Tuesday, January 8, 2013

Blogger uses rap to teach pithy business lessons

Ben Horowitz, a prominent venture capital investor in Silicon Valley, says rap holds a trove of lessons for tech entrepreneurs

Silicon Valley, where engineers in khakis write software code, might not at first glance have much to do with the world of rap music, where artists in sagging pants write irreverent lyrics.

But Ben Horowitz, a prominent venture capital investor here, says rap holds a trove of lessons for tech entrepreneurs. Throw business classes and books out the window, Horowitz says, and listen to rap lyrics instead.

Horowitz applies his theory on his blog, where he has attracted a following of tech readers and other executives by offering business lessons, almost all of them preceded by a rap lyric that summarises a moral, and with recordings from Grooveshark, the music site. In the process, he has linked two cultures in Silicon Valley, which is not exactly known for its racial or cultural diversity.

Entrepreneurs may do well to listen to Horowitz’s advice. He started the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz with Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of Netscape, and the firm made vast amounts of money on investments in companies like Groupon and Skype, and stands to make more on Facebook’s initial public offering. Late January the firm announced that it had raised its third fund in three years, $1.5 billion in fresh capital, a large amount even in Silicon Valley. The two men previously started Opsware, a data center software company, and sold it to Hewlett-Packard (HP) in 2007.

Horowitz uses rap as an introduction as he philosophises about business challenges like how to fire executives, why founders run their companies better than outside chief executives and how to stand up to difficult board members. “All the management books are like, ‘This is how you set objectives, this is how you set up an organisation chart,’ but that’s all the easy part of management,” Horowitz said in an interview in his spacious office on Sand Hill Road Menlo Park (California), the epicenter of tech investing. “The hard part is how you feel. Rap helps me connect emotionally.”

How to deal, for instance, with the stress of the 11th-hour, late-night auditing mishap that almost stymied the $1.6 billion sale of Opsware? Listen to the Kanye West song “Stronger”: “Now that that don’t kill me/Can only make me stronger/I need you to hurry up now/’Cause I can’t wait much longer/I know I got to be right now/’Cause I can’t get much wronger.”


Source : IIPM Editorial, 2012.
An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri
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