[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.
My policy is to not click on articles whose title are unclear. If I am intrigued I read the comments first and generally find out a comment (like yours) explaining this article was a waste of time
I don't. I always go straight for comments, unless I already recognize by the title or domain name that the article is something I'd like to read. Then I skim comments to learn whether the article is worth reading. Even if it isn't, if I want to participate in a thread that's about the article directly (vs. an interesting tangent), I go back and at least skim the article, just to not be that person who comments on TFA without reading it.
Same here. More often than not, there's people in HN who have experience with a topic and can add perspective (and hopefully an impartial view).
More than ever, we need to tone down the clickbait, put it to perspective, and understand if it's something we should give attention to. HN does this in a quick manner
It works especially well with click-baity things where someone has helpfully quoted the key bit in the top comment and you can avoid dealing with popup-riddled sites to find it.
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.
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).
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.
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 :)
As someone who started a company and had it fail years ago, I still consider that a defining moment in ruining my life today. The knock-on effects are not so simple unless you have the benefit of tens of millions of dollars of exceedingly wealthy investors' money to play with. Relationships destroyed, people's finances ruined, people that had nothing to do with my company losing their jobs. I was often told my biggest mistake as a founder was that I cared about people rather than money.
This post reeks of the privilege of a VC who sells self-help books.
I've found a lot of success in that philosophy, but also some incredible damage. I ran towards my dear for a long time, and mostly it worked out. Even when it failed, it was a learning experience - I knew not to trust, but was no longer afraid of what I had previously feared. There's a huge difference between being afraid and being aware of falsehood/scam/danger.
Then I ran into something truly awful, and got drugged (and possibly raped, though I will never know). I've been afraid since then, and it's gonna take me a good long while to shake it off. It has immensely negatively affected my life, and it's made me question my judgement in a lot of situations - because I'm pretty sure the experience is only unique in that the stars aligned, not that the intent, will, and opportunity wasn't there in plenty of previous places, only didn't all line up before.
I don't have anything that I can take from it, except a certainty that Chestertons fence is real, and a lot of things that are looked down upon are looked down upon for good reason.
The trouble with these reactive emotions is that they’re twice removed from reality. You see a tiger in the distance, your body pumps itself with adrenaline and you get ready for fight or flight. But the brain and the body don’t work on absolutes - only patterns. You see or hear something, you’re pumped full of adrenaline, and now you have to fight or flee. There’s no way to rationally examine the thing that triggered you and un-secrete or quickly flush the adrenaline.
That’s what we need in a modern non-jungle world - understand your impulses, but be enough in control or yourself to rationally examine your environmental triggers, counteract your adrenaline and logically decide your future actions.
Save the evolutionary adaptions for your camping trip.
Maybe the metaphor is a bad one, but he doesn't mean physically approach the fear, he means confronting the actual problem mentally instead of sticking your head in the sand and just hoping it works out.
> Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense.
I'm always baffled that people who flop in the most spectacular way manage to convince others to buy books with advice from them.
I distinctly remember an article about a year or so ago touting a new managing partner(?) at a VC who ran his one and only startup into the ground. The logic was "He can help you not to do what he did"
I mean, isn't a whole big shtick of the Silicon Valley mindset that it tolerates, even celebrates, failure? And insists on learning from it. If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it. Fall down seven times, stand up eight, etc..
That's a great principle, but they key to realize its value is actually learning from it, and one of the most important lessons here is that in startups, spectacular successes are driven by luck. If that one lesson doesn't sink in, then all other "learning from failure" is akin to training your machine learning model on random noise.
> If you don't make it running a company, maybe you can make it from writing, just don't stop trying to make it.
Isn't that confusing what someone who fails should do ( do it again/do something else/try another path) with what those who see it should do ( not listen to whoever failed about how to succeed at doing what the failed person did )?
It hits home even if you haven't. I'd say that I've felt the same tingle when writing code as well. At times when someone asks for a new feature or I'm working on a particular solution to the problem, I'd definitely get the same feeling that this particular abstractions isn't going to cut it, or that this part of the codebase is going to become unwieldy soon.
I'd argue a great engineer is someone who can anticipate exactly how a software product is going to evolve, where it will not scale properly in those cases and see if the code they are writing today is potentially going to be a problem then or not (and play a fine line game of not over-engineering vs. preparing for future circumstances).
Yes, he should have addressed something with head of sales. He should have recognized the coming downturn and stopped expanding his staff. He should have done other things. His gut was telling him this.
But he didn't. He delegated the space problem so he didn't have to think about it anymore. And it cost him $30M that he would desperately need not long later (read The Hard Thing About Hard Things for that story).
It's not about ignoring evidence that the market is turning. It's not that specific. It's that your spidey-sense, for lack of a better word - your gut, your sense of fear - is telling you that something is a problem. You can then either engage that problem, or avoid that problem. And if you avoid it, you will screw up.
But it's incredibly difficult to face our gut fear. So we don't do it.
It was a different era then. Things are a lot tighter now.
Loudcloud was a terrific concept in its day. It could have become what AWS has become. But it was growing because money was just getting poured into dotcom startups. When the money dried up, they were stuck with all this hardware and staff they had needed. It's a credit to Horowitz that he saved even the sliver he did.
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.
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?
>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.
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.
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.
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.
I received orders to move against Colonel Thomas Harris, who was said to be encamped at the little town of Florida[, Missouri], some twenty-five miles south of where we then were...
Harris had been encamped in a creek bottom for the sake of being near water. The hills on either side of the creek extend to a considerable height, possibly more than a hundred feet. As we approached the brow of the hill from which it was expected we could see Harris' camp,and possibly find his men ready formed to meet us, my heart kept getting higher and higher until it felt to me as though it was in my throat. I would have given anything then to have been back in Illinois, but I had not the moral courage to halt and consider what to do; I kept right on. When we reached a point from which the valley below was in full view I halted. The place where Harris had been encamped a few days before was still there and the marks of a recent encampment were plainly visible, but the troops were gone. My heart resumed its place. It occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him. This was a view of the question I had never taken before; but it was one I never forgot afterwards.
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.
> I think the vague and abstract way Ben Horowitz has worded his essay makes the lesson he's trying to impart very confusing.
Perhaps he's writing for a particular audience. Anyone who's run a company for any meaningful length of time will be nodding along as they read this essay.
His decision was a false dichotomy. If the problem was people in the office space (fire marshal), then he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business.
That's sort of the middle road, between buying office space and firing people, right?
>he could have started having employees work from home. I'm sure that even in the dot com era, telephone and IRC and email would have worked out just fine for coordinating business.
The 1999 to 2001 time period of home-internet was mostly slow dial-up modems instead of high-speed broadband. I'm unaware of any high-velocity SV company that had an army of remote workers collaborating and checking in code over dial-up. (Yes, Linus Torvalds Linux project was collaborating over email but that's a different cadence.)
In the story, he says they lost half their customers in the dot-com crash. That magnitude of revenue loss is going to overwhelm the savings of having people work from home and layoffs will happen anyway.[0] The company still has to pay employees' expensive full-time salaries whether they're in the office or remote.
Large parts of the east and west coast had broadband by that time ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/@Home_Network for example.) I had a cable modem by 1998. Before that, since 1996, I was on ISDN.
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.
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.
> 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.
Ben has done it. His experience, and the way he describes them, speaks to me. His first book, the Hard Thing About Hard Things, is therapy for founders. I don't think he's trying to prescribe anything new.
To paraphrase something that stuck with me: "the mechanics of starting a business are easy and can be taught to anyone. the emotions involved are very difficult and it's [Ben's] job at A16Z to help founders deal with them." I really appreciate what Ben is doing.
discomfort. We got too used to comfort. That uncomfortable situations with (and mostly) other people is the thing that brings fear (of rejection). And yes, some of that fear comes from our tribalism. We used to live in tribes (even in the Bible) and if you got thrown out of your tribe it's a serious thing.
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Doing boring things that are important and face uncomfortable situations makes the cut for a great founder (and for achieving objectives in life).
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?
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.
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.
I had the same question. In that case, the root of the issue was that the crash broke the key assumption that the CEO was operating on: that the company's growth in revenue and headcount would continue at current rates. Delegating the to someone else to quickly find a new office doesn't fix the problem that history broke the CEO's own preconditions.
I think the CEO's overall point is still valid, but in a different way. If you are a leader with substantive responsibilities, you'll get tons of "bad feelings", and some subset of them will turn out to be real problems. One sign of a good leader is how accurate they are at predicting which ones are real problems. This is one place where experience matters a lot, because experience (applied well) helps a lot to translate the bad gut feeling into targeted investigation.
Stopping and thinking critically about the situation, questioning assumptions, analyzing KPIs, analyzing risk levels... (or delegating the above to a capable team member with the understanding that you want the truth), asking thoughtful, open-ended questions of subordinates --- essentially, opening your mind up and allowing yourself to carefully consider all potential outcomes, even the nasty ones that you would rather remain blissfully ignorant of.
As a leader, you want to believe everything is going along just fine. Sometimes when it's not, you sense that as a fear-in-the-gut, and the temptation is to ignore it. The message here is - don't.
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.
This sort of activity was very common during the dot com days. I witnessed a startup with a barely functioning product spend over $2 million upgrading their office space after raising close to $30 million. 3 years later it was "acquired" for a fraction of the investment, of course.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> "[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.
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.
> 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.
They're not giving you their money for their health, ya know? You should already have decided that your business ambitions align with the way a VC wants you to run your business before you take their money. Want to start a passive income project? Take a loan from the bank :) or bootstrap.
If you're at the point where you've taken VC money and you're not sure you want to run a VC-type business, mistakes were made.
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.
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")
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[Me gets to the end of the article] Oh, Ben has a new book coming out so he needs to shill it. Makes sense.