$46B of hard truths from Ben Horowitz: Why founders fail and why you need to run toward fear (a16z co-founder)

**Ben Horowitz** (0:00)
The worst thing that you do as a leader is you hesitate on the next decision. The thing that causes you to hesitate is both decisions are horrible. Probably one of my bigger ones on that was we went public with $2 million in failing 12 months revenue at 18 months old. That's obviously a bad idea, but the truth of it was the alternative was going bankrupt, and that's a worse idea.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:23)
It's very difficult and painful to be a CEO, to be a founder. In spite of that, so many people want to start companies.

**Ben Horowitz** (0:28)
The psychological muscle you have to build to be a great leader is to be able to click in the abyss and go, okay, that way is slightly better. We're going to go that way. If everybody agrees with the decision, then you didn't add any value because they would have done that without you. So the only value you ever add is when you make a decision that most people don't like.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:47)
You are famous for writing one of the most popular pieces of literature for product managers.

**Ben Horowitz** (0:52)
What I was trying to get out in Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager, was the job is fundamentally a leadership job, and it's a tricky leadership job because nobody is actually reporting to you.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:05)
There's always this kind of sense that the PM is not the mini-CEO. How dare you call yourself that? I actually think that's exactly what the PM is.

**Ben Horowitz** (1:12)
It doesn't matter if you write a good spec or you have a good interview or you do this or do that. What matters is that the product wins.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:21)
Today my guest is Ben Horowitz. Ben is the Z in A16Z, the world's largest venture capital firm with over $46 billion in committed capital. They're investors in OpenAI, Cursor, Andriol, Databricks, Figma, basically every generational tech company. He's also the author of two New York Times bestselling books, The Hard Thing About Hard Things and What You Do Is Who You Are. Ben is endlessly fascinating. He started a rap group when he was younger. He started his career as a product manager and wrote the now famous Good Product Manager, Bad Product Manager piece. In our wide-ranging conversation, we cover a ton of ground and Ben shares stories and insights that he's never shared anywhere else. A huge thank you to Shaka Senghor, Ali Goetze and Adam Neumann for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube, it helps tremendously. And if you become an annual subscriber of my newsletter, you get a year free of 15 incredible products, including a year free of Loveable, Replet, Bolt, N8N, Linear, Superhuman, Descript, Whisperflow, Gamma, Perplexity, Warp, Granola, Magic Patterns, Raycast, ChatPRD and Mobbin. Check it out at lennysnewsletter.com and click Product Pass. With that, I bring you Ben Horowitz. Today's episode is brought to you by DX, the developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchers. To thrive in the AI era, organizations need to adapt quickly. But many organization leaders struggle to answer pressing questions like, which tools are working, how are they being used, what's actually driving value. DX provides the data and insights that leaders need to navigate this shift. With DX, companies like Dropbox, booking.com, Adyen and Intercom get a deep understanding of how AI is providing value to their developers and what impact AI is having on engineering productivity. To learn more, visit DX's website at getdx.com/lenny. That's getdx.com/lenny.
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Ben, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast.

**Ben Horowitz** (4:16)
All right, thank you Lenny. Excited to be here.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (4:19)
I'm even more excited to have you here. I want to start with a question that a close friend of yours suggested I ask you, Shaka Senghor. So Shaka, he's like, we could do an hour just on how interesting this guy is and the things he's done.