Ben Horowitz is a pretty successful business dude. He is the co-founder and CEO of one of the best known venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. The guy went from Netscape big shot to starting an enterprise software company, and then provided an encore by building a venture capital firm that went from $300 million in managed capital to nearly $5 BILLION in less than 5 years.

I start this post by giving a guy huge praise that I’ve never spoken to, met, or even seen in person.  Ben Horowitz and I are not pen-pals because I think those ended in 1992.  If you asked him, “Who is Corey Stark, this devilishly handsome guy that writes on the super smart site called Stark Business??” He would like respond with, “No fucking clue, man.” But after listening to a podcast recently that featured Mr. Horowitz, I felt more than inspired, but compelled to write about it.

The feature is on Stanford’s Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders speaking series. The video and audio of each weekly presentation during the school year is available online.  Check these out immediately, because, at minimum, they’re all good.  Some are great. And the session with Ben Horowitz is necessary due to its awesomeness.

One, the interviewer did a good job and the rapport between the two help the flow. Two, Horowitz is a super funny, self deprecating super geek that loved rap music growing up and makes fun of the hippy movement. Third, he talks about how to be great, not what to do to be great.  If you’ve read any of my posts, you already know that this is important to me and vital to growth.  There are a ton of people that can tell you what to do, but they are mostly studying success in hindsight.  The “how to” from people’s experience and free thinking is where you can really find hallmarks of change for the better.

The best example of how Horowitz teaches the “how to” is when he speaks to his baby sleeping habits when he first became a CEO.  In this time, he would go to bed stressed about everything that he couldn’t do and what was going wrong with his company.  So, like a baby, he would wake up every 2-3 hours crying his eyes out uncontrollably.  He wondered why none of the reading he was doing was working.  He used the example of how books would tell him to, “hire A players.” His response when he’d talk to others about it was, “Oh yeah, because I was going to hire fucking idiots.”

I have found myself in similar predicaments of how to handle situations, read people different than me, and how to grow my business. So Horowitz gets past “the what” and talks about “the how.” I don’t want to ruin it for you but check this podcast out immediately.  The talk was in response to a book Horowitz recently authored titled The Hard Things About Hard Things. I have already purchased this book online and waiting for it to ship after hearing the podcast on a run last week.  I am super excited to see what the book will bring and the talk will preview some great tidbits for you (ie.wartime CEO vs. peacetime CEO).

So check out this podcast. Start the conversation below because I’m excited to see what others think.