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Ben Horowitz: “Nobody was born a great manager. It’s a very unnatural job.”

May 27, 2025

“Startups get really hard when the product gets into market… When you’re building the product, it’s all good. How’s your startup? It’s doing fantastic - we’re building a product, it’s going to be great, it’s so genius, everybody I tell about it kisses me on the lips and says it’s wonderful. But then you get in the market and nobody wants it. Then it gets real hard, real fast.”

So the first job for any startup founder is build a great product.

“If you can’t build a great product, it doesn’t matter if you can build a great company.”

But once you’ve built a great product, your goal becomes building a great company. And to build a great company, you have to become a great manager, which Ben argues is a learned skill:

“Nobody was born a great manager… It’s a very unnatural job… But as CEO, as a manager, that’s what you have to do - you have to evaluate people’s performance. You have to correct them. You have to make sure they’re on task. And those kinds of motions, you have to learn how to do them, and you have to learn how to do them in a way that everybody doesn’t hate you all the time.”