavior that generated the unwarranted promotion

These tips were taken from Marc Andreessen’s blog and Ben Horowitz’s blog(Parners at Andreessen Horowitz : venture capital firm)