I very much enjoyed Ben Horowitz's last book called, The Hard Thing About Hard Things. In fact, five years later, I still find myself going back to it in my mind, particularly the bits about high quality decision making.

So I am looking forward to his latest book about how to create and sustain the kind of business culture that you want. It's called, What You Do Is Who You Are, and that should give you a sense of where this is going.

Here's an excerpt from Ben:

Because your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day.

It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental and the rest will be a mistake.

Your culture is who you are. Who you are is not the values you list on the wall. It’s not what you say at an all-hands. It’s not your marketing campaign. It’s not even what you believe.

It’s what you do. What you do is who you are. My new book aims to help you do the things you need to do so you can be who you want to be.

If you'd like to pre-order a copy, you can do that here. 100% of the proceeds will go to anti-recidivism and to Haiti.

The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a book that I read a number of years ago (Amazon just told me that I purchased it on March 12, 2014), but that I frequently come back to in my mind. 

One of my favorite themes in the book can be summed up with this quote: “Often any decision, even the wrong decision, is better than no decision.”

Decisions can be scary. What if I make the wrong decision and things go horribly wrong? Then things are on me.

In some organizations, indecision may feel like the safest decision. Let’s do one more study just to make sure that we’ve got this right. 

But in a startup (which is what Ben Horowitz’s book is about) and in organizations that would actually like to grow, innovate, and accomplish things, indecision can mean death. Without decisions, organizations lock up.

None of this is to say that bad decisions are okay. Executives must make high quality decisions as fast as possible, and as a rule of thumb you probably want to make more good decisions than bad decisions. 

But speed, momentum, and organizational clarity also matter a great deal. 

One of the reasons why I mentally come back to this book is because oftentimes I find that things can get hung up on relatively inconsequential decisions. So I like to remind myself that go is better than stop.

As Ben points out in his book: “The only mistake you cannot make is running out of cash.” And time has a funny way of burning through cash.

Earlier this week the Wall Street Journal published an article claiming that the celebrated venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz was lagging behind its elite peers in terms of returns.

The firm then responded with a well-written blog post explaining why this accusation is off the mark. Their response was simply that you can’t measure returns on “unrealized gains.” Until there is a liquidity event – that is, the company gets sold or goes public – it’s just paper returns. And what matters is cash. 

As the post clearly states: “I can’t spend unrealized gains.”

But beyond just a rebuttal, the blog post is a great primer on how the venture capital industry works. We talk a lot about the tech space on this blog, so I thought some of you might find it interesting. 

One of the reasons I like to follow the VC space is that there are many similarities to real estate development. Not only in the way that the funds are structured, but also in the way that the gestation periods are incredibly long.

The post talks about this as a “J curve.” In the early years of a fund, the returns are negative. Money is going out the door to invest in immature and risky startups. And it’s not until the harvesting period (7+ years later) that the realized gains start getting paid out to investors (LPs).

It’s also interesting to note that the exit timing for companies – at least according to Andreessen Horowitz – seems to be increasing (10+ years). This is yet another similarity to real estate development where it seems to be getting harder and harder to build and deliver new supply.