
Which Way Do You Run? - yarapavan
https://a16z.com/2019/10/17/how-to-be-effective-ceo-leader/
======
eric_b
[Me reading the article]: Hrmm, I'm not sure I understand the point of this
article. Seems like vague hand wavy advice and platitudes (I mean c'mon "run
towards your fear"? Cheese-factor 1000).

[Me gets to the end of the article] Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he
needs to shill it. Makes sense.

~~~
Zelphyr
Running toward your fear isn't hand wavy advice. It is in essence what modern
therapy around fear, panic, and anxiety teaches. It's good advice because it
works. Running away only makes the problem worse. Be that losing $30M or not
being able to walk out of your house.

~~~
Judgmentality
Fear might be the most important emotion from an evolutionary perspective.
Pretending you can simply run towards your fears and things will get better is
awful, awful advice. I am not saying you should let your fears consume you or
that they can never be conquered, but maybe an alcoholic's fear of being in a
bar is a healthy thing (there are plenty of other examples but that was the
first I thought of after 5 seconds).

~~~
nostrademons
The point about running toward your fear isn't that things will get better,
it's that you'll _know_ which of your fears were valid and which were
illusory. Oftentimes the thing you're most afraid of is simply _not knowing_
what's going to happen next.

In the context that Ben is writing this post (founding a startup), basically
the worst thing that can happen to you is that your company goes bankrupt and
you have to look for a job. It _feels_ a lot scarier than that because your
ego gets wrapped up in the startup and all sorts of negative events can be
existential threats to the startup, but there are basically no physical
threats to your person other than yourself. If a tiger comes running at you or
someone points a gun at you, by all means, be afraid and run away, but if
you're signing a $30M lease, be afraid and then face that fear and rationally
analyze the risks.

~~~
lmeyerov
The hard part of juggling startup risks feels more of the reverse of what
Ben's remembering.

It's not that you need to spot a ball is about to drop and catch it. Founders
are up at 2am and every e-staff & advice meeting thinking about them & then
acting on them. However, running at all of them will give you a heart attack,
burn out your team, and derail your mission.

Instead, you have to accept that a ton of balls are dropping, and somehow get
good at guiding which & how. Now that's a chapter I'd like to read :)

------
jsonne
For context I have an anxiety disorder. This makes entrepreneurship even more
difficult as these hard decisions are very hard to intellectualize even if you
want to as it can cause panic attacks and in extreme cases disassociation
events.

One helpful thing though is the same framework I use to manage my anxiety is a
great decision making tool for business. Forcing yourself to actually ground
yourself where you are right now and look at what's actually going on.
Basically cutting through the meta narrative and seeing things as they are.
Early on in dealing with my anxiety the name of the game was pain avoidance.
Use whatever I could to go numb basically. After a while, some of us at least,
realize what's happening and are able to take the steps to change that
perspective. Going numb constantly is no way to live. A focus on the process
and what's happening right now as opposed to the maybe outcomes is really key.
You learn to basically coexist with the anxiety, and as weird as it sounds,
find a place of peace inside of it. To me that's what this post is saying. See
things as they are, and lean into the pain rather than go numb. Ironically
when you do that you realize the imagined horror is usually worse than the
reality and in terms of business you make the hard decisions to get things
done.

This post resonated pretty deeply with me and I appreciate him sharing.

~~~
testfoobar
Your experience is interesting: entrepreneurs take a lot of responsibility
with lots of uncertainty - feeding lots of raw material directly into the
anxiety disorder. How and where did you learn your techniques for managing
your anxiety? How long did it take before you were able to see positive
changes? Any diet and/or daily routine changes?

Wouldn’t it be less stressful to get a job?

~~~
jsonne
>How and where did you learn your techniques for managing your anxiety?

Trial and error over a period of about 8 years. Lots of suggestions from
folks. Some worked out, some didn't. Lots of incremental change, but
mediation, exercise, stoic journaling, and therapy were the big 4 leaps I
made. The therapy mostly focused on process orientation and self esteem/self
worth for me personally.

>How long did it take before you were able to see positive changes?

Usually a few weeks with any of the 4 above. If I keep in my routine I usually
can feel positive change within 1-2 weeks.

>Any diet and/or daily routine changes?

Limiting alcohol helps a lot. Generally avoiding processed foods and high
sugar or starch foods helps. Supplements are a very mixed bag, but vitamin d,
vitamin b, fish oil, magnesium, a mens daily vitamin help. Everything else
either had no effect or negative effects for me. Also it seems silly but
drinking enough water is a big deal.

>Wouldn’t it be less stressful to get a job?

Almost certainly it would be easier. Though a different more existential
anxiety sets in after a while whenever I stop working on my own thing so it's
a bit of give and take.

~~~
testfoobar
Thanks for answering. I find it valuable to understand how others manage their
emotional states. I find regular exercise, meditation and good sleep hygiene
to be effective. I'm reading about stoic journaling now. I did not know about
this.

------
jasode
I think the vague and abstract way Ben Horowitz has worded his essay makes the
lesson he's trying to impart very confusing. Here's my interpretation of his
advice into more concrete terms:

\- _" fear"_: "dot com boom will crash" ... but I can't articulate why I
believe that in perfectly logical statements

\- option (1) is to run away or ignore the fear: delegate to somebody to go
ahead and buy more office space for $30 million and make the fire marshall
happy

\- option (2) to "run towards the fear" is to _cut spending immediately_ which
may also include _laying people off_. E.g. create a new MS Excel spreadsheet,
put all the staff's salaries on it and start making the hard decisions of who
needs to be let go. In other words, your _business actions_ still need to
match your fears -- even if your "fears" are poorly articulated gut feelings

As a bonus, the _painful exercise_ of doing Option 2 _may reveal the logic_ of
why you believe the dot com boom is ending.

(Of course, an alternative to Option 2 is to _find new revenue_ but that's
often 100x more difficult than cutting costs.)

In other words, it's way easier to have your office admin shop for a new
office building than to _fire people_ \-- some of whom are your friends that
took a risk and depend on you.

~~~
aeternum
A better way to phrase it might be "trust your fear". Not sure that is always
the best advice because sometimes fear is justified and sometimes not. In this
case, it was.

~~~
geomark
It feels to me like he is just to taking the very old advice to "face your
fears" and make it seem like he has something new to offer.

~~~
eerburu
Yeah, but it goes a little deeper in the sense that sometimes you feel fear
but don't understand it, and you can try to go deeper understandig and
confronting the fear, or since you are not sure what is happening, let go the
situation and try to hide, escape it, delegate it, distract yourself. The
point is more about the sense of fear that you don't understand where it comes
from, and you prefer not to dig deeper understanding the fear because you fear
that you will find something ugly. And instead confront it.

------
karl11
There are a lot of people in the comments that seem confused by the point of
this article. I think if you have ever run a business (managing a team is
_not_ the same) then this article is clear as day.

Owners have infinite ways to allocate their time. Many owners feel problems in
their gut but they are uncomfortable to deal with, and so instead they do
other things (which are easy to rationalize as more important). E.g. firing
someone, perhaps someone that was just hired two months ago who moved across
the country to take the job but is not working out. Many people would come up
with a hundred reasons to keep the person even if their gut is saying to fire
them, because of how uncomfortable it would be to actually do it. This article
is saying you need to run towards those moments of fear and discomfort and do
the right thing, not run away from them and dig the hole deeper.

~~~
tempsy
Yes I think everyone understands that’s the point he’s trying to make, it’s
just that he’s doing it in such a vague and generalized way and trying to pass
it off as actionable advice that it becomes almost comical.

There’s nothing revelatory about telling someone to “face your fears” but a
pseudo-philosopher VC is trying to pass this off like it’s this sage piece of
advice no one has heard before.

~~~
mbesto
> it’s just that he’s doing it in such a vague and generalized way and trying
> to pass it off as actionable advice that it becomes almost comical.

Totally.

1) Vague advice is much easier to sell and elevate ones position (look at Tony
Robbins). There's no negatively correlative impact to the advice so its hard
to argue if someone is wrong.

2) Providing concrete advice is impossible to "scale" (e.g. books, podcasts,
video, etc) as it requires context.

~~~
unlinked_dll
> Providing concrete advice is impossible to "scale" (e.g. books, podcasts,
> video, etc) as it requires context.

Wouldn't that make it easier to scale, since there's more context you can
provide?

~~~
bpt3
The context is specific to the recipient of the advice, making it effectively
impossible to scale.

~~~
unlinked_dll
the scale is you're reaching a different audience and can provide different
context for the same message on top of a different medium.

~~~
bpt3
You're describing the type of impersonal advice that the parent poster said
was generally unhelpful for the recipient.

Everything you said sounds great for the person selling advice, but not great
for the consumer, which was the point of the original comment.

------
gz5
Many people, including Ben Horowitz and Andy Grove, have also identified how
many CEOs are often overly optimistic or even irrationally optimistic.

If that's the case (I personally think it often is), then it that much more
important to run towards the fear in the relatively rare cases that you do see
the possible indicators.

I have also found it useful to document key assumptions, and the reasons
behind those assumptions, and then compare to actual as actual materializes.
That comparison sometimes unearths problems (or opportunities) that may have
otherwise been obscured by other items.

Any other methods that folks use to have more open eyes and ears to potential
problems, or to assure you act upon them in the right manner without
rationalizing them away?

~~~
icedchai
The truth is startup CEOs have to be overly optimistic, otherwise there's no
way they'd ever start a company. The dark side of this is then often don't
believe something is "wrong" until it's too late.

------
akersten
I'm having trouble following the example. If running away from the fear is
delegating an employee to find more office space due to the fire marshal's
requirement, what is running toward the fear? Saying no to the fire marshal?

It's probably finding the office space themselves, and presumably for cheaper.
But this is kind of left for the reader to conclude, so I'm not sure what the
message is here.

~~~
swsieber
He chose not to think about the decision by just rolling with it.
Alternatives, off the top of my head:

* Fire people?

* Do a cost-benefit analysis - could they sustain a new space? Or would they have to move everyone to somewhere cheaper?

* Would shifting some people to work remotely work?

Delegating getting more office space was running away from fear because it was
the option that required the least thinking about his fear.

~~~
beat
Loudcloud was at the peak of the dot-com boom, late '90s to early '00s.
Working remotely wasn't really an option then.

------
noonespecial
I don't suspect that his "dark" feeling came from prescience about the
impending dotcom crash. Locking a fledgeling business into a $30M lease should
feel dark in any economy.

~~~
subpixel
I can't work out this $30MM - was it a deposit? That seems...insane.

~~~
Qworg
Five years, $6M a year, 60,000 sq feet (roughly 150-300 employees, depending
on how it is organized). You lock a lease and you're on the hook.

------
mips_avatar
I just feel like the example Ben Horowitz gave here is likely colored by his
experience. Were his gut feelings really foretelling the dot-com crash? How
many times were similar anxieties wrong?

~~~
doitLP
The point though is how you handle it, not necessarily that you were a good
fortune teller or not.

What I’m not quite clear on is how he would’ve handled the situation
differently by “running towards” the fear. Handle the building search
personally? Letting the Fire Marshall shut him down? Act on his gut feeling
that something was wrong and start slow slowing down? Those don’t seem like
that’s what he meant. Maybe I would understand more if I knew more of his
story.

~~~
mips_avatar
I personally am a little too paranoid to act on most of my suspicions. So
running towards all my fears would lead to me tackling mostly false positives.
I think that's probably a growth area for me.

------
JohnJamesRambo
If this is any indication, I think I’ll pass on the book... vague reflections
of a no-longer-hungry exec remembering what happened through the rosy lenses
of survivorship bias isn’t my cup of tea.

------
arbuge
I found this article somewhat high on the fluff and low on the substance.

To me the biggest takeaway might not be what the author intended... never ever
sign leases which put unreasonably large amounts of cash at risk. To answer
his question, I'd certainly run away from those!

------
tempsy
It's blog posts like these that totally break down the "mirage" of the
philosopher VC for me. This completely lacks any substance or meaning or
relevancy, and makes me question why we pay so much attention to glorified
check writers.

~~~
everythingswan
I appreciate it because I've read his other book. If I had not, or maybe if I
didn't enjoy it as much as I did, I wouldn't get much from this either. It's
purely a promotional component for his upcoming book so it's more of a teaser
than anything.

------
scarejunba
This is a thing I've noticed in all the very successful people I know. It's a
sort of schlep-sight[0] that they have. Something is wrong, and instead of
pushing it to the back of their mind, or letting this critical thing be
ignored, they put it in the front and worry about it. And prod it. And attempt
to deal with it.

I don't have this skill automatically so I'm trying to cultivate it.
Ironically, I'm here on HN because I'm dodging a fear.

0: As an antonym of the famous schlep-blindness
[http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html](http://www.paulgraham.com/schlep.html)

~~~
itronitron
Interesting, reminds me of seeing Chris Stolte's presentation on Polaris which
was all about schlepping SQL and which would eventually become Tableau

------
semiotagonal
> "[O]nly the truly elite ones run towards the fear."

Every time I read the philosophizing of a venture capitalist, it sounds more
and more like an indoctrination into how to run your company in the venture
capitalist's favor.

If you're a venture capitalist with a portfolio of dozens of CEOs running
toward their fear, odds are a few of them are going to crash through and win,
and the rest you can just disregard as the cost of doing business.

If you're the CEO actually running toward the fear, it's more of an all-or-
nothing thing.

~~~
nostrademons
Running towards your fear is generally a good strategy even if you're not a
CEO running a company. It's particularly relevant for young adults just
starting their careers out of college: there's a very strong tendency to not
want to make hard choices about what you want your life to look like, which
avenues will you close off, and what you put your effort into despite not
knowing whether it'll ever pay off, but people who avoid those choices get to
40 and then find that not only has their life not amounted to much so far, but
everybody they meet expects that their life will never amount to much and
writes them off.

The reason it's a good idea is because it forces you to really confront your
feelings, examine the present moment, and identify which are rational and
which are assumptions that you were just raised with. If you run away from
your fear you'll always be boxed into the path that you were on in high
school; if you run towards it you have the option to really decide what you
want your life to look like.

------
natmaka
This should not lead to the will to never "run" ("never forfeit"), as it is as
counter-productive as the will to "take any challenge".

If a challenge induces a major risk with a subpar reward, just don't take it,
or drop it.

Churchill's "We shall fight on the beaches" is sound when the stakes are at
their max, when there is no other way around.

Moreover there are challenges imposed to you, and challenges you chose (among
those last there are rewarding ones and also (whatever the reward) too
dangerous ones).

Expertise is the best tool when it comes to select a challenge rewarding and
adequate for you, to avoid/drop other challenges and to avoid having anything
imposed to you.

As Frank Borman said "A superior pilot uses his superior judgment to avoid
situations which require the use of his superior skill."

However in order to gain expertise you have to tackle challenges. Generally
life and our family and friends let us start with non-dangerous ones,
therefore the best way to gain pertinent expertise is, especially as a
youngster, a "realistic" and guided will to explore.

------
bryanmgreen
There's something valuable in this post although I do agree with everyone's
comments that the messaging is poorly communicated or even biased.

For me, I think the actual takeaway here is: _Find what scares you, and figure
out why you fear it_

Then, rather than making a blind decision to "run towards or away" from it,
you can actually try to make a more calculated decision.

------
dimitar
I feel like there are more alternatives to a 30M lease. Maybe a a second,
smaller site? Maybe allowing everyone/some-group/rotate-people to work from
home?

There should be an executive other than the CEO who can solve the problem with
the given constraint ("don't spend too much")

------
travisl12
I naively thought this would be an article discussing overpronation and
supination.

~~~
twic
I was ready to weigh in with a defence of Naruto style.

------
robocat
"Correct" intuition is the underlying key to this article.

The smartest people I know tend to often see things correctly, or do things
correctly. Their intuition is just a form of intelligence, where something has
been recognised but it can't necessarily be rationalised. Intuition has deeply
negative connotations to many people, so we often use other words instead
like: pattern matching, foresight, common sense, seeing connections, feeling
in my /\w/, etc.

The problem with the word intuition, is that plenty of people have "incorrect"
intuitions that fail, and often they overestimate their intuitive abilities
(Dunning-Kruger intuition?). It is very hard to identify people with good
intuitions, and sometimes we just say they have good luck.

Good intuitions are especially valuable with soft skills - anything where you
have to deal with people and you start to spot someone with a knack - this
should be highly prevalent in successful CEOs (and politicians, marketers
etcetera).

"Obvious" is another way to say this: seeing something is obvious, then
stating the rationalisations why it is obvious, only later to find out they
were right but their rationalising was wrong (I find this frustrating).

From another comment: "it’s just that he’s doing it in such a vague and
generalized way and passing it off as actionable advice that it becomes almost
comical" \-- it really is _extremely_ hard to write about intuitions, and we
often dismiss good commentary (even when written by a smart person trying to
communicate something difficult to us).

Disclaimer: I am an engineer type that loves rational thought. I see my smart
friends come up with intuitive answers that turn out to be correct, and then I
struggle to try and learn the same skills.

------
siliconc0w
The corollary to this is that you have a CEO that overreacts to every bump and
is constantly changing priorities to fight the latest fire their 'gut' is
telling them about so nothing gets done. Your gut can't predict the future -
solicit input and plan a strategy, agree with the data you have it's the best
choice, define what metrics you'll use to know it's working and when you know
it isn't and then execute.

------
cryptica
Sounds like they almost went bankrupt. As if the probability was very high. If
that's the case, I'm not sure running towards fear is good advice because if
someone else follows that advice, they will most likely end up in jail or
something... Kind of like what happened to Elizabeth Holmes; look where
runnning towards her fear got her. That's the normal outcome. The outcome OP
got was abnormal, not a rational outcome and not a reasonable decision.

------
magashna
I wish there was a little more to the article. I'm not a C-level, but that
physical feeling of a big project possibly going south is real. Gut wrenching,
sleep losing, fear.

------
d--b
Maybe it's good advice to address what you fear most first, but the problem is
you're never sure that what you fear most is what's going to get you!

------
kris-s
Snake oil wisdom.

------
amoitnga
this strike a chord with me. I am facing a bit of procrastination, that pretty
much caused by fear. Fear of interviewing. I'm pretty unhappy with how things
are but absolutely afraid to apply and interview for other jobs. Fairly
pathetic state. I should definitely face this fear.

------
stillwater56
I can never tell if he thinks the rap lyrics are funny or if it is cringe-ly
serious.

------
dpedu
Every point in this article can also be used to talk about technical debt.

------
hkmurakami
"Do you intellectualize it away? "

This hits pretty hard.

