Ben Horowitz is a great entrepreneur and a great investor. But it's pretty hilarious how he quotes the Geto Boys and Snoop Dogg while being assiduously politically correct in his writing style ("the women from the girls"?).
You can understand this if you realize that he's actually an ultramasculine guy, and rap lyrics (caricatured though they be) are the only acceptable way today to express unbridled, unchecked, dominant masculinity.
But in addition to being ultramasculine, he also loves to win. And you don't win if you say that stuff outright. No white collar white male can get away with even 1/1000 the stuff that DMX says on a daily basis. So thus his formal writing has "hers" and "shes" all over the place, while his true self is channeled through a rap star messenger than no gender egalitarian can successfully attack for fear of being dubbed racist.
Wow, I think you're over-analyzing this. First, there's a lot of misogyny in rap music, I agree, but it's too easy, and wrong, to dismiss all of it as misogynistic, ultra-masculine braggadocio. There are just too many sub-genres for a simplistic definition. And, if you spend time listening to rap lyrics, you'll come across some truly profound verses; some of Lupe Fiasco's stuff is just mind-blowing. I think Ben Horowitz simply appreciates rap as an art form and enjoys summarizing his posts with applicable verses. Does there have to be more to it than that?
I really love this post by Ben. It feels so honest, shares so many insights and at the same time gives such encouraging advice.
My favorite parts are where Ben describes the struggle in these one-liners. It reads like a novel. Incredible. I can feel it when I read it.
And the part where he talks about going public. So encouraging. There's always a way. Just great.
IMHO we need more posts like this - especially all the founders and co-founders out there thinking about starting a startup, or thinking about finding a (technical) co-founder. This kind of honesty and encouragement is what they need to get started. This is what they need not to loose faith.
> When they teach you how to drive a racecar, they tell you to focus on the road when you go around a turn. They tell you that because if you focus on the wall, then you will drive straight into the wall.
This is very true.
When I took racing school, my instructor told me the same thing. I learned to focus on the road and the turn; by the end of the course, I nailed every apex on lacuna seca in my little formula dodge and set a blistering lap time.
Funny thing is, I didn't realize that I'd been applying this to my life ever since until I read this article.
All capitalists want Marxism - to stage their own revolt in an old industry and wind up on top as dictator of their own little command economy. We aren't so different, you and I...
Soviets were designed as self-governing co-ops - which is similar incentives to a startup with widely held equity right? It's not fully the same of course, but the views aren't so different in their aims.
The closest parallel to an equity structure would probably be to the employee-owned cooperative firms that exist in some jurisdictions. A crucial difference from startups is that equity is not tradable, not available to non-working investors, and cannot be taken with you if you leave the firm. Rather than owning securitized shares, you definitionally are entitled to a share of profits while working at the company; and everyone is entitled to the same share. So, for example, if there are 10,000 employees, you have a 1/10,000 claim on any dividends. If you leave the company, you no longer own shares. And there is no way to buy shares; cooperatives will generally only accept investment on bond or loan-like terms, not equity terms.
Sure, it's not as flexible, especially the totalitarian systems, though co-ops aren't as simply structured in their mature forms.
Look up "Mondragon" for what a modern form of distributist co-ops look like. Not the same share of profits, equity investment is the rule (limited to workers or co-op friendly orgs), and there are many other interesting aspects.
Wow. This is one of the more powerful essays I've read in a while. If you don't get why that is, please just think about it some more. Think about what you are telling yourself about it.
You can understand this if you realize that he's actually an ultramasculine guy, and rap lyrics (caricatured though they be) are the only acceptable way today to express unbridled, unchecked, dominant masculinity.
But in addition to being ultramasculine, he also loves to win. And you don't win if you say that stuff outright. No white collar white male can get away with even 1/1000 the stuff that DMX says on a daily basis. So thus his formal writing has "hers" and "shes" all over the place, while his true self is channeled through a rap star messenger than no gender egalitarian can successfully attack for fear of being dubbed racist.
It is 3D chess after all.