Ben Horowitz: “To be a good CEO people have to want to work for you”

“What's the fundamental thing that you have to be able to do in order to be CEO? People have to want to work for you. That's it. Because if nobody wants to work for you… you can't actually do anything.”

Ben urges founders to consider the reasons people actually want to work for a person:

“Do they have good vision? Do they care about my interests and not just theirs? Are they somebody that I can get behind? These are the questions people ask of themselves.”

He points out that TV generally portrays CEOs as ruthless, but that’s actually the opposite of what you want to do because nobody wants to work for a person like that.

Full video: University of California Television (UCTV) “Ben Horowitz Co-Founder Andreessen Horowitz“ (Mar 2010)