The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 17 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Horowitz: Hiring through separate diversity initiatives fails at real inclusion
“So if you hire somebody on race and gender through the urban talent department, instead of through the normal talent department, through the fucking side door instead of through the front door, because you can't see the talent, then you're never going to be go…”
a16z operates without a head of diversity or diversity program
“But we don't have a head of diversity. We don't have program. We just have, like, criteria that's wide, where we can see talent that we ourselves might not have.”
Horowitz: Founders who lie in pitches also lie to employees
“If you have a founder who's, like, say, telling you, like, some pretty aggressive, not true things in the pitch, then, you know, that's gonna be a tricky founder to work for, because it's very rare to have a person who, you know, lies only to investors and not…”
Horowitz: a16z employees who publicly trash startups on Twitter are fired
“One of the things I tell everybody at New Employee Orientation is if you get on Twitter, like some VCs, and start shitting all over somebody's company, you know, saying, oh, they'll never make any money, that's a dumb idea, I can't believe they called it bodeg…”
Horowitz: Annual performance reviews fail to drive company culture
“That's not how you move culture through an annual performance review. Like, this is a daily thing. People have to face it daily.”
Horowitz: Uber had a 'very compelling culture' under Travis Kalanick
“Uber had a very compelling culture under Travis with a very bad issue.”
Horowitz: Culture is defined by who gets promoted, not posted values
“You can't say, okay, people are going to behave according to the values on the wall. They're going to go, oh, that person who just got promoted, lobbied the CEO for six months, took credit for her work, did those things. That's your culture. That's how that ge…”
Ben Horowitz fined a16z team members $10 per minute for late meetings
“So, you know, I was determined, ok, how do we set the culture so that doesn't happen, and so the, you know, one of the first rules I put in place is, if you're late to meeting with an entrepreneur, 10 dollars a minute fine.”
Horowitz: Enterprise sales teams must be compensated with commissions
“I was like, Stuart, we have to pay commissions. Like, we're not, like, this is sales. It's a prize fight. No prize, no fight.”
Horowitz: a16z is 52% female with seven female general partners
“We're a 180 people, we're 52% women we're, And we have like seven women general partners, something like that”
Horowitz: Company culture must support strategy, not copy Jeff Bezos
“Whatever your culture is should support your business strategy. It shouldn't be what you borrowed from Jeff Bezos, because he built a different company than you're building.”
Horowitz: Culture is defined by actions, not beliefs
“A culture is not a set of beliefs. It's a set of actions.”
Ben Horowitz: Shocking rules enforce culture by forcing employees to ask why
“And I call that that type of rule a shocking rule, which is a rule that you have that everybody wants to know why do we have that rule.”
a16z surveys rejected founders to measure if they were treated respectfully
“We measure, we do a customer satisfaction survey of entrepreneurs we rejected to measure whether we treated them with, because that's kind of, to me, the litmus test of, are you treating people with respect?”
Horowitz: Evaluate startup culture by asking about specific behaviors, not general questions
“If you say, is this a good culture? Nobody's gonna say that the culture is bad if they're trying to hire you so you kind of have to get into specific behaviors that you might think are indicative, or that you have experience in a bad culture and just see if th…”
Horowitz invested in Databricks the day it incorporated
“When Databricks came to me, like I invested the day they incorporated the company”
Quincy Jones, P Diddy, and Kevin Durant are a16z fund LPs
“One of the reasons we started the Cultural Leadership Fund is we wanted a partnership with people who knew how to move culture in the general sense. And if you look at the LPs in that fund, Quincy Jones P Diddy Kevin Durant, so forth, they're all people who ha…”