Ben Horowitz - "Your ONLY job is Right Product, Right Time"

You people are doing everything but your job. You're writing these requirements. You're pitching customers. This and that. You're doing all this stuff. It's a lot of work. But your job is right product, right time. And if you don't give me the right product at the right time, I don't give a fuck what you do. The story of the company is why do we exist? Why should this be a company? Why should you join this company? Why should you invest in this company? The why is the depth. If you know the why, I don't even have to tell you the what, cause you know what to do. Founders spend time on everything. Hiring, fundraising, product specs, customer conversations. But at the end of the day, there's only one thing that determines whether a company works. Whether you deliver the right product at the right time. Everything else supports that goal. Strategy evolves as you learn. The story becomes how you communicate it. And the team exists to execute it. But none of it matters if the product isn't right. In a world where tools are changing faster than ever, the core challenge remains the same. Here's Ben Horowitz speaking at a sixteen z's Speedrun on what it takes to get it right. Another challenge that we talk about here at Speed Run often is sort of building teams. Mhmm. Many of the folks who are bringing on their first employees, their first sort of set up hires. Confirmed. What do you find has worked best in teams trying to attract top talent early on when they don't have as much of a brand to attract record just yet? Well, if you have a brand, all you have is a story. Right? So this is something that I think founders often neglect over time is the so the story of the company is also the strategy of the company. Nobody's got some strategy in their back pocket that's entirely secret, and then they've got a story that's different. So, like, that's the one thing. And the truth about strategy is it's not like a meeting that you have and you go out with your team and go, like, what's our strategy? Okay. Everybody give me your input. And then we assemble this strategy by committee. What really is happening is you have the initial idea. You're learning about the market. You're learning about the customers. You're learning about the technology. You're learning about each other. And in your mind, you're kind of adjusting that strategy a little bit at a time every day. But then a quarter later, it's actually pretty different than what you started with. And so it's really important that you keep upgrading your story, the articulation of your story. Like I would definitely recommend it be in written form and it kind of be something that you can share with everybody in the company, but everybody you're recruiting, everybody you're trying to raise …