Garage Entrepreneurs

by Benjamin

Jun. 7^th 2010

Ben Horowitz has a great post on his blog titled: href="http://bhorowitz.com/2010/05/30/how-andreessen-horowitz-evaluates-ceos/">How Andreesen Horowitz Evaluates CEOs.

One of the key elements of their evaluation is decision-making. Here’s just a quick snippet from Ben’s post:

Some employees make products, some make sales; the CEO makes decisions. Therefore, a CEO can most accurately be measured by the speed and quality of those decisions. Great decisions come from CEOs who display an elite combination of intelligence, logic, and courage.

That’s absolutely true. It’s something I’ve written about before — href="http://www.instigatorblog.com/startup-ceo-decision-making/2009/12/22/">Startup CEOs Make Millions of Decisions.

Recently someone asked me what the difference was between being an early employee at a startup and a co-founder. My response was: Decisions. As a startup founder that’s your job, making decisions. And this is especially true of the startup CEO.

But what’s equally important – and something I reflect on a lot – is all the decisions that a startup CEO or founder never makes.

href="http://www.instigatorblog.com/indecision-kills-startups/2009/12/16/">Indecision kills startups. And that rests squarely on the shoulders of the startup CEO and co-founders.

When reflecting back on past mistakes and lessons learned, it’s oftentimes the decisions we didn’t make that have the most impact.

This is the 3rd of a series for startup CEOs (and co-founders). Here were the first two:

• href="http://www.instigatorblog.com/startup-ceos-delegate/2010/05/04/">Startup CEOs: Delegate Responsibility, Don’t Outsource It
• href="http://www.instigatorblog.com/startup-ceos-masters-of-alignment/2010/05/05/">Startup CEOs: Masters of Alignment