‘Nobody was born a great manager – it’s a very unnatural job’
In the mythology of startups, the founder is often cast as a product visionary – someone who can see what others cannot and bend reality into software. But when you listen to Ben Horowitz tell the story of building companies, that mythology quickly dissolves.
What replaces it is something much more uncomfortable, and much more human.
The slow, often painful transformation
Horowitz knows the transition all too well. Before co-founding the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), he ran Loudcloud.
It began as an infrastructure services startup launched in 1999 with Marc Andreessen. After the dot-com crash, the company sold its hosting business, pivoted to enterprise automation software, renamed itself Opsware, and eventually sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007.
The story is now startup ecosystem lore – but the lessons he shares from that journey are far less glamorous.
In a 2014 Stanford eCorner talk titled “Nailing the Hard Things,” Horowitz describes the moment when a startup’s honeymoon phase ends.
“Startups get really hard when the product gets into market,” he says. “When you’re building the product, it’s all good […] But then you get in the market and nobody wants it. Then it gets real hard, real fast.”
Inside a startup, the early days can feel almost frictionless. A small team gathers around a shared idea, moving quickly while insulated from the outside world.
Progress is measured in milestones, prototypes, and late-night breakthroughs. The product, as a result, evolves almost daily – with each improvement reinforcing the belief that the team is onto something.
But the real moment of truth often arrives when that product leaves the building.
Customers hesitate, sales stall, and prospects offer polite interest but no purchase orders. Competitors begin to surface, sometimes with deeper pockets or louder distribution.
That is the moment Horowitz is describing.
From product builder to people manager
If building a product is creative work, managing people is something else entirely. Horowitz describes it as almost “unnatural”.
“Nobody was born a great manager,” he says. “It’s a very unnatural job.”
Most founders start companies because they love building things – writing code, designing systems, shaping ideas into reality, you name it. Management, however, pulls you into a completely different arena of human dynamics.
Suddenly the job involves evaluating performance, giving difficult feedback, and correcting people who may be more experienced than you.
Aligning teams whose incentives and personalities don’t always cooperate, and it’s something you need to learn to catch right off the bat.
“As CEO, as a manager, that’s what you have to do,” Horowitz says. “You have to evaluate people’s performance. You have to correct them. You have to make sure they’re on task.”
It’s uncomfortable work, and it’s why founders often avoid it at first – hoping culture will sort itself out, hoping people will naturally align.
Yet in reality, they rarely do. Leadership, Horowitz argues, is a hard-learned discipline.
A founder’s hardest job
At the end of the day, this is the quiet transformation many startups underestimate.
The early startup days may reward product genius, whether that be speed, insight, or technical brilliance. But scaling a company demands the ability to manage, coach, and sometimes confront the people building that product.
And unlike coding or design, management offers little immediate feedback (you can’t run a unit test on leadership). You just start to learn it the uncomfortable realities of hard mistakes and conversations.
If Horowitz’s advice sounds simple, it’s only because the reality is so hard. First, build something great. Then, learn how to lead the people who build it with you.
The first skill creates the startup, but the second determines whether it survives its own growth.
