Executive summary: Read this if you enjoy self-aggrandizing stories about how to be successful when you start with $20 million in investment.

Buy it through this link and I’ll get a few pennies!

What I liked

There’s a story about how Horowitz was trying to sell his business and one buyer backed out. The second interested buyer heard the news about the first buyer backing out, and then revised their offer downward.

Horowitz didn’t accept the lower offer. He said the buyer had to stick with their initial offer. There was a standoff, but eventually the buyer went with the original price.

Also, there’s some good advice and analysis on what makes software sales effective.

What I disliked

This is a much bigger list.

First off

Ben Horowitz uses “she” and “her” when talking about hypothetical CEOs. It is jarring to read a sentence where obviously, Ben Horowitz is talking about himself in the abstract, but he uses “she” and “her” for pronouns.

You might think using “she” and “her” as default pronouns makes sense if you call yourself a feminist. And Ben Horowitz tells you right at the beginning how he’s donating profits from this book to a charity focusing on women.

But if you read between the lines of the book, Ben Horowitz is no feminist. Here’s a few examples:

• As far as I can tell, there are literally no quotes from any women at all in the book.
• Ben Horowitz is all about making his employees work lots of overtime. This is maybe not the top offender, but every survey I’ve read mentions this expectation as being unfriendly to women.
• His own personal life follows an old-school pattern: his wife stays home with his children, while he works all the time. This is how he expects his employees to operate as well.
• Take a look at who his investment firm writes checks to, and count the boy names and girl names. The ratio is at least 20 to 1.
• Go spend a few minutes reading articles like this one, showing how so few women have any of the top positions.

In short, every time I read him use “her” and “she, I got pulled out of the narrative, and started arguing with him in my head.

For the record, not that anyone cares, I don’t call myself a feminist. Mostly because it’s a term that applies to such a broad group of ideas that it has become useless.

The next thing

He starts every chapter with some hip hop lyrics. Mostly irrelevant lyrics, too. There’s no tie back to the lyrics in the text.

This all reminded of that brilliant scene in Office Space, where the guy blasts Geto Boys on the way to his tech job, but when he’s stuck at a red light, he turns the music way down as a black guy walks by selling flowers.

That’s how I see Ben Horowitz every time he tries to say that he and Jay Z or he and Kanye have stuff in common.

Side note: I don’t understand how this guy listens to DMX and then also acts like he cares about womens issues. You’re gonna start your book with a DMX Lyric, right after you tell us how you’re donating all the profits to women’s causes? Really?

Third and last point

Ben Horowitz calls himself a wartime CEO. This really bugs me. We’re living in a time when real combat vets are having a terrible time re-integrating in society.

Horowitz doesn’t know the first thing about their struggles. He’s just playing GI Joe.

Business and war are different. Business involves negotiations and contracts and agreements.

War involves napalm falling on children, or laying siege to cities, or raping and pillaging innocents. That’s war. Ben Horowitz may be good at the game he plays, but he’s not a warrior.

Ben Horowitz is not a feminist, not black, and not a Navy SEAL, but he sure likes to think he’s all three. In my view, he is a typical “drink champagne for charity”, limousine liberal, massive hypocrite. He grabs phrases and images from other people to make himself look more enlightened, less a member of the elite, and more macho than he really is.

And if he wants to get in the ring with me any time, I’m game.