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I Don’t Want to Hire Women
Commenting on this thread is closed. If you still feel that you have something important to contribute, post your comment in this spillover thread: SPILLOVER THREAD. I don’t want to hire any more w…
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There are no B players
“Only hire A players! Fire the B players!” “If you hire B players, then they will hire C players!” “Over time, the A players will get frustrated with the B players and will leave to go to other companies and you’ll be left only with B and C players,
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Leaving Google
As of March 17th I’ll be an ex-employee. It’s an amicable separation in the face of irreconcilable differences: I wouldn’t move to California and Google wouldn’t open a Vancouver office. I haven’t decided what to do next.
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"We need a pony. And the moon on a stick. By next Thursday."
So, the US Secret Service has issued a requirement for software that can detect sarcasm in tweets . And lo, there was much rejoicing in the land, especially among post-doc researchers looking for grant money to pursue research in algorithmic applications of semiotics with a side-line in heuristic knowledge processing…
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Early Days on Street View
A friend was asking about the early Street View timeline, which prompted a trip down memory lane. It's been at least five years for most of...
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How to Minimize Politics in Your Company (2010)
Ben Horowitz is a cofounder and general partner at the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. He is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, The
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The Builder's High
When I am in a foul mood, I have a surefire way to improve my outlook – I build something. A foul mood is a stubborn beast and it does not give ground easily. I
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409A as a Service: Cash Cows Get Slaughtered
Background: 409A is a set of tax rules passed, in part, to stop companies from avoiding taxes through issuing underpriced (cheap) equity as compensation. While well-intentioned, it spawned a cottage industry of third-party valuation firms/i-bankers who charge companies, including startups, thousands (sometimes…
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Ignoring pull requests discourages open-source contributions
What's the first thing you do when you find a bug or see a missing feature in an open source project? Check out the project page and submit a patch!
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Coconut Headphones: Why Agile Has Failed
The 2001 agile manifesto was an attempt to replace rigid, process and management heavy, development methodologies with a more human and soft...
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Be Nice Or Leave
We have a sign like this in our beach house. We got it in New Orleans many years ago. I thought of that sign when I was on the phone yesterday. I was talking to a person involved in a deal I’m working on right now. He said “you guys are being awfully nice here.” For […]
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The Wolf
You’ve heard of the 10x engineer, but I am here to tell you about the Wolf. They are an engineer, and they consistently exhibit the following characteristics:
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Code review without your glasses
You’re part of a preternaturally enlightened dev team, and have set aside an entire day for nothing but code review. However, after the first 2 hours, you realise that you have forgotten your glasses and have just been staring at colourful blurs all morning. What do you do?
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Working from home
The challenges of working from home full-time, and some tips on how to do so effectively.
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Board Members
Over the last five years, there has been an incredible shift in leverage from investors to founders. It’s good in most ways, but bad in an important few. Founders’ desire for control is good in...
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The Toughest Adversity I've Ever Faced
This period began when my successful business (discussed here) failed overnight. After I discovered our accounts were closed, I checked if the dupe method still worked. To my surprise, it did! So I...
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Hidden Costs That Engineers Ignore
“It’ll only take me a few hours to implement the feature,” we sometimes say. But after finishing, we find that every few weeks, we’re either fixing a bug with the feature, explaining it to another eng