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(Left to right: Mcdonald's CEO Donald Thompson, Ben Horowitz, Mayor Rahm Emanuel, Amy Rule, J.B. Pritzker, Howard Tullman)
Part of the privilege of being in the 1871 community is the opportunity to observe and interact with the “big dogs” of entrepreneurialism that come to chat every now and then. There’s a quote I’m pretty fond of that goes something like, “the best way to be an outlier is to not be one” -meaning, surround yourself with other outliers, and that behavior becomes the standard. 1871, Catapult, etc. give us that opportunity, and for that reason I try to observe as many of these talks as possible. I guess this can be considered a follow-up to my post a few weeks ago about the “weird ones”, as I’ve found another individual of particular interest. His name is Ben Horowitz. He runs one of the most noteworthy venture capital firms in the world, called Andreessen-Horowitz.
Some might say Ben’s identity is defined by the company he founded, Opsware, along with the wild success of Andreessen-Horowitz's portfolio- which includes Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest, to name a few. But that’s not an identity. A person’s true identity boils down to a combination of character and flavor. We learned a bit about Ben’s character, as well as flavor, when he stopped into 1871 for a conversation with J.B. Pritzker.
"Go call him a n*****. If he says anything, spit on him".
Ben ran into his first such character-defining moment as a 5-year-old hanging out in the neighborhood. An older kid on the block, much bigger than Ben, told him to go down to the corner where another young boy was hanging out, and deliver a message to him. The other boy was black, and the message was: “Go call him a n*****. If he says anything, spit on him. Don’t worry, I’ll kick his ass if he does anything”. Ben had never heard that word before, but the big kid was, well, big, and Ben was small, so onward he walked over to the corner. When he arrived, for some unknown reason, things didn’t feel right to the five-year-old Horowitz. So he blurted out his own version of the message... “can I play with your red wagon?”. The two have been best friends ever since, and the former boy on the corner was the best man in Ben’s wedding. At 5 years old, the course of his life was forever set on the foundation of a bold decision.
Defining moments build character. But defining style, that builds flavor. The latter particularly intrigues me when it comes to Ben Horowitz. On his cerebral surface, he comes across as an unquestioned veteran of many a computer science summer camp. While he did look smooth at 1871 in a black leather jacket and flat bottom sneaks, “swagger” is hardly the word that would come to a stranger’s mind upon hearing Ben Horowitz speak. That’s what’s so interesting about his peculiarly defined style: in a world of tech guru's and financiers, Ben's an outspoken hip-hop fanatic. He's a walking dichotomy, known for injecting his own tech blog posts with the (often explicit) lyrics of hip-hop’s titans, brilliantly converging two seemingly opposite worlds. Hip-hop is often characterized by brute masculinity and often-outrageous claims at being the fearless “boss”. In that regard, I suppose it makes slight sense that Ben is a hip-hop head. He was, after all, the CEO of his own company.
“When I was CEO, I slept like a baby. …woke up every two hours crying”.
…Ok maybe not the exact image of "boss" invoked by a Jay-Z or Rick Ross lyric. Crying isn’t new to Ben, by the way. When his mother dropped him off the first day for nursery school he was crying incessantly. The lady in charge told his mother that he would be fine, and that once she left him there he’d stop. Three hours later Ben’s shirt was soaked with tears, and he was still crying. It was at that prodigious moment the nursery lady knew that his sheer persistence would lead to entrepreneurial fame and glory ...or perhaps she just thought he was a wuss. Ben probably wouldn’t disagree. He described himself as a “very frightened kid”, and said that his “perception of the world was too serious”. If preschool was such a dire struggle, this kid would surely be doomed as he grew older. So what happened?
Pritzker: “In your book, you talk glowingly about the ‘struggle’. Why is that?”
Horowitz: 'Well, let me first explain the struggle…
'Don’t say that you feel like dying
Life’s hard then it feels like diamonds
Your home’s just far too gone
Much too late to even feel like trying
Can’t understand what I’m saying?
Can’t figure out what I’m implying?
If you feel you don’t want to be alive
You feel just how I am’
…that’s Lupe Fiasco!”
Without hesitation, and un-prompted, he rattled out the full line off the cuff. 40 some years later, part of what happened to the little nursery home cry baby is clear as day. Hip-hop provided him with a glimmer of internal salvation, and the gusto to take on the world.
Granted, that’s a pretty brutal line, but take into consideration the roller coaster of a career he was using it to describe. Ben’s entrepreneurial struggle was of the fiercest kind. He had to conduct 3 major layoffs, firing his closest friends and most loyal believers. Then he did it again. And then he did it one more time. He underwent what journalists later referred to as “The IPO from Hell”, in which he took his company public just 30 days before it would have gone bankrupt. Once the stock was public, he had to cope with his own mother stressing over the financial stake she had tied into the company’s stock. He would soon lose 40% of his customers, being tech companies themselves, to their own bankruptcies. Oh and this was all in the matter of a year. Lupe said, "Life’s hard then it feels like diamonds”. Well, in Ben’s case, it was more like diamonds crushing into his skull. Scary, right?
"Mike Tyson’s former trainer said: 'The difference between a coward and a hero is not what they feel. They both feel scared. It’s not how you feel, it’s what you do.' …that was important for me, because I always felt scared."
So where did the perpetually scared computer nerd find comfort? In listening to the audaciously bold lyrics found in the world of hip-hop, of course. Words, Ben felt, that relate closer to the business world than those in other forms of music. Horowitz puts it best when describing that while rock and roll’s vibe is along the anarchical lines of “F*** the man”, hip-hop’s is more along the lines of “Become the man”. It doesn't hurt that the repeated theme of "the struggle" echoes strongly throughout the genre.
Ben doesn't care much for the "all is fantastic!" ra-ra bullshit spewed by the vast majority of entrepreneurs (in all fairness, it's tough not to fall into that category when you're constantly selling). He expects to crawl through the mud with every start-up, saying: “I know the guys who have been the most successful doing this. …Even they had to struggle”. With that line, Ben was primarily referring to the company formerly known as TheFacebook.com. While the general public sees him in all his glory today, what’s forgotten about Mark Zuckerberg is that half the publications in the Valley were running campaigns to remove him as CEO. It was a hell of a struggle for Zuck, and filled with one of the struggle's core pillars: haters.
“As an entrepreneur, you have to be aware of haters. …There are ‘can do’ and ‘can’t do’ cultures. …'Can’t do' cultures are because of haters”.
The good news is, almost any given hip-hop song will advise listeners to simply disregard the haters (in not so polite terms : ). So pop in a pair of headphones, tune into the Blueprint or Illmatic, and keep on building that "can do" culture.
With that, we witnessed firsthand the flavor of Ben Horowitz, engrained into a deeply rooted character and put on display in our own 1871. He's a superstar of the start-up world, who'd likely be outcaste in 9 to 5 land. It's that type of flavor that makes the struggle so enticing. It’s never for the money. Wouldn’t be worth it. Ben’s company sold for $1.6 billion, and he still didn’t think the cash alone justified its accompanying struggle. It’s something else, maybe a disorder of sorts, or maybe an addiction to the thrill of the ride. Perhaps the below sums up the spirit of a ‘trep in the struggle:
“As you scrap with massive ass gorillas
as your bloody foes
Approach ‘em one by one, you’ve got the heart
and everybody knows
They’ll cuddle up to subtle woes
befuddled as their color shows
So double up the crushing blows
and punch ‘em in the f****** nose”
