Perhaps the most common mistake that I see a technical founder make when building her sales organization is she applies strategies that worked in building the engineering team to the sales hiring process. This may sound shocking, but sales people are different than engineers and treating them like engineers does not work well at all.

It starts with the hiring process. If you attempt to hire sales people using the same assumptions that worked with engineering, then here are some of the things that will go wrong:

The Interview

A good engineering interview will include some set of difficult problems to solve. It might even require that the candidate write a short program. In addition, it will test the candidate’s knowledge of the tools she uses in great depth. A small portion of the interview may address personality traits, but smart managers will tolerate a very wide variety of personalities to find the best engineers.

A good sales interview is the opposite. You can quiz them on hard sales problems all day long, but only a horrible sales rep won’t be able to bluff her way through the most intricate quiz on how to sell a complex account. On the other hand, great sales people tend to have very specific personality traits. Specifically, great sales people must be courageous, competitive and hungry. They also need enough intelligence to get the job done. That’s the magic formula. Hire engineers with that profile and you’ll fail. Hire sales people who are really smart problem solvers, but lack courage, hunger and competitiveness, and your company will go out of business.

Dick Harrison, CEO of Parametric Technologies, home of perhaps the greatest enterprise sales force ever built, interviewed Mark Cranney, the greatest sales manager I have ever met, as follows:

Dick: “I’ll bet you got into a lot of fights when you were a youth didn’t you?”
Mark: “Well yes, Dick, I did get into a few.”
Dick: “Well, how’d you do?”
Mark: “Well, I was about 35-1.”
Dick: “Tell me about the 1.”
Mark tells him the story, which Dick enjoys immensely.
Dick: “Do you think you could kick my ass?”
Mark pauses and asks himself: “Is Dick questioning my courage or my intelligence?” Then replies: “Could or would?”

Dick hires Mark on the spot.

Ask an engineer that same set of questions and at best she’d be confused and at worst she’d be horrified. By asking Mark those questions, Dick quickly found out:

• If Mark had the courage to stay in the box and not get flustered
• That Mark came from a rough environment and was plenty hungry
• That Mark was super competitive, but smart enough to calculate his answer

Hiring sales people is different.

The Background

When screening engineers from other companies, it’s smart to value engineers from great companies more than those from mediocre companies. All things being equal, always interview the Google engineer over the Quest Software engineer. Why? Because, as an engineer, you have to be way better to get a job at Google than at Quest. In addition, Google’s engineering environment and techniques are state-of-the-art, so engineers who come from there will be well trained in an environment with high standards.

In contrast, anybody with a pulse can sell a massively winning product like Google Ads or VMware hypervisors, but people who consistently sold Lanier copiers against Xerox were elite. In fact, it might be a good sign that a sales rep was successful at a bad company. To succeed at selling a losing product, you must develop seriously superior sales techniques. In addition, you have to be massively competitive and incredibly hungry to survive in that environment.

The Cost of Making a Mistake

Great engineering organizations strive never to make hiring mistakes as hiring mistakes can be very costly. Not only do you lose the productivity that you might have gained from the hire, but you might well incur severe technical debt. To make matters worse, even when an engineering manager recognizes she’s made a mistake, she’s often slow to correct it, leading to more debt and delay. In addition, building an engineering organization too quickly will cause all kinds of communication issues, which makes slow hiring in engineering a really smart thing to do.

On the other hand, you often can’t afford to build out your sales force too slowly, especially if you have significant competition. Sales people, when compared to engineers, work in relative isolation, so there’s productivity loss, but relatively little long-term debt or fast growth issues. Sales managers generally don’t have issues with firing poor performers, so sales people go fast. I have a friend who was fond of saying, “We have two kinds of sales people: rich and new.”

The Conclusion

Applying engineering hiring techniques to a sales organization is like eating poison ivy to get more green vegetables. You will get the opposite of what you want.

When I was 20 years old, I was a computer science major at Columbia University and I needed a summer job. It was 1986 and I was barely aware of a place called Silicon Valley. In those days there was no “startup culture or entrepreneurship movement”. Most people were only recently becoming aware that computers existed and almost nobody knew where they came from. The startups themselves were quite different than today’s breed. Most of the important startups were computer companies like Sun Microsystems, Apollo Computer, Cydrome, Compaq and Silicon Graphics. In 1986, there was no outsourced manufacturing and China was largely irrelevant to the technology industry. All the companies in those days had their own manufacturing—often in Silicon Valley—and were very large in terms of employees compared to today. Having more than 100 employees prior to shipping a product was not unusual.

Although there were important exceptions, very few 20-year-olds started companies in those days. I was not the exception—I just wanted a job. I wanted a job, but I knew absolutely nobody in technology or in Silicon Valley and there were no technology startups in New York. I had no idea how to get a job and then I got a break.

My father’s friend had just married Ed McCracken, the CEO of Silicon Graphics. I had my father ask her if she would talk to Ed, which she did. Ed then passed me to his head of Administration, Ken Coleman. Eureka! I had made the proverbial “friend of a friend of a friend” connection.

Ken agreed to meet with the son-of-a-friend-of-the-CEO’s-wife. After we met, he also agreed to take a chance on me as a summer intern.

Silicon Graphics was the Google of its day—the place where all the best engineers wanted to work. The company invented modern computer graphics and was building the coolest machines in the world. Prior to arriving, the only jobs that I’d held were paperboy, busboy, waiter, bellhop and valet attendant. Coming from those environments, I thought that I had died and gone to heaven. One day I’m washing dishes and the next day I’m helping debug the operating system that would run the graphics for Jurassic Park. In one connection, I’d gone from the outhouse to the penthouse. Everybody at Silicon Graphics seemed to be a genius, the products were incredible and I never wanted to leave work. I knew that I had to do whatever it took to get myself to Silicon Valley permanently.

Unfortunately, I had not been properly socialized for life inside a big corporation. As the son of a new left radical (who later completely switched sides), I was combat trained. If somebody said something that I didn’t agree with, I wouldn’t hesitate to attack them ruthlessly, call their ideas stupid or personally insult them. I couldn’t help it. It was how I was raised. It was like I was Huey P. Newton and everybody else was The Man. I am quite sure that I would have and should have been fired several times, but for some reason Ken Coleman took an interest in me and smoothed things over whenever I got myself into trouble. He was my personal guardian angel. He helped me to build my life and career doing what I loved.

Over the years, despite being about 100 times more important than me, Ken always found time to meet with me and give me pointers about how to be effective. Much of what you read on this blog originally came from Ken.

After we met, Ken’s career continued to accelerate. He eventually became the chief operating officer of Silicon Graphics. He is now chairman of Saama Technologies and on the board of City National Bank, United Online and Accelrys. And Ken continues to help people like me. He helps people figure out how to fit into the amazing, innovative, magical world known as Silicon Valley.

This fits in very well with how we think about Andreessen Horowitz. We help technical founders learn how to be CEOs, we help engineers find the right company and we help executives find the right match. So, it’s natural, obvious and awesome that today we announce that Ken Coleman is joining Andreessen Horowitz as a Special Advisor.

As CEO, you know that you cannot build a world-class company unless you maintain a world-class team. But how do you know if an executive is world-class? Beyond that, if she was world-class when you hired her, will she stay world-class? If she doesn’t, will she become world-class again?

These are complex questions and are made more complex by the courting process. Every CEO sets out to hire the very best person in the world and then recruits aggressively to get him. If he says yes, she inevitably thinks she’s hit the jackpot. If I had a tattoo for every time I heard a CEO claim that she’d just hired “the best VP in the industry,” I’d be Lil’ Wayne.

So we begin with a strong bias that whomever we hired must be world-class even before performing one day of work. To make matters worse, executives who start off world-class often deteriorate over time. If you watch sports, you know that world-class athletes don’t stay world-class for long. One day, you are Terrell Owens and the next day you are Terrell Owens. While executives don’t age nearly as fast as athletes do, companies, markets and technology change 1,000 times faster than football. As a result, the executive who is spectacular in this year’s 100-person startup may be washed up in next year’s version when the company has 400 people and $100 million in revenue.

The Standard

The first thing to understand is that just because somebody interviewed well and referenced checked great does not mean she will perform superbly in your company. There are two kinds of cultures in this world: cultures where what you do matters and cultures where all that matters is who you are. You can be the former or you can suck.

You must hold your people to a high standard, but what is that standard? I discussed setting this standard in “Old People”. In addition, keep the following in mind:

• You did not know everything when you hired her. While it feels awkward, it is perfectly reasonable to change and raise your standards as you learn more about what’s needed and what’s competitive in your industry.
• You must get leverage. Early on, it’s natural to spend a great deal of time integrating and orienting an executive. However, if find yourself as busy as you were with that function before you hired or promoted the executive, then she is below standard.
• As CEO, you can do very little employee development. One of the most depressing lessons of my career when I became CEO was that I could not develop the people who reported to me. The demands of the job made it such that the people who reported to me had to be 99% ready to perform.  Unlike when I ran a function or was a general manager, there was no time to develop raw talent. That can and must be done elsewhere in the company, but not at the executive level. If someone needs lots of training, she is below standard.

It is possible to take the standard setting too far. As I discussed in “The Scale Anticipation Fallacy”, it’s not necessary nor is it a good idea to evaluate an executive based on what her job will be two years from now. You can cross that bridge when you come to it. Evaluate her on how she performs right here and right now.

On Expectations and Loyalty

If you have a great and loyal executive, how do you communicate all this? How do you tell her that despite the massive effort and great job she is doing today, you might fire her next year if she doesn’t keep up with the changes in the business?

When I used to review executives, I would tell them: “You are doing a great job at your current job, but the plan says that we will have twice as many employees next year as we have right now. Therefore, you will have a new and very different job and I will have to re-evaluate you on that job. If it makes you feel better, that rule goes for everyone on the team including me.”

In giving this kind of direction, it’s important to point out to the executive that when the company doubles in size, she has a new job. This means that doing things that made her successful in her old job will not necessarily translate to success in the new job. In fact, the No. 1 way that executives fail is by continuing to do their old job rather than moving on to their new job.

Finally, what about being loyal to the team that got you here? If your current executive team helped you 10X your company, how can you dismiss them when they fall behind in running the behemoth they created? The answer is that your loyalty must go to your employees—the people who report to your executives. Your engineers, marketing people, sales people, finance and HR people who are doing the work. You owe them a world-class management team. That’s the priority.

Ask 10 founders about company culture and what it means and you’ll get 10 different answers. It’s about office design, it’s about screening out the wrong kinds of employees, it’s about values, it’s about fun, it’s about alignment, it’s about finding like-minded employees, it’s about being cult-like.

So what is culture? Does culture matter? If so, how much time should you spend on it?

Let’s start with the second question first. The primary thing that any technology startup must do is build a product that’s at least 10 times better at doing something than the current prevailing way of doing that thing. Two or three times better will not be good enough to get people to switch to the new thing fast enough or in large enough volume to matter. The second thing that any technology startup must do is to take the market. If it’s possible to do something 10X better, it’s also possible that you won’t be the only company to figure that out. Therefore, you must take the market before somebody else does. Very few products are 10X better than the competition, so unseating the new incumbent is much more difficult than unseating the old one.

If you fail to do both of those things, your culture won’t matter one bit. The world is full of bankrupt companies with world-class cultures. Culture does not make a company.

So, why bother with culture at all? Three reasons:

1. It matters to the extent that it can help you achieve the above goals.
2. As your company grows, culture can help you preserve your key values, make your company a better place to work and help it perform better in the future.
3. Perhaps most importantly, after you and your people go through the inhuman amount of work that it will take to build a successful company, it will be an epic tragedy if your company culture is such that even you don’t want to work there.

Creating a company culture

In this post, when I refer to company culture, I am not referring to other important activities like company values and employee satisfaction. Specifically, I am writing about designing a way of working which will:

• Distinguish you from competitors
• Ensure that critical operating values persist such as delighting customers or making beautiful products
• Help you identify employees that fit with your mission

Culture means lots of other things in other contexts, but the above will be plenty to discuss here.

When you start implementing your culture, keep in mind that most of what will be retrospectively referred to as your company’s culture will not be designed in, but will evolve over time based on the behavior of you and your early employees. As a result, you will want to focus on a small number of cultural design points that will influence a large number of behaviors over a long period of time.

In Jim Collins’ massively successful book Built to Last, he wrote that one of the things that long lasting companies he studied have in common is a “cult-like culture”. I found this description to be confusing because it seems to imply that as long as your culture is weird enough and you are rabid enough about it, you will succeed on the cultural front. That’s related to the truth, but not actually true. In reality, Collins was right that a properly designed culture often ends up looking cult-like in retrospect, but that’s not the initial design principle. You needn’t think hard about how you can make your company seem bizarre to outsiders. However, you do need to think about how you can be provocative enough to change what people do every day.

Ideally, a cultural design point will be trivial to implement, but will have far reaching behavioral consequences. Key to this kind of mechanism is shock value. If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change.

Here are three examples:

Desks made out of doors – Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price and customer service leader for the long run. You can’t do that if you waste a lot of money. Jeff could have spent years auditing every expense and raining hell on anybody who overspent, but he decided to build frugality into his culture. He did it with an incredibly simple mechanism: all desks at Amazon.com for all time would be built by buying cheap doors from The Home Depot and nailing legs to them. These door desks are not great ergonomically nor do they fit with Amazon.com’s $100+ billion market capitalization, but when a shocked new employee asks why she must work on a makeshift desk constructed out of random Home Depot parts, the answer comes back with withering consistency: “We look for every opportunity to save money so that we can deliver the best products for the lowest cost.” If you don’t like sitting at a door, then you won’t last long at Amazon.

$10 per minute – When we started Andreessen Horowitz, Marc and I wanted the firm to treat entrepreneurs with great respect. We remembered how psychologically brutal the process of building a company was. We wanted the firm to respect the fact that in the bacon and egg breakfast of a startup, we were with the chicken and the entrepreneur was the pig: we were involved, but she was committed. We thought that one way to communicate respect would be to always be on time to meetings with entrepreneurs. Rather than make them wait in our lobby for 30 minutes while we attended to more important business like so many venture capitalists that we visited, we wanted our people to be on time, prepared and focused. Unfortunately, anyone who has ever worked anywhere knows that this is easier said than done. In order to shock the company into the right behavior, we instituted a ruthlessly enforced $10/minute fine for being late to a meeting with an entrepreneur. So, you are on a really important call and will be 10 minutes late? No problem, just bring $100 to the meeting and pay your fine. When new employees come on, they find this shocking, which gives us a great opportunity to explain in detail why we respect entrepreneurs. If you don’t think entrepreneurs are more important than Venture Capitalists, we can’t use you at Andreessen Horowitz.

Move fast and break things – Mark Zuckerberg believes in innovation and he believes there can be no great innovation without great risk. So, in the early days of Facebook, he deployed a shocking motto: move fast and break things. Did the CEO really want us to break things? I mean, he’s telling us to break things! A motto that shocking forces everyone to stop and think. When they think, they realize that if you move fast and innovate, you will break things. If you ask yourself, “Should I attempt this breakthrough? It will be awesome, but it may cause problems in the short term.” You have your answer. If you’d rather be right than innovative, you won’t fit in at Facebook.

Prior to figuring out the exact form of your company’s shock therapy, be sure that your mechanism agrees with your values. For example, Jack Dorsey will never make his own desks out of doors at Square because at Square, beautiful design trumps frugality. When you walk into Square, you can feel how seriously they take design.

Why dogs at work and yoga aren’t culture

Startups today do all kinds of things to distinguish themselves. Many great, many original, many quirky, but most of them will not define the company’s culture. Yes, yoga may make your company a better place to work for people who like yoga. It may also be a great team-building exercise for people who like yoga. Nonetheless, it’s not culture. It will not establish a core value that drives the business and help promote in perpetuity. It is not specific with respect to what your business aims to achieve. Yoga is a perk.

Somebody keeping a pit bull in her cube may be shocking. However, the lesson learned—that animal lovers are welcome or that employees can live however they want—may be societal values, but they do not connect to your business in a distinguishing way. Every smart company values their employees. Perks are good, but they are not culture.

The point of it all

In How Andreessen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs, I described the CEO job as knowing what to do and getting the company to do what you want. Designing a proper company culture will help you get your company to do what you want in certain important areas for a very long time.

Your startup is going well and as your business expands, you hear the dreaded words from someone on your board: “You need to hire some senior people. Some real ‘been there, done that’ executives to help you get the company to the next level.” Really? Is now the time? If so, where do I begin? And once I get them, what do I do with them? And will I know if they are doing a good job?

The first question you might ask is, “Why do I need senior people at all? Won’t they just ruin the culture with their fancy clothes, political ambitions and need to go home to see their families?” To some extent, the answer to all of those may be “yes” which is why this question must be taken quite seriously. However, bringing in the right kind of experience at the right time can mean the difference between bankruptcy and glory.

Let’s go back to the first part of the question. Why hire a senior person? The short answer is time. As a technology startup, from the day you start until your last breath, you will be in a furious race against time. No technology startup has a long shelf life. Even the best ideas become terrible ideas after a certain age. How would Facebook go if Zuckerberg started it last week? At Netscape, we went public when we were 15 months old. Had we started six months later, we would have been late to a market with 37 other browser companies. Even if nobody beats you to the punch, no matter how beautiful your dream most employees will lose faith after the first five or six years of not achieving it. Hiring someone who has already done what you are trying to do can radically speed up your time to success.

But CEO beware: hiring senior people into a startup is kind of like an athlete taking performance-enhancing drugs. If all goes well, you will achieve incredible new heights. If all goes wrong, you will start degenerating from the inside out.

In order to make all go well, if you are considering hiring a senior person, do not chase an abstract rationale like “adult supervision” or “becoming a real company”. A weak definition of what you are looking for will lead to a bad outcome. The proper reason to hire a senior person is to acquire knowledge and experience in a specific area.

For example, as a technical founder, you probably do not have terrific knowledge of how to build a worldwide sales channel, how to create an invincible brand or how to identify and negotiate ecosystem-altering business development deals. Acquiring a world-class senior person can dramatically accelerate your company’s ability to succeed in these areas.

One good test for determining whether to go with outside experience versus internal promotion is to figure out whether you value inside knowledge or outside knowledge more for the position. For example, for engineering managers the comprehensive knowledge of the code base and engineering team is usually more important and difficult to acquire than knowledge of how to run scalable engineering organizations. As a result, you might very well value the knowledge of your own organization more than that of the outside world.

In hiring someone to sell your product to large enterprises, the opposite is true. Knowing how your target customers think and operate, knowing their cultural tendencies, understanding how to recruit and measure the right people in the right regions of the world to maximize your sales turns out to be far more valuable than knowing your own company’s product and culture. This is why when the head of engineering gets promoted from within, she often succeeds. When the head of sales gets promoted from within, she almost always fails. Asking yourself “Do I value internal or external knowledge more for this position?” will help you determine whether to go for experience or youth.

Once They Arrive

Bringing senior people on board can be fraught with peril as I outlined in Why is it Hard to Bring Big Company Execs into Little Companies? and Hiring Executives: If You’ve Never Done the Job, How Do You Hire Somebody Good?

Equally difficult is managing them effectively once they come on board. Senior people pose several important challenges:

• They come with their own culture – they will bring the habits, the communication style and values from the company they grew up in. It’s very unlikely these will match your environment exactly.
• They will know how to work the system – because senior people come from larger environments, they usually develop the skills to navigate and be effective in those environments. These skills may seem political and unusual in your environment.
• You don’t know the job as well as they do – in fact, you are hiring them precisely because you don’t know how to do the job. So how do you hold them accountable for doing a good job?

In order to prevent the internal degeneration mentioned earlier, it’s important to both be aware of the above issues and then employ appropriate countermeasures to make sure they don’t metastasize.

First, you should demand cultural compliance. It’s fine that people come from other company cultures. It’s true that some of those cultures will have properties that are superior to your own. But this is your company, your culture and your way of doing business. Do not be intimidated by experience on this issue, stick to your guns and stick to your culture. If you want to expand your culture to incorporate some of the new thinking, that’s fine, but do so explicitly—do not drift.

Next, watch for politically motivated tactics and do not tolerate them. I describe this in detail in How to Minimize Politics in Your Company.

Perhaps most importantly, set a high and clear standard for performance. If you want to have a world-class company, you must make sure that the people on your staff—be they young or old—are world-class. It is not nearly enough that someone on your staff can do the job better than you can, because you are incompetent at the job—that’s why you hired them in the first place.

Be careful not to set a low bar because you have not done the work to know what good is. For example, I’ve seen many a young CEOs excited about her company’s competency in marketing and PR because she got a bunch of positive stories on her launch. That’s not a high PR standard. Anybody can get reporters to write nice things about a sweet, cuddly, baby of a company. Only world-class PR people can deal with gangly, pimple ridden, teenage companies. World-class PR people can turn around negative stories. World-class PR people can turn chicken shit into chicken salad. Turning chicken shit into chicken salad requires long-term, trusted relationships, deep know-how and the confidence to make use of both appropriately. PR kids don’t have any of the three.

One excellent way to develop a high standard is to interview people who you see doing a great job in their field. Find out what their standard is and add it to your own. Once you determine a high yet achievable performance bar, hold your executive to that high standard even if you have no idea how they might achieve it. It’s not your job to figure out how to create an incredible brand, tilt the playing field by cutting a transformational deal or achieve a sales goal that nobody thought possible – that’s what you are paying them to do. That’s why you hired them.

Finally, you’ll need your new executive to be more than just a goal achiever. She will need to be well rounded and part of the team. My friend Bill Campbell developed an excellent methodology for measuring executives in a balanced way that will help you achieve this. He breaks performance down into four distinct areas:

1. Results against objectives – Once you’ve set a high standard, it will be straightforward to measure your executive against that standard.
2. Management – Even if an executive does a superb job achieving her goals, that doesn’t mean she is building a strong and loyal team. It’s important to understand how well she is managing, even if she is hitting her goals.
3. Innovation – It’s quite possible for an executive to hit her goal for the quarter by ignoring the future. For example, a great way for an engineering manager to hit her goals for features and dates is by building a horrible architecture, which won’t even support the next release. This is why you must look beyond the black box results and into the sausage factory to see how things get made.
4. Working with peers – This may not be intuitive at first, but executives must be effective at communicating, supporting and getting what they need from the other people on your staff. Evaluate them along this dimension.

Aw Man, You Sold Your Soul

Hiring the first senior people into your company may feel like selling your soul and if you are not careful, you may well end up selling the soul of your company. But if you want to make something from nothing, you have to take risks and you have to win your race against time. This means acquiring the very best talent, knowledge and experience even if it requires dealing with some serious age diversity.

The other day, a friend of mine asked me whether CEOs were born or made. I said, “That’s kind of like asking if Jolly Ranchers are grown or made. CEO is a very unnatural job.” After saying it and seeing the surprised look on his face, I realized that perhaps it wasn’t as obvious as I’d originally thought.

After thinking further, I realized that most people actually assume the opposite—CEOs are born not made. I often listen as other Venture Capitalists and board members rapidly evaluate a founder and conclude that she’s not “CEO material”. I am not sure how they figure these things out so fast. It generally takes years for a founder to develop the CEO skill set and it is usually extremely difficult for me to tell whether or not she will make it.

In athletics, some things like becoming a sprinter can be learned relatively quickly because they take a natural motion and refine it. Others, like boxing, take much longer to master, because they require lots of unnatural motions. For example, when going backwards in boxing, it’s critically important to pick up your back foot first, because if you get hit while walking backwards the natural way—picking up your front foot first—often leads to getting knocked cold. Learning to make this unnatural motion feel natural takes a great deal of practice. If you do what feels most natural as a CEO, then you may also get knocked cold.

Being CEO requires lots of unnatural motion. From an anthropological standpoint, it is natural to do things that make people like you. It enhances your chances for survival. Yet to be a good CEO, in order to be liked in the long run, you must do many things that will upset people in the short run. Unnatural things.

In fact, even the most basic CEO building blocks will feel unnatural at first. If your buddy tells you a funny story, it would feel quite weird to evaluate her performance. It would be totally unnatural to say: “Gee, I thought that story really sucked. It had potential, but you were underwhelming on the build up then you totally flubbed the punch line. I suggest that you go back, rework it and present it to me again tomorrow.” Doing so would be quite bizarre, but evaluating people’s performances and constantly giving feedback is precisely what a CEO must do. If she doesn’t, then the more complex motions such as writing reviews, taking away territory, handling politics, setting compensation and firing people will be either impossible or handled rather poorly.

Giving feedback turns out to be the unnatural atomic building block atop which the unnatural skill set of management gets built. But how does one master the unnatural?

The Shit Sandwich

A popular and sometimes effective technique for feedback beginners is something that experienced managers call The Shit Sandwich. The technique is marvelously described in the classic management text, The One Minute Manager. The basic idea is that people open up to feedback far more if you start by complimenting them (slice of bread #1), then you give them the difficult message (the shit), then wrap up by reminding them how much you value their strengths (slice of bread #2). The shit sandwich also has the positive side effect of focusing the feedback on the behavior rather than the person, because you establish up front that you really value the person. This is a key concept in giving feedback.

The shit sandwich can work well with junior employees, but has the following challenges:

• It tends to be overly formal. Because you have to preplan and script the sandwich to make it come out correctly, the process can feel formal and judgmental to the employee.
• After you do it a couple of times, it will lack authenticity. The employee will think: “Oh boy, she’s complimenting me again. I know what’s coming next, the shit.”
• More senior executives will recognize the shit sandwich immediately and it will have an instant negative effect.

Early in my career, I attempted to deliver a carefully crafted shit sandwich to a senior employee and she looked at me like I was a little kid and said: “Spare me the compliment, Ben, and just tell me what I did wrong.” At that point, I thought that I was definitely not born to be a CEO.

The Keys

To become elite at giving feedback, you must elevate yourself beyond a basic technique like the shit sandwich. You must develop a style that matches your own personality and values. Here are the keys to being effective:

• Be authentic. It’s extremely important that you believe in the feedback that you give and not say anything to manipulate the recipient’s feelings. You can’t fake the funk.
• Come from the right place. It’s important that you give people feedback because you want them to succeed and not because you want them to fail. If you really want someone to succeed, then make her feel it. Make her feel you. If she feels you and you are in her corner, then she will listen to you.
• Don’t get personal. If you decide to fire somebody, fire her. Don’t prepare her to get fired. Prepare her to succeed. If she doesn’t take the feedback, then that’s a different conversation.
• Don’t clown people in front of their peers. While it’s OK to give certain kinds of feedback in a group setting, you should strive never to embarrass someone in front of their peers. If you do so, then your feedback will have little impact other than to a) cause the employee to be horribly ashamed and b) cause the employee to hate your guts.
• Feedback is not one size fits all. Everybody is different. Some employees are extremely sensitive to feedback while others have particularly thick skin and often thick skulls. Stylistically, your tone should match the employee’s personality not your mood.
• Be direct, but not mean. Don’t be obtuse. If you think somebody’s presentation sucks, don’t say: “It’s really good, but could use one more pass to tighten up the conclusion.” While it may seem harsh, it’s much better to say: “I couldn’t follow it and I didn’t understand your point and here are the reasons why.” Watered down feedback can be worse than no feedback at all because it’s deceptive and confusing to the recipient. But don’t beat them up or attempt to show your superiority. Doing so will defeat your purpose because when done properly feedback is dialogue, not a monologue.

Feedback is a dialogue, not a monologue

You may be the CEO and you may be telling somebody about something that you don’t like or disagree with, but that doesn’t mean that you’re right. Your employee should know more about her function than you. She should have more data than you. You may be wrong.

As a result, your goal should be for your feedback to open up rather than close down discussion. Encourage people to challenge your judgment and argue the point to conclusion. Culturally, you want super high standards thoroughly discussed. You want to apply tremendous pressure to get the highest quality thinking, yet be open enough to find out when you are wrong.

High frequency feedback

Once you’ve mastered the keys, you should practice what you’ve mastered all the time. As CEO, you should have an opinion on absolutely everything. You should have an opinion on every forecast, every product plan, every presentation and even every comment. Let people know what you think. If you like someone’s comment, give her the feedback. If you disagree, give her the feedback. Say what you think. Express yourself.

This will have two critically important positive effects:

• Feedback won’t be personal in your company. If the CEO constantly gives feedback, then everyone she interacts with will just get used to it. Nobody will think: “Gee, what did she really mean by that comment? Does she not like me?” Everybody will naturally focus on the issues, not an implicit random performance evaluation.
• People will become comfortable discussing bad news. If people get comfortable talking about what each other are doing wrong, then it will be very easy to talk about what the company is doing wrong. High quality company cultures get their cue from data networking routing protocols: bad news travels fast and good news travels slowly. Low quality company cultures take on the personality of the Wicked Witch of the East in The Wiz: “Don’t nobody bring me no bad news.”

Making the CEO

Being CEO requires also a broad set of more advanced skills—I’ve written about many in this blog—but the key to reaching the advanced level and feeling like you were born to be CEO is mastering the unnatural.

If you are a founder CEO and you feel awkward or incompetent when doing some of these things and believe there is no way that you’ll be able to do it when your company is 100 or 1,000 people, welcome to the club. That’s exactly how I felt.  So did every CEO that I’ve ever met. This is the process. This is how you get made.

This is a guest post by Marc Andreessen, co-founder and partner at Andreessen Horowitz.

I’m delighted to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is investing $15 million in Rap Genius.

Given that Rap Genius is a website where people explain rap lyrics, and given that my partner Ben is a noted rap fanatic, your first reaction might be, “That Horowitz guy has completely lost his mind.” I, on the other hand, find rap every bit as comprehensible as ancient Mesopotamia. That’s why I’m writing this blog post—not him. Let me explain why we’ve invested in Rap Genius…

http://rapgenius.com/Marc-andreessen-why-andreessen-horowitz-is-investing-in-rap-genius-lyrics