I was never aware of Ben Horowitz’s involvement in the tech sector other than his position at a16z as a general partner. I had always assumed that he was an early employee at Netscape, and got along with Mark so well that they decided to start a VC firm.
His story starting in early adulthood, through the rise of Netscape, and the treacherous years of Loudcloud/Opsware were extremely captivating. My respect and admiration of Ben has increased drastically after reading this book. The number of problems and hardships he experienced throughout his years as CEO must’ve been hard, and it is impressive how he always found a way out.
A lot of the lessons regarding being a CEO (i.e. how to hire execs) aren’t very applicable to my day-to-day life but were interesting nonetheless. Some of the lessons can be easily extended to a manager-IC relationship. As an IC, this helped provide some perspective into how my manager and his manager might be approaching certain problems. For example, even if someone is performing very well and is asking for a raise simply to have it be matched by a competing offer, it might not always be in the best interests of the manager to match it regardless of how well the employee is performing.
Overall, this book is worth reading for anyone interested in the tech sector or if they have an entrepreneurial bug of any kind.