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I think the vague and abstract way Ben Horowitz has worded his essay makes the lesson he's trying to impart very confusing. Here's my interpretation of his adv

by jasode 7y ago

I think the vague and abstract way Ben Horowitz has worded his essay makes the lesson he's trying to impart very confusing. Here's my interpretation of his advice into more concrete terms: - "fear": "dot com boom will crash" ... but I can't articulate why I believe that in perfectly logical statements - option (1) is to run away or ignore the fear: delegate to somebody to go ahead and buy more office space for $30 million and make the fire marshall happy - option (2) to "run towards the fear" is to cut spending immediately which may also include laying people off. E.g. create a new MS Excel spreadsheet, put all the staff's salaries on it and start making the hard decisions of who needs to be let go. In other words, your business actions still need to match your fears -- even if your "fears" are poorly articulated gut feelings As a bonus, the painful exercise of doing Option 2 may reveal the logic of why you believe the dot com boom is ending. (Of course, an alternative to Option 2 is to find new revenue but that's often 100x more difficult than cutting costs.) In other words, it's way easier to have your office admin shop for a new office building than to fire people -- some of whom are your friends that took a risk and depend on you.

balabaster 7y ago
- option (3) to find a way to profit in either scenario. Just like with hedging and shorting stock.
aeternum 7y ago
A better way to phrase it might be "trust your fear". Not sure that is always the best advice because sometimes fear is justified and sometimes not. In this case, it was.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  The way I phrase it is "the fear of the thing is usually worse than the thing itself." In his Personal Memoirs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S._Grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S....), Ulysses S. Grant wrote of how he learned this lesson one of the first times he led troops into battle in the Civil War: I received orders to move against Colonel Thomas Harris, who was said to be encamped at the little town of Florida[, Missouri], some twenty-five miles south of where we then were... Harris had been encamped in a creek bottom for the sake of being near water. The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet. As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp,and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.
- geomark 7y ago
  It feels to me like he is just to taking the very old advice to "face your fears" and make it seem like he has something new to offer.
  - eerburu 7y ago
    Yeah, but it goes a little deeper in the sense that sometimes you feel fear but don't understand it, and you can try to go deeper understandig and confronting the fear, or since you are not sure what is happening, let go the situation and try to hide, escape it, delegate it, distract yourself. The point is more about the sense of fear that you don't understand where it comes from, and you prefer not to dig deeper understanding the fear because you fear that you will find something ugly. And instead confront it.
thanatropism 7y ago
I smell a hit book, "Freudian Methods in Capital and Human Resources Management".
edouard-harris 7y ago
> I think the vague and abstract way Ben Horowitz has worded his essay makes the lesson he's trying to impart very confusing. Perhaps he's writing for a particular audience. Anyone who's run a company for any meaningful length of time will be nodding along as they read this essay.
eutropia 7y ago
His decision was a false dichotomy. If the problem was people in the office space (fire marshal), then he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business. That's sort of the middle road, between buying office space and firing people, right?
- jasode 7y ago
  >he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business. The 1999 to 2001 time period of home-internet was mostly slow dial-up modems instead of high-speed broadband. I'm unaware of any high-velocity SV company that had an army of remote workers collaborating and checking in code over dial-up. (Yes, Linus Torvalds Linux project was collaborating over email but that's a different cadence.) In the story, he says they lost half their customers in the dot-com crash. That magnitude of revenue loss is going to overwhelm the savings of having people work from home and layoffs will happen anyway.[0] The company still has to pay employees' expensive full-time salaries whether they're in the office or remote. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudcloud+layoffs https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudclo...
  - icedchai 7y ago
    Large parts of the east and west coast had broadband by that time ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network for example.) I had a cable modem by 1998. Before that, since 1996, I was on ISDN.

by jasode 7y ago

balabaster 7y ago

- option (3) to find a way to profit in either scenario. Just like with hedging and shorting stock.

aeternum 7y ago

A better way to phrase it might be "trust your fear". Not sure that is always the best advice because sometimes fear is justified and sometimes not. In this case, it was.

smacktoward 7y ago
The way I phrase it is "the fear of the thing is usually worse than the thing itself." In his Personal Memoirs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S._Grant https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Memoirs_of_Ulysses_S....), Ulysses S. Grant wrote of how he learned this lesson one of the first times he led troops into battle in the Civil War: I received orders to move against Colonel Thomas Harris, who was said to be encamped at the little town of Florida[, Missouri], some twenty-five miles south of where we then were... Harris had been encamped in a creek bottom for the sake of being near water. The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet. As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp,and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.
geomark 7y ago
It feels to me like he is just to taking the very old advice to "face your fears" and make it seem like he has something new to offer.
- eerburu 7y ago
  Yeah, but it goes a little deeper in the sense that sometimes you feel fear but don't understand it, and you can try to go deeper understandig and confronting the fear, or since you are not sure what is happening, let go the situation and try to hide, escape it, delegate it, distract yourself. The point is more about the sense of fear that you don't understand where it comes from, and you prefer not to dig deeper understanding the fear because you fear that you will find something ugly. And instead confront it.

thanatropism 7y ago

I smell a hit book, "Freudian Methods in Capital and Human Resources Management".

edouard-harris 7y ago

> I think the vague and abstract way Ben Horowitz has worded his essay makes the lesson he's trying to impart very confusing. Perhaps he's writing for a particular audience. Anyone who's run a company for any meaningful length of time will be nodding along as they read this essay.

eutropia 7y ago

His decision was a false dichotomy. If the problem was people in the office space (fire marshal), then he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business. That's sort of the middle road, between buying office space and firing people, right?

jasode 7y ago
>he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business. The 1999 to 2001 time period of home-internet was mostly slow dial-up modems instead of high-speed broadband. I'm unaware of any high-velocity SV company that had an army of remote workers collaborating and checking in code over dial-up. (Yes, Linus Torvalds Linux project was collaborating over email but that's a different cadence.) In the story, he says they lost half their customers in the dot-com crash. That magnitude of revenue loss is going to overwhelm the savings of having people work from home and layoffs will happen anyway.[0] The company still has to pay employees' expensive full-time salaries whether they're in the office or remote. [0] https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudcloud+layoffs https://www.google.com/search?q=loudcloud+layoffs&oq=loudclo...
- icedchai 7y ago
  Large parts of the east and west coast had broadband by that time ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network for example.) I had a cable modem by 1998. Before that, since 1996, I was on ISDN.